June 12, 2025 Show with Anthony Rogers on “Defending the Essential Truths of Christ and His Gospel” (Part 2)

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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 Thursday on this 12th day of June 2025.

For those of you who missed my first interview a couple of days ago with Anthony Rogers, today is part two of that discussion. We had Anthony Rogers on the program a couple of days ago to begin discussing with us the theme, Defending the Essential Truths of Christ and His Gospel Against His Primary Opponents Today.

I knew full well when conducting that interview that there was no way we could fit all of the vital content of that weighty theme into one two-hour program. So today, we have Anthony back on the program for part two of that same theme.

Anthony Rogers is a Christian apologist, debater, ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America, also known as the PCA, and regional director for Metanoia Prison Ministries. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Anthony Rogers.

Thanks so much. I am delighted to be back on with you.

And by the way, folks, for those of you who did not hear Monday's program with Anthony Rogers, after this live show is over, I urge you to look that up in the archives of ironsharpensironradio .com. And that program was Monday, June 9th.

And just type in Anthony Rogers in the search engine and that will come up. But, Anthony, when we had you on the program on Monday, we were primarily having you articulate a biblical defense of the deity of Jesus Christ and also a biblical defense of the Trinity.

And we never really got around to having you defend the gospel of Jesus Christ, because there are just as many, if not more, people out there who have a false understanding of the gospel as there are people who have a false understanding of Jesus Christ.

Because on top of those who deny His deity and deny the Trinity and deny the gospel, there are many who profess belief in the deity of Christ and the Trinity and yet deny the gospel nonetheless. So is there anything that you care to wrap up from Monday's program where you were defending the deity of Christ and the Trinity?

Sure. So one of the things I was pointing out there, and I really hope Christians get a good handle on, is the Old Testament witness to the doctrine of the Trinity, the deity of the coming Messiah, and so forth.

Because as I said then, the attack of non-Christians often gets much of its impetus from the assumption that the Old Testament is bereft of a revelation of these things. And so when you point to a text in the New, it's often rebuffed by saying, well, such an understanding is contrary to the Old Testament.

And so either the New Testament is false, which is what contemporary Jews say, or you're misinterpreting the New Testament because your interpretation would bring it into conflict with the Old. And yet, again, as I said, the Old Testament isn't silent with respect to these things.

The New Testament certainly enhances our understanding, but that doesn't mean that the Old Testament in itself is not a bright light with respect to them. I don't know how much I can't recall now I mentioned back then, but just think of a smattering of passages in the Old Testament.

Isaiah 7 speaks of the coming Messiah, the virgin-born child, as Emmanuel. When Matthew cites this passage and says it was fulfilled in the angelic announcement of Mary's conception, he tells us that this was to fulfill what was written in Isaiah the prophet, and he quotes the statement that his name would be called Emmanuel, and then he interprets it.

He says, which means God with us. The fact that Matthew stops to interpret it shows that it's not just accidental or for some lesser reason that the child would be called Emmanuel. In other words, there are people in the Old Testament who have what are called theophoric names, that is, names with the name of God embedded in them, like Elijah means Jehovah is my God or Yahweh is my God.

Elijah's name points to God, but this child is called God with us and Matthew stops to tell us that's what this name means precisely because he doesn't want us to miss the significance of it. In fact, he says something else there that I think is often missed.

In Matthew 1, they're told, Joseph is told, you're to give him the name Jesus for he will save his people from their sins. There's a connective there. Matthew is giving us the reasons or reason why he's supposed to be called Jesus.

But if we're not familiar with the fact that names have meaning in a Hebrew context or with the Old Testament pattern of people naming people according to some trait or some hope they have for the person or what have you, we would miss entirely what's going on here.

The angel is telling Joseph this is the right name for him precisely because he's going to save his people from their sins. So when you look at the meaning of the name Yeshua, which is Yahweh saves, you now understand the connection.

You're to give him the name Yeshua, which means Yahweh saves, for he will save his people from their sins. So we're explicitly told this is why he's named Yeshua, because he's going to save his people.

His people, whose people? The people of God. And that means, therefore, that he is God. He's the one he's going to save. And so the Old Testament already anticipates this in the prophetic announcement of the virgin born child, who would be Emmanuel.

Only a chapter later, the prophet is talking about the land of Israel and he talks about how the land is going to be devastated and he directly addresses Emmanuel. That is the prophet seven centuries before Jesus.

In Isaiah chapter eight, this again is a statement I think people probably missed, but here's what Isaiah says. It will sweep on into Judah, that is this thing that's going to happen. It will overflow and pass through.

It will reach even to the neck and the spread of its wings will fill the breadth of your land O Emmanuel. Notice, the prophet is directly addressing this figure already before his conception, which already indicates his deity, but then he heightens it by directly addressing him long before his birth.

Then the next chapter, Isaiah nine, tells us that the child who would be born would be mighty God, prince of peace and so forth. This is just a very small subset of passages talking about the deity of the coming Messiah.

I think Christians should really spend time familiarizing themselves with it. That's why when you get to the New Testament, you notice if you're reading carefully, the writers of the New Testament don't present this as though it's an innovation into the truth of God.

They argue for this on the basis of the Old Testament. The author of Hebrews in Hebrews one cites a litany of Old Testament texts proving the deity of Christ, all from the Old Testament. One more example I would give here that I greatly delight in, and it's what we see in Philippians two.

This observation that I'm about to make is one I learned a long time ago from the lion of Princeton, B. B. Warfield, a giant of theological acumen. In Philippians two, Paul is exhorting the Philippians to humble themselves before each other and esteem others greater than themselves.

The idea is, though you guys are on an equal plane, if you will, your fellow human beings, you are in Christ, you're brothers and sisters, nevertheless, you are to esteem the other as better than yourselves and humble yourselves to that person's betterment, for their service and so forth.

And then to bring to bear an example that should rouse them up to this, Paul marshals forth the example of Christ himself. He says, let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus, who, although existing in the form or the very nature of God, did not consider that equality something to be used to his own advantage, but humbled himself, taking the form of a servant being found in human likeness and so forth.

What's interesting about this is, we often point to this as proof for the deity of Christ, and it is, but what we miss is that Paul's not here trying to prove the deity of Christ. He's taking it for granted.

This is the genius insight of Warfield. He mentions that Paul just takes it for granted, and he uses that as a basis to make his exhortation strong. He takes as a given that Christ is God, humbled himself and so forth.

So most of what you see in the New Testament, in the epistles and so forth, is not the apostles arguing for the deity of Christ, but taking it for granted. Now, to be sure, in the gospels, there are people that challenge the idea that Jesus is God, but it's not because they're challenging the idea so much that the Messiah could be or would be God, for there were many Jews that believe this, as I mentioned last time.

But what their problem was, is the claim that Jesus, this guy from Nazareth, this carpenter from the backwaters of Galilee, was claiming to be the son of God and divine. And so I really think this is momentous, I think Christians should really get a handle on this.

There are a lot of good books they could get. One book I really like, would recommend to people, is by Robert Raymond, and it's called The Divine Messiah, The Old Testament Witness. He also wrote another book called The Divine Messiah, New Testament Witness.

I think those might be sold together now as one book, but either way, as far as the Old Testament, I especially recommend his book on that. It's got like seven chapters where it deals with seven basic arguments for this, and that's only scratching the surface.

So that's what I would say as far as wrapping things up. And then as sort of a segue into our discussion of the gospel, I would point out that this is critically important to a right understanding of the gospel and to warding off misrepresentations of it.

In Psalm 49, it says, nobody can by any means redeem his brother or give to God a ransom for him. For the redemption of his soul is costly and he should cease trying forever, that he should live on eternally, that he should not undergo decay.

What the psalmist is saying is no person can provide a ransom, can redeem somebody else. And that's because our blood is not sufficient. We are fallen, finite and fallen human beings. And as such, we can't pay the debt that sinners owe to God.

And so we might ask, well, then what hope is there for anybody? Well, if no mere man can do this, that still leaves the door open for God doing this. And that's exactly what the psalmist goes on to say.

He goes on to say in verse 15, God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol. He will receive me. And so the expectation of the psalmist is that what man can't do, God could and would do. And this we see fulfilled in the person of Christ.

That's why Christ's death is sufficient to atone for the sins of his people. And that's why his people can have nothing but confidence that through faith in him, they'll be brought safely to God. As the author of Hebrews said, by the sacrifice of himself, he has saved to the uttermost those who come to God through him.

So the issue of the deity of Christ is critically important to a right understanding of the gospel and of the atonement, which lies at the heart of the accomplishment of redemption.

By the way, I'd like to plug a book myself on this issue written by my dear friend, Dr. William Webster. I don't know if you're familiar with Bill Webster.

Yes. Love his stuff.

Yeah. Well, he wrote a phenomenal book, Behold Your King, Prophetic Proofs that Jesus is the Messiah. It's quite a weighty book. And you could get that book from christiantruth .org, christiantruth .org, which happens to be the publishing ministry of William Webster, Christian Resources—420 pages of prophetic proofs that Jesus is the Messiah.

So I guess we can move on now to something that we really didn't address last time, and that is a defense of the true gospel, because the true gospel is under attack even more than the person and work of Jesus Christ and his deity and so on, because many who profess his deity and profess to believe in the Trinity have a false gospel.

And that would include, but would not only include, but it would include the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Coptic Orthodox Church. They all claim many of the things that we do, but they have a false gospel.

Before you even get into a definition of the gospel, Anthony, as you may have noticed, there is a growing trend among evangelicals that has been going on for decades, but it's even becoming more and more prevalent amongst Reformed Christians, Christians who share our soteriology, to welcome as brethren people like Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox individuals solely on the basis that they believe in the deity of Christ, they believe in the Trinity, and they have some other important commonalities with us regarding biblical truth.

But they clearly have a different gospel, which if they have a different gospel, we have to identify it as a false gospel. Do you believe that it is appropriate for Bible-believing Christians, regenerate Christians, to have Christian fellowship with people such as this?

Now, I'm not talking about having loving relationships. There are many Roman Catholics that I know, having been raised in Roman Catholicism, there are Roman Catholics in my family, but I even over the years have gained a number of close friendships with Catholics, ironically, because of the debates that I organized for decades with Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries predominantly.

I had one debate I arranged with Dr. Tony Costa, but debates with Roman Catholic apologists, I've gained many friendships with Catholics, even though they know my position that I believe their gospel is false.

But do you believe that we should be having Christian fellowship with these folks?

Certainly not. And it's striking that anybody could entertain this idea who is at all familiar with the Scriptures, and not just Paul's writings, though that's a prominent place that we should turn to.

Paul is the one who most frequently speaks to this sort of thing. But again, I just can't imagine Paul thinking, well, it's fine that you have a different gospel, just so long as you believe in something like the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and so forth.

In fact, before I get more directly on some of that, I think that we have to observe that while there is this formal agreement among us on the Trinity and deity of Christ and that sort of thing, there's a failure here to apply that.

So there's a sense in which we could say that we have some difference with these groups, even on matters pertaining to the Trinity and the deity of Christ. Because after all, we think of the saving work that we put our confidence in as believers as a work of the triune God.

And God reveals himself through his works. And so if somebody thinks of salvation as something wrought by some other creatures, whether in competition with God or in working with God, which is what Catholics and Orthodox would say, that mitigates what we're saying when we confess the Trinity as our God and our Savior.

And what I mean here, of course, is in the Roman system and the Eastern system, Mary is portrayed as having a part to play that Scripture does not give her. She is referred to in Roman Catholic and Orthodox literature in various ways.

Among the terminology are terms like co-mediatrix, co-redemptrix, co-dispensatrix. That last one, many people probably have not heard.

I haven't heard of it until just now.

Yeah. Well, it's found in a lot of the older Catholic literature, and the concept is still very.

Current.

So if you look at Alphonsus Liguori, for example, the distaunch defender of the Council of Trent, he has a commentary. It's behind me, in fact, on my shelf. He has a commentary on the Council of Trent and also wrote a bunch of books on Mary, like The Glories of Mary.

A lot of people are familiar with that. But in there, he's addressing the Roman view of Mary. And by the way, he's a doctor of the Roman Church. So he's not just another saint, which would already be significant enough in terms of representing what Rome teaches, but he's a doctor of the Roman Church.

There's only about 36 or 38 of those.

And it can't be just written off because of that as, oh, give the guy a break, he's got excessive piety in his poetic language. You can't write it off that way. Right.

Well, so he uses this term dispensatrix to refer to the idea that Mary is the one who bestows the Holy Spirit. Wow. All the graces that believers receive from God in Christ. And so nobody has the spirit or grace apart from Mary.

She's the one who dispenses it. Now, all this sort of stuff should be, you know, when I was talking a moment ago about how Rome and the East undermine their Trinitarian confession, this also should be included in that because one of the chief examples or proofs of the deity of Christ is the fact that he is the one who pours out the Holy Spirit.

Remember that all through the Old Testament, the promise made by the prophets, the expectation was that the spirit would be given by God and this is what would enable them to put on immortality and corruption and so forth.

This was a promise of the age to come. And so when you read in the prophet Joel, all who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved, it's in that context where he says that the Lord will pour out his spirit on all flesh, same promises made in Isaiah 33, many, many other Old Testament passages that God is going to do this in Isaiah 34.

And so when you get to the New Testament and you read John the Baptist saying, I baptize you with water, but one who coming after me will baptize you with the spirit. He's showing the superiority of Christ and his ministry by saying he's only baptizing with water, but this one is going to baptize with the spirit.

It shows the superiority of Christ, but just how superior we know from the fact that this is ascribed to God in scripture. It's God who gives the spirit and the same thing is true of grace. Think of all the apostolic salutations.

I absolutely love the salutations. I mentioned Warfield a moment ago. This is another insight I gleaned from Warfield. Warfield has this excellent study of the salutations of Paul in which he shows that they have an apparent formulaic character to them.

They're very similar, yet there is some variation and that variation, given the remarkable uniformity of these salutations, whenever there's some slight difference, what Warfield points out is they're probably not inconsequential, these differences.

But one of the observations he makes about what's common to them is this statement, grace and peace to you from God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ. Among the variations are things like grace and peace to you from God, the Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ, or God, our Father.

Those are one example of the difference. But what he points out here is that Paul uses a single preposition when speaking about that grace and peace which we receive, these twin divine blessings, he says, are alike from Father and Son.

It's not merely through the Son, though that's true too. We have these things because the Son became incarnate and we participate in Him through faith and so forth, but it's because the Son is not merely a human being and Messiah and so forth, but God incarnate, one with the Father as to his deity.

He also is the source of those two divine blessings, grace and peace. And so when somebody takes these things and assigns them to Mary or the saint, and then on top of it begins to talk about things like a treasury of merit, so that if your own works are insufficient to add to the work of Christ, supplement the work of Christ and save you, well, good news, Mary has some excess merit, so do the saints and so forth.

That's the Roman system, but it has nothing to do with the Bible. And so I think that it compromises Trinitarianism because, again, God is known through his works and the chief work that Scripture sets before our eyes is the work of redemption.

If you go back to the Exodus, for example, when God is bringing about the salvation of Israel, which is a temporal deliverance, he constantly says he's doing these things so that they will know that he is the Lord.

In other words, these saving actions are revelatory of him. And then that means if we take these deeds and we parcel them out to others, we are compromising our confession of God as our savior, and so also obscuring the picture that he presents of himself in Scripture.

So I think it's a big problem. A false gospel proves to be a big problem, even when it comes to those apparent similarities between us and them when it comes to the Trinity and the deity of Christ.

Okay, we're going to our first commercial break, and when we come back, we will have Dr. Rogers define the gospel, and then we will move on from there. If you have any questions about anything that we brought up in the first discussion of this issue on Monday, or if you have any questions about what we're discussing today, that is the person and work of Jesus, which we primarily addressed Monday, and today we are looking more specifically at the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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We're now back with Anthony Rogers, Christian apologist, and we are primarily discussing the true gospel today and defending the true gospel, the true biblical gospel, against the counterfeits of Christ's opponents, some of whom have been Christ's opponents for centuries, and some of them have risen up on the scene more recently in time.

But I'd like to once again give our email address if you have a question for Anthony Rogers. It's chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name, at least city and state and country of residence.

So Anthony, if you could give us a biblical definition of the gospel.

Sure. So the late John Murray, another towering giant of a theologian, wrote a book once called Redemption Accomplished and Applied. And what he was referring to, of course, is to the foundational work that we call the gospel, that is a work of the triune God, and then the application of it to us by the spirit.

And these two ways are ways in terms of which we can speak of the gospel. So in terms of the accomplishment of those things that were necessary in order to procure redemption for us, one of the things that we should do is always see it in the larger picture of the work of the triune God.

And I think Paul gives that to us in many places, but one place where he gathers up many things relevant to this is in Ephesians 1, 3 and following, where he speaks of the father of the son of the spirit and what each person has done and is doing pursuant to our salvation.

So he begins by blessing the father who chose us in Christ, then proceeds to praise the son in whom we have been redeemed, that is by his blood. And then it speaks of the spirit by whom we're sealed into the day of redemption.

And one way that Christians have sometimes expressed this is they've said, we are chosen by the father, purchased by the son, sealed by the spirit, blessed God, three in one. So that's sort of the larger picture of what the gospel is, the saving work of the triune God, the father, the son, and the spirit.

And there's much more that could be said to fill that out. The father doesn't merely plan and then watch as the son carries it out. As Jesus said, the father is always with me. So there's an action of the father in the activity of the son as well.

And I could go on to show how this is true of the spirit. But, well, one thing, let me point this out. When it talks about the incarnation, the virgin birth of Christ, remember, we often think of the spirit as the agent by whom the virgin birth came about.

The spirit came upon Mary and she conceived. But it's also true to say that the father was involved in this and that the son was involved in this. And again, not merely in some sort of spectator sense.

The statement I read earlier, for example, in Philippians 2, it says that the son took upon himself the nature of a servant. That's an active term there, as Paul uses it in the Greek, showing that the son himself was involved in his own incarnation.

In Hebrews 10, the Lord Jesus is quoted from the Psalms, saying, sacrifice an offering you didn't desire, a body you prepared for me. Notice all three persons here are beauties involved in the virginal conception of Christ.

And so the point that I'm making here is just the actions of the triune God, though we normally focus on each person in a special way in relation to some of these actions, it's a work all the way through of the triune God.

And to be more specific, it centers on what was done by our Lord Jesus Christ. According to scripture, the Lord Jesus came into the world, he lived a life of perfect obedience, and then he yielded up that life of perfect obedience on the cross to endure the just judgment of God due to us and rise again from the dead, showing that his death paid the penalty for sin.

And in order to communicate the benefits of all of that to us. So he is the one who pours out the spirit, he is the one who does everything to put us in possession of the benefits that he procured for us.

Now, very clearly, I think Paul speaks to this, and he's just giving us a summary here, but it's the heart of this in 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul says, I deliver to you as a first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that on the third day he rose again, according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to seep us and so forth.

Now here, as I said, I'm referring to the objective side of the gospel. It's objective accomplishment. It's the father who planned and purposed and chose, and the son in whom we were chosen, by whom we are redeemed, and the spirit who brings us to the father through the son and gives us faith and regenerates our heart and all that.

But that last part where I was talking about the spirit pertains to the subjective side, where these things are applied to us. And when we look at a passage like Romans 8, there it explains to us what the gospel is in terms of its application to us.