This is the second year in a row that I’ve sort of preached on the KuyperDispy subject on/around June 4 (see last year’s here). “It’s my birthday and I can preach what I want to” or something like that.

I’m weaving this into our series on the Lord’s Household, related to how our kids have much overlap with all those who live “by faith,” including some Christians outside our local church, which also includes some (but not all) baby-baptizers.

It was provoked by a conversation I was having with Jonathan at the beginning of December (and I should give credit for the Cs to his informal white-boarding).

Kuyperian Dispensationalism is:

• Confident (full of faith)
• Consistent (lets a word be what it says)
• Comprehensive (all the things Christ cares about, on earth and for eternity)
• Conspicuous (manifest blessings)
• Compelling (jealousably provocative)

You’ve heard, be the kind of single person that the kind of person you’re trying to attract would be attracted to. So, be the kind of jealousable household that the kind of person you want your kids to marry would be drawn to, and you look for the same.

What virtues make a family worth partnering with, as in, what foundations should be in YOUR family and what foundations should you look for in OTHER families, not only for the baseline of shared fellowship but also for multiplied fruitfulness? This is part of the counsel I’m telling my unmarried kids about. Let me commend these five Cs.

Confident

Confidence means with faith. The fide is right in the middle.

We confess that Jesus is Lord and believe that God raised Him from the dead (Romans 10:9). So our faith is in the one who rules every thumb’s-width in the cosmos (nicknamed as Kuyperian), and the one who is Himself the resurrection and the life (John 11:25).

Need help? Ours is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth (Psalm 124:8).

Feeling weak? We have access to mercy and grace at the throne of grace through our great High Priest that sympathizes with our weakness (Hebrews 4:15).

Feeling fearful? We trust in Jesus who partook of flesh and blood like His brothers, that through death He might destroy the devil and deliver us from fear and slavery (Hebrews 2:14-15).

Our faith is in Christ Jesus the Lord, and this is great confidence.

Consistent

I don’t prefer to call most of the interpretations I think are wrong heresy. I don’t even find it rhetorically preferable to call them unbiblical. I DO think a lot of interpretation comes from bad Bible reading. A lot of interpretations are inconsistent.

What I’m after is Consistent reading, at least as consistent as possible. I think the grammatical historical hermeneutic, without additional lenses, pushes toward that consistency (labeled as, whether not it’s a great label, Dispensationalism). A text can’t mean what it never meant. Read from left to right, front to back.

For example, I couldn’t agree more with this sentence:

“I have said for years that our cultural battles are over editorial control of the dictionary.” (source)

But that declaration itself was written by a faithful/fruitful Christian who also says he’s a supersessionist (American Milk and Honey, p. 14), that “Israel” means the “Church” and vice versa. That’s changing the dictionary.

Of course typological readers, and Christocentric readers, Redemptive-Historical readers, and even Quadriga readers, argue that they’re being consistent. Yet attempts to call such conclusions consistent require reading something into the Scripture texts, not reading from them. Capital C Covenantal theology, from which paedobaptism and Postmillennialism come, requires consistent disregard of too many details.

I just can’t do it.

Comprehensive

A Kuyperian Dispensationalist has a Comprehensive theology/worldview that orients present and future expectations for every interest, celestial and terrestrial.

We can be confident and consistent when we care about all the things Christ cares about, on earth and for eternity.

If the Lord Jesus Christ cares about it, we can care about it. Christ’s interests are comprehensive.

• If He created it, He cares. “All things were made through Him, and without Him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3).
• If He controls it, He cares. “He upholds the universe by the word of His power” (Hebrews 1:3).
• If He commands it, duh. Among the commands, we can go all the way back to the mandate for divine image-bearers: with His blessing, men are to fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion on it (Genesis 1:28).

His Lordship gives us freedom and responsibility to learn about and to love ALL that He made and maintains.

This includes our general commissions to take dominion over all creatures (Genesis 1:28) and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:18-20), as well as our specific hope in the fulfillment of His covenant to save a particular people in a particular land. It’s near and far, today and the Millennial Kingdom, the work of our hands to the glory of the heavens.

So “may [the Father give us] strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth” of His power and promises (Ephesians 3:18).

Conspicuous

To the degree that a Kuyperian Dispensationalist is confident and consistent in his comprehensive worship and work, he has every reason to believe that the Lord will bless him. In fact, a KuyperDispy’s blessings will be Conspicuous .

Faith has fruit, thirty, sixty, a hundredfold (Matthew 13:23). God is not mocked, whatever one sows, that he will reap, so in due season we will reap if we do not give up (Galatians 6:7, 9). While that is a warning about sowing to the flesh, it is also a motivating promise for those who sow to the Spirit. So as we have opportunity, let us do good (Galatians 6:10)! The blessings of the Lord are multiple and manifest.

The salt of the earth is tasty (Matthew 5:13). The light of the world shines before others in good works (Matthew 5:14). Grace extends to more and more people for sake of increasing thanksgiving, to the glory of God (2 Corinthians 4:15).

We live “in the fullness of the blessing of Christ” (Romans 15:29). We are #blessed. Blessings abound. They are obvious and outstanding.

Compelling

Here’s the fifth (and final) C for KuyperDispies: Compelling

A quick recap. Because we confess that Jesus is Lord, we are full of faith: that’s confident (1).

Because Jesus is Lord, we believe that He will fulfill all His words, including promises made to the Patriarchs about salvation and land and blessing, along with the certainty of new hearts and the indwelling Spirit and inhabited cities and abundant grain: that’s consistent (2) (in acknowledging authorial intent, both OT and NT).

Because Jesus is Lord, we acknowledge His sovereign interests in all history over all the earth, that He calls GOOD what He has made and what He maintains, so that we also can live as image-bearers here and now, not just post-rapture/“in heaven”: that’s comprehensive (3).

Because Jesus is Lord, living according to the above results in Jesus’ blessings on His people: that’s conspicuous (4).

And so KuyperDispies are Compelling (5), that is, we expect that God is causing His blessings on us to be jealously provocative.

Salvation has come to the Gentiles “so as to make Israel jealous” (Romans 11:11). This salvation includes all the spiritual blessings, but also “riches for the world” (Romans 11:12). This is no guarantee of material prosperity, but it is an argument against gnostic/dualistic pietism.

By faith some conquer kingdoms, enforce justice, put foreign armies to flight. Others are tortured, chained, imprisoned, afflicted, and all of them are those “of whom the world was not worthy” (Hebrews 11:35, and see verses 32-38).

And so Paul said, “I magnify my ministry in order to somehow make my fellow Jews jealous, and thus save some of them” (Roman 11:13-14).

In God’s plan, the remnant in Israel will be compelled by the blessings of God to the nations (like us) unto repentance and confession in Jesus as the Messiah. And when the fulness of the Gentiles has come in, among the next stages of God’s work there will be a full inclusion of Israel, and “what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead?” (Romans 11:15)

This is the Blessed Option, not a bunker mentality. We are not holding back, we are God’s workmanship to show off His grace and the unsearchable riches of Christ. That is compelling, that is jealousable.

Conclusion

Jealousable households love Christ and have parents who love their kids and love these virtues for and into their kids. Those households look for other households to be in the same community to build and battle, they look for similar households when it’s time for the kids to get married.

Note: none of this requires any extra meetings, events, money, but it touches all our fellowship and efforts and pursuits.

I think that one of the reasons we get so much from the “Moscow Mood” is because they have 4 of the 5 of these Cs (lacking consistent reading). That said, I’d rather have their kind of inconsistency most of the time. What you/we find compelling is not their Covenantalism, it’s that they live by faith. (For more discussion on this, check out the All Are Yours podcast Episode 5.)

everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. (1 John 5:4 ESV)

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Some Starter Questions

• How would you rank TEC households on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being FULL, for each of the five Cs? Which of the Cs is most lacking?
• Let’s say you were friends with a family that was everything else except for consistent, what challenges might you have? Would those challenges be worth breaking fellowship over?
• Would you rather have your child marry a paedobaptist with Kuyperian bona fides or a credobaptist with a well-stocked doomsday bunker?
• What damage have inconsistent Dispensationalists done?
• Or, isn’t it better to lower our expectations and just try to get along with each other in Jesus’ name?