Reading the Bible Backward

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, a ministry breaking news alert, breaking news alert. No Compromise Radio has just been declared as essential. It is good to be back here in the studio today. I haven�t been recording too many shows lately, so I�m just about four shows ahead.

There were days that I was about 35 shows ahead, and these days, it�s just like, �Oh, that�s right. You have to feed the no-co machine, do you not The leech has two sisters, Giv-Giv, and that�s what weekly radio is as well.

Daily Radio. My brother, Pat Abendroth, and I will be leading a trip to Israel, Lord willing, February 23rd in the year of our Lord 2022. That�s next February. You can write me, Mike, at NoCompromiseRadio .com for information.

You can, I don�t know why I�m winded. Why am I breathing like that? I went in for a stress test the other day, a nuclear stress test for my heart, and they said, �Oh, your resting pulse rate is low. It�s going to take a while for you to get your heart rate up to 150 and they were correct.

But no blockages. I�ll die of something else most likely. Anyway, Pat and I go to Israel, hopefully, and if you live in Boston or Omaha, of course, you can go with the group, or you�ll just fly from, let�s say you�re listening in Atlanta or Ohio, and you just, with the help of the travel agent, you�ll meet us in New York or Boston and then fly over, or you�ll meet us in Tel Aviv, and off we go.

I think this is the fourth time Pat and I have co-hosted a trip. I want to say I�ve been to Israel, I don�t know, is it five or six times? I�m not sure. Anyway, we�ll have a great time, learn a lot, good fellowship, and maybe we�ll have some Bible quizzes, No Compromise Radio slash Bethlehem Bible Church versus Omaha Bible Church.

The Pactum Podcast and Recent Ministry Updates

Speaking of which, Pat Ebendroth has a new podcast, The Pactum, P-A-C-T-U-M, and I�ll have Pat on here pretty soon on the radio, No Compromise Radio, and he can promote that show. I�ve listened to the first three episodes.

The first one was on Biblicism. The second one was on Law Gospel, and the third show is on Christ-centered preaching, and he had already told me, �Oh yeah, he�s just doing a weekly show, and oh yeah, you�ve got to go in and feed the monster.

So we�re doing that. What else is going on in the world? I, January 10th, quit social media, so I don�t really know what�s going on. I have friends that sometimes will let me know, �Oh, did you read the Rabi Zacharias updated article?

What about the latest things in the Southern Baptist Convention? What about Bodhi Bacchum�s heart issues? That�s how I have to be caught up now is by people like you. Shepherds Conference was canceled, and I have probably met so many people in the orbits of Grace Church and Master�s Seminary, University College, and TMAI, the Master�s Academy International.

I know a lot of people in those realms, and while I usually don�t go to too many of the sessions, I do enjoy fellowship with lots of friends and the book table and all that, so I guess not this year. Well, today I�d like to talk a little bit about reading books of the Bible and understanding the entire book of the Bible before you understand particular verses.

But then you have to do the cycle or the circle, the spiral, and then how can I understand the whole book without understanding particular verses? And therefore, we are needing to study the Bible so we can understand what verses mean.

I am all for expository preaching. I�m all for exposing the divine author�s intention. These days, I think we need to really stress divine author. I think in the past, there�s been a lot of stress on the human author, and of course, there is dual authorship, but I think if we keep in mind the divine author, that will keep us protected from certain Enlightenment philosophies and hermeneutics and other things.

Palindromes and Right-to-Left Writing Systems

Well, maybe I could do it this way for my show today, for our show today. If I were to read a few of these things, can you tell me what they are? What am I describing? A man, a plan, a canal, Panama, and that�s the first one.

Second one, a nut for a jar of tuna. Third, borrow or rob. Fourth, taco cat. Five, was it a car or a cat I saw? Madam, in Eden, I�m Adam. Murder for a jar of red rum. UFO tofu. What was I describing? I was describing palindromes.

That�s correct, palindromes. What�s a palindrome? That�s what I want to know. Well, Oxford English Dictionary said that a palindrome comes from some Greek words, the root words for back and running, back and running, and therefore, if you read a word or a phrase or a sentence the same way backward and forward, letter for letter, number for number, or word for word, that�s called a palindrome.

What do these things have in common? Arabic, Hebrew, Pashto, Persian, Urdu, and Sindhi. What do those have in common? Well, they�re languages, that�s correct, but they�re RTL languages, right to left.

We, probably because of Latin, write from left to right. We, W-R-I-T, from L-A-F-T to R-I-G-H-T, right? Right, correct. This is called directionality. Which way you write, directionality. Writing systems that go from left to right are sometimes referred to as sinistro-dextral, and if you write right to left, it�s dextro-sinistral.

Is the Latin word for left sinister? How does that work? Are you left-handed? You�re sinister-handed. Right-handed dexter, okay, I get that. Ambidextrous, okay, I get that, I�m starting to figure this all out.

We�ve got two illustrations there, two examples of kind of going about things in a backward fashion, backwardly. Now let me give you the third. The third is found in the book of 2 Peter. And I think if you read it backwards, backward, backwardly, it will help you understand the book.

Now, probably the first thing you�re going to have to do is read it frontwardly. You know, in the old days, to be rescued from moments like this, we need special message moments.

I declare that God has made you special. You are not average, you have been custom-made. You are one of a kind. Of all the things God created, what he is the most proud of is you. You are special. He�s most proud of you.

Hold your head up high, keep your shoulders back, knowing that you are a child of the most high God made in his image. Crazy.

Am I allowed to play that on the radio? By the way, it is liberating to be off social media. I think, I don�t know, some of that stuff just gets me so riled up. And you read articles, or you watch what�s getting posted, and I don�t know, I just, in my mind, theologically and everything else, I�m so far away from the, you know, Beth Moore said that, and Ann Voskamp said that, or for that matter, Joel Osteen said that.

What about this? What about that? What about, what about Moscow, Idaho people and Doug Wilson, and it�s just different now. I just, maybe that�s why I had to go get a stress test, because I don�t know, I need to have an outlet for all this stuff, right?

Reading 2 Peter Backwardly as a Way to Understand the Book

Well, what about reading a book of the Bible in a backwards fashion? What do I mean by that? Is that kind of like you�re out in the sticks, country, and you�re not educated? I don�t mean people out in the country are uneducated, but, you know, that stereotypical thing where people are backwoods, and I don�t know, they�re living in the swamp or something, they haven�t been to school.

If you turn your Bibles to 2 Peter, or listen to me talk about 2 Peter, I think I can explain what I�m talking about. And 2 Peter is one of those books that not many people preach from it. I think it�s probably neglected.

Simon Kistemacher said 2 Peter is arguably one of the most neglected books in the New Testament canon, and a lot of people will write commentaries on the book of John or Romans, but not as many on 2 Peter.

Not many scholars do a lot of work in 2 Peter. And I think it�s probably, if you said overlooked, well, that�s actually the first couple of centuries of, you know, in the 100s and 200s and 300s, you could say, well, it was even overlooked then.

And I think it�s overlooked now. I don�t know how often people preach from it. I mean, I just got done finishing with the book of Nahum, and that�s probably preached less than 2 Peter is. I think I�m going to do to Haggai coming up.

I just need to get my mind wrapped around it first so I can figure it out and read it backwardly and then I�ll preach it. We don�t want to neglect any book of the Bible. The Bible is a Christian book, and we want to make sure that the only thing that would hold us back from really diving deeply into the book of 2 Peter would simply be time.

That is to say, we spend so much time studying other books of the Bible because we�re just systematically going through them, we haven�t got to 2 Peter yet. I think that�d probably be a good, I don�t know if I want to say excuse, but that�s probably what it would be, a good excuse that some people haven�t studied or preached through or heard 2 Peter being preached.

I mean, some churches don�t preach through books of the Bible at all, right? The fad today, as you know, is, and I just had lunch with somebody the other day, a young man, and he was telling me about his old church.

He said something like this. He said, �Oh, Pastor Mike, the church that I used to go to, you know, they�d open the Bible and teach the Bible. He didn�t really have a lot of theological categories, but he was just saying, �But they really wouldn�t teach it like you do.

They wouldn�t go week by week and pick up where they left off. He didn�t say Lectio Continuum and sequential expository preaching or anything like that. He just said, �Well, they just teach it differently, and they would have like a theme, and you know, it�d be a six to eight-week series with and then I said, �with a cool graphic.

If some of the pastors that I know would spend more time studying the Bible and less time on what cool graphic to come up with, that would probably be helpful. But maybe the coolest graphics are by the cool graphics team.

Maybe the graphics team does that, and it�s not even the pastor. That might be fun to farm out. How many things could I farm out to people? Maybe that should be a no-compromise deal that you can work behind the scenes helping me create sermons.

No, I�d like to do that myself. That�s the joy of study. That�s the joy of preparation. Yes, difficult. Work. Yes. This week, work. I was supposed to get in here to the studio way earlier today, but I was trying to figure out something for my sermon tomorrow, and it was work.

This week was work for sermons. I don�t know how long I put into it, but it was a lot of, did I mention the word work? People want book talks like, you know, Oprah Book Club talks. I�m not talking about Bible books.

They want cool graphics and not very much meat. It�s important to go to a book like 2 Peter and then just preach through it, because people need this truth. There are truths in this book that people need.

When I look at churches, I want to say it�s Jim Eliph a long time ago said that he�d look at a church. I don�t know why I�m attempting to yawn all the time. It�s only Saturday afternoon at 4 .30 p .m.

You would watch a show on TV, and there would be a commercial, and they would be asking for money for orphanages in an impoverished place. They would show you pictures that would play with your emotional heartstrings, and you would want to give money, right?

It�s kind of like the dogs that are abused give money, and then they�d show you the children that are starving. You could see their ribs, but their stomachs were huge. Distended bellies, but starving, and bloated stomachs.

In one sense, that�s a model or a description or a figure of the local church. Many local churches, huge, but they�re starving, because people go there and they�re just getting fluff. Here in New England, we have something called fluff.

It�s some kind of liquid-ish, liquidy marshmallow stuff. It�s not complete liquid, but you can spread it on a piece of bread like you could peanut butter. If you put peanut butter and fluff on the bread, it�s called a fluff-a-nutter.

That�s a New England thing here, and maybe they do it in England, I�m not sure. There are fewer, probably, megachurches these days, because they�re all closed because of COVID. Now, I know there are state-by-state laws, and so I don�t want to step on any toes.

Well, I don�t really care about stepping on toes, but I want to be kind and generous. Every pastor has had to deal with the pandemic in his own unique circumstance, with his own leadership and everything else, and local laws and all that.

Some want to defy, and others, they just kind of close up. I don�t have a lot of respect for churches that just close up and never, ever meet. They just don�t meet. Maybe you get a recorded message by the pastor once a week, but that�s kind of crazy to me.

Anyway, maybe one of the benefits of the pandemic and all this kind of hype, obviously, COVID is real, but in terms of its death rate, it�s basically for people that are older and probably were going to die anyway.

This isn�t a political show, nor it�s a medical show, but anyway, I have more to say, but I�m just trying to stay on target. I need to hear sermons that have a high view of God and a view of man that�s true, that is to say, honest, biblical, factual, and I need to make sure that I see God so holy as he�s preached and man so needy slash sinful slash perverse that the gulf between holy God and sinful man could only be bridged by the thrice holy God, by the sending of the Son, empowered by the Spirit, Jesus to die and become a mediator and to die and be a mediator and advocate to bridge the gap as it were.

Therefore, when I think of just books that need to be preached, 2 Peter is right up there. I wish more churches would, and maybe we could do for the rest of the show because I don�t think I�m going to get to the backward part yet, but maybe I could put it this way.

Why 2 Peter Is a Book About Jesus Christ

I�m excited to study 2 Peter and even talk about it on the radio show for several reasons, and I think I can give you three. I don�t know if I can give you three in the next six minutes or not, but I�ll try to give you three why I love the book of 2 Peter.

Number one, it�s a book about Jesus. It�s a book about Jesus. Now, if I were to say to you, �Book of Revelation, what�s it about You�d probably tell me end times, and you�re kind of right, but you�re kind of wrong.

It�s not mainly about end times. It�s apocalyptic literature, that�s true, but it�s the unveiling of a person, and it�s Jesus Christ. Revelation 1, 1 and following, �The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place.

He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw. The book of Revelation is a book about Jesus, and so, too, 2 Peter is about Jesus.

Now, many people would say, �Well, you know, 2 Peter slash Jude, because they�re pretty similar, those books are about false teachers and end times. I think there�s some truth to that, but primarily, it�s a book about Jesus Christ, and you could look at the bookends of this particular epistle to find that very thing out.

Simeon Peter, that�s 2 Peter chapter 1 verse 1, �A servant and apostle of Jesus Christ to those who obtained a faith of equal standing with ours, by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ.

May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. And that�s the very front end, and then if you go to the back end of it, 2 Peter chapter 3 verse 18, �But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

To him be glory both now and to the day of eternity. This book is all about who Jesus is, what Jesus has done. We even at the very beginning of chapter 1, you�ve obtained a faith, �By the righteousness of God our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Peter at the very beginning wants everyone to know, you don�t come up with faith, you don�t earn faith, you didn�t do anything for faith, you didn�t merit faith, God doesn�t owe you a debt to give you faith.

This is something that�s earned by the work of Christ as he was born under the law, kept the law, not for his sake but for ours, and then takes the penalty of our sin that is law-breaking upon himself, and then his law-keeping as he earns righteousness, gives to us that righteousness, that is a righteousness that is not our own but from the Lord Jesus.

Everything about this book, from front to back, is about the Lord Jesus, his saving righteousness here at the very beginning, Jesus called God. When you read those verses, you can study them, and you can study some of the Granville Sharpe rules of Greek grammar and realize this is talking about Jesus, and he�s calling him God.

This is like Thomas, it said, �My Lord and my God in John chapter 20, verse 28, �the deity of Christ, the divinity of Christ, for in Christ all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form. Colossians chapter 2.

From Lord to Jesus means Savior, to the word Soter, Savior, this is a book that hopefully will drive you to say, with J. Wilbert Chapman, �Hallelujah, what a Savior, hallelujah, what a friend, saving, helping, keeping, loving, he is with me to the end.

Jesus, from the very front into the very back, this Inclusio, we call it, he is the Savior, he is God incarnate, he is the one that the Father sent to rescue us, and he is discussed in more places than the very beginning and at the very end.

Chapter 1, verse 11, Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Chapter 1, verse 14, Lord Jesus Christ. The transfiguration he talks about in verses 16 and 17, Lord Jesus Christ. Chapter 2, verse 20, Lord and Savior Jesus.

Chapter 2, verse 2, Lord, excuse me, chapter 3, verse 2, Lord and Savior through the apostles. Peter understands that this is a book about Jesus, and even things that warn about false teachers have their basis in the personal work of Jesus.

Well, that was a fast 24 and a half minutes. My name is Mike Abendroth, NoCompromiseRadio .com. You can write me, Mike, at NoCompromiseRadio .com, if you want to talk about books, if you want to talk about Israel, if you have questions, whatever I can do, I will help you.

God bless you.

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 6. 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.