Classic Summer 2020: The Shack Book Review

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.

We're here to take your calls as well. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio. My name is Mike Abendroth, your host. This is our third week. We want to stand up for the truths of Christ Jesus, and if that means critiquing or criticizing or looking at error in such a way that some might call it unloving, then that is what we must do.

Sound Doctrine, Refuting Error, and the Value of Controversy

New Testament elders in Titus chapter 1 were to do two things. They had to teach sound doctrine, and they had to refute those who contradict. And so what I'd like to do on this show is to try to be biblical.

I'd like to be provocative and engaging. I know this is a radio audience, and so people are tuning in, and I want people to not be bored. I want them to be interested, and sometimes that interest can be stimulated by controversial kind of topics.

Machen said, if you want to avoid controversy as a Christian, you ought to close your Bible, because it is a controversial book from Genesis to Revelation. And so each day of the week at No Compromise Radio here at WVNE 760 AM, we talk about a different subject matter.

Mondays, taped sermons from Bethlehem Bible Church. I believe we're in Matthew 7 this week again. Tuesdays, I have Pastor Steve Cooley in the studio, and we talk about church issues. Make sure you tune in next Tuesday, because we're going to talk about legalism, alcohol, cigarettes, tattoos.

How does a church deal with those things? Are they in fact sin? I think you'll be surprised at the answers. That's next Tuesday. And Wednesdays, we talk about books. Now the last two times we dealt with books.

It was book burning, kerosene type of books, books that you could use for, I don't know, papier-mâché, collage, writing your haiku on them. I don't know what you do with some of those books, but they're not good for you.

And so I'm concerned as a pastor and as a theologian that you have good material. You've got one life to live, and I want you to read the right kind of books. So today was going to be the positive books that you ought to read, but I think I'm going to push it back one more week, because there's a book that I haven't dealt with yet.

I think Tom Krause and others have dealt with it. But today I want to talk about the book that's the most popular today that many of you have been reading this week, maybe last week, New York Times bestseller, The Shack, written by William Paul Young.

And I'm not talking about Shaquille O 'Neal, although I think he could write a better book. I'd like to have Shack versus Paul William Young might be a good show. That would probably sell well. Now, who can distort the Trinity more, Shaquille O 'Neal or The Shack book.

And so again, at No Compromise Radio, what we do is this, I want to challenge you. You might not agree with me, but I want to challenge you. And my biggest challenge up front is this, what you read will influence you.

And even though you say, well, this is a fictional book, we can't be wooed by fiction. Dan Brown wrote a fictional book called The Da Vinci Code as well. My premise is this, fiction does influence. Good writers know how to emotionally talk about things and influence your views of almost anything.

And so you mean to tell me that we as theologians and pastors cannot critique fiction? Of course we can, because what the authors do is they talk about non-fictional characters. William Young talks about non-fictional characters in his fictional book, and therefore I'm going to give you a non-fictional critique, because anything less would be fictional.

Listen to what Trevor said, Trevin, excuse me, Trevin Wax, about this book regarding fictional critiques. Let's say you meet an author who wants to use your grandparents as the main characters in a novel.

The author tells you the narrative will be fictional, but that your grandparents will have starring roles. Sounds great, you think, but when the manuscript arrives in your hands, you discover that the story does not accurately represent the personalities of your grandparents.

The relationship between them is all wrong. Grandpa reberates grandma. Early on they run off in a lope, which is totally out of character. At one point they contemplate divorce. When you complain, the author responds, remember, I told you it would be fictional.

Yes, you say, somewhat exasperated, I knew the story would be fictional, but I thought you would get my grandparents right. The grandparents in your story aren't anything like my grandparents. Who cares, the author responds, it's a work of fiction.

Well, I care, you say, because people will put down this book thinking that my grandparents were like the way you portrayed them. That's the issue. You can say it's fictional. You can say it helped you.

You can say you understand God better, but you are not going to understand the God of the Bible better. Friends, this is an idolatrous book. This promotes a view of God that is below God's holy name. This is not a view of God that you should teach your kids, teach your grandkids, that you should read.

This is a portrayal of God. That's the problem, is that it's a bad portrayal of God. And I'd much rather have you read books that are good for you. I really don't know how a serious Christian who is maturing in Christ can read the shack and say it was a good book.

You can't read this and say it's really good. It's not a good book. It has a wrong view of God. It has lots of other things that are wrong with it as well, and that is low views of church. This has a low view of church.

For the author, Young, it is basically an emphasis of me and Jesus, me and God, individualistic Christianity, no corporate church, no local church, no importance of the one another. It's just this personal relationship.

I have a personal relationship with Jesus. Friends, you may have a personal relationship with Jesus, but in the Bible, that personal relationship is fleshed out in a local community called a church. The book The Shack has a horrible view of not only the church, but also God's word.

What do you think The Shack does? It elevates mystical, subjective experiences, and then it makes scriptures basically the footstool for feelings. It makes scriptures irrelevant. Here is what The Shack says, quote, you will learn to hear my thoughts in yours, says Sauru, the supposedly Holy Spirit.

You might see me in a piece of art or music or silence or through people or in creation or in your joy and sorrow. Now what does that say about the word of God? It minimizes it. I would have to say, friends, that one of the number one aggressive enemies of the Christian faith is a subjective mysticism that elevates itself over the revealed, spoken word of God inscripturated.

It's got a big problem. When mysticism rules, who needs the Bible? You mean God's going to speak in some kind of old book when he talks to me personally? I think this is no wonder Oprah would love such a book.

The Trinity, God's Transcendence, and the Problem of a Buddy God

What about the Trinity? That's really the big problem here in this book. The Trinity is reduced to a close buddy, friend. There's two concepts theologically that everyone needs to understand. Whether you know the words or not, you need to understand the concepts.

One, the transcendence of God, two, the eminence of God, I am. Transcendence and eminence. Transcendent means over. God is holy. He's different. He's above. He's large. He's not with us. He's over us.

And we need to have that view of God because that view of God is in the Scriptures. There's also another view of God that we need, especially magnified in the Incarnation, and that is the eminence of God.

And that is the closeness, the intimate relationship that we have with God. But we have to have both. God is over us. And if we're Christians, God is in us via the Holy Spirit. And so, Mac, the star of the book, if you will, he's got this buddy God system.

And there's no holiness, no transcendence, nothing that would make you think of Job, chapters 38, 39, 40, 41, and 42, where God says to Job, you sit down, you shut up, I've got some questions for you.

It's time to close your mouth and come to school. There's nothing like Isaiah 6, where basically Isaiah has to say, I need to close my mouth, I'm a man of unclean lips, I represent a people of unclean lips, I've seen the king and I'm going to be undone, I'm disintegrated, I had integrity, I have no more integrity.

There's not that kind of portrayal of God. It's this really close God only. No wonder people buy that book because it's so much better to have some kind of close, touchy, feely God. No wonder people like the book because it focuses on these feelings.

If you read the shack, I guess I don't blame you, but I hope you read the shack and said, this did not help me think more biblically about God. That's the issue. Did this help me think more biblically about God?

If you say, well, it's helped me spiritually, I just don't know how that can happen. I don't know how error like this could do that. Frankly, now, if you're a pastor, I'd like to address you. If you are promoting the shack to your people, I think you ought to repent.

I think you ought to call your people up and say, I've been giving you some food and inside the food, inside the grains of corn, there are pellets, there are BB gun pellets, and it doesn't do you any good.

There's strychnine in there actually, and I've done you no favor. When Eugene Peterson says on, with his endorsement of this book, listen to this, when the imagination of a writer and the passion of a theologian cross fertilize, the result is a novel on the order of the shack.

Listen now, this book has the potential to do for our generation, what John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress did for his. It's that good. The bad news is it does have the potential to influence a culture, but not biblically like Bunyan, but satanically full of lies and errors about God.

The Trinity, Mutual Submission, and Hierarchy in God

How can people go around talking about the Trinity in modalistic, civilian, wrong ways? You can't do that. Here's what he says about the Trinity. The Trinity, quote, are in a circle of relationship, not a chain of command or a great chain of being.

Hierarchy would make no sense among us. I just have to sigh, because there is a hierarchy in the Trinity. They are co-equal, Father, Son, and Spirit. They are of the same essence, but you read 1 Corinthians chapter 11 and you'll see that there is a hierarchical role with no sin, a holy relationship between the Father, Son, and Spirit.

Listen to what the Father, Papa, says, supposedly the Father of God the Father, I am truly human in Jesus. So now we've got the Father in the Son in this kind of unbiblical mind meld of a way. That's not right.

How about this? In the book, Jesus says, quote, that's the beauty you see in my relationship with Abba and Saraiu. We are indeed submitted to one another and have always been so and will always be. Papa is so much submitted to me as I am to him or Saraiu to you or Papa to her.

Submission is not about authority and it is not obedience. It's all about relationships of love and respect. In fact, we are submitted to you in the same way. We're submitted to people in the same way.

The triune God is submitted to people. Friends, mutual submission, biblical mutual submission is a lie. It's just a lie. You take a look at what this book teaches. There are God-given authorities and this mutual submission thing that swirls around, so husbands have to submit to their wives and employers have to submit to their employees.

It's just not true. And so he feeds people this desire that they have, which is called pride and equality with God, and it just is kerosene to that. How about Young talking about free will in the book, The Shack?

Here's what God says, allegedly, I don't want slaves to do my will. This is Jesus talking. I want brothers and sisters who will share life with me. This sounds like some bad romance novel gone awry is what it sounds like.

Some kind of time. Hey, let's just, let's just do no compromise for a second. If you're a woman and you like this book, I don't criticize you as much as if you're a man. If you're a man and you like this book, there's something wrong with you.

There's really something wrong with you that you are so watered down that you're so feministic now that you like this kind of gobbledygook romance novel stuff. You need to grow up. You need to read the Bible a little bit and you'll find out that that's not what the Bible talks about at all.

Here's what Young says, according to Jesus, I want brothers and sisters who will share life with me. Now, who talks that way? What kind of man, let alone the, the man, the son of God, the son of man, Christ incarnate.

He doesn't talk that way. Can you imagine him talking to the Pharisees like that in Matthew chapter 23? Um, I, I'm kind of mad at you guys. You made me feel really bad. What does Jesus say? Woe to you.

Here's what Young has Jesus blasphemously say. We will come and live our life inside of you so that you begin to see with our eyes and hear with our ears and touch with our hands and think like we do, but we will never force that union with you.

If you want to do your thing, have at it. Time is on our side. That is some kind of free will gone crazy. That does not explain the fall. That does not explain indwelling sin. That does not explain God's monergistic regeneration where he seeks and saves those who are lost.

Papa in the book explains to Mac, there was no way to create freedom without a cost. That is just bugs me to no end. How about this? You will learn to hear my thoughts in your sis, are you? Of course you will make mistakes.

Everybody makes mistakes, but you will begin to better recognize more of my voice as we continue to grow our relationship. So scripture comes from the inside. It's tainted by the fall, but who cares of those mining, mining, uh, minor details.

No scripture comes from the outside. We have to have an outside source. God's speaking to us, not in us. You can show me two religions of the world and there's only two. One is God speaks to us from an external source.

He speaks outside of us and every other religion in the world combines that or has only God's speaks in us, inside of us, according to us as one of us. How about this? In seminary quote in the shack, Mac had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred scripture.

Properly interpreted. Of course, God's voice had been reduced to paper and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. Nobody wanted God in a box, just in a book, especially an expensive one bound in a letter with guilt edges or was that G U I L T edges.

Friends, this man demeans the word of God. I think it ought to make you mad. Here's my question for you. Do you hate what God hates? If you do, how can you stand up for the shack? Especially if you're a man, how can you stand up for what God hates?

God hates it when his word is contradicted. God hates it when we say we hear God from the inside in some kind of mystic, paganistic Gentile fashion. Why would God have to come and speak to us if we could just figure it out on the inside?

God hates it when his Trinity, his triuneness, his three in oneness is somehow desecrated by some fiction. People hiding behind a book is fiction. He hates it. I think you ought to hate what God hates.

Jesus, the perfect man had a holy hatred when it comes to sin. He had a zeal for his father's house, a zeal for God. When this blasphemous book says Jesus isn't a Christian, that's a quote in there. I guess they make you think Jesus didn't think he was the only way there was truth in every religion and they all kind of led to the right place.

And when he wishes, quote, to join them in their transformation to the sons and daughters of my Papa, I don't know what that means except universal Unitarians for unity language is what I used to call it.

It is just wrong. How about this quote? I mean, how many blasphemous quotes do we need? And then we're going to say, yeah, but you know, I really got something out of it. As I've said before on the show, that is not an indictment on anyone except you.

You want not to get things out of it except mad and angry and say, I can't believe this. Quote, I understand what you're saying. I did that for years after seminary. I had the right answer sometimes, but I didn't know you this weekend sharing life with you.

Max says has been far more illuminating than any of those answers. Forget what I learned in the Bible at seminary about you got, it means nothing. But I had this special relationship this week. I had a little tentative meeting like with Moses.

I hope that bugs you. I hope you say, you know, somebody better stand up and say, quit this pragmatic view of the shack where, oh, I got something out of it. It must be good. I want a book that tells me more about the substitutionary penal atonement of Christ Jesus versus some kind of Indian legend of a sacrifice of a princess for her people.

So the plague is stopped. I don't need that. Papa says to Matt, quote, I don't need to punish people for sin. Really? He goes on. Sin is its own punishment devouring you from the inside. It's not my purpose to punish sin.

It's my joy to cure it. A friend that is that spiritual arsenic. Jesus does have to punish sin or he's not holy. He's not righteous. He's not just read Romans Revelation chapter four and five before the tribulation comes.

We need a good dose that he is still righteous and he is on the throne. Is sin its own punishment? Yes, it is. You can read Romans chapter one, but there is also an external punishment that comes from God and ultimate punishment that comes from God.

It is his purpose to punish sin. It is Jesus's prerogative, yes, to come and save and to cure sin as it were. But that language is all muddled. And when you know what he's trying to say, he's trying to say, we're going to give you a book that's going to make you feel better about God because God's got too many sharp edges.

We need to cut, contour, get the sandpaper out, get the little, the block playing out and make everything kind of smooth. A little bit of sugar will help this go down and the sugar will be a cutting and pasting and editing of the word of God.

I rebel against that. I think any weak Christian would say, okay, cut him some slack. I think any mature Christian would say, when it comes to the word of God, this man ought to know better. This is not some two year old Christian who gets asked a question and they somehow slip up and say something about Jesus and the Holy Spirit and they're, they're one in the same and they use the egg as an illustration of the Trinity with the yolk and the albumen and the shell.

Our water is like gas and liquid and solid ice. This is not some immature Christian. This man knows better and publishers know better. I think this is self-published though. The guy's, I'm sure rich and I'm sure he's working on his next book.

But we have to be careful. Don't you want to learn only the good things about God? Haven't you lived your life like me long enough worshiping a false God? I dare you to just get your Bible open, turn, open your Bible to Acts chapter one and begin to read and say, whatever this Bible teaches me about God, I will believe and I will believe nothing else.

And I will only believe what it teaches me. And if it teaches me that I'm a sinner, that I'm a wretch, that I'm crushed by the fall of Adam, that God in his wisdom says, you are in Adam and what Adam does, he will be your representative.

And in God's complete wisdom, if that's true, I will believe it. And I will believe that if God says that he will allow Satan to tempt and allow Adam and Eve to fall, I'll believe it. I'll believe that God can ordain sin.

I'll believe that God can even overturn sin. I believe that God can make sin his handmaiden and turn out good things out of sin. He can take evil and make it into something good or you make good out of it.

And I'll believe that Jesus Christ didn't die on the cross for a lack of self-esteem, somehow some kind of feeling about some kind of, and even now that I'm thinking about it, A, we're going to have some kind of woman representing God, the father.

Can't you see how sly this is, how seductive this is, how deceitful this is to try to bring this in? But the people love it. So I walk into chiropractor's offices and other people, oh yeah, I've read the shack.

Well, I hope if you've read the shack, A, you just checked it out at a library because it's not worth the money that it's printed on. And B, if you have the shack, back to last week's show and two shows ago on last Tuesday, two Tuesdays ago, just you need to burn that book.

I think you'll feel better, especially if you're a guy. If you're a guy and you want to be full of honor and courage and you don't want to be known as Neville Chamberlain your whole life, it's time to grow up and say, let's get some liquid flammables and get rid of that.

Let's get some gel flammables. Now I've already been in trouble because people said, oh, Hitler caused book burnings and everything else. I'm not making you burn the book. If you figuratively burn it, I'd be happy.

If you literally burned it, I'd be happy. Or if you want to keep it and move it from your theology section, theology proper, doctrine of God, and move it to your cults, heresies, aberrations, and other whack-out jobs who want to try to make money at the expense of your desire of a low view of God.

That might be a good way to do it. So this is kind of no compromise radio style. In person, I want you all to know that I'm nicer usually, I'm kinder usually, I have a wife and three daughters and a son, but I would not stoop so low to let them read the shack to think poorly about God, to speak in a way of God that would shame me as a dad.

I will speak of God according to his holiness and his graciousness in the scriptures. And I don't need anything else. Are you content with what the Bible says about God's word? Or are you so discontent with God's written revelation that you have to go outside the Bible into a book like the shack to find it?

And I think you answer that question today and every day. Why don't you read Isaiah this week and find out the transcendent, holy one of God, the one that the devils said of Jesus, this is the holy one of God.

I think you'll be impressed as you read the Bible and you'll say to yourself, the more I grow in Christ, the less I need of drivel, milk toast. I don't know if you like Weetabix, but if you take a Weetabix and put it in milk for long enough, it just disintegrates.

What does that have to do with anything? I have no idea, but I want a theology that's full of meat. And the writer of Hebrews said in Hebrews 5, you know enough now you should be teaching. You don't need to necessarily follow anymore.

God bless you. This has been NoCompromiseRadio .com. We'll see you next time.