Great Doctrines of Salvation-Begin of Identification Truths

When we decided to teach this class last year, we decided to include identification with it because I think it's part of the salvation package. And what I intend to do today is just sort of give a little bit of an overview and then I've got questions for next week, give you a little history of identification, but basically try to set the premise for what we're going to talk about over the next couple of months. We have spent eight months talking about what God has done for the believer. I emphasize the word for the believer. We have not talked about anything that God did to the believer.

You see that? There's a big difference. The second thing is that we have talked only about sins, S-I-N-S, those things that non-believers and believers who walk in the flesh, the acts that they commit. We have not talked about the source of those acts or answering a really huge question which is what did God do about the sinner? Now you could say, well, we've learned that Jesus died on the cross for my sins, he was buried and resurrected, I have been justified, I am being sanctified, and all of the terms that we use, but we have not discussed what God may or may not have done with that nice little sin nature that we were all born with.

What did he do with that thing? Maybe the best question to ask you is a trick question. Is there such a thing as a saved sinner? What do you think? I have a yes. How many think yes? There is such a thing as a saved sinner. I've got three. Who thinks there isn't such a thing as a saved sinner? One, two, three, four. I've got a couple of chickens in here too. There is no such animal as a safe sinner from God's perspective. You didn't say that. You're not qualifying. I said it was a trick.

So what we're going to learn about hopefully in our foray into identification is exactly what did God do about the sinner. And he did a lot more, even though the doctrines we have just completed studying, which has to do only with our salvation from the penalty of sin, and our justification and standing, righteousness, and all those kinds of things, we haven't talked about what God is going to do, or has done, about you the sinners. And that's what we'll be spending a lot of time with. We're going to cover a lot of John 17, obviously Romans 6, and some other verses.

I will say this, unless there is a thorough understanding of your identification with Christ and His death, burial, and resurrection, you're not going to grow. Are there any good books on that besides the Bible? I'll bring you one. I've got a really good one. I'm going to say this again. Unless you understand your identification with Christ on the cross, you will not grow spiritually. Anybody want to guess why you wouldn't? There's no foundation. There's no foundation. What else? Think about this for a minute. Here's the thing.

If all you know is that you've been saved, and you've been justified, and you're being sanctified, and you're righteous, and all of the items that are covered in the first part of this, and you know nothing about your being crucified with Christ, then your whole Christian effort is to try to get the man that you were in Adam to be a good Christian.

You won't abandon him. You won't leave him. You'll be working on the wrong guy for your whole Christian life. And you'll be really susceptible to legalism because the law fits this guy. If you understand your identification with Christ and his death, burial and resurrection, ascension and seeding, you will eventually abandon making him better. and using any type of legal method to do it and you'll begin to live by grace and your faith will be focused on your position in Christ. So that your life will become not I but Christ. If you don't know that information, I don't think you have a chance of abandoning your good old man, your good old self that you know yourself to be. So when somebody like me stands up and says, well, you're a new creature in Christ, you're thinking, what does that mean?

It's like going to the Pontiac dealer and getting a new car. Still the same driver. So that's basically where we're headed. And obviously we'll go slow. And even though it took the Apostle Paul to come on the scene to explain what identification is, The Lord Jesus, in John 17, you'll begin to see that he sort of referred to and identified that there was something coming that was going to be different through the language that he used. John the Apostle, when he writes John 30 some years later after Paul and everybody else has left the planet, will refer to identification but he never explains it. Paul's the guy that explains it. So we'll spend a lot of time discussing the doctrine of the two men, and we've talked some about that, but we'll talk about why two men and where it is.

It's Romans 5. And then God's issue was, well, how does he get you out of this man and into this man? How does he disassociate you and unidentify you with this man over here who is Adam? and identify you with Christ. How does he do that? And did he do it? And what am I supposed to do about it if he did it?

But for purposes today, I want to talk about identification history. How did this language and this lingo come about? Because through most of, up until the early 1800s, You can't find any or very limited writings in English or any other language that talks about identification. So it is built upon the birth truths identification. You have to have the birth truths down which we all of you are now.

Not yet. Actually, I was thinking the other day, when I'm done, if you'd like, I'll Xerox my six pages of notes and give them to you so you can put them in your notebook, okay? The identification truths are not the birth truths. I want to distinguish that.

When I say birth truths, what am I talking about? Death, burial, resurrection. Actually, the whole book that we've studied up to this point, that's what I'm talking about. March Banks, the basic doctrines that relate to salvation, those are known as the birth truths. Well, now we're going to talk about growth truths. Now that we already are Christians, how do we grow? A synonymous term with that is identification truths. and that's what we're going to try to develop and establish as we go.

Now in 18, the guy that comes on the scene that starts this whole process is a guy named Martin Luther and he was a German monk and thank God for him because he reinstituted, think about this, 500 years ago. That's a long time. That brought to light again the life-giving truths of justification by faith. Justification by faith, that you are justified or declared righteous by God simply by believing Him. Up until the time that he made it an issue, there were, I dare say, people who got saved via justification by faith, but in general, no, because the predominating religion in at least European countries was Catholicism and they were justification by work really hard and write big checks. And so here comes Martin Luther and he brings to life Romans 117, that the just shall live by faith. Now he, although he began that information, and if you've studied anything about Martin Luther, because he never approached identification truths, you know, he sort of, Lutheranism, sort of, you know, deteriorated into lots of legalism over time.

But he, and you know, the Catholic Church being the cool cats that they are, they decided they'd have a big lunch and invite him to speak. What he didn't know is he was lunch. But he could hold his own. And he did hold his own. The only reason he survived as long as he did is that there were these very wealthy noblemen in Germany that protected him. And it wasn't for religious reasons that they protected him. They were trying to take some of the power away from the Pope. The Pope was the most powerful man in the world at that time. He decided who was who and what was what and who had what.

So, I would say that since Martin Luther, the world has never been the same, because the word got out after him, and fairly soon after that, publications, the Gutenberg Bible, the Gutenberg Press was invented and things began to spread. So, a quote from J.B. Stoney, in the Reformation, which he really started, there was, through grace, a great deliverance. The groundwork of Christianity was recovered. namely, justification by faith. So, to repeat the birth truths, what Martin Luther actually was responsible for was the recovery of the great doctrines relating to salvation. Martin Luther could have read Marchbank's book and he would have understood it.

And that would have been the pinnacle of Biblical doctrine up to that point. Okay? What is that word? Recovery of what? The recovery of justification by faith. Or, what did I say? Yeah, you used something else. I don't know. Okay. Anyway, one other word that you need to be aware of is when we're talking about birth truths, we're talking about substitution. Christ took my place on the cross and he died to pay my penalty for the sins of the world, or my sins personally. Substitution. Substitution is a word that fits under birth truths or salvation.

So, just to get established, and we talked about this, we were born anew, born again out of corruptible seed. but of incorruptible by the word of God who lives and abides forever. That's what we've studied for eight months. We also discovered, especially Hassan's teaching last couple weeks, that we were accepted in Christ. We are fully accepted in Him. To the praise and glory of His grace wherein He has made us accepted in the Beloved.

Ephesians 1.6. We are eternally secure. We have life because our life is hid with Christ in God and we are positioned in Christ God hath quickened or enlifed us together with Christ and he has raised us together and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. Now those kinds of verses can also talk about your security but really what they refer to is your identification.

I'll just make the statement. It is futile to try to grow spiritually based on the birth truths alone. Now I've had a lot of people argue with me about that because they will point out, well I know so and so that's in such and such reformed church and boy he's really a worker for the Lord and he's a terrific guy and he's a spiritual heavyweight but he doesn't know anything about identification. You think that guy just because he's a performer is spiritually mature? What do you think?

I think the only way you determine is when the heat gets on, how you stand up in the heat. We were talking on Wednesday night about tribulations and things like that and how what Christianity is today is not anything like what it was early on and what it was for almost 2,000 years.

We live in almost a Renaissance period of no pressure. If you read Paul's epistle, every one of those cities that he wrote letters to, they were getting hammered. But we don't get hammered. We got it easy. I don't know why. We must be the weaker ones.

So a lot of people are not mature then because most churches really don't go into this type of teaching. Okay, let's talk about what spiritual maturity would be. How would you define spiritual maturity? Knowing that you've been crucified with Christ and that your old sin nature is nailed to the cross and you're a new creature and you have the power to live that way. Yeah, to abide in Christ. That's what spiritual maturity is. Spiritual maturity is not, you know, two degrees from a first class seminary and be able to quote Bible verses and, you know, and have a huge church. Spiritual maturity is to live the life of Christ and be able to do it.

What kind of life does he intend to live through you? Health, wealth and wisdom, right? No. A life of suffering. In Colossians, Paul says that we fill up the sufferings of Christ. Wow. I must say that we in America don't know much about suffering. For Christ's sake, we don't. We will, but we don't now. Well, what would that look like, suffering, in real life? I'll show you. I'm glad you asked.

If you turn to Romans chapter 8, starting in verse 35, here's what Paul says. cannot separate us from the love of Christ, which is in the love of God. Tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, and we identified eight perils, or the sword. For it is written, for your sake we are killed or slaughtered all day long. We are counted as sheep for the slaughter. That's suffering.

Now, if you take each one of those things individually and just spend a little time studying them, you'll find that this is a pretty good description of a homeless guy who is being tracked down and run down for the purposes of increasing the distress in his life personally, put the squeeze on him, and that he doesn't have any food to eat, he doesn't have very many clothes to wear, and he's in peril all the time, and not only that, the authorities are after him.

That's what Paul describes as a Christian. And he's saying that that won't separate you from the love of God that's in Christ Jesus. Now I've got to tell you, let that start happening to us over three weeks and we would be having Everybody in the world would be calling up and saying, Christ must not love me anymore. Look what's happening.

It's kind of interesting too, earlier in Romans 8, what is it? 18 for I reckon the sufferings, present sufferings are worthy to be compared to what's ahead. And that's what I mean, is that we don't know from experience what it is like to suffer for Christ. Because we have this freedom to speak our mind, you know, without any consequences. I mean, the worst thing that's going to happen is somebody's going to yell at us. They can yell, you know. Okay.

Now, however foundational the birth truths are, they're not intended for the means of spiritual growth. And you're going to run into that issue a lot, especially with reformed people that you talk to, that they think that the birth truths are all you need. They don't want to talk about identification. The birth truths are what we would call the milk of the word and not the meat. So really what we've just finished studying is milk. Not that it's unimportant, it is.

You have to have that foundation on which to grow on. Now, if you take the Lutheran church of today, you'll find they've kind of even lost the birth truce. And they don't have any growth truce at all taught in their doctrine. And so what does it result in? Legalism. And they don't even teach eternal security anymore.

And on top of that, the charismatic element has begun to sneak in there. I know one where they're believing in evolution too. Oh sure. Well I remember in college with a Jesuit professor, here's what he said was, how he compromised creationism and evolution, is that God started by creating, but everything has evolved since then. And at some point God instilled into some sort of creature the nature of Adam and Eve. Well, nobody in the class was smart enough to say, well, how about Genesis chapter 1? So, in general, Reformation-oriented, Reformed churches with birth truths, there are lots of those around, but they have little or no growth truths at all. How many of you have attended churches like that? Two or three people. These people haven't. They've always gone to good places.

And basically what you find there is that the law is put on believers as the rule of life, the mosaic system. Not the whole thing. I mean, sometimes they'll say, well, we don't have to do the ceremonial part of it, but we do have to do the moral part. So in a lot of those churches, like John went to Denver Christian, which is Dutch reform. Well, they do teach justification by faith.

There's no question that they do that, but that's where it ends. They don't maintain that the old man was crucified at the cross, and even though they refuse to be Catholics, they still consider the flesh to be before God. I remember a circumstance there with a man that, why he picked me out, I don't know, but he wanted to talk about some spiritual issues and so as we got going I took him to Romans 6 and he was really liking what I was teaching him until we got to the point where it said that he that is dead is free from the law. He said that can't be true and that was the end of our discussing after we had met for a couple of months. Once we got there I said well let's Who's the final authority?

Your church doctrine or the word of God? Which is it? It's got to be the church. It's got to be the church. So, a lot of these reformed churches would say that they would refute legalism for salvation but they hang on to it for spiritual growth. Now, if you know anything about the law, what's the law designed to do? To show your sin. It's designed to show you sin. It's designed to condemn you. It's designed to inflame the sin nature. It's like, the best example is like if you're camping and you've got a fire and it's time to leave the campsite and put the fire out and you try to put it out with gasoline. That's what the law does to your sin nature.

A quote from Newell. Newell says, almost all the theology of various creeds of Christendom date back to the Reformation. which went triumphantly to the end of Romans 5. And so far as theological development and presentation of truths were concerned, stopped right there. Consequently, you must not regard yourself as bound to accept all that legal doctrine of sanctification, which has been and still is predominantly the sine qua non of orthodox belief.

He wrote that in 1937. So, any any reformed, covenant, charismatic church you're in, you're going to get law to live by. You're just going to get it. Now it may be sugar-coated, but it's legalism because it's going to give you something to do in order to be more pleasing to God. About 350 years ago when the substitution of the new birth truths came in, again they were the foundation of moving towards grace again. But it wasn't until a guy named John Darby, everybody around here has heard that name, he lived from 1800 to 1882.

He was a lawyer and he was also a priest in the Irish Anglican Church. And two years after he was ordained, he had a parish or some office he had, he began to be convicted about spiritual issues. And he knew better than to try to reform the Irish Anglican Church, so he quit.

And he began to teach I'll give you a dozen things that this guy taught that nobody else was teaching. Full assurance of salvation. The complete acceptance by the father in his beloved son. He began to teach the church as the body of Christ. The absolute distinction between Israel and the church. And therefore between law and grace.

He began to teach basic dispensations in the Word of God. Now dispensation is an interesting word. It means an economy or it means the household of God or the rule in the household of God. I think a better word than dispensation is stewardship. But he began, he was the father of dispensationalism.

He taught the pre-tribulational, pre-millennial rapture of the church. Everybody know what that is? Who doesn't know what that means? The pre-tribulation, what he's talking about is before the tribulation happens, the church gets raptured out of here. And before the millennial kingdom happens, the church gets raptured out of here. So the church will not go through the tribulation, But we will be back here for the Millennial Kingdom, ruling and reigning with Christ.

He put a lot of light on prophecy. Our identification with the Lord Jesus and his death unto sin is burial, resurrection, and ascension. He brought that back into vogue. Our deliverance from the reign of sin and the old man via Romans 6. Our freedom from the principle of law via Romans 7. Our position in the Lord Jesus at the Father's right hand and God's purpose to conform us to the image of His Son.

Before John Darby, none of those things were ever discussed. Now you might even look at, there's a woman named Madame Gaillon that was a French lady, but she had some of this in there. But the guy that brought it into vogue and understood it and wrote about it was John Darby. And anybody from 1850 to 2010 that writes anything about identification can thank John Darby for what he knows. Just like anybody who writes anything about justification by faith can thank Martin Luther. You don't hear about John Darby very much today, but he was the guy.

He started a church called the Brethren, the Plymouth Brethren. And they for about 20 or 30 years were, Miles Stanford used to say, were the best example of how the church should run that had been on the earth since the early church. But like all organizations that are like that, they began to have problems. And the thing that caused them problems was their exclusivity. In other words, we're different than you. And they began to set up, guess what? Rules. Like the Catholics. Yeah.

Now, Courtney Hemingway came out of a Brethren Church. So did Roger Henderson. And what's interesting is the Brethren Church, Brethren Churches were to be the safeguards of these growth troops. But the Brethren Church that both Courtney and Roger went to, used to invite Hal Malloy to come over and teach them what they should already know. And he would go over to that Bellevue Bible Church and he would teach them the identification truths.

They didn't know them. Because of their exclusivity, they began to eliminate people out of their environment. And so there became two Brethren churches, the open and the closed. The closed were the guys that were supposedly the original guys that had it all together. Well, you know, if you have a closed church, how long are you going to last? Not very long.

And what they would do is that they began to focus on how they were meeting rather than why they were meeting. And when you start to focus on how you are meeting, then you begin to have problems with the people who don't see it the way you see it. So they started to splinter. I would say about the Brethren Church though, they have the greatest collection of writers and authors who understood growth truths that's ever been written.

These guys have no peer. John Darby and William Kelly. J.B. Stoney, Charles Coates, Macintosh. These guys had no peer when it comes to explaining and writing about the growth truths. The problem is that for today, these guys wrote 100 years ago, 150 years ago, and you have to kind of get used to the language. But they had no peer. there's nobody that writes like these guys do and explain things carefully like they do.

And most of their writings are eminent domain on the web and if you want to look them up you can. You can find Darby, you can find Kelly, you can find Stoney, you can find all these guys on the web and download them for free and study them. You can also, there's a group in England called the Kingston Bible Trust If you want to get any of their stuff in hardback, you can write them or email them. It's very inexpensive and they'll send you the books. You've got to pay for them, but they're not very expensive. And some of the stuff that they teach is... I think I've been studying that stuff for 25 years and still haven't even begun to scratch the surface in all the stuff these guys wrote. It's so good.

Now, the next step in identification truism from a historical standpoint now is the Keswick movement. It's spelled K-E-S-W-I-C-K. It sounds like Keswick, but it's pronounced Keswick. And it started to rise about 1875. And it was in England when it started. and it began to spread the identification truths beyond what the Brethren, beyond the Brethren assemblies. And here's the way Akazic would work. Can you spell that again? K-E-S-W-I-C-K. I just read about that. Are those those conventions that they had over here? Yeah.

Now here's what, here's the, when they first started, they were wonderful because what would happen is they would come to a place like Holly Hills. and they would have a five-day convention. And all day long, speaker after speaker, and they would have guys like William Kelly and Stoney and these guys teaching. These were really, really, and then later on, guys like Lewis Ferry Chaffer and Schofield would teach at these things. And they would teach the whole identification truce in five days. They lay the whole thing out. Sounds wonderful, doesn't it?

Problem is that spiritual growth takes longer than five days. So once they left, people that got the truce and were really excited about them, there wasn't anybody to nurture them along. Then the second thing that began to happen to these people is that they began not to be so strict about who the teachers were. And once you do that, from the outset the Keswick Method of an annual week of concentrated teaching of identification truths has confounded many inadequately prepared believers. If you go to one of those conferences and you're not prepared, By the end of the week your brains are scrambled, you don't know what they're talking about and you have picked up pieces of it and are trying to live it and you didn't get the grace because it takes longer. Too much too soon. Their consequence seeking to reckon upon that which is insufficiently understood has been the cause of much personal failure and disillusionment.

I know that today, there's a movement today that we would refer to as the one nature guys. And what's that group in Denver? It's called Deeper Life Ministries? No. Started by a man in Denver actually and carried on at Exchange Life Ministries is the name of it.

Now here's what this guy would do. He would bring you in if you wanted to be counseled by him and he would sit you down over five, six sessions, which you had to pay for. And he would give you the identification truths, and he would say to you, your old man doesn't exist anymore. One nature. You don't have two natures, you have one. And once he got done telling you that information, then he would say to you, well you got it all, you don't need to come back and see me again. See? Way too much, way too fast. How many in here have been studying identification truths for a lot of years? You all have.

Some of you are new to them, but you find that this is not the kind of thing that you learn in a week. I'm not discounting what Keswick did. I mean, imagine if they had a Keswick here in Denver with those great teachers, I'd be there every minute. Because those truths would be getting out. But we're going to spend three or four months going through identification truths, because it's a slow process. Although the early Keswick's maintained a high quality speaker level in the presentation of the growth truths, it was inevitable that time would eventuate in the platform breakdown. The key to identification and growth, the cross for the old man, has been all but bypassed as otherwise fine, but unqualified for growth speakers have given access to the Keswick podium. John MacArthur speaks at Keswick's today. He's not qualified.

A lot of these guys, you know, it's like we talk about the great and wonderful Dallas Seminary. I wouldn't recommend anybody from Dallas today. They've been reformized. Dr. Bach and Dr. Blazing have took what was classic dispensationalism and came up with neo-dispensationalism, which all it really is is to bring a little bit of Israel and a little bit of law into grace. That's all they're doing. So you can't recommend a place like that anymore. At once they were great, but not today. Let me ask you a question. This is just a personal question.

Why do you think God doesn't allow anything that seems to be really solid on the earth to last very long? like the Brethren Movement, like the Keswiks, like Dallas Seminary. Why do you think he does that? Ever had those thoughts? Is it God or is it man who steps in and wants his ego to come to the front?

Yeah, it's God who starts him with a man, a man like John Darby, but then over time it dissipates. The ministry either dies with the man or the ministry gets too big or I don't know, for people's egos get involved and it seems like God doesn't maintain what he starts. Well, it's just like overhearing a conversation and by the time the 10th person hears it, it's completely different.

So it's the same here. No, but think about this. The Brethren Church that Darby started in like 1830 for about 20 or 30 years was, as Miles said, the best example of how the church should function that had been on the earth for 2,000 years or 1,850 years. But then it starts to splinter. How come? Did God just say, well, that's enough of that, we're moving on?

Or the Keswick movement, when it first started, it was just wonderful. Dallas Seminary, when Louis Barry Chafer started it, boy that's the place, if you were going to go to seminary, that's where you wanted to go. Because that's where the best training was. The best understanding. How come? I have an answer. I'm probably asking something you don't think about. I think about stuff. Give us the answer.

I think the answer is that because the church is a heavenly organism and not an earthly one. And our focus is to be heavenly. and not on some organization that started on the earth. Your focus here should be heavenly, not how it is by the church. Yeah, but okay, so what if you said then, you know, the Catholic Church has been around forever, they don't need to have a problem with us. Yeah, and they have been. from about a hundred A.D. forward. Oh, so you're saying if something has a strong truth, it seems to go away. Yeah, that's what I meant. I should have explained better. Yeah.

Well, how about Martin Luther King? He was a wonderful revolutionary. He had a fantastic faith. He became really anti-Semitic. I mean, he didn't stay on. And I think that's part of the problem with what we have now with the church being Israel, is it not? You can trace that back to him. Yeah, you can. Martin Luther, what she was saying is Martin Luther brought in the truce, reintroduced the justification by faith, but by the time he was done, he was anti-Semitic.

And you know, the Catholic Church at that time were having these inquisitions where they were killing their opposition. Guess what the Lutherans were doing by the time he died? Killing his opposition. Burn them at the stake. wanted to kill him from the beginning. Oh sure, so he decided he'd reciprocate. He'd run and hide the rest of his life.

When you grow up like I did and you go to Catholic schools and you have to take religion classes, you learn about all these heretic groups called the Anabaptists and the Huguenots and all of those people. When you become a Christian and you start to study them, you find out they were the real Christians. The Anabaptists, you know why they called them Anabaptists?

Because they wouldn't baptize infants. And so what the Pope would do is he would tell a guy who had a duke or somebody who had an army but didn't have much land, he'd say, you know, up over here, you know, outside of this town, there's this whole conclave of these people that are, they call themselves Christians, but they don't believe in infant baptism.

We need to wipe them out. So take your boys up there and wipe them out. And when you do, you can have all their land and all their property. So what they did was with the anti-baptists, they took them all down the river and they You don't believe in infant baptism? Come with me. You believe now?

No. Anyway, so there is this dilemma that I have discovered in my own personal studies of Why don't these organizations, organisms last? Now some of the people that write, their doctrines, their writings preserve, but the seminaries and the organizations, and I was just reading a biographical sketch of Lewis Barry Chafer and how he got involved and started Dallas Seminary and how wonderful it was to start with, but now it's just, it's no better than any secular Bible college. The only Bible college I can tell you that even approaches teaching identification truths is this Frontier School of the Bible up in Wyoming, the only one I know of. The only one. You read Chafer's Systematic Theology, they don't teach his Systematic Theology anymore in his seminary.

Did both bells go off? So, in 1975, Keswick had a convention in the United States that celebrated its 100th year. 15,000 to 20,000 people attended that week. As an example of what the movement has come to, we find that 100 years of identification and truth ministry climaxed by a program featuring a covenant theologian, John Stott, presenting the law as the rule of life for the believer, and an evangelist, Billy Graham, preaching the gospel message.

Neither one of those guys have any business being at what was originally designed to be a growth truth ministry, because neither one of them know anything about spiritual growth. Some of the early speakers in the United States, Keswick, were guys like L.L. Letgers, Griffin Thomas, Charles Trumbull, and Gordon Watt. And these were really good guys that really understood.

And some of these guys you can still find their writings around. But the Deeper Life message is gone now from the Keswick. So if you see, come to a Keswick convention, don't waste your money. Because it just, even though they still exist, they don't teach, they don't teach the deeper life ministry. Okay, I still have more to finish up on the history.

But here's some questions for next week and basically what we're going to do is we're going to start and try to identify the fact that there are two men and that the first man that God created, Adam, was a certain way and when he sinned to do, and when Adam sinned, was God's purpose still maintained? Did he still find satisfaction, and if he didn't, how can we contrast Adam before the fall and Adam after the fall, which we've kind of done from a justification standpoint, but now we're going to take a look at it. from an identification standpoint. Father how we thank you for your word and how we thank you for the grace that we live in and how we thank you for the Lord Jesus Christ who is our very life and we pray in your son's name. Amen.