Problems That Cannot Be Solved (Part 1)

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, a ministry.

Mike Abendroth here. Wondering today, do we do daily shows? Do we do monthly shows?

Do we do weekly shows? Should we do two shows a day? That�d be a good question to ask or answer.

I can pretty much give you the answer right now. Info at nocompromiseradio .com

if you�d like to write us. I don�t know how many messages I get a week. The ones that are forwarded to me probably are about ten or less, five or six, eight or ten.

If I had to summarize the questions that are most often asked, number one would be, who do you think you are?

Just kidding. No, we get a few of those, but that�s not number one.

Number one would be, I�m thinking about leaving a church, what do you think?

And just in general, my response is, if it�s a Bible -teaching church, it�s a decent church, you better go talk to your pastor and work through those issues and be slow to move.

But if it�s not a good church, it�s seeker -sensitive, it�s man -centered, I just tell them, you know, you still might want to go say goodbye to the pastor, you know, you can do as you please, but I would leave.

After you wrap up your ministry responsibilities, I would leave. Who wants to stay at a man -centered church? I think it was

Godfrey who wrote the article, The Myth of Influence, years ago, and when you first begin to understand things, you want to try to use influence to change the church for the better.

But if you�re not in the leadership roles, it�s very, very difficult. If you want to order anything online,

Amazon has some of our books, and so does NoCompromiseRadio .com. A couple books are in the works.

I don�t know when they will get done. If you can edit and you don�t charge much, you let me know, info at NoCompromiseRadio .com.

I�ve got a Colossians book by S. Lewis Johnson that I�d like to put out. I don�t know if you knew this, but about one month ago, his wife

Martha died. Lewis first married Mary, and I believe she died in 1979, 1980, and then shortly after that he was remarried to Martha.

I never met Mary. I met Martha, though, and she just recently died outside of Dallas, Texas, and sorry to hear that.

But she�s not sorry, just kind of like R .C. Sproul, right? We are sorry for our loss, but R .C.

now understands completely what he used to teach us. I�m thankful for his ministry.

I was online the other day, and I was looking at problems, and I typed in �problems that can�t be solved.�

I thought that was kind of interesting. I don�t know why I really got there. In the old days, if you wanted an illustration or something to start off a sermon or a radio show,

I had illustration books and stuff like that. I�ve since thrown those away, but Google�s always good for information or just search on the internet.

The three cups problem is a mathematical puzzle, and it can�t be solved, so why try?

You start the problem with one cup upside down, the other two are right side up.

The objective is to turn all cups right side up in no more than six moves, and you have to turn over two cups at each move.

And did you know, you can never solve that. There are other problems that can�t be solved.

Fifteen puzzle that can�t be solved, these are different puzzles that are unsolvable.

Five -room puzzle, the MU puzzle, I don�t know about this one, but it was on the list there on the internet.

Mutilated chessboard problem, that would obviously be a problem. Seven bridges of Konigsberg, that�s a problem.

And so in the realms of physics and computer science and math, different type of analysis, you have problems and they can�t be solved.

The mathematical problems that can�t be solved, Hilbert�s problems, there are 23 problems that Hilbert proposed in 1900, unsolved.

Edmund Landau�s problems, 1912, four of them remain unsolved. Taniyama�s problems, it�s interesting, by a guy named

Taniyama, Utaka Tamiyama, 36 problems he proposed in 1955, unsolved.

Thurston�s 24 questions, Smalley�s problems, DARPA�s math challenges by Mr.

DARPA. No, DARPA is an acronym. And the one that�s probably the most popular is the

Millennium Prize problems, Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000 gave seven problems.

Six have yet to be solved, P versus NP, Birch and Swinerton dire conjecture, et cetera.

Problems that cannot humanly be solved. One man said there�s a problem that can�t be humanly solved, that problem is human stupidity, because the man said it knows no bounds.

Well, in the religious realm, not the math realm or the puzzle realm, but in the religious realm, the spiritual realm, there�s a problem that can�t humanly be solved, and that is how can someone be right with God?

How can a sinful person, a sinner, be acceptable in God�s eyes? How can a holy

God take a sinful person to His holy heaven? God is so holy, so pure, so without stain, and we, because of Adam and our own sin then consequently, have become very, very sinful, and so how does

God accept us? Is there any possible way, humanly, we could figure out how to get to heaven?

I mean, we have a hard enough time explaining why does warm water freeze faster than cold water.

If we can�t figure that out, how can we figure out how can a man go to heaven?

How can a woman have a permanent fellowship with God? I mean, after all, not even

George Danzig could solve that problem. Remember the movie Good Will Hunting, loosely based on this

PhD student, 1933, he shows up late to his stats class, and there are two problems written on the board.

He thought that was his homework, and so he apologized when he turned in that a little late, but he figured out the problems.

What he did not know was these were problems in statistics that had never been solved, and it wasn't homework, they were problems that could not be solved, and he solved them.

This is an unsolvable problem from the human perspective. Something has to be done from the outside to solve our problem.

How can man be forgiven? How can God stay just and justify sinners?

Albert Einstein said, �Problems cannot be solved with the same mindset that created them, and they can't be solved with the same mind either that created them.�

Yet the mind of God has solved the problem, the sin problem, and He has solved the problem not at the expense of any of His attributes.

And so this time of year we celebrate Christmas, and this celebration is the answer to solve the problem for sin.

The baby Jesus we celebrate at Christmas grew up, lived a perfect life, died on the cross, and was raised from the dead.

Why Jesus came to earth? To solve the problem, because we could not solve the problem.

God had to be the Savior, and to be our representative, God also had to be man, and to be our substitute, and to be able to withstand the wrath of God, He, the

Savior Jesus, also had to be God, and that is exactly who Jesus is. He's the

God -man, the Son of Man. The eternal God takes humanity upon Himself and is born from Mary to solve the sin problem.

That's good news, because left to ourselves, we are not going to be able to solve this problem.

It had to be given to us by revelation. That's what we call the Bible is revelation, God revealing

His mind to us. I'm not talking about the book of Revelation, the uncovering of Jesus, but here, the revealing of Jesus, because sin so ensnares, sin so enslaves, sin so captures and catches us.

We just get in the quagmire of sin. We need someone outside of the quicksand pit to rescue us, someone who never sinned, someone who's not enslaved to sin, and the good news is

Jesus was in fact that. The Bible is a wonderful book that documents and demonstrates this fact, that Jesus rescues sinners.

And if you look at the Bible big picture, you will notice that the Holy Scriptures, the 66 books of the

Bible, contain the good news that Jesus, the Messiah, saves sinners, the redemption of mankind by the

God -man, Jesus Christ. It's incredibly good news by a credible man, the

God -man, Jesus. And when you look at the Bible, I don't mean at the micro level,

I don't mean at the atomistic level, I don't mean every single word of every single verse, because after all, we have some proverbs, but overall, the overarching theme of the

Bible is the Messiah, Jesus Christ. Jesus, of course, talking about the Old Testament, but it's very easy to talk about the

New Testament as testifying to Jesus, Jesus said in John 5, you search the

Scriptures because you think in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life,

John 5, verses 39 and 40. At least of the overarching umbrella type of thinking,

Jesus is the one who is the theme of Scriptures. They bear witness to Jesus.

Later on, Jesus says in Luke 24, does he not, O foolish ones and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken?

Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?

And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

And so these things that are concerning me here in the Old Testament, we don't know how many are to what degree, but certainly he is there in the

Old Testament, testified to Jesus. Luke 24 goes on.

These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets in the

Psalms must be fulfilled. He then opened their minds to understand the Scriptures and said to them, thus it is written that the

Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.

You are witnesses of these things, and behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you, but stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.

The Old Testament is about Jesus. It is not primarily about anyone else.

Sometimes we think it is, though. We look at the Bible and it's about character studies.

The problem is that's not the good news that we need. We need good news about Jesus saving sinners. If you look for just characters in the

Old Testament and you do a character study on David, well, eventually you figure out things about David's life that you don't want to emulate, and you could maybe even turn it into, well, don't do what

David does when he's sinning and do what David does when he's righteous. Don't do what

Abraham does when he's sinning. Hey, this is Sarah. She's not my wife. She's my sister.

You can have her. But when he does something good, he's trusting in God and the promises of God, Genesis 12, then you should emulate him.

Is that what the Old Testament is about? Is the Bible about character studies? Does it not say in 1

Peter 1 concerning the salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the

Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories.

When you look at this passage here, the Old Testament is speaking about Christ. He is the main character.

If you're going to take the Bible and say, well, we're going to make it a character study, do you even need the

Bible? Can't you find another book to do character studies on? The Koran maybe, the Book of Mormon, some other book if it's going to be biographical preaching.

If it's just going to be dare to be a Daniel or I guess negatively don't be a Jezebel and don't be a

Nabal, don't be an Ahaz, but be like Noah, then you can use other books.

If you're going to just say, you know, Hannah taught us to pray for a child, then we should pray.

Joseph trusted, so we should trust. David defeated a Goliath, and so we've got Goliath in our lives, and Nehemiah is about leadership.

One man said, appealing to the normative pronouncements of Scripture, I could as well preach on the death of Prince William I in this exemplary manner as I could on the death of Jacob.

I could as well hold up Napoleon as a deterrent example, as Nebuchadnezzar, because in both cases the normativity must be carried in from elsewhere.

I guess you don't even need a book to do character kind of studies. You could say, like on one of the

NoCo videos we've done, be like Mike, I'm almost always on time.

Not always, but almost always on time. Almost always get up in the morning and read my Bible, and you should be punctual, and you should read your

Bible. I mean, is that what the Bible's about like that? That's not going to be good news, because inevitably you'll see things in me and David and Noah and every other person, male or female, that you would know is not perfect.

That's not good news. They haven't solved the problem of sin, right?

Those people can't solve the problem of sin, and you look at the Bible and you think, you know what? What's the Old Testament about?

It's about solving the sin problem. What do we turn it into sometimes?

Not just character studies, but into kind of psychology. What was Saul, King Saul, mental stability, our lack thereof, about?

Did we see stubbornness and obstinate tendencies in Naaman the leper? Let's take an analysis of Mary's grief as she sees her son crucified on the cross.

Maybe Peter, he flip -flops a lot, and maybe he's schizophrenic. When you do that, then the

Scriptures are second place to how smart the preacher is. Should I not go to the passage in the

Old Testament, Genesis 22, and every pastor and preacher should come up with the same, if they're doing it biblically, every pastor and preacher should come up with the same essential message,

Genesis 22? If there are 15 different emphasis, then 14 of them, at least, maybe 15, are doing it the wrong way, correct?

Because we should all have the same, what does the text say, what does it mean? This type of psychologicalizing—I know,

I know I did that on purpose—making the book, the Bible, some type of psychological analysis isn't helpful.

That's not good news. Driving on the inside isn't good news. I need a Savior from the outside.

And even if you take the Bible and say, you know what, this book is going to help us live moral lives.

We want to be good people, upstanding citizens, white picket fence type of people, nice neighbor type of people,

I think I should do good, I think I need to be good. We call this moralistic preaching, and that's not good news, because if you take the good news that Jesus Christ saves sinners and turn it into something you do, that's taking the gospel and turn it into law, that's not good news.

That's bad news. And even if you say, you know what,

I think the Bible is a book of, a handbook for life, a guidebook for living, and it's going to help us figure out questions like finances and marriage and can

I charge interest? Is it really like this trivial pursuit,

Pharisaical pursuit? What happens if a person divorces and remarries, Sadducean pursuit, and you know, is it okay to pick grain on the

Sabbath? Life perspectives, as Michael Horton calls the sermons for these kind of churches.

No. The Bible is about Jesus. The Old Testament is about Jesus. The New Testament is about Jesus.

It's good news. And that's why in the book of Hebrews, you see nothing in this sermon except good news.

Well, okay, I'm exaggerating. There are laws there, and there are warnings.

But overall, the sermon is about Jesus. Good news, using the Old Testament to tell us that there's good news about Jesus.

You say, well, I want to hear sermons about, oh, you know, saying no to sin.

I'd like to hear sermons about what we get forgiveness, how we get it.

Okay, I don't blame you. I like some of that too, but at the top, at the apex, at the pinnacle, is

Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Not even secondarily what we receive, but primarily who

Jesus is. Because when you talk about His death, how can you make it some abstract thing when isn't

Jesus the one who's dying, Jesus the one who is raised? We don't have Jesus the person and then walk across the room and talk about what

He did. And He personally did. So when you're talking about one, you're talking about the other, because Jesus, to use

Calvin's kind of language, is clothed with the gospel. Maybe you want to say Jesus is the gospel incarnate.

It says in Hebrews 4, 1, therefore, while the promise of rest, entering His rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it.

And then He talks about good news. For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them because they were not united by faith with those who listened.

Good news. See, all of the Bible is about Jesus, and therefore, it's all about good news.

Oh, it deals with bad news first, but the bad news makes the good news better, correct?

Because the bad news has a problem, is a problem, and that problem is solved.

And the Bible solves that problem and shows us, God solves the problem and shows us in His Word in the

Bible how He does that, and how He can keep justice and holiness and righteousness while still exercising

His love and compassion and His grace. But for you to benefit from that good news, you have to believe.

The immediate context of the book of Hebrews is this. There was good news preached to Israelites, and that good news was, you know what?

Here's what's required to enter in the promised land and walk by faith, which will lead to your obedience.

But they didn't want to do that. They didn't believe, and then they didn't want to obey. And what does

God do then? God doesn't give them the physical rest. Now these listeners to this sermon in Hebrews hear this message, and they're warned.

Israel didn't get in because they didn't believe in God. Here, you can learn all about the good news, now in a spiritual realm, not an earthly realm, that Jesus Christ dies for sinners and reconciles

God to men by faith. And if you don't add that faith to these promises, they're not applied to you, right?

You're saved by faith and through faith, because faith is saying, I take you at your word,

God. I have knowledge of this. I assent to it, and I'm volitionally trusting in you. I'm taking you at your word to the extent that I'm trusting in you, knowledge, assent, and trust.

And anything short of that is going to keep you in the wilderness, for Israel in the literal wilderness, for you in the spiritual wilderness.

The good news, the problem that cannot be solved humanly, is found in the

Bible, and it's found throughout the Bible. That's what's so great about reading the Bible. It's everywhere. People talk about redemptive historical preaching, and rightfully so, because this is the drama of redemption.

And you see what happens all the way back in Genesis 2 and 3, and then the proto -gospel in Genesis 3 .15,

and then looking for signs of that great redemption that will be found. And you see Passover, and you see

Levitical sacrifices, and you see the Day of Atonement, great passages that talk to us about pointing to the

Lord Jesus Christ. Well, my name is Mike Ebendroth, this is No Compromise Radio. My health is pretty good,

MRI came back clear and clean, and one more year I get another MRI, and then in 18 months, biopsy, hopefully

I'll be gone, it'll be over, and I appreciate the prayers, and we're very thankful.

But one thing that's made me, it's made me so tired. The last six months, I've never been so tired, and it is just tiring.

I could probably fall asleep now, talking on No Compromise Radio, I'm that tired. I'm seated in such a way that I've never been seated here in 1 ,900 shows.

So tired. Anyway, God bless you. No Compromise Radio, with Pastor Mike Ebendroth, 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 10 .15 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.