February 27, 2019 Show with Ken Golden on “Entering God’s Rest: The Sabbath From Genesis to Revelation (& What it Means For You)”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, 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.

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. Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania,.

Lake City, Florida and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 27th day of February 2019 and my friends over at the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals urged me to interview someone that they believe is going to be a great blessing to you today and I take very seriously the recommendations of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals because I am extremely pleased with everything that I know about them and the events that they promote and the speakers and authors that they promote and that they publish, one of whom is my guest today for the very first time ever.

His name is Ken Golden, organizing pastor at Sovereign Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Davenport, Iowa and the author of Presbytopia, What it Means to be Presbyterian. Today we're going to be addressing another book of his published by the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Entering God's Rest, the Sabbath from Genesis to Revelation and What it Means for You and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio,.

Pastor Ken Golden. Thanks Chris, I appreciate the opportunity. And we appreciate the opportunity to.

Have you here today with us and please before we go into the topic at hand, why don't you tell our listeners something about Sovereign Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Davenport,.

Iowa. Sure, we're a mission work of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. We've been at it for a while. I picked up the work back in 2011, full-time church planner. The previous one was, he was living out of the area, changing direction there.

His denomination was plugging away ever since, trying to reach this community, not only for the gospel, formed in Presbyterian Church in the.

Cities where there is none. Yes, and the Orthodox Presbyterian denomination, for those of our listeners who are unfamiliar with it, this is a denomination that arose, I should say, during the fundamentalist modernist controversy in the earlier part of the 20th century when liberals were gaining horrifying control over churches and establishments and seminaries and universities that had long been known for their biblical soundness, and denominations were splitting and congregations were splitting, and a great hero of the Christian faith, J. Gresham Machen, knew that he was at great odds with this modernist movement.

In fact,.

He was excommunicated, wasn't he? Yeah, I'm not sure what term they used back then. I know he was deposed from ministry, and it was the Bible-believing foreign mission that the social gospel was more important, and Machen and his colleagues were appalled by that and set up their own independent mission board, and that did not fly well with the denomination, and that was the beginning of the end for a number of those men who were seeking to believe the gospel.

Yeah, wasn't the liberal missionary Pearl Buck at the center of this? Yes, yes, she was in China, and she's a famous novelist. Most people don't realize that she was a missionary as well, and that she did not believe that the Bible is the Word of God, she believed that it was the Word of men.

That was certainly not in keeping with the Hesopotamian tradition, or any Christian tradition, and his colleagues felt compelled to give an alternative and send missionaries out who were faithful missionaries to God.

Testimony, Jewish Heritage, and Coming to Faith in Christ

Well, now let me hear something about your book, not the one.

We're discussing today, but the one with the funny name, Presbytopia, what it means to be Presbyterian. Are you making the claim that being Presbyterian brings you in some sort of utopia?

Certainly not, it's actually from Presbys. Really, so it's a real word, or you coined it? I believe that I coined it, although some people don't like it because it sounds too much like Presbyopia,.

Which means old eyes. Well, perhaps at some point we can have you on to discuss that book, but before we have you begin our discussion on Entering God's Rest, the Sabbath from Genesis to Revelation, and what it means for you, whenever I have, or at least most often, when I have a first-time guest on Iron Trip and Zion Radio, I have them give a summary of their salvation testimony, what kind of religious atmosphere my guests were raised in, if any, and what providential circumstances rose up in their lives that the Lord used to draw them to himself and save them,.

So I'll have you give that same story yourself. Well, thanks for that opportunity. I'm a Jewish convert. I was raised in a form of Judaism called conservative Judaism, involved in fairly traditional worships, I believe, of the Old Testament.

It would be parallel to a lot of mainline Christian churches. So I was raised in that. My father was an immigrant from Poland, and he grew up in an Orthodox family, and when he came over he was really not all that interested in any kind of personal or any kind of formal relationship, and he threw off the shackles, form of Judaism, but he embraced Israel, and he still wanted to raise his children, many Jewish children, and I learned enough to be able to do my bar mitzvah, to read from a selection of the Old Testament.

And I had to read it in the Hebrew, and I didn't learn what the words meant. It was oration, or speaking of the Hebrew words, and it was a big show. And after I did that, because I really wasn't all that interested in that experience in Hebrew school, I really made a silent vow to myself that I was never going to look at another Hebrew character again.

And I was done, pretty much, with any kind of, you know, trying to figure out my place at Indiana University. And while I was painting, I was trying to find myself looking for deeper meaning. By the way, I'm an art major myself.

Really? Yes. Really. Now that sounds like I should be interviewing you then. No, it would be a lot less interesting, believe me. I studied art for four years in Indiana, and I met my future wife there in my senior year, and I ended up moving back to New York from New Jersey.

I ended up moving back to New York to study at Pratt Institute in a master's program, and I was really wanting to give the New York City arts scene a shot. I did so, completed my program, and I had a show in 1994 in the East Village.

Wow. And I thought my career was taking off, but it really just happened. The gallery I showed at closed. Most of all, I had an experience in 1996 that challenged what I wanted to do the rest of my life, faith in Jesus Christ.

My mother-in-law, brother-in-law, and really my whole wife's family were Roman Catholic, and they left the Catholic Church in 1996 and started attending a Protestant church, part of a church. And I really had no interest in becoming a Christian, but I did have an interest in understanding the faith that my wife has brought up together.

So I was willing to study the Bible, and so was she. And we had our opportunity, when we went to a local congregation of this, they wanted me to just start reading the New Testament. I really never had any interest in it.

Once I picked up the New International Version that they gave me, and started reading the Gospel, I discovered that it was actually interesting. It wasn't King James, so there weren't any begats or anything like that, but it actually was interesting for the first time.

And not only interesting, but there was a character in it that interested my interest. Jews don't... The honest ones, the Orthodox at times, will call him a false teacher. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.

You can't lead people astray. You want to be polite. Well, we didn't talk about him. He was a taboo topic. I didn't know what to do with this character, Jesus, but I found myself being drawn to him. As I was reading through Matthew, and then Mark, and then other books, I found myself cheering for him, because he wasn't like anything that I had expected.

He wasn't a moralist. He wasn't trying to clean up everybody's act. He was actually having meals with the riffraff. He was inviting people, the dregs of society even, to his table, and he was embracing them.

But he was loving them. He was loving them where they were, which was very different than anything I'd ever imagined about him. Calling out all of the religious leaders, the ones who were trying to look, seeking man's approval.

But I didn't want to believe it, because how could I? I'm a Jew. Well, as I kept reading and reading, I am more and more, until he gets arrested and he up and dies. Now, I have looked at plenty of altarpieces, studying art, and I knew about the crucifixion scenes, and I knew that he was going to die, but when I read it for myself, after investing all of this emotional energy, Jesus, I was heartbroken.

I was truly sad when I read that. I thought, how unfair. He didn't do anything. But then, to my surprise, he rose again from the dead, and I thought, this is so different. What do I make of it? Well, the group I was studying with, that they did with people they were recruiting, and I wasn't moving fast, so they called in the big guns.

They called in a Jewish convert from Brooklyn, and he started studying with me, and he encouraged me to read the Old Testament, starting in Genesis. And I was willing to do that. I started reading in Genesis, and it was a breeze.

And then I got to Exodus, and Exodus, the first half, very interesting, it was to read that and understand it. And then I got to Leviticus, and Leviticus recalled memories of being in synagogue, especially on the high holy days, when we did go to synagogue.

And I remember sitting in the synagogue as a child, not understanding a word, that the cantor, the singer, I remember being bored out of my mind. I remember my parents being irritable. But here I am, as a 30-year-old, reading Leviticus for the first time, plodding through the early chapters on the sacrifices and the purity laws.

And then I come to chapter 16, the Day of Atonement, or in Hebrew, Yom Kippur. And I thought, here we go again. Do I really want to read this? But I did. And as I was reading it, God does something unusual and remarkable.

He used the book of Leviticus to convert me.

Wow.

As I was reading, yes, probably the first person you've ever heard say that. As I was reading chapter 16, I saw the two goats. And the first goat was sacrificed, and the second goat, Aaron, priest, upon that goat, and God's people on that goat.

And then, in reading those, I put two and two together. Two goats equaled Jesus. I could see for the first time spiritually, and I believed, and I knew. What I did next, what to do next. The church we were studying, I was happy, one bit.

But they didn't disown me. And we didn't end up joining that church. We ended up joining an evangelical church. We stayed there a while. But while I was there, I was introduced. It got me part of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

It was their magazine back then.

Yeah. Didn't Mike Horton have something to do with that?

He did. And ironically, I went to Promise Keepers in 1997, which was something that many Christian men did back in the 90s. And after Promise Keepers, my friend, who is my Reformed mentor, he suggested we go to a conference on Reformed theology.

What is that? So we went to a local United Reformed church in northern New Jersey, and the speaker of all people was this Dr. Michael Scott Horton. Never heard of the guy. Never heard of the guy. And he was very interesting, but I really didn't know what to make of it.

And the issue that was on display that month had to do with a sacrament. And I didn't even like the sound of that word. It sounded so Roman Catholic, or I guess, you know, using that dichotomy between religious and spirituality, which I don't believe anymore.

And I read the articles in there, and they rubbed me the wrong way. I couldn't put it down, because I had all of these questions. The whole church, gradually, I began more and more to gravitate toward a Reformed church in New Jersey.

Over the years, I felt myself being called into the ministry. And I had made a decent career. The abilities that I had to the ministry, Mary in California, and study with Michael Scott Horton and some of the other people that I had read, quitting our job, the one job that we had at that time, going from one income to zero income, fill a state market back in 2001, California, from New Jersey.

And I graduated three years later, and I found myself around my second call now. This is a church plant in the Quad Cities. Most people have never heard of the Quad Cities. But it's an area that is, there's quite a few Bible believing churches, and many of them are good churches, but there's no Reformed America.

By the way, just out of curiosity, do you know, I very rarely hear the answer no to this when I'm speaking to an Orthodox Presbyterian, but one of my dearest friends, going back to the 1980s, is Bill Shishko.

Do you know Bill?

I've met Bill, yeah. He's the pastor, or was the pastor at Franklin Square.

That's right. Now he runs Reformation Metro New York, which is a parachurch ministry under the oversight of the Orthodox Presbyterian Presbytery out there in that area. And in fact, Bill is a client of mine, and I am the one that sold him his airtime for his radio program, Visit to the.

How fabulous. Yeah, he's very gifted, and ironically, this is a really obscure story, but one of his parishioners, who is somewhat of an expert on Van Til, a man by the name of.

Eric Sigward... Oh yeah, I've met Eric many, many times for many, many years.

Eric is a key... I hope he's listening, because he probably doesn't remember me, but when I was at the Evangelical Church, my friend, who was a merchant, and he had a queen, she got to know Eric, and he would invite Eric to our church and have Eric teach.

It was really all of these broad Evangelical folks being taught by Eric, who was fairly intellectual and sometimes spoke over their heads. But one of the things that I'll never forget is that Eric would bring copies of Louis Burkhoff, and he would talk about reform things, and it was a little weird.

I'm sorry, I interrupted you with my laughter.

Oh, I appreciate the laughter. I was eating it up, and all of those were there for me in the.

Early years. In fact, my landlord is a retired Orthodox Presbyterian minister, Al Stever, he's a graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary. He, in fact, went to a 50th anniversary of all those who graduated in his class about a year or two ago, and good friends with a lot of folks in the OPC.

Jason Wallace, if you ever want somebody to speak on Mormonism at your church, Jason Wallace is a thoroughly knowledgeable expert, pastors a church in the Salt Lake City, Utah area, and Magna, Utah to be specific.

And Lowell Ivey, fascinating guy in Virginia, Orthodox Presbyterian pastor, who was a white supremacist gang member in prison before he got saved and became an Orthodox Presbyterian and is now pastoring in Virginia.

I mean, I know a lot of folks, so I always feel at ease when I'm interviewing somebody from your denomination.

That's true. I've met Jason before at General Assembly. I've never met Lowell, but that's an amazing story. I didn't know that about him.

In fact, this reminds me to ask for prayer from my listening audience, something that I failed to do before today. Please pray for the local Orthodox Presbyterian pastor here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Jody Morris.

His wife unexpectedly and tragically died just about a week or so ago, maybe two weeks ago, at the age of 42. And that obviously has been a great tragedy, not only to Jody and his two sons, but also for that congregation.

So please pray for Pastor Jody Morris. He was married 25 years, even though his wife is only 42 years old. She got married when she was 17, and that must be a very difficult time that he's going through.

I know personally the tragedy of losing a wife. I lost my wife, as many of my listeners know, back in 2011. She is now in eternity with Christ after nearly 20 years of marriage. But please pray for Jody Morris of the Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

I'm sorry, I just wanted to throw that in there.

I'm glad you mentioned that, actually, because Jody was the first person that I thought of when you mentioned Mormonism. Jody and I were classmates at seminary, and...

That's right, he's a former Mormon.

Former Mormon, that's correct. And I think the world of him, and I remember having a lunch when I was in seminary with him and Belinda, and Jody's an outstanding guy, and he's really smart, and I'm assuming you know him well, living in Carlisle.

He's a good man, and we've been praying for him and his family. So, Jody, if you're listening, I just want you to know that we've been praying for you for a couple weeks. Well, I'm sure he appreciates that enormously.

And, well, we are now going to be entering into our... By the way, did you finish your discussion on your testimony? I don't want to cut you short there, because it was utterly fascinating. In fact, I already know I want to have you back specifically to address more about your Jewish heritage and the interesting phenomenon of the majority of Jewish believers rejecting Reformed theology.

And one of the aspects of that that utterly baffles me is how Jewish people fully recognize and embrace the fact, without hesitation, that God chose the Jewish people not because of anything they believed or did, or because of their specialness, their unique beauty, or anything like that.

He elected them. He chose them out from among the pagan nations. And yet, when Jews come to faith in Christ, that concept of unconditional election, of election not based on anything intrinsic to the ones being elected, they seem to be not only ignoring that, avoiding that, but sometimes even being vehemently opposed to that notion.

Not all, of course. We have some exceptions, like yourself and some other brothers in Christ I know who are Reformed theologically, but it is an interesting phenomenon,.

Isn't it? It's a phenomenon, and I'm certainly no expert on, even though I was raised Jewish, and I know certainly a little bit about the different streams of Judaism and Messianic believers. I attend my church, and I even had coffee one day with a local Lubavitch rabbi.

Hard to believe there's a rabbi here in the Quad City, and I'd be happy to come back and talk about whatever I know. The last thing I would say with this is that my silent vow that I made on my bar mitzvah, the dust off of my feet.

And lo and behold, my first year in seminary, Hebrew 101, and I'm thinking, what am I getting myself into? But I actually enjoyed it, and I still work, and I really enjoy the Hebrew. It's the language itself.

He sure does. By the way, I want to clarify for our listeners who may not have understood what I was talking about in regard to Jewish believers in Christ who reject unconditional election. I'm speaking of unconditional election in the salvific sense, not in the natural sense where the nation of Israel was chosen amongst all of the Gentile nations as God's own people.

I'm speaking of eternal election, election unto eternal life, and so on, that many, if not most, Jewish believers, Messianic believers are opposed to. So they believe in the one aspect of the chosen people of the Old Testament who are chosen not for anything they believed or did, and yet they reject a spiritual or salvific election that we who are Reformed believe and very enthusiastically declare and teach and preach.

But we are going into our first advertising break right now before we enter into entering God's rest, which is the subject of our program today, the main subject, entering God's rest, the Sabbath from Genesis to Revelation, and what it means for you.

Very controversial theme because it is something that divides brothers and sisters in the body of Christ. Not all Christians have the same understanding or acceptance of a new covenant Sabbath day, and even those that do don't always agree on what that means.

And even amongst theologically Reformed Christians, there is disagreement on the Sabbath. So this should be a very interesting conversation, especially, I think it even has some unique meaning, knowing that my guest is formerly, or he's still Jewish, but formerly a part of the conservative Jewish sect amongst or within Judaism.

So it should be interesting, even more so because of that. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

And please give us your first name, at least your city and state of residence and country of residence if you live outside the USA. And please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

So don't go away, we'll be right back with Ken Golden and entering God's rest right after these messages from our sponsors.

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Sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today is Pastor Ken Golden of Sovereign Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Davenport, Iowa.

We are discussing his book, Entering God's Rest, The Sabbath from Genesis to Revelation and What It Means for You, published by the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, c-h-r-i-s-a-r-n-z-e-n at gmail .com, and please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA.

Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Ken, as you may know, there are many books written on the Sabbath. In fact, one of the of the church where I'm a member, he was a pastor there for 40 years, Walter Chantry, he wrote a book that seems to have been very popular for many years called The Sabbath, A Delight, and there have been many others.

Why did you believe that there was an additional volume.

Needed to bless the body of Christ in regard to the Sabbath? Well, I think some of that is mystery and fiction and observance. They don't just add to these things, but I guess the short answer is that, and you said it earlier yourself, Chris, that Sabbath observance, even in the Reformed tradition, one of the things that I mentioned in the book early on as I quote a book by Dick Gavin that he wrote about Calvin and the Sabbath and these types of people who view the Sabbath, some he would call dominical, that it was completely fulfilled in Christ and that the Lord's day has no connection to the Sabbath whatsoever, that it's an ecclesiastical, and some of the Reformers even fell into this category to some degree.

Would they have been the Continental Reformers, perhaps? Yes, yes, that would be Luther and Calvin, even though in practice, what they, especially Calvin and Geneva, closing on being Church, it was done for, and we rent continuity when it comes to being the Sabbath.

And there are even Seventh-day Baptists. In fact,.

I had a debate on the old Iron Shepherds Iron Radio program between Reformed Baptist theologian Sam Waldron and a Reformed Baptist pastor on the day of the Sabbath, and in fact, it was interesting because even the Seventh-day Baptist pastor involved in this debate.

Was a Calvinist, a five-point Calvinist. Wow. Yeah, yeah, and I think there's a lot of Messianic Jews as well who would want to worship on Saturday rather than Sunday. There certainly are some arguments that they make from Scripture to the Dominical folks.

And then there are the Puritan, Presbyterian side of our tradition, often in the Westminster Shall, for lack of a better word, which is very, in many respects, similar to the approach of the Seventh-day Sabbatarian's extransfer from the Seventh-day to the Day of the Week.

There is certainly discontinuity as well, and I don't mean to be oversimplistic at all, and I try to. Some of those details in the book, it's a very strong continuity view of the main areas of discontinuity would be the day of ceremonial aspects of the Sabbath that you find in the Old Testament like that.

You have different views and primarily arguments. Again, I do address in the Sabbath Territories as well of the Presbyterian Church, but he does also implement the way that we use the language that we have on the opinions in the OPC on this issue.

How do we get along with many? And that's one of the reasons for the gap, clearly not a model. So if you could now, and obviously it would take a week's worth.

Of programs to have you be very detailed about this, but if you could describe in as much of a summary as you can your view that you think is most biblically faithful, starting off with what the Sabbath was in the Old Covenant.

Obviously, it's not even something that began with the Decalogue, it's a creation ordinance, but how that Sabbath day, that Sabbath command, was transferred over to a New Covenant and what changes occurred and what things were retained.

In a New Covenant Sabbath. Sure, sure, and I've got nine chapters and a couple of appendices where I tackle the majority, if not all, of the pertinent biblical texts. The book is primarily exegetical.

I'm not quoting Puritan theologians and this and that, I'm trying to stick to the primary standard as much as I can in this book. I'll just read something very briefly which gives us a bit of a framework.

On page two in the introduction, tumbling across, it appears in Genesis, develops in Exodus, multiplies in Leviticus, deepens in Isaiah. In the New Testament, Jesus clarifies it in the Gospel, appears to abandon it in the Epistles.

Sabbath references span the periods of creation, Sinai, monarchy, exile, and New Testament. It receives lots of attention in the Old Covenant and lots of reflection in the New Covenant. The questions that arise from this is, what continues and what doesn't?

And how do these continuities and discontinuities relate to time and observance and Sabbath in the New Testament Lord's Day? Now, our confessions, you know, answer that last Sabbath, and certainly I agree with that language, but I also unpack that language, because I quote Meredith Klein in my book, but he was certainly somebody that I read that I was very intrigued about in thinking in terms of Sabbath as enthronement.