And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.—Revelation 5:13

Introduction

The topic of the speech tonight is “Why Reformed Protestant?”¹ That question demands an answer. Why in the year 2021 did a new denomination of Reformed churches appear on the earth? There are already many Reformed denominations. There are Reformed denominations that are large and influential and Reformed denominations that are small. Why in the year 2021 did there have to be another Reformed denomination known as the Reformed Protestant Churches? Why Reformed Protestant?

The purpose of this speech is not to justify the existence of the Reformed Protestant Churches. The formation of this denomination was a work of the Lord Jesus Christ from the right hand of Jehovah. Jesus Christ by his word and Spirit formed this denomination, and as the work of the ascended Lord, this denomination does not need a justification to exist. The Lord gathers his church. The Lord defends and preserves his church. And when he does so, no one may say unto him, “What doest thou?” The speech tonight does not justify the existence of the Reformed Protestant Churches.

But the speech tonight is intended to explain the existence of these churches, explain why they had to be brought into existence. That is for our encouragement who are members of these churches, but especially that explanation is for the broader church world. The target audience tonight is the broader church world—not first of all Reformed Protestant men and women, not first of all Protestant Reformed men and women, but the broader church world. Why Reformed Protestant?

The purpose of answering the question, why Reformed Protestant? for the broader church world may seem foolish. It may seem foolish because as a denomination we are very, very small and virtually unknown. We are not on the radar of the ecclesiastical world. The ecclesiastical world is not lined up around the block to hear an answer to the question, why Reformed Protestant? There is no clamor from the church world for us to explain how we came into existence. To those who are clamoring for an answer—and there are some—that answer has been given many times. The question, why Reformed Protestant? has been asked by family members; it has been asked by our mother church and members of our mother church. That answer has been given many, many times. But in general the Reformed church world is not clamoring for an answer to the question, why Reformed Protestant?

If you add to that the fact that, as Reformed Protestant Churches, we have our own controversies already in two short years of existence, then it may appear even more foolish yet that we would seek to give an answer for the broader church world to the question, why Reformed Protestant?

And yet that question, why Reformed Protestant? is a vital question. It is a necessary question. That is because the Reformed Protestant Churches stand in the line of the Reformation in a way that no other Reformed denomination does. The Reformed Protestant Churches stand in the line of Christianity the way no other denomination on earth does. The Reformed Protestant Churches stand in the line of Christianity and the Reformation in a way that the Christian Reformed Church does not and the United Reformed Churches do not and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church does not and the Presbyterian Church in America does not. That is not because of the people in the Reformed Protestant Churches. The people in the Reformed Protestant Churches—we as members—are weak, we are small, we are not strong, we are not faithful in ourselves, and we are not grateful in ourselves. We Reformed Protestant members must confess about ourselves that there is no weaker people in all the earth, so that we would confess what God said about Israel: “I did not choose you for your great size or for your great strength.” Our confession as people is that we are the chief of sinners, and you don’t have to live among us very long to see that. Nevertheless, I maintain that the Reformed Protestant denomination stands in the line of the Reformation and Christianity in a way that no other denomination on earth does.

In fact, I go a step further and maintain that Reformed Protestant doctrine is the doctrine of heaven. The saints who are in heaven right now, at this moment, believe Reformed Protestant doctrine. The angels in heaven believe Reformed Protestant doctrine. The saints and angels in heaven do not believe United Reformed doctrine. They do not believe Orthodox Presbyterian doctrine. The saints and angels in heaven believe Reformed Protestant doctrine and only Reformed Protestant doctrine.

When I say that, I do not mean that we Reformed Protestants on earth are the measuring stick for what must be believed in heaven. Not at all. What I mean is this: heaven has a doctrine. Heaven has its own confession. That is the confession that was read tonight in Revelation 5. The saints and angels have a doctrine in that confession. And that doctrine, as they confess it in heaven, is the doctrine of the Reformed Protestant Churches. It is the doctrine of the Reformed Protestant Churches in a way that it is not the doctrine of other denominations, even Reformed and Presbyterian denominations. The saints in heaven do not confess Baptist doctrine. They do not confess a well-meant offer of the gospel. They do not confess salvation by the will or the work of man. The saints in heaven confess God. That is who they confess: God. And they confess the work of God as the sovereign work of their salvation—which is why I say that in heaven the doctrine is Reformed Protestant.

Also, this question is vital because we in the Reformed Protestant Churches desire to have fellowship in the gospel with others—with many others. We desire that those who believe the doctrine of heaven join with us, not so that our fellowship would be that as different denominations we work together or cooperate in projects but so that our fellowship in the gospel would be that you leave your denomination and join the Reformed Protestant Churches. Now, that is not a naked attempt to steal sheep, as they say. This is our hope as Reformed Protestant Churches and our fervent desire: that those who agree with the doctrine of heaven, who agree with the doctrine of God as God is confessed in heaven, join us in this denomination, where that doctrine of heaven is preached and taught and believed and confessed, by the grace of God. There is a standing invitation to all who love that pure Reformed truth, which is the gospel of Jesus Christ, to join us in the worship of our God.

And so the question, the vital question, that faces us tonight is this: Why Reformed Protestant?

The answer to that question is simple. It is as simple as can be. It is as clear as a sunny morning. The answer to the question, why Reformed Protestant? is this: because of the truth of the gospel. Why must there be this denomination of churches that formed last year? Because of the Truth—the capital-T Truth. Because of the truth of God and the truth of the gospel. That truth formed the Reformed Protestant Churches. We are founded upon it. That truth determines what the Reformed Protestant denomination is. It determines our character as churches. And that truth of the gospel determines our relationship as churches also to all who are around us. Why Reformed Protestant? Because of the truth of the gospel.

In order to understand that, then, we do not begin first of all with the history of the formation of the Reformed Protestant Churches. We could begin there: we could talk about the events that led to our formation; we could look at the dates and put all of them in chronological order. But that is not where we begin. The answer to why Reformed Protestant? is not first an answer of history but an answer of doctrine. The Reformed Protestant denomination exists because of the truth of the gospel. And so we begin by looking at that truth of the gospel.

The One Truth of the Gospel

There is only one truth of the entire gospel. There is one thing that the gospel says. In fact, you can say the whole gospel in one word. The one truth that the gospel teaches is this: God. God. That is all the gospel teaches: God.

You can see that when you open the scriptures to the very first verse and find that the first thing God reveals about himself is himself. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). And you can go to the last chapter of the Bible, Revelation 22, and find at the beginning of that chapter the throne of God and the river that proceeds from it (v. 1). You can go to the last verse of the Bible and find the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the revelation of God, proclaimed upon all of God’s own (v. 21). The one thing that the gospel teaches is God.

That was the truth of the gospel as Jesus Christ preached it, according to Mark 1. When we get to the part of Mark 1 that describes Jesus’ sermons—not just his sermon on that day but all of his preaching and teaching—we find that the content of all his preaching was the kingdom of God. “The kingdom of God is at hand,” Jesus said (v. 15). That was his message, so that Jesus taught God.

And that was the song of the citizens in heaven, the saints and angels, as we read in Revelation 5. “They sung a new song, saying [to Jesus], Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation” (v. 9). And again, “Every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever” (v. 13). That is the one doctrine of the gospel: it is God.

The gospel proclaims God in his holy being. It proclaims God in all his glory. It proclaims God in his mighty working. The one truth of the whole Bible is God.

That truth is marvelous. It is breathtaking. There is nothing like that truth that any man can teach.

What is the doctrine of God, the theology of God, that the Bible teaches as its great truth? It is this: Jehovah God is the true and everlasting God. He is God, from eternity to eternity the same. There is no shadow of turning with him. The Lord Jehovah is the true God over against all the pagan gods of the nations. No idol is a God. Every idol is a stone dug out of the earth, but our God made the earth. Every idol is the imagination of man’s mind, but our God made the heavens. The Lord Jehovah is the true God.

And that God is the living God. That is the truth of Jehovah God: he is the living God. His life means that he lives together with himself in his own perfect covenant fellowship. He is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost dwelling together as the divine family in eternal, perfect fellowship: the Father breathing the Spirit to the Son and the Son breathing the Spirit to the Father. God is the living God, who is God with God in God and fellowships as God with God in God. That is the truth of the Bible regarding our God.

That God has an eternal good pleasure. His eternal good pleasure is to make himself known outside of himself. Jehovah God did not need the fellowship of any other. He is the ever-blessed God as the living God. But it was his eternal good pleasure and therefore his eternal decree to reveal himself outside of himself. And that revelation of himself is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the brightness of God’s glory and the express image of God’s person, so that he who sees Jesus Christ has seen the Father. He who sees the Lord, who has come in our flesh, has seen Jehovah God himself, as Jesus told his disciples when they were sad at his going away: “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). God’s good pleasure is to reveal himself outside of himself in Jesus Christ, so that the heart of God’s good pleasure, the very center of all of his counsel and decree, is Jesus Christ as the revelation of the living, triune, true God.

God, the living God, who lives in perfect fellowship in himself, has as his good pleasure not only to reveal himself but also to bring a helpless people into that fellowship through Jesus Christ. And whenever God deals with that people whom he has decreed to bring into his fellowship, he reveals that his dealings are pure grace and that in those dealings he is the sovereign God, and he alone is sovereign, and he alone is gracious. There is no dealing of God with anyone outside of himself in which God makes himself depend on that one outside of himself, but in all of his dealings he is purely gracious to his people and deals with them in tender mercy and undeserved love and favor.

That is evident even in God’s choosing this people to whom he would reveal himself and whom he would take into his fellowship. From all eternity, before any of those people were born or had done any good or evil, God set his love upon them and decreed that they would belong to him. And he emphasized the graciousness of that election by also decreeing regarding many, many others—before they had done any good or evil—that they would not belong to him. He reprobated many, and he chose few, so that everyone who is chosen would know all his life and on into eternity, “I do not deserve this. According to my nature and my flesh, according to what I have done in my life, I deserve to be rejected.” But God elected his own and reprobated many others to highlight to his people, “My dealings with you are entirely gracious. Before you did anything, I gave you heaven. I gave you to Christ. I brought you to my own fellowship. Before you were born or knew anything or did anything, I gave you all things in Christ.” God shows that his dealings are gracious. That is the truth of the gospel that proclaims God as the gracious God and the merciful God.

Even when God created in the beginning, he showed that this fellowship that his elect people would enjoy with him was entirely gracious because this people was made of the dust. That is no great thing. God made the dust what you walk upon! He made the dust what you wipe off your feet before you go into your house! That is what you are! That is what you are made of! You are the dust! So that we would know for all our lives that our fellowship with God and belonging to him is gracious, entirely gracious. He is the God of mercy.

And God decreed that the whole human race, made of dust so that they were already of the lowest part of the earth, would fall in Adam. God decreed that. God decreed that fellowship with him would come in the way of sin, would come in the way of the fall of the whole human race. He decreed Adam’s fall—not as its author but in order to show that our fellowship with God and being restored to his fellowship in Christ are pure grace. God is the God of mercy. That is the truth of the gospel.

And God redeemed his people in Christ, sending his only-begotten Son into our flesh in the great wonder of the incarnation, which is the only way that salvation could be accomplished. No man could make God flesh. No man could manifest the Godhead bodily. Only God could send his Son in our flesh, so that the incarnation is another testimony that God deals with his people only in grace and in pure mercy.

Jesus Christ, as the revelation of God and as the officebearer of God upon this earth, obeyed God to the smallest detail, taking upon himself the curse that was due to God’s people and bearing that curse away on the cross. Christ rose again the third day according to the scriptures for the glory of God, that by his death and his resurrection, by which he redeemed and saved his people, all men might know that this alone is the way of salvation. The way of sin and the way of grace, which is the way of Christ—that alone is the salvation of God’s people. That is grace! That is the truth of Jehovah God as the God of grace.

Even when you talk about the people who are saved by that grace as rational, moral creatures—and you must talk about them that way, for God made us with a mind and a will, so that we are rational, moral creatures. We think. We do. Even when you talk about God’s people that way, as rational, moral creatures, the only way you can talk about their salvation is by the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ, who takes those who are dead in trespasses and sins in themselves and unites them to the Lord Jesus Christ and abides with them and gives to them all the blessings and benefits of Jesus Christ. Even if you want to talk about man’s activity of believing, that is given to him; even if you want to talk about man’s reigning, that is given to him, so that the only thing you can ever say about the salvation of the people of God is that it is of pure sovereign grace. God did it that way deliberately! At no point does God’s relationship with his people depend upon those people. Never. At every point their fellowship with God depends upon God, who gives them himself and all things for nothing, for absolutely nothing. And that is grace: something for nothing.

In that grace God gathers his people into his church and makes them members of the body of the Lord Jesus Christ. In the worship of the church, they hear his voice. You don’t deserve that, and I don’t either. To hear the voice of God and to be fed and nourished unto everlasting life by that voice of God—that is grace. To partake of his body and blood in the Lord’s supper and to be washed with his blood in baptism, the sacraments that Christ gave to his church, to fellowship with him through the Holy Spirit and his Word and with one another as fellow members of the body of the Lord—that is grace. That is all grace.

And the grace of God in dealing with his people is this: the culmination of all things shall be the Lord Jesus Christ’s returning, raising the bodies of his people from the dead, casting the wicked into everlasting fire, and bringing his people to the new heavens and the new earth to live with him forever, where God shall be all in all, so that no matter where you look in the new heavens and the new earth—in that corner, behind that tree, or before the throne of God—there you see God in all his glory. God is all in all, so that you do not think or see or know anything except as the revelation of God. That is the one doctrine of the whole Bible; that is the one truth of the whole gospel: God in all his being, in all his work, in all his glory.

That truth of God is the Christian faith. That is all the Christian faith is: the truth of God, who is the Father of Jesus Christ. That is what we confess in the Apostles’ Creed: I believe in God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. That confession of God as the truth of the gospel did not begin with the Reformed Protestant Churches. This simply is the Christian faith. I believe in God! This is the confession of all of the ancient creeds—not only the Apostles’ Creed but also the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed. Those creeds all declare the one truth, “I believe in God.” This is the truth of the three forms of unity, the Reformed confessions, which are in order of their publication the Belgic Confession in 1561, the Heidelberg Catechism in 1563, and the Canons of Dordt in 1618–19. The first of those was the Belgic Confession. This is article 1 of the first Reformed confession:

There Is One Only God

We all believe with the heart, and confess with the mouth, that there is one only simple and spiritual Being, which we call God; and that He is eternal, incomprehensible, invisible, immutable, infinite, almighty, perfectly wise, just, good, and the overflowing fountain of all good. (Confessions and Church Order, 23)

This truth of God, especially now in his dealings with his people—which, remember, is gracious and merciful and only gracious and merciful—is what the Reformed faith means when it talks about TULIP or the five points of Calvinism or the doctrines of grace, all referring to the same thing. Those doctrines of total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the preservation of the saints are all simply the confession God! God as the sovereign one, God as the merciful and gracious savior, who does for man what man cannot do because man is depraved in himself. The confession of the Reformed faith is just the confession of God as sovereign and gracious.

Or we could talk about the five solas of the Reformation: sola scriptura, scripture alone, by which all truth is judged; the glory of God alone; and salvation by faith alone in Christ alone by grace alone. Those five solas are simply the Reformed way of saying, “God, who is sovereign and gracious in his salvation.” That is a beautiful, glorious, joyful truth and gospel. And that is all the saints in heaven sing. When they sing praise to the Lamb, who has redeemed us unto God, they are singing this truth. When they sing praise to him who sits on the throne, who has sent the Lamb, they are singing this truth. The one truth of the whole gospel is God. That is beautiful. That is a beautiful song.

The One Corruption of the Gospel

Just as there is one truth of the gospel, so there really is only one corruption of the gospel. That too can be summarized in one word. The truth of the gospel is God. The corruption of that truth is Man, Man with a capital M. Always the truth of God has been attacked by the lie of Man.

That is the way it was at the beginning. When the serpent, controlled by Satan, came to Eve, with Adam apparently in attendance, the serpent told this lie to Eve: you shall be as God. You, Adam and Eve—man—shall be God. That is the attack on the truth of God. It is the attack that man is God. And if man is God, then man saves himself and blesses himself. That was the next thing Adam and Eve did. Having fallen into sin, in the grip of that false doctrine that man is God, they tried to save themselves by making aprons of fig leaves to cover their nakedness. If man is God, then man is savior! That flies in the face of the truth that God is God and that God deals graciously and mercifully with his people, so that he alone saves them.

That false doctrine of man was evident in the first worship recorded in the Bible, by Cain and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve. The worship of Cain and Abel looked almost identical. Formally, their worship was the same. Abel built an altar; Cain built an altar. Abel made a sacrifice; Cain made a sacrifice. Abel brought a lamb of the flock of which he was a shepherd; Cain brought the fruit of the ground of which he was a farmer. Formally, those sacrifices were the same. But they were radically different. One was God; one was man. Abel’s sacrifice was the confession “God, because I am a sinner, and only shed blood can cover my sins, which blood must be offered to God because Jehovah God alone can provide the sacrifice.” That was his offering: God. And Cain’s offering was man. “In the sweat of my face and my brow I have labored to till the soil and pull the thorns that grow there, and out of the earth I have brought this crop. Here, Lord, is my work. Here is man that I offer unto thee.” That is the false doctrine. That is the corruption of the truth. The truth is God, and the attack on it is always, always man.

You can trace that through the whole scripture. The doctrine of the Pharisees in Jesus’ day was man. By their keeping of the law, they would be right with God. The doctrine of the Judaizers in the apostles’ day was the doctrine of man. By their keeping God’s law, they would be just and right with God. All the terms were the same. They spoke of Christ; they spoke of God; they spoke of grace. Formally, everything looked very similar to the truth. But the doctrines were radically different. The truth was God and his grace; the lie was man and his work.

And that is the nature of every idol of every pagan nation. Every idol is really simply man, because how does one appease every god but by his own work and his own doing, so that man makes himself right with his gods? That is always the attack on the truth of the gospel: it is the exaltation of man at some point.

Can you imagine the saints in heaven singing that gospel? “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain. All glory be to him that sitteth upon the throne and unto the Lamb and unto us, who have done that thing that we must do in order to be here.” That would be a discordant, jarring, obnoxious note in the beautiful song of the gospel. Man doesn’t belong in that confession! But that is always the attack of false doctrine. Always it exalts man.

The Corruption of the Gospel in the Protestant Reformed Churches

That is the lie that entered into the mother denomination of the Reformed Protestant Churches. Our mother denomination is the Protestant Reformed Churches in America and her sister churches in Northern Ireland, in Singapore, and in the Philippines. The Protestant Reformed Churches in America began well. They began with the gospel. They professed God. They professed that to their own hurt, to their expulsion from their mother, the Christian Reformed Church, in 1924. The confession of the Protestant Reformed Churches (PRC) in 1924 was particular grace—the grace of God that is for his elect alone, the grace of God that is powerful to save his elect alone—over against the teaching in the Christian Reformed Church of a common grace that made God gracious and merciful to all men but left so many of those men to perish in hell. Over against that lie that made God a weakling and a beggar, the Protestant Reformed Churches confessed sovereign, particular grace, grace for God’s people alone. That is the confession of God and God’s grace, which alone saves.

The Protestant Reformed Churches were infiltrated in the 1940s by a covenant theology that made man’s continuation in the covenant to be man and his fulfilling of a condition. It was the covenant theology of the Liberated churches in the Netherlands, whose representatives in North America today are the Canadian Reformed Churches and the American Reformed Churches. Those Liberated churches taught that God made a promise at baptism to all of the children of believers, but it was a conditional promise, and it was up to the child to fulfill the condition of faith and obedience when he came to years of discretion, in order to make that promise real for him and to obtain the blessings of that promise. That was a conditional covenant doctrine. That doctrine infiltrated the PRC so that fully half of the churches and ministers were infected with it through friendships with the Liberated churches in the Netherlands. God preserved the Protestant Reformed Churches by maintaining among them an unconditional covenant.

The problem is that in 1953, when the main teacher of that conditional covenant, Rev. Hubert De Wolf, was expelled from the PRC, the PRC had unfinished business on their hands. They had expelled a man, but there was an aspect of his theology that Protestant Reformed theologians were comfortable with. The aspect of conditional covenant theology that they were comfortable with was this: in the experience of covenant fellowship, there are conditions. Not in God’s making that covenant bond; not in God’s maintaining that covenant bond; not in God’s perfecting that covenant bond—all of that is unconditional. But in the experience of it—my enjoyment of it, my participation in it—there is a condition. That condition is the thing that I must do. Whether that doing is my activity of believing or whether that doing is my activity of working, there is something that I must do in that fellowship to enjoy it. That is the language that De Wolf used! At his Formula of Subscription exam, he said that in the experience of that fellowship, there is a condition. He said that outright, black on white.² And the judgment of those who examined him was this: “We rejoice in his exam.”³ That was the judgment of the minority report—for those who are familiar with that history—which was the strongest of the two reports at Classis East of the PRC in May 1953! The writers of the minority report said, “We rejoice in his exam”! How can you rejoice in that exam?! Because there was unfinished business. Man was there and had infected the Protestant Reformed Churches.

Following 1953, in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a deliberate attempt by the new ministers coming into the Protestant Reformed denomination to preach less doctrinally and more practically. Less doctrinally means less God. More practically means more man. “Reverend, tell us what we have to do! Tell us how to have a happy life and a happy marriage!” That is the perennial cry of a church that is tired of the gospel of God. That is the perennial cry of a church that has itching ears and will not endure sound doctrine. “Tell us what to do. We’re sick of hearing what God has done.” So that, as the Protestant Reformed Churches themselves have said, there was a deliberate move in the 1960s and 1970s away from doctrinal preaching to practical preaching.⁴ For many decades the Protestant Reformed Churches had the form all right; they had the vocabulary—unconditional covenant, particular grace, grace alone, five solas, TULIP, Reformed confessions. They had the words right, but within the bosom of the PRC there was poison. It was the poison of man.

We didn’t realize how deeply that poison had sunk until in 2015 a sermon in Hope Protestant Reformed Church in Walker, Michigan, was protested. That sermon said about the “way” of John 14:6 that Jesus is that way, and our obedience is also the way to the Father. Jesus and our obedience. When you have that, you do not have the gospel. You do not have God. You have man. You have only man. You can say the word God. You can say the word grace. But you do not have God. You have man. You have man as much as Cain had man. He had an altar; he made a sacrifice; he brought something on top of that altar; but he had only man there. When you say that Christ and man are the way to salvation, you don’t have Christ; you have only man.

We didn’t realize how far that poison had sunk into our own thinking, as evidenced by how long it took us to understand that false doctrine, how long it took us to see, by the grace of God and his Spirit, that that was indeed the lie. We were tardy. We were slow. That is why I say that what the Reformed Protestant Churches are is not due to Reformed Protestant people. We would have perished before anyone else would have.

The Protestant Reformed synods could not ever rid the denomination of man. Man remained the doctrine of the Protestant Reformed Churches throughout the whole controversy. When it came to Synod 2016, synod could not condemn the sermon. They should have damned it to hell! That is what they should have done with that sermon. “This stinks like the sulfur of the devil’s breath”—that is what they should have said. They could not condemn it.

In 2017, when protests came against their previous decisions and the synod even upheld those protests, even then the synod had to hold man to its bosom; for in 2017 they said, “Properly done, the preaching of the law is the preaching of the gospel, and the preaching of the gospel is the power of God unto salvation.”⁵ They couldn’t let go of man, here represented by the law and man’s obedience to the law.

In 2018, even when they used language that fooled me for years, the strongest language that I had ever heard the PRC use in the whole controversy up to that point—that the doctrine of several sermons was out of harmony with the Reformed confessions and displaced the perfect work of Christ and compromised the truth of the unconditional covenant and justification by faith alone—even then they had to say, “This is our doctrine: ‘We experience fellowship with God through faith…on the basis of what Christ has done…and in the way of our obedience.’”⁶ Even then they could not get rid of man! At some point during all of that, they should have said, “You know what? We are finished talking. We’re just going to say, ‘God’; we’re just going to say, ‘The grace of God and his sovereignty’; and we’re going to leave man out of it.” But the PRC never could. They couldn’t leave man out of it. They needed him. That is an attack on the truth. It is an attack on the gospel of Jehovah God.

Immediately after Synod 2018 it became clear which direction the denomination wanted, with statements in her publications like this: “If a man would be saved, there is that which he must do.”⁷ And today the Protestant Reformed Churches are full of capital-M Man. And they’re full of Man in the heart of the gospel: justification by faith alone. The Protestant Reformed Churches’ big project that many of their writers have signed on to and their preachers pursue is the project to show that the state of justification is by faith alone, but the forgiveness of sins is by faith and by repenting and by forgiving those who sin against you, and who knows what else has been added to that by now. Oh, they know enough to say, “Justification by faith alone.” But your forgiveness? That is another matter.

What is Reformed? The Reformed doctrine of justification is taught in article 23 of the Belgic Confession under the title “Justification”: “We believe that our salvation consists in the remission of our sins for Jesus Christ’s sake” (Confessions and Church Order, 51). The Reformed confession defines justification as forgiveness of sins, so that if you have added faith and repenting and forgiving others to forgiveness, that means you have added them to justification. You don’t have justification by faith alone. You have justification by man. And if you have lost the heart of the gospel, you have lost the gospel.

Those who are now members of the Reformed Protestant Churches (RPC) protested, preached, and wrote against the error of our mother church, where we were members at the time, until finally our mother threw us out, deposing officebearers and leaving no room for the people of God, who wanted the gospel of God and not the gospel of man.

That is why our evaluation of the Protestant Reformed Churches is not that the RPC are just the PRC but in a different degree, so that what separates us is just a matter of degrees. Our evaluation of our mother is that what separates us is kind. She is not the true church; she is a false church. She is a prostitute, and her lover is Man in all her doctrine of man. She does not serve God. Though she has worship services and practically screams the word grace, she worships man. She is a manifestation of the harlot who rides the beast in Revelation, a synagogue of Satan.

Whether God has his elect people in the PRC is for him to know. The judgment that I make is about the institution and the denomination. She is apostate. How do you know? By the truth. The truth determines that. The truth determines what is true and what is false. By the truth she is known.

By that truth the Lord delivered us into the Reformed Protestant Churches and gave to us in these churches the heritage of the truth that the PRC once held. The Reformed Protestant Churches consider themselves the true continuation of the Protestant Reformed Churches, the true continuation delivered from that doctrine of man in the experience of covenant fellowship. That is reflected even in our name: Reformed Protestant. Why Reformed Protestant, even as a name? When the Protestant Reformed Churches were organizing as a denomination in 1925, they had two options for their denomination’s name: Protestant Reformed Churches or Reformed Protestant Churches. They chose Protestant Reformed. The name that we chose reflects our conviction that we are the continuation of the Protestant Reformed Churches.

The Corruption of the Gospel in the Broader Church World

What about why Reformed Protestant? with a view to the whole ecclesiastical scene today? That same lie of man has infected all Reformed and Presbyterian churches that I know of. (I say, that I know of. I don’t know every church.)

The lie of man is represented in the theory of theistic evolution, which is rampant in Reformed churches, believed by many, and taught by Christian Reformed and United Reformed professors in Christian and Reformed colleges. That lie of evolution takes away the grace of God in his salvation of this dust that he had made. He made man of the dust—not of a monkey. He made man of the dust because dust is lower than a monkey, so that man would always know that his salvation is gracious.

The well-meant offer of the gospel is taught in many Reformed and Presbyterian churches today. That is the majority opinion in the churches: the well-meant offer of the gospel, which says that God on his part desires the salvation of all, but he doesn’t actually save everyone he desires to save. He wants to; he preaches to them; he offers them Christ in the preaching; but he doesn’t save them all. That is a weak God! That is not God; that is a god of silver and gold. It is a stock and a block, a stone. That is all it is.

Divorce and remarriage, which is tolerated and is rampant on the ecclesiastical scene today, is an attack on the truth of the covenant. Marriage is the covenant. Marriage is the symbol of the covenant, for God has taken his church to himself as his bride forever—until death do them part, and God will never die. God has taken his bride to himself forever and ever in the bonds of the covenant. And when divorce and remarriage is tolerated in churches today, every divorce for unlawful grounds and every remarriage while the spouse remains says, “God is a dirty adulterer. He is a fornicator.” That is what they say about God. God has given marriage for life as a symbol of his purity and his faithfulness to his church for life.

The federal vision, which turns faith into a work and makes everything that man receives conditional upon what man does, has found a comfortable home in Reformed and Presbyterian denominations for a long time.

All of that is man. All of that is an idol. In fact, it is two idols. On one side of the pulpit, those doctrines build an idol of man. Look how grand man is, who contributes something to his salvation. And on the other side of the pulpit those doctrines turn the true God into an idol and say, “God depends on this man over here.” That is not the true God; that is an idol too. There are two idols every time false doctrine is proclaimed.

God abhors those idols. He hates them. That is evident in Reformed and Presbyterian churches today in the rampant homosexuality that infects those denominations. The Presbyterian Church in America has an openly homosexual minister who identifies himself as homosexual. It doesn’t matter that he says he is celibate. He openly identifies as a homosexual. And what does the Reformed world do? They run around trying to figure out how to keep a man like that out of office. Let’s change our directory of worship—our Church Order. Let’s ask these questions at their synodical exams before they’re made ministers. Let’s do all these things. Homosexuality in Reformed and Presbyterian denominations is not the problem. Homosexuality is God’s judgment on the problem. The problem is those two idols. You don’t fix homosexuality that is institutionalized in the church by fighting homosexuality; you’ll never be rid of it. Homosexuality is not the problem. The problem is the idolatry of false doctrine. And God says in Romans 1 what his judgment is on idolatry. “If you change me into that kind of an image, I’ll change you and make your men lust after your men and your women lust after your women.” That is God’s judgment on false doctrine.

The way to fix it, then, is not to fight homosexuality. The way to fix it is to fight that false doctrine, fight that lie of man. When God sends the Babylonians into Israel as his judgment on Israel’s idolatry, don’t make laws against the Babylonians; put away your idols.

Implications of Why Reformed Protestant?

Because of the truth of God, there are three implications of why Reformed Protestant?

First, for the Reformed Protestant Churches, that truth of God must be the measure of all things. There is a temptation for Reformed Protestant Churches not to have that. There is a temptation to make the face of man the measure. There is a temptation to make popularity the measure. Our mother fell into that. She was tired of bearing the reproach of the gospel. She was tired of being called one-sided. She was tired of being called antinomian and hyper-Calvinist. No one will ever call her that again. She has what she wants. But all of that is the fear of man and respecting the persons of men. That may not be the measure of anything in the Reformed Protestant Churches. The truth must be. All things must be measured by the truth.

Second, the implication of why Reformed Protestant? is that the truth is always antithetical. Being founded upon the truth and characterized by the truth will mean that we have enemies. And when those enemies appear, outside or within, we don’t try to smooth things over. That would be possible. You can make the way smooth. But to do that you have to get rid of the truth. You can’t preach God. You can’t have God as sovereign if you are going to smooth things over with men. The truth is antithetical. God himself put enmity between two seeds, remember. And wherever the truth appears, the lie will come to attack it. This must be. Wherever the light shines, there the darkness hates it and denies it.

That is why the Reformed Protestant Churches consider the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council (NAPARC) to be an abomination of hell. I don’t say that lightly, but I say it very sincerely. It is an abomination of hell because at NAPARC churches come together to do things and put down the truth to do it. “What will unite us is all the things we have in common and all the projects we want to do. What we will not deal with is all the differences of doctrine that we have.” That is man. Satan goes to lunch at NAPARC.

That also means that the Reformed Protestant Churches have an ongoing controversy with denominations that teach man: the well-meant offer, theistic evolution, divorce and remarriage, federal vision. Our desire as churches is not to affiliate with such denominations—not at all. Our desire is to fight those denominations, to fight with the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. I say that to a broader audience not to snarl and bare my teeth but so you may know what governs and must govern the Reformed Protestant Churches.

And third, the implication of why Reformed Protestant? is this: that to all who love the gospel of God and hate the lie of man, who desire to fight that lie and oppose it wherever it rears its head, there is a standing invitation to join the Reformed Protestant Churches. The truth of the gospel is what the denomination stands for—not by any strength of man but sheerly by the grace of God. And we love fellowship in that gospel, communion in that precious truth.

When the Reformed Protestant Churches formed, the individual churches and then their federation together, this was written into or implied in our documents: we invite all who love this like precious faith with us to join us in the worship of Jehovah God.

Why Reformed Protestant? God and his truth.

I thank you.