Baker Dictionary of Theology

Is this the time we have the intro? We wait for 12 seconds. Here it comes. Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. Mike Ebendroth with Pastor Steve Cooley here. What do we call this? A radio studio? An office?

A study? What is this called besides just bad furniture?

The anxious bench. Because every time I sit here, I'm a little anxious. I'm thinking, you know, what happens if this thing falls down? What is the anxious bench?

See, I love theological humor.

Yeah, well, everybody in the audience, if there's a thousand people, yeah, I'm being optimistic. If there's a thousand people listening to this right now, 999 .7 of them, see what I did there, have no idea what the anxious bench is, so.

You know what I love, Steve? Along those lines, with altar calls and calling people up to the front and everything else, when I got to Bethlehem Bible Church 26 years ago, maybe coming up on 27, actually, they asked me, why don't I do altar calls?

Right? And one guy said to me, why aren't you evangelistic? He didn't ask during the service, but it was after a service. Here's an altar call. Altar, altar. I could have said, well, there's no altar here at the church, you know?

That's one reason, there's nowhere to call them to. But now, lots of the younger people have grown up in the church, and when they go to a church that has altar calls, they think it's weird. So I like that.

They're feeling the anxiousness. What did Spurgeon say about altar calls? You know, you want me to call you, sinner, to a special room to sit or whatever? He said, you don't need to go to a room. You need to believe in the Lord Jesus now, and like a stag that has been pierced by an arrow, you just need to bleed out right here and then trust the Lord kind of thing.

Bleed out. Welcome to bleed out ministries.

Did you know, Steve, that Gospel Assurance is now out on paperback, Kindle, and we have Audible now. It's on Audible. Audible? David Martin read it, and you can buy it on Audible now. Wow.

Wow. I heard that it was number one in the category of assurance books that are available on Audible.

Well, you know, Washer's book title is similar, and his was first, Gospel Assurance, but something about warnings and the wonder or something. Warnings and something else. Making you wonder. Stop. This is like Smoker's Cough Day.

Steve, I have a stack of books, as you see, in between us. Or on the table in between us. And I'm just going to talk about these books today. And so it's going to be kind of, what do we want to call it?

If we had like a wheel of fortune here to spin, or it's just a wheel of books, what do we call that? Mike's meanderings.

I'll just be a witness. Can I, every once in a while, while you're describing the books, you can go, can I get a witness?

I'll go, oh yeah. All right. These are some books that I say, Steve, as I'm looking at them, one, two, three, four, five, six. Six books we'd like to recommend. And as we meander, Mike's meanderings with Steve's speculations.

Oh yeah. I just, you know, now that we're live on air, did I offend you on Sunday when I talked about the Kia car, and how it was just kind of like an outline of things, and it was an outline of a Mercedes not earlier?

Well, just between you, me, and the listener. You often offend me, but not this past Sunday.

Well, that word shadow in Colossians 2 was S-K-I-A, yeah. And I'm like, okay, what do I do? What does it make me think of Ski? I've had a couple of Sorrentos, and what's a Skia? What's a Kia? All right.

Baker’s Dictionary of Theology on Love, Jealousy, and the Trinity

The first book that I'd like to recommend, no particular order, is Baker's Dictionary of Theology. And who wrote it, by the way? BDOT. You know, well, isn't it, it's a compendium, isn't it? So Baker is just because it's Baker Bookhouse, right?

Yeah. In the headquarters of Grand Rapids, Michigan. I wonder when I first became a Christian, that Wycliffe Bible Commentary, it wasn't written by John Wycliffe. What? I thought, what is going on? So do you have a copy of this, Steve?

Do you remember back in Bible study days in North Hollywood? I would talk about this book all the time.

I think I still do. I mean, it doesn't have that wonderful blue cover that you have. I think I still have the hardback, but I know I certainly have it.

You can get it on, I think it's like on StudyLite or BibleHub or whatever. I think you can access them there. You just pointed to an interesting man's name there. Everett Harrison is the editor in chief.

And so this is a random, you know, they've got a miscellaneous authors, right? And then who's the consulting editor? Carl F. Henry. Isn't that interesting? Yes. So one of the reasons I like this book is, Steve, if we have a word, for instance, let's do low-hanging fruit, love.

And we say love in English. What would be helpful to tell the listener, especially if they're a new Christian, we need to go to the original language and not just think about whatever love means today and import it into the scripture.

So, yeah, I mean, if you're talking about the Greek, there are different forms of the word for love, but just to take this on a different tangent, I might've mentioned this before, but just that you would randomly pick that word is just funny to me, because I don't know if you remember this, but the first time you ever asked me to teach was at a couple's retreat that we all did up in the mountains, like Lake Arrowhead or something like that.

And so I had no idea how to teach or to do anything like that. I was not a public speaker per se. And I said, I don't know how to do that, Mike. And you go, just look up, you know, like you said that, what's the word for like the complete exhaustive concordance?

And you said, just look up love in the concordance and just like find all the places where love exists. Like 4 ,000. Yeah, and so I don't remember, but it was like, and you said, just talk about it for five minutes.

It was the most excruciating five minutes of anybody's life.

Let alone yours. Yes, let alone mine. I forgot about that, Steve, but now I remember where we were and I believe it was, I can't remember the guy's name. He, Wismer, Dave and Marianne Wismer. They were super kind to us.

And that was a great little,.

I mean, it was more than a little, it was a really nice place they had up there. I know.

Well, when I first became a Christian, I would hear something and I'd think, you know what? I better see what that means in the Bible, right? Love could mean a lot of different things, feelings, emotions, self-sacrificial, brotherly.

And I remember the first word I ever looked up in this book, Steve, it was jealous. Because I heard some preachers say that God is jealous. And most of the time, if we meet with husbands, let's say, or spouses or something, and they're jealous, it doesn't usually mean something that's good.

Yeah, jealous is negative.

So how could jealous be good? Why would you say God is a negative thing, right? Right.

And so it used in scripture of the emotion inspired by infringing or denial of the right of exclusive possession. It describes the attitude of God toward the infringement of his right to the exclusive worship and service of his people.

Now this is written by O .T. Ellis. Already I'm starting to think though. These are great names. I know. I'm thinking to myself, well, he's got the emotion there. Is he saying that God has emotions? Or is he leading from one thing to the next?

Certainly he's right that there's an infringement on exclusive worship and that God is jealous, his name is jealous. But that was the first word I ever looked up. Sometimes I think it's translated in English, zealous.

It's just so, again, interesting to me because Sunday morning before I did our Hosea reading, I went to Exodus and read the first commandment.

Of the 10 commandments. That was good because we really have to kind of place set Hosea readings.

Right. Yeah, I mean, because how many times can you hear whorings and whoredom and whore, whore, whore. I mean, it's a lot in Hosea. And so you just have to kind of go, okay, why so much emphasis on this?

And, you know, because God is God and he's jealous and Israel was going after these false gods.

Steve, I just opened it up to Thomism. Let the reader understand. The worldview of Thomas Aquinas deals with the truth under the authority of revelation, et cetera. Now in the back, it's got the contributors.

And some of these contributors we are very familiar with, F .F. Bruce, John Gershner, Leon Morris.

I mean, it's just kind of cool because, I mean, I want to, it's almost like when you read these, it's like reading your grandpa's name or something, you know, you're like, oh yeah, John Gershner. S. Louis Johnson Jr.

Yeah. Homer Kent. Yeah. Who else is here? I mean, you know, over the, because you read so much or you hear messages from these guys and like, even though they've been in glory, I don't even know how long some of these guys have been in glory, but, you know, it's almost like you just have fond memories of spending time with them and you're like, I never spent time with them, but it doesn't matter.

How about this? I remember the first time I heard this name and I think it was R .C. Sproul talking about it. Trisagon, Trisagon. I'm like, what in the world is Trisagon? So since I have my little Baker's Dictionary of Theology, I'm like, oh, I can look that up.

Trisagon. This name Trisagon means thrice holy, was originally applied to a liturgical hymn based on Isaiah 6 .3. Isn't it interesting? Now here's with the Trinity stuff. The Trisagon entered into the monophysite controversy when the clause, who was crucified for us, was inserted after the word immortal.

Neither this nor later modifications found favor except among the monophysites and the monothelites, the apostolic origin of Trisagon cannot be maintained. But we think of Isaiah 6, holy, holy, holy. Let me ask you this, Steve.

This is kind of fun. Now, we've been taught that if God says something once, of course, it's important. If he wants to really stress something that, you know, often in scripture, the two words are used, truly, truly, amen, amen, verily, verily.

But only one time, I think that we can find in scripture, God has mentioned three times as holy, holy, holy, holy, right? Right. So far, so good. Yeah. It doesn't say love, love, love, just, just, just, righteous, righteous, righteous.

But is holiness, do you think, the preeminent attribute because of the Trisagon, Isaiah 6 .3? Do you think that that's like his supreme attribute?

Supreme. Well, I mean, I, because you can say his love is holy. I mean, in other words, it's other. So if in that sense, when we talk about his holiness, yes, this is supreme because he's, everything about him is otherly.

It's so different from us that we can't, we can sort of relate, but we can't ultimately relate. Interesting.

When I first became a Christian, I would read attributes of God and then say, someone said, well, you know, you can't really, you know, he doesn't, his attributes, maybe it's perfections, maybe it's, you know, how do we describe God who is one and who he is?

But then it, it gets harder and harder, the older you get into it.

Well, and it does, especially when you start talking about simplicity and, you know, there are people who want to, you know, sort of make the God, the sum of his attributes, which is wrong, right?

So. All right, how about this last word? And we'll get to the next book, the Trinity. Although not itself a biblical term, the Trinity has been found, has been found a convenient designation for the one God self-revealed in scripture as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Well, isn't that convenient? Uh-huh, that's good though. It's convenient because if we say Calvinism, we don't have to explain it all. Right. If you say Trinity, you don't have to explain. Well, sometimes you do.

Yeah, well, these days. It signifies that within the one essence of the Godhead, we have to distinguish three persons who are neither three gods on one side nor three parts or modes of God on the other, but co-equally and co-eternally God.

That's a good definition. Yeah, but I thought the father's the father, so he's like got the main purpose. He knows things. He's the sender, so he's a little bit better.

He's the father because he eternally begets the son. Okay.

So would you say God is single and unique? Yes. Okay, that's Deuteronomy 6. It says here, it is not surprising, therefore, that while we have no dogmatic statements, there are clear references to the three persons of the Godhead, right?

Matthew 3, Matthew 28, 2 Corinthians 13. The fact that Christian faith involves acceptance of Jesus as Savior and Lord meant that the Trinity quickly found its way into the creeds and confessions of the faith.

Here's my question to you, Steve. When people start wondering about the Trinity, the deity of Christ really is at stake. That's the first thing that goes, right? Always.

Yeah, because if you can get rid of the deity of Christ, then now he's just a man.

Yeah, they don't seem to attack the Holy Spirit as much, but it seems to be the deity of Christ, hence Unitarians, right? They're gonna, well, but here's a question. Why don't Unitarians come knocking at the door?

Why don't they proselytize people? I mean, seriously. I think Unitarians, Universalists, United Unitarians for Universalism, I think they're just disgruntled people with the triune God and who he is and how he is holy and just, and they just end up there, but there's no door knocking.

Well, basically, I mean, I go back to my friend who's now in eternity, but he said once when he'd gone from evangelicalism to a Unitarian Universalist church, and I asked him, I said, how do they teach that you get to heaven?

And he said, well, we don't. These are very, I would say, they're very self-satisfied people. The journey is enough. They don't need any external revelation because all of revelation resides within them.

I like that, Steve. There's a church here in Central Mass in Sterling, and I think they're called, I think it's a federated church. I can't remember what they're actually called, but I think they're a mixture of Baptists.

Federated. Baptist Unitarians, Universalists, and Congregationalists or something. And you know what? I wouldn't mind if there was two churches in town and they're not a lot of attendance, you don't have clergy, so the Baptist and the Congregationalists got together.

I wouldn't mind that. No, that's fine. Right, or if you had Congregationalists here in New England and some Presbyterians. I wouldn't mind that at all. The annual meetings would be fun to go see there.

Food fights. But once you bring in Unitarianism, what about this, Steve? Why do they even get together? Is it because of the inbred desire for fellowship that God has given us with other people and they just have to have a false fellowship group?

Is that it?

I think so. I mean, people like to get together, right? We've experienced during the lockdowns and all that, the hardest thing to do is to be isolated. It's cruel and unusual punishment to leave people by themselves in jail, right?

But we put a whole society through that. But I think people long for others who even if they don't fully agree with them can at least identify with them.

Nobody likes to be alone. Steve, you spent several years in jail, not because of a crime committed, but because Thank you for clarifying. Crimes were committed and you were paid to go do that. I was talking to one of the nurses when I was in the hospital for those 16 days a year and a half ago.

And I said, I feel like I'm in jail, partly because I'm isolated via COVID, partly because I'm stuck to a machine. I can only go so far. So I'm limited in who comes and visits, no one, and how far I can walk or go or step.

And then I said, well, do you nurse have patients that come in from jails and you have to give them operations, do this, that, and the other? I said, what's that like? And she said, oh, they're very nice.

They're happy. There's usually a policeman here and they're handcuffed or whatever. And they love being here because they have some access to this big room by themselves. And they're not like locked in.

And so they like being here. And I thought, isn't that interesting? What I'm hating, they would love. Right.

Yeah, it's way better there than, you know, I mean, certainly it's warm instead of being cold. Or, you know, whatever, you know, if you say, hey, can I have another blanket? The answer's usually not no.

Isn't that amazing? You just were talking earlier about, okay, solitary confinement and what the, you probably have rules, right? As a jailer, as a sheriff, when can we put somebody in solitary confinement?

And all of a sudden by government mandate and fiat here in America, solitary confinement for many.

Yeah, I mean, we had a bunch of rules and regulations. Like you could only have, you could only be on disciplinary diets like every other day for 10 days max. And you could only be in isolation for 10 days.

And then it had to be reviewed. And there were all these stipulations and things like that. And yeah, because we understand the effects that that has on a person.

Steve, what would be a meal if somebody had disciplinary diet? I mean, I try to be on a disciplinary diet, but you know, before I go on vacation and stuff, then I can just eat what I want when I'm on vacation.

But what would an inmate's disciplinary diet be?

Well, part of it you would like because it's all based on calorie count. You'd like that part. Okay, easy to count calories. But they would only feed them twice a day and they would bring in, it's this awful loaf.

You know, like to call it meatloaf would be to do every meatloaf in the country like a major disservice. And it would just be all the nutrients and everything you're supposed to have, but just kind of all baked together in a big nasty loaf.

Oh, okay. It reminds me of the bologna that has, I don't know, pimentos in it or something. If you slice it really thinly,.

It's got all these weird things. I think it was made out of, no, I'm kidding. It was made out of pimento loaf.

What's going on with all these commercials for dog food? And you can't give your dog dry food anymore. It has to be perishable food that's in your fridge that you have to use.

Are you really asking me that? Because I'll tell you what's going on about that. If you just think about how many people are refusing to have kids or refer to their dogs as their kids, that the companies have listened to that and gone, oh, well, if people really feel that way, then let's get them to treat their dogs like kids.

I mean, the next thing you know, we're gonna be having designer clothing for dogs, right? I mean, you're gonna be spending, not you, but people will be spending 40, 50, 100 bucks changing their dog's clothes every day.

I mean, it's coming.

Maybe they could have some Harry Styles clothes or something on there.

Well, I mean, you already have doggy daycare. You know, I mean, people get these dogs and then they feel bad for their dogs being alone all day because both the people are working so they take them off to these kennels where they spend all day.

How about if dogs, you know, like a male dog wants to be like identified as a female dog? How would that work?

They have clothes for that? Well, they would have to express that. And, you know, certainly. Okay, okay.

Certainly then you couldn't. Now see, I was gonna look at these other books, but I mean, we're already this far into the show for bakers. So let me pull this up. This is the entrance. This is the entry rather for predestination.

Okay. What would you guess, just knowing some of these contributors? Who do you think might be riding on predestination? Bettner. You got it. Ding, ding, ding, ding. That is so good. We have to, what do we want here?

Oh, there it is. Thank you. Okay. That is excellent. Lorraine Bettner. Tell us about Lorraine Bettner. Okay, that's enough there. Enough clapping. It's actually a guy. First of all. I mean, how many guys do you know Lorraine?

He was tough. We know that. He wrote a whole book. What was it called? The Doctrine of Predestination? The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination. Yeah. How about this? Objections against the Doctrine of Predestination bear with equal force against the foreknowledge of God, because what God foreknows must be as fixed and certain as that which is predestinated.

In other words, if God were to look down the course of time to see what you would do, repent and believe, God would then learn something, then he would choose you.

And so even there, the And it would be fixed anyway. It would still negate free will, right? Because the future would be fixed. There would be nothing that you could change about it. So the, and that's where people came to, what's it called?

The open theism. Because to really have free will, you have to be able to change your destiny, right? Which means that you have to be able to change God's mind. What he knew? Well, he didn't know perfectly because you just changed things up on him.

I think there's a new book title here, Steve, but it won't be written by Bettner. The Arminian Doctrine of Post-Destination. Your destiny is determined post what you do. How can that be?

Well, it dethrones God. You know, ultimately what they want to say is, I don't like the idea that God's in charge. I want to be in charge. Or, you know, I want somebody else to be in charge. But the falsity of that, and we know this inherently, why do we pray for anybody's salvation?

Because we believe that God can change hearts. Well, aren't they responsible for changing their own hearts? And, you know, if God really impinges on their hearts, is that fair?

Well, back to the anxious bench and Finney with his sermon entitled, Men Bound to Change Their Own Hearts. How about this? Bettner writes, even the sinful acts of men are included in the divine plan. They are foreseen, permitted, and have their exact places.

They are controlled and overruled for the divine glory, the crucifixion of Christ, which admittedly was the worst crime in all human history, had, we are expressly told, its exact and necessary place in that plan, Acts 2, Acts 4.

That's money right there.

Yeah, it's almost like he understood, you know, the Westminster Confession faith, the London Baptist Confession of 1689. It's like he knew those documents and believed them. God uses secondary means, you know, and is no way touched by sin.

People say, well, how can that be?

I don't know, but it is. Isn't that interesting? Foreseen, permitted, and have their exact places. I'm gonna start using that. They have their exact place. Oh, I like that. All right, is there anything, let's just, I'm just gonna do a rando, open it up.

You can tell I'm not looking and I'm just gonna, oh. It's danger. Seriously, this, I did not plan this. Peligro. Uh-huh, it says, I opened it up randomly. I kid you not, you saw me. You can vouch for me, it says gospel.

Gospel. Who wrote the gospel section? Let's see, Daniel Fuller. No, excuse me.

That would be muy mal. Robert Mounts. Oh, good old Bobby, as we call him.

Uh-huh, it's interesting. Good works are right before gospel here. They're not, they're not before the gospel in real life in the Ordo. Thank you for that clarification. But it was by John Gershner talked about good works.

You can almost hear John Gershner's gravelly voice with good works.

They're the fruit, not the root.

The English word gospel, from the Anglo-Saxon God's spell, God's story, is the usual New Testament translation of the Greek euangelion. According to Tyndale, the renowned English reformer and translator, it signified, I like this, quote, good, merry, glad, and joyful tidings.

I think we have to spell merry, M-E-R-R-Y, so. Here, he spelled it M-E-R-Y.

M-E-R-Y? Uh-huh, because it's older English for him. And joyful was with an I, I-O-Y. Good, merry, glad, joyful tidings that makes a man's heart glad and makes him sing, dance, and leap for joy.

Well, I mean, if you hear the gospel, if somebody preaches the gospel to you and you're like, eh, that's old news, man. I don't wanna hear that.

Well, even for Christians, I don't really wanna hear that because I'd like to be motivated by fear of losing my salvation, fear of not being finally justified.

Or I like to just have something practical. This gospel stuff, I can't really do anything with it.

Well, even back to Colossians 2, verse six, as you have received Jesus Christ as Lord, so walk in him. Right, you're going back to remember who this Jesus is and was on earth. And then you're thinking, okay, now so walk in him.

There's a tie-in.

It doesn't improve my place, but I want to. I think if we, I was listening to somebody who recently said, it's a matter of the sins that we once enjoyed now repel us. And does that mean we don't sin? No, but it means we regret those sins.

If we could, we could just like disavow them. We wanna be away from them. And it's all because of the work that the Holy Spirit is doing within us.

Amen, well, thanks for listening today. No Compromise Radio, Baker's Bible Dictionary. Find it online for free or pick up a copy. I think it'd really be helpful for you. And you know, these resources, Steve, you can keep for the rest of your life and pass them on to your kids and grandkids, right?

Because the truth does not age. Amen.