Shane Rosenthal Interview

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, �But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Mike Abendroth Introduces Shane Rosenthal and the White Horse Inn

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and I am back from a long vacation in Santa Cruz, California. Was ministering with some wonderful people there in Sacramento, with some Reformed Baptists down in Phoenix, with some other folks that are Bible teachers, and it just was a joy to get some rest, get some bicycling in, listening to a lot of podcasts.

I have certain podcasts that I listen to every one of their shows. And in light of that, I thought, you know what, we need to have someone from the White Horse Inn on today, because I have been listening to the White Horse Inn, I think since 1990, in my little home in North Hollywood, California.

My guess is it was on at 9 p .m., and then I listened to Dennis Prager at 10 p .m. And so today, we're going to be talking to Shane Rosenthal from the White Horse Inn. Shane, welcome to No Compromise Radio.

It's a pleasure to be with you. Do you remember those days? I think it was 1990 or 91. Did you ever listen to Dennis Prager after the White Horse Inn?

Yes, I've been a Dennis Prager listener for years and years, and Mike Horton actually was invited one week to do the Dennis Prager show after the White Horse Inn. And so those are the days where we...

I was still in college producing programs. In fact, I just recently got an email from a listener in the UK. He was riding his bicycle, you know, on this, like, 20-kilometer ride throughout Manchester or something like that.

And he was listening to shows. So I asked him, which show in particular were you listening to? And he said he'd listened to a bunch from the early 90s. And I thought, that's so weird that he's, you know, I'm trying to picture this guy riding his bike throughout England listening to shows I produced back when I was in college.

It just kind of blows your mind away.

But yeah, those were the fun days. I think Dennis Prager used to have, like, a priest, a rabbi, and a Protestant or something. So I'm glad to know that Mike... It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke.

It does. It does. So many folks know The White Horse Inn because I talk about Mike Horton and Kim Riddlebogger and who's that other guy, that Lutheran guy, Ron? Rod Rosenblatt. Oh, Rod. Sorry. Yeah, not Ron.

But they don't probably know much about you unless they've been listening recently. Tell us, Shane, how you got into the show. And you, in my mind, you were behind the scenes for a lot of years, but you probably should have been in the front.

But you were happy to serve behind the scenes. Give our listeners a little scoop about that.

Shane Rosenthal’s Early Years with the White Horse Inn

Yeah. So in the late 80s, I ended up hooking up with Michael Horton and Kim Riddlebogger at a church that they had planted in Cyprus. It was a Reformed Episcopal Church, and mostly it was a bunch of students from Biola.

They had had an organization at Biola, which was, they called it Cure Christian Junior for Reformation. And mostly they had like, you know, speakers like J .I. Packer and R .C. Sproul and others who, you know, came to give speeches at the college club.

And I volunteered for the organization like 88 or so. By 1989, I was the executive director because all the guys from the college ended up moving and, you know, graduating, moving away. So and, you know, Mike and I did some fundraising and wrote some grants and got some funding to do the show and the magazine back in early 1990.

So I think we first went on the air. Our pilot was in September of 1990. Our first show on KKLA was November of 1990. So it's been some 31 years now. And I was the producer of the show. Mike was the host.

And I was the guy answering the calls in the beginning and coming up with talking points and also doing man on the street interviews. A lot of people remember if they've been a listener to the show, they'll always come up to me and talk about the man on the street segment that I've done over the years, which is always sort of a way into the conversation, I thought, a helpful way in because it took sort of the ivory tower conversations, the theology, which is sometimes dense and hard to get into.

But it took it outside the walls of the ivory tower down to the man on the street. You know, what are these what are the people in the street? What are Christians at a Christian convention? What do pastors at a pastor's convention think about these important ideas like justification and sanctification and the Ten Commandments and all these kinds of different things?

So that was my experience for most of the 30 years. Last three or so years, I stepped in and moved in as host as Mike sidestepped over to Core Christianity for a couple of years. And then Core Christianity is our other program, it's a daily show hosted by Adriel Sanchez now.

Mike had to take a sidestep out of that because it went live daily, and he's a daily professor at Westminster Seminary, so he couldn't do the live daily, but that show is also doing very, very well. We're on something like 300 stations nationwide, live daily with Core Christianity.

Well, thanks, Shane. You can access whitehorsein .org, both Modern Reformation, White Horse Inn, and Core Christianity, all at that White Horse Inn site. Do you think you're going to be doing this a long time as the main host, Shane, or do you think, you know, it's too hard, it's too much fun, you have other things going on?

What's the future look like for you?

Well, the future is interesting. This has not been publicly released here, but just between you and me, it's looking like Michael Horton may be coming back as main host. So I'll tease that out here and then just kind of let that settle.

But maybe look for that for information to come about that in the next few months.

OK, thanks. Speaking of the man on the street interviews, give me maybe behind the scenes the craziest story that happened to you. Somebody got mad at you. Somebody hit you. Somebody questioned you. Shane, there has to be some kind of juicy tidbit story in one of those interviews because they were so classic.

So there are.

I have a few of these. One of my favorites is asking, there was a time when I was going to a Christian convention asking people if they could name the Ten Commandments because we were doing a series on the Ten Commandments, and we were just trying to figure out, you know, do people know their Bibles?

And one person said, oh, I can't name them all, but just because I can't name them doesn't mean I don't love them. And another person said, well, there's don't commit adultery. You got to honor your mother and father.

And then she said, God, what a quiz. I said, oh, you got another one. That's don't take the Lord's name in vain. She didn't realize how she got there, but yeah, it was written on her heart. And then another one was when I was at the really depressing one, actually, was asking people about justification.

And this one girl said, you know, I said, what is the doctrine of justification? This is a Christian convention. And the person said, well, we have to justify ourselves here on earth in order to be accepted during the rapture.

And so she understood the idea of justification, but she just she took the, you know, more Pelagian side of the thing, you know, this is something we have to do for ourselves, which was just really shocking when you hear that, you know, it just sort of breaks your heart.

But then finally, another one that comes to mind is when I asked at a pastor, how important to your ministry is the doctrine of imputation? That's the crediting of Christ's righteousness to us. And, you know, this imputation, the crediting of his righteousness so that we may be righteous.

And this pastor said, imputation, imputation. And wow, that takes me back to seminary days. No, no, actually, that was another one that this other person that you what was that you asked me about? Amputation?

I said, no, no, imputation. He was he was thinking he gutterballed into amputation. So anyway, you don't think that pastors would make that kind of a mistake?

Well, I assume, Shane, that when somebody has a microphone put in their face, that there might be some kind of fumble or foible or something because they're put on the spot. But after a while, I mean, these are these truths that are, I hate to use the word, but I will, core to the Christian faith.

These are not outliers. These are not, you know, even issues with baptism and and eschatology and other things. I mean, here we have the heart, the hinge, as they would talk about in the Reformation. And sometimes I liked it when you ask questions, well, do can you lose your salvation?

And the pastor would say, no. Do Christians sin? Yes. What what happens if a Christian perpetually sins? Do you remember asking that one? Oh, yeah. And and what's their automatic default? Their default was, well, then maybe they're not a Christian.

When essentially what we've done in evangelicalism is we've made the law, law light, because I mean, have any of us at any time really with delight and love, perfectly obeyed God and loved him and loved our neighbor?

Aren't we perpetually sinning? I mean, we hate it when we do. We repent. But the question, do Christians perpetually sin? Sadly, from our perspective is yes, but we do sin. I mean, I don't know too many Keswick people, but they functionally act that way.

Yeah. I mean, what's the line from Psalm 143, verse two, Enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous before you. And that's the that's that's the reason why we have to live a life in your repentance.

It's not something that we do one time and now we're good with God. It's a lifetime. It's a daily drowning of the old Adam and rising in Christ. And that's, you know, the sort of view that says it's a one time thing.

And now when you sin again, you have to sort of become saved all over again. That is not a healthy way to live through the Christian life. It's really destructive, frankly.

Justification by Faith Alone and the Obedience of Christ

Talking to Shane Rosenthal from Whitehorse Inn today on No Compromise Radio. You can always access their website, whitehorseinn .org. I think probably, Shane, my favorite thing about the Whitehorse Inn over the years has been that very clear exposition and focus on Sola Fide, the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

I regularly have my students read Buchanan on justification, Calvin on justification, Fesco on justification and guys like that, so they can get their arms wrapped around this doctrine because it affects so many other areas.

And here's one that I think about. Pastors always will talk about obedience. But if they forget the obedience of the Lord Jesus to the laws of God as the second Adam, who's obeying, meriting credit for us, we're going to talk about the congregation's obedience if we're not going to talk about the Lord's.

Do you see that correlation as well? When you have a lot of law preaching, moralistic preaching? Well, they're forgetting about the Lord's perfect righteousness and His law keeping, and vice versa. The more we talk about the Lord keeping the law, the better nuanced we talk about the law from the hand of Christ.

Yeah, that's, I think, the key to understanding the big flow of the Bible's narrative. The big picture is no one ends up being the cure. No one ends up being able to fulfill God's demand. All those in Adam are more sinful than we can realize, and all the heroes that you find in the Bible are completely flawed characters.

That's something we've looked at over the last few months in our White Horseman series, The Gospel and Genesis. The gospel is about the coming promise, not about the various heroes. That's sort of the law approach which sees the Bible as presenting.

It's the to-do list view where this is the owner's manual to guide to, you know, this is what I have to do to please God. When you go to the Bible looking, we're trying to read it that way, primarily trying to read it that way.

There are instructions, and there are places where we go to see how do we live the Christian life. But if we primarily see it as the instruction manual for life, then it's primarily about us, and we're the ones to whom it is being addressed on every page.

But if you see it as, here are the requirements of God, and here's how this person didn't fulfill his obligation, nor did this person, nor did this person. And then, you know, you get all the way down to King David, and he, you know, is looking at porn on the top of his palace and killing this guy's wife and taking her to be his own.

And this is the guy after man's, you know, God's own heart. So what we need is the, he's the one promised all the way back in Genesis who we find out quickly it's not Isaac, it's not Jacob, it's not any of the, it's not Moses.

It's not the end of the promised land. It's not David, you know, hundreds of years later. It's the ultimate son of David, and he's the one that is promised and hinted at, and sometimes not even hinted at.

He's actually there in various Old Testament passages. He's the one, he's the angel of Yahweh, the messenger of Yahweh sent by Yahweh to reveal himself as the solution to the problem of Adam's fall. And so that's where, as you're reading the Bible, if you're thinking, this Bible is about Jesus, not about me, then, you know, and we get that from John 539 and the end of Luke 24, the Bible is mostly about Jesus, and then we reflect on that, and we say, in light of Jesus' own declaration that the Bible is about himself, now we find ourselves in Christ, and we live in him, not in order to be saved, but because we have been given this great rescue and redemption.

And now we, what does it mean to live in Christ? That's a different question.

Reading Genesis as Promise, Not a To-Do List

Reminded me of the show that you guys played on May 23rd, Failed Bible Heroes, and while I think generally we in the Reformed camp would say, oh, we read the Old Testament in, not in light of the new, we read the, I'm sorry, we read the Old Testament in light of the new, not the old in light of the new.

And so what happened was, in that show, you caught me off guard in a wonderful way, because you and your guest that day, okay, what if we read the Bible thinking, all right, this next person born, this next seed, this, oh, I've gotten a man from the Lord, Cain.

Is Cain the Messiah? Oops. What about Noah? What about David, like you said, and Josiah and all these people? I thought that was an excellent show, just trying to think, we're waiting for this great Messiah, this last Adam.

When is he going to show up?

So I appreciated that show. Yeah, and when they do, when a person does show up and you see that there are amazing parallels with the great commission there in Genesis, that you are to be fruitful and multiply and fill the world with seed honoring to God, well, then you have a character like Abraham, who is, given some of that language, you know, he is called out and he's told to, you know, you will be a blessing to the world, but it's actually not through Abraham himself, because he is committing sin, major sins, in ways that sort of echo to the fall of Adam, but it's in his seed that the world will be blessed.

And that points us to someone else who will be the one to rescue, not just us, but Abraham himself.

I think in the same show, maybe you mentioned, or maybe it was your guest that, read the Bible this way, let's look at how a man is going to treat his bride, because we know the ultimate Messiah is going to treat his bride in such a great way, true love, agape love, self-sacrificial love.

And before you know it, not just Abraham once, not just Abraham twice, but then Isaac does the same thing and essentially said, I'm not going to die for her, where's the husband who's going to love his bride so much he'd be willing to die for her?

And so I appreciated that in your show as well.

Abraham, Isaac, David, and the Bridegroom Pattern

Well, the interesting thing about that is that Abraham himself says the reason he lied to Pharaoh about his wife, because he feared Pharaoh, that Pharaoh would kill him in order to take the bride. In order to take his wife, he was afraid that Pharaoh would kill himself.

But now fast forward 1 ,000 years to King David. King David is the stuff of Abraham's nightmares. King David is the pagan king who kills the man to take the bride. And that goes to sort of enormous, in a fascinating way, and this is where I don't think typology is the best way to think about the Bible, but these sort of variations on a theme, that theme that you see there in Genesis, with Abraham and Isaac lying before the great kings about their wives, is sort of retold in this new way, but it's in a way that makes, what's his name, Uriah, more like Abraham.

He's the man from the north, the sojourner from the north coming south, and he's the one who's killed. So that King David, who's now supposed to be the hero of the story, but in this scene he's the wicked villain that sort of matches us, ties us into Abimelech and Pharaoh from Abraham's scene.

And so when you see this exceeding sinfulness of sin, you see that God is working through all these sinful characters for his own ends. And when you fast forward to David's greater son, what does Jesus do?

Not in fear for his own life, but he gives up his own life willingly so that he can take his bride, the Church, and make her undefiled. It's the very opposite of all that had preceded him. That's the aspect from following the thread, looking at all the various, you know, giving yourself for your bride, are you protecting yourself or are you giving yourself?

And Jesus, his wife, survived. And that's the heart of the story, and that's why, you know, our love, as he has loved sacrificially, light of that reality. But it's a reality that's grounded in God loved us.

Not that we loved God, but that he first loved us and gave himself for our redemption. That's the key to the whole thing.

Amen. And then you read Matthew 1 and the genealogy, and you see in the genealogy of our Lord, not just Abraham and David, but there are those that have raped, those that have committed incest, those that have committed prostitution, and you think, well, I guess Jesus does really identify with us, God with us.

Jacob Wrestling in Genesis 32 and Salvation by God’s Weakness

Well, time is going by fast, Shane. Give our listeners a little bit of insight into your series, The Gospel in Genesis, where you talk about Jacob and wrestling, and who do you think Jacob thought he was wrestling?

Give us a little teaser so they'll pull up that featured series on whitehorsein .org.

So I ended up preaching through this series a couple of years ago, and I was just sort of dumbfounded when I got through Genesis from 28 to 32. 28 is the scene in which you have Jacob's ladder, and Jacob is leaving the land, and because he just threatened to kill, because his brother had threatened to kill him, he had, in Isaac's words, he had deceived his father and his brother, and now his brother is threatening to kill him, so Jacob is leaving the land.

It's kind of exile. And 20 years go by, he has a number of wives and children, and he's now coming back into the land of Genesis, 32, and as he's coming back into the land, you just have text after text that talks about his fear.

It's not speculation. He says, he tells you what he's fearing. He's afraid of his brother, Esau, that he will come and attack me and the mothers with their children. So what does he do? He sends these offerings to appease his brother's anger and sacrifices and these gifts to appease him, and that sacrificial language is kind of the language you find throughout Leviticus, gifts given to God.

So he has this sort of misplaced fear, because he's coming back into the Holy Land, and he's focused exclusively on his brother. So I started thinking about that, wrestled with a lot of the commentators, when they looked at Genesis, 32, they saw Jacob wrestled with God and refused to let God go so that he could get his blessing.

And I was just unsatisfied with that. This is a tradition, an interpretive view that goes way back. So even Calvin takes this view, and contemporary writers like Sinclair Ferguson, whom I respect both of them immensely, but on this one, I just thought they didn't get it right, because that wrestling, struggling, striving theme had always been a negative in the book of Genesis.

And so when I started focusing on this question of who was Jacob fearing, I ended up thinking that, you know, there in the dark, he thinks he's just been attacked by his brother, and he's wrestling in the dark with his brother, and I think when he's pinning his brother down, refusing to let him go, I think he thinks it's Esau.

And so that driving, that wrestling, is something he's been doing with Esau since day one, since before day one, since in the womb. But that striving was always to get the blessing of firstborn status by his own efforts.

And if you take that view, that he's trying to do this by his efforts, then of course that matches the sort of, you know, the striving that Abraham and Sarah are trying to do to make this work by use of Hagar.

It's a striving to fulfill the promise on our own. Well, there are a couple of clues that point in this direction. Like, there's a scene in one of the earlier chapters where Jacob's wife, Rachel, says she's wrestling with her sister, and it actually says in the Hebrew, she's wrestling with God and her sister, and she prevailed.

And that prevailing was having Naphtali, who she named the wrestler, you know, struggles, and that was not actually a good thing. It was, this was the wrestling that caused her to have a child through surrogate pregnancy, through surrogate motherhood.

In other words, it was through her servant, Bilhah, that she had this child, not through her own, because she was infertile. In other words, the very language of wrestling, striving, in this case with a sibling and God, was described specifically, I think in 30 or 31 of Genesis, it's described as a bad thing, and as the same kind of thing that Abraham and Sarah had done.

And anyway, so when you think about Genesis 32, Jacob is wrestling with God. The key insight is, it's not because he conquered, the key is that God, in the form of a man, in my view, he's sort of invading Jacob's fears, becoming an incarnation of his nightmare about his brother.

I'm the one you need to fear as you come back into the Holy Land. He is reminding Jacob that he's the one he needs to deal with, and then yet, as Jacob wrestles with this man who he assumes is his brother, he is coming, you know, this same God allows himself to be defeated.

And at the end of the narrative, it says, you have not wrestled with men, but with God. You have wrestled with man and God, and it prevailed. And Jacob then says, my life has been delivered. So he, it seems to be clear he's not sure about his wrestling partner's identity until, like, verse 29 or so.

He even asks, what is your name? He's confused for a while. So at the very beginning, you can't clearly say he knows the identity of this person. He's confused all the way through until the very end. And yet, when he finds out that it's God, he says, my life was delivered.

That's the key to the narrative. How is it that Jacob enters the land? He enters through God's weakness. He was saved in the encounter because God met him there, wrestled with him, but didn't take his life.

He's not saved. He's not given grace because he thrived and he conquered and he refused to let God go. He conquered because of God's weakness. That's how the people of Israel, from the very beginning, were able to enter the land.

And so that, I think, ties us in. Augustine has a great, beautiful quote where he connects us to the cross, and that's how we enter the eternal land, because of God's weakness by God letting go of, you know, of his strength and allowing himself to be crucified for our redemption.

And there are a couple of commentators who take this view. John Lennox, I found, has that same view, but most commentators don't take this view. It's something that I tried really hard to find commentators with this approach, but it's a kind of a—not your primary interpretation of Genesis 32.

But there are those throughout church history who've taken this, and Augustine was wonderful.

Michael Horton’s Return and Favorite Book

Well, thanks, Shane, for being on the show today and giving us a little glimpse of what you've been talking about in your show, the series Gospel in Genesis. I think maybe we've had a little bit of a bad connection today.

We've had tornado—not just watches, but tornado warnings here in Worcester, Massachusetts. And so it's just pouring outside and all kinds of crazy stuff going on. One-inch hail, I heard. But I think the conversation is good enough for us to keep it and to air it.

And so thanks for being on. One final question. What's your favorite Michael Horton book? And don't give me two, just one.

One Horton—my very favorite—I'm going to have to say Putting Amazing Back into Grace, because I think it's the best introduction to all the key doctrines that we've focused on over the years at Whitehorse Inn.

You have justification, you have sanctification, you have election, you have the sovereignty of God, and you have law and gospel clearly defined. And it's also written at a very introductory level, so it's accessible to people who, you know—his book on justification is wonderful, but it's more for, you know, people who have seminary degrees.

So I enjoy it, but I think the best one to recommend to outsiders, I think, is Putting Amazing Back into Grace.

Well, that reminds me of my introduction to Michael Horton's written works. I was going to Calvary Chapel West Covina with Raul Reis as the pastor. He was also on KKLA and probably still is. He's in Diamond Bar now, I think.

And they had a bookstore. And in the old days, I wanted to read, but I was too stoned to do it, and so then God saved me and I quit all those other things. And so I wanted to read again. And I thought, well, I have no idea what to read.

And I have a Bible. I have no other books. Literally no other books besides dictionaries and a few things like that. But no theological books. And I looked at a book, and it was prominently displayed in West Covina, and it had maybe a snake or something.

I forgot the cover, but it said, The Agony of Deceit. Oh, yeah. And I had no idea who Michael Horton was, and I got that book, and that was one of the first Christian books I ever read outside the Bible.

So there you go. Actually, I did a little bit of the background work, preparing, you know, giving some facts about Kenneth Hagin and others for that book. And then, you know, so I mentioned in the acknowledgments of that book, just to climb to fame.

Well, now you're extra famous because you're on No Compromise Radio Ministry. Yes, wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. Well, we love to support ministries that talk about the Lord Jesus and His wonderful work, and that don't just rely on moralism and pietism and everything else.

No Compromise Radio Ministry wholeheartedly endorses whitehorsein .org. You can go there. I listen to every one of the shows. And Shane, I'm very thankful for you and your ministry, and thanks for taking the time to be on the show today.

Thank you, Mike, and keep up the great work. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.