February 18, 2025 Show with John Marshall Otis on “When Heaven Seems Silent: Trusting in God’s Unfailing Promises”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors and Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse 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 two hours and we hope to hear from you the listener with your own.

Questions. And now here's your host Chris Arnzen. 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 Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 18th day of February 2025.

Before I introduce my guest and our topic for the day, I want to remind our listeners not only to continue praying for my sister Mary who is in her 70s and had her leg amputated last week. She is recovering as I've mentioned on the air and in social media at a rehabilitation facility learning how to spend the rest of her life with one leg.

So please continue to pray for her not only physically but mentally and spiritually and that the Lord would use this trial in her life to draw her closer to himself. Also I added to that prayer request something that's more urgent.

Yesterday I announced this for the first time on the show I believe. Yes I did announce it yesterday for the first time because I only found out the day before which was Sunday. My brother who has been living for years in a local nursing home ever since he was paralyzed on the entire left side of his body after a massive stroke.

He was rushed to the hospital from his nursing home because of dangerously low oxygen levels and he has also has an aspiration problem where debris collects in his lungs which increase radically increases the chances of getting pneumonia which could be fatal.

Well my brother is on a ventilator right now. He is sedated and unconscious. He was in a critical condition but I was told he has since been brought to a stable condition and they told me they were going to contact me the moment anything negative, if anything negative, were to develop.

So I hope I don't get a call even during this program today because I'm going to have to take it even if even if briefly to return later to the live discussion. But please pray for my brother Andy Arnzen also in his 70s and that this trial would also be used in his life to draw him closer to the Lord.

My brother has made a profession of faith for decades but it's always been suspect. The credibility of his his profession never has sat well with me due to the way that before he was hospitalized the way that he was living while at the same time professing to be a born-again believer.

So please pray that the Lord does a genuine work of salvation in his heart and that I would see the fruits of that salvation and be able to rest in the knowledge that no matter what happens to him, if the Lord were to take him, that he would be in eternity with Christ.

So I appreciate those prayers and of course continue to pray for me as I continue to recuperate from congestive heart failure. Right now I am feeling no symptoms whatsoever, no longer out of breath easily as I was.

My appetite that had been destroyed by the congestive heart failure, almost completely removing my desire to eat, is gone. I'm eating normally now and so I have everything to be thrilled about in this regard.

But my blood tests are not a hundred percent where they should be. I have a blood clot in my heart and in my lung and the medication I'm on is supposed to dissolve these clots and my doctor is not a hundred percent pleased with the blood tests.

So he keeps adjusting the dosages of medications I'm taking. So please pray that I hear a much better praise report the next time I'm in his office and that we are on the right track with the medication or that the Lord just miraculously heals me.

But I am thrilled to have an old friend of mine on the program. I've been interviewing this dear brother ever since I launched Iron Sharpens Iron Radio in 2005 out of WNYG Radio in West Babylon, Long Island, New York.

His name is Dr. John M. Otis and he has been a very important friend in my life. I will never forget that he and his late wife Christine made a very long drive to visit me in Boone, North Carolina when I was graduating, as they called it, from an alcohol rehab ministry that I had checked myself into during a backslidden state in my life when I was sadly, after 18 years of sobriety, had returned to habitual and scandalous levels of drunkenness.

And thank God I have never even had an urge to drink ever since leaving that wonderful ministry in Boone, North Carolina. Well, John and his lovely late wife Christine made the trip there to be present.

The only people that I know personally that were there, other than those that I got to know while being there, and that will always occupy a big place in my heart for this dear brother in Christ. He is a retired pastor and he's also a published author and he is now involved in an open-air evangelism ministry called Triumphant Ministries, and it's primarily going to be taking place on the campus of the University of Georgia in Athens.

And today we're going to be talking about the theme of John's new book, When Heaven Seems Silent, Trusting in God's Unfailing Promises. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron.

Trippin' Zion Radio, John Otis. It is always great to be on your program, Chris. I will give a caveat. I'm not technically a doctor unless you converted a doctor to me just a few minutes ago. Well, as soon as those words.

Came out of my mouth, I realized I don't think John's a doctor. I haven't written enough books to be a doctor, but technically, yes. Well, that shows you the high esteem with which I hold you, because you're certainly brilliant enough to be the recipient of a PhD or other doctorate, and I'm honored to know you and to have benefited richly from your own knowledge and wisdom and ministry.

Well, first of all, before we get into the theme, tell us more about your new open-air evangelism ministry, Triumphant.

Ministries. Well, for the last several years, even before the Lord took my precious wife to glory, I began to pray and to realize in the 40-some years of my ministry, pastoral ministry, and in writing quite a few books where you can reach people, the Lord was burdened me with the fact I've never really devoted myself to reaching those who reside in darkness and in the shadow of death, and that burden continued to grow, and I began to pray, Lord, I'm 73 years of age, and I said, I don't know how many years that you have ordained for me on this earth, but I want to devote the rest of my life, whatever those years, to being used of you to be a fisher of men, to bring those out of darkness into light, to be that mechanism to the preaching of the gospel, and after my wife died in May of this past year, 2024, that burden began to grow even more so, and so I began to, the Lord saved me in a campus ministry when I was 18 years of age, and then I was nurtured in a parish church organization called the Navigators for four years that God eventually used in my life, and so I've been attracted, I realized that college students are very malleable, they can be easily manipulated, as we can bear testimony on our college campuses today, so there's a great need, and at that period of life, you make decisions oftentimes that will direct you the rest of your life as a vocation or whatever, future spouse and that, so the Lord has laid on my heart to primarily, maybe not exclusively on that particular campus, but primarily on that campus, so I just wanted to dedicate myself to that.

We are just beginning this, and I have scouted out the campus, and we're places that you can do that, where students are gathered, so we're looking, we're excited about it. I've got a group of godly Christian men and women who said they will pray for me, and I have always indicated I'm a firm believer in the power of prayer, and let me just mention in that regard, one passage that changed my whole view years ago, perhaps on missions, is Romans chapter 15, verse 30, where Paul's writing there, and he says, I urge you, brethren, to pray, to strive together with me in your prayers to God for me, and he was getting ready to go to Jerusalem, and he was longing to come to Rome, and we can see the edge of that prayer.

He will go to Jerusalem, he will be arrested by the Romans who scared his life, and he'll petition to go to Caesar, since he was a Roman citizen, and he'll end up going to Rome in a way that he had never imagined, but God was orchestrating that whole thing, because we know from the Scriptures he was under house arrest for at least two years, and can you imagine what would be the impact of those Roman soldiers who had close contact with the Apostle Paul?

Well, we know from Philippians chapter 1 that Paul says the gospel has even reached the household of Caesar. So God, they answered those prayers, so I'm excited about what the Lord has in mind, and I believe that I'm in the process.

I've got several men. I can always use benefactors to help in this ministry, and so those who feel a letter of the Lord to want to contribute to this ministry would be more than welcome, but I'm excited about the Lord's prospects.

I believe that the Lord, if we believe in him to do great things, he will do so. Let me just mention in that regard to evangelism, my favorite preacher probably in history is George Whitefield, which you're probably familiar with as well.

Oh yeah. I came to the Doctrines of Grace.

When I was a new believer. I was vehemently opposed to everything I was hearing about Calvinism in this Reformed Baptist Church where I had newly become a member, and they agreed to tolerate me. They didn't say it that way, but they welcomed me joyfully into membership as long as I had promised that I wouldn't seek to undermine the teaching there, and that I was willing to be patient and God-willing grow in my understanding of the Scriptures in these areas.

Someone in the church, Nigel Stone from England, who's now in heaven, he approached me and said, I understand you're having difficulty understanding the doctrines of sovereign grace and election. Well, read this.

And he gave me a booklet, George Whitefield's Letter to John Wesley on Election, published by Chapel Library. I read it. My first reaction was, oh no, this is true, but I still hate it. But then, I think less than two months, I fell in love, madly in love with these doctrines, and have been joyfully proclaiming them ever since.

But I didn't even know who George Whitefield was at the time, so it wasn't George Whitefield that really the Lord used to convert me. It was the Scriptures that Whitefield presented to John Wesley, and I didn't know who John Wesley was either at that time.

But I later would do research on Whitefield and read more of what he wrote and more of what people wrote about him, like Dallimore and so forth, and I just fell in love with him as a hero of the faith.

Yeah, the thing that I was going to mention there is, in terms of prayer, it was January the 1st, 1739, and there was a meeting with the Wesleys, and there's some, it was a Moravian love feast. Whitefield talks about how the presence of God was overwhelming that evening, and they prayed to 3 o 'clock in the morning, and he said, we went out believing that God was going to do something wonderful.

And then on February the 15th, 1739, in Bristol, England, he, on the coldest day known history of England, he began his open-air preaching, and the world has never been the same. But it began with prayer, and another, so I'm always in the process of getting people who've, well, we'll pray for you, John.

So I'm looking for people who take it very seriously. So that happens in Romans 15, 30, that I mentioned, that word there in English, strive together, the Greek word is sun agonizamai. It's a combination of the preposition sun, meaning with, and agonizamai, and I said, does anybody know an English word that's similar to agonize?

Agonize, that is actually, that Greek word is where our English word agonize comes from. It's a word used with prevailing. So what Paul, the reason that changed my life, Paul says, I want you to agonize together with me in your prayers to God for me, so that sometimes people, Chris, think, well, nothing else I can do but pray.

That's the most important thing to begin with, and what Paul is saying is those who agonize with him in his ministry are really and truly, on a spiritual sense, they're on that field of battle, helping those to come out of darkness into light.

So I've got people praying. I have a godly sister-in-law, Motis Brothers' wife, who is a great woman of faith. She says, John, I'm gonna believe that God is going to bring about a revival. I said, well, you keep praying that way.

And so, and another passage real quick, then we'll get into the topic of the day, is Isaiah 62, 6 and 7, where it says, On your walls, O Jerusalem, I'm appointed watchman, who cry all day and all night, and you who remind the Lord, give yourselves no rest and give him, that is God, no rest until he makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth.

And he talked about persevering a prayer. What God is saying, he's inviting us, see if you can wear me out by praying for the victory on earth. So I want people who will say, we will pray for you, John.

And I believe as they pray, we're going to.

See wonderful things happen. Yeah, my pastor, Simon O'Maney, at Trinity Reform Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, just preached recently on persevering in prayer. But the common thing that we may hear from our brethren who do not share our Reformed faith, if they were hearing you today, they might say something like, well, this guy certainly doesn't sound like a Calvinist.

But this comes from a false and slanderous stereotype of what Calvinism actually is and what it always has been in its authentic form, which is another thing proven by the fact of the very ministry that you have launched, the Triumphant Ministries, this open-air evangelism ministry.

There are who knows how many countless deceived people who just don't believe Calvinists are ever engaged in that kind of thing. And of course, many Calvinists aren't, but many Arminians aren't either.

There are multitudes of Arminians or non-Calvinists who, through sheer laziness or apprehension and fear of being embarrassed or being hated, do not involve themselves in evangelism. So for them to point the finger at Reformed folk as if we corner the market on apathy and evangelism is ridiculous.

But we should have every more reason to be zealous in evangelism, because we know for certain that the Word of God shall not return void, and we know that He has an elect people out there. His sheep will hear His voice, because He knows them, and they will follow Him.

We know that as a fact, a promised fact.

You know, one of the great verses in the Scripture that I've always referred to is Acts 13, 48, when Paul told the apostate Jews, all right, we're leaving you, we're going to go to the Gentiles, who gladly were willing there in Acts 13 to hear him preach.

Paul says, as many as were ordained to eternal life believed. And the gospel—Whitfield referred to himself, even though he stayed in the Church of England, he referred to himself as a Calvinistic Methodist, and as you said, it was clearly in his preaching.

One of my favorite heroes in the 19th century in America is Daniel Baker. I don't know if you're familiar with him. There's a wonderful book, a biography by his son. It's partly biographical, autobiographical.

He was from the mid -19th century. He was a tremendous preacher, tremendous evangelist as well, and he was a.

Thoroughgoing Calvinist. I've got to look him up, because I've never heard of him.

Daniel Baker. And look him up. One of the greatest revivals at the College of New Jersey happened. I won't go into that. It'll thrill you. The book, I think, is Making Hearts Glad. I think something like that.

You got to read that book, Chris. It's magnificent. Did the College of New Jersey eventually become Princeton? Yes. Okay. But one of the great revivals in American history began—and I'll just say this briefly—by the time he was a student there, he said there was about 130 students.

He said that there was only four of us that took the faith seriously, and they were praying for their student body for a year. And in this book, he says, we were about to throw in the towel because nothing was happening.

Wow. And then in 1814, President James Madison called for a national day of fasting and repentance, because they were right in the midst of the War of 1812. And so they called the classes off that day, so Baker and his buddies said, well, let's go talk to our students.

And boom! That's when it happened. One notable student came to Christ, and it led to another and to another. The president of the college says it was an amazing thing. Baker says, I believe that one-third of the student body was soundly converted, and all the preachers that came out of it.

And then he mentioned that the British press said that the greatest divine living was at the College of New Jersey. That got my interest up, so I did some research, and I believe about 99 %—Charles Hodge.

You know Charles Hodge? Yes. Systematic theology. He was there during that time, and I believe that's who that greatest divine—so it started in the prayer meeting, and it led to one of the great revival stories in American history.

And Baker, I'm telling him a familiar art. So, yeah. Praise God. I want to go to my first.

Commercial break right now before we dive into the actual theme at hand, which is the theme of your new book, When Heaven Seems Silent—Trusting in God's Unfailing Promises. And if anybody has any questions, you can submit them to ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

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

And this is the kind of topic that lends itself to personal and private questions because the book, obviously, as the title reveals, is an effort to bring encouragement and comfort to those agonizing over people in all kinds of trials in life, coming to the wrong conclusion that God does not hear them because heaven seems silent.

And so, obviously, there may be folks out there with private questions and you want to remain anonymous. That is completely fine. But if it's just a general question on what the Scriptures have to say about this issue, please give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence.

And by the way, I am going to email to you, John, so you can have it during the break, a question that has already come in from Anthony in Hoshton, Georgia. It is so long of a question that I thought that it might be best for you to have it in writing right in front of you.

So I'm going to email this to you, and you can look it over during the station break.

By the way, Hoshton is six miles from me. Really? Well, that may be why this.

Listener wants to be involved in your open-air evangelism ministry. How did you pronounce it? Because I've been calling it Hoshton for years, and nobody's.

Corrected me. They pronounce it Hoshton, like hush. Hoshton. Hoshton. Okay, well, now I know.

And Anthony, you have never corrected me, so shame on you. But he's been listening to this program and has submitted many questions over the years. And so I'm going to be sending this to you. Also, I want to give everybody listening, since I mentioned the Christian addiction recovery ministry, since I mentioned that as a part of my own testimony of coming to sobriety, I want to make sure that our listeners know the name of that wonderful ministry.

It is Hebron Colony, and the website is hebroncolony .org. It's in Boone, North Carolina, and it is absolutely free of charge. It's the oldest continuously running addiction recovery ministry for men in the United States, and I have nothing but praise reports about that wonderful place.

And they do have a sister ministry in Santee, South Carolina, for women called Grace Home, but you can find out about both of those ministries at hebroncolony .org, h-e-b-r-o-n-colony .org. So, once again, if you have a question for John Otis, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Give us your first name at least, city and state of residence, and country of residence, if you live outside the USA, and you may remain anonymous for personal and private questions. Now we're going to hear a word from our newest sponsor of Iron Trumpets Iron Radio, Lebanon Federal.

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We can be reached at securecommgroup .com. That's securecommgroup .com. But today, I want to introduce you to my senior pastor, Doug McMasters of New High Park Baptist.

Church on Long Island. Doug McMasters here, former director of pastoral correspondence at Grace to You, the radio ministry of John MacArthur. In the film Chariots of Fire, Olympic gold medalist runner Eric Liddell remarked that he felt God's pleasure when he ran.

He knew his efforts sprang from the gifts and calling of God. I sensed that same God-given pleasure when ministering the Word and helping others gain a deeper knowledge and love for God. That love starts with the wonderful news that the Lord Jesus Christ is a Savior who died for sinners and that God forgives all who come to him in repentance, trusting solely in Christ to deliver them.

I would be delighted to have the honor and privilege of ministering to you if you live in the Long Island area or Queens or Brooklyn or the Bronx in New York City. For details on New High Park Baptist Church, visit nhpbc .com.

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Royaldiadem .com,. Royaldiadem .com, and do not forget to mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with John Otis, an old friend of mine who is a retired pastor, and he is also a published author, and who has just launched an open-air evangelism ministry called Triumphant Ministries, which is primarily going to be taking place on the campus of the University of Georgia in Athens.

And if you have a question about his book, When Heaven Seems Silent, Trusting in God's Unfailing Promises, a very important word there I looked up, you can send in the email to chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence, and you may remain anonymous if the question is personal and private. Before we go to Anthony and Huston George's, did I say it right?

Huston? That's pretty close. But not quite right. Okay, well anyway, before we go to Anthony's question, Anthony and Huston Georgia, I'd like you to go into the background of this book and what were the compelling factors that led you to write it.

I'm wondering if it had anything to do with the illness of your precious late wife, Christine. Well, a.

Major part of the reason for the book is that back in 2022, my wife was was fine, and she all of a sudden began to experience leg issues that began to get worse and worse, and went to doctors, and no one could could figure out what was going on.

This went on for about eight or nine months. After 14 MRIs, two neurologists, two neurosurgeons, no one could ever figure out, we don't know why you can't, you're having difficulty walking. She wound up in a wheelchair, tried rehab, and then in October of 2023, we were praying, and simultaneously, let me just mention, with her illness, I began to experience, for many years, the work that I've been engaged in.

I've often had to do supplement, like tent making, but not tents like Paul, but painting houses, and that has been a major part of my income for my family for many years. Well, all of a sudden, I went from the best year ever in 35 years to a seven-month lull, which I cannot explain.

I did nothing different. So here my wife ends up in a wheelchair. I'm experiencing a real downturn of my painting business, and then simultaneous with that, and I don't need to go into the detail, some ministerial issues that basically broke my heart, and so all of this was coming at the same time, and my wife and I, we felt like Job, but as nothing of the magnitude, of course, of Job, but it was one successive affliction upon another, and then in January of this past year, 2024, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and everything we tried to do, we had some alternative ways to try to deal with that.

It was very aggressive, and then the Lord took her in the day before my birthday, my 73rd birthday, the day after Mother's Day, and took her to glory, and Chris, the Lord was very gracious to us, and my wife has always been a great godly woman, greatly instrumental in my ministry.

She's the one that learned to typeset professional back in the early 2000s. She's the one that typeset all my books. She's the one that created all my websites for triumphal publications and the Good News Bible series that we have going, and she was the one that figured out how to take these free Bible courses online to the world.

So, she did all of that, and back in October, before she was diagnosed with cancer, and we always have devotions, and one day, I said to her, I said, my dear, one of the precious verses in all of Scripture is Romans 828.

All things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose. I said, my dear, I wish I could tell you what the good is going to come from all of this, but I can't because I don't know.

But I will tell you this, there is a great good coming because God has promised it, and that's all we need to know. And she had this big smile on her face and nodded in agreement. Chris, anybody? Yeah, she was, it bothered her of all these afflictions, but she never complained spiritually, okay?

Anybody that came to visit us, and the pastor of our church, he was a wonderful pastor, Chris Strevel, may have been on your program before, but he said, if you go see Christine Otis, you're always going to find a smiling face.

And that was true. Godly women that came over to visit her, one elder's wife says, we didn't know what, after she was diagnosed with cancer, we didn't know what condition we were going to find her, if she was going to be upset.

He said, that's not what we saw. We saw a great woman of faith who trusted in the Lord. And so after the Lord took her, I thought, I didn't complain either. I understood. And one of the things about afflictions, Chris, is that it's not a matter of if they're going to come, it's just when they're going to come.

And we're all going to experience something, just as you've experienced with your brother and your sister and others. And with this, we got to recognize that God is the ultimate source. If we really understand the sovereignty of God, then he's brought these things.

He's brought them into our lives for a purpose. And so there's a great passage, which is the thesis of my book. And that passage is in 2 Corinthians 1, verses 3 through 5. It says, Bless me, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all of our afflictions, so that we will be able to comfort others in all of their afflictions with the comfort by which we have been comforted.

And so it is on that basis that the Lord saw us through this. We gained the victory in the sense that we knew that God was behind all of it. It was for his glory. It was for our benefit. It was to build character in us.

And if I ever, I told the pastor one day, I said, if I ever catch myself wanting to complain about something, I immediately stop myself and say, hold on, John can't complain. Because if I complain, who am I really complaining against?

A sovereign God. And who am I to complain against my Lord? So that puts me back in place real fast. And so in the sense that we know there are a lot of people that go through things like this, and they have a real difficult time handling it.

And we want to be able to convey in this book, how you can have the victory. You know, you can have the victory. Go ahead.

Well, you could finish your thought, if you'd like.

Well, I gave you the main thesis, and that the victory ultimately is in the subtitle, trusting in God's unfailing promises. And when we believe the Word of God at face value, and you look at all the promises that are even associated with affliction, then we come to understand God's purpose in it.

And when you trust in His promises, you can get through any affliction. I mean, any affliction. And that's what we want to convey, those biblical principles.

I just recently got the book, so I haven't had time to read it. But I'm assuming you did not delve heavily, or perhaps at all, into the heresies of the Word of Faith movement. But I think that it is important to bring up, because it is such a rampant heresy, where people are being taught that if your faith is strong enough, you will have the prayers of your heart answered in the way that you want them to be answered, no matter what.

And if they aren't answered, if you're not healed physically, and if you're not restored financially and enriched financially, it's because you have something lacking within your faith. I can even remember when I worked for a Salem media affiliate, WMCA, in New York.

I was there for 15 years as an account executive, and there was a couple, Clinton and Sarah Utterbach, who were Word of Faith heretics on the show, on the station. And the aforementioned Nigel Stone, that British gentleman who gave me the booklet, George Whitfield's letter to John Wesley in election, he used to call them the UtterRots, you know, instead of the UtterBox.

But I can remember Sarah Utterbach having the audacity to state that when Job, after having all the calamities that God allowed Satan to bring into his life, the loss of not only property, but also the boils and all these calamities, the loss of children, the loss of everything, and then having his wife curse him, why don't you just curse God and die?

When Job said, the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord, Sarah Utterbach said, now that was heresy. And in fact, which is insane, because the Scripture is saying, and well, this Job did not sin.