September 8, 2016 Show with Jeff Pollard on “God’s Gospel of Grace: The Doctrine of Salvation from the Pages of the ‘Free Grace Broadcaster'” PLUS Russel T. Fuller on “The Importance of Context: Knowing the Old Testament to Fully Understand the New”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century Gospel Minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27, verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host, Chris Arnton. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming.

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This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 8th day of September 2016.

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I am so delighted that for the first hour today I have a guest on the program that I have wanted to have as a guest for quite a number of years, even before we relaunched the all -new

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Iron Sharpens Iron. Jeff Pollard has been somebody that I've wanted to get on the program.

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He is pastor of Mount Zion Bible Church in Pensacola, Florida, and director of Chapel Library, which is one of the most phenomenal publishing ministries in existence, not only because of the precious truths that they regularly bring back into print and sometimes publish authors for the first time, but because of the inexpensive rates that these wonderful booklets and tracts and books are being sold for, because the primary reason that Chapel Library exists is to spread the doctrines of sovereign grace and to see the lost saved and to see those in theological error come to truth.

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But it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron, Jeff Pollard. Thank you very much,

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Chris. It is a real honor to be on with you, and I appreciate the opportunity, so thank you.

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Yeah, the pleasure is all mine, brother, and it was such a joy to meet you in Pensacola, Florida.

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I guess it's been over a year now. I can't remember exactly what date it was, but it was at that Bible conference where you were one of a number of speakers at the

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Jeremiah Cry Bible conference. That's correct, yeah. Do you remember exactly when that was?

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That was March of 2015, I believe. Okay, yeah. Well, it was such a joy to finally meet you in person, having already spoken with you in the past, and of course

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I have been loving and appreciating and benefiting from Chapel Library going back to the early days of my salvation in the 1980s when

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Leroy Shelton was the pastor of Mount Zion Bible Church and also running the

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Chapel Library, and he was obviously a dear man of God. And how did

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Mount Zion and also Chapel Library, after Brother Leroy went home to glory, how did these ministries wind up under your leadership?

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Well, at least for me, it's quite a remarkable story, Chris. Pastor Shelton was a wonderful brother in the

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Lord. He was a man very powerfully influenced by George Mueller, and he was likewise a great man of prayer, and he founded the work here in 1978.

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The way he and I met was in the late 90s,

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I wrote a little tract called Who is Jesus Christ, and a friend of mine wanted that translated into Spanish, and someone told him to look up Leroy Shelton Jr.

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in Pensacola, Florida at Chapel Library, and he would probably be glad to have it translated. So Pastor Shelton did just exactly that.

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He translated the tract into Spanish. He liked the English so much that he asked permission to print it, and he told me if I ever wrote anything again to please let him know.

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A couple of years later, I submitted to him a booklet entitled Christian Modesty and the

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Public Undressing of America, and he printed that.

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I think the first one was about 5 ,000, and that was in 2000,

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I believe, and it's been in print since then. So after he printed

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Christian Modesty, we both started talking together on the phone fairly regularly, and we became good friends on the phone.

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I had no idea I would ever end up here. We would just talk about the things of Christ, and we'd talk about prayer, we'd talk about the scriptures, and then he invited me to come and speak here, and it was at that time in 2002,

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April of 2002, that he had me come to speak, and while I was here, he asked if I would pray about joining him in the work here.

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Well, obviously, the Lord answered those prayers, and Mount Zion Bible Church is now under your leadership.

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Obviously, you are under the leadership of Christ, but in an earthly sense, it's under your leadership.

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Tell us something about Mount Zion Bible Church. What makes it unique? I know that it is a sovereign grace -believing church, but what else can you tell us about it?

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Ah, well, Mount Zion Bible Church has been one of the great blessings here in my life.

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It is a small congregation. There are two elders here. My fellow elder is

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Pastor Clarence Simmons. He was installed earlier this year.

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Prior to this, for about 12 years, my fellow elder was

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Brother Stephen Frakes. So I came here in 2002.

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I was installed in July of that year, and so there have been two elders here in my 14 -year labors.

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It's a small congregation. We have about 47 voting members.

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We have large families, so we have lots of children. I think our smaller families may be three or four children, and we have as many as eight and ten in some of our families.

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So that fills out the congregation a good bit, and we have about, oh, probably anywhere between 16 and 30 people with their children that visit here on a regular basis, or I should say are regular attendees.

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And then because a lot of people do know Chapel Library, we have visitors throughout the year.

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So any given Sunday, we may be around, I suppose, anywhere between 90 and 110, 120 folks.

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Yeah, and in fact, I have spoken with your fellow elder,

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Clarence, and he was the one, I believe, that made the arrangements for me and my former pastor,

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Mike Adosh, to stay in Leroy Shelton's home, the late Leroy Shelton's home, when we were at that Bible conference.

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That's exactly right. Clarence actually came here just a little before I did, and he's got a marvelous testimony.

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You want a good testimony, sometime just call up Brother Clarence and have him on your show.

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Oh yeah, definitely. The way he ended up at Chapel is really just an extraordinary work of the

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Lord, to a certain degree. It's pretty much that way with most of us who labor here.

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None of us were natives of Pensacola, but the Lord has brought us from all kinds of places to take part in this great work.

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And it's a confessional church. We hold to the 1677, also known as the 1689

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Second London Baptist Confession. And we are,

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I would say, a growing church, growing in the grace and the knowledge of the

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Lord Jesus Christ, no whistles and bells. We're not a contemporary church, but we have the blessings of preaching

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Christ every week. So we're growing in the grace and knowledge of the Lord, and I can't say much more than to say there's a very sweet fellowship here that has been growing for the years that we've been here.

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Now, did Leroy Shelton found both Mount Zion and Chapel Library?

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Well, that's a good question. He founded Mount Zion Bible Church. He came here and founded it in 1978.

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In fact, he was actually born in New Orleans and served as his father's assistant pastor for some years,

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L .R. Shelton, Sr. And then Pastor Shelton moved up to Litchfield, Minnesota, to pursue ministry there, and he earnestly taught the

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Lord about giving away this great literature that he was reading.

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He's really an interesting piece of Baptist history here in this country.

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He was selling Banner of Truth books before they became vogue, you know, in America.

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So all of that being the case, he prayed, he really wanted to see the gospel of God's grace go to the ends of the earth.

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He was a man with a tremendous heart for evangelism, and in his earnest prayer, he sought the

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Lord regarding ministry where he could give away the literature. And so the

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Lord opened up an opportunity for him to move down to Pensacola, and it was in 1978 when he came here, and he launched it with three other families.

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It was just his family and three other families in a little 40 by 46 building that the

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Lord provided, and it's grown into three buildings. And he began by preaching on the radio, then he had a prison ministry, and all of that eventually came down to 1988 when we received the blessing of taking on the

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Free Grace Broadcaster. The Free Grace Broadcaster and Chapel Library were not native to Mount Zion Bible Church.

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Okay. Yep. The Free Grace Broadcaster in 1988 was inherited from W .S.

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Bell up in Canton, Georgia. He knew of Pastor Shelton Jr.'s work, and he contacted him and he told him that he appreciated the work down here and the publishing that he was doing.

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And so he said, you know, I want to give you the magazine. So we took on that, which expanded our mailing list to about 1 ,300 at the time.

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And Chapel Library was actually handled by Lawrence and Amy Nelson.

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They were down in Venice, Florida, and they began to have health issues, and they contacted

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Pastor Shelton as well and said, we love what you're doing, we love your work. And in fact, they go all the way back to,

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I think, about 1983. And they gave it up to Pastor Shelton.

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He went down there, picked all of the stuff. It wasn't originally a real lending library, and it was great classical works that you just...

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American Christianity, by and large, was not reading solidly Reformed works, works by A .W.

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Pink, Charles Spurgeon, J .C. Ryle, the Puritans, until it was a lending library that also printed tracts and had a large audio library.

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So somewhere in the 80s, I guess, 87, 85, 86, somewhere in that area, they contacted

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Pastor Shelton and asked him to take it over. And so with the acquisition of Chapel and then the

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Free Grace Broadcaster, that really pretty much set in stone the way the ministries were going to go.

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Well, I had no idea that when I, as a brand new Christian, came to embrace the doctrines of grace through a chapel library booklet,

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I had no idea that the ministry had not already been flourishing for many, many years before that.

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It was really, I guess, since I was saved in the 1980s, that ministry really had just really blossomed not long before I became a

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Christian. Yeah, at least as far as right here in Pensacola, that's exactly right.

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I actually cannot remember how long Lawrence and Amy had Chapel Library, and that's probably a piece of our history,

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I need to get a little sharper on. I know that they had it for a number of years before Pastor Shelton took it over, but the chapel that most people know now did not get established here until the 80s.

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Yeah, because I can still remember when I became a Christian in the mid -1980s,

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I was raised Roman Catholic, and when

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I had graduated grammar school after my confirmation, really started to very seriously doubt the credibility of the

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Catholic Church, just by having conversations with the priest, and there seeming to be so many differences of opinion about major things in the

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Catholic Church. I just became disillusioned with it, and as a teenager, immediately fell into drug and alcohol abuse, and eventually, by God's grace, was rescued from that, and rescued from sin and death by the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and was going to a Reformed Baptist Church, and I didn't even know what that was at the time.

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And I can remember when my pastor in a Bible study had brought up predestination, and I remember thinking to myself, what on earth is he talking about?

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Which to me, it sounded like some kind of a Hindu thing or something. I didn't know what on earth, and I had to tell him afterwards, what are you talking about?

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This sounds crazy. And I remember I met with my elders before I was baptized, and I said, look,

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I love you guys, I believe this is the church where the Lord wants me to be, I trust you as shepherds,

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I love the people here, but I'll tell you something, I don't know if I'm ever going to believe in this predestination stuff.

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And they said that they were going to be patient with me, and they said that as long as I submitted to the teachings of the elders, and didn't seek to undermine it, that they would baptize me anyway, and welcome me into fellowship there.

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And very soon after that, when I was hemming and hawing about the Calvinism issue, my friend

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Nigel Stone, who's now with the Lord, he's from England, he gave me the booklet by Chapel Library, George Whitfield's letter to John Wesley on election, and very quickly the

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Lord opened my eyes to those truths of sovereign grace, and at first,

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I acquiesced, I waved the white flag, and I said, this is true, but I hate it.

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But then, very soon after that, I fell in love with these doctrines, and my salvation became all the more personal, and Christ's death for me was not a

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Jesus hanging on a cross, dying for a nameless, faceless sea of humanity that he was hoping he was going to redeem, he was saying to me,

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Chris Arnzen, I am dying for you, and I'm paying the price 100 % for your salvation.

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And that just totally, radically revolutionized my faith.

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That's, amen. You know, we still publish that. Yes, and I have given it out, actually. And you're, in fact, with no disrespect to Brother Leroy in heaven,

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I'm sure he doesn't care since he is in heaven, but you have taken Chapel Library to a whole other level with the quality of the appearance of the booklets and the tracts, including the

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George Whitfield booklet. Well, I can tell you,

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Chris, with all my heart, Chapel Library is a team effort. The elders oversee that work.

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In fact, we actually have six ministries here. Chapel Library is the one that everybody knows generally, but there really are six ministries here, and it is a wonderful team effort.

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My fellow elder at that time when I came, Stephen Frakes, and I looked at the chapel literature.

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We print almost 850 titles of tracts, small booklets, large booklets, and paperbacks, and all of them were solid gold as far as their content.

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But the external appearance was extremely dated, very, very, very low -key, and we had moved into a graphics -oriented culture.

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And so our desire was, we're not trying to compete with what the world is doing, but we did want to make more attractive covers, things that spoke more plainly to a video culture, one that looks at colors and images.

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So we prayed about it, and we have been able to transform quite a number of our titles, and it's our hope and our prayer to have every single one of those 800 -plus titles with new covers.

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And the nice thing about it is doing it the way we do it. We give them away, so at any time during our printing, if we decide we want to upgrade the covers and change them, we can do that.

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So we've got people that give us wonderful recommendations for the covers.

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Actually, believe it or not, that's really one of the hardest things for us, is getting covers for the themes that we deal with.

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You know, what do you make as a cover for a book about holiness? And so we will put a particular image on one booklet and get letters about how it's not honoring the

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Lord and move on to the next. Sometimes I've seen other publishers, even very good ones, you look at the cover they chose and you'll see a booklet about hell with a picture of a beautiful flower on the cover.

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I'm like, what is this? It doesn't make any sense. But anyway, I'm sorry I interrupted you. Oh no,

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I probably need to be interrupted. I can tell you that that was one of the things that has driven us, and while we've not,

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I can't say that we've really gotten all the covers where we would like to see them, and occasionally people will write to us and say, well, we don't think this cover's really appropriate for one reason or another.

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We're even having a discussion about that right now. Should these covers that are about, say, the attributes of God, should they have the picture of the author on it?

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Are we dishonoring the Lord by that? People write and tell us, well, we're here in the

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Philippines, or we're here in South America, or we're here in Africa, and old white guys with long beards, that doesn't speak to us.

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It's really a challenge to come up with the covers, but we have been able to upgrade them, and I'm very glad that you're appreciative of them.

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I'm very thankful for it. Yeah, well, obviously, in an earthly sense, I owe my belief in the doctrines of sovereign grace to Chapel Library, so I thank

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God for everything that you folks do. And just in case I forget to announce the website before we run out of time, it's chapellibrary .org,

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for those of you listening, chapellibrary .org, and they have absolutely mind -blowing prices, and I mean by that low prices, for their booklets, tracts, books, and you could get hundreds of tracts or booklets for an amazingly low price, and I have done that myself, just as an individual, so all you churches out there listening, or you pastors,

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I should say, or elders or deacons who make the decisions on what tracts and booklets that you use for your narthex, or wherever you put your tracts and your free information,

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Chapel Library is the key place to go for that, especially if you believe in the doctrines of sovereign grace.

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Although, I can tell you, I have found your tracts in non -Calvinist churches, obviously not on those specific doctrines, but I've found other issues addressed in tracts and the tract racks of some

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Arminian churches. I will tell you, Brother Chris, we are astonished at who actually uses our literature, and we've actually seen and heard of, you know, of the very same thing you were talking about, pastors coming to see the doctrines of grace when they read them.

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They've heard of Spurgeon, they start reading Spurgeon, they start reading our catalog of Spurgeon titles, and all of a sudden they're realizing

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Spurgeon is teaching what the Scriptures are teaching, and they aren't.

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And so we've had wonderful, wonderful testimonies over the years of people being converted by reading the tracts, the booklets, or people coming to see and understand the glories of God's great sovereignty, and they've come to see the doctrines of grace.

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It really is thrilling. Do I have a moment to say something about what you just said about we have available?

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Oh yeah, definitely. Let me say that actually, we print everything that we print to give away.

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Everything is free, but what we have is a monthly cap.

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Anybody, anywhere, can order any of our literature every single month up to a $20 limit, and it's absolutely free.

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Now, past $20, all we ask is that they would cover our print costs, and if they cover the print costs, they still have the $20 free.

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And anything over that, if they cover the print costs, we're happy to give them as much as they want.

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Now, there are other situations where we're dealing either with missionaries or churches that say, hey, we want to go down to the campus, there's 5 ,000 students down there, we want to pass out stuff.

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Well, we'll send them boxes absolutely free. So if they'll just contact us, if they have large needs, we have what we call here elder approval.

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And if it's a need that we think that we can fill, we will happily fill.

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A lot of times, street preachers want to get out on the street, they want to go down there during various parades or events that are taking place in their town, they want to pass out thousands, we're happy to supply that.

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Yes, in fact, I remember you supplying me with quite a number of tracts and booklets. I believe when

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I was at a United Reformed Church Bible Conference manning a book table, you supplied hundreds of the

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Canons of Dort for free. Yeah, I remember that. And some other booklets like the

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George Whitfield booklet that led me to the Lord, well, led me to Doctrines of Sovereign Grace, I should say.

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And it's just amazing the stuff that you have and the things that you make available for free.

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And even if one has to pay, it's just ridiculously low, amazingly low.

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And, well, I'm looking forward to the rest of our conversation. We have to go to a break right now.

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But we want to talk about a book that you have, an actual book, God's Gospel of Grace, the

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Doctrines of Salvation from the Pages of the Free Grace Broadcaster. And we're going to be getting into that theme right after we return from our sponsors.

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And I want to remind our listeners, if you'd like to join us, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

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We were made to thrive. Welcome back.

30:50

This is Chris Arns, and if you just tuned us in, our guest for the first hour today is

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Jeff Pollard, pastor of Mount Zion Bible Church in Pensacola, Florida, and also director of Chapel Library.

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We are speaking on God's Gospel of Grace, the Doctrine of Salvation from the pages of the

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Free Grace Broadcaster. That's for the first hour. Coming up in our second hour, we'll be joined by Dr.

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Russell T. Fuller, professor of Old Testament Interpretation at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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He's also co -author of An Invitation to Biblical Hebrew, and he's the plenary speaker at the

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Christ Our Redeemer conference at Pittsboro Baptist Church in Indiana, and we'll be discussing the importance of context, knowing the

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Old Testament, to fully understand the New. So we hope you stay tuned for the second hour as well.

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Our email address here, if you'd like to join us on the air for the question for Jeff Pollard, is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

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That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside of the

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USA. The gospel, well, God's Gospel of Grace, you have a really phenomenal lineup of authors from the past who have contributed to this.

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Well, you have compiled their writings for each of the chapters contained in here, and from what

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I saw, I think the only 20th century author was A .W.

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Pink, and everyone else was from years or centuries previous to the 20th century, and it's quite an impressive group of folks.

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Actually, I'm sorry, J .I. Packer is in here too. I did not see J .I. Packer here before, but you have

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Thomas Boston and J .C. Ryle and Thomas Manton and Charles Spurgeon and Jonathan Edwards and Octavius Winslow and John Owen and Jonathan Edwards and Charles Hodge and James Buchanan, Horatius Bonar, and on and on I could go.

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You have some mighty men of God who you have selected writings from for this compilation,

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God's Gospel of Grace, the Doctrines of Salvation from the pages of the Free Grace Broadcaster, and as we mentioned earlier, the

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Free Grace Broadcaster is a periodical that you publish. It's free of charge that you mail out to people on your mailing list that has articles of men of God from the past and present who have something that we need to hear for any age, correct?

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That's correct, Chris. Pastor Shelton was the editor of the

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Free Grace Broadcaster when I came here, and I took over that work after the

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Lord took him home in January of 2003.

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And the Free Grace Broadcaster is a quarterly digest. We take a theme, and we will fill out that theme with authors from the past.

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Generally speaking, we have something of a slogan here at Chapel, and it's, you don't have to be dead for us to publish you, but it helps.

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That's also a great rule of thumb when naming your children after someone famous.

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Because you never know what they're going to do when they're alive still. That's right.

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We've had men that we have published that were living authors that have changed positions radically sometimes on things that have caused us a lot of issues over the years.

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So generally speaking, while we still do rarely print modern authors, as a matter of fact, we're about to put out a book by Sam Waldron on the

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Lord's Day, which we're really excited about. Well, we'd all be shocked if Sam Waldron became an Arminian along the way.

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Yes, that would be problematic. So the

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Free Grace Broadcaster then is a quarterly digest. We take up great pastors and preachers and theologians of the past,

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Charles Spurgeon, Arthur Pink, Horatius Bonner, J .C. Ryle, many, many of the

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Puritans, and that's what we fill up the broadcaster with. We fill out that theme.

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We usually have at least a theological theme, a couple of them during the year, something like justification, or the new broadcaster that just went into the mail last week is on God's decrees.

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Then we have a more devotional type sometimes when we look at things like Thanksgiving or the

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God of all comfort, suffering, those kinds of things. And then usually once a year we have at least a theme on a family -oriented, and what

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I mean by family is a biblical view of manhood and womanhood. And so we've had broadcasters like virtuous womanhood, godly manhood, marriage, children's responsibilities to their parents, you know, those kinds of things.

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So the broadcaster, you are correct, it's a 48 -page booklet. It comes out once a quarter.

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It's absolutely free, and if your listeners want to sign up to it, they can go to our website, which is, as you said earlier, chapellibrary .org,

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chapellibrary .org, or you can call us. You can email us.

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You can send up smoke signals if you want to. But we'll be glad to put you on our address.

37:29

There's no obligation. We never ask for donations. That's entirely up to the people that read our stuff.

37:37

We never ask for donations. We do not share our mailing list. So we're not going to ask you for money, and we're not going to put you on someone else's mailing list that will ask you for money.

37:47

It really is, honestly, free. And then it goes out, and we're digitizing it as well.

37:55

If you don't want a hard copy that you get in your mailbox, you can go to our website, and most of them have now been digitized, and you can read them either as PDFs, Kindle, or EPUB format.

38:09

So, yeah, the broadcaster is kind of what we might call our flagship publication because we have people all around the world that read it.

38:21

We're very excited. A couple of years ago, several years ago, we began to publish it in Spanish, and we have now moved from twice a year to four times a year, like our

38:32

English edition. And I guess we should make a very serious clarification here that, unfortunately, there is a group of professing

38:46

Christians who have hijacked the phrase free grace and mean something entirely different than we, who are believers in historic

38:56

Calvinism, mean by that. There are those who believe in a repentanceless

39:04

Christianity, that you can be assured that you will go to heaven just because you have recited a prayer or welcomed

39:16

Jesus in your heart, a phrase which you never find in the Bible. But then, it doesn't matter what horrific and satanic lifestyle you may live after that, you will be assured of heaven.

39:31

And this is obviously not what you are standing for with free grace. Not in the slightest.

39:37

No, we are historically, as I mentioned, our congregation is a 1677 -1689

39:47

London Baptist Confession. That is one of the great confessions to have come in the post -Reformation era.

39:58

And it's very, very similar to the Westminster Confession of Faith and to the

40:06

Savoy Declaration. So it preaches a glorious and,

40:12

I believe, a clear biblical gospel, which includes, it is a message about God and His holiness, it is a message about man and his sinfulness, it is a glorious presentation of the person and work of the

40:31

God -man, Jesus Christ, and that it is a call to repentance and faith.

40:36

And so we stand in a very long historical line of those who hold forth what

40:43

I believe to be clear biblical gospel. Well, you have this book,

40:50

God's Gospel of Grace, in five sections, basically five parts of the book, and obviously

40:58

Calvinists have some kind of a thing for the number five. And this is broken up into, as I said, these five different parts, which are, the first one is the gospel, and then you have substitution, a very controversial term today, because there are a lot of non -Calvinists who use that term, and I think that they are not logically consistent when they do.

41:28

Justification is the third, imputed righteousness is the fourth, and repentance is the fifth.

41:33

If you could summarize the gospel, because that may sound like a simplistic thing to ask one to do, but there are many different understandings of what that is today, and therefore you have a lot of false

41:48

Christianity, and you also, just to let you know, there are people that listen to Iron Sharpens Iron on occasion that are not

41:55

Christians. We even have Muslims sometimes listening. So if you could summarize the gospel.

42:02

Certainly. Let me lay out just a little bit of the reason for the book and the way that it is what it is, and then

42:09

I will be glad to do that. God's gospel of grace is what we believe is preached throughout the pages of the clear, the apostolic writings.

42:27

God's gospel, God's good news, God's report from heaven is a message from God to lost humanity.

42:37

And so we took five years, or I should say five volumes of the

42:45

Free Grace Broadcaster, dealt specifically with the heart and soul of the biblical gospel.

42:52

That's why the very first part in here, part one, is the gospel, and you see the names of the people that we have put into that particular edition.

43:08

Thomas Boston, Jedi Packer, Thomas Manton, J .C. Ryle, C .H. Spurgeon, Jonathan Edwards.

43:15

All men who preach the glorious gospel of God's grace, which I'll summarize in just a moment.

43:22

Secondly, then substitution. Well, it is absolutely true.

43:27

One of the great controversies is the belief in a substitutionary death.

43:35

There are some theologians in times past that have even called that idea obscene. It's completely wrong for someone that's innocent to die in the place of someone else.

43:47

But that's why we gave a whole broadcaster to the substitution. Again, Spurgeon, Pink, Octavius Winslow, John Owen, and Edwards.

43:55

In fact, believe it or not, even though many non -reformed or non -Calvinist or non -doctrines of grace

44:04

Christians, free will believing Christians, even though many today will use that term substitutionary atonement,

44:14

I actually saw and heard a professor at a

44:21

Nazarene seminary or university in a documentary on the doctrines of grace, who basically was logically consistent with the

44:33

Wesleyan Arminianism that he was teaching, and he was scolding Arminians for using the term substitution.

44:41

And he said, you cannot believe Christ was a substitute for all because that would imply all would be in heaven.

44:48

And since they do not believe in particular redemption or definite atonement or limited atonement, he recognized the dilemma in using that term substitution.

44:57

It's exactly right. If Jesus Christ died in someone's place, bearing all of God's wrath for that person or that group of people's sins, their sins are paid for.

45:15

And therefore the Arminians who really understand, as the men you're obviously talking about did, as they understand the idea of substitution can't really fit logically into their system.

45:27

They use it very often inconsistently, but it's wonderfully set forth in Scripture.

45:34

Jesus Christ in the place of sinners. And if that's the case, those for whom he died and those for whom he is the high priest, those for whom he does intercede, cannot be anything but saved.

45:48

If he died and he's the substitute for everybody, everybody must be saved.

45:53

Or we have to take the other position, that Jesus Christ died for his elect.

45:59

He died for the people of God. His Father gave him before the foundation of the world. He came into the world and was a complete substitute for all their sins.

46:09

Amen. And that's very much what that Part 2 is about.

46:14

Part 3 was about justification. Justification lies at the very heart of gospel truth, and therefore it's under attack in every generation.

46:28

When the federal vision movement arose, it was about the time

46:34

I had come to Pensacola and to chapel and to pastor here at Mount Zion.

46:41

And so I wanted there to be a good statement in 48 pages of what solid men throughout the years that would be called

46:54

Reformed or Calvinistic, those who believe in the grace of God, I wanted a good solid statement of justification by faith alone in Christ alone.

47:06

And so that's exactly what you have there, the meaning of justification. Justification as a forensic act.

47:11

The immediate ground of justification by James Buchanan, which is really excellent. The instrument of justification by Arthur Pink.

47:20

Not faith, but Christ by Horatius Bonner. Absolutely superb article.

47:26

All of these are excellent. Abuse of justification by Robert Trail. And then peace through justification by J .C.

47:33

Ryle. Part 4 is imputed righteousness. That too was attacked by the new perspective, which actually deletes the idea of imputed righteousness.

47:47

So I wanted another clear statement that someone could sit down and in reading 48 pages would come out on the other end a very clear understanding of what men mightily used of God have preached for the salvation of millions.

48:04

Part 5 is about repentance. And that is, as Pastor Albert Martin, years and years ago, he was one of the first men that I heard preaching after I was converted, and he did some messages on repentance as the missing link from modern religion.

48:26

And I was in a group, I was brought up in a group that said repentance is not for Gentiles, it's just for the

48:34

Jews. And that's what had been pounded into my brain. And when the Lord actually converted me, one of the very first things that was branded in my heart was the issue of repentance.

48:47

And as I began studying the scriptures and reading plainly, page after page after page,

48:52

Pastor Paul even defines, he describes his ministry as one of preaching repentance.

49:00

So having said all that, in answer to what you've asked me to do,

49:06

I do really like to set forth what it means to preach the gospel.

49:13

And the gospel is a report from heaven. It's good news from God to men.

49:18

What is that good news? Well, in order to really understand that good news, the first thing we have to, the first thing anyone needs to realize is that there is a

49:26

God, that God is holy, and he has demands upon us, creatures made in his image.

49:35

Secondly, we as creatures made in God's image have gone our own way. We are sinners, we are rebels.

49:43

We want to do our own thing, not what God has commanded us to do.

49:48

And we stand condemned. We are under his just judgment.

49:54

And that's why we desperately need good news. And that good news comes in the form, then, of the message about Jesus Christ.

50:06

Who is that? That is the eternal Son of God, the second person of the

50:13

Holy Trinity, who came into this world, and in the astonishing miracle of his birth, united with humanity, with full manhood, so that we have two distinct natures in one person.

50:33

That Jesus Christ, born in Bethlehem, is the God -man. He kept all of his

50:41

Father's laws, which none of us have. He died upon Calvary's cross as the sin -bearing substitute.

50:49

And he was raised again the third day. He later ascended up into glory, and he's seated at the

50:57

Father's right hand right now, interceding for his people. We are to set that Christ and his saving work upon the cross, and his glorious, miraculous, triumphant resurrection before lost men and women and children.

51:16

And having set the God -man and his glorious work before them, we are to call men and women to repent of their sins, which is a change of mind about their sins, about God, about Christ, about themselves.

51:34

It is a change of mind to look to him as the only hope for the pardon of sin, and to believe him alone.

51:44

It is repentance and believing on Christ by which

51:50

God forgives believing sinners. Amen. And I know that there is going to be one thing that you,

52:00

Jeff Pollard, are going to learn by conducting this interview today, is that the next time you're on, you have to be on for two hours.

52:09

Because we have people waiting to have their questions answered, and we've got eight minutes left.

52:15

So let me go to at least our first listener and see how many others we can fit in.

52:24

We have, let's see here, we, oh,

52:31

I just lost it. I had it right in front of me. And we, oh, Seth from Randleman, North Carolina.

52:39

Seth from Randleman, North Carolina asks, which American pastor or author has contributed the most in the area of Reformed theology?

52:51

And obviously in your opinion. Wow. Well, Seth, that's a really good question.

53:01

I'm not sure I will give a satisfactory answer. You probably would need a greater church historian than I.

53:10

Would you think Jonathan Edwards would be the one that's most universally known, probably? Well, that's exactly who

53:17

I was going to go to. I was going to say there were great, there were many, many great preachers, and one of the most underrated and less read today is

53:25

Samuel Davies, a mighty and a powerful preacher. We hope to print more of his work.

53:33

But Jonathan Edwards is probably the one that is most well -known. God might have used him, of course, in the

53:41

Great Awakening here in the colonies.

53:46

So I would say that probably he's the one most well -known for his preaching the grace of God and as a

53:56

Reformed pastor. But I'd certainly be happy to take any correction from church historians on that.

54:02

Well, guess what, Seth? You are getting absolutely free of charge as a gift from Chapel Library to you,

54:11

God's Gospel of Grace, the Doctrine of Salvation, from the pages of the Free Grace Broadcaster.

54:18

And the thing that's going to blow your mind when you get it in the mail, Seth, is that it looks very different from most of the things that you see from Chapel Library, which are paper.

54:28

This is a beautiful, very high -quality hardback. I mean, this is really, you've used like the finest of binding for this book.

54:37

This is really remarkable here. Well, we had missionaries in other countries in mind.

54:46

We wanted pastors and missionaries anywhere, but especially in other countries, to have a long -lasting book.

54:59

The five parts in here are at the heart of preaching the

55:05

Gospel of Jesus Christ, and we want missionaries and pastors everywhere around the world preaching the glorious Gospel of God's grace.

55:14

Amen. And we want to thank again Chapel Library for supplying this for you,

55:20

Seth, and also Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, who mails out all of our free books to the winners on this program, the winners in our audience who submit questions.

55:32

And their website is cvbbs .com, cv as in victory, bbs .com.

55:40

We have one more. We actually have several more, but I think only one more we can possibly get to before the show is over today.

55:49

We have CJ from Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, and he says that Charles Haddon Spurgeon had referred to the doctrines of grace or Calvinism as the

56:02

Gospel. Do you think that he really meant that you had to believe in the doctrines of Reformed theology in order to inherit the kingdom of heaven?

56:18

Well, I'd urge him to talk to Charles. Well, you might not want to rush that, because that would involve him leaving this planet.

56:30

Right. I have puzzled over that statement.

56:35

I don't think anybody preached the Gospel any more clearly, the glorious Gospel of God's grace than Charles Spurgeon.

56:42

And I personally have puzzled over exactly how he meant that, but I do believe that he had the heart of the issue.

56:54

He did have Moody preach in the Metropolitan Tabernacle, and Moody was not a

56:59

Calvinist, so I'm assuming he couldn't have made that strict assumption in his mind, to the strictest extent.

57:06

Well, I think that he sees, and this is just my opinion, again, all us virgin authorities can write me a letter and correct me, but I believe, after having read him for years,

57:18

I think what he meant by that is, you know, the Gospel is good news.

57:24

When you look at the doctrines of grace, what you have is the heart of what the

57:31

Word of God teaches from the grace that God decreed before the foundation of the world, the grace that was given to us in Christ Jesus before the world began, gloriously expressed in election, effectually calling his people to hear that wonderful Gospel from Heaven, hearing about a successful Savior, and that because Christ has done absolutely everything infinitely necessary to save and keep his people, all of the elements that you find in the

58:10

Gospel are ultimately summed up by what you see in the doctrines of grace.

58:16

So I don't know how strictly he would have pushed that, but I certainly get that kind of sense when

58:22

I read him. Yeah, and the late John Gerstner, I can remember being in the audience at 10th

58:29

Presbyterian Church when he was at a conference speaking, he basically set forth the notion that if you really believed in the theology of Arminianism to its logical conclusion, he thought that it is unlikely that you were a

58:47

Christian, but he was not saying that all Arminians are not saved, but he was saying that if you truly in your heart of hearts believe in these teachings to their logical conclusion, which he would say most

58:59

Arminians don't, they're not consistent. We do have a listener in Kenroth, Scotland, very quickly we'll have to include him in here,

59:09

Murray, who says, Sadly in this day and age it seems that most people who would need or would read a book like this are already saved, in a fair proportion of those already

59:22

Calvinists. The modern day unbeliever probably wouldn't want to sit down and read a whole book.

59:30

While this would anyway be a great book to encourage believers, would you consider putting out a tract booklet of an abridgment of what you have in the book to make it more accessible to unbelievers?

59:44

Well actually they already do, that's the Free Grace Broadcaster. Right, that's true

59:49

Chris, and you know that's a really good point, your listener there is exactly right.

59:55

When we put this together, when we put God's Gospel of Grace together, again

01:00:02

I hate to repeat myself, but really what we had in mind was to get a book to feed pastors and missionaries.

01:00:12

We want those who are going to preach to God's people to be well -stocked.

01:00:17

We want their minds and hearts overflowing with the glories of God's grace so that they will preach that Gospel in the streets, in the congregations, every place in life where they can find the opportunity to magnify the

01:00:33

Lord Jesus Christ. So we did not think of this book as necessarily being a

01:00:44

Gospel tract as such, but we print hundreds of Gospel tracts that are very sound.

01:00:51

We have sermons by Spurgeon, by Ryle, by Pink in small booklets, in pamphlets that are shorter versions of what the

01:01:04

Gospel is. We have defenses of the doctrine of election, of particular redemption, of all the doctrines of grace.

01:01:12

So we do have that, and I would urge your reader or your hearer to go to our website and look through our 800 -plus titles, and he should be able to find...

01:01:24

As a matter of fact, we have a really excellent Gospel tract by Joel Beek. He called it An Appointment He Will Keep.

01:01:31

I wrote one called Do You Know Jesus Christ? And they set out the

01:01:36

Gospel that I outlined a while ago. And they're readable, and we've got dozens of street preachers all around this country that take them and use them.

01:01:47

They preach on the street and they pass them out. So we have them. And mature or even growing readers might love

01:01:55

God's Gospel. And we're out of time, Jeff. And the website again is chapellibrary .org.

01:02:02

Thank you, Murray and Kenrose Scotland. Continue spreading the word to all of your neighbors there in Scotland about Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

01:02:11

And all of you who are waiting for a question to be answered by our guest

01:02:17

Jeff Pollard are going to receive a free copy of this beautiful book. Thank you, Jeff, and we look forward to having you back on the program soon, and hopefully for two hours next time.

01:02:27

Thank you very much, Chris. Delighted to be with you. God bless. And coming up next, we have on the program

01:02:35

Dr. Russell T. Fuller. He is going to be our second guest today after these messages from our sponsors.

01:02:41

So don't go away. We're going to be right back with Russell T. Fuller of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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That's wrbc .us. Welcome back.

01:05:48

This is Chris Arns. And if you just tuned us in, our second guest today for the remaining hour is

01:05:53

Dr. Russell T. Fuller, Professor of Old Testament Interpretation at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

01:06:01

He is also co -author of An Invitation to Biblical Hebrew. And he is the plenary speaker at the

01:06:09

Christ Our Redeemer Conference at Pittsburgh Baptist Church in Indiana, which is being held tomorrow and Saturday.

01:06:16

And I urge all of our listeners near or in Indiana to go to that conference.

01:06:23

I have already had folks, at least three that I know of from our audience who told me that they are going to try to make it, and I hope they do.

01:06:32

But go to pittsburghbaptist .com for more details on this conference. That's tomorrow,

01:06:38

September 9th, and Saturday, September 10th at the Pittsburgh Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, Indiana.

01:06:46

The website is pittsburghbaptist .com. That's p -i -t -t -s -b -o -r -o -baptist .com.

01:06:54

pittsburghbaptist .com. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome back to Iron Sharpens Iron, Dr.

01:06:59

Russell T. Fuller. Well, thanks, Chris. I'm glad to be back with you today. And just so we can summarize the

01:07:09

Christ Our Redeemer Conference at Pittsburgh Baptist Church where you will be the plenary speaker, for those of our listeners who missed your last interview or who missed

01:07:20

Pastor Josh Fryman's interview or who missed Pastor Isaac Evans' interview, they were both interviewed to promote this conference as well, but not everybody hears every single program.

01:07:34

So if you could summarize the Christ Our Redeemer Conference. Right. This conference is going to be about how

01:07:41

Christ is the unifying figure of Scripture. And He's what brings the

01:07:47

Old Testament and New Testament together in unity. And so we're going to really stress how

01:07:53

Christ unifies the entire Bible and especially how what I'm going to stress is where we see

01:07:59

Christ in the Old Testament. We obviously can see Him in the New Testament, but He's also throughout the

01:08:06

Old Testament. And so I'm going to spend most of my lectures talking about Christ in the

01:08:12

Old Testament. Yes, and we did discuss that the last time that you were on, and we are going to be speaking on something that really dovetails with that.

01:08:23

The theme that we are addressing today is the importance of context, knowing the Old Testament to fully understand the

01:08:30

New. And isn't it true that one can really not appreciate the meaning of many things that are in the

01:08:39

New Testament without having some basic understanding of the

01:08:45

Old Testament, about all that took place in heaven and on earth that is recorded in the

01:08:52

Scriptures before the dawn of the New Covenant? That's correct. The New Testament assumes knowledge of the

01:09:00

Old Testament. And so if we don't know our Old Testament, when we read the New Testament, it's kind of like starting, let's say, halfway through a book.

01:09:08

Or maybe even in the New Testament situation, 70 % through the book. And now you're reading things, and the

01:09:15

New Testament assumes you know the Old Testament. So you're going to miss many things about understanding the

01:09:21

New Testament if we don't see the Old Testament. So it's very important that we understand that the

01:09:27

Old Testament and the New Testament form a unity. And this is one of the major distinctions between Christianity and, let's say,

01:09:35

Islam. Islam does not see unity between its Scriptures and the

01:09:41

New Testament or the Old Testament. What they teach is that Christians have corrupted the New Testament, and the

01:09:47

Jews have corrupted the Old Testament. But as Christians, we say, oh no. Listen, all you have to do is look at the

01:09:54

Old Testament, and it connects with the New Testament. There's no corruption here. There's a unity between the

01:10:00

Old and New Testaments. But again, Islam, because it is, again, a false religion, what it has to do is say, no, we're unique.

01:10:09

The Old and New Testaments, they don't connect because of Christians and Jews. See, the

01:10:15

New and the Old Testament, they connect. That's what Christians teach. Clearly, 2

01:10:20

Peter 1 goes into detail on that. And let me repeat our email address if you'd like to join us.

01:10:28

It's chrisarnson at gmail dot com. chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

01:10:35

We do have a listener, Arnie, in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who asks, is it absolutely required of a human being to understand anything about the

01:10:51

Old Testament before they repent and have faith upon Christ when you are evangelizing them?

01:10:59

No, well, they have to understand they're sinners, and obviously the Old Testament teaches that.

01:11:06

But really, a person like when I came to Christ, I'll be honest with you, I had zero knowledge of the

01:11:12

Old Testament when I came to Christ. When I heard the Gospel preached, and it was a

01:11:17

New Testament passage and everything, I fell under the conviction of the Holy Spirit. I was so glad there wasn't a theological test for it to be saved, or I would have never gotten saved.

01:11:28

But the Holy Spirit just used the preaching of the Gospel to save me. I think good preaching of the

01:11:33

Gospel, though, is going to have Old Testament in it as well. But to answer his question very directly, no, that's not absolutely necessary.

01:11:43

Yes, there are many even ministers who carry pocket Bibles that only have the

01:11:49

New Testament, and I know other pastors and Bible scholars and teachers who hate those

01:11:55

Bibles. Well, maybe that's a harsh word to say you hate the Bible. More that they hate the binding of it,

01:12:02

I guess, is a better way of putting it, that there's only half of the Bible, or less than half of the

01:12:07

Bible, in the pocket -sized version. But, obviously, as you said, that it's not absolutely essential, but obviously you're going to be stunted, incredibly stunted in your growth, if you don't understand the context where Jesus arrives on the scene and needed to die for the sins of men.

01:12:30

And not only are you going to be stunted in your growth and knowledge, but without a grounding in the

01:12:38

Old Testament, your beliefs and teachings that you inform others of could be really going into all kinds of heretical directions, couldn't they?

01:12:48

Absolutely. I'll give you an instance of that. You know, there's different views about the Atonement, and so there's like a governmental theory of the

01:12:58

Atonement, there's different theories. But when we look at the Old Testament sacrifices, those were clearly substitutions, and really they were penal substitutionary atonements.

01:13:11

They weren't just some type of moral suasion or moral persuasion. They weren't some governmental theory.

01:13:17

No, no, no. Those sacrifices in the Old Testament were strict penal substitutes for the person who committed sin.

01:13:27

And so if we'll just go by what the Old Testament teaches about sacrifice, it'll keep us from errors about the doctrine of Atonement when it comes to Christ.

01:13:37

Well, that's an interesting thing that you bring up, because I scratch my head, and I'm not going to broad brush here,

01:13:45

I have to be very careful, but the majority, not all, but the majority of those that I have met and spoken with and enjoyed fellowship with who are involved in Messianic ministry are not believers in what we would call

01:14:03

Particular Redemption or Limited Atonement. Most of them would be, as we call them historically,

01:14:11

Arminian, who would believe in a General Atonement. And it seems odd to me that people who are so steeped in the

01:14:21

Old Testament, who seek to be thoroughly knowledgeable about the

01:14:27

Hebrew roots of the faith, that they cannot see that the sacrificial system that was commanded by God in the

01:14:35

Old Covenant had no benefit to the pagan Gentile nation surrounding them.

01:14:41

That's exactly right. I mean, the Old Testament sacrifices were particular.

01:14:48

They were limited to those who brought those sacrifices by faith. They're the ones who got the benefit of the

01:14:57

Atonement. They were not just General Atonements. And even on the Day of Atonement, when the sacrifices were made for the nation, it would only be efficacious to those who came in faith, trusting in what the

01:15:12

Lord was doing. So even within Israel itself, those who were present there on the Day of Atonement, but did not exercise faith in what

01:15:21

God was doing through the sacrifices, that Atonement would do nothing for them. So again, it was very much particular in the

01:15:29

Old Testament, and it's very much particular in the New Testament. Would you say that many who reject the doctrines of grace, who are seemingly totally ignorant, or have a blind spot when it comes to God's love in the

01:15:53

Old Covenant, that the people, those Arminians, even those involved in Messianic ministry, seem to have a real blind spot when it comes to God's love today?

01:16:07

For some reason, they seem to forget that God had a particular, specific, chosen people in the

01:16:17

Old Covenant that were chosen by God not because of anything they believed or did, and they weren't better than anyone, they weren't more lovely or attractive or desirable, and yet God chose them.

01:16:34

And it seems that the New Covenant, they're totally oblivious to this fact. They don't seem to understand that God still has a particular love for a particular people, but now it obviously has nothing to do with ethnicity or bloodline, physical bloodline, and that these people are from every tribe and tongue and nation, but they are still a specific people.

01:17:04

Now, I know that even Calvinists disagree as to the extent of God's love for all humanity, but there's one thing that all those who believe in the doctrines of grace share in common, is that we certainly believe that God only loves

01:17:20

His elect people as a father and as a spouse. Very unique kinds of love, because it makes no sense to have a love for a person who is spending eternity with Christ that is no more powerful or intense than the love

01:17:39

He has for people who are tormented in hell. That doesn't make any sense at all. That's correct.

01:17:46

You have, in the Old Testament, clearly you have a God -elected

01:17:53

Abraham and his seed, but even within Abraham's seed, there's an election, as it were, that election.

01:17:59

That's right. And so not all Israel was truly saved in the remnant according to election, as Paul would say in Romans 11.

01:18:09

This is absolutely correct. And what we see today, you're exactly right, no longer is it primarily connected to a certain people group, but now

01:18:19

God is choosing people from all nations, all tongues, and so forth. But again, it's a particular election.

01:18:28

As you see in Scripture all the time, so that Paul can talk about, you know,

01:18:33

God saved me as an individual. It's an individual particular election, is what you see in both

01:18:40

Testaments. You see it both ways. Now in the Old Testament, you will occasionally see a

01:18:45

Gentile come to faith in the Old Testament. And again, there'll be like types of what you're going to see in the

01:18:51

New Testament on a much larger scale. So there are some non -Israelites saved in the

01:18:58

Old Testament. But again, it's completely by the grace of God. Absolutely. Amen.

01:19:05

And what we mentioned earlier, that being disconnected from a thorough understanding of the

01:19:15

Old Covenant can lead to all kinds of heresy. And wouldn't you say that those who fail to see

01:19:23

Christ in the Old Covenant as you have seen Him, not just as a figure or type or a shadow, but literally being there, the

01:19:35

Second Person of the Trinity, being involved in many more of the dominant or important acts that we read in the

01:19:47

Old Testament than we might ever think, were actually addressing the

01:19:52

Second Person of the Godhead. But those who have a cloudy understanding or perhaps total ignorance are more likely perhaps to fall into an

01:20:03

Arian understanding of the Godhead or of Christ, that they would view

01:20:09

Him not as this Second Person of the Godhead that has eternally existed and that they don't see

01:20:21

Him as someone who has been doing great works of God in the

01:20:31

Old Covenant and they see Him more arriving on the scene 2 ,000 years ago for the first time, even though they might not on paper write that down and say that.

01:20:42

It's something that they may be conceiving in their head. That's correct. And when you look at the

01:20:49

New Testament authors, they to me are the authoritative interpreters of the

01:20:57

Old Testament. When Jesus gave to the apostles the keys to the kingdom, I believe one of those keys was the key to interpretation of Scripture, meaning especially the

01:21:07

Old Testament. And what you see in the New Testament is that the apostles will quote an

01:21:15

Old Testament passage which refers to God or by His proper name

01:21:20

Yahweh, but yet they'll say that's Jesus. So that when we read the

01:21:26

Old Testament and we see either Yahweh or God, we shouldn't read it just simply as if it's referring to the

01:21:31

Father, but it's referring to the Father and the Son and the

01:21:37

Holy Spirit. So when we see God doing something, when it says God does this or God does that in the

01:21:43

Old Testament, we must read that in a Trinitarian way. So the Father is doing it through the

01:21:48

Son, and the Father and Son are doing whatever is being done in the Old Testament through the Holy Spirit. And so it's very important that we read the

01:21:56

Old Testament like the apostles read the Old Testament. Because again, the ultimate interpreter of Scripture is the

01:22:03

Scripture itself. And that's, I think, the best way to read Scripture. We do have a question from Tyler in Mastic Beach, Long Island, New York.

01:22:13

It's a bit off topic, but it is related in a sense. Do many modern confessing evangelicals formulate methods of evangelism due to their ignorance of the doctrine of regeneration and effectual calling?

01:22:31

Yes, especially that latter part of effectual calling. There's many folks that are doing evangelism.

01:22:41

And listen, I'm like Paul. If Christ is being preached,

01:22:46

I'm going to rejoice. Even if it's not done always the way that I think it should be done. If Christ is being preached,

01:22:53

I'm going to rejoice in that. However, we've got to be careful that we don't think that we have some kind of special gift in just saying it the right way or that we're like in an argument with a sinner where we can convince them to come to faith in Christ on our ability to argue with them or present.

01:23:17

But we've got to understand that when we witness to the unsaved, that they're dead in their trespasses and sin.

01:23:25

They're spiritually dead. What we must do when we're witnessing is we give them the gospel, but we've got to recognize that it's the gospel itself that's the power of God to salvation.

01:23:36

So it's not in us. It's in the gospel. And it takes the Holy Spirit to open the eyes of the sinner so, again, that he can see his sin and misery, that he can understand who

01:23:51

Christ really is, and therefore his will is renewed in order that he can really accept

01:23:58

Christ, you see, by the work of the Holy Spirit. So the Spirit really does have to work faith in us and convince us of the truth of the gospel.

01:24:07

And so, yes, there's some types of evangelism that I think is so man -centered that I think sometimes it's very harmful.

01:24:17

And sometimes people will even use tricks to get people to come down an aisle and do things like this. The problem with that is now we have someone who, they think they got saved because they walked an aisle, and now what we have is a person who's carnally secure.

01:24:33

They believe they're saved because they didn't actually trust in Christ, but they walked down an aisle or they did something like this, and now

01:24:41

I think you've done more harm than good when you do something like that. Yeah, you were speaking of tricks.

01:24:48

I don't know if you've ever read the booklet, in fact

01:24:54

I think Chapel Library publishes it, now that I think about it I'm certain they do. I just had

01:24:59

Jeff Pollard who is the director of Chapel Library, but they publish a booklet called

01:25:07

Decisional Regeneration by J .E. Adams, and he quotes in that tract the absurdity of Jack Hiles who in his seminary class speaking to students preparing for the pastoral ministry, he was warning them to never say things like this near the conclusion of a sermon.

01:25:46

He said you shouldn't say things like, now in conclusion, or my last point is, or things like that, because he said what you're going to do is your audience is going to dig in their heels and resist your altar call.

01:26:03

You've got to sneak up on them with the altar call and get them by surprise.

01:26:09

I mean can you imagine God's system of salvation being built upon tricking people and using clever speech and that kind of a thing?

01:26:20

Isn't that utterly amazing that a man who had gained reasonable popularity numerically amongst fundamentalists, a certain segment of them anyway, how he could come up with such insane teachings?

01:26:37

That's right. And what you'll see sometimes is people will start pushing people's emotional buttons at the end of sermons.

01:26:46

And I've seen this especially when people are preaching in view of a call to a church.

01:26:52

At the end of a sermon they'll start saying some very emotional things to get people feeling very emotional.

01:26:59

And what the purpose is is to get everybody to walk the aisle so that it looks to the church that this is the man that we must vote in as our next pastor.

01:27:08

I hate to say this but you see tricks like this and when we're doing that we're not trusting in the

01:27:14

Holy Spirit to save people. We're using our own personality to draw a crowd.

01:27:22

And there's many megachurches that are doing this today. And not just megachurches but they're drawing a crowd but it's not through the gospel.

01:27:32

I was looking the other day at the top 100 largest churches and you know someone like Joel Osteen is number one.

01:27:41

He's got I think it was like 42 ,000 members. He's still number one? I thought that somebody had surpassed him.

01:27:47

I don't know why. I was just looking at this one. Maybe somebody has on another one but I was just looking at this one, this list.

01:27:55

And again there's very little gospel if any gospel when he's preaching. And then number two was

01:28:03

Andy Stanley. And I heard Andy Stanley in a sermon just a couple of weeks ago. Matter of fact the sermon was titled

01:28:09

The Bible Told Me So. And in there he makes this statement. Christianity was not born on the back of quote the

01:28:17

Bible says the Bible says. Well you know you and I started off talking this afternoon about the unity between the

01:28:27

Old and New Testaments. Well in Christianity you know when Christ, John the Baptist were preaching about the kingdom which was a fulfillment of the kingdom of the

01:28:35

Old Testament. Over and over in the New Testament it's in order that this prophet what he said might be fulfilled.

01:28:43

That scriptures might be fulfilled. Or as it is written. As it is written. That's exactly right.

01:28:48

Because you see the New Testament sees itself as the fulfillment of the Old Testament. And so indeed

01:28:54

Christianity was born on the back of the Bible says the Bible says.

01:29:00

Of course it was. And he held the Pharisees accountable for not knowing it. And he shamed

01:29:08

Nicodemus. He certainly did. And Nicodemus was what was called the teacher of Israel.

01:29:15

Which means he was one of the most highly respected teachers of his day.

01:29:20

And also you refer to John chapter 5 there where Jesus rebukes the Pharisees.

01:29:26

Had you known what Moses was saying in the law and believed it then you would believe me.

01:29:33

Because he wrote of me you see. And search the scriptures because that's where I am. I'm there.

01:29:38

That's what Jesus was saying there. That's exactly right. And what it says in Acts is all the prophets prophesied of him.

01:29:45

And Paul says oh I'm speaking to you. I'm speaking to you nothing except what Moses and the prophets said should come.

01:29:53

That Messiah would come and die and be raised again from the dead. You see Christianity is clearly born on the back of the

01:30:02

Bible says the Bible says. I hate to say it but again people like Andy Stanley are false teachers.

01:30:09

They're teaching a false gospel. And you know it's very sad. Chris the bottom line is we're living in an age of apostasy in this country.

01:30:18

And we have to go to a break right now. Lou from Sharpsburg Georgia. If you could be patient we will get to your question when we return from the break.

01:30:28

And we have a couple of other people waiting. If you'd like to join them with a question of your own on the air.

01:30:34

Our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.

01:30:40

Don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr. Russell T. Fuller. And more of our discussion about knowing.

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01:34:29

And welcome back. We'll get to you in a moment. Lou from Sharpsburg, Georgia.

01:34:35

And by the way, Lou, I don't know how close Sharpsburg is to Atlanta, but I want to announce that I will be,

01:34:44

God willing, at the G3 conference in Atlanta, Georgia, January 19th through the 21st.

01:34:51

And this is in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the

01:34:56

Protestant Reformation. The three G's stand for grace, gospel, and glory.

01:35:03

And the lineup at this conference is absolutely phenomenal. We've got Paul Washer, Stephen J.

01:35:10

Lawson, D .A. Carson, Vody Baucom, Dr. James R. White, Tim Challies, Conrad M.

01:35:17

Bayway, who is the pastor of Kibwata Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia, probably, in my opinion, the most powerful preacher alive today.

01:35:26

Just an extraordinary man. Phil Johnson, the executive director of Grace to You. Rosaria Butterfield is giving her testimony.

01:35:35

She is a former leftist lesbian tenured professor at Syracuse University who was rescued from that way of life, or should

01:35:45

I say way of death, by the mercy of Christ. She has totally transformed the wife of a pastor now.

01:35:52

John Kratz, who's down there in Georgia as a pastor as well, and a number of others.

01:36:00

That's only about half of the speakers. If you'd like to join me there, I am manning an exhibitor's booth.

01:36:06

I would love to see you there. Go to g3conference .com, g3conference .com,

01:36:14

and register as quickly as possible. It's January 19th through the 21st, 2017. And don't let the fact that it's in 2017 make you lackadaisical if you want to go, because already the closest hotel to the venue where the conference is being held, the closest hotel that has a discount relationship with the conference, is already booked completely.

01:36:41

So if you intend to go, I would register as quickly as you can.

01:36:49

And that website address again is g3conference .com, g3conference .com.

01:36:57

And we hope to see you there in Atlanta, Georgia, January 19th through the 21st at the convention center.

01:37:11

Lou from Sharpsburg, Georgia asks a question that is in some way the reverse of an earlier question.

01:37:19

Can a person be saved by reading just the Old Testament? An example would be

01:37:24

Isaiah. Yes, I think so. You see it in the

01:37:30

New Testament when Philip was talking to the Ethiopian king. They were in Isaiah 53 and so forth.

01:37:39

Also, there's a student we used to have here at Southern Seminary. He's now a pastor. And he was in prison before he got saved.

01:37:49

And he's a Jewish fellow. And he said there were two people in prison with him that always argued about the

01:37:55

Bible. And it really irritated him. And he said one day he decided he was going to settle the argument.

01:38:03

So he says, I'm going to start reading the Bible. And according to his testimony, he says, I read Genesis 1,

01:38:08

I read Genesis 2. And when I read Genesis 3 in the fall, he says, God just right there showed me my sinfulness.

01:38:17

And they were talking about Jesus. And he says, I just cried out to Jesus right at that point. As soon as I hit

01:38:22

Genesis 3, I saw myself as a sinner. And then they told me who

01:38:28

Jesus was, and boom, there it was. And so he has a wonderful testimony.

01:38:33

And so I've seen people basically almost just the Old Testament and get saved. That's pretty rare, but it does happen.

01:38:41

Yes, and would you say, though, that God and his providence in the

01:38:47

New Covenant would always provide someone to exegete the Old Testament so that the person would understand that this

01:38:56

Messiah has been fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus Christ?

01:39:02

That is correct. You're going to have to believe. It's faith in Jesus Christ.

01:39:08

In the Old Testament, obviously, Jesus hadn't come yet. But people back in that day were trusting in God's provision for them.

01:39:16

And they understood in the Old Testament that there was one who was coming that was going to be the fulfillment of all the

01:39:23

Old Testament prophecies. This is why Jesus could say, Abraham, rejoice to see my day.

01:39:30

Because ultimately, Abraham was looking to the Messiah. He was looking to the one through whom all the nations of the earth will be blessed for his salvation.

01:39:40

So they, through their types and symbols, were looking for that one who would come and fulfill all the

01:39:47

Old Testament promises. That's what they were looking for. So they were seeing Christ through the types and symbols, where today we have the advantage of looking back at him and seeing him directly.

01:39:58

And we do have Murray from Kinross, Scotland, who asks, In studying the

01:40:04

Old Testament in order to get at the truth in an ordered and profitable way, would you recommend a strictly chronological approach?

01:40:16

Yes. Sometimes the Old Testament in English, the way it's laid out, it's not always strictly chronological.

01:40:24

Some of the books are earlier than others, like the

01:40:30

Minor Prophets, for instance. Some of the Minor Prophets, they're not strictly in chronological order.

01:40:36

But if you just read from Genesis, like in our English Bibles, from Genesis through Malachi, that's excellent.

01:40:42

But if you do some study and find out how the Old Testament books, a pretty good idea of how they fit chronologically, that would be good as well.

01:40:51

Either one of those would be fine. Just read Scripture. That's the important thing. Thank you very much,

01:40:58

Murray from Kinross, Scotland. Please continue to spread the word about Iron Sharpens Iron in the UK for us.

01:41:04

We do have, let's see here, we have Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who wants to know,

01:41:13

I am troubled by some Christians that used to be viewed as great modern day heroes of the faith who have adopted theistic evolution.

01:41:26

How far must one go into that theory before you believe they are totally apostate?

01:41:35

My example to you would be, could a truly saved

01:41:40

Bible -believing brother in Christ believe that Adam and Eve were evolved from animals?

01:41:51

Yes, I would say that the evolved from animals is a real problem.

01:41:58

Because what the Scripture teaches is that God created Adam, not from some existing species of animals or something like that, but directly from the dirt of the ground.

01:42:11

And Eve was created from Adam, directly. And so,

01:42:17

I know there was people like B .B. Warfield, who, and it's somewhat controversial whether he was truly a theistic evolutionist or not, but he clearly believed that Adam and Eve were directly created by God.

01:42:31

And that's, to me, that's very, very important. Yeah, my friend Fred Zaspel, who wrote a biography of B .B.

01:42:38

Warfield, said that the Darwinianism of the day had given

01:42:46

Warfield just, I guess, reason for pause, where he didn't adamantly reject it and believed it might have been a possible explanation of creation.

01:43:00

But he said that Warfield was never some kind of an enthusiastic supporter of evolution, of theistic evolution.

01:43:10

Yeah, that's right. It's controversial. People have different views on how Warfield saw it.

01:43:15

But one thing for sure, Warfield did not see that Adam was, again, just evolved from some existing species or something like that.

01:43:25

No, he believed in direct creation of Adam and Eve. Now, would you say that, because the question involves the actual salvation of a person, obviously,

01:43:38

I would think that you would agree that even a born -again child of God, a true

01:43:46

Christian, can have certain areas of his belief system that are absolutely heretical.

01:43:53

Could he not? I mean, especially if it does not intrinsically involve the gospel itself or how he was saved, if it does not specifically involve the death of Christ and his resurrection, couldn't somebody have come up with all kinds of crazy ideas and still have a certainty of heaven awaiting them?

01:44:19

And obviously, we would still call them dangerous if they're teachers. We would still call them heretics. But maybe perhaps only known to him and God, or maybe just to God, that person we might meet in heaven someday.

01:44:36

That is correct. You know, when it comes to salvation, it is very difficult for us to judge on some of these issues.

01:44:46

But definitely, I would not want these people teaching in Sunday school classes in my church, or, again, we would not ordain a person who held to these views.

01:44:57

Now, if people just flat -out deny clear scriptural teachings like the resurrection, the deity of Christ, inspiration of scriptures, that gives us pause to wonder if they truly are saved or not.

01:45:16

But again, we're going to have to leave... Of course, if they just come out and deny the resurrection, that's very clear. If they deny who

01:45:23

Christ is, and the Trinity, and things like... Let's say the fundamental teachings of scripture...

01:45:31

Salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, seems to be, according to the Apostle Paul in his letter to the

01:45:37

Galatians, seems to be... Now, I'll say this about theistic evolutionists. There are some who...

01:45:43

they vary quite a bit. I know some who do believe, or at least this is what they claim, they believe in the historicity of the early chapters of Genesis, but they just interpret it in a way that they think matches modern science.

01:45:57

Where I've run into others, like, for instance, some people at Biologos I've run into, that's a website that really pushes theistic evolution, where the guys will say...

01:46:07

I've heard one of them say to me, you know, Genesis 1, 2, 3, the first few chapters of Genesis, that's just not even our world.

01:46:15

That's not even true at all. Well, that's real problematic for me. I mean, that's very, very problematic.

01:46:23

But I'll just be straight with you, though. Theistic evolution is... It troubles me.

01:46:28

I do not hold to theistic evolution. I know there's some people who believe in Old Earth, I understand that.

01:46:35

I'm a Young Earther myself, but when you go to theistic evolution, that really troubles me.

01:46:46

That really troubles me. Yeah, I've even been hearing from Old Earth advocates that it's not just that they want to be accepted as having an equal voice amongst brethren in Christ.

01:47:02

Some of them are actually saying that Young Earth creationists are responsible for making a mockery of Christianity, and therefore we are largely responsible for the intellectuals rejecting

01:47:19

Christianity, because we've made the faith a laughing stock, basically, by believing in things that they think have been scientifically disproven.

01:47:30

But this is where it gets me angry, when it reaches that severe level of snobbery, even, if you want to call it that.

01:47:39

That's right. I mean, Bruce Walkie said this, by the way. Really? Oh, yes. Because he's such a humble man.

01:47:45

I met him back in the 80s when I was a new Christian, and he seemed like such a humble brother, and I was so sad to hear him develop this view of theistic evolution.

01:47:55

That's right. He basically called Young Earthers, you know, cultists. Really? Oh, yes.

01:48:01

Oh, yes. Now, he used to be a Young Earth advocate, wasn't he? You know, I'm not sure of that, but he looks at Young Earthers with disdain.

01:48:13

I mean, absolute disdain. Wow. That's hard to believe, because he seemed like a gentle and humble soul, and for him to come to that kind of arrogance is surprising to me.

01:48:26

Yes, that's true. But, again, the reason I'm a Young Earther is, to me, when you just read the

01:48:34

Old Testament, it looks like they're talking a Young Earth, like when Moses in the

01:48:42

Ten Commandments, when he says, For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth to see, and all that in them is, and so forth.

01:48:48

It really does match up with a Young Earth, not an Old Earth. And even comments by Jesus about, from the beginning, he made a male and female.

01:48:56

You know, he sees that as the beginning of time, not as if there's, you know, billions of years, you know, between the creation of man and the creation of the beginning of time, you know.

01:49:07

So, there's scripture after scripture that, to me, seems to teach a

01:49:13

Young Earth. Well, one other thing I'll just mention real quickly on this. Where do you start day one of creation?

01:49:21

Well, a lot of folks who do not want to hold to a Young Earth will start day one in verse three of Genesis 1.

01:49:27

But if you look in the Hebrew Masoretic Text, that's the basis of our Bibles, there's no doubt that the way you're supposed to read it is day one begins with Genesis 1 .1,

01:49:37

not Genesis 1 .3. And so day one should be from, again, there's no gaps or anything.

01:49:45

That clearly leads, again, to a Young Earth position. And wouldn't even the fact that the

01:49:52

Sabbath was a literal single day have some indication that the rest of the days were literal 24 -hour days?

01:50:02

Absolutely. I mean, it's just, I think people are stretching scripture to fit, let's say, modern preconceptions of what they believe is true.

01:50:15

And, you know, I do have brethren in Christ that I do highly regard and love and even can learn from in many areas.

01:50:23

I mean, I believe the late Dr. James Montgomery Boyce may have been an Old Earth creationist.

01:50:30

But at least I know one of the Christian, I have to be careful how

01:50:36

I say this, Christian scientists, scientists who are Christians, that he had speak at his conference on Genesis, I believe, was an

01:50:47

Old Earth creationist. Right. And some of the guys who have influenced me the most, even though I'm a

01:50:55

Young Earther, people like Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, B. B. Warfield, these guys have had tremendous influence upon me.

01:51:03

And even modern people today, I have many friends, even here at Southern Seminary, who hold to an

01:51:08

Older Earth view. They're fantastic Christians, great men. We just differ on this one.

01:51:15

We read the scriptures differently on this one. And going back to something that I touched on earlier about the love of God, how it can be twisted and misunderstood without some kind of a background in the

01:51:34

Old Testament. Don't you think that a lot of the reason that many of those who are not

01:51:40

Reformed or Calvinist or who reject the doctrines of grace, when they see these universal passages over and over again in the

01:51:49

New Testament about God's love, don't you think that they are forgetting that it was such a radical thing at the time that the

01:52:01

New Testament was written for Gentiles, all the pagan nations, to be included in the

01:52:08

Gospel? And that the references to the world and all people and so on are really just referring to every tribe and tongue and people and nation, unlike the

01:52:22

Old Testament where it was only an occasional proselyte Gentile who was brought into the

01:52:30

Covenant. But here in the New Covenant, you have such an explosion of the Gospel going to the four corners of the earth, which was just unheard of at the time for God's people to witness.

01:52:42

That's right. It was shocking to the New Testament. I think even the apostles were sort of shocked at this.

01:52:49

Peter was, obviously. Oh, yeah. And what Peter says, though, he quotes from Joel in chapter 2.

01:52:55

And there, it's not every Israelite who calls on the name of the Lord, but it's whosoever will.

01:53:01

So you can see that in the Old Testament, the great promise is that not only will the

01:53:07

Jews be saved, but the Gentiles too. Messiah will be a banner around which the

01:53:13

Gentiles will rally. And the great mystery, as Paul saw it, was the

01:53:19

Gentiles now being part of the people of God. And so he constantly stresses that great mystery of Gentiles being saved by God and being seen in the

01:53:31

Old Testament as well. So, yeah, that was earth -shattering, that it's whosoever will, not just any

01:53:38

Israelite, you know, that calls on the Lord to be saved. So that was shocking, absolutely. And very interesting way of phrasing that, using scriptural language, because the non -Calvinists and anti -Calvinists insist, we don't believe whosoever will may drink of the water of life freely.

01:54:00

But we do believe that, because whosoever will, doesn't that just mean anyone who wants to?

01:54:06

And the question is, who wants to, right? That's exactly right. That's the question.

01:54:11

Who actually wills to come to Christ? Well, I'd say from my own experience, and I think from every saved person, if they really think about this, it wasn't that we loved

01:54:21

Him first. It wasn't, no, He loved us first. It wasn't that, oh, boy, you know,

01:54:27

I just really want to come to Him. No, He did something to me first. Or is it the way it's described in Psalm 110, we're made willing in the day of His power.

01:54:41

That's exactly right. Yes, it does not mean everyone is capable or able to come.

01:54:49

It means anyone who wants to may. God isn't going to be standing at the gates of heaven on the day of judgment and say, yeah,

01:55:02

I know that you believed, but do you have your election ticket? There is not going to be anybody who, in a saving and genuinely repentant way, who loved the

01:55:15

Lord, standing there at the gates of heaven and being refused admittance because they didn't have some lottery ticket that they won.

01:55:26

Everybody who is of the elect believes because God has given them the gift of faith, as Paul says to his letter to the church in Ephesus.

01:55:36

Right, exactly. That's right. A lot of times we'll view faith as the one work

01:55:42

God will accept. But faith is an instrument. It's not the great work.

01:55:48

It's the instrument by which we receive and apply Christ in His righteousness. So I think it's very important we understand that faith itself is also a grace.

01:55:59

It was given to you not only to believe but to suffer. It was given to us to believe, you see, and that's very important.

01:56:07

Well, I want to make sure that you have at least three minutes to summarize what you'd like to leave with our listeners today that you want most etched on their hearts and minds.

01:56:16

Okay. It's very important that we read the Bible as a unity. Sometimes as New Testament believers, we have a tendency to think, well,

01:56:25

I'm just living under the New Testament, so the Old Testament is not that helpful for me. But really, that's not what the

01:56:30

New Testament authors talk about. If you look at Romans 15 .4, listen to what this says.

01:56:36

For whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instructions.

01:56:41

He's talking about the church there, of course, our instruction. That through perseverance and encouragement of the Scriptures, we might have hope.

01:56:49

I think it's very important to realize that when the apostles want to establish their doctrine, they'll go to the

01:56:55

Old Testament to establish it. So when Paul wants to establish justification by grace through faith, he goes back to Abraham.

01:57:01

When the New Testament authors want to establish how Christians ought to live, like when Paul talks about love in Romans 13, where does he go?

01:57:08

He goes to the Ten Commandments. That's how he defines love. So I think it's very important that we read the

01:57:14

Bible as a unity, and not just read the New Testament, not just read the Old Testament.

01:57:19

It's the same God who wrote both. He hasn't changed. Yes, we don't live under the Mosaic economy.

01:57:25

We live under the New Testament economy. But yet, we must read these things together for Scripture.

01:57:32

We'll interpret Scripture, and if we do that, we'll be on firm ground. Amen. Well, I do want to remind everybody that our guest,

01:57:43

Dr. Russell Fuller, is going to be at the Christ Our Redeemer conference at the

01:57:49

Pittsburgh Baptist Church tomorrow and Saturday. That's the 9th and 10th of September.

01:57:54

I want to make sure I say that because some people are going to be listening to this in the future on an archived podcast.

01:58:00

So this is for the 9th and 10th of September, 2016, and this weekend.

01:58:08

And we hope that as many of you who are able to get to Pittsburgh, Indiana, as possible, can join

01:58:16

Dr. Fuller at this conference. My dear friend, Pastor Josh Fryman of Community Baptist Church in Riverhead is going to be one of the speakers.

01:58:25

Reverend Isaac Evans of Glastonbury Baptist Church in Glastonbury, Connecticut is another featured speaker who

01:58:31

I had on this program recently. Reverend John Peoples, who I don't know, but I would love to get him on the program at some point.

01:58:38

He is the pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. And, of course, as I said, the plenary speaker will be

01:58:45

Dr. Russell T. Fuller, professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at the

01:58:50

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. For more information, go to Pittsburghobaptist .com,

01:58:56

P -I -T -T -S -B -O -R -O, baptist .com. Any other contact information you care to give

01:59:02

Dr. Fuller? To contact me, you could go to Southern's website, just look up Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and from there you can find my email.

01:59:12

But I'll give it to you very quickly, rfuller at sbts .edu. rfuller at sbts .edu,

01:59:23

and that s -b -t -s stands for Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Correct. I want to thank everybody who listened today, and especially those who took the time to write in questions, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater

01:59:38

Savior than you are a sinner. We look forward to hearing from you tomorrow with your questions on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.