June 3, 2016 Show with Donald R. Miller on “Milestones in Biblical Understanding: Keys to Unlock Scripture”

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Donald R. Miller’s Background and Early Christian Testimony

On this fourth day of June 2016, the very first day, the very first Friday in June of 2016 and I am very excited about our program today because I am being joined by someone whom I have never interviewed before and I'm looking forward to getting to know him on the air since we barely had any time to even speak in a preparatory fashion beforehand, but I think sometimes those kind of spontaneous interviews are the better ones and I am speaking of Donald R. Miller who is a retired Presbyterian pastor and he actually was the pastor at one time of my frequent co-host Reverend Buzz Taylor and first of all let me welcome you into the studio and on to Iron Sharpens Iron for the very first time, Reverend Donald R. Miller.

Well thank you, glad to be here. I'm a bit caught by surprise but I'm looking forward.

With anticipation also. Yes and my very frequent co-host Reverend Buzz Taylor is sitting right next to him. And why don't you greet the audience Buzz.

Well hello, now Chris since Don just got to town, we have a lot to catch up on so you can go take a nap now. I mean unlike you who is usually napping.

During the show, I mean it's my turn. Okay well go ahead there Reverend Buzz.

Well Don, this is almost a re-hello because he just got to town, in fact I'm sure you can tell a little bit about what actually brings you here, but Don was my pastor when I lived up in Maine. We were starting a church in my living room and I remember seeing a little clip in the paper out of the Heidelberg Catechism and it had your church's name attached to it and as a result I thought well I'm not going to reinvent the wheel.

Of course it was about a 45 minute drive to get down to the church, but I wasn't going to reinvent the wheel so I said well let's go check this church out. I don't need to start one if there's another reformed church in the area.

So we went down to the church. And what was the church? Well the church first of all when we went down there was closed. I know this is embarrassing. They knew you were coming Buzz. Well this is embarrassing to say to a Mainer but the church was canceled because of snow that day.

So we were the only ones that showed up. So that was the Emanuel Reformed Presbyterian.

Church. And that was in Auburn, Maine you said?

Auburn, Maine. Yes. That's correct.

And what specific kind of a Presbyterian Church was it?

Well it was a part of a small sort of mom and pop Presbyterian Church. It was called the Reformed Presbyterian Church General Assembly.

That still exists right? Yes. Doesn't Don Kistler, isn't he a member of that? He could be. I'm pretty sure he is.

And Ken Gentry? I don't remember Ken Gentry being a part of it at that time. But no, the key person lives in Lakeland, Florida. And it is closely associated with, as close as you can get an association, with Whitfield Theological Seminary.

Oh Ken Talbot. Ken Talbot, exactly.

Thank you for that. In fact, I've been trying to get Ken Talbot on my show since 2006 and something always conflicts with his schedule and I know he really wants to be on the show because he actually shipped me his books, Calvinism, or actually it's Arminianism, Calvinism and Hyper-Calvinism, or Calvinism, Arminianism, I don't know what the order is, but you know the book.

But Buzz, if you wanted to let us know more about how you two met and so on.

Well, as I mentioned, we went to the church and it was closed the first week and then we got a call from Don. We talked to him on the phone and he apologized for not being there and worked out to our advantage because when he showed up the next week he took us out to dinner.

But we attended the church, I don't know how many years, I kind of lose track of the time, but most of my time up in Maine Don was my pastor. As your listeners know, when they heard my testimony before, I was around the block theologically for a number of years and I had just settled into Reformed Presbyterian thought when I discovered the church there, which was why we were starting a church in my living room.

So like I said, we didn't reinvent the wheel, we found a nice little church there and not only were ministered to, but we had a chance to minister there in Sunday school and music and so forth.

So Don, are you the one I should be blaming for screwing him up so much mentally?

It's his fault, it's his fault, yes. Only partially.

And before we go on with your testimony, because I'm dying to hear your own testimony of how you came not only to the saving faith in Jesus Christ, but also how you became Reformed and so on. But I just wanted to make a little clarification here.

When Buzz, when you said that you had finally settled on Reformed Presbyterian theology, that is not to be confused with the denomination, the Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America, who are the covenanters and sing a cappella exclusively and are exclusive psalm singers.

No, no, that was not speaking in an organizational sense, but more in a descriptive sense.

Right.

Yeah. Well, it was, as he said, the Reformed Presbyterian Church General Assembly.

Right. Yeah.

Yeah. I typically will say Reformed and Presbyterian, so avoid that all.

Okay, yeah, sounds good. I'm still learning from him, see?

And I do have friends, though, in the RPCNA, and I've heard some very powerful preachers from that group. Ted Donnelly is one.

Well, you're talking to one right now, too, Don, was one of them.

Well, I'm talking about the covenanters.

Oh, I'm sorry. No, I was never a covenanter. One of us is napping.

And it's not me. Not yet, anyway. So tell us something about Don. If you don't mind me asking, how old a man are you? And tell us about when your Christian journey began.

Well, I'm 82 years old.

Wow, praise God. I would never guess that.

But I was in a conversation with a man today that accused me of being 54.

That's great.

And he looked at my son, who is 62. You know you're old when your son is 62. And accused him of being 90.

Well.

So, I don't know what to say about that, anyway. The Lord is gracious.

So you have a blind friend now, huh?

The Lord is gracious.

Look, I came to the Lord in 1961. I had struggled so hard to become an engineer. And I was an electrical engineer with the General Electric Company in Lynchburg, Virginia.

I've been there. My very first girlfriend when I became a born-again Christian lived in Lynchburg, Virginia and taught at Jerry Falwell's Elementary School.

Well, this is ancient history. Candler's Mountain, where Liberty University is today, was only populated by the General Electric Company. Later on, it expanded. And, of course, Jerry bought property and began his ministry up there.

And now, the very building in which I labored is the Thomas Road Baptist Church. They had moved it out of the city from Thomas Road to Candler's Mountain to this big complex they call Liberty University.

But that's back in the days when Jerry Falwell had only 800 in his Sunday school.

Yeah.

That's when the Dead Sea was just sick.

But the thing is, is that I was eager to be an engineer. I loved being an engineer. I loved being... I was a design engineer. I loved being able to create circuits. And this is back in the day before transistors were developed.

It was back in the day when we had to design all our circuits around vacuum tubes. And amplifiers were humongous. They were heavy because of the iron, the transformers and all that.

And just if I can briefly interrupt you, what theological background were you raised in?

I wasn't.

Was it agnostic, atheist, or nominal?

Nominal is the closest you can come, and that comes from my mother.

Nominal what?

She was a congregationalist. But she attended a lot of Baptist churches and would take me and drop me off. But in my early years, none of that took effect. And so my wife and I settled in outside of Lynchburg.

And I'm down in the basement because one of my other aspirations is I wanted to be an amateur radio operator. And I'm down in the basement building a transmitter. But I should have said something first.

That's true, I was in the basement when this event took place. But prior to this, this godly Baptist man next door saw how heathen and pagan I was. And he witnessed to me and witnessed to me. He took me to his church.

He took me to a revival meeting. And I just simply said, Lo, Lo, please just leave me alone. And so he left me alone. And I'm down in the basement. This is about a month or two later. And while I'm in the basement, two men knock on the front door.

And my wife lets them in. They're two Methodist men. And so I come up and I sit down with them. And they ask me if I went to church. I said, No, no, no, I'm not a believer. Well, we think you ought to come to our church.

And I looked at them and I said, OK. So I got into the church and they pressured me to join. And they said, We think you ought to be a member of this church.

Even though you weren't a professing Christian?

Well, they wanted me to go through that process. They did ask me these questions. But it just shows you how you can pose the proper questions and think you are answering them correctly and yet be devoid of belief.

At any rate, they said, We think you ought to join. And I said, OK. Then they wanted me to be, they found out I was an engineer. And that meant I knew the whole alphabet. So they wanted me to be a Sunday school teacher.

So I take this adult class and I found an award Bible that I had received as a kid. You know, the kind that cost maybe a dollar back in those days?

Yeah, right.

A King James version, wonderful. But it had no notes, no footnotes, no marginal notes, no references. Just a handful of wonderful pictures and that was it. And I blew the dust off it and put it to work as I began to teach the class.

And I had the Sunday school material and I had the Bible. And I'm preparing the lessons and I see the scriptures and I am hit with the reality that this is two different, these are two different things.

The description that was in the material was different from what I was seeing the scriptures to say. So I would bring this out in class and the class became quite controversial. And then it grew, it grew.

But all of this as an unbeliever. Now one day, one delightful Baptist man, and if he happens to be listening, I want him to know that I still remember his name. His name is Hugh Preston, beautiful man.

And he didn't quite know how to evangelize me, but he looked me in the face and he says, you need to get saved, Miller. That's what he said. That was the extent of the evangelism. And I loved it. Because what I have left out, which I will now provide, is that in that short period of time, through exposure to the word, I came under a heavy conviction of sin.

And as far as I was concerned, I found that I had no hope. I mean, I was a lost cause. I was condemned by the scriptures. And when he told me, Miller, you need to get saved, the Holy Spirit made that sound encouraging.

And so while I was sort of an infidel during the day, when I got home, I would sit on the couch and go through the scriptures. And one day, I'm in Romans chapter 6, and I'm reading about dying with Christ, being baptized into his death, and then rising again to newness of life in him.

And the Holy Spirit made that so real to me that I popped off the couch and went into the kitchen and told my dear wife, I just got saved. And that has not been reversed in any way in any way since. Just how God uses some of the simplest things, but not apart from his word.

And I knew I was a theological zero. I mean, you didn't want to be around me. My neighbor asked me. He saw that there was a change. He also worked at General Electric, and so we had a lot of contact. And he looked at me, and he says, Don, do you sin anymore?

And I thought about this thing. And I said, no, I don't think so. Well, he didn't talk to me for a year. He knew that was a lie. I didn't. I just felt so clean. In fact, those early days, my feet didn't touch the ground.

But I have to tell you something. I was a Calvinist in the making. Because I knew that if Jesus Christ died for one person, that one person was me. Bad theology, because he died for all his elect.

But that's how.

So I've never, over the years, had any problems with assurance. And I didn't know that the Lord was going to call me into ministry. But he was preparing me. And I'll wrap this up by just pointing out the very first issue.

Would you like to guess what the first issue was? The first issue that the Holy Spirit brought to me after being united with Christ is the authority of Scripture. Never realizing that I was going to spend the rest of my life defending the Scriptures.

Amen.

And so that's how we got started.

And how old were you at that time?

Well, it was 1961. I was born in 1933. I was 28 years old.

And so did you join the Baptist Church at this time? Or this pastor was evangelizing you?

No, I remained in the Methodist Church and became a lay preacher. But I didn't remain there long. Because I found myself almost immediately surrounded by a cubby of Calvinists.

In the Methodist Church?

No, no, no.

At work.

Oh, okay.

But you see, my life was so wicked that when it became known that I was professing faith in Jesus Christ, that one of the engineers, a mechanical engineer, a godly man who mentored me and to whom I am most grateful for his advice and guidance, he would take me down the halls and introduce me to Brother So-and-So and Brother and Sister So-and-So and all the way down the line introducing me to the believers within General Broderick.

Never once saying, this is Brother So-and-So. It took him a month to accept that God had begun to work. And he's a Calvinist. Isn't that silly?

Now, you don't have to reveal details of your life that you're not comfortable with revealing, but when you consider yourself such a wicked man, obviously all of us before regeneration are...

Desperately wicked.

Yes, and all of us are deserving of hell. But were you notorious in the town that you lived in for being some kind of an overtly wicked person?

Not in the town necessarily, but certainly on the job. I had a very foul mouth, a very wicked mindset, nuancing all kinds of things. I'm embarrassed to go into it, but I'm not afraid to go into it. It's just that I hate to reflect on it.

Well, you were a typical worldly person.

I was a worldly man, and I would tease women. And I can't say on the air, because on the one hand, folks will say, that's awful. On the other hand, they'll go and do it themselves. I'm not going to give them that opportunity.

All right. Thank you.

Sometimes the things you shouldn't do, people will imitate and you've mentioned. So I won't go there.

Well, you've had some other struggles since then. Do I recall a story about one of your books that flew across the room once?

Well, those are the early days. Being surrounded by these goofy Calvinists. In fact, the very first question that this engineer asked me was, and I don't know why, but he asked me, he says, do you think God ought to save all of the savages in Africa?

And I thought about that. And I thought about that. I said, well, it's only fair. Any which way. He started off that way. But I found myself picking up this book. You know what it is. It's by Steele and Thomas.

The Five Points of Calvinism. I think it's defined, documented, and defended. And I started reading these verses in these different sections of it. And I got so angry, I threw that thing across the room and broke the spine.

And now he's got this old book literally laced together.

With knit. And I have it on the shelf to remind me of that. But I went for years collecting data concerning the tulip and all of this. And one day it just popped, and I was a budding Calvinist, and I became a full-blown Calvinist.

That's been a long, long time. I've been a Calvinist since, no doubt, 1963 or 64.

Calvinism, the Gospel, and the Authority of Scripture

Yeah, that's interesting. I have heard from a couple of folks I know, pastors that I know, who were Arminian. And when they were being taught the doctrines of grace, otherwise known as Calvinism, by friends or acquaintances of theirs, I know at least two of them who were given books and threw the book against the wall in rage.

One of them was A .W. Pink's The Sovereignty of God.

Oh, yes.

And this one man said that it fell behind a bookcase or under his bed or something, and he just remembered crawling through the dust after the curiosity built up after he'd thrown the book. Days later, he crawled and got the book and read it, and the rest was history.

But for the benefit of those listening who are not theologically reformed, once in a while I get new listeners who don't even know what that is. Why don't you give a summary of that? What is Calvinism or Reformed theology in summary form?

Okay, I'll make it as quickly as I can. I'll use Spurgeon as an example. If you were interviewing Spurgeon, but I'm not Spurgeon, but if you were interviewing Spurgeon with the same boundaries set, he would have said, it's just simply the gospel.

And it is.

It is what the scriptures tell us about God's absolute, sovereign choice of sinners to be his people.

It's the only theological system I know of that gives 100 of the credit and praise, honor, and glory to Jesus Christ for our salvation. Whereas almost every Christian will say that.

Yes.

But if you dissect what they believe, they don't really believe that. Or they may even in their heart of hearts believe it, but they on paper or in their profession will reject the fact that God is the author and finisher of our faith and reality because he is the one that gave us faith.

He is the one that first brought us to life and regenerated us and gave us new birth before we even believed.

I remember you, Don, explaining to my dad when he was down visiting, up to Maine visiting once, that you were specifically referring to the five points of Calvinism. You said one of the interesting things about those is they not only are logical, but each one is biblical.

You were pointing out to him that any other system that you look at, you can follow your logic and sooner or later it's going to take you away from the scriptures.

That is so good.

Well, that came from you.

Well, that makes it even better. No, what I have tried to convey to others is that the concept in the mind of the Calvinist is found in scripture. His conclusions are found in scripture, and the logic that takes him from the initial data to the conclusion, that logical process is also found.

In scripture.

Why anyone would accept anything that had less than that is what we respond to with great wonder sometimes. But listen, part of what I have in my book, there is this chapter called What is the Gospel?

Let me announce the fact that you did write a book because I failed to announce that in the beginning. One of the reasons that we have Reverend Donald R. Miller on the program today, not only because he was at one time our co-host Reverend Buzz Taylor's pastor, but he also is the author of at least one book, and the book that we are going to be discussing today is Milestones in Biblical Understanding, Keys to Unlock Scripture.

And if you could go on with the point that you wanted to make.

Well, what I have in my tenth chapter is entitled What is the Gospel? I have five things, and I share them with others, but I don't find that others are grasping it or willing to jump at it. But let me read to you so that we can make a tie between this and what we were discussing previously about the nature of Calvinism and it being the gospel.

I point out, as preachers love to do, with alliteration, I chose the letter M. First of all, the gospel is God's everlasting mission to establish his righteous kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. That's number one.

That's the mission of the church. But number two, it's God's good message. Here it goes. His good message of his covenantal intention to populate his kingdom with elect sinners whom he saves through the atoning work of his anointed son, the Lord.

Jesus Christ.

Thirdly, it's God's ordained means. I'm using that to point out how God chooses the gospel to save the lost. It's number three, God's ordained means to concentrate his saving activity which he accomplishes by the energizing work of the Holy Spirit.

Then four, it's God's holy mandate to sinners to enter his kingdom by repenting of their sins and entrusting their lives to his enthroned son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And then finally, it took me years.

I started off with three and now I have five. And if you see me next month, I might have a number six. But here's number five, God's great might. The gospel is the power of God unto salvation, Paul says in Romans.

So with that dog on me, I included that. Five, God's great might which he exercises to initiate and sustain the salvation he brings to those who believe.

Amen.

And we're going to be picking up more on that when we return from our station.

Break.

And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Reverend Donald R. Miller, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages. Hi, I'm Chris Arnson, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

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And Mr. Miller left electrical engineering in 1966 to go to seminary and answer to the Lord's call to the ministry. In 1970, he was graduated from Westminster Theological Seminary and ordained by the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and began 35 years of pastoral ministry in Maine.

He also pursued the U .S. Naval Reserve Chaplaincy for 21 of those 35 years. He retired from the Naval Chaplaincy in 1991, and in 1995, he received an LHD degree from Whitfield Theological Seminary for ministry in a difficult field.

In 2005, he retired to Virginia with his wife of 52 years. For six years, he served as a ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, and he is presently assisting an independent congregation pursue a more biblical basis for its life in ministry and teaching the Bible in a local jail as a volunteer.

And we are discussing Reverend Miller's book, Milestones and Biblical Understanding, Keys to Unlock Scripture. And right before the break, you were basically outlining the gospel of Jesus Christ with five pertinent elements, and this was not the five points of Calvinism, but it was five biblical elements that you derived from the scriptures that are in your book.

And being a Reformed Christian, obviously, seems to be very important to you. And while we don't want to come off as sectarian or proud or arrogant or look down our noses at those who disagree with us, because we are accused of that very often, and the irony is that the last thing that Calvinism should do to anyone is make them proud.

But why is this theology so very important in your heart, mind, and soul other than, unfortunately, we've all met them, no matter what theological system you may find yourself, there are those people who view themselves as basically being more intelligent or have more biblical insight than their friends and neighbors, and they take pride in the denomination or theological camp that they're in because they look at it as some kind of an exclusive club or something.

But, obviously, we're not supposed to be viewing it that way. But there are, having said all that, there are things about Reformed theology that make our lives and our relationship with Christ so much richer than we remember prior to understanding them.

I like the way you think, Chris. Anyone who knows me knows that Don has an analytical mind. No one has ever accused me of being brilliant. I have the ability to slowly grasp the truth. I didn't do that, listeners.

That was your pal, Buzz. He does it quite frequently, actually.

Buzz did it. But what I'm trying to reach for here is the fact that my gift is to try to explain what others already know very well but sometimes go right over our heads. I really am concerned about helping Christians learn.

I go out of my way to provide handouts. I will sit down with them. This book is nothing more than a book that is designed to help people pick up on some of the things that I found most helpful to me to unlock the Scriptures.

Now, I want to say this, though, concerning and this adds to the flavor that you added in your introduction, and that is this, is that when I teach the Scriptures, I want to use as much as possible the language of Scripture.

Theologians, I consider myself a theologian. You, too, are both theologians. But theologians have a tendency to try to give description to things by using extra-biblical language. And I'm not against that in the sense that it is necessary to understand these things.

We talk about the active obedience of Christ and the passive obedience of Christ. Well, that is just an effort by the theologians to talk about Christ's life and his death. Okay, with regard to the law.

But what I want to do, more than anything else, is to make sure that the language of Scripture is used in our communication.

Why?

Because I want these folks to be Bereans. You remember how the Bereans, they were the ones who were more noble than those in Thessalonica, Acts 17 -11, who were so interested, so desirous to know what the Scriptures had to say, that they would even question what Paul said.

Yes, I've been using that analogy quite a lot lately in having conversations with my Roman Catholic friends. And I don't think that a Roman Catholic can really ever truly be a Berean. The actual system that they are a part of doesn't allow it.

No, it cuts them off from Scripture and it makes them reliant on what they are told. In other words, it's like... Listen, this happens in evangelical Christianity also. The church is filled with people who just want to be told what to believe.

They don't want to search for themselves. They want to be told what to believe.

Right, and for the Catholic listening who says, I'm not cut off from Scripture. I have a dozen Bibles in my house and I read them every day. But the thing is that when you come to an understanding of what the Bible teaches, it has to be something that has been defined by Rome in order for you to embrace it as truth.

Exactly.

But also we talk about the authority of Scripture, how it is supreme. When you start taking some other document and placing it alongside, like the Roman Church does with tradition, it doesn't take long before that document that is brought alongside is raised above Scripture and now Scripture has to be seen and interpreted through those things.

But what I'm reaching for is just something as simple as this. I want them to study the Scriptures. And you know something? When they're reading the Scriptures, they're going to read what it actually says.

That's what Don said. That's what Don said.

Okay?

That's what Don said. So that I want them to see that it was in the Scriptures. Now you can't always do that. We often have to put things in our own words and we do have to appeal to other things that are most helpful.