Joel Webbon introduces "reformed confessionalism" as a blueprint for Christendom 2.0, arguing that Christians act as viceroy rulers under Jesus' sovereignty to advance God's reign now rather than waiting for the end. He contrasts Adam's failure with Jesus' victory, rejecting prosperity gospel heresy while affirming that obedience yields ordinary blessings. Webbon criticizes modern evangelicalism for prioritizing internal attitudes over practical engagement, urging believers to immediately adopt historic confessions like the Westminster or 1689 Baptist documents to counter threats like Drag Queen Story Hour and infant mortality, asserting that choosing established doctrine is essential for effectively ruling the world today. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Adam's Forfeited Dominion00:10:49
This is what I want to discuss.
So, the first of these seven doctrines to rule the world is reformed confessionalism.
And so, what I want to do is I want to take those two words and speak a little bit on each of them.
What does it mean to be reformed?
What does it mean to be confessional?
But before even getting to that, I want to address the subtitle of the conference.
So, you know, Blueprints for Christendom 2.0.
The subtitle, it didn't need it.
You could have just left it there.
It was a catchy title.
Good enough.
But, you know, after careful consideration, I decided to become worse.
And so, I thought the subtitle.
It'll really rub some people the wrong way, and I think that there's an immense value.
There's a ministry in that.
Eric Kahn is a faithful minister in that arena.
From time to time, I like to enjoy him.
The nice thing about, you know, X Twitter is that if I ever get in trouble, you know, that every three hours I've got another tweet from Eric coming that'll take the focus off of me, you know.
So it is a ministry, and he faithfully does it.
But all that being said, you know, this subtitle of Seven Doctrines for Ruling the World, that bothered people.
Well, you don't rule the world.
Yes and no.
Yes and no.
So, starting with reformed confessionalism and starting with that word reformed, what's the first, you know, the first rule of fight club, right?
You don't talk about fight club.
Well, what's the first rule of Christendom?
What's the first rule for ruling the world?
It's properly understanding that you don't rule the world.
So, in the ultimate, truest sense, King Jesus rules the world.
In the ultimate, truest sense, when I say reformed, what I mean by that is certainly much more can and should be included in that word reformed.
It can mean much more, but it cannot mean less than the absolute sovereignty of God over all things.
As the late great R.C. Sproul once said, there's not one maverick molecule in all the universe.
And the first foundational doctrine for the Christian in understanding properly their role as a viceroy, as a lowercase r ruler, lowercase k king in ruling the world, the first thing that they must understand is.
Is that there is a king above them, that God is meticulously sovereign in his ruling, in his reigning in all things.
And yet, it's not one or the other, it's both.
And yet, although God is the one who rules the world, the next question that we need to answer is how?
How has God, who is sovereign, who is king of kings and lord of lords, determined for his rule and reign to advance and be stewarded in this world?
And the answer is through his image bearing creatures.
That's not my idea.
That's not even a uniquely post millennial idea.
You can't even get past the first two chapters of Genesis without grappling with this idea.
So it's God's world, right?
This is my father's world.
It's God's world.
But in creation, what God does is he appoints and delegates rulership, dominion to Adam.
And then Adam forfeits this dominion to Satan.
But then the question for us, and this is where certain eschatological positions come into play, and there are some debates and disagreements on this, and some people are wrong and some people are right.
But the question is is this dominion that God holds in the ultimate sovereign sense, but that He, in a secondary sense, Gave and delegated to Adam, and then Adam, he forfeited by his sin and handed over to Satan.
Where is the football now?
Right?
So it started with God, it was passed to Adam.
Adam dropped it and fumbled it, and Satan picked it up.
And is that still where the rule and dominion lies?
Or did something else happen in this great redemptive gospel story?
And this thing that happened doesn't have anything, any bearing on rule, on kingly rule.
And I would argue, I think the scripture argues that yes, something happened, and yes, the football has changed hands.
Because in this gospel story, there is a second Adam.
There's a better Adam.
And it's crazy just to think of all the different distinctions.
I mean, you could draw this out for days.
The first Adam, he begins this probationary period in the garden as a full grown, mature man.
Jesus begins his conquest as an infant.
Jesus has to resist sin as a two year old.
Adam can't do it at mature adulthood, and Jesus does it as a toddler.
And Adam is able to do this in a protective, conducive environment of plenty.
A garden where there's only one tree off limits, everything else is a yes.
Whereas Christ, as he's living in his earthly ministry, and then especially when you look at his temptations in the wilderness, Adam is in a garden with plenty.
Christ is 40 days fasting in a wilderness with nothing.
When Satan comes to tempt Eve, where Adam is there with her in the garden, it's not as though he's absent.
When the temptation of our first father and mother takes place, it is in the context of plenty, in a world that is unfallen.
With two individuals who are born mature in adulthood, Jesus starts as a child, as an infant.
And he grows in wisdom and stature and favor with God and man.
And then he's confronted in the wilderness, not a place of plenty, but a place that is desolate, a place of lack.
He's hungry, and Satan comes to tempt him.
And the second Adam, the final Adam, the better Adam, he succeeds where the first fails.
And I want to just address that real briefly.
Some of the, you know, like we can do, you could call it post millennial myth busters, you know, a fun game show.
Well, you know, Jesus, you know, you post millennial guys, you're nothing like Christ.
You're doing precisely the opposite of what he did.
You know, Satan confronted Jesus in the wilderness and took him up on a high hill and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and held that out as a temptation, but as a viable offer.
Just for the record, it wasn't a bluff.
It was sinful.
It was a sinful temptation, but it was not a bluff.
Satan is offering the kingdoms of the world because, in a very real sense, he has them.
At that time, at that moment, that God, who is still sovereign over all, including Satan, you think of the book of Job, Satan has to ask permission, and there are very clear boundaries that are prescribed to him by God.
Satan is always on a leash, just for the record, even the Old Testament, Satan still was on a leash.
I would simply argue that the leash is significantly shorter now, post Christ, but he's always a creature.
He's always been a creature, and all creatures do not have autonomous freedom.
There's something to be said for freedom, but not autonomous libertarian freedom.
Satan has never had that.
But at this time, as he's confronting Christ, he does have a rather long leash.
He was the prince of the air.
He was a ruler, in a sense, under God's sovereignty, but still with dominion over the kingdoms of the earth.
Why?
Because God, who is ultimate king, gave dominion in delegation to Adam, and Adam forfeited it and gave it to Satan.
And when this moment happens in the wilderness, it's the exact parallel opposite of the first and the last Adam.
The first is in a garden, plenty, protection, provision.
Christ is in the wilderness, hungry.
And he's tempted by Satan.
And here's the thing Satan says, If you bow down and worship me, I will give to you dominion and kingship over all the kingdoms of the earth.
And the answer of Christ, of course, is, Well, I don't want that because I don't care about politics.
Well, that's the G H E Y version of Jesus, but not the biblical version of Jesus.
Jesus is not a pietist and he is not effeminate.
Jesus doesn't say to Satan, I have no interest in worldly kingdoms.
No, what Jesus rejects and refuses is Satan's offer to give him those kingdoms because Jesus fully intends on taking those kingdoms.
And he does.
He does.
And he does so by his life, death, resurrection, and glorious ascension.
He takes rightful dominion over these kingdoms.
But the very next question is Does the football now stay with Christ?
Well, in one sense, the ultimate highest answer is yes.
But in a lower sense, in terms of human agency and means, God is sovereign over the ends.
But God brings about his sovereign purposes and ends through means, through human agency.
And Christ now is the second Adam who has taken, not been given, but taken back dominion over earthly kingdoms from Satan.
He then delegates that, just as God did in the garden with Adam, he now does with us, his church.
That Christ is actually expanding, of the increase of his government, there shall be no end.
He is expanding his kingdom, his rule, his reign in this world, not cataclysmically and suddenly at the very end of the age, which will likely be next Thursday.
But instead, progressively and gradually, like yeast, leaven, and a lump of dough or a mustard seed that grows not overnight, but progressively in this gospel age, in human history, through time and eventually fills the earth.
Christ is progressing, right?
Obedience Brings Blessing00:11:44
Shout on, pray on.
We are gaining progressively, gradually ground.
And Christ is doing all this through the agency, the means of his church, Christ's body.
You are Christ's body.
You are his hands and feet.
This is not the prosperity gospel.
That's another post millennial myth buster.
This is not the prosperity gospel.
If I teach my children as a father, every Friday on your way home from work, you should stop by the nearest convenience store and buy, you know, a Texas lotto ticket and play the same numbers and use, you know, your mother's birthday.
And if you do this faithfully, week after week, for several years, eventually you will win.
That's the prosperity gospel.
But me teaching my children, if you work hard, beginning at a young age, and if you make vows to your spouse and keep them, and if you practice integrity in business and in friendship and in parenting,
then ordinarily, over a long period of time, long obedience in one direction, ordinarily, not as a guarantee, not that you're entitled and that God somehow owes this to you, but ordinarily as a general principle, you'll experience blessing.
That's not the prosperity gospel.
That's called the Bible.
If obedience doesn't bring blessing ever in this life, if that is not something that we can speak as a general principle, then you have to discount so many volumes of the scripture.
I don't even, there's hardly anything left to preach.
And somewhere along the line, we determined that the prosperity gospel was not merely faith in our faith.
That's wrong.
That's heresy.
It's not merely the power of manifestation or the power of positivity or wishful thinking.
All that really is the prosperity gospel, which really is a damnable heresy.
But somewhere through the power of pietism and apathetic theology, I want to say some other words, but we'll leave it there.
An apathetic theology, we equated the prosperity gospel not just with faith in our faith or the power of positivity or manifesting.
But we actually began to truncate and define the prosperity gospel as any teaching that asserts even the possibility that blessing in this life may come about as a consequence of obedience.
In other words, we damned the Bible.
We started calling approximately 85% of the scripture heresy.
Woe to us.
And when I say us, just to put a fine point on it, I'm talking about.
Not just Christians and not just evangelicals, but particularly the Reformed camp.
And we need to sit with that.
We need to feel that for a moment.
It was particularly Reformed preachers that overreacted to the prosperity gospel and began to essentially, effectively assert that verses and principles and passages of Scripture that say things like, I don't know, something like this God will not be mocked, a man will reap what he sows.
The reformed camp began to at least, at least subconsciously and indirectly assert that that's wrong.
And we need to recalibrate.
We need to repent.
There are ditches on both sides of the road.
The prosperity gospel really is a false gospel, but the pietism gospel really is a false gospel.
There really is blessing guaranteed in the life to come, but ordinarily as a general principle in this life as well as a result of obedience.
And the Bible calls this blessing.
Leftists call it privilege.
Well, your kids are privileged.
That's white privilege.
No, it's not white privilege, it's Christian blessing.
If I don't get incarcerated and I don't.
Leave my wife and abandon her and cause my children to be bastards, then, yeah, my kids are practically, it stands to reason, they're going to be better off than other people's kids who do those things.
That's not white privilege, that's Christian blessing.
And I know that it's there, and I can count on it being there because the Bible told me so.
And that's not faith in my faith.
That's faith in God, the giver of all good things for those who would trust and obey.
Until 15 minutes ago, that was just called basic Christianity.
And now I have to teach on these things.
And here's the crazy thing I teach on these things, and thousands of people subscribe to my YouTube channel.
Like, some people ask, what was your strategy over these last three years?
Right?
Response just came out of nowhere and bursted.
Like, I literally, this was my strategy.
I came up with this incredibly novel concept.
I thought, what if I did a podcast that was just called Theology Applied?
And I'm not saying that to brag, I'm saying that as an indictment on 95% of the church.
I should not, nobody should know who I am.
My wife and kids, and, you know, maybe a church of 100 people as a faithful local pastor, and that's it.
You know how pathetic it is that I'm standing up here right now in front of 800 people?
I am not that smart.
I'm not that gifted.
All I decided by the grace of God and His grace alone was hey, maybe obedience is not just theoretical.
Maybe obedience is not androgynous, right?
That the highest calling of any Christian, whether you be male or female, husband or wife, or adult or child or master or slave, is just to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
Okay, great.
How?
How?
Of course, that's the highest call of every Christian to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
The question is, how?
And when we get to the how in daily practice, is that answer exactly the same for a husband as it is for a wife?
No.
So, biblical manhood is not X, Y, and Z. Great.
What is it, though?
Because it's something.
And it's not just something inwardly.
It's not just something spiritually.
It's not just something theoretically.
It's something that I can say to my young son in very practical terms this is what you do, not just who you are, not just what you believe.
Christian obedience in the Christian life is never less than who you are, but it is so much more than who you are.
It begins, all Christian obedience begins as a matter of the heart, but it ultimately should come out of our hearts.
A wise man once said, You know, theology comes out of our fingertips.
Of course it does.
How could it not?
And if it doesn't, what do you call theoretical obedience?
You call it disobedience.
That's what it is.
What do you call androgynous obedience, generic obedience?
Obedience is merely of the heart.
And so it really doesn't matter your station in life, where God sovereignly appointed you, whether you be a husband or a wife or a child or a parent.
Obedience is merely in the realm of the heart, and therefore it is universal, it is androgynous, it is generic across the board.
What do you call that kind of androgynous, generic, spiritual obedience?
You call it disobedience.
Or you call it, over the last few decades, reformed evangelical obedience.
Because disobedience and reformed obedience, as of late, have been synonymous.
So, you do rule the world.
If you are in Christ, you rule the world.
In the ultimate, highest sense, no.
First rule of dominion is to know that you don't rule the world, but God does.
Second thing to know, though, is that God works through means.
And He has appointed His image bearing creatures, and especially and particularly those who have faith in Jesus Christ, His church, to be the means and human agency by which He carries out the progressive and gradual growth of His reign, His rule, His dominion in this earth.
Not merely the 17th dimension, but in the world.
You know who cares about the cosmos, the physical, natural world, the world that actually exists, that's not just theory?
The people who care about the world.
Are Democrats, liberals, progressives, socialists, communists, the devil, and God.
For God so loved the world.
The only group of people that I can even think of who don't care about the physical world is Christians, particularly over the last 150 years.
I'll leave that one open ended.
What happened 150 years ago?
Schofield.
Darby.
So.
We should care about the things that God cares about, which is never again, hear my disclaimer, never less than matters of the heart, never less than those things which are eternal.
This is not an argument of substitution.
This is not an argument of saying God cares about the physical and not the spiritual.
That's not the argument.
The argument is both, not less, simply more.
So you do rule the world.
This dominion has been given to you.
And there are a certain set of doctrines, a certain way of interpreting and understanding God's infallible word.
That are more helpful and more suitable for exercising godly dominion.
So you could call it doctrines to rule the world.
And it doesn't make you a prosperity preacher, it makes you a logical evangelical thinker, which again looks like heresy to most of the evangelical world right now because they lost their minds.
Reformed.
Okay, last confessional.
So, reformed, certainly much contained in that word.
It can be more.
It is more.
Should be more.
Must be more.
What it is to be reformed.
But I'm arguing that it can't ever be anything less than the view that God is absolutely sovereign over every single molecule in the universe.
And therefore, in the ultimate sense, you don't rule the world.
He does.
But in the secondary agency sense, because God, with his sovereign means, works through appointed sovereign ends, works through appointed sovereign means, you do, in a lowercase r, rule the world.
The world.
That's the reform part, the confessional part, and I'll be done.
I'll make it brief.
Do not waste your life.
Do not waste your life.
Confessions Are Fallible00:06:04
The enemy is at the gate.
We've got Drag Queen Story Hour.
We've got a million babies being murdered annually in this country alone, and that's a low number.
That doesn't even begin.
You can't track all the murder that's happening with pills.
The enemy's at the gates.
You cannot, listen to me, you cannot afford to take the next 40 years to do theology a la carte.
I get it.
I know you want to.
I know that you still think in the back of your mind that if you just have enough time and you just try hard enough, that you can outdo the Westminster or the 1689.
I love you.
I'm not trying to be rude, but it's just the enemy's at the gate.
The sons of Issachar, they know the times.
We need to wake up.
We need to, you know.
See what time it is.
You don't, we, I'm sorry.
I'm not trying to be rude, but we are out of time.
We're in dire straits.
We do not have time for you to spend 40 years and then come to the conclusion oh, turns out confessional is the way to go.
We just don't have time for it.
Right?
When we were living in a neutral world, fine.
You say, well, I'm Calvinistic Baptist and not Reformed because I disagree with the Sabbath.
That was cute during the neutral world.
You just don't get to do that anymore.
We're not in the neutral world, we are in a negative world.
There are people who want to kill you.
I'm not speaking in metaphors.
They want to kill you.
They want you dead.
They hate your children and they hate you.
And we don't have 40 years for you to find out what good theology is and be like, oh, turns out this guy was right the whole time.
Everyone, just like Sproul used to say, everyone's a theologian.
The question is not whether but which.
You're either a good one or a bad one.
So, to apply the same principle, every Christian is confessional.
You either have a tried and true historic confession of faith or you have the confession, unwritten, organic, In constant fluctuation, that you're currently writing in the back of your own head.
Those are your options the historic confession, tried and true, or your confession.
And in love, as your brother in Christ, let me encourage you with these words your confession sucks.
It's not that good.
You think it's good, it's not.
It's not that good.
So stop wasting time.
Your children can't afford for you to waste time.
Don't work for 40 years theologically to a confession.
Do not see a confession as the finish line of your theological work.
A confession is not something to work to, it's something to work from.
It's the starting place.
It's like, well, but I don't know.
I haven't read all the scripture citations.
You're telling me to start with man?
Uh huh.
Well, why not start with the Word of God?
It's so silly, and I really don't have time.
Everybody has an interpretation of the Word of God.
No one has the luxury of saying, I don't have an interpretation.
I don't have theology.
No creed but Christ.
Who's Christ?
Oh, well, he was born of a Virgin Mary.
Did he live a sinless life or did he met?
Okay, by the time you're done, you have a creed.
You just gave me a creed.
The difference is it's an inferior creed to the Apostles' Creed.
We could have saved a lot of time if we just started there.
We don't have time for Christians to be cute doctrinally right now.
And that's all it is.
You're just being cute.
Everyone has a confession.
It's a good one or it's a bad one.
All a confession is, is a systematic theology in a condensed, concise, historic, tried and true way to say, this is what the Bible says.
Well, I'll take the Bible over the confession.
That's not the dichotomy.
The confession is simply saying, this is what the Bible means.
And you're going to do it or they're going to do it.
And when in doubt, you're not choosing man over God.
The confession written by man, which is fallible, over God and his word, which is infallible.
No, what I'm asserting is this you have no option.
It's not whether, but which.
You will read the scripture through an interpretive lens.
And that interpretive lens of what does the scripture mean comes from man.
So it is the scripture, God, interpreted through a lens, interpretive lens, man.
So now the only question is not God or man, it's which man.
You or Calvin?
So, stop wasting time.
So, the foundation, the first of these seven doctrines for ruling the world, is I would strongly urge all of you to prayerfully and seriously consider reformed confessionalism.
Reformed, God is sovereign in the ultimate sense, He alone rules the world.
And confessional, aka everybody's got a theology, it's either mine or somebody else's, and honestly, in this moment of time, given the state of the church, And the state of theology, we don't need to be popping out any confessions anytime soon.
By God's grace, you know, maybe there is a confession yet to be written that could be superior to the Westminster.
Probably not.
Probably, I mean, there's one, the 1689.
But other than that, right?
Probably not.
Right?
We're probably not going to beat that.
But maybe we could because the confessions are fallible.
Not as fallible as you, not as fallible as Fred's confession in his head.
But they are fallible.
And so, therefore, it does theoretically stand to reason that they could be topped.
But probably not in 2024.
That ship sailed.
Honor Fathers, Hope Future00:02:44
The reality is, our fathers and our grandfathers and prior generations, recent prior generations, we passed on pretty much any hope of being theological superiors to the Reformers or the Puritans.
But by God's grace, our great great grandkids.
I'd like to think that our brightest minds are not just behind us, but before us.
I don't think they're in our generation.
And it may be, like Dusty was talking about small beginnings, it may be that all you do in your generation is set your kids up to succeed.
And well done, good and faithful servant.
That is a ministry, a massive ministry.
I don't think we have a Calvin today, but I don't think we only have a Calvin of yesterday.
I think we will have a Calvin of tomorrow.
And part of this idea of Christendom 2.0 is believing two things, and this is a winning motto.
It is looking with honor to the past with our fathers and looking with hope to the future.
Honor towards our fathers, hope towards our future.
What evangelicalism, by and large, has done for at least 60 years, and we could argue much longer, but at least the last 60 years, what it has done is that it said, Your fathers were bad and your future is bleak.
And everybody essentially gave up, or at least retreated to the realm of private lordship, private devotionals, private Christian faith.
Because we were told, we were convinced, it was insisted your fathers are bad, your heritage is bad.
The Crusades, bad.
The founders of America, racist.
When you teach an entire generation, or I would argue two or three generations by this point in the West, you teach them, your fathers are bad, your future is bleak.
Then they don't really get to work.
But if you teach them, say, your fathers weren't perfect, they were men, they were fallible, they had problems, but the headline, that's the footnote, the headline of the story is that your fathers should be honored and your future is hopeful.
That's it.
Blueprints for Christendom 2.0 in a nutshell.
It's Post war sentiment, revisionist history, what you've been taught over the last 60 years in regards to the past is largely a lie.
And what you've been taught by dispensationalism for the future, which only includes nine or ten days left, is also a lie.