Beza Briefing - God the Father

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the

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Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her

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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.

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My name is Mike Abendroth. And then I always grab the microphone like that, but I'm not going to do that today. It is, in real time,

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October 24th, does that seem right? And we are filming this today as well, filming,

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I mean, it's my iPhone. You can always catch us at the nocompromiseradio .com

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website. I think all 2 ,500 shows are archived there, pretty good search engine. And if you're there and you order

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Sexual Fidelity, you automatically get things that go bump in the church for free, so we have that.

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What else do I have for housekeeping? The Israel trip for next February will be postponed one year, and that will be 2022,

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February 23rd. So you're invited, all you no -co -listeners, you're invited as well. Probably fly from Boston to Munich to Tel Aviv, and maybe we have to go through Newark.

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What else is happening here in No Compromise Radio? I was asked by the producer, a director, of the

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American Gospel Films. I was supposed to be in the first one, but had radiation for cancer, so I'm too tired.

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Second one, a couple of spots I was in there, and actually, the last words of that movie were mine.

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Did you get that? I'm going to do about a five -part series on the law and gospel and sanctification that will air on Brandon's network.

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So we'll probably film that in the next month or so. I think that's all I have for announcements today.

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If you have show topics, you can always write me, mike at nocompromiseradio .com.

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I will—oh, I guess I do have another announcement. I will be with my friend, John Tucker, this—Terry just said on Facebook we're recording a show

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Thursday night. Well, that's right. It's not No Compromise Show, but it's Colv—I don't know—Ben and Jerry Show, Mike and Terry Show.

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Terry is going to be picking me up from the airport, and so he said he'd have green M &Ms. Let's see what else would

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I like. I would like a protein drink, maybe some kombucha, dark chocolate, no flavors, just dark chocolate.

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Anyway, Terry, it's been a long time since I've seen you. I'm looking forward to that, but I'll be in Beloit—I want to say

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Beloit, but I think it's pronounced Beloit, Ohio, south of Cleveland, with my friend John Tucker, and also doing a conference there on sanctification, law, and gospel.

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And I think Friday night I do a message, and then there's a Q &A. Saturday, a couple messages—three messages, maybe?

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Yeah, three messages, or two messages and a Q &A, and then Sunday morning preaching, and I think the guy that's got those old

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Bibles, he'll be there. And I don't know if John's speaking or not, but I was there last year, enjoyed the folks there south of Cleveland, and I'll be back this year,

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Lord willing. So that's this Thursday I arrive. Don't forget,

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Terry. I like to be picked up in, like, what's that new Jeep? There's some new cool

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Jeep, Rubicon or something? That's what I like the most. Oh, and I hurt my arm, too.

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I've got this neck pinch thing, this disc in my neck, so I think you need to carry my luggage. So we started a new segment for No Compromise Radio, and I don't do many things new because I'm a creature of habit, and I guess it's my

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German background or something, but I just recorded one, not on Facebook Live, but just regularly, and it's called

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The Beza Briefing. And of course, I make fun of New Englanders, although I'm one, right?

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I'm here for 23 years, and I'll be here until the day I die, most likely. That's the plan. Theodore Beza, or Bezer, oh, yeah,

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Pete's Coffee, don't forget. I don't drink coffee late at night, so it doesn't work. Theodore Beza, The Christian Faith.

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This is what the book looks like backwardly, The Christian Faith by Theodore Beza, and you can get it,

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I think it's easier to get now. When I got this, it was very difficult, about 112 pages. And for those of you that don't know who

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Theodore Beza was, he followed

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John Calvin in Geneva. He succeeded John Calvin, and he wrote a commentary, excuse me, a biography on Calvin.

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This that I have in my hand, The Christian Faith, it's a concise declaration of the

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Christian Faith, and it was published in Geneva in 1558. So, regularly now on No Compromise Radio, we're going to have a briefing about systematic theology through the eyes of Theodore, or Teddy Beza, Teddy Bezer.

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That's how we're going to promo this, the Teddy Bezer briefing. And it's interesting, and I'll just go by memory, the sections in this short systematic theology, and by the way, if you're, if you like Grudem systematic theology, you ought not to.

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You ought to get rid of that. Louis Burkhoff is what you ought to be reading. I think you can get that systematic theology for free, by the way.

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But this is even shorter, and so I'm going to try to regularly teach some systematic theology on No Compromise Radio from Beza, and the sections are simple.

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The Trinity, we covered that last show. If you're on Facebook Live now, you have to wait for that to air a week or two.

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And then, what's after that? Next, God the Father, any guesses what the next one is?

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God the Son, next, God the Holy Spirit, the Church, and then the

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Last Judgment slash Conclusion. So those are the sections, and the great thing about this

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Beza book is as it goes through the sections, and I'll even show you on Facebook Live, I know it's backwards,

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I'm sorry about that, but I have no option. See how nice those sections are, 1 .1 and 1 .2?

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It's just nice. It looks like it's Hebrew, probably, for you. You kind of have to read backwards.

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I don't know. Is it backwards for you or not? But anyway, we went over the Trinity last time, and now we're going to look at the section

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God the Father. What's important about this book is that it's an easy, accessibly, it's easy to access.

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It's easy to read, and it not only teaches what's true, but then it teaches what's false.

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And I'm not going to review the Trinity section, but I just will try to describe to you what I'm saying.

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He talks about these persons, he's talking about the persons of the Trinity, are coessential, coeternal, without confusion of properties and relationships, because some people want to commingle the deity of Christ and his humanity.

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That would be an error. And then he says, Church condemns Sibelius, Samosata, Arius, Nestorius, Marcion, others.

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And then it says, and all other heretics whose heirs we detest earnestly with all our heart.

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That's why I like Theodore Beza. We detest these heirs with all our heart.

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I mean, we don't want to worship the Lord wrongly, right? Because that sounded funny.

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We don't want to worship the Lord wrongly, right? Comma, right? Because anything we think about God that's not true is, what, idolatry.

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So we want to think about him properly. And of course, since God expects precise worship according to his word, it should not surprise us that Satan and the world system, using hypocritical lie speakers to use the language of 1

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Timothy chapter 4, will come along and try to distort and confuse.

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So I like this about Beza, Theodore Beza. So I don't know how far we're going to get today.

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The last section, the Trinity was pretty short, and so is the Father.

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So I think we can get it. Yes, doctrine divides. That's exactly true. And it divides truth from error.

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And good pastors, good shepherds, good systematic theologians should do what Titus chapter 1 says, and we teach sound doctrine that's hygienic and good and right.

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And we contradict those who teach the opposite, right? We refute them and say that's not true.

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To one, the person of the Father. So it just leads in from the Trinity, from what we talked about last time on the radio.

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We believe in God, the Father, whose person is neither the Son nor the Holy Spirit, John 1, 1,

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John 17, 5. Indeed, although the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one indivisible

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God, it is necessary, however, to distinguish between the persons such that the one is not the other.

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And of course, if you think about the Trinity properly, you know, no man or woman can get their minds totally wrapped around it.

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But as Augustine said, if you deny the Trinity, you are going to go to hell.

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If you can completely explain it, you'd have to be one of the persons of the Trinity. But we do have revelation, so we can understand some.

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And that is, we have one God, right, Deuteronomy 6, Acts 17, and then three persons.

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And we looked at Matthew chapter 28, verse 19 last time in the singular name of the

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Father and of the Son and of the Spirit. So we understand they're not just separate, they're not just like modalistic, you know,

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He shows up as the Father, then as the Son, and then the Spirit. That would be wrong. But we have one God, three persons.

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So we just take what Scripture tells us. And as I've said many times, you know, we start talking about the

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Trinity and people tune out. I'd like to go to a marriage conference. How many of you would sign up for a marriage conference?

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Well, probably most, and that'd be good, a biblical marriage conference. How many would sign up for a conference on eschatology?

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Probably some would, right? A lot would. But if you knew there was a conference on the Trinity, would you sign up?

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And it's so very, very important to understand the object of our faith. And so the next thing we do, if you think about the

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Trinity, if you kind of had looked at a triangle in your mind and you have three things to think about, and that's easy because we're thinking about Trinity.

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God is one. The Father's God, the Son's God, and the Spirit's God. We could prove that from different texts of the

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Bible. And then the last thing is, what he's talking about here, Beza, is the Father's not the

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Son, and the Son's not the Spirit, and the Spirit's not the Father. That is the way we make sure we distinguish.

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And to use Francis Turretin's language, we distinguish. And that's really important.

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See, we already lost viewers because we're talking about the Trinity and not marriage conferences. Like, oh, great.

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We distinguish eternal Father, eternal Son, eternal Holy Spirit. 2 .2,

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how the Father is creator and preserver of all things. There are ways that Scripture will reveal things so that we can see certain aspects of administration, particularly in the

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Bible. So let's see if I'm right. It is he, the Father, who created all out of nothing,

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Genesis 1 .1, Hebrews 1 .2, Hebrews 11 .3, John 1 .3, when it seemed good to him by his eternal word.

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So the Father creates by the word, that is to say, his Son acting with the

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Father. I like that. He has arranged and ordained everything, as also he sustains and governs everything, according to his eternal providence, by his infinite and coessential power, who is the

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Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son. And therefore, you'll see Turretin, excuse me,

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Beza, be very, very particular on what he's saying. And of course, the backdrop, if you've got

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Nestorian and Arius and Sibelius and all these people teaching opposite, it has to be very, very precise.

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And so that's what he's doing here. But you're going to see that this is only like a page and a half, and so it's easy. So I'm trying to get you to buy

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Theodore Beza's The Christian Faith to encourage you so that you'll have some mooring.

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So if a Jehovah's Witness comes and you go, oh, duh, this is the Arius heresy.

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And with Beza, I can detest earnestly with all my heart such theological error.

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What else does it say? 2 .3. The creation of the angels. We believe that he has not only created the visible world, the heaven and the earth and all they contain, but also invisible spirits,

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Colossians 1 .16. Some preserved wholly by a singular grace of God are the happy messengers set for the preservation of the elect,

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Hebrews 1 .14, Psalm 103 .21 and Psalm 34 .8. Isn't that an interesting way to talk about angels?

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Happy messengers. That is excellent. And of course, angel does mean messenger, but these are happy messengers, right?

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And the only reason they didn't fall, not because they were so great in and of themselves, but a special grace of God. The others, he's talking about bad angels, the devils having fallen by their own malice, right?

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So God, by his grace, keeps the holy angels from being unholy. But the responsibility falls on the bad angels, fallen by their own malice.

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I'm sorry, but there's a town called Malice is going through my mind with Paul Weller. Without any hope of recovering themselves,

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John 8 .44, are condemned to perpetual damnation, the last stage of which they await.

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Second Peter 2 .4, Luke 8 .31, Matthew 25 .41. So what Beza is doing is he's just setting everything up and he's making sure we understand the

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Trinity and now God the Father and what he does and how he creates through the Son, by the agency of the

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Son, how he arranges things and providentially takes care of things. And as you know, here on No Compromise Radio, one of the great things about studying

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God, especially something like the Trinity that blows your mind, right? That's this infinite

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God and I'm this finite, sinful person trying to understand it. I'm hopefully caught up in that so much so that I'm not saying my neck, that I hurt some disc or something.

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I got this radiating pain down my arm. Ouch, I have to have traction on Monday. And then maybe an MRI later.

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And then I've got all these other issues and something on my hand, some kind of growth on my hand. I'm like,

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I'm falling apart. Oh, I thought I could be retired in five to 10 years to 15, but retirement is going to be a casket soon enough.

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But do you notice when you begin to think about things like this that are way beyond your comprehension, but somewhat grasped because of doctrine of revelation,

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Scripture. I forget about these things, right? I'm thinking about the right things. The just shall live by what?

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Faith in this God, in this God that's transcendent yet eminent. You think of the incarnation and this

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God that really blows your proverbial mind. Nobody could come up with such a God. That's what you ought to be thinking because it's true.

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That's one of the reasons why, not the only reason, but you should be studying things like this that make you go, oh,

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I can't study this when it's nighttime. It's 1030 and I'm laying down on the couch. I can't do it.

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Beza, that is why, listen, we detest the error of the

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Sadducees who deny that they were real spirits having substance, Acts 23, 8.

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Sadducees denying these angels. And that of the

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Manichees who say that the devils have their origin in themselves and are wicked by their own nature, that they did not corrupt themselves.

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So you see the Manichees, what they did is they're essentially blaming God. God created everything.

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The angels, bad angels were created bad and therefore corrupt.

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And so even today, I went and bought a couple of bookshelves because I'm putting a library together at my home.

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And it's kind of a, we've redone the basement. It's just this nice kind of library. It's not a man cave.

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It's a no -co cave. It's a no -co cave. Yes, I'm sitting here laughing.

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And yes, there's not one person in this office or in this building. And so I showed up today to this, you know,

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I bought it on Facebook or something or Craigslist type of thing. And I said, hello, you know, and knocking the door and I stand back a little bit and say, hi, my name's

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Mike. I'm here to buy the bookshelves. And the guy's like, oh, okay, you know, come on in.

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And so I'm carrying the bookshelves a little bit, you know, kind of with one arm because my left arm is killing me.

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And he's, I said, oh, I'm a pastor in West Boylston because I'd kind of throw that out and see what they say. Oh, and he said, honey, he said to his wife, this guy's a pastor, you know, in West Boylston.

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I said, yeah, I teach the Bible and I've been here for 23 years and, and originally from Omaha, Omaha and all that.

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Anyway, we're loading up the stuff in the truck. Me with my one arm, my neck, we're loading up everything.

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And he basically talked about God making people broken, right?

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He didn't say God don't make no junk. But anyway, I said, you know what?

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God made everything upright, but it's man's responsibility that he fell, right? And it was

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Adam that introduced death. God did not create death into the system because that's what he was alluding to how, you know, he knew my arm was hurting.

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And so he said something about how God made death and all that, all this to say, of course, God didn't make death.

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And so God made men and women upright. And therefore the responsibility in scripture is placed rightly so on men and women who sin.

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And so now Beza says the same thing in his Christian faith. We detest the error of the

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Sadducees who deny that they were real spirits having substance and that of the Manichae's who say that the devils have their origin in themselves and are wicked by their own nature, that they did not corrupt themselves.

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So all this is protecting the integrity and holiness of God, the father in this first section of God, the father in Beza's the

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Christian faith. This is no compromise radio. If you just tuned in, I know this is backwards, but this is called the

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Christian faith by Theodore Beza, the successor of John Calvin. This is written in the 1550s, and it is a great one.

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I mean, you can see how small it is. It's about 112 pages of Christian theology, essentially bullet point.

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And that's why I think it's so good. So we've got a new section now on No Compromise Radio, and it's called the

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Beza or the Beza briefing. All right, next section, and we're almost done with this section, and we've done this in 19 minutes.

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And you can see how short it is for these particular areas of theology.

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The works of the Trinity are inseparable in these three persons who are the

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Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Notice those definite articles, just like Matthew chapter 28, verse 19 and following singular name, the

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Father and of the Son and of the Spirit. We recognize distinct personal properties.

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Each has his own. However, we do not make any separation between the Father, the

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Son, and the Holy Spirit, either regarding providence, creation, the government of all things, or in anything which pertains to the essence of God.

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What is he saying? And by the way, that is the entire section, those one, two, three, four sections on God the

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Father. And so whenever you say to yourself, you know, I should probably be reading a systematic theology regularly.

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That's why this Beza Christian faith would be so good for you. And again, I do this regularly because everything in my life tends to focus on me.

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That's my sad default of my flesh is I just think about myself, right?

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So now I begin to think about who God is, and that's the right way to think about everything through the lens of God.

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And now I begin to think of the world, relationships, the local church, everything through the nature of the triune

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God. And what Beza is trying to say here, and again, you have to kind of think and it stretches a little bit, we have

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God who we've learned from Beza is co -essential, right? Co -eternal, no mingling between the

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Father and the Son and all these things with different heresies. But he's trying to say, when you read scripture, there are certain things economically that the

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Father seems to do more than the Son, that the Son seems to do more than the

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Father. And I guess the easiest way to say this, and by the way, I'm thinking about almost every word

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I'm saying, because it is easy to be a heretic when you talk about the Trinity. It is so easy to do that.

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By the way, the most common error that I hear when it comes to this mingling of the members of the

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Trinity is I'll hear people say, Heavenly Father, right? You ask somebody to get up and pray or at a prayer meeting.

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Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you that you've created all things. Thank you for dying on the cross.

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Really? No, only the Son dies on the cross. So right there, if that's all you knew and you weren't a

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Beza expert or a theological expert, a Trinitarian expert, you would know there are certain things while God, the

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Father, and the Son are co -eternal, co -equal, there's not mingling of things, you would go, oh, but it's the

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Son that dies, right? If you said something like this, this would not be heresy. Heavenly Father, we thank you for what you've done.

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Thank you for this day. Thank you for preserving all things. Lord, thank you for dying on the cross. That's not heresy if,

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Lord, you mean the second person of the Trinity. So here are the big words to kind of wrap up the show.

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I've got a minute to go. Ontologically, that is of nature and essence, co -equal, co -eternal.

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Economically, when you hear the Trinity talked about, can you end a sentence with a preposition? When you talk about the nature of God and the outworking, what you see in Scripture, it's fair to say economically that there are certain emphasis of the

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Father, for instance, planning, the Son executing, and the

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Holy Spirit applying. That's the best way to think about it. Economically, you'll see kind of a lot of scriptural data about the

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Father in terms of planning and preserving. You'll see a lot, and that's not to say that you'll never hear anything about the

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Son and the Spirit doing that, but you normally will hear about the Son and how he's executing the purposes of God on earth, and then the

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Holy Spirit, especially now that the Son has been risen and ascended, how the

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Holy Spirit is applying certain things and convicting and all that. Anyway, that is my Beza briefing.

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So my name is Mike Ebendroth. This is No Compromise Radio. If you missed the first Beza briefing, you can pull that up on nocompromiseradio .com.

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Tell your friends about No Compromise Radio and Bethlehem Bible Church. We will see you tomorrow with Matthew chapter 8.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6.

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We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org