Covenant Theology vs Neonomianism (Part 1)

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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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

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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.

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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

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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

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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.

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My name is Mike Abendroth, and we have a special treat lined up for you. I was on the show

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Gospel on Tap, I think it's called Kingdom Prologue now. Kingdom Prologue, is that right?

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With Aldo Leon down in Miami, and he interviewed me. November 7th it played, if you go to iTunes,

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Gospel on Tap. He entitled it Covenant Theology vs. Neonomism, and it says

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Reformed Covenantal Perspective with Pastor Mike Abendroth, Bethlehem Bible Church. It says

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SBC, but it's not SBC. Anyway, a four -part series here on No Compromise Radio.

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I'm essentially going to play that interview on this show because I think it's going to be helpful to you.

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Enjoy the show. Welcome to Kingdom Polemics.

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You've heard me by myself for a couple of times, did a Westminster Larger Catechism episode, did a musing on various concerns of mine about dialectical theology episode.

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We did drop something about Presbyterian polity being turned into a pyramid, but now we have another guest to discuss issues of polemics in the kingdom.

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He is very well known, so I'm pretty sure that many of you on this podcast would know who he is, but many of you wouldn't.

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So before we talk about neonominism, the conversation about not being anti -law or no law, but creating a new standard that is attainable to maintain and justify and sustain your relationship with God based upon you, and the whole conversation about grace and the powers of Christian life,

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I would like our OG, Original Gangster, on social media and talking about the gospel publicly,

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Mike, to introduce himself. So go ahead, bro. Sure. Glad to be on. I was happy to have you on our show, and I think maybe one of the highest downloaded shows so far when we are talking about federal vision.

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So I thank you for that. I'll send you the royalty check if I ever get one. My name is

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Mike Abendroth, and I pastor in West Boylston, Massachusetts. Been pastoring there for 25 years now, my first and only church that I pastored.

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And it's right in the center of Massachusetts, north of a town called Worcester, and Worcester is known sometimes as the armpit of New England.

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So I'm happy to be right in the center of it all, a little town of about 6 ,000 people.

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I also host No Compromise Radio. I think, Aldo, it's been 14 years now of daily radio,

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Monday to Friday. So we've got about 3 ,500 episodes. Fourteen years ago, I think my theology was a little different.

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So don't listen to those shows, listen to the newer ones. And the theme really is, and I thought in light of your new show title, even renaming

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No Compromise Radio to make it not some discernment deal. But to really talk about who the

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Lord is, Christ for pardon, Christ for power, and everything about the Lord Jesus bleeds into topics like sanctification, assurance, motivation for obedience.

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How do we preach? Where do we put works? What's the law? How is it different than the gospel?

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So everything is kind of under that umbrella. And I just released a book called

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Gospel Assurance to try to help people be sure and confident and have that realization that in fact, they're right with God, not because of something they do.

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That's Rome, that's standing before God based on your sanctification, but something that's already been done.

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So I love to talk about the Lord, love young men like you who want to stand for the truth. And so it's a privilege to be on.

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Good stuff, man. Twenty five years in one church, that's that's I hope

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I hope that could be me someday. Maybe not twenty five years, because maybe see if I were to live to be in my 80s and I got this call two years ago and I'm forty one.

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Yeah, I get like a like a 40 year call or something that that'd be cool, man, but. That book,

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I appreciate the the copy, I have a question, like how where did you get all those quotes, is that just stuff you've compiled, like how did you how did you put all those quotes together?

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I was I was pretty impressed with the array of quotes. Well, what happened was, although I had an idea,

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OK, I need to give somebody a book on assurance. I regularly go to churches and speak on the topic and I thought, well, what book do

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I give people now? The Louis Burkhoff book, Assurance of Faith. It's good. It's free. A PDF online.

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You can get it at Monergism. Joel Beakey's book on assurance, I think, is good. But I wanted to hand them something else.

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And so I thought, you know what? I got really sick last year with covid and almost died and my mind's still foggy.

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I don't think I can write a hundred thousand word book on assurance. So I'll write a six thousand word intro and then

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I'll start accumulating other chapters on assurance that I like from typically

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English Puritans, English reformers. And then I thought, well, I'm going to start looking up assurance quotes.

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And so I basically Googled to answer your question, duck, duck, go, stuff that I've kept, stuff that I've found.

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And I just tried to put a variety of quotes in there from Jerry Bridges, who's the gateway drug into proper thinking for lots of people, to Vitsios, to Thomas Brooks, Thomas Goodwin.

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Anybody that said something that I liked, I put it in the book. So there's five quotes on assurance at the end of every chapter.

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Yeah, it's really good. And it's like, yeah, it's very much like a. It's very accessible to the

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I don't I'm not a book person because it's kind of like it's kind of like broken up and like devotional style, you know, like a like a reading a day kind of thing.

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And a lot of people tend to appreciate that, you know, instead of reading something like six hundred page book on.

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Right. What happened was and this is probably going to lead into the conversation that we'll have today to people want assurance outside of the objective work of Christ.

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So almost all the assurance that people typically move toward is subjective and looking internally.

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And of course, if you'd like to look at the Holy Spirit's evidence in your life as a

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Christian, you should. It's Romans eight. We cry out Abba, Father. That's the shriek.

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That's the cry of a pregnant mother when you're really, really hurting and you don't know what to do. And when you cry out,

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Father, help me. That's a sign of the Spirit of God working in you. You know who will help you as a wonderful father.

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Secondly, the fruit of the Spirit, right? Galatians chapter five. Those aren't things we work for in that passage.

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Those things are given to us by the Spirit. And there's that subjective love, joy and peace. And that reform syllogism of the

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Bible teaches that Christians have love, joy and peace. I have some love, joy and peace. I wish it was more. Therefore, I must be a

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Christian. So that's fine and dandy and wonderful. And we study assurance. But assurance can't be divorced from the objective work of Christ.

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Object, objective. The object of our faith is Christ. So what I did a little bit, Aldo, in that book is the first few chapters are just about Jesus.

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Simple, easy, not divorcing assurance from Jesus. Luther said, when

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I look to myself, I don't know how I could be saved. And when I look to the Lord Jesus, I don't know how I could be lost.

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And so I didn't, I hate to admit it, but I started off really easy in those daily devotionals.

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I call it a guide because devotional, you know, girls read devotional. Guys read guides.

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And so then it gets harder and harder and harder. But I didn't want the people to only focus on assurance.

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It was, I think, Spurgeon who said, can I quote Baptist here on your show? Yeah, yeah. I think

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Spurgeon said, when you chase assurance, it flies away. Yeah, that's really good. Yeah. But when you fix your eyes on the

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Lord Jesus by faith, the dove of assurance will come and settle on your shoulder. Yeah. So like I like how the

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Westminster Confession talks about when you're lacking assurance to go to the means of grace. And obviously, like, what are the means of grace?

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They are the means by which Christ and his benefits are communicated to us.

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And so there's a whole lot of talk about introspection and, you know, and, you know, the lively Christian life and, you know, a faith that works.

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But there's those sections where it says, and by the way, if you really want to know that you're right with God, you better go to those ordinary

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Christological means of grace that remind you of who you are because of Christ.

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So that's a good segue. Why don't you, as the expert, tell us what

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I did a little bit in the beginning, but just more succinctly and clearly, what is neonomyism and why don't you start talking about why is this so popular?

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What is it and why is it so popular? Sure. Well, like any job that people might have in any field, any hobby even, there are terms and there are vocabulary words that are unique to that setting.

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My wife and I have a pool table, a billiards table, and we'd like to get better. So last night we watched a little

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YouTube on exactly what to do with angles, what everything's called. And so it has its own nomenclature.

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And similar with Christianity, lots of Christians, I think they want us to dumb everything down into monosyllabic words.

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And they're like, I don't want to understand. I don't want to know that word. And so when we say N -O -M, our gnome, it simply means law and law means to do something, right?

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It's a command. It's an imperative. It's to do. And if you put an anti in front of law, you're against the law.

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We'll talk about that more later. And if you put a neo in front of it, you're not on the matrix, but it means it's new.

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So it's a new law or an additional law, something that you're going to have to do in order to be right with God.

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So saying that to move a little more forward, I think what happens, although, as you know, the works get a bum rap, we are all for works.

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We just, as Luther said, we want to place works in the right category. And so here's how

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I would talk a little bit more about neonomism or gnomism or our kind of legalism, not should you celebrate

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Halloween, but in fact, real legalism. Where do works go? And so if we think about it this way,

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I think it's the best. All right. Standing before God, the ground of our salvation on that day, when you stand in front of a thrice holy

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God, you better be perfect because it only takes one O ring for the space shuttle to go up in flames.

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And it only takes one sin to be damned by God. I mean, how many times do you spit in the king's face before he condemns you?

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So you need to be in front of God with perfect, a perfect righteousness. That's why the ground of our salvation is

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Jesus Christ. He's paid for our transgressions and he's also earned a righteousness for us by obeying the law, meriting righteousness for us as the last

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Adam. So that ground is perfect. So works before God must be perfect. They must be the

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Lord Jesus. Well, what about works afterward? Is there any place for works as a necessary consequence?

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And of course the answer is yes. Out of gratitude, we have all kinds of works that we do because we're saved.

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Not to keep our salvation, not to earn our salvation. Where neo -nomism comes in to play on the front end and on the back end, it's especially dangerous when it says, you know what?

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There's a necessary condition that you have to have some works to stand before God.

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Not as a consequence, not as fruit, not as evidence, but as a necessary condition.

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And so that really, really is difficult when you say things like this.

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You must surrender as a response to the gospel. As an unbeliever, you must surrender.

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You must have a certain amount of love. You must have obedience. You must yield. You must submit.

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You must lay back and let God. All those terms are really terms that should stay in the necessary consequence.

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And we've put them into the necessary condition. The way you stand before God is based on the perfect righteousness of Christ.

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And you receive that righteousness by faith and faith alone. Knowledge, assent, and trust.

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Not knowledge, assent, trust, willingness, submission, but knowledge, assent, and trust. So neo -nomism comes into play on the front end.

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You've got to have these extra works. And then on the back end, for final justification, we'll get to that, I'm sure, soon.

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Yeah, yeah. And the question is, why is this so popular, this not living because of what

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I already have in Christ, based upon Christ's perfect act of impassive obedience?

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Why is living so that in my obedience, so I obey so that I can finally or fully arrive?

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Like, why is that such a popular thing, you think? I mean, there's a whole lot of reasons. What do you think,

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Mike? You know, I think, well, there's plenty and no particular reason, no particular order, rather.

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We're not taught well as pastors, even in some seminaries, so forth. If we're not taught well, we don't know how to communicate it.

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We're not confessional, where we've seen these problems already dealt with back in the 1500s, 1600s, 1800s.

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And so we kind of abandoned the past and we want to say, biblicistically, let's just try to find this.

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We're afraid to tell people, do you know what? You stand before God. He couldn't, as a Christian, he couldn't love you more.

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He couldn't love you less. There's nothing that can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. And they're afraid if we talk that way, that people are going to run crazy.

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They're going to disobey. They're going to be lawless. But I think maybe the biggest reason is we don't talk about Jesus when we preach very often.

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Now, there are some Christ -centered preachers, of course. But when the course of the day is, the three meal of the days are moralism, law -keeping, asceticism, whatever, then there's no real reason to even think about Christ's righteousness is my ground.

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We turn our righteousness into our ground. And by the way, what kind of human father would ever do such a thing?

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You have children. I have four children. They're grown. Never did I say to them, by the way, you've disobeyed and I'm going to give you a spanking and you're now out of the family.

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I would never do that. I would say, since you're in the family, I love you. That's why I give you discipline. And daddy couldn't love you more or less based on your disobedience.

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We make human fathers kinder and nicer and more generous than even God the Father. With God the

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Father, it's you obey or else. And so I think there's lots of reasons. Christ isn't proclaimed, no confessions.

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We don't understand justification and sanctification and similarities and differences when one starts, when the other stops.

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And so I think it's a theological illness that we have. And I think it's also the, you know, like the reformers said that the bent of the natural, fallen human heart is works righteousness.

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So the reason why there's so much conditional religion in the world is simply because it's what's intuitive to us.

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And part of the reason for that, I find it interesting is that the way God made us, if you buy it, if you believe in the covenant works,

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Adam was made in such a way where he could earn ultimate end time life with God.

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Like Meredith Klein would say, the ultimate end time life would could have been a probationary, a probationary accomplishment would have would have brought him to the final fullness that was anticipated.

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Um, and man after the fall no longer can hear

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God give some kind of condition, but the wiring of, of conditionality is, is there in like our, our, our first federal head, but after he falls, um, there's only one person now that can hear the, the charges in the garden to, you know, earn that, that final fullness of life.

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But man still thinks that he's in the garden. So he has the hard wiring. He doesn't realize that there's a, an infection, a virus in the system.

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And, and so he's still in the, you know, he still acts like he's, you know, Adam that could, you know, obtain this unto this.

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And he can't, after the covenant of works is forfeited and broken by Adam, the confession talks about a, another covenant, a second covenant known as the covenant of grace, where God meets the conditions and brings us in based upon the last

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Adam. So I think it's, it's just in our hard wiring to do so. And I also think, you know, it's just one of the reasons why

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I believe that neonominism is so popular is because the devil is real.

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Um, he exists, he roams the earth, he hates God. He is the chief enemy of God.

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And he knows what is most chiefly glorifying to God is the gospel.

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And so if you want to, um, uh, counter the glory of God and the way

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Ephesians one says that God has chosen to manifest his glory is, uh, the praise of glory is grace. It's through the choosing of the father through the son and the sealing of the spirit.

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Then if you're going to be very effective, uh, in countering that, then you're going to do something like neonominism to, um, counter that.

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Neonominism is better than antinominism because I think, again, it doesn't like no law at all.

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It doesn't appeal to the worst righteousness in our fallenness and our old Adam kind of like wiring.

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Um, there's not a whole lot of people that I think are truly bought into like a lawless system.

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Um, I do believe that the norm is more some kind of probationary arrangement.

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And this is, you know, why it's cause it's like, it's like, Hey, you know, there's a little bit of grace in there that you need, but there's also like a little bit of works because there's nothing for free.

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And so neonominism, I think it appeals to our fallenness. And it also is a, you know, the devil knows how effective the true gospel is and therefore he likes to, you know, target it with this.

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Uh, what is it, what are Richard Baxter say that the new covenant

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God creates a new standard by which we can use grace to now earn something, which wasn't as exclusively high, um, as it was in the old

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Testament, you know, like Paul explains the old Testament standards, his curse is everybody does not abide by everything written in the book of a lot of before them, but the new

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Testament, we have the grace and a lower standard and on and on it goes.

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Well, as you were talking, I had lots of things come through my mind. And one is this,

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Aldo, what you said earlier. So true. What's written on our hearts.

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Is it the gospel? Is it good news? Of course not. It's law, right? And therefore the gospel has to come from outside of us and it has to be given from a preacher, a herald,

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Romans 10. And therefore if the pastor is not continually talking about who the Lord is, then we just evolve into this, this law world.

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And we don't even know who gave us the law. Luther said, I'm preaching against self -righteousness every single week because what's innate to a man, even a

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Christian man, what's on his heart, it's not the gospel, it's the law. So we have to be very, very careful there.

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Yeah, you will never, you will never intuitively come to the gospel. Yeah, it has to be revealed.

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It has to be proclaimed. Right. And so the other thing that I was thinking about is when you have this transactional

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Christianity that you were discussing, if I do this, then God does that. And if I have these works, then

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God is pleased. I'm thinking to myself, this is, this is, this is, this is back to Rome.

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This is to do the good things. Then I do, I do the first step. Then God responds. And I'm thinking, this is not right.

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I personally believe that neonomianism, legalism, nomism, it's worse than antinomianism, not because only it's more popular than what you said is true, but also because what category is neonomism in?

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Answer, justification category. If I have to make a mistake, while both are sinful, antinomianism, neonomism, both are sinful.

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Let's make sure we have that clear because people want to, you know, tell us we're antinomians all the time. I teach the third use of the law all the time, but what's worse, something when it comes to your standing before God or something in the sanctification category.

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And therefore there's all these people thinking antinomianism is so awful. It is, but not as awful as jamming in our works into the finished work of Christ, which is essentially

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Rome. Now, justification and sanctification are commingled and blurred.

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And now I think as a Christian, my standing before God is my holy works and my obedience.

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And that is a killer. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a good point.

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No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Ebendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston.

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