Machen Quiz #3

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

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you. 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 King.

Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. I think we have a slogan, �Always Biblical, Always Provocative, Always in that Order but I don�t think we always do it.

That�s why we always need a mediator, period.

We always need a mediator.

New paragraph, �Pastor Steve, welcome to No Compromise Radio. Thank you very much. I didn�t want anybody to think that I meant you were the mediator. I wouldn�t want to be the mediator.

Because you�d need a mediator. It�s like, if anybody ever says, and it happens like once a decade, �Steve, you�re my hero I always go, �Aim higher, get another hero.

There was a lady that worked at a retail store here in town, and she visited one day. I think her background was more like vineyard kind of church and stuff like that, very feelings-oriented. I preached a sermon.

She greeted me at the door. I said, �Welcome. Good to have you. Long time no see. I�ve been into the store lately. She said to me, �You�re the smartest man I�ve ever met. I thought to myself, I just smile, but I thought, A, you don�t get out much, and B, that�s not the answer that I was looking for when I preached a sermon, that I look smart.

That�s actually bad preaching. Of course, it might have been bad preaching, but I�m not trying to tell people how much I know.

I�m going to blow you away today with my knowledge. Stand by.

Well, I was going to be getting into the differences between the eminent and economic trinity, and why we can still have impassibility and simplicity. Some people don�t like eminent trinity talk and economic trinity talk, because like Boltman or somebody would say, �Well, that�s two trinities and then they use missions instead and other things.

It�s been quite fascinating.

And now that thousands of radios across the world are being shut off.

No, you should get the book, The Trinity, by Scott Swain, and then if you want to up it a little bit, you can get Simply Trinity by Matthew Barrett.

I have Swain�s book on my counter, and I have Barrett on my Kindle, and I�ve begun, I don�t know how far I�m into that, 30, 40 pages, I don�t know.

Okay. And then I talked to my son the other day, and he went and bought, I don�t know, eight books on the trinity, because like you, he wants to make sure he�s got this down. And so in light of Luke�s recommendation, I bought De Trinitate or whatever by Augustine.

He said it�s good. Is it in Latin? Well, the title is still. When I taught at the conference for John Tucker at the Community Bible Church Pillars Conference, I asked on Friday and Saturday for a whiteboard.

Sunday, you know, no dice for preaching. But I had the whiteboard, and I said, I just want to write down a couple Latin words in honor of R .C. Sproul. So I wrote down �duplex gratia. And I got to see R .C., well, several times, but one for a class where he had the chalkboard out, and I got to see him write in Latin.

It was quite the moving experience. Did you like think about stealing the chalkboard? Tell the truth.

No, I just stole the chalk. So Steve, we�re dealing with Machen. And of course, when I think of what is faith in the book that Machen wrote, Christianity and liberalism, something about man, what is man or the doctrine of man.

There's some sermons in a little Banner of Truth book called The Transcendence of God. We would encourage people to read Machen. D .G. Hart wrote a great biography on Machen, as well as Ned Stonehouse.

I was going to call him Stone Ned House, because that's how tired I am. They had like Stone Phillips. Well, like NBC, you know, 20, 20, 48 Hours guy or something, Stone somebody, Stone Ned House. He was a great professor.

He's one of the old school Westminster Seminary Philly guys. Anyway, we encourage you to read Machen because he's going to point you to the Lord Jesus. And in his new book, which is some radio addresses, Westminster Seminary Press put together Things Unseen.

Easy to read, encouraging, would be good to read to your kids to teach them kind of step by step from what the Bible teaches to the person and work of Jesus, etc. And we're up to chapters 12 and 13, the deity of Christ.

And we're going through a quiz. So today is quiz number three, Pastor Steve. But before we do that, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you very much. I'd ask you if anything's new, but I'd ask you that twice in the last hour.

And you gave me the kind of coolie look. There's a certain look that I know you give sometimes. That's not the look. I have to tell you, one of the funniest things, and of course, you know, it's just dumb, but I was talking about common errors of sanctification.

And what are some of the common errors, pietism, moralism, etc. And then I talked about kind of getting zapped, right? And so I looked up sociologists, so-and-so first coined it as slain in the spirit and what would happen and this energy that would go through you.

I played drowning pools, let the bodies hit the floor. And so that's a theme song for slain in the spirit. Have you ever been somebody tried to slay you in the spirit or have you been slain in the spirit?

Allegedly? No, never.

I mean, I've seen it. I was there when it happened, but not me.

No. I've never been slain in the spirit, although they tried to push my mom down once and she was resolute with her forehead and pushed back against the guy. So then he finally went to the next guy or next gal and pushed her or him over while my mom stood unannoyedly by herself.

The Deity of Christ and the Need for a Mediator

All right, we're talking about the deity of Christ and we hope you're encouraged to not only read Machen, but also rejoice that you have a risen Savior who is the God-man, truly and perfectly. Number nine on the quiz, because we covered one through three two times ago, we covered four through eight last time, and now we're on question nine, a quiz that Pastor Steve made up to get us to think about Jesus.

It is not wrong to think of all men and women as children of God. So this is like the Octoarder Creed. It's a good question, but maybe formed like in the negative. It is not wrong, so that means it's right.

It is right to think of all men and women as the children of God. That's how I'd have to do it, so that I'd have to say, hmm, fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, are all children really the children of God?

I say false. You would be correct.

All right. And there was a reason I wrote that, of course there was, because he was talking about Jesus having a special relation to the Father, right? Because even when he tells Mary Magdalene in John chapter 20 that, you know, tell my brothers that I'm going to ascend to my God or your God and my God, right?

And, you know, many commentators say, well, why doesn't he just say, or he could say, I'm going to ascend to our Father, you know, our Father. And why does he differentiate there? And the reason is because there's a quantum leap between the sonship of Jesus and the sonship that we have, because our sonship or daughtership is entirely dependent upon Jesus Christ.

We are only sons and daughters of God in the truest sense, because we are in Christ. We are adopted because of him. You know, we are granted co-heir status because of his finished work, not because of anything we do or because of our inherent value.

And in fact, you know, if we talk about a universal kind of brotherhood of mankind or sisterhood, brother and sisterhood of mankind, what we're really doing is we're engaging in anti-biblical thought, because there are two sorts of children in the world.

There are the children of God who are children of God by virtue of being adopted in through Christ. And then there are the children of Satan.

And that's all there is. Sorry. Well, you're the one preaching through John. And as you were talking, my mind went to where your mind was going. And Jesus said, I speak of what I have seen with my father, John 8, and you do what you have heard from your father.

Everybody's got a father. Yeah, everybody has one. There are no orphans in this world in terms of spiritual orphan. Nope. They answered, Abraham is our father. Jesus said to them, if you were Abraham's children, you would be doing the works Abraham did.

But now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did. You are doing the works your father did. They said to him, we were not born of sexual immorality.

We have one father, even God. Jesus said to them, if God were your father, you would love me. For I came from God and I am here. I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say?

It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father, the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires.

And it's one of the great lies out there that people can be morally neutral, that they're somehow unaffiliated. Exactly what you said. You know, you're either a child of Satan, and I don't care how nice you are.

You know, you could be this wonderful little old lady who gives apple pie to all the kids in the neighborhood. Great. That doesn't change your spiritual nature.

You could do more good works than Christians do. Yes. You could be more... I mean, I just was riding my bicycle on Sunday or Saturday and rode past a friend and he's out there picking up paper with his son that people discard from their cars.

And I said, what's the thing that you pick up the most these days? Masks? And he said, masks and little nip bottles where they have like an ounce or two of alcohol and people drink them around the corner, he said, and throw them out.

Now he's out there picking stuff up and I'm out of my bike, but that doesn't mean that his father is my father. Right. Right. And remember what second Timothy chapter two says, Steve, about slaves to do things.

It says, God may grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth. He's talking about unbelievers that they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil after being captured by him, Satan, to do his Satan's will.

You think you're free, but you're a pawn. Everybody's got a father.

No spiritual orphans in this world. Well, or even Romans six, you know, your will is either enslaved to Satan or it's enslaved to Christ. You know, and so this idea, and that was my initial point was just this idea of some sort of moral neutrality or not being a son or daughter of God, but also not being a son or daughter of Satan.

Wrong. Right. Yeah. Good. You know, that legacy standard Bible?

Yeah. We got free copies of. I think I actually gave you a copy. Yeah, you did. They first were going to call it the LSB. They were going to call it the literal slave Bible because they translate slave literally.

They were not. That's a big fat fib. True or false? False. Number 10, Jesus never referred to our father. And see, that's kind of a tricky question. It is a tricky question because you think about the Lord's prayer and you think about.

Okay. Now, see, look at how I worded it there because I am somewhat careful. Never referred to our father in quotation marks. Right. Yes, he did. Right. Well, he did refer to it. That's all it says, isn't it?

Well, come on. Okay, so it's true. See, I got one over on the Monday guy.

Yeah, well, he did refer to our father in terms of he said it, this is how you guys should pray. That's exactly right, yeah. And we also know that he doesn't pray exactly that way either because he would never confess his sins, right?

That's exactly right, yeah.

That was the point, you know, so thanks for stumbling into that one.

Okay, well, I'm going to be careful on the next one.

If I could fool myself on one, maybe I could fool you too. It's one to one. Fool yourself on your own quiz, that's lame.

The fool has said in his heart, there's our father references. Number 11. Hey, I read them, you answer. True or false? These are all true and false. Jesus was so humble, he never presented himself as God.

In other words, he's so humble that he wouldn't say, well, I'm God and I'm to be worshiped and I'm the creator, redeemer, sustainer.

Humility hermeneutic. I mean, it's almost implied in that, that it's somehow bragging to say, by the way, I'm God. Well, if you are God, is it bragging? Right, and glorify myself? Yeah, it's not wrong.

So, that obviously is false. It has nothing to do with humility. I mean, it's just a false premise.

That's the way I was looking at it. Do you think, Steve, when the Lord, of course, incarnate Jesus wants to give glory to the Father, and you would see his deference and you would see his desire that the Father would be glorified, he's obedient to point of death, even death on the cross, he humbled himself, right?

By the way, that's one of the reasons why I don't think there was this weird subordination in eternity past where he's humbling himself because he's the son. He doesn't have to humble himself in eternity past and then humble himself a little extra to take on humanity.

No, the incarnation was the humbling, right?

Well, how would we even know about some kind of eternal humbling, right?

But I need eternal humbling if I want my wife to always humbly submit to me. Oh, yeah, well, that's kind of loopy. That's kind of loopy. Henno, that's what that would be. I don't say henno on the show very much anymore.

Once you're off Twitter, what do you do?

You become more sanctified, I guess. That's true.

You don't have to get bothered by Tome Police and Gospel Coalition. Don't say anything bad about anybody else or whatever. Okay. He was humble. Yes. Right? But he didn't say to himself, well, I could never say that I'm God.

Obviously, we talked about that last show. Number 13, true or false? Doctrine... Wait, number 12? Oh, excuse me, 12. Number 12, people who believe in God, but don't accept Jesus, will go to heaven.

See, I notice how he's slowing down and reading this very carefully now.

Uh-huh, so people who believe in God, and you know what? Everybody does to some degree, right? If you think of Romans chapter one, they just suppress him. But don't believe that this God sent the Son.

I believe you, but I don't believe what you've done.

See, the Trinity helps. It does help. Well, it's kind of repeats question 18 in a sense. We're never getting there. Yeah, I know. Belief in the Trinity is necessary for salvation, which is at the heart of this question.

Can you believe in God salvificly without believing in Jesus?

The answer is no. We have a word for that kind of person, especially here in New England, historically, they would be called Unitarians, right? And I always remember S. Lewis Johnson, when he would talk about the Son on the throne in Revelation five, worthy is the Lamb, he would say, there are no Unitarians in heaven, because the core with Unitarianism is they deny the deity of Jesus.

There's so many heresies.

I know, I know. So little time. If they don't accept Jesus, they're not going to go to heaven. That's exactly right.

He's the only one, John 14, six, right?

Yeah, and you know what? I was reading 1 John the other day, because John is easy to read in Greek, and it's kind of fun, Steve, when you open up 1 John and you read verses one and two of chapter two, and here's this, you know, if we do sin, we have a mediator, and here's this great, righteous advocate that we have who makes propitiation for our sins.

Well, we're going to stand before the Father, the thrice holy God, without a mediator? I'm positive that God is present in hell, and what makes hell hell is the presence of God, and you have no mediator, right?

That was almost like a foretaste of judgment. There was judgment, but a foretaste of hell in Genesis 3 with the fall. You're standing before God naked. I need a mediator, right? How much worse it would be to be in hell with no mediator, and how great it will be to be in God's presence, heaven, with a mediator.

Amen, preach it. All right, so now we have number 13, right? Yes. Doctrine is less important than works. Doctrine is less important. Doctrine is more important than works, less important than works. What were you going at regarding Machen?

I could launch into orthopraxy, orthodoxy, but—.

I think if I just put it this way, I'll give you a book title and you can wax eloquent. Okay. Christianity and Liberalism.

Maybe we should write a book called Liberalism and Christianity, and we can make some more money off of it. Sure, why not? Well, I mean, doctrine, how am I going to know what to do? How would I know why to do it?

I would have a motivation to do something if I didn't know why I was going to do it. You know, just, you know, your dad's coming home from vacation, look busy. Just do good stuff. Yeah, what is a good thing?

Right, and see, that's the problem. Good according to whom? I mean, I can't even tell you how many people I see, unbelievers, talking about the good things that they do or good things other people do, and why don't Christians engage in those things?

Well, they're good according to you, right? According to your fallen standard, your depraved mind standard. Well, let's see what God thinks. And we're going to find out one day, and it's called Judgment Day.

And I don't think he's going to, you know, he may not share your optimism about those so-called good works.

Think about this related to the last question, Steve. I'm going to reject Jesus, the son that you sent, and that you say the first thing I need to do, the first work that needs to be done is to believe, if you want to put it in those terms.

But I'm going to bypass that, because I don't care what you say. I want to do some things, and I'm going to do things not because of Jesus, not for his honor or anything else. I'm just going to do things because I could care less about Jesus.

That'd be bad.

My good stuff is enough. And by the way, I know you weren't intending to say this. I'm going to say it just for the record. Faith is not a work.

So we just want to be clear there. Well, that's true. But in the New Testament, sometimes they'll say, you know, what are the works? The works of God is that you believe. Right.

Yeah. So we just want to be clear about that.

And even faith, we know, isn't technically salvific, because it receives, and it's an instrument. It's not a mean, it's not a cause.

Right. Our sub-theme is we're going to avoid heresy on this. Well, I was being biblicistic.

Yes, I know. And I knew that. Somebody at the church said to me today, this last Sunday, rather, what are we going to do about Massachusetts soon requiring vaccination to work at schools and all these things, you know, forced requirement for vaccination with no religious exemption, because Connecticut just did that.

And so this person said, what are we going to do? And I said, well, what do you mean by we? There was a bunch of people standing in the hallway. What are we going to do as a church? What are we going to do?

You and me, these people here. It was very interesting. And she's like, well, what are we as a church going to do about, we need to have religious exemptions for vaccinations.

We're going to build walls, establish a compound.

I said, well, if you think about a couple kingdoms, the sphere of the kingdom that we're talking about here is church regarding this church. We, church, are not going to do anything about that, because you can get a vaccination or not.

You can be exempt or not and still go to hell. And I've got some, a message that needs to be proclaimed because the gospel isn't in the stars. The gospel isn't going to give, you know, be given to us by Congress.

There's one place you can get it, not your conscience, but it's here.

If we're forced to get a vaccination and it kills us, then what? I think the answer is the same, glory, right?

You're waking up to bright lights one way or the other when you have an operation. Then I said to her, if we is you and me, oh, I'm not interested because I've got other things to do, but if you would like to protest, write letters, hire lawyers, you can do that all you like, because if you'd like to be in that particular sphere of the kingdom, two kingdoms go right ahead.

Yep. All right. All right. We're getting close, Steve, but we want doctrine. Yes, we do. Right. When people say there's no creed, but Jesus, that's a creed. Everybody's got a creed.

Doctrine is important. And doctrine informs how we live. Absolutely. And doctrine is what? Any truth that we know about God.

Yes. And what he said in his word. Number 14, the Sermon on the Mount has a lot of ethics in it. Ethical behavior where you, if the world would live out the Sermon on the Mount, it'd be a good place to live.

Why'd you write that in terms of major? Are you going to give me the whole Christianity liberalism thing? No, he wrote a whole chapter.

In fact, the chapter is about the Sermon on the Mount, and he wrote a whole chapter. And here he says, you know, unbelievers love that chapter because they're like, why don't you just live out the Sermon on the Mount?

And he goes, are you sure you love that chapter? And then he points out, you know, basically a few different points where Jesus is saying things. I mean, especially at the end, it comes to mind, you know, well, or even this part, he says, many will say to me on that day, right?

Did we not do this? And did we not do that? Well, what is on that day? Well, it's talking about judgment, judgment day. And he goes, what does it mean to depart from Jesus? Well, to depart from Jesus is to go to hell.

So, he's telling you flat out there. Well, who would be doing such a thing? Who would be judging on that day? Well, it's God. He's telling you he's God. So, are you sure you love the Sermon on the Mount so much?

You know, you don't think Jesus talks about being deity all that much. Well, here it is, you know, right in front of you.

Short of the divine beatitudes up front, if you look at the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, and you're an unbeliever, you ought to be thinking, maybe you don't understand first use of the law and third use.

And we would, of course, say, well, we as Christians, as sons, we don't want to look at a woman with lust, right? But you should be thinking first use of the law. He's given you ethical commands that must be met, chapter 548, because if you don't perfectly obey them, you are going to find yourself hearing those words that Pastor Steve just talked about, that Jesus said in Matthew 7.

So, anyway, the whole point of, and exactly the whole point of this whole thing is he went there and he also went, oh, at the end of the last beatitude, he says, Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

And he goes, who would even talk like that? How can you be blessed? When will you be blessed? And he's like, it can only be on judgment day. You know, so he does a few things like that to just make it clear that Jesus Christ is God.

He is the only means of salvation. And by belief in his life, death, and resurrection, you may be saved.

Steve, I have one word to summarize what you just said, quoting the Lord Jesus, stupendous. Thank you. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text. Please come and join us.

Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbcchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.