FERGUSON: I think Jesus answers that question in the conversation with Simon Peter in John 13,
"You are clean, but not all of you," referring to Judas. "You do not," to Peter,
"wash the whole of me, you don't—he who has already been cleansed doesn't need a bath;
he needs his feet washed." And that I think is an implicit reference back to the fulfillment
of the promise of the coming covenant in Christ that He would wash clean His people.
So, I think you can argue just on the basis of that conversation in John 13 that the Apostles
minus Judas are to be viewed as faithful, covenant respondents to Jesus Christ and that when Judas
leaves the room, as he does later on in John 13, Jesus goes on to speak about their union with Him
in John 15, "I am the vine, you are the branches." He doesn't say "So now,
get yourself into Me." He says, "Now remain in Me. You're already branches in the vine."
So the whole tenor of that final teaching conversation I think indicates that
they are true, what we would call "true believers," before the coming of the Spirit
at Pentecost. And the reason for that is that although Holy Spirit came at Pentecost and He
came in a new epochal way, He was present. You know Him because He's with you. He's
ministering to you through My ministry. It's because of His ministry that you've
come to faith in Me. So I think there's a lot of evidence, even just in the Upper Room Discourse,
but the Apostles were viewed by Jesus as those who believed in Him, in contradistinction from Judas.
THOMAS: It's an interesting question.
Somebody asked me recently, they asked me how many elders we had at the church. And I said I
wasn't sure, eighty, ninety elders. And, and the question that immediately followed was,
"Are they all Christians?" which I was rather taken aback at is if I
had some supernatural ability to answer that in any definitive way. And all I could say was,
"Well, they all profess to be Christians, and they all profess to be orthodox, and they all subscribe
the Westminster Confession. But I have no means of giving you an answer to the question definitively,
'Are they all regenerate?'" which I think was what he was asking.
Because we've all known folk who profess to be regenerate and whom we have regarded as
Christians, who have sadly fallen away and about whom we now have
considerable doubt as to whether they were converted in the first place.
So the question is actually very interesting and perhaps behind it may lie the idea that
a Christian can be known by a very decided manner of conversion experience and a narrative
that that can be defined very clearly. You know, Rosemary and I have a very different
narrative. Rosemary doesn't, I mean, she was raised here in North Belfast somewhere, and
she doesn't remember a day when she didn't believe, but mine was sudden and dramatic and
I can tell you "It was 11:30 on December the 28th in 1971." I mean, I can be that precise about it.
So the question is, is an interesting question. It raises a whole lot of issues.