37 - Jesus and Salvation, Part 3 The Significance of His Death

Well, welcome to the

Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology. Now I was told that this week

I'm not supposed to be preaching, but I didn't remember to clock that tells me what the time is, so this class could go really long.

Who knows? Anyway, we welcome you here, all those new students who are with us.

We are glad to have you join us. As I did say on Facebook, we're going to have a special homework assignment for you later tonight.

It should be kind of fun, but we will talk about that later.

But we welcome any of the new students that we have with us. If you are with us for the very first time, well, you're about 36 lessons too late.

But that's okay, because you can go to YouTube and you can actually go to this site down here and go to our

YouTube channel and catch up on the full playlist and get all the lessons that you missed, because theology is not a really good thing to start in the middle.

You want to start at the beginning. So we're going to start with class.

If you have your syllabus, the syllabus you get when you enroll as a student of the academy at the website at strivingforeternity .org

down there, and you can get a syllabus, and with the syllabus comes basically some fill in the blanks that you have and some things to follow along.

You'll have all the notes that I'm teaching from, and we do sometimes send some other things out throughout the year.

All right, so we are going to, we haven't quite finished the lesson from actually two weeks ago, which was

Christ and salvation. Now, if you remember, as we've been kind of going through, just as a recap, we're in, we have four books in our systematic theology that we're going to go through.

We right now are in book number two, we're in book number two, and if you remember, book number two, we were dealing with the doctrine of salvation, specifically with the doctrine of salvation.

We were dealing in lesson number six. Now this was Christ and salvation, so we already dealt with the

Father and salvation. We saw that the Father planned salvation. Now we started looking at the fact that the

Son provided salvation. Now in saying that, just as a way of recap so that we can look at what we are looking at, we looked at the suffering, the death and suffering of Christ.

We examined His examinations. Those were the illegal trial that they had put

Christ on, and then we started to look at His execution. That was last week, and this, and also last week we started, and what we'll finish up this week is the significance of the death of Christ, the significance of the death of Christ.

So that's where we're going to pick up, and it is a timely thing, just if you're watching it live, you know that the resurrection

Sunday is coming up in just a short period of time, and so with that in mind, it's good to think about the resurrection and what all of the death of Christ means.

It's something that we shouldn't just wait for once a year. I know, you know, it's like you ever hear people, they go, they sing a

Christmas song, Christmas carol, other than during like December, and people are like, oh wait, hey wait, you're not only supposed to talk about that or sing that during Christmas.

No, every day we should be celebrating the birth of Christ, and every day we should be celebrating the resurrection of Christ.

Actually, some of you may not realize this, maybe some of you never really thought about this, but why do we as a church worship on Sunday and not

Saturday? You see, if you're Jewish and you're following the old law, you would be worshiping on Saturday.

That's the seventh day. Why do we do it on the first day of the week? We celebrate the first day of the week to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

So every week was supposed to be a reminder that He arose, not just once a year.

But that being said, it is a time that people are more aware of the resurrection of Christ as we enter into the

Passion Week, Palm Sunday, and what people call Palm Sunday, the week that Christ would have entered into Jerusalem, where they would have laid down the palms in front of Him as He rode in on the donkey, and they're calling

Him King, and they're worshiping Him. And then just a few days later, they can go from that to screaming, crucify

Him, crucify Him. What a fickle crowd. Let's not be too hard on them.

We're probably just as fickle, aren't we? But let's pick up again where we left off with the, we started with looking at the atonement.

And we had said in the atonement, as we looked at that, we mentioned with this last week, but just to recap, the definition of the atonement was, is that Jesus Christ became our substitute.

If you have a syllabus, that means you have some blanks to fill in, and those blanks are there for a couple of reasons.

Those are the key words we want you to try to remember when it comes to these things. So Jesus Christ became our substitute for sin, that's what the atonement is, and has eternally satisfied our payment for sin, eternally.

That becomes an important thing. As we go through and we look at salvation, we're going to get into different issues.

We're going to look into things like God's sovereignty and human responsibility, whether you can lose your salvation or not.

That's a heated debate with some. Now, when we have a better understanding, and this is why we want to start theology at the beginning, because when we do it at the beginning, well, then what we end up with is we end up with an idea of the fact that we are building up to the point, not just jumping into the middle.

I mean, theologians, those that study theology, don't start with the doctrine of salvation.

They start either with the doctrine of the Bible, because that's where we're going to get all of our information, or the doctrine of God, and they're going to build everything off that.

Now, really, a proper systematic theology would start with the bibliology, the study of the

Bible. It's where you would start, because that's what you're going to base everything on. We actually started with hermeneutics, the first class, the school of biblical hermeneutics.

We started with talking a little bit about the Bible, and then how to interpret the Bible, and now we're trying to put all those lessons to practice by looking at the

Bible as a whole and categorizing. That's what we're doing. You want to build upon it, because what you're going to see is, when you have good definitions of things, some of these things that people argue over, well, they get explained.

For example, when you understand atonement correctly, when you know that it's satisfied a payment for sin, if you believe that you can lose that salvation, essentially you're saying you lost that atonement work, that payment for sin, and now you're back under the judgment of God as guilty, well, think about that.

Then what is going to pay the atoning work the second time? Because the first one's already been paid.

Now you've pushed that aside, and now you're back in a state of unregenerate state.

How do you get regenerate again, if not by the blood of Christ? Now, there are some groups that would say, well, yes, it is by the blood of Christ.

Yes, you need to repent again. In that case, then, this atonement is not eternally satisfying the payment of sin.

It's temporally satisfying it. You notice the difference? If you've been following the

Striving for Eternity, our ministry, you'll see that we recently have been dealing with a group called the

Church of Wells, a group that we're starting to believe may be a cult. I actually am to the point where if the teachings that we're seeing are true and the things we're hearing are true, they would fit under that definition.

Now, the issue, the real big issue theologically that we have with them is their teaching that anybody who does a willful sin loses their salvation.

Now one of the things they do wrong is they misdefine willful. What is a willful sin?

Every sin. You can't sin without your will involved. And they're messing up the definition of the atonement because they say once you're damned, once you get that salvation, then you lose it, now you're back under God's judgment and you're damned.

Well, how do you get it back again? Well, it's by doing the works. And so now they have a different gospel because ultimately it's a works -based gospel.

And so really at the heart of the issue that we have, I know there's other people, this group has made it in the national news because of accusations of abuse, family abuse and things like that.

We understand that. That's not where we go. We may address some of that if it's in a theological manner.

And so we're going to be looking and dissecting some of their doctrines. You can actually go to our website down there, search under world religions and cults or righteous world religions and look for the

Church of Wells and you'll see some 13 questions that we have posted to them that we asked for them to answer.

So we are, we want to make sure we understand what the atonement is.

Now we started looking at last class whether that atonement could be limited or not.

And we said that if it is limited, but how?

It's definitely limited because it hasn't been applied to every single person. So only a universalist could argue that the atonement is not limited.

In other words, it's been applied to everyone. So we would argue that it has been limited, it's particular.

In other words, it's applied to those who believe. Now does that mean that when we're going to talk about the propitiation, we're going to get to that in a little bit, does it mean that Christ's death was sufficient for all people?

We're going to get to that in just a minute and we're going to look at that more in a few weeks. So we know these are hot button issues for some people.

And don't let the hot button issue turn you off to the truth of God's word.

One thing I will say when it comes to theology, we want to let the text interpret our theology, not our theology interpret the text.

Now everyone would agree with that statement. However, you'll find people that though they agree with that statement verbally, when it comes to the way they interpret a text, ultimately sometimes they rely on their theology.

And that's what's really defining the meaning because it fits into the theological system.

Theological systems, even like this class, are guidelines. They're a barrier, a framework to work within.

But they're not inspired. It is this book that's inspired.

This is where we get our teaching from. It is not from our theology. Our theology will teach us, but it's not the authoritative teaching.

You understand the difference, I hope? All right. Let's look at next. The next one is redemption.

Redemption. And in this one, let's give a definition of redemption.

If you look in your syllabus there. The definition that we have here is that this is the freedom.

That's your blank there, freedom. This is the freedom resulting from the payment being made.

This is a definition that I grabbed from Charles Ryrie. Now I don't agree with everything that Charles Ryrie believes, but I do seem to quote from his basic theology quite often why.

I'm just going to mention this because someone had asked this of us. Because there are a lot of good systematic theology books that you can go to.

Wayne Grudem has one. I don't agree with everything Wayne has, but his theology is pretty good.

You can look at some of the old guys, you know, Hodge and Augustus. You could go to, well, there's a whole lot of them.

You can go to Schaeffer. The thing that you're going to find though is that each of these guys have a lot that they have to deal with.

They're very large volumes usually. And what Charles Ryrie had done was he put a basic theology.

It was like a, you know, something where if you're like me, what I did was I read one chapter a day.

Chapters on average I think are only like three pages long. So you can get through it in about four and a half months by reading one chapter a day.

Don't rush it. Take your time. Take notes. Read through it. It's meant to be explained at an easy to understand level.

And so we want to take that and interpret it, you know, or understand it.

So that's where that one's a really good one to start with. He has very concise definitions for things and that's why

I end up using some of them. Not saying that I agree with everything he believes. Okay.

So let's look at our definition again. This is the freedom resulting from the payment being made.

In this case the payment was the death of Christ. Now let's take a look at some words that we have for this idea of a redeemer or the redemption.

If you look in your syllabus you see starting with some Old Testament words.

Gail, this is the idea of the kinsman redeemer. The kinsman redeemer.

If you see that blank there, that's in Ruth chapter 4 verse 6.

The kinsman redeemer which was the price of the family obligation.

So in Ruth 4 .6 we see then the redeemer said,

I cannot redeem it for myself lest I impair my own inheritance.

Take my right of redemption for yourself. I cannot redeem it.

And so what you see there is this idea of a kinsman, a family redeemer.

And the way that worked was if someone was to die.

You had a male that died. He's married. He doesn't have any children to carry on the name.

But he's got a younger brother. His younger brother would become the kinsman redeemer and would marry his brother's wife in his brother's place to keep the family line going.

So he would then have children and they'd be under his brother's name. This is actually a really interesting thing when you come to the genealogies of Christ.

What a fun study to do. I know most people look at the Matthew passage and the

Luke passage where it gives the genealogies. And many people look at those and they argue that that's one's the line of Joseph and one's the line of Mary.

That could be. But I think a better argument is something that we found in a historical book, a history of the church that's from way back, one of the early church fathers, explaining some of the things and explaining this passage.

What we have is he's actually arguing that Joseph, I think it was his father or his father's father,

I forget which, is mentioned as having a kinsman redeemer. So one of the lines is the direct line of the actual person who was in the line of Joseph and the other line would have been the kinsman redeemer line.

Just like as we read in Ruth, the kinsman redeemer may not be the younger brother. If there is no younger brother, it goes to the next closest member, the next closest kin.

Just like in the case with Ruth, it wasn't a brother, but it was a cousin.

And Boaz was not the nearest kin, so he went to the nearest kin and says, hey, this is your responsibility.

This guy didn't want to share his inheritance. So he decides, you know what, I don't want the inheritance. You take it,

Boaz. And Boaz did. And he married Ruth. And so what you end up with is this idea of a kinsman redeemer that was the price of a family obligation.

Next we have pachfad, which is, if you look in your syllabus, the payment of a ransom.

Your blank there is ransom. The payment of a ransom without family obligation.

We can see this in the Old Testament in Numbers 18, 15 -17.

You can also see it in Exodus 13, verse 12, where it says that the

Lord shall set apart, that you shall set apart to the Lord all that open in the womb, that is, every firstborn that comes from an animal, which you have, the males of the

Lord. This was the idea of a ransom, that everything belonged to the

Lord. This is the idea, so in the kinsman redeemer, there's a family obligation. That's one kind of redemption.

You're obligated. You have a duty to do this. This next word, what we see, it's a ransom.

There's no family obligation here. But it's a ransom that is paid. You're paying of a ransom.

Some people get into debate over who the ransom is paid. This may shock some people because some people are taught in certain churches that the ransom is paid,

Christ pays the ransom to Satan. That's inaccurate. The ransom was paid to God, the

Father, from God the Son. Actually, I'll bring up a point about that with God the

Son. Someone this week, I love students that take these lessons and are thinking through them, applying them.

We had a student this week on Facebook that took some of these lessons and asked a grammatical question based on the lessons they had learned in these classes and asked the question of which one is correct.

Are we a sinner saved by grace, no comma, or are we a sinner, comma, saved by grace?

There was lots of discussion back and forth. The argument was actually that we are a sinner saved by grace because if you put the comma, the focus becomes on the sinner, not what happens to the sinner.

In other words, we are not still a sinner. We are no longer a sinner because we are saved by grace.

An interesting thing also with that is which one of these is correct? Some people talk about this. God, the

Son of God, or God's Son, which one is right? Because one is right and one is wrong.

See, biblically we talk about the Son of God. That's a title of deity and it is putting

Christ in the place of the second person of the Trinity. God's Son is offspring and Jesus isn't the offspring of the

Father. Notice the difference. These points are important. These little things that we look into are important.

That's why we spend the time to go in and dig into some of this. You may not get all of this and we understand that.

That's why we have these on YouTube so you can watch them over and over again. If you are anything like me, you don't pick this stuff up right away.

You go over it a couple of times. We hope that you will. Hope that you go over this several times and in the process you pick up more and more each time.

The last Old Testament word for redemption is kippuf, which is the sum paid to redeem a forfeited life.

The sum paid to redeem a forfeited life.

The blank there is forfeited. You get the idea there that you have a payment that is made.

The issue there is that the payment must be made for that forfeited life.

We understand that quite well now when we look at what Christ did. Christ was that payment.

He became that payment. He became that ransom. Let's look at some New Testament words. We see ergatzoh, which is the idea of purchasing in the marketplace.

The idea of purchasing in the marketplace. Let's get into some things I started to mention.

Who paid the price? Let's look at 2 Peter. But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the

Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.

Who is it that paid the price and bought them? It's Jesus Christ.

You can write in your syllabus there the answer to that. Who paid the price? Jesus Christ paid the price.

What was the price? The next question there. Let's look at Revelation 5, verses 19 -20.

Oh, that says 9. Sorry, I should have said 9 -10.

Sorry, I had that wrong. The slide is right. Who paid the price?

Revelation 5, 9 -10. And they sang a new song, saying,

Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our

God, and they shall reign on earth forever. So what you have there is you saw that what was the price?

The price was the death of Jesus Christ. Okay? So you can fill that in now.

So who paid the price? Jesus Christ himself paid the price. What was the price?

His own death. What was bought?

Or in other words, who owns it? This is where we get into the theological conundrum that some see that we mentioned earlier, and that's 1

Corinthians 6, 19 -20. Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the

Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not of your own, for you were bought with a price, so glorify

God in your body. So what we have here is we have a case where we see that what was bought was you and I that know the

Lord. That's what was bought. Who owns it?

God the Father owns it. Jesus Christ, God the

Son. Now, I didn't say God's Son, but God the Son.

That's a difference in the distinction, just like I mentioned earlier. But what you have here is you have a case where you have

Jesus Christ. Not only does he pay the price. Not only is the price his own death, but what he buys with that is you and I that know him, and he's paying

God the Father. That's the way this works. Satan is not, or let me rephrase that,

Jesus Christ is not answerable to Satan. Jesus Christ doesn't owe

Satan anything. Satan wishes that the way some churches and some

Christians talk about him was true, as if he was God. Some people like to focus so much on Satan, they lose sight of how great and glorious God is.

Satan is an angel. He's not all -knowing. He's not omniscient.

No. He's not everywhere present. He's not all -powerful. And he is a condemned person.

He doesn't rule hell. This idea that some have where Satan is ruling in hell, and Jesus had to go to hell and answer to him for three days?

No. Satan is a participant in hell like everyone else.

He will be thrown in to cast into that lake of fire and suffer the same consequence, if not more, than everyone else.

He will not be a ruler in the lake of fire, but a sufferer.

He's not the warden of the prison. He is a prisoner. He is, as Martin Luther said,

God's devil. Now, you really want to shake some people up.

You know who the ruler is in the lake of fire and in hell? God.

God is the ruler. God is the one that is answered to.

Not Satan. Okay, I'll get off that before I get told I'm preaching. All right, let's look at the next...

Okay, so the next word there is parapolema, which is to keep safe or to purchase for oneself.

To keep safe or purchase for oneself. Acts 20, 28.

We won't turn there, but this is the idea of, you know, you have the parable that Jesus told of someone finding a pearl of great price, you know, a treasure in a field, and he goes and purchases for himself this field.

He redeems the field unto himself. And that's sort of what we see what

Christ did. Christ redeemed us unto himself because he's God. So it's God redeeming us unto himself.

Last is lutro. Lutro is literally to loosen.

An example of this is a prisoner or a trapped animal. A release on one recipient of ransom.

Okay, so it is to loosen or release. And that is when we were redeemed, you and I were imprisoned.

We were bound and we were chained and we were destined to the eternal lake of fire.

But God redeemed us and set us free. Now you think, well, gee, you know, thinking about worshiping the resurrection of Christ every week, every

Sunday, you think you could do that if you're thinking about this lutro?

That you were bound and destined to a lake of fire and God himself paid the price for your freedom.

He was the price of your freedom. And he bought you to pay himself back with his own death so that you, a caged, imprisoned person, could be set free.

Yeah, I would say that's pretty cool. I would say that, son, you could wake up every morning thinking about, and in every day thinking about that, you can say, you know what?

I have something to rejoice in. No matter how bad my day may seem, I have something great to rejoice in.

Okay, let's look. So we looked at, so far, the atonement. We then looked at our redemption.

Let's look at one more, not the last one, but is our reconciliation.

Our reconciliation, okay? So, looking at the reconciliation, let me give you a definition as we've been doing.

I'm going to give you a definition first. This is something else that's of significance to the death of Christ.

The reconciliation is defined as changing a relation from one of hostility to harmony.

I know, we got to alliterate, so we had to have two H's. Hostility to harmony.

That's to help you remember it. You could say from darkness to light. You could say from lost to saved.

From unredeemed to redeemed. From an enemy of God to a child of God.

All those things have the same notion in it. It is that we were once hostile, enemies of God, hating

God. We were God -haters to God -lovers. That's one of the significant things that came out of the death of Christ.

That we can change, we have a changing of our relationship from one of hostility to one of harmony.

Those are your blanks there, hostility to harmony. That's a need. Why is that a need?

Because man is in a condition of sinfulness.

Man is in a condition of sinfulness. That's your blank there. The need for reconciliation is real.

This isn't some, as some try to say, reconciliation is just a feeling to get rid of guilt.

No. It is a real judgment before God. We are being judged by God.

That's who we're accountable to. We're in a state, a condition of sinfulness, and that is why we have a need for reconciliation.

We cannot redeem ourselves. In fact, let's take a look at some verses there.

Psalm 5, 4 and 5. For you are not a

God who takes pleasure in wickedness, nor shall evil dwell with you.

The boastful shall not stand in your sight. You hate all workers of iniquity.

I know that from this verse some people get this idea that hell and eternal death is this idea that we're going to be separated from God for all of eternity.

That's what's basically going to be the thing that's so hard about hell is that God won't be there.

I want you to think about this. If someone hates God, they're an enemy of God, they're a

God -hater, they're hostile to God, do you think hell, if hell is the absence of God, do you think hell is a place they would want to be?

Yes, it is. That's exactly where they want to be. They want to be in a place where they can hate

God and He's not there. You know why they really hate hell? God is there.

God is not going to allow them into His realm in heaven, in the new heaven and new earth, but it doesn't mean that God stops being omnipresent.

He is in hell. He's everywhere. It's just that their relation to Him there will be very different.

The issue here is, if we look at this next verse,

Romans 5, Since therefore we have been justified by His blood, much more shall we be saved by Him from the wrath of God.

For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more now we are reconciled, shall we be saved by His life.

Notice how we get justified. It is not by ourselves, it's not by our works, it's not by the things that we do, but by what

He did. Do you see that?

It's by His blood that we're justified. We were His enemies, but it's by His death that we can be reconciled.

Do you see that? That is some good news. We can't redeem ourselves.

You can look at Titus 3, verse 5. You can look at Ephesians 2, 8 and 9. And you're going to see that we can't reconcile ourselves to God.

God does that. God is the one that reconciles us back to Himself.

That should give us such great joy. There's no work that we could do that could make up for an eternal consequence.

Only God can pay that fine. Only God can do that.

So let's move on and let's look at the next one. So not only is the significance of Christ's death seen in the atonement, we can see in the atonement, we see it is in redemption.

We can be redeemed because of His death. We saw the reconciliation, that there's reconciliation with God because of the death of Christ.

And next is the propitiation. The propitiation, that's a big word.

Okay, so we don't have the slide for this. If you look at the propitiation, let me give you the blank there that's for your syllabus.

The reality of the wrath of God makes necessary an offering, that's your blank there, an offering to appease that wrath.

In other words, propitiation is the appeasing of the wrath of God.

The reality of God's wrath, God is a wrathful God. I know some people don't talk about that anymore in the

Gospel message, but God is wrathful. We saw that in Psalm 5. He hates wickedness.

He hates those that do wickedness. And so because of the wrath of God, it makes necessary an offering to appease

His wrath. What is that offering? The death of Christ. Now, 1 John 2 .2.

You can put that in there in your syllabus, 1 John 2 .2.

Now, what you have here is a verse that, again, this is where some people's systematic theology interprets the meaning.

Why? Because what you have here is a passage that says, if you have your

Bible open, hint, hint, what you have here is a verse that for some people they struggle.

Let's read this. I don't have a slide on this, but this is an important one for people because this is something where it's a good example where you see people's theology interprets instead of the text.

It says, Now we have a problem.

If Christ is the propitiation, He's the propitiation.

He paid the cost. He satisfied the wrath of God.

Okay. So, who did He satisfy it for? Well, it says the world.

Now, some people will take this and say, well, world could mean all tribes, all the nations. Well, we have this word world quantified right before it.

It says whole world. Okay. You could say, yeah, that means everyone in the whole world. There's people being saved out of the whole world.

So, this is meaning just the elect, those that are in the whole world. Okay. But there's one more qualifier.

Look at what it says. Not us, not for us only, but.

Well, who's the us? The us is believers.

This is John writing about believers. Who's the not us?

Unbelievers. Wait a minute, Andrew. Are you saying that Jesus Christ satisfied the wrath of God for unbelievers?

No, I'm not saying that. John said that. That's what the text is.

But this doesn't fit into my theological system because my system says that Christ only died for the elect.

Maybe something's wrong with your system then. Did I just step on toes? I'm sorry.

I'm going to be a man of the book, not a man of the system. Now, you say, but how can that be?

How could Christ have paid the propitiation and satisfied that wrath, and yet there's people that go to hell because it wasn't applied to them?

Well, I don't understand that. Well, neither do I. But I don't fully understand the mind of God. Deuteronomy 29, 29.

All I know is what the text says. The text says that he was a propitiation, not for us only, but also for the whole world.

So, there you got it. You're going to have to go deal with that. So, let's move on. Probably opening up a can of worms for that.

But this is an area that takes some serious study. And I think that that passage is one that people interpret because of their system more often than not.

Let's look at the next thing. Wrath. The wrath of God. Let's define this here because this really isn't talked about much nowadays.

But there's 20 different words used almost 600 times in the

Old Testament describing God's wrath against sin. God, however, is never unreasonable.

His wrath is always righteous. And His grace allows for ways to have fellowship with Him.

While the New Testament does not speak as much on God's wrath, the reality of it is still present in two

Greek words. Orge and Themos. So, what we have there is,

I don't know that we're going to have time to look up the verses. But what we have here is that in the death of Christ, one of the significance of the death of Christ as we see with the propitiation is that the wrath is satisfied.

And we're bringing this up because so few talk about the wrath anymore. And yet, we have to be aware of the fact that God is a wrathful

God. And that had to be satisfied. And the only way of satisfying it is with an eternal payment from an eternal being.

This is what makes Jesus Christ unique in history. And why Christianity is the only religion that can offer a

God of true mercy and justice. Because it's just that He did require a payment for His wrath.

There had to be an appeasing. And the appeasing was made by Himself because He's the only one that can.

That's what makes Christ so unique. Let's look at the last one here, an offering. An offering.

And you have here in your syllabus that the blood, that's your blank there, the blood of Christ was clearly the appeasement for God's wrath.

Now, let's take a look at a couple verses. Now, why am I making the issue of the blood? You know, there was a debate a couple years ago with John MacArthur where he talked about the death of Christ being the appeasing.

And there were some people that just jumped on him something fierce. Because they were arguing, you know, oh, he said it was just the death and not the blood.

And he clarified that. But there's still some people that just hammer him on. Let's take a look at some verses here.

Romans 3. Oh, I'm being told that we do have 1

John. It was just in the wrong place. Okay. See, there we have it in case you wanted to look at it earlier.

So, the verse there, I'm being told

I just put it in the order of the book, of our syllabus.

So, it could have been earlier. So, all right. Hebrews 2 .7. Okay. So, there you have a case where we again see this idea of the propitiation having to be made that there had to be an offering.

Okay. And that offering was Christ himself. Okay. This is the reality.

And the reason we have such a watered down gospel today is because people don't talk about the wrath of God.

Therefore, people don't understand their sin is going to come under judgment. People are being told, hey,

God loves you the way you are. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. You don't have to change for him.

He loves you so much. And the reality is if people don't understand the wrath of God, they don't understand why there's a need for God to pay the price.

Because they think, hey, I think I'm a wonderful person. My works will be good enough. God can't judge you by your works because your works are anathema, are cursing before God.

They're filthy rags. Because he had to pay the price of eternity, you cannot.

And because you and I can't, we have to understand that that wrath of God has to be appeased.

And it can only be appeased by God. That's why when we look at that payment, that ransom, that ransom is paid by God for God.

Right? Jesus Christ pays it. You and I are what's bought in it. He himself on the cross is the payment and it's paid to God the

Father. Okay? So if you have any questions with this next class, we are not going to have class.

Okay? So no class next week, but we will have a show. We will hopefully be live on the channel.

I will be up in New England area going to all the Ivy League schools, preaching on the campuses to the students there.

So we will have an update. Probably going to try to do a daily update maybe.

We'll see. But we'll have some updates out there on what's going on with that outreach.

You can still give, by the way. I did not raise enough money to go.

I'm still going by faith that the money will be raised somehow. We have half the money raised of the $450 that I need to be able to pay all my way for the food and gas and everything else.

So if you want, you can go to the website there. There's a donate page. You really want to help us out? Go to the donate page and donate monthly.

You'll get some benefits for doing so. In other words, some DVDs, CDs, some things that get sent out if you do that.

But if you have any questions with this class, you can email us at academyatstrivingforeternity .org.

Encourage you to go to our store. Our store is open. The store is open.

And because of that, we have the ability now to sell some of our products.

And so we want to encourage you to go there and buy some of our products. Help support us.

Another way you can help support us is to register for the Ohio Fire. Maybe that should be the homework.

Register for the Ohio Fire. Do that now. Do that quick. Be talking about that. Be sharing it with your churches.

Be letting others know about Ohio Fire, May 30th and 31st. You can get fired up to warn the lost of the fire to come.

Now I said that we're going to have some homework. Some fun homework to do. I got a brother

I want you to encourage. I mentioned the work that we're doing on the Church of Wells. I'm working with two individuals.

One who is heading up a ministry that is doing a lot of the research now. Up until now, it's been a lot of the work that we've been working off of is my interaction with the

Church of Wells. People that I used to know. People I used to support. People who

I've gotten to know. Different family members. Different people I've been dealing with them. Now, as I've been working off building the understanding of their theology, now we've got some heavy hitters involved.

I'm working with Tony Miano. Some of you guys know his name from this class. Another is, you may not know, and this is going to be the brother of the week.

That is Matt Slick. Those who are regulars here, you know that the brother or sister of the week is someone that we want to go and encourage this week.

We want to get you guys to encourage this person every day this week. Even if you're not watching it live and you watch it three months from the live show, you can still do this.

This is going to be your homework. If you go, you should go to karm .org. There's tons of material out there on every subject.

You can sit there for months reading everything. You can go and you can learn a lot there.

You can study. You'll see some of the articles that we got up that we're working on for the

Church of Wells. Matt just got done debating Dan Barker. He's a great friend and a great brother in Christ.

Here's the thing. I was half tempted to send his private email and have you guys all email him privately.

Then he'd kill me for giving that away. Or give out his cell phone number. That would really get me in trouble.

Here's the thing. If you email him at matt .karm .org, he may get it.

Grant that. He's real busy. Even if you did know his cell phone number, he doesn't always answer.

He doesn't always text. Here's how we want to get you. You could tag him on Facebook, but he's not really active on Facebook.

How are we going to get the message to him that we are encouraged by the ministry he does?

Here's what we're going to do. Here's going to be your homework assignment. This week, let's all try to do this.

Let us call up his radio show. He is on the radio every week.

He's on the radio. If you're watching, depending where you're watching, if you're watching here in the

Eastern time zone, the show is on from 5 to 6 Eastern time. Work it back for whichever time frame you're in.

5 to 6 tomorrow, what I want you guys to do now is I want you to call up his show.

The number is down there. I want you to say that you heard about him from the Striving for Eternity Academy.

You heard about all the good work he's doing. You want to encourage him. What's some of the good work? If you go to his site, you're going to see the many years of labor that he's put into clarifying theology, to clarifying world religions and cults, clarifying things on Christian living.

Then what you're going to notice there is you're going to notice when you go out to his website, you're going to see how much information is out there, how much research has been done, so that you can very quickly learn something.

You have a question on some group, go check it out there and see what he's got, because he's probably got it covered.

Now, Churchill Wells is new, so what are we doing? We're going to be researching that.

He's got a team of people that are going through all the information out there. We want to encourage you to call his program up and let him know on the air that you are encouraged by the ministry that God has put in his life of calm,

Christian Apologetics Research Ministry. That's his group. You can encourage him on what he's doing on exposing the

Churchill Wells, because you know what? Quite frankly, someone told us that only the three of us,

Matt Slick, Tony Miano and myself, are the only ones that seem to be dealing with this group on a theological note.

A lot of people are starting to love the Churchill Wells because they're open air preachers. They have a tendency to want to take their side because other open air preachers are seeing the way people are reacting to their preaching.

I don't think there's really, listening to some of their preaching and having preached with some of these guys, I don't know that it's really the shock and awe type stuff.

Some of them are really caring in their preaching. It's not that it's the shock and awe type, it's just some people hate preaching.

When you move to a small town, they're going to get upset. We're on the forefront, really, of trying to deal with it theologically.

We're going to come under fire. Matt's already come under fire. Encourage him with what he's doing there.

He is the brother of Encouragement for this week. You can mention to him, you can let him know why you're encouraging him.

Say, hey, I heard about you on the Striving for Eternity Academy, or you could say you're the Striving for Eternity Academy's brother of Encouragement this week.

Even if it's months down the road, you can call him up and say, hey, just heard about it and we just want to be encouraged by you.

His show is going to be, and you can go to karm .org and look at the radio times, it's there. He's got a link for the radio, but it's live.

It's going to be 5 to 7 Eastern Time, and there's the call -in number. He also has a Skype number. If you go to the website, you can find a

Skype number under the radio link. He's the person to encourage this week.

Still tag him on Facebook. He won't mind that. You can encourage him by going to Karm.

You may start listening to his radio program on a daily basis and start just seeing what's going on.

He's got a lot that he could teach you, a lot of different topics, a lot of different things. Don't agree with everything. He doesn't agree with everything that I believe, but that's okay.

We still both love one another and care for one another, and that's the way we should be as Christians, right? Also, let you know,

Jersey Fire is coming up. July will be here quick, so you can register for that at JerseyFire .org.

Until next week, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.