The Shadow Knows

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

My name is Mike Abendroth. And lately I've been doing a lot of shows on Saturday. I don't know how that works.

But today is not Saturday. Today is Friday. And I believe it's

October 4th in real time. I was supposed to be up in New Hampshire today doing a preaching seminar, kind of a finishing touches kind of thing.

And something came up, not on my end. But it got postponed. I think it's going to be mid -November or January.

But I will be up in Saskatoon November, I think, 1st and 2nd. I said

October 1st and 2nd before, but that was wrong. October is incorrect. And let's see, since I have, let's see, this is a bad radio.

I guess I don't need my alarm clock. What would that tell me? Anything? I will be in Saskatoon training

Bible teachers and pastors coming up November 1st and November 2nd, 2019,

Saskatoon. If you type in Pastor Steve Flippen, fellowship, Bible fellowship,

Baptist fellowships, communion, fellowship chapel, Saskatoon, you'll find it.

And then I'm preaching there that Sunday. And I'm looking forward to that. By the time you hear this, maybe the

R. Scott Clark conference will already be finished. It was great. And by the way, speaking of preachers,

I regularly watch sermons for Master Seminary doctoral students and sometimes the

MDiv as well, and other friends. I watch their sermons and kind of give them a critique for $99.

I don't really talk about money much on the show, but if you go to sermoncritique .com, you can have your sermons critiqued by me.

I'll watch it once or twice. We'll Skype for an hour and I'll give you a little written format, a written follow -up on what

I think you could do better in terms of delivery. I just have to watch one of your sermons and sermoncritique .com.

There you go. I have to have something to help me out when I'm going to be a senior citizen.

I don't get a pension. Today we're talking about the book of Hebrews and obedience.

I know many of you, because I talk about free grace so much, sovereign grace,

God's abounding grace, that you might be thinking, wait a second, I don't know.

Does this guy promote obedience? Does he want people conformed to the image of the son?

Does he want holy living? Does he want good works? What are the motivations to obey? Does he care about duty, imperatives, and commands?

Anyone that listens to me pretty much knows the answer to those questions. I just like to rub it in the faces of neo -Nomans, neo -Nomians.

Gnome is law. If you're against law, anti -Gnome -ism or Gnome -ianism, and neo is you're adding new law, extra laws to the

Christian, the responses to Christ, it's going to be sola fide and it's not going to be anything else.

Anyway, I want you to know dogmatically, emphatically, categorically,

No Compromise Radio understands that God, doesn't sound funny like Charles Barkley when he uses the third person.

No Compromise Radio, which is me, sometimes it's with Steve, we know,

I know, it knows God requires obedience. Obedience is important to God.

God the creator expects his creatures, his creation to obey.

The God who made you requires your obedience. God's laws are to be kept.

God's standards are to be lived up to. Can you end a sentence with a preposition?

Obedience is not an option. Now, I'd like to read for you 1

Samuel 15 to highlight this idea that God expects obedience and how important obedience is.

And by the way, this chapter is crazy. This chapter is wild.

This chapter deserves to be read, not dramatized like I'm going to act, but with proper inflection and mood and drummer.

That's what it needs. And Samuel said to Saul, I'm going to say the

Lord, but it's Yahweh, Yahweh sent me to anoint you king over his people,

Israel. Now therefore listen to the words of Yahweh, thus says Yahweh of hosts,

I've noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt.

Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.

So Saul summoned the people and numbered them in Telam, 200 ,000 men on foot and 10 ,000 men of Judah.

Saul came to the city of Amalek and lay in wait in the valley. Then Saul said to the Canaanites or the

Canaanites, go, depart, go down from among the Amalekites lest I destroy you with them.

For you showed kindness to all the people of Israel when they came up out of Egypt. So the

Canaanites departed from among the Amalekites and Saul defeated the Amalekites from Havilah as far as Shur, which is east of Egypt.

And he took Agag, the king of the Amalekites alive and devoted to destruction all the people with the edge of the sword.

But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep and of the oxen and of the fatted calves and the lambs and all that was good and would not utterly destroy them.

All that was despised and worthless, they devoted to destruction. The word of Yahweh came to Samuel, I regret that I made

Saul king for he has turned back from following me and has not performed my commandments. Samuel was angry and he cried to the

Lord all night and Samuel rose early to meet Saul in the morning. And it was told

Samuel, Saul came to Carmel and behold, he set up a monument for himself and turned and passed on and went to Gilgal.

And Samuel came to Saul and Saul said to him, bless be to you, Yahweh, I have performed the commandment of the

Lord. And Samuel said, what then is this bleeding of the sheep in my ears and the lowing of the oxen that I hear?

Saul said, they have brought them from the Amalekites and the people have spared the best of the sheep and the oxen to sacrifice to the

Lord your God and the rest we have devoted to destruction. Then Samuel said to Saul, stop,

I will tell you what the Lord said to me this night. And he said to him, speak.

And Samuel said, though you are little in your own eyes, are you not the head of the tribes of Israel?

The Lord anointed you king over Israel and the Lord sent you on a mission and said, go devote to your destruction or to destruction the sinners, the

Amalekites and fight against them until they are consumed. Why then did you not obey the voice of the

Lord? Why did you pounce on the spoil and do what was evil in the sight of the

Lord? Saul said to Samuel, I have obeyed the voice of the Lord. I have gone on the mission on which the

Lord sent me. I have brought Agag, the king of Amalek and have devoted the

Amalekites to destruction. But the people took the spoil sheep and oxen and the best of things devoted to destruction to sacrifice to the

Lord, your God in Gilgal. And Samuel said, has the

Lord, has Yahweh as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the

Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice and to listen than the fat of rams.

For rebellion is as the sin of divination and presumption is as iniquity and idolatry because you have rejected the word of the

Lord. He has also rejected you from being king. Saul said to Samuel, I have sinned for I have transgressed the commandment of the

Lord and your words because I feared the people and obeyed their voice. Now, therefore, please pardon my sin and return with me that I may bow before the

Lord. Samuel said to Saul, I will not return with you for you have rejected the word of the

Lord and the Lord has rejected you from being king over Israel. As Samuel turned to go away,

Saul sees the skirt of his robe and it tore. And Samuel said to him, the Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this day and has given it to a neighbor of yours who is better than you.

And also the glory of Israel will not lie or have regret for he is not a man that he should have regret.

Then he said, I have sinned, yet you honor me before the elders of my people and before Israel and return with me that I may bow before the

Lord your God. So Samuel turned back after Saul and Saul bowed before the Lord. Then Samuel said, bring here to me

Agag, the king of the Amalekites. And Agag came to him cheerfully. Agag said, surely the bitterness of death has passed.

And Samuel said, as your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women.

And Samuel hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal. Then Samuel went to Ramah and Saul went up to his house in Gibeah of Saul.

Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul and the

Lord regretted that he had made Saul king over Israel. I obeyed.

The people disobeyed. It is better to obey than to sacrifice.

Dear Christian friends, God requires obedience. And if there is obedience, think about it.

Here's the point today in NoCo. If there's obedience, you don't need a sacrifice.

Sacrifice is for disobedience. The disobedient should die.

They're sinning against a holy God, but the sacrifice dies in their place.

If the people obeyed, there'd be no need for sacrifice. My question this morning is,

I guess it's afternoon. Have you obeyed God's law? Do you obey

God's law? If you have not obeyed God's law with perfect obedience, you need a sacrifice.

You need a high priest. And more than that, you need someone to obey for you as representative.

You need the Lord Jesus Christ. And the book of Hebrews talks about this

Jesus as prophet, priest, and king. This Jesus preached about in Hebrews, this sermon called

Hebrews, the epistle to the Hebrews. This Jesus is majestic in his superiority.

He is incomparable. He is the way, the truth, the life. He is the king of all kings, the

Lord of all Lords. And he is not like anything you think he is. Luther said to Erasmus, your thoughts of God are too human.

Here we have the greatness of the Lord Jesus, the superior of Jesus. And therefore he is so great.

The writer wants you to trust in him, to give allegiance to him. Once you've trusted in him, to obey him, not in order to be saved, of course, but because you are saved.

This is the God, Jesus Christ, the God -man that God has spoken to in these last days, who's appointed heir of all things, who made the world.

This Jesus is the radiance of his glory. This Jesus is the exact representation of his nature.

This Jesus upholds all things by the word of his power. This Jesus makes purification for sins.

And this Jesus, because he's been raised from the dead, sits down at the right hand of the majesty on high. This Jesus is perfect, eternal, better, and he is the high priest.

This book, Hebrews, essentially follows the paradigm of the first 10 and a half chapters, is who

Jesus is. And in light of Jesus, how do you respond? And since he's better than prophets, angels,

Moses, and Aaron, you ought to respond properly. Now let's have a little outline. We're in Hebrews chapter 10 today, and I want to yawn so badly,

I can hardly stand it. I'm looking outside and I see windy trees. There's some green, some yellow, since it is

October 4th here, we're starting to get the fall foliage changing colors.

I'm also almost booked our speaker for next year, 2020, one of my favorite preachers, the person

I listen to regularly on iPad, iPod, iPhone, I don't know, iHeartRadio, iPod catcher, iPodcast catcher.

But I can't announce it yet. I got to get final confirmation. But I think what you should do is you should plan to come to New England, bid

October next year, and you could do a fall foliage deal. And then you can come hear the speaker.

It's going to be about preaching Christ Jesus, Christ -centered preaching. And how do you do that? From Proverbs and from Psalms and from the

Old Testament. And I think you're going to be really, really encouraged. And the great part about this preacher, when he's talking about Jesus and good news, you can tell he's happy, right?

As Pastor Steve and I said the other day, when you're talking about Jesus, you ought to be happy when he's offering good news and forgiveness and demonstrating his love.

Boy, it's sure windy out there. Wow. Some kind of tornado country.

They do have tornadoes here. There's a big one in Worcester before I got here. I don't know what year it was, 1919. There's the almost yawn.

I'm protecting it. I'm stopping it. Here's the outline for today. Why was

Jesus born? It's in the form of a question, obviously. And I'm going to give you some answers from the book of Hebrews.

Why was Jesus born? Now, it's proper to say

Jesus because that's his human name, right? So, he eternally exists, the second person in the

Trinity, Christ, the Son. And I think technically, most oftenly, we're not going to say

Jesus until after the incarnation, okay? Why was

Jesus born? Now, not only am I going to yawn, I can tell I'm going to sneeze. You ever know that?

It's just like moments away from some kind of sneeze. And you're like, how can I make myself sneeze just to get rid of it?

The other day, I snosed so hard. I sneezed so hard. I was sneezing so...

Number one, Christ had to be born. Jesus had to be born because all other sacrifices for sin were inadequate.

All other sacrifices for sin were inadequate. Look at Hebrews 10, verses 1 through 4.

And as you're turning your Bible there, hopefully not while you're driving in the car, how do people get rid of their sins?

Right? We know everyone sins. Jesus is the sinless one, the blameless one, the perfectly obeying one.

This is my beloved Son in whom I'm well pleased, the Father, Son of the Son, but everybody else. I mean everybody. I don't care if it's

Mary, the mother of Jesus. I don't care if it's Peter. I don't care if it's your grandma.

I don't care if it's your mom. I did a video on NoCo YouTube. Your mom doesn't deserve to go to heaven.

Neither does mine. I mean, nobody deserves it. Nobody's earned it. People try to get rid of their sins.

They know they've sinned. They know something's wrong. They're broken and wounded. And they have diseases.

They have boo -boos. They have syndromes. They have illnesses. They might even think they've sinned and erred somehow and fallen short or trespassed or didn't hit the mark.

But it's rare for them to realize the one they're really sinning against.

Problem is, with people trying to get rid of their own sins, they're tainted by sin, and so their offerings are tainted by sin.

Right? Sin -tainted people only offer sin -tainted sacrifices because are they really given with pure, perfect motives?

The writer here wants you to know, you need a once -for -all sacrifice. Hebrews 10 1 -4, for since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come, instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near.

Otherwise, they would not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins.

But in these sacrifices, remember the backdrop of the Old Covenant, Moses, specifically

Day of Atonement, there's a reminder of sins every year, for it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

You've got Yom Kippur, the great Day of Atonement, and the writer's essentially saying this, if those worked, why'd you do it the year after?

If you went to the doctor and you got better, why do you go back the next year?

Now, as I say it, of course, maybe you're going for a wellness checkup, a wholeness checkup.

You have to do those once a year, right? That's not what we're after. If something has to be done over and over and over and over and over and over and over, then it must not be efficacious.

That's the point. You have things on earth, daily sacrifices, real lambs, real bulls, real goats, real pigeons, real sacrifices.

I mean, we're not talking about pigeon in Day of Atonement, but just essentially the sacrificial system. And then you've got

Jesus who comes down from heaven. And so things are different over and over and over.

One writer says, frequency and failure over and over and over and never take away sin.

What do you get instead of remission? You get a reminder. You get a reminder every single sacrifice for the

Day of Atonement that the Old Testament, the Old Covenant specifically, couldn't take away sins.

And you look at the language there in chapter 10, verse 1, continually offered without interruption, always.

That's what that word means. Something's wrong. They're not sufficient. They are deficient.

They're not perfect. Now, they're perfect in what they do in the sense that they're perfect to whom they point.

They don't perfect people, but they were given by God. And so that sense they're perfect because they perfectly point to the ultimate sacrifice, the

Lord Jesus Christ. They serve as a sermon illustration. They are shadows and types all pointing as signs, as it were, to something down the line.

You've got blurry and you've got in focus. I had a telescope handed to me a while ago at a friend's house and I was trying to look out through the telescope, couldn't figure this thing out.

Everything was blurry until you finally, there's enough, you know, but binoculars, binoculars, there's only usually a couple of different things to move.

And here we had other things to move. So finally, when I figured it out, it became very crystal clear. And that's what you have in the New Testament.

It's crystal clear that all these sacrifices were pointing to something, a better sacrifice, a one and done sacrifice, a sacrifice that didn't need to be perpetually offered over and over and over.

Those Old Testament things, what does the text say? And it's in the front of the Greek sentence. It's a shadow.

It's blurry. No substance.

Once a statement says a shadow indicates reality, but has no substance in itself.

Right? It shows you the pattern. It gives you like a silhouette, some kind of outline, but it doesn't help you figure out the real, right?

Johnson, as Lewis Johnson talks about the silhouette of good things to come. And that's how we read the Old Testament, looking for and being reminded that there's going to be other things coming to clarity in the

New Testament. And this is a way that you see the Lord, prepare the hearts of the people to understand who

Jesus is. Once for all sacrifice. Jesus's blood, chapter nine, efficacious.

The sacrifice needs to be all efficacious. Calvin and some other

Reformers would talk about if you're going to draw someone and you make the outline sketch first, that's what we see in the

Mosaic covenant. But those things can never, can never, can never there are, there are built in limits.

Never, never, never. And you can, you can hear the preacher in Hebrews when he says, otherwise they would not have ceased to be, they would have not ceased to be offered since the worshipers having once been cleansed would no longer have any consciousness of sins.

I just looked at the time friends, and it's time to quit. How can that be? How can that be?

You, you, you better not run to your old covenant system because it can never take away sins.

Only the Lord Jesus can. And if you need forgiveness, you need to look to the Lord Jesus. Anyway, my name is

Mike Abendroth, info at NoCompromiseRadio .com, SermonCritique .com, No Compromise Radio, YouTube channel, and more.

Talk to you soon. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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.

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.

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