April 7, 2025 Show with Jerry Johnson on “Was the Apostle Peter a Rationalist?”

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this seventh day of April, 2025.

I have one of my favorite frequent guests returning to the program today for another interview, an old friend of mine named

Jerry Johnson, who is a Reformed Christian apologist and renowned documentarian, most well -known for co -writing and co -producing the popular

DVD series Amazing Grace, the History and Theology of Calvinism, and for his podcast, or should

I say webcast series, Against the World. Today, Jerry Johnson is going to be addressing,

Was the Apostle Peter a Rationalist? And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Jerry Johnson.

Thank you, Chris. It's good to be here, brother. Well, if you could, first define what a rationalist is.

All right. And then tell us why you wanted to discuss this specific topic about the Apostle Peter in relationship to it.

Yeah. And do let me say, I was talking with a buddy of mine, Dave Queter, in Knoxville, Tennessee, and I forget, they're opening up a new church.

I forget the name of it. If Dave is listening, which I think he should be, having to email you the name of the church.

But he suggested, instead of rationalist, just say very practical.

And I started thinking about that, and I think he's right. Because rationalism, you know, gives many different understandings.

We want to be rationalistic, but we don't want to fall into rationalism like, oh, man, what was a philosopher?

I just had a senior moment. Good. Not with a big heart. So we don't want to start with man.

We want to start with the scriptures. And I believe the Bible, the 66 books of the

Old and the New Testament, are the Word of God. Now, saying all that, let me give you a little context.

When I work out, and I try to work out twice a day since I've had the stroke. When I work out,

I usually will listen to a sermon or read a book, you know, an audio book. And I was listening to a sermon, and the guy said something.

And, you know, it probably was not what he intended, but my mind started racing.

And let me just give you a little background of the text, if you will.

Because you'll actually find it in Matthew 9, Mark 2, and Luke 5.

And what is interesting, and people can go back and read that passage, that is the conversion of Peter.

Now, let me make a couple of points. Peter was very, very practical.

And if you look at the conversion of Peter, it's pretty long. Luke, I think, records it the longest.

And you've got to remember, with Peter, Peter was probably a meat and potatoes guy, like me and most of your listeners, all right?

And very practical at that. And so Peter didn't like any games, if you will, any drama.

You kind of get the idea he was just your average Joe sex pack, all right?

And when we get to his conversion. Now, I grew up in Florida, and I saw them clean out fishing nets before.

And they used a pressure washer, and then they fixed the nets where they got snagged on something, on some rocks or something.

And it would take actually a while for them to do that. And I'm sitting there thinking, can you imagine how long it took without all the modern technology, without the pressure washer or everything else?

And here are these guys on a boat, and Peter is not in a good mood, all right?

He hasn't had his morning coffee. He didn't catch anything. He's been fishing all night.

And he's sitting there fixing his nets. And all of a sudden, this young rabbi comes up to him and jumps in his boat.

What would have been your first thought? Mine would have been, who the heck is this guy?

What is he doing? And he starts teaching the people. And you're sitting there thinking, well,

I wanted to say something. But you know I'm not. He's a rabbi. He's a religious leader.

He has evidently the respect of all these people. I don't want to be a killjoy, if you will.

So he went on fixing his nets and washing them. And this guy's speaking to the people.

Probably more of a crowd gathers on the shore there. And Jesus is in the boat.

And all of a sudden, he says he's done with his speaking. And he turns to Peter and says, hey, row out a little farther into the sea and drop your nets again.

Now, I want to tell you this. I don't know if you're a fisherman or not, Chris. I love fishing.

The great thing is I married a girl that loves fishing. Tracy and I go out fishing all the time.

Well, I know there's fish you catch at dusk.

There's fish you catch at dawn. There's fish you catch in the middle of the night.

There are fish you catch in the middle of the day. You really wouldn't go to catch catfish at 1 o 'clock in the afternoon.

They're usually not feeding at that time. So I would argue that Peter was looking for a specific kind of fish that brought him good money at the market.

And he didn't get any of it. And here's this guy saying, hey, row out farther and drop your nets into the sea.

And Peter is thinking, this guy doesn't know anything about fishing. He doesn't know what we're after.

You know, I might catch a fish I don't want to sell in the market. I don't want to do it now.

But because he asked, I'm going to go ahead and do it. I don't want to embarrass him.

And so they row out farther, and they drop their nets, and they didn't really expect anything.

And I would argue that the fish that they were looking for that night is what was in their nets.

And logically, they shouldn't have caught those fish. And their nets were so full of them that the net started to tear, and the boat started to sink.

And then Peter turns right around, and what does he say? Leave me, Lord. I'm full of sin.

So here's something there happened. I mean, anybody that has fish, you know the biggest fish stories come from fishermen.

They love to tell you about the fish they caught 10 years ago. There's no evidence of it, but they love.

And the one that got away was the biggest fish of them all, right? And here they are dragging their nets into the boat, and their boat starts to sink, and he says that,

Leave me, Lord. I'm full of sin. That had to really rock

Peter's world, totally turned it upside down. And not only was

Christ saying to him, I'm the Lord of the fish, but I'm the

Lord of everything, and Peter realized it. Then when you get,

I mean, Peter is going along because he leaves everything, and he follows Christ.

Now we come to the conversion or the call of Matthew.

And I find that real interesting because all Christ says to him is follow me, not this big drawn -out story.

Now, Matthew was a tax collector. He wasn't liked by most of your

Israelis, if you will. They thought he was a traitor. He sided with the

Romans. But Matthew didn't care. He had wine. He had women.

He had a big house. He was a tax collector. He had all the money you could want.

And also, he had the Romans. He could say something, and they would come to his defense immediately.

But Christ simply had to say to him, follow me. Now, if you look in the

Gospel of Matthew, you've got two verses that mention the conversion of Peter, or Matthew, I'm sorry, his own conversion.

In the Gospel of Mark, you've got two passages. And Luke, you've got about four.

And that's it. And the other times it's talking about, you know,

Jesus says to him, follow me. And that's usually one or two verses. And then the later verses are dealing with Christ was having dinner with him and some of his tax collector buddies.

And the Pharisees ask him, you know, why are you eating with these tax collectors and sinners?

Yeah, of course, Jesus says the statement to them. I didn't come to call the healthy to repentance.

I came to call the sick. But can you imagine if you were

Peter and you went through this big drawn out thing of his conversion, and then you come to Matthew and all you got is follow me.

Now, what was God trying to get across to Peter and subsequently to us?

That his ways are higher than our ways. That we're never going to understand because it makes no sense to our minds, to our fallen minds.

Now, that's the only thing I could come away with because Dave Queener asked me this morning.

He said, what's the point? I don't know if there is a point. But I was hoping that some of your readers or listeners could maybe think about it also and come up with something.

What is the point? I'm sure there's a point. I'm just not seeing it. Maybe it's to explain to us that God's ways are higher than our ways because Peter saw many miraculous things that I'm sure he thought didn't make sense to his own way of thinking.

It's meat and potatoes thinking. It wasn't irrational.

It was just God's ways are higher than our ways. What we consider to be practical,

God may not consider to be practical. What do you think? Well, obviously,

God can do anything, and very often we doubt that he will come through when we are praying, even fervently praying and repetitively praying for something.

If we're too impatient about it, we can doubt that he will come through.

He has his reasons for making us wait. He has his reasons for not answering our prayer when and how we want him to on occasion.

Not always, but on many occasions, that is the case. Yeah, God's ways are higher than our ways.

He knows what's best for us. I'm assuming you were trying to get to the point of the different approaches he had to calling them to discipleship when it came to Peter and Matthew, is that they were different people.

They had different mindsets. They had different presuppositions, and Jesus just approaches people as individuals.

He doesn't have a cookie -cutter approach. Yeah, I think of a lot of things like that.

I was thinking recently when the Israelis or the country of Israel, they were out fighting the

Philistines during the time of Goliath. And the armies of the

Philistines pretty much outnumbered the army of Israel.

And we all know the story about David and Goliath. But if you ever asked yourself, why didn't the

Philistines attack? They had them outnumbered.

Why didn't they just attack? Why did Goliath go out there every day for weeks and challenge one of their champions?

Why didn't they just attack? You know, according to them, according to man's wisdom, they should have been able to defeat them.

But why didn't they attack? Why did they wait? Have you ever thought about that?

I don't know. I can't remember ever thinking of that. Yeah, honestly,

I had never thought of it. I thought of it recently. And the only thing

I could come up with is they had heard the stories about them coming out of Egypt, and they were afraid also.

As the armies, that's the only thing I could come up with, is that maybe they were afraid also.

Because it doesn't make sense to me. I don't know. I guess that that is a point.

All right, my dog just came. She loves, she comes in to see if I'm still here.

Well, going back to your original point, which you wanted to start off the discussion about, was

Peter a rationalist? And to reiterate, according to at least one

English dictionary explanation or definition, a rationalist is somebody who bases their thoughts and actions on knowledge and reason, not on emotions.

And it's interesting that this dictionary uses the word not on emotions or religion, as if religion doesn't involve knowledge, doesn't involve facts, and so on.

Of course, there are religions and there are religious people that believe in all kinds of false things and lies and fables and fairy tales and superstitions, just because their religion tells them to.

But when you're talking about the true religion of God, the

Christian faith, the God of both the Old and New Covenant, we are not just asked to blindly embrace things that are outlandish and defy any reason.

Now, there are many things that go against the grain of our thought process and presuppositions, and God and Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, have done and do things today that we might find astonishing and beyond our scope of experience.

We know that Jesus does things that we would never do. Jesus is patient with people, including ourselves, in ways that we are never patient.

And he forgives people that we would never forgive, and we could go on and on and on. But our faith is not something that defies all reason and is not based on knowledge.

Right. Remember in, oh, man,

I'm having a senior moment again, Philippians 2, it says, let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.

And I guess if I had a point, rationalism, like the one that René Descartes articulated, started with man.

And I think what we're trying to say here is we need to start with God, and for us, we need to start with the

Scriptures, because that's how we know God, through the Word. And so what seems logical or rational to man may not be the same thing to God.

So we've got to start with God, you know. Well, just like the

Jews who never in a million years would ever think that God in the flesh would die a shameful death like crucifixion, cursed is the man who is hung from a tree.

And so, you know, there you have an example of even

God, even the thought of God in the flesh dying and even the thought of him not just always conquering his foes.

And of course, there will be a day when that happens. But while they were on earth, and while Jesus walked the earth, he might and definitely was viewed by many as a complete failure.

Right. Yes, he was. In fact, there were, what, some young moon actually believed that Jesus failed as the

Messiah because he ended up getting himself crucified. And that wasn't

God's plan. And in fact, I know that I may upset some or many or all of our

Arminian friends who may be listening, but the understanding of what

Christ did on the cross, all those who are outside of the theologically reformed camp, which believes in limited atonement, which just means that the purpose of Christ's death was to redeem a limited or specific number of people, not every single person, also called definite atonement, also called substitutionary atonement, which amazingly, today, many

Arminians even call the atonement substitutionary, but it makes no sense according to their thinking.

But going back to my thoughts here, is that according to the non -reformed person, the person who believes in universal atonement,

Jesus did fail because in their minds, his death was specifically to pay for the sins of every single human being.

And most of those people who he allegedly died for in their system are going to hell.

So that is the biggest act of failure that I can even imagine. But we don't believe it's an act of failure, because we believe

Jesus died on the cross specifically to save his people from their sins and specifically for the elect, and he did redeem them, and he guaranteed that everyone for whom he died as a substitute will be in heaven.

Yes, I would agree, because the Arminians, if you actually listen to a lot of them, they'll say things like,

Jesus paid the penalty for my sins. Well, what about the man over here that's going to hell?

Did Jesus pay the penalty for his sins? And they will say yes. Well, but he's still going to hell, so evidently he didn't pay them.

I mean, can you imagine if you were, you know, pulled over by the police and given a ticket for going 55 through a school zone, and it was actually a blind school zone, and you were in jail, and your bail was $25 ,000, and I paid it for you, and as you were leaving the police station, they tried to enact another payment out of you, because that's what they have.

They have it be in double jeopardy. Jesus paid the penalty for your sins, but they're not paid yet.

That's what they're saying, and that's kind of a contradiction. It makes

God, his Father, doesn't accept the payment that Jesus made, and that definitely creates a problem in their system.

Yes, as Charles Spurgeon, I don't have the quote right in front of me, and perhaps

I'll look it up during a break, because he said it so eloquently and perfectly, not perfect like the inherent

Word of God, but using a euphemism there, but he basically said that if you believe that Jesus died for people, who will be punished in hell after he allegedly already received that punishment upon himself?

That that is a God more grotesque than a God of the pagans and thugs, and that could be found in his booklet,

Defense of Calvinism, which I believe is an excerpt that Chapel Library has put into print out of his autobiography, but it makes no sense, which

I believe, if I'm not mistaken, in your documentary Amazing Grace, don't you have a

Nazarene college professor rebuking his students for using the term substitutionary atonement?

What he is doing, and that was J. Kenneth Greider, he actually chastised

Arminians for saying that Jesus paid the penalty for your sins.

And he is an Arminian. Yeah, and what he does then is he goes on a diatribe, if you will, about the governmental theory of the atonement, which really says

Jesus didn't pay the penalty for your sins, but he simply suffered for your sins, and that's what he says, and he suffered for everybody equally.

And that is foreign to the New Testament, totally foreign. Right. Hell.

Well, we have to go to our first break, and if you have a question for Jerry Johnson, it doesn't have to be on that specific issue of the question, was the apostle

Peter a rationalist? It could be on anything, because Jerry is an apologist. Doesn't mean he is guaranteed to give you an answer for your question, but he does have a broader scope of knowledge than the title of our conversation today.

But our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Give us your first name at least, your city and state and country of residence, and only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

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shipping worldwide. We're now back with Jerry Johnson, and I did find that quote, by the way, that I wanted to read exactly the way

Spurgeon said it. This is in regard to comparing limited atonement, which is also known as definite atonement, and particular redemption and substitutionary atonement.

If Christ on his cross intended to save every man, then he intended to save those who were eternally lost before he died.

If the doctrine of universal atonement is true, that he died for all men, then he died for some who were in hell before he came into this world for doubtless there were even then myriads there who had been cast away because of their sins.

Once again, if it was Christ's intention to save all men, then how deplorably he has been disappointed.

For we have his own testimony that there is a lake which burns with fire and brimstone, and into that pit of woe have been cast some of the very persons who, according to the theory of universal redemption, were bought with his blood.

That seems to me a conception a thousand times more repulsive than any of those consequences which are said to be associated with the

Christian doctrine of special and particular redemption. To think that my

Savior died for men who were or are in hell seems a supposition too horrible for me to entertain.

To imagine for a moment that he was the substitute for all people and that God, having first punished the substitute, afterwards punished the sinners themselves seems to conflict with all my ideas of divine justice.

That Christ should offer an atonement and satisfaction for the sins of all men, and that afterwards some of those very men should be punished for the sins for which

Christ had already atoned appears to me to be the most monstrous, monstrous iniquity that could ever have been imputed to Saturn, to Janus, to the goddess of the thugs, or to the most diabolical heathen deities.

God forbid that we should ever think thus of Jehovah, the just and wise and good.

So obviously, as I said, Spurgeon put it much more wonderfully than I could have ever done on my own recollection.

Yeah, he was an eloquent speaker, and I do not have the same flowery speech that he did.

He could think of things off the cuff and say them in such a way I wish I could, but I would agree with him.

If you have Christ paying the penalty for every single person, and then a lot of them are in hell, then what did he pay?

So you would have to take away the idea that there was an actual payment for sin.

Right. Then you get into work salvation. Well, wait a minute. Man has to add his 1%, his faith, in order to make it active.

So he didn't actually die for anybody, no specific persons.

He died for everybody equally, and the majority of the time, because he tells us that brought us the way that leads to hell, all those people that he shed his blood for that are going to hell, he can't take that to his father and say here is payment for these people.

Amen. Go ahead. Go ahead.

I'm going to let you go. Well, I was just going to say, before we move on to any other subject,

I know that you said that you didn't want to necessarily limit yourself to the title of the theme that we opened up with was the

Apostle Peter Rationalist. But when we go back to what you were saying earlier about how

Jesus, when he was calling people to follow him, didn't say perhaps the exact same thing to each individual because they were from different backgrounds and so on, is that evidence to us that although the gospel message is always exactly the same and that we are never to alter the gospel or soften it or make it more palatable and digestible for those who hate

Christ, we still nonetheless may have different approaches to different people according to the presuppositions and backgrounds and behaviors of these people and also according to the circumstance.

Like, for instance, you move into a neighborhood and you've got a neighbor next door who is not a believer or vice versa.

It might be you that has lived in the neighborhood and you have a new neighbor that doesn't believe in the gospel.

You're going to perhaps have a different approach of ministering to that person through the evangelizing and the declaration of the good news of the gospel.

You're going to have a different approach perhaps with somebody like that that you know or that you're confident, anyway, that you're going to have many opportunities to get to know that person, for them to get to know you so that they can have a sense of perhaps respect for you and admiration of you and appreciation of you for your kindness.

There's going to be a different way perhaps that you minister to somebody like that than when you are on a train, plane, or automobile or waiting room or even on a street corner doing open -air evangelism when you know that there is a likelihood you will never see the specific people you are talking to ever again.

There's a different approach. Am I making sense? Yes, you are.

I mean, and that's one thing. We've got to be careful not to put the presentation of the gospel into a cookie cutter.

Now, I agree with you. The substance will not change, but how do you deal with a girl that is dancing nude at a nudie bar versus your neighbor that is like Joe Sixpack?

And of course, a Christian cannot be evangelizing a woman while she's dancing nude in a nudie bar.

You have to be speaking to her after or before she gets into that condition or into that activity,

I should say. Let me do this, Chris. I want to keep on this idea of the atonement, all right?

Because I think that's a very important topic. A mutual friend of ours recently wrote a diatribe on his

Facebook page, and he has, in my view, gone so far from the faith.

I read this post, and I'm like, I don't think this guy ever understood what we would call

Calvinism. And he was a professing Calvinist at one point. Yes, and what

Calvin called Augustinianism and what

Augustine called the gospel, I don't know if he ever believed it. He is writing about some guy that had a shirt that I do believe the shirt was wrong.

But let me say this. Don't create a straw man because that's what you're going to end up doing.

And a straw man is where you argue against something based on something else, based on something else, based on something else, and it's almost an act of sophistry where you believe that if you disprove something, that the whole system will fall apart.

Now, just to go back to this T -shirt, which I remember from this blog article, there was a man

I'm looking at it right now. There was a man wearing a T -shirt that said something like Calvinism, some lives matter, ticking off of the

Black Lives Matter. And that might be viewed by most people who would see that as a non -Calvinist mocking

Calvinism. But according to the author of the blog, this mutual friend of ours, this was actually a professing

Calvinist wearing that shirt. Right. That's what he said. I'm sure he's telling the truth.

The problem is, the shirt is wrong. Right. God said, thou shall not commit murder.

It didn't say, thou shall not commit murder against people who go to church.

It says, thou shall not commit murder. It's a blanket statement. It applies to every single person.

So the shirt is wrong. So what he's doing is, he's arguing against the phrase some lives matter when that is not what the

Bible speaks on. That is not what Calvinism or what we would call the gospel speaks on.

What are you going to do? You know, I will tell you this, Chris. It often amazes me that people allow

God to have an elect in the Old Testament, but somehow he's not allowed to have an elect in the

New Testament. Right. What makes that even more amazing is the vast majority, not all, but the vast majority of Messianic Jews and Messianic Jewish ministries reject the concept of unconditional election.

Now, I don't know what the theological makeup today of chosen people ministries is, but chosen people's ministries was started in the 19th century as a result of the evangelistic efforts of Presbyterians in Brooklyn, New York, and an

Orthodox Jewish rabbi heard the gospel from Reformed evangelists and embraced the gospel, and I believe that he himself was a

Calvinist, this rabbi, and that's what launched chosen people ministries. And I know that Mitch Glazer, who was for a long time, he may still be the president,

I don't know, but Mitch Glazer, a Jewish believer, was a, or is a

Calvinist. He's a dispensationalist, but he is a Calvinist. So, those things are not antithetical to each other, but it is true that most

Messianic Jews who believe God had an elect in the old covenant do not believe that he has an elect in the new, that is at least comprised of those from out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation as being the chosen.

In their mind, it's still the Jewish people who are uniquely and exclusively the chosen.

Right. And that, I mean, a simple reading of Deuteronomy 28, when

God gives the curses, if you don't obey, you come away with thinking, wait a minute, you know, how can the, let me say it this way, there is nothing consistent saying that you believe in God and you reject

Jesus Christ as Lord, as both God and Christ.

You can't do it. Jews that say they believe in the Old Testament, but they reject

Jesus Christ as Lord and God, they do not believe in the Old Testament because the old, whole

Old Testament was about him. And, but getting back to it, it does astound me a lot of times.

You'll sit there and talk with Arminians, and they do believe that the children of Abraham were the chosen people in the

Old Testament, but you're not allowed to have the chosen in the New Testament. And of course, what you and I believe,

God, or Abraham believed God and it was accounted unto him as righteousness.

It's the same way for you and me or Joe Schmuckatelli. If we believe in the

Lord Jesus Christ and we believe the gospel, then we, it is accounted to us as righteousness.

And Galatians 3 actually makes the argument that we are partakers of the

Abrahamic covenant. We are his children of promise. And I don't get, one time,

I don't mean to pick on dispensationalists here, but one time, I was at seminary, at Knox Seminary, and the professor had been a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary.

And we were going through the book of Galatians and he read Galatians 3 and I raised my hand, you know, because I didn't want to embarrass the man.

He's a good man. And I said, Fowler, how could you, as a dispensationalist, read

Galatians 3 and come up with your distinction between the church and Israel?

And he got very stolen. He looked down at his Bible. He looked back up at me and he said,

Honestly, Mr. Johnson, we ignored those passages. And that was it.

And I'm like, well, that's what you would have to do. You would have to ignore those passages.

And I want to deal with every passage honestly. The idea that Calvinism teaches that some lives matter.

What do you do with Abraham's brothers or his father? What do you do when

God loved Moses but didn't love him the same way that he did

Pharaoh? He gave all these things to Pharaoh, you know, the course, the hierarchy, everything.

The prince, you know, he was the prince of Egypt and here was Moses put into a basket.

Yes, he was raised in the court of Pharaoh, but then he was exiled and he was a wanderer in the desert and he ended up loving

Moses more than he did Pharaoh. Now, did the

Egyptians who died in the parting of the Red Seas, lives matter to God?

Well, that wasn't the issue because you can look down. I mean, one of the things I've often, and I tell

Christians, be very careful when you say, God won't reject us.

Yes, he will, but does that mean your life? I know when I was a little kid, the girl next door to me had married a pastor and the pastor and his children before church were going to get milk and they died in a car accident.

Does that mean that he didn't love them because they died? Of course not.

You know, I don't know for what reason he called them home. I don't know.

But the thing is, some lives matter is incorrect because it should have read some souls matter.

Now on that, I would agree. You know, God's children who are elect, their souls do matter to God, and that's the one whom

Christ shed his blood for. We talked about it earlier. He made a payment for them.

He didn't make a payment for the people that are in hell right now. He made a payment for them and them only.

Yes, there is a serious error in the way that universal love is declared from the pulpits of many

Christian churches, even professing Reformed churches on occasion, where there is no distinguishing between the elect and non -elect when it comes to the love of Christ.

Now, there is debate amongst Calvinists on a universal love of some kind that God has for every human, and in fact, for creation in general.

But it's clear from the New Testament that God does not love everyone as a father loves a child or as a groom loves his bride.

And that is a unique love and a unique relationship between God and the elect.

Yeah, that's a good illustration. I have a general love for all children.

I think children are great, but I have a special love for my own children.

Are you saying I have to love every child the same way as I love my own children?

I can remember Bill Shishko, a very close friend of mine, whose voice you hear in an ad for Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service on this program.

I can remember him years ago saying in a sermon, Can you imagine bouncing your child on your knee, your own child, your son or your daughter, and the child says to you,

Do you love me, Daddy? And your response is, Of course I do. I love all the children of the world.

Yes, but do you love me, Daddy? Yes, I already told you I love all the children of the world.

What a crushing blow that would be to hear from your own father. And it is also not the way

God in His Word answers that question. He doesn't love every single person in the world the same.

We have to go to our midway break right now, and if you have a question you'd like to ask

Jerry Johnson, anything involving the Scripture, anything involving Reformed theology, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

chrisarnson at gmail dot com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. Don't go away, we'll be right back after these messages.

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Christ honoring biblically faithful theologically sound doctrinally solid church I have extensive lists spanning the entire globe of biblically faithful churches and have helped many people in our audience all over the planet earth find churches sometimes that are only a couple of minutes from where they live that are biblically faithful so if you are in that predicament yourself no matter where you live in the world send me an email to Chris Arnson at gmail dot com and put

I need a church in the subject line that's also the email address where you can send in a question to Jerry Johnson that's

Chris Arnson at gmail dot com give us your first name at least city and state and country of residence we have a question that I've heard before from listeners when

I've had you on the show Jared in Torrington Wyoming asks are you ever going to come out with part two of the late great planet church you know

I would love to um we actually had a script mostly done and of course then everything went digital instead of a

DVD and I gotta confess I didn't know how to uh migrate over to that I wasn't smart enough to know how over to and actually at this point

I would have to say no I would love to though uh we had a thing uh uh an acrostic uh

Ichabod and we were gonna follow that and I gotta see if I can remember it the

I was gonna be for Israel the C was gonna be for church the H was gonna be hematology most people don't know what that is yeah me sin is dealing with the atonement um then

O was gonna be otherworldliness uh this another side

I can't remember the whole thing but we were following Ichabod was what we were doing the glory of the lord has departed and that's what we were gonna call it dispensationalism the glory of the lord has departed and I believe from dispensational theology it really has but uh are we ever gonna come out with it

I doubt it I'd love to tell you differently but I doubt it

Jared sorry okay uh and I assume that also means that you're not planning on having a return of uh against the world you know um

I still you know it periodically at times it's like the lord will put something in me and I'll watch a couple of those and I go

I say to myself we should have never ended those we actually had an idea for amazing grace two and we were gonna call it the foundations of reform theology and what we were gonna do is we were gonna pit the reforms view of the five solos against the roman catholic view of that day and then show how pretty much the modern church has acquiesced all of those things okay uh yeah

I used to really uh love that uh program against the world and that's how

I got introduced to you uh well actually no it was amazing grace the the history and theology of calvinism uh that uh was the vehicle how

I discovered you uh yeah I I seem to recall one of the first uh podcasts we did was on that charles thinney dvd yeah that that recording is still available on iron trip and zion radio if they go if they go and listen to that because you might even be able to tell now but ever since my stroke um usually about this time

I get real tired and that is part of the problem I don't type as fast as I used to and uh you know apart from the fact that you know

I start doing that and I don't get tired uh I really don't see that happening and I'll let you know this um

I write like a technical journal all right I write very technically my partner at that time he wrote very beautifully and he would take what

I wrote the theology and he would polish it up and it sounded real good you know that's exactly what phil johnson did and does for john macarthur he takes his sermon notes from legal yellow legal pads handwritten and he turns them into books and that's no secret that's no secret by the way folks it's not like I'm revealing some secrets it's true and it's openly known

I saw recently that he is not really doing good health wise no he's not but he is still with us are you talking about john or phil johnson because phil johnson john macarthur okay because phil johnson also had his scary battle with blood cancer and seems to be doing well and i'm trying to get him back in the program to give us all an update on that um let's see brother what i would like to do what i would like to go to next if we can okay is are good works a requirement for salvation it is one of the even even after you're a christian are good works required all right and what happened was i recently saw uh read a book by uh r .c

sproul and sproul had made a comment in there he said where there is no sanctification there probably was never any justification and i would agree with that a lot of people get into their minds though that good works are a requirement to please god or good works or requirement in order to become a christian and it is one thing that we need to shout from the top of our lungs the answer is no now that doesn't mean i don't believe in good works but uh the idea that good works are a requirement to be a christian is just simply not true christianity does not require good works christianity produces good works and i think that's something that we need to say loud and often because we need people to understand that it's going to produce them but that is christ that is producing them not us right not us ourselves and unfortunately i run into a lot of people whether armenian or reformed that seem to believe the latter that in order to be a christian you must have it requires good works nothing is further from the truth christianity produces good works and we need to state that yes uh the only good works that are involved in our salvation of those of christ himself he lived a perfectly obedient life which made him a perfect sacrifice a spotless lamb and his death as our substitute the substitute for his people was the work that accomplished perfectly and finally once and for all the redemption of his people and obviously in time that work of redemption does not manifest itself in the lives of his elect until they are regenerated by the power of the holy spirit and they repent and believe uh but uh because before then we are uh enemies of god we are not children of god and then he adopts us and uh he uh gives us new hearts and so on but the the actual perfect work of redemption was on calvary 2 000 years ago and the thing is we need to emphasize that it's all of christ christ will produce the good works now when i first became a christian yeah you know i i wasn't a great sinner i was just a run -of -the -mill joe six -pack sinner all i cared about was drinking beer and chasing girls that's all i cared about when i was a younger man and when i became a christian not like i became a christian and i didn't think about that stuff or i didn't do that stuff slowly the lord started to sanctify me and over time all of that stuff did not become as important as it was because at the time laura was a christian chasing girls and drinking beer was the most important things in my life but things started to get mutated if you will and all of a sudden those sins that i used to hold to they don't bother me anymore i don't do them now that isn't to say that i'm perfect because i'm not just have some in my life she'll tell you i'm not perfect but uh the things that yeah and let me say this i i notice that i have new sins in my life that'll come up periodically periodically and i'm like oh lord please do away with those you know but it is all of god god is the one that does away with them and it produces salvation produces good works and that is something we need to emphasize because i cannot tell you how many christians i have met that believe now that i'm a christian i need to be perfect well you do need to be perfect but you're not going to do it you're not going you're not going to do it christ is going to do it through you he is going to produce those good works which you were created beforehand to walk in them and of course that's not the biggest problem dominating professing christianity in modern evangelicalism it's people who are teaching and believing that you could be living a completely unrepentant life and yeah still have the confidence and assurance and the comfort that you will be in heaven because you raised your hand uh in bible camp oh that's right prayer it's something tracy and i love watching those murder mysteries you know like a true crime or something like that and two times a couple of months ago we saw one or salt two i should say where people said oh we're christians but we need this that this other person has so we're going to murder them and god will forgive us if you believe that you can commit sin and i mean that the same sins that nailed christ to the cross that you can just do them without any conscience you are believing a doctrine straight from the gates of hell and really i you know i'm sorry we make this distinction in the amazing grace dvd that uh eternal security is only one side of the coin it's actually better perseverance of the saints we will persevere in holiness we will eradicate sin out of our lives if you are not and that was what sproul was getting apart or getting to the point if there is no sanctification there probably was never any justification and in fact even that phrase perseverance of the saints is better said perseverance and preservation of the saints yes people i've heard people say preservation either way i don't see really any major distinction at least not in this point you know of my life if you will i've heard people say that and i'm like okay whatever okay we have clied in south sioux city nebraska who says or asks you uh mentioned earlier a type of theology that begins with the letter h that involves the atonement can you repeat that yeah it was a hematology if i recall if i'm pronouncing it right okay now i have heard hematology defined as the study of sin so i'm not sure why we are at all i'm not sure either i forgot i mean it's been a long time since we wrote that script and i would have to go back and see how we defined it i don't remember how we did i mean i'm sorry that was over 10 years ago and before i had the stroke so but i was afraid at the time i was like oh people aren't gonna get this and we wanted to give it to people something they could remember and i don't even know if we were gonna use that because i think it was uh myself and ken gentry at the time that were talking about this i'm a bit disturbed that i just got an email from somebody in my family who wants me to watch a video that they are feeling blessed by and the person is a notorious heretic so uh pray folks for this very close relative of mine that they come to see that this person that they are endorsing is an enemy of christ let me ask you this are you going to tell us the video or who did it uh let me uh see um the uh i i just recognize the person's face and i and i know that uh i have heard his uh false teachings exposed by justin peters i'm looking at the email the church is that elevation church um and uh i'm looking for uh i used to know right off the top of my head this person's name and i can't find it um stephen furtick here it is when we talked about the promises of god and i did not mean to start that video so i'm gonna turn this off here trying to turn us all into heretics um yeah i uh i don't know what to say about that but anyway um let's see we uh we do have another listener who has a question for you uh what is the most frequent objection that you hear to belief in the biblical truth of the jesus from those when you are evangelizing them um i mean i would guess the most frequent one see most people in my neck of the woods were part of the bible belt and i consider it we've talked about it before on this show a lot of people believe that there is a gospel and believe there was a jesus christ but believing there is a gospel and believing in the gospel are two different things and a lot of people here um they believe that justification by death everybody is going to go to heaven so what would i say is the number one i mean i've heard i've had a couple of people say to me over the years how could a father send his son to die that is probably the one i've heard the most by the way that was an anonymous listener which is why i didn't say his name yeah um i mean but as far as a an objection to christ because i don't run into many people that are like you know jewish i don't run into a lot of people that are jehovah's witnesses i don't run into a lot of those people i run into people who believe that they are christians but are not you know i one time um i was watching this youtube video and they they had this girl who was a porn star had died and they were interviewing her friends and her friends were saying oh heaven's brighter because she's in it and this girl not only was she a porn star she was a drug addict she was an alcoholic she's been arrested for stealing many times and i'm sitting there thinking and they believe that she's in heaven they believe it with all of their being and they believe that the minute she died she committed suicide and they believe the minute she died that she went to heaven and that is one of the biggest things around here that i will meet people that think they are christians but there's no change in their life no nothing they have no sanctification yes that reminds me of many years ago a an old presbyterian pastor from mississippi i was having a conversation with him this is when i was living in new york and he said to me with his very deep gravelly voice you got it easy up there in new york all you got to do is get people saved we gotta get them lost and then get them saved yeah and that that is true most people i would agree most people up here don't know they're lost and that's why if you remember in the basic grace dvd we talked about using the law of god and you know really talking to people about the law of god you know have you ever looked upon a woman with lust have you ever stolen anything do you ever covet do you ever lie you know things like that well if you violate the law of god in one place you have uh violated it in every place and it's really hard to get people to see that they are sinners in need of a savior because everybody thinks they're gonna go to heaven now i believe that's pretty much churchwide as well as worldwide um i could remember one time you remember when princess diana died right and there was a teacher at a christian school in england and a kid asked her do you believe princess die is in heaven and the teacher said if she repented and believed on the lord jesus christ and the teacher got fired for not saying she was in heaven and i was like you gotta be kidding and i remember uh when uh what's his name oh man frank sinatra died and i think it was time magazine they had an article on his death and they said heaven will never be the same i don't know if they're in heaven or in hell but it doesn't look good for them if you look at their alignment their profession yes you know in fact there was a uh christian talk show host in phoenix arizona of for whom my very close friend dr james r white of alpha omega ministries used to substitute for him on occasion when he was out of town or sick or whatever but this talk show host whose show was on a very major christian network national network he was fired the day that he was fielding questions from listeners which happened to be the day after the death of pope john paul 2 and someone asked do you think john paul 2 is in heaven right now and the talk show host said unless he repented he is not in heaven and i've never heard any evidence at all that he repented because he had a false gospel and declared himself the head of a church which is a false church and therefore i have no confidence he's saved of course i'm paraphrasing him i'm not saying exactly what the way he said he was fired by this evangelical christian network yeah i i was i got my start on radio all right i did a radio program out of atlanta georgia back in the early 90s and it was a pentecostal radio station i won pentecostal at the time i had been saved in a pentecostal church and i was pentecostal for a while but then i became southern baptist and i don't know if i ever told you what a presbyterian is what's that a sanctified baptist by the way folks uh jerry is a presbyterian for those of you who are wondering the source of that joke yeah so anyway uh i had made a comment somebody had called in and asked about benny hinn's latest book good morning holy spirit and i said there were a lot of problems with the theology in that book and i thought i gave what was a good explanation and they kicked me off the radio program they just said no more all right i mean i'm not gonna take it back you know yeah thankfully they did nothing like that when iron trip and xyron said for a considerable portion of the time that i was on wnyg radio in babylon long island uh that station was purchased by an all spanish pentecostal network and when the change came everybody who worked for the english christian station had to leave and the the general manager of radio called me up and said is this mr crease i said yes it is my name is josue ayala the general manager of radio contigo nuevo in west babylon where your show used to be aired and i said yes well our phones are ringing off the hook for your show will you come back i said yeah but i'm an english speaking hosts.

Your programming is all in Spanish." And he said, well, we don't care if you don't. So I went back there, but even though they were all

Pentecostal, I did not change what I said or what my guests said on my program.

And that doesn't mean that I never have Pentecostals on my program, but I would very frequently expose serious errors that I have seen and heard in that movement.

And thankfully, nothing like that happened to me as far as being testimony.

Chris, let me tell you this. I've been Reformed since about 1992, and I have been invited to speak in Pentecostal churches.

I was invited to speak at Free Methodists, Evangelical Methodists, even a very conservative

United Methodist, Assemblies of God, Church of God. Now, I don't go into their pulpits and say things that directly would upset them.

I don't do that. But I don't compromise anything that I believe.

If I'm speaking on a subject matter, I tell them what, and the thing is, they'll sit there, they'll talk about the sovereignty of God, and they'll all say,

Amen. And I'm like, all right. But if the Lord opens up a door, I'm going to go through it, you know?

Amen. And we have to go to our final break. If you would like to join us with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsson at gmail .com.

Don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages. the great commission, supporting and sending for the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth.

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At Lindbergh Baptist Church, we believe the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the inspired

Word of God, inherent in the original writings, complete as the revelation of God's will for salvation, and the supreme and final authority in all matters to which they speak.

We believe in salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. This salvation is based upon the sovereign grace of God, was purchased by Christ on the cross, and is received through faith alone, apart from any human merit, works, or ritual.

Salvation in Christ also results in righteous living, good works, and appropriate respect and concern for all who bear

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Lord's Day, we'd love to have you come and join us in worship. For details, visit lindberghbaptist .org.

That's l -y -n -brookbaptist .org. This is Pastor Keith Allen of Lindbergh Baptist Church, reminding you that by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves.

It is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast of the

Lord's blessing and the knowledge of himself. Dr.

Joseph Piper, President Emeritus and Professor of Systematic and Applied Theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

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Tony Costa, Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary. I'm thrilled to introduce to you a church where I've been invited to speak and have grown to love,

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It's such a joy to witness and experience fellowship with people of God, like the dear saints at Hope Reform Baptist Church in Coram, who have an intensely passionate desire to continue digging deeper and deeper into the unfathomable riches of Christ in His Holy Word, and to enthusiastically proclaim

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I hope you also have the privilege of discovering this precious congregation and receive the blessing of being showered by their love, as I have.

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I'm Pastor Bill Shishko of The Haven, an Orthodox Presbyterian church in Comac, Long Island.

I hold the Iron Sharpens Iron radio program hosted by my longtime friend and brother,

Chris Arnson, in the highest esteem, and I'm thrilled that you're listening today.

I'm also delighted that Iron Sharpens Iron is partnering with one of my favorite resources for Reformed Christian literature for decades now,

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Just, I want to say this, because we do this pretty much every time.

RoyalDiadem .com was outstanding for me. People need to understand that, you know,

I get so busy sometimes I will forget things. And it was about five days before her birthday, and I'm sitting there, oh man, her birthday's coming up.

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And I called him up, and he got his daughter on the phone, and they sent me pictures of numerous rings.

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There you go. So that's royaldiadem .com. Make sure you mention Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

I also want to remind all men in ministry leadership that you are all invited to the next

Iron Trip and Zion Radio Free Pastors Luncheon, Thursday, May 1st, 11 a .m.

to 2 p .m. at the Carlisle Reformed Presbyterian Church right here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

The featured speaker for the very first time is Dr. Jason Lyle, who is a world -renowned astrophysicist and young earth creationist, an author, and highly sought -after conference speaker.

Everything is free, not only your admission, but your meal, and everyone who attends will receive quite a number of free, brand -new books personally selected by me and donated by Christian publishers all over the

United States and the United Kingdom. So if you're a man in ministry leadership, you can register by email at chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Put Pastors Luncheon in the subject line and let me know your full name, the name of the church you represent, and the number of men who will be joining you.

That's chrisarnson at gmail .com. Well, Jerry, I would really like you to summarize what you really want most etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today, and we look forward to having you back, of course, as we always do.

But tell our listeners exactly what you want them to walk away with today, first and foremost.

Well, the thing I would say is, first off,

I hope everybody is reading through the Bible, read the Word of God every day. But remember this,

God puts things into the Bible for us to know. He wants us to know that.

And the question we need to ask is, why does he want us to do certain things?

All right, so when you're reading the Bible, put yourself in the listener's shoes as well as the speaker's shoes.

What would they have thought? What would Peter have thought when he saw the call of Matthew?

What would, why did the Philistines not attack Israel? Why? You need to ask those questions and you need to put yourself in their place.

If you were a Philistine and they weren't attacking, why were they not attacking?

Why were they waiting? Were they scared of something? I don't know, but put yourself in their shoes.

I heard a sermon years ago, and I'm talking 25 years ago, and they were saying, the preacher was saying, if you were

Aaron and you had just seen your sons consumed by fire, how would you have felt?

You know, fire came out of the altar and consumed them. I mean, what would you think?

Lord, I did all these things for you. Why are you killing my sons? Because you had to figure

Aaron loved his sons. He would love your sons. You know, how would he have felt?

What would he have thought? What would he have said? What would he have done? So you need to put yourself in their place, in Aaron's place, in Moses' place.

And what would you have done if you came up to a burning bush, but it wasn't being consumed?

What would you have thought if you had been tall and you had been walking and all of sudden a light shone around you and said,

Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? What would have been your thoughts? What would have been your actions?

What would you have done, you know, if you were the same person as him? And that's what

I would say. We need to do more than just read black ink on white pages.

We need to go beyond, and we need to be careful not to go beyond actually what is written, but what in the world would they have thought?

So that's what I'll be saying. It's interesting that you gave us that warning not to go beyond what is written, because you also brought up Aaron's sons who were consumed by fire,

Nadab and Abihu. And it's amazing that many

Christians are fully aware of that account of the Scriptures that tells us that Nadab and Abihu were offering incense to the

Lord as an act of worship. Right, sure. Yeah, and it was not exactly as God had commanded.

Right. Let me pause right there. There is nothing in the text that says that what the sons were doing they thought was evil.

They thought they had found a new and exciting way to worship God, but it was not a way that they were to approach

Him. And exactly the same thing would go for Uzzah when they were transporting the

Ark of the Covenant, and the ox stumbled and the cart was turning over, and Uzzah, I'm sure, had the most noble of intentions, reached out his hand to steady the

Ark, and God struck him dead for it. And the reason I'm bringing these accounts up is because so many

Christians treat the worship of God flippantly and think that they can be creative to the point where they could do anything that they want, anything that gives them pleasure and joy to add to a worship service.

And that's why the Reformed principle of the regular principle of worship, it says we are not to worship

God other than the way He prescribed it. We do not go outside of it.

And I think people think that because people are not in the 21st century bursting into flame at the direct act of an angry

God because they're being inventive in worship, they think that God has a different attitude in the

New Covenant. But that's not the case at all. He doesn't have a different attitude against homosexuality either, and all of these abominations that are listed clearly in the

Old Testament, some of which are repeated in the New Testament, but his attitude has not changed at all.

Yeah, I would agree. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

And brother, we don't know—you're right, at least I don't hear of reports of somebody bursting into flames, but I've heard of heart attacks.

I've heard of people dropping dead, you know. So I don't know. I'm not going to say that was

God's anger, but maybe it was. I don't know.

Well, thanks, Jerry. I always enjoy having you on the program, and I like the free -flowing give and take that we have.

Look forward to having you back. I just want to remind our listeners quickly, please help support

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio financially. If you can, go to ironsharpensironradio .com, click

Support, then click Click to Donate Now. That's ironsharpensironradio .com,

click Support, then click Click to Donate Now. Thank you so much to all of you faithful donors and advertisers who are keeping

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio on the air through your generosity and benevolence and love for this program.

I can never thank you enough, I should say. I can never thank you enough, and I can never clearly reveal to you my gratitude to you and my gratitude to God for you.

I hope you all always remember for the rest of your lives, Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.