Ex Comedian Umasks Jesus and the Truth Will Shock You Todd Friel

Welcome to the Striving for Eternity Academy. We are very blessed this class because we're going to do something a little bit different. We are going to be interviewing someone very special, author of a new book called Jesus Unmasked.

Todd Friel’s Background and Early Comedy Days

So it is a pleasure that we have to welcome with us.

Mr. Todd Friel. Todd, how are you? This is a class? I get to be the teacher? That is true. Wow, hopefully you don't act like the student I was back in the day, falling asleep. You know, I remember one.

This is back, I think, 10th grade. I was in religion class. I think we were studying the book of Acts, if I recall. And I wasn't saved at the time, if that's any excuse. I fell asleep on my Bible so soundly that the professor actually dismissed the entire class and left me there sleeping.

And it was so, Andrew, it was lesson learned. I actually fell asleep like this. And when I woke up, I had drool on my Bible and the entire class was gone. And there sat my professor just looking at.

Me through his glasses. I had something similar in college when the first time I took coding. I don't have that as my excuse. Yeah, well, I guess it was really bad. He sat in front row. It was an accounting class.

And when five students tell you that the professor tried waking you up and you shot your head up from the desk and said, what's your problem? Can't you see I'm sleeping here? And I put my head back down and went to sleep.

Yeah, I had some apologizing to do next.

Class. Yeah, OK. As long as we're swapping drug stories. I had one wisdom tooth, whatever that means. And I was given Percocet. I think Elvis made it famous. And I took one Percocet that day. And that night, I had to go do stand-up comedy.

And I remember going up onto the little platform. And I think I was about five minutes into my shtick. And I remember my eyes just kind of rolling back as I stared at the ceiling. And I don't know how long I was gone.

And then when I finally came back, I just looked down and said, I've got to go. And I walked off. And I don't need. I don't know if I drove home, floated home, what happened. But Percocet, yikes.

Well, were people at least were they laughing at that?

No, I think it was a little bit of a confusion because I was supposed to I think I was supposed to do 30 minutes. And I think I did about five minutes and just I was tingling and buzzing. I do not understand why people like drugs.

I don't get that at all. But that's just me.

So they didn't think it was part of the the shtick?

The shtick. It wasn't funny. I wasn't funny. But that's beside the point.

So you know, you used to be a comedian, correct? Yeah. Now you're not anymore? No. Is that because you're no longer funny? Or?

I never was. I used to do stand up comedy. It was so it was so popular. If you could fill up time, you got hired. Back in Minneapolis, that that particular market was red hot for comedy. And so I did a lot.

I worked pretty much every weekend for a number of years, probably doing about six to 10 shows a week. So it was it really wasn't because I was funny. It's just because comedy was so popular then.

So they liked seeing tall, thin guys?

Yeah, but like, there were stages all over the Twin Cities. And so they just needed comedians. This was. I mean, this Minneapolis was a hot market. Louis Anderson came out of there. Jeff Cesario came out of there.

Tom Arnold came out of there. A number of people that write Hollywood sitcoms. And Todd Friel came out of there. So I just fell into a big river. That's all.

Jesus Unmasked and Why Progressive Revelation Matters

So let's let's talk about your new book. Um, you have. Well, it's actually your first book. Well, actually, it's not.

It's not. I've written a number of books. I just never liked any of them. This this one I liked.

Yeah, I read through it in an evening. I got a couple comments, a couple things I noticed. One thing is you seem to think it's good to use big words, you said in one of the earlier chapters. So I want to ask you to go into some detail about two of the words, which really a lot of a lot of this is is based off of is the progressive progressive revelation.

And then you talked about typology. So what what what are those two? Because a lot of this book's based off that.

Yeah, I'm going to have my administrative assistant. If I had one, take care of that. My apologies. You know, here's I think it was I think it was Milton Vincent who rightly pointed out that people don't complain about big words in other settings.

You're in the doctor's office and the doctor says you've got some humongous word. You don't go, hey, Doc, whoa, chill with the big language. No, you take out a piece of paper, you write it down, you get home and you Google it and you learn everything you can because it's important.

And the same thing is true with biblical words. There's such a dumbing down in evangelicalism these days. People are suggesting that this stuff isn't interesting or worthy of some brain cells being applied to understanding big words.

Well, these words are humongous, progressive revelation that the Bible progresses in its sophistication. It progresses in its revealing of truth. Now, this has humongous application for us. Number one, it helps us to understand the Bible better.

Another application would be we understand that we are not Israel. We're not living under that covenant at that time with those rules because we have a progressive revelation. The fullness thereof is Jesus.

Now, that explains why we don't take over Canada or we don't invade Mexico because we're not Israel anymore. And those those directives don't apply to us. Islam does not have a progressive revelation.

They don't have any way of reforming, if you will. We do. So progressive revelation helps us understand a lot about God, a lot about his revealing of his plan of salvation. And if it's true that the fullness of God's revelation is seen in Jesus Christ, which it is, I think Hebrews 1 .1 tells it, the entire book of Hebrews, John 1 .1, it's all about Jesus.

That means prior to Matthew chapter one, Jesus is revealed in Scripture from Genesis to Malachi. And that's what progressive revelation teaches us. And that's what we try to pull out of Jesus unmasked.

Now, you also talk about typology, which you did one thing in the book that I really appreciate because a lot of people take typology and when you define it, but you also talked about the fact that how we use.

You had a rule for typology. So if you could explain that.

Yeah, you got to put the brakes on it. This is not a concept that I've made up like some sort of numerology interpretation. Typology is a biblical concept. Jesus said, John chapter six, you read the scriptures because in them you believe you have life.

But I tell you, they testify about me. What scriptures? Genesis to Malachi. Jesus, Luke 24 on the road to Emmaus revealed to the two disciples about himself from Moses to the prophets from the Old Testament.

Colossians 2, 16 and 17 Sabbath festivals were merely types. They were pictures of Jesus Christ. So this is a classical study called typology, not allegory. Allegory is looking back and seeing stories as fictitious with a truth.

Every story from the Bible that is revealed as history is indeed that history. And Jesus says that there are things inside of the books of the Old Testament that point to me. They're fuzzy pictures. He is the fulfillment.

It's the study called typology. And we can be assured that our Bible is supernatural if we do a right study of typology and seeing the consistency of the Bible and that it's all about Jesus. But we've got to we have to have some rules, some biblical rules.

And the rule that I followed in Jesus unmasked is if the New Testament says that in the Old Testament is a picture of Jesus, then you can be assured it's a picture of Jesus. If the New Testament does not say that, you better be really careful because you can do what the Roman Catholic Church and a lot of the reformers even did for centuries.

They turned almost everything in the Old Testament into a picture of Jesus or a New Testament understanding. And there were a lot of wacky interpretations of the Bible. We don't want to fall into that ditch.

Hebrews, the Tabernacle, and Scripture-Heavy Teaching

Yeah, I mean, that was that's one of the things I did appreciate. And I got to say, I mean, I read through this in an evening. Now, granted, seminary training kind of forced you to have to learn how to read a lot and quick.

So the advantage of reading about a page a minute, I got through this in about four hours. So I can literally say I couldn't put it down. But one of the things I appreciated was that you go through all these things and you even say, hey, this is an area where there's some things that just scream typology, but the New Testament doesn't specifically say it.

And I appreciate that you even told us in chapter 12, you told us this is the chapter to read. If we're not going to read anything else, you said it's titled, read this. So chapter 12, why did you think that that chapter was so important to read this?

What made that chapter different?

Yeah, well, I think we have a tendency as evangelicals, we probably are inclined to read the right side of our book more. And we're probably inclined to read it pretty quickly, especially if you've read it a number of times.

And so when we explained in the book, Jesus Unmasked, that the book of Hebrews is about Jesus being the better. He's better than angels. He's better than Melchizedek, the priest. Jesus is a better covenant.

Jesus is a better tabernacle. And so when we explained those things in the preceding chapters, I think especially in chapter 11, I wanted people to read Hebrews 8, 9, and 10, because then you see exactly what Bob, he's the one who wrote the book of Hebrews.

So we can just move on. Bob was trying to say that all of these details about the tabernacle, about the temple in Hebrews 8, 9, and 10 were pictures of Jesus Christ. And so with a little explanation, I think it made the book of Hebrews kind of jump out and go, wow.

Whoever wrote the book of Hebrews was trying to say all that stuff in the Old Testament was pointing to Jesus in the New. And with a little explanation, which is what typology does, I think it makes so much of the New Testament far more historical, meaningful, and really reliable.

Yeah, I mean, the Hebrews, I often have seen in commentaries, read and studied, you really need to really get an understanding of Hebrews, you've got to go back to Leviticus and understand Leviticus well.

And in that chapter, really, you had built up to chapter 12. And then really, it's just scripture, which one of the things I really appreciated throughout the book, I mean, half the book, I could say you plagiarized.

I mean, basically half the book is scripture, which is great. It's not just references to scripture. As I went through, I think there was one scripture reference I had to actually look up that you didn't give the quote, the actual quote.

So like half this book is literally scripture.

Yeah, a number of years ago, you know, Ray Comfort, of course, his great sermon, Hell's Best Kept Secret, I don't know anybody. Yeah, he's, yeah, he's, yeah, and a lot of energy. And he wrote that sermon, Hell's Best Kept Secret, which I encourage everybody to go to livingwaters .com and listen to it for free.

It's right on their homepage. And it's such an amazing sermon. And Ray, a number of years ago, decided to release the manuscript, the actual, his text for it, which he's preached word for word, hundreds, literally hundreds of times.

And I read the manuscript and it's like, ah, there's its power. I think it had between, if I recall, between 40 and 60 Bible verses, either quoted or alluded to. And it's like, well, that's what makes it so good.

Its power comes from the scriptures. And so writing about Jesus, I wanted to make sure it wasn't my ideas, but they were Bible ideas. This is what the scriptures teach, which actually then gives it, I think, power.

I really, you look through the scriptures, there's so many people, authors that just quote, they just give the reference to the scripture. And people don't always go back and look it up when they're reading.

So much of this book is literally God's word. That's why I really appreciate chapter 12, because you didn't try to get around. It's just, here's what God says. These three chapters of Hebrews so clearly explains everything you were building up.

And why try to add to what God's already said? It was beautiful.

Yeah, well, it's funny, and I've done this too, but maybe you've heard a pastor say, you know, this actually comes from Hebrews 8, 9, and 10. We don't have time to read that today. And then you get the pastor's thoughts.

Well, wait a second. With all due respect, if you're going to allude to a Bible verse and tell us that the word of God is supreme, then let's read it. Let's quote it. Let's take the time to see what it says.

If you've ever taken a systematic theology course and the individual teaching, it just told you all the different columns of theology and said, here's what we believe about soteriology, theology, proper bibliology, Christology, pneumatology, etc.

But didn't quote Bible verses? Man, you didn't see the power of the Bible and how it harmonizes and how it all makes sense. So I wanted to make sure I wasn't guilty of that. I wanted to quote the Bible a lot.

Yeah, and we here actually teach a theology class, and we do that. We have, you know, two, three dozen verses of Scripture that we put up per class just in each topic because we don't want to say, hey, this isn't my word for it.

This is what God is saying. And we want people to dig into the Scriptures. And you didn't just give a verse. A lot of the times you gave large sections of Scripture, you know, quoting passages, not, you know, make sure you got context.

And that was, I really appreciated that. But it almost seems, I could be mistaken, but it almost seems as if you want people to see that the Old Testament imagery points to Jesus.

The Old Testament as a Portrait of Jesus

Yeah, you know, that's exactly it. Because, you know, these days, it's not just the pagans. It's inside the church. Our understanding of Jesus is, there was somebody, I think Lifeway commissioned a poll for Ligonier Ministries, and most evangelicals have wonky theology.

They don't even have the basics of Jesus down. And so I wanted to show how Jesus is in the Old Testament. These days, we have a tendency to give out just New Testaments, failing to remember that the left side of the book is about Jesus, too.

So I wanted to make sure that people learned that Jesus is all the way throughout the Bible. The Bible harmonizes. It makes sense. There's a reason that Habakkuk is in there, if we understand the point and the flow of the Bible.

So that's what we try to accomplish.

Who Jesus Unmasked Is For

So, who did you have in mind, then, when you were writing this?

A couple of groups of people, really. People who weren't saved, for sure, which is why there's basically an altar call at the end of every chapter, without actually going to the altar. Basically, a call to repentance.

So it's very evangelistic. It's for the new believer, but it's also for the Christian who maybe has never fully understood the flow and the order of the Bible. Why do we have stories about King David?

What's the point of King David? What's the story? Why is Samson in there? Okay, Daniel in the lion's den. Who's your enemy? Who's your lion? Who's the flaming furnace in your life? You know, we've all heard those sermons, but why is Daniel in the Bible?

Why is Goliath in the Bible? What are these stories really about? And unless we understand that it is about a promise that God gave to Abraham for a land, a nation, and a seed, singular, who is Jesus, a lot of the Old Testament doesn't make any sense.

So understanding biblical covenant, and I'm not talking about covenantalism. I'm talking about the covenants of the Old Testament, God's immediate promise of a Messiah in Genesis. Without that understanding, the Old Testament can seem kind of random, and we can teach it as a bunch of moralisms or life leadership skills or how to be a better boss.

That's not the point. The Old Testament is about Jesus. So I wanted to teach that group of people how the Bible works.

Truth, Preference, and the Deity of Christ

Yeah, I mean, it definitely seemed as if you were trying to, basically, it seemed like it was one really large gospel track that you're trying to get out to people. And throughout it, I mean, even the rabbit trails that you went on, because you had these things where it seemed like it was a rabbit trail.

I mean, when I first opened the very first chapter, and my first thing was, you know, about baseball. You know, the truth is not like a baseball game. It's like, where is he going? But each chapter, you have these little somewhat rabbit trails, but those rabbit trails, you wrap up beautifully.

And not only that, that each of those rabbit trails, or seemingly rabbit trails, though you may not see it at the beginning of the chapter, by the end, not only is it wrapped up, but you end up bringing each one back to the gospel and showing how each one of these points that you bring out, each of these typologies, not only bring us back to Christ, but bring us to the foot of the cross.

Yeah, and it teaches us something about God. So the rabbit trails, and I tried to limit them, when you've got ADHD, not easy to do, but I tried to limit them, but it was to teach something about God, to teach us something about ourselves, so that we can better appreciate Jesus.

It's clear. I think this is a book that could easily be given to an unbeliever. You even mentioned some things directly to those that profess to be atheists. It could be given to, like you said, new believers, or even those who've been in the church for a while, because there's a lot in here that I think many people who've been sitting in pews for 20 or 30 years have never been taught from a pulpit.

That's one of the reasons, too, because we do a fair amount of traveling and speak in different churches, and I discovered, Andrew, even in good churches, you know, some Bible teaching churches, I would make an allusion to, or a reference to Jesus in the Old Testament, or I would share one of the pictures of Jesus in the Old Testament.

He's a surety. He's Jacob's ladder. He's the ark. He's the door. He's the pitch. He's the bread. He's the water. He's a better Melchizedek. He's a better covenant. He's a better tabernacle, whatever it happened to be.

And I would watch, you know, you get this look, like it was going in, but the wheels were, why have I never heard this before? And again, this is not some sort of hocus pocus with the Bible. This is the way the Bible has historically been understood, but we've been failing to teach it using the left side of our book to point to the right side of our book.

And so I just discovered that even in good churches, people were kind of like, wow, this is a strange word. I've never heard this before.

So I thought, let's put it in a book. And you, you know, one of the things I mentioned in the first chapter, you talked about a difference between truth and preference. And I think this is something even within the church, I don't think people understand.

Why is that so important to understand the difference between truth and preference?

Yeah, because we're living in a world that is asking the Pontius Pilate question, what is truth? Well, he was being somewhat acerbic, but today truth, schmooth, who cares about truth? What's true? What's the point of truth?

I'm just tripping through. My truth is my truth. Your truth is your truth. It doesn't matter. In Ephesians 6, we see that there is a hierarchy, that somehow the devil has a hierarchy of minions that do his bidding.

I don't think the devil is all over the place. He's not omnipresent. Only our God is. If I had to guess where the devil is, maybe the White House. But short of that, I think that he concocts these really deceiving ideas, these lies that then the minions go out and spread.

And I think one of the most brilliant lies that he's concocted to date is postmodernism. You can believe what you want to believe about Jesus, Andrew. And if it works for you, that's fine. But that's not my truth.

Well, what a convenient way to just dismiss Jesus who said, no, I am the way, the truth, the life. And so we need to confront people with Jesus' words, what he clearly said. Because if they are true, they are more than a preference.

Because Jesus' truth invades everybody's space. Everybody is going to be confronted with the truth of Jesus Christ on Judgment Day. And it can't be dismissed by saying, well, he's not my truth. And so these days, people confuse ice cream with religion.

They confuse ice cream with science. They confuse ice cream with history. Ice cream is a preference. You like Rocky Road versus peppermint bonbon? That's a preference. But a definitive statement about the way the world works, who owns it, what we are supposed to believe is either true or false.

And now you can have a preference. You can ultimately conclude, I prefer Buddhism over Hinduism or Mormonism over Catholicism or Lutheranism over Methodism or Christianity versus. You can prefer that.

But that does not change the truth of what it teaches. We've got to make sure that people understand the difference.

And it seems throughout your book, it seems very, very clear that you want people to understand the difference that Jesus Christ is actually God.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why Jesus Unmasked was the title of this. Because people know he's just a good teacher. He was a rabbi. He was maybe a miracle worker. He was a nice guy. He dined with sinners.

He's a fable. He's a myth. Hold it. That's everybody putting their own understanding of Jesus onto Jesus. Let's take off the mask, see what Jesus Christ says about himself. And what is loud and clear, Jesus claimed to be God in a more profound way than just going, I'm God.

He did it based in a history of a nation, the history of a religion, the history of a sacrificial system, the fulfillment of promises. He was grounding himself in the Old Testament, which makes his claims far more reliable.

Jesus’ Deity and the Witnesses in the Gospels

Yeah, I mean, I've been on college campuses. I debate Muslims on the deity of Christ. I've been, I mean, I expect it from Jehovah Witnesses. But what I really find is when I open air preach and I don't say Jesus is the son of God, I say Jesus is God.

And I get well-meaning professing Christians that want to try to correct me. It actually got me to do a study, which I'm now trying to put in, I'll be working on putting into a book on Jesus Christ's claim as a deity.

One of the things I had found when you look at just the Gospels and you take the direct and indirect references to Jesus being God, like when he read people's mind, when he showed he had the authority over demons and nature, you take all those things together, 44 of the Gospels refer to Jesus as God directly or indirectly.

It seems like a pretty important thing that the New Testament Gospel writers are trying to get across. It's something that comes through very clearly in your book.

You know, it's funny that there are so many Christians, and I get it. We use these terms, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, because, well, that's the way Jesus referred to himself and to the Father. So we use those terms there.

In a sense, they're anthropomorphisms. They're the best concept we have on this earth to understand the relationship between the first and second persons of the Trinitarian Godhead. But that doesn't mean that the Father had a baby named Jesus, and that's Mormonism.

That's not Christianity. So the terms, we need to understand what they mean and how the Bible defines itself. And again, Jesus' claims to deity are far more profound, way more sophisticated, and a lot more reliable than just going, I'm God, everybody.

Yeah, and he does do that in John 8.

He does it over 20 times by referring to himself as the I Am. So he does that too, but he also does it in more sophisticated ways.

Yeah, I mean, he said, hey, look, look at the works I do. They testify of me. Well, what were those works? Authority over demons, authority over people's bodies, physical bodies, having the authority to give forgiveness of sin.

John 5 or 6, Jesus is in that open air setting, and he basically sets up a courtroom presentation. It's a fantastic read. He uses judicial language. This is dating back to the Sanhedrin, the courts that would be set up throughout Jerusalem, where you could go and have your trial heard, and you had to bring at least two witnesses.

Better if you had three witnesses. So Jesus, when they accuse him of blasphemy, he sets up a courtroom drama, and then he brings forth five witnesses, and you rightly brought forth one of them that he brought forth was the miracles.

Hello, that should be enough. He uses the scripture. He uses John the Baptist. He uses his own words. The father testifies about me at his baptism. This is my beloved son. So he brings forth five witnesses in this courtroom.

It's great open air preaching. It's just vivid. Here's the courtroom. Witness number one. Witness number two. They all testify about the deity of Jesus Christ.

Wretched Radio, Wretched TV, and Why Todd Friel Calls Himself a Wretch

Yeah, it's interesting. Even his enemies testify to him, because his enemies never denied the works he did. They never denied the resurrection. They just wanted to lie about it. You know, so you have gone from being an ex-comedian.

You now work at Wretched Radio.

Nobody ever calls me. Honestly, that thing never works.

So when you're doing the TV show or the radio show, is your phone usually on? Dude, honestly, you know what?

I should have turned it off. But seriously, it's like nobody calls me. We're living in a text world. Who uses the phone anymore? Come on, people.

21st century here. See, the thing is, is once you were there, I think EZ was on the comfort zone. And he announced that he was reading something from his phone and said, I know I'm not supposed to do this.

You know, I have my phone on. So what happens? The engineers start sending him text messages and calling him, you know. I've actually had where I was preaching at, I think it was the Ohio Fire. And one of the guys started texting me to see if I would, you know, have my phone because I preach from my iPad.

And so they wanted to see if that was going to pop up. But I've got an iPad.

Let me just show you something. Here you go. This is the beast that I preach from. I'm not quite as hip as you are.

Well, yeah, it was donated to us. So I actually it was it was James White who convinced me. You always have the papers. And he just he just sat there and he was preaching right from the iPad. And I was like, that convinced me.

I was like, wow, that's just so easy.

Yeah, you know, the problem with OK, this is an old Dell. I bought it from a guy in his house. He was drunk getting a divorce. It was weird. But at any rate, I bought this thing. And and when I try to click it, just, you know, to bring it down while I'm preaching, there's like a little box underneath it that I'll sometimes hit that makes the pages just go.

That's a nightmare.

Actually, Tim Challies has an article on how to preach from an iPad. But it's some good suggestions, because one of the things he says in there is, you know, he's got some tools because if you're in like pages, for example, from an iPad and you try to scroll up, sometimes you're actually editing and then you get confused.

So there's a tool to where it's just scrolling. He talks about making sure you have a Bible. So you're opening pages. I just don't like flipping the pages when when I'm up there preaching. So I really like that having the iPad because people don't know.

I have to confess, I like the old fashioned like this type of, you know, like system because I'm a visual kind of learner.

I know where it is on the page. Well, I do that and I'm color coordinated because I actually I actually have colors in my sermon. So anything in green means if I'm running out of time, I just toss it.

No thinking about it. Great point. Think about it ahead of time. Anything that's in blue is a summary or scripture. Anything in red is an illustration. So I kind of color coordinate everything. That's smart.

You know, and I'll actually when I first started preaching, I used to actually time it and put the times in there. So I knew when to end on time.

But you know, it's it's funny because when you write a new sermon and deliver it, you have no idea how long it's going to be. Usually. And so what I've learned to do a similar system is I write three endings.

And that way, if I look at it, typically they've got a clock over there. So if I get to that ending and my time is up, amen. If there's more time, you preach to the second ending. More time, you preach to the third ending.

That helped me. Yeah, well, it doesn't help when and this is the reason I usually take my iPhone and keep it so I can check the time because I was actually preaching in a church. And it it took me a good half hour to realize that their clock wasn't working.

A broken clock is only right twice a day.

Yeah, not very helpful for them. And that went on for like an hour and a half.

Yeah, I was actually invited back to preach at that church several times. So I guess they liked it. So tell us about Wretched Radio, Wretched TV, the ministry of Wretched. Why do you call yourself a wretch?

I thought you're in Christ, perfect in Christ, righteous in Christ. Are you still a wretch?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're now not yet. We're now righteous, but not yet perfected. So Paul, I think in Romans chapter seven, referred to himself that way. So I have no problem with now, not yet. We are indeed redeemed, but we are not perfected.

So I can still be very, very wretched. I mean, in fact, learning more and more just how wretched I am in ways that I never would have even pondered. In fact, about a week ago, we were talking about this.

Do you do this when you're out to eat with a group of people, your very own family and the food gets delivered? I don't know about you, but I have a tendency to kind of look around and see what everybody got.

And you know what my wicked heart is doing? I'm determining who got the best food because it should be me. And if I notice that somebody else has better food, especially if it's my kids, you know what I do?

I parachute it and just grab some. Now, if I have the best food and somebody wants a sample of mine, unless I have an overwhelming amount of it, my wicked heart goes, I don't want to give you any of this now.

Really? I mean, well, this is really even consciously thinking it, but I'm reminded how selfish and how wicked and wretched that I am, even when I'm out to eat dinner.