Fighting Words (Part 1)

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. This is

Mike Abendroth, your host again today. And today we will discuss fighting words.

Fighting words. I call these inferno words. I remember when I was a kid,

I saw the towering inferno of my parents at a drive -in. That was quite some time ago,

I think, maybe early 70s, maybe. Fighting words. Christians should fight for the truth and they should fight against the error.

Sometimes people think Christianity is just a religion that only turns the other cheek, that they are to be run over, they are weak, they are emaciated.

But if you look at Jude, Jude, which is known as the Acts of the

Apostates by scholar Coder, Jude shows us that Christians must stand and fight.

Christians stand and fight, Jude, verse three. Beloved, while I was making every effort to write to you about our common salvation,

I wanted to write and instruct you like Paul would instruct the church at Rome.

I want to write a book like Romans. So I was going to write that, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing, the verse says, that you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.

I want you to fight for the truth, stand up for the truth. I was eagerly and aggressively going to write to you about our common salvation, what we were for, but I, propelled by the

Spirit of God, had to stand up and write for something that we stood against. You see, most of Christianity today does this whole effeminate, well, we don't really want to go say anything bad about anybody else, and we're just known for the truth here, we're going to be known for what we're for and not what we're against.

It's naive at best, at worst, it's calculated to try to draw masses into your so -called church because that's what popular people want, that's what's popular with the people.

It's more popular to just say, well, you know, we're going to feel good about ourselves, we never want to say anything bad, but show me a maturing

Christian, show me a Christian that wants to learn from the Bible and you'll show me somebody that will stand up and fight.

By the way, if you're going to fight, there has to be an enemy. I don't know how many people stand and fight and hold the

Maginot line against an enemy that doesn't exist. No, there's an enemy, and we are needing to stand up and contend earnestly, agonize, the

Greek root word there for contend earnestly, agonize like in some kind of athletic

Olympics kind of match, wrestling match, you're going to have to agonize for the faith, not just a faith, not just like Prince Charles is defender of a faith, a defender of faith, but defender of the faith, the faith that was not once upon a time, but the faith that was once and for all delivered.

We didn't make it up, didn't come down through the word traditions or old traditions, it was delivered, we have it and it has been given to us.

The Puritan Manton said the word delivered implies a leaving things in another's hands by way of trust.

And so does not only note the mercy of God, but the duty of the church to whom the oracles of God are committed to be kept.

We have a faith worth fighting for. The faith is worth fighting for.

No Christianity without fighting for the faith. And so I, you know, of course

I want to be liked, I'd like to be, you know, friends with everybody, but I have not been running my own life since God saved me in 1989.

So I work for another, I have to do what another says. If Jesus purchased the church, then

I do what he says with the church, I do what he says pastors should do. And if all the people out there in radio land say, we don't like fighting, we don't like controversy, we don't like standing against things, we only want to be taught, instructive things and not this other stuff.

I don't know what to tell you. A, I don't answer to you. I guess you could rise up and tell V &E to take me off the air.

I don't answer to V &E in the sense that I, what am I going to do? Christianity is a little different.

I answer to them in the fact that they can decide to put the show on or not. And I guess there's some submission there.

But my point is this, my point is if Jesus bought the church, I'm under orders and mandate from Jesus, the commander, the purchaser, the captain, the author, the general to do what he says.

And if he says fight, I fight. Oh, I don't really feel like it. It's not too popular. How insane, how idiotic, how asinine is that?

That is horrible. And so the culture today says, well, we want to just be soothed and given warm words and kind of Oprah -like talks from the pulpit.

We're known for what we're for. I wish I had a dollar every time someone said that to me. We want to be known for what we're for.

Once again, that doesn't take into account the church of Laodicea, who is only known for what they were for and Christ rebuked them.

That doesn't take into consideration Jude 3, where you're to contend earnestly for the faith.

That doesn't take into account 1 Timothy, Titus chapter one, where there are people who are erorists,

E -E -R -R -O -R, erorists, and we have to stand up for the truth.

There are some things worth fighting for. Now, to be an elder, you're not to be pugnacious, but this is not having to do anything with pugnaciousness.

This has to do with standing up for the gospel because it is worth fighting for. It's worth dying for.

Christianity is not some kind of spectator sport. This isn't even just for elders or for deacons or for pastors or for leaders.

This is for you. If you're listening today, you ought to stand up for the truth.

So let me give you a few words that are worth fighting for, fighting words, as we call them, inferno words, that you should say to yourself,

I am willing to stand up for these, taking the side of truth, and if it creates controversy, fine.

If it creates me not having a lot of friends, fine. I mean, the society today is so much, well, we want friends, and we don't really have any friends at church, and we think the church should provide everything we need, fellowship, friends, home groups, people to talk to.

How about this instead? How about there's some people Jesus died for in this local fellowship? Go serve them until you are exhausted.

I think you'll find friends. I think you'll find fellowship. I think you'll find all those things as results of, as results.

That's not the driver. That's not where you say, well, I'm looking for a place for friendship. I think you could probably go get friends down at the brothel, if you want.

You can go find friends at a movie theater. You can find friends at a post office. You can find friends at the Moose Lodge.

But here we're to go serve these sinners, because Jesus loved them in eternity past. He loved them at Calvary.

He loves them now, and we're to love them because He isn't around to love. If Jesus was around to love, then we would love

Him. And He would tell us, and don't forget to love my children, to love my disciples. But in the meantime, we're going to say to ourselves,

I'm getting off track, but that's just the way it goes around here. If this is the first time you've listened, it's Mike Abendroth.

I'm nicer in person than I am on the radio. And this is NoCompromiseRadio .com if you'd like to find any old shows.

So today, the first word that I think is worth fighting for is inerrancy.

I -N -E -R -R -A -N -C -Y, inerrancy.

And here the Bible in its original manuscripts, the original autographs, as it were, are free from error of any kind.

No errors, because God Himself has written the scriptures.

They are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Lenzel said,

I will contend that embracing a doctrine of an inerrant scripture will lead to disaster down the road.

If the scriptures aren't inerrant, then you've got a theological tornado approaching. Lenzel said, it will result in the loss of missionary outreach.

It will quench missionary passion. It will lull congregations to sleep and undermine their belief in the full -orb truth of the

Bible. It will produce spiritual sloth and decay, and it will finally lead to apostasy, end quote.

And that has happened. That has happened. Once you abandon inerrancy, it's this quick and slippery slope down to apostasy through liberalism.

We have the Word of God. We have the Word of God, and all kinds of people will try to attack the

Word of God. And so we need to stand up for the truth. This is not a time to be silent when the scriptures are attacked.

If we don't stand up for the truth, Lenzel would go on to say, just look at church history where the scriptures are not stood up for.

They're not defended. That's the word I'm looking for. Something was going on here in the studio, and I looked over and lost my train of thought.

There was some kind of buzzing sound. I don't know if it was that weird beaver thing I saw out in the parking lot a couple of days ago somehow attacking the church.

I don't know. What does Enns say? Paul Enns in his moody handbook of theology, which is a great book you ought to get.

"'The result has shown, "'has necessitated the inclusion of verbal, "'additional verbiage to state the

Orthodox view "'is now necessary to include terms verbal, "'plenary, infallible, inerrant, unlimited inspiration.

"'All this has been necessitated "'because of those who have retained words "'like inspiration, infallible, and even inerrant, "'while denying that the

Bible is free from error.'" We believe that the scriptures are without error of any kind in what they say.

Inerrancy basically means, Webster even says, free from error, because they are, in fact, given by God.

So whether it's doctrinal, historical, scientific, geographical, the

Bible is inerrant, I almost said inerror. Incapable of error.

Infallible is close to its meaning, but it has the idea of unable to make errors.

Infallibility means God is unable to make errors. Inerrancy is the other side of the coin, which is the result of infallibility.

Here's what one errantist writes. This is a person who believes the Bible can have errors.

The Bible is infallible, as I define that term, but not inerrant. That is, there are historical and scientific errors in the

Bible, but I have found none on matters of faith and practice, Stephen T. Davis.

And so, what does that mean? Well, it means that God gave men his message, and then the message didn't quite make it to us.

We believe that the Bible is without error or fault in all its teaching.

That's exactly what the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy in Chicago stated.

The one interesting thing is, in all this, unbelievers know what the issues are. Chrisop Lake, University of Chicago, quote,

It is a mistake often made by educated persons who happen to have but little knowledge of historical theology to suppose that fundamentalism is a new and strange form of thought.

It is nothing of the kind. It is the partial and uneducated survival of a theology which was once universally held by all

Christians. How many were there, for instance, in Christian churches in the 18th century who doubted the infallible inspiration of Scripture?

A few, perhaps, but very few. No, the fundamentalist may be wrong.

I think that he is, says Chrisop Lake. But it is we who have departed from the tradition, not he.

And I am sorry for the fate of anyone who tries to argue with a fundamentalist on the basis of authority. The Bible and the corpus theologicum of the church is on the fundamentalist side, end quote.

That is fascinating. That is a fascinating statement. And I believe that if you say the

Bibles are full of errors, that you're casting doubt and you're casting aspersions on the very person and work of God.

That's what it gets down to. E .J. Young said, at no time in our history has the church of God been free from attacks of the enemy.

Satan is many -wild and he employs his full arsenal to undermine the people of God and, were it possible, to destroy the church.

We believe, according to 2 Peter 1, that prophecy was not made by an active human will alone, but men moved by the

Holy Spirit spoke from God, spoke from God.

So, you've got all kinds of issues today when it comes to the scriptures, and we believe it is worth fighting for to proclaim to people that the

Bible is inerrant. And if it is, you should study it. You should defend it.

The second word to fight for today. Mike Abendroth here,

No Compromise Radio Ministry, info at nocompromiseradio .com. The second fighting word today is blood.

The first one was inerrancy. The second word that you should stand up for and fight for is the word blood.

Lots of people in Christianity today are sneaking around this word blood.

And so, let's just work from general to specific. Lloyd -Jones says, sin is so terrible, so foul, and so vile that nothing could deal with it but the blood of Christ.

And that is what happened on the cross. It is not a patching over, a covering over of sin.

It is not God saying, do not worry, all is well. It is God showing us sin as it is, really bringing it out to the light and then dealing with it.

What is the blood of Christ? Is it just a bunch of hemoglobin? Is blood important?

Why is it worth fighting for? You could even think of a book in the Bible that has blood, blood, blood.

People say Christianity is a bloody religion. It's steeped in blood, it's soaked in blood because they talk about wars that were fought allegedly in Christianity's name.

Some actually were, some disobedient Christians. But the word blood is found lots of times, over 400 times in the

English Bible. And you have one book, the book of Leviticus, seemingly dedicated to the word blood regarding sacrifices, et cetera.

You must have blood or you won't have Christianity. And it is the blood, it is the vicious death, the bleeding, yes, but the death of Christ that is so important.

And so if you look at Ephesians chapter one, salvation is found in Christ Jesus alone.

In him, we have redemption. There isn't a plan B, there isn't someone else, a

Buddha didn't die for your sins or an angel from heaven didn't die from your sins. Provision is found for man's redemption alone in the beloved son,

Christ alone. In him, we have redemption. And that redemption goes on to say, the passage goes on to say, through his blood.

Through his blood, Jesus gave his life a ransom for many. If you wanna see blood in the

Old Testament, go to Leviticus. If you wanna see blood in the New Testament, read Hebrews, 19 times in the book of Hebrews.

The word blood is found 10 times in chapter nine alone. Verse seven, verse 12, verse 13, verse 14, verse 18, verse 19, verse 20, verse 21, verse 22, and verse 25.

Talking about the better sacrifice, Christ being the better sacrifice, not through the blood of goats and calves, but through his own blood, he entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption.

Blood must be shed for if the blood of bulls and goats and ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve a living

God. We need bloodshed. The wages of sin is death.

That's exactly what happens. When you see the word blood in the Bible, oh, sometimes it's blood that's really the red stuff that comes out of your veins, but many times you'll see blood as a theological shorthand for Christ's sacrificial substitutionary death.

The wonderful scholar Peter O 'Brien said, this abbreviated expression, blood, is pregnant with meaning and signifies that Christ's violent death on the cross as a sacrifice is the means by which our deliverance has been won.

It was obtained at a very great cost. So when you think of the word blood theologically, you ought not say to yourself, let's sever that word blood from the substitutionary atonement where Jesus laid down his life for our sins.

Leviticus says, for it is the blood by reason of life that makes atonement.

That's why Christ's blood is called precious in 1 Peter 1. Here is this lamb of God who was slain for our sins.

Say, well, I don't like violent deaths. I don't like bloodshed. I don't like theology of blood. I'm too highbrow for that.

Well, Colossians 1 .20, having made peace through the blood of his cross.

Sacrificial substitutionary atonement through blood to free us. Salvation to us is free, but costly to God.

God didn't just say, well, you know, men are forgiven. In the beginning, he makes things just with his word.

So he says, you know, oh, they're forgiven too because justice has to be accounted for.

Holiness has to be satisfied. Phil Johnson said, MacArthur's right -hand man, the wonder -working power of the blood in a fountain filled with blood is not meant to be taken literally.

There's no magical or mystical cleansing property in the red fluid, and there is no container of blood in heaven that is somehow literally applied to sinners.

By the way, that's a very popular thought. Such language is meant to speak of Christ's sacrificial atonement.

Just as when Paul spoke of the preaching of the cross, he had in mind the death of Christ, not the literal wood instrument on which the

Savior died. We're not to think of a piece of wood as the point of our preaching. What happened on that cross is what is efficacious for salvation, not some magical power in the wood itself.

Similarly with the blood of Christ, it is the violent pouring out of blood in Christ's sacrificial death that saves us, not some supernatural property of the fluid itself.

So, Jesus did shed literal blood on the cross, true or false? True. But literal bloodshed is not going to do any saving.

What if some of the bloods got splattered on the centurions when they were doing something to Jesus?

They poked a hole in his side with the spear, and the blood came out and got on them.

Would they be saved? Donald Gray Barnhouse said, "'I do not look upon the blood of Christ "'when

I taught concerning the doctrine, "'and when I use the phrase as to be primarily "'a matter of biochemistry.'"

That's exactly right. Blood is an important word, and we owe our salvation to the blood of our

Savior, that is, his death. And so you'll see people today, especially fighting fundamentalists, people who fight

Christians anywhere, who wear that as a badge of honor, to fight people, specifically MacArthur, on his view of the blood, which is the

Savior's view of the blood, which is Paul's view of the blood. There's not some kind of blood up there that's being spilt again.

That's the same error that the Roman Catholics make, except just different. If you take a look at blood, in Leon Morris's article in the

Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, page 163, the Old Testament employs the word dom, or blood, 362 times, of which 203 refer to death and violence, 103 to the blood of sacrifices.

Seven connect life and blood, with which we should link 17, which refer to eating meat with blood.

These numbers show that when a Hebrew heard the word blood, the most likely association it would arouse would be death.

That is exactly right. Morris also says, as in the

Old Testament, excuse me, the largest group in the 98 occurrences of the word in the

New Testament is that for death by violence, 25 times.

So when you think about the blood of annual sacrifices, you ought not just think of blood coagulating, you should think of blood yielding in death.

There's gonna be bleeding, yes, but it's going to be death. That should be your conclusion.

When you say the blood of Christ, you should be thinking of the substitutionary death of Christ, having him die on behalf of sinners.

Bleeding, yes, but not simply bleeding. My name is Mike Avendroth.

This is No Compromise Radio Ministry, and today we're talking about fighting words, words that you should fight for.

You should fight for the authority and sufficiency and infallibility and inerrancy of the Bible. You should stand up for the word of God, but you should also stand up for the word blood.

You say, well, I never really even thought about it before. Well, you probably will hear about it. What's the next word we should be willing to stand up and fight for?

That next word is, oh, I'm gonna have to go to the next show. We already ran out of time.

We have ran out of time. If you've got a question about words that we should fight for, you think we fight too much, you don't think we fight often enough, info at nocompromiseradio .com.

I try to make this show first interesting, no, first biblical, and then interesting.

Sometimes I'll talk about politics, but I'm not really into that. Sometimes I'll talk about sports, but I'm not really into that.

Frankly, I think too often about politics. I think too often about sports. So why do

I wanna talk about that more? I'd rather tone that down in my life. Politics will come and go. Sports will come and go.

And politics and sports in the end will mean nothing when it comes to eternity. Well, of course you can stand up against certain kind of things and abortion.

I get all that. But right now I'm trying to get you to think about the Lord and the gospel and the word.

And you ought to be able to contend earnestly for the faith. If you're not contending for the faith, you're ashamed.

And just ask God to forgive you and grant you the boldness to do something for the Lord, for his kingdom, and to be like a

David Livingston or a Mary Schleser. 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 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.

The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.