WWUTT 2465 Q&A Infant Baptism, Spanking in the Bible, Responding to John Mark Comer

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Credo Baptists and Infant Baptizers obviously have some differences about baptism, but can we still fellowship with one another?

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Does the Bible actually advocate spanking? And what are the problems with the teacher John Mark Comer?

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The answers to some of these questions and others when we Understand the Text. This is

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When we Understand the Text, a daily Bible study in the Word of God. We thank you for listening and for telling others about our program.

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Let them know about our website, www .utt .com, where they can find all our videos, podcast episodes and more.

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Here once again is Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. You're welcome. Reading from Psalm 45 to start off here.

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My heart overflows with a pleasing theme. I address my verses to the

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King. My tongue is like the pen of a ready scribe. You are the most handsome of the sons of men.

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Grace is poured upon your lips. Therefore God has blessed you forever. Gird your sword on your thigh,

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O mighty one, in your splendor and majesty. In your majesty, write out victoriously for the cause of truth and meekness and righteousness.

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Let your right hand teach you awesome deeds. Your arrows are sharp in the heart of the king's enemies.

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The people's fall under you. Your throne, O God, is forever and ever.

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The scepter of your kingdom is a scepter of uprightness. You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness.

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Therefore, God, your God has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.

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And that's a section of Psalm 45 you might recognize from Hebrews 1, knowing that it is talking about Jesus Christ, whose throne,

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O God, is forever and ever. That is our Savior. I had asked

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Becky before we started recording to pick a number between one and 150. And so you picked 45.

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Yes, because Monday, you turned 45. I turned 45.

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There we go. I've been doing this podcast for 10 years. From 35 to 45.

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That's quite an accomplishment. Honestly. 34 to 44, technically. But yeah, it was right up next to my birthday when we started.

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So anyway, when she said 45, and I looked at this, and I was like, okay, so you think I am the most handsome among the sons of men and grace is poured upon my lips?

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But of course. Oh, yeah. Well, thank you for listening to the program.

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This is the Friday edition, when we take questions from the listeners, and you can send those questions to whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com,

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or you can go to www .utt .com and send us a voicemail, which you can record from your phone or your computer.

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I rearranged the buttons on the site so that if you bring it up on your phone, it puts the voicemail button more like right in front of you.

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Because the way that it was on there, if you were looking at it from your phone, it was kind of hidden. You had to click like the more button to see voicemail.

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So, I put the links that people most often visit more to the left side, based on my stats.

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And then, yeah, if you really want to read about us and our statement of faith, that's now not the first thing on there, it's closer to the last thing.

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Figure if you're listening to the program, you know who we are by now. Or you have a rough idea. Generally.

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Okay, well, before we get into our questions for today, I wanted to mention a few of the episodes of Hear the

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Word of the Lord, which is my daily Bible reading, a few of those got dropped. The reason why they got dropped is because we had a really terrible dust storm blow through.

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We've been getting quite a few dust storms lately. We have. It's been busy. And it really triggered my allergies.

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Yes. And because I'm doing the Bible reading, not just for that podcast, but also for Bible apps who want to, they have said they want to use my voice reading those books of the

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Bible on their app. I need to be as consistent with it as possible. Yeah. So I didn't. With your voice.

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Yeah. I didn't want to sound congested. It would be a little awkward to hear one clear voice and then like a congested

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Rocky. And then the next day. And the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah saying. Stuffy voice. Yeah, right. For the next verse.

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And then sniffing every third verse or something. And then clear again. And then suddenly he's clear.

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So yeah, that's why a few of those episodes got dropped. I also moved everything around in this room. We have a different desk set up.

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We do. So this happened because of renovations we did at our church. We knocked out a wall to increase the seating.

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But increasing the seating meant reducing the size of my office. Yes. So this desk really doesn't fit in there anymore.

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I mean, it would. It would be snug. Yeah. It just means that if they wanted to use my office for anything else, like a meeting or a

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Sunday school class or something, it would be a lot more difficult to get everybody in there if this desk was in there.

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So I've decided to do something different with my desk. This one I brought home, which means

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I had to get the other one out. And that one was falling apart anyway. We knew that if we ever moved that desk again.

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It was done for. It was done. Yeah. That desk was not. It was kind of like we managed to finagle it in a way that it would hold together.

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And it was particle board. So there's no way of fixing it, you know, like it was just going to fall apart.

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Once the particle board starts falling apart, that's right. So because I had the room change set up, that actually changed the acoustics and therefore

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I had to make adjustments. So there were several different factors that went into why a few of those episodes got dropped.

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Yeah. But just letting you know, I still try to do that daily as much as I possibly can. Right now, as you're hearing this program,

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I'm in Georgia. Yes. God willing, my plane got there. OK. Right. And I'm there for the

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White Harvest Conference, which is primarily on Saturday. So if you're listening to this on Friday, if you're in the

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Atlanta area, you can still make the conference tomorrow, Saturday, and go to northern

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Atlanta, right? Yeah. It's a little bit to the north of Atlanta, like from the airport. I think it took an hour and a half or two hours to get there or something like that, which the airport's on the southern end of Atlanta.

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Yeah, it is. So look up White Harvest M .I .N. dot com,

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White Harvest Ministries. So White Harvest M .I .N. dot com. And that will tell you all the details you need to know about the

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White Harvest Conference. Scott Klusendorf is speaking there, Jimmy Hicks from Wretched Radio, myself,

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Jim Osmond, Justin Peters, the three of us, rumor has it, are going to take over Wretched Radio in Todd Friel's absence.

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So if you're a regular listener to Wretched sometime in the near future, it'll be me and Justin and Jim that are going to be talking about various topics.

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I'm curious how that's going to go. I don't know if I'm supposed to be announcing that or not. Yeah, you know.

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You could be stuck with me on three podcasts. Hear the word of the

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Lord when we understand the text in Wretched. That's awesome. Two W's. Two W's and an H.

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Anyway, all right, let's get to some questions here. This first one is a voicemail that comes from John.

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Thank you for listening, John. And it has to do with something that I taught earlier this week out of Luke 18.

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So here we go. Hi, Pastor Gabe and Becky. This is John from New York.

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I wanted to leave a comment and also a question regarding a recent episode of your podcast.

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You're expositing Luke 18, verses 15 through 17, and you briefly talked about infant baptism and you had mentioned that you don't believe in that tradition.

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I'm a former charismatic and I became a Lutheran about five years ago.

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And one of the arguments that had prompted me to become a Lutheran was actually on the belief of infant baptism.

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And I don't believe that the Bible says anything about the age of accountability.

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I also believe that God is able to grant faith to an infant to believe.

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And I believe that the account of John the Baptist leaping in Elizabeth's womb is an example of that.

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And those are the reasons that I believe in it. And I wanted to ask for the denominations that do believe in infant baptism, are they in error?

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And also, just with all the different beliefs that there are regarding baptism in general, how do we know which belief is the correct one according to the

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Bible? John, that was a great question. Yeah, definitely. And I appreciate you listening.

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And I want to say, I love all of my Peto Baptist brothers. I don't think that you're believing heresy or anything like that, whether you're

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Lutheran or Presbyterian or Anglican. I don't know if I have any Methodist or Wesleyan listeners, but in case

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I have some from that denomination as well, I would kind of think that the Reformed tradition side of things might sort of drive them away.

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My dad grew up Lutheran. So I do have sympathies toward that tradition.

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He loved Martin Luther. My dad did not really talk to me much about church history, but when he did, it was almost always

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Martin Luther. Oh, interesting. Something about the Protestant Reformation and Martin Luther. He really loved

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Luther, even though he himself is no longer Lutheran and he is not

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Peto Baptist either. So, and even on the Reformed tradition side of things, he's not really there yet also, though he's become more accepting of it since his son is

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Reformed Baptist. But anyway, with regard to Peto Baptism, love my brothers, don't share the view.

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Let me come back to Luke 18, verses 15 to 17. I'll read that again and then we'll go from here.

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Let's talk a little bit about Credo versus Peto Baptism. Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them.

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One of the things that I mentioned on Monday in teaching from this passage is that the reference to infants is unique to Luke.

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We find the same exchange in Matthew and in Mark, but it's only in Luke that Luke uses a word that could be translated babe or infant.

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So they were bringing infants to him. In the other two synoptic gospels, it's children.

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So this is infants that he might touch them. And when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them.

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But Jesus called them to him saying, let the children come to me and do not hinder them for to such belongs the kingdom of God.

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Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God, like a child shall not enter it.

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One of the things that I mentioned about this passage is that this is one that has been used. Um, I don't want to say against me, but kind of, yeah, in that, in that sense, this passage has been used to question you maybe right, exactly to say, see,

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Jesus even said, don't hinder infants from coming to me. And so they will use this as a proof text for infant baptism.

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But as I made the argument on Monday, you're still reading your tradition into that. I believe just as John does, that even an infant can be a believer.

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Absolutely. Of course. In our own statement of faith, it talks about how elect infants, though they may die in the womb or though they may die in infancy would still have entrance into the kingdom of God.

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Amen. As we read from Jesus in Matthew, and he's quoting from Psalm eight out of the mouths of babes and infants, you have ordained your praise.

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So I certainly believe that is true with infants, but baptism specifically is a practice and ordinance, as we call it, that is meant for professing believers and children.

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Infants do not profess belief on their own. It needs to be something that as they get older, they profess faith and therefore are baptized and just because they did not receive baptism in their infancy, doesn't change their status before God.

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True. Our condition before the Lord has not changed. Now as a Lutheran, I know you believe a little bit different than that.

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Oh, do they? So my understanding, and you can correct me on this if I don't have this exactly right, but Lutherans do believe in baptismal regeneration or that new birth takes place in baptism.

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There's something a little bit different with Lutherans and baptism that's not the same as what even Presbyterians or the

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Reformed or especially us as Reformed Baptists believe concerning baptism. So as I said,

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I do not share the infant baptism view. We're going to stick with that. We'll talk about baptismal regeneration another time.

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Do I think that people who believe in infant baptism are in error? Yes, I do.

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I don't believe that means we're different in the family of God as brothers and sisters in the

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Lord. You're still my brothers and sisters. Nothing about our differing views on baptism has disqualified us in the family of God.

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At least I believe that about you. I hope you'd extend the same courtesy to me. But with regard to infant baptism, we don't find it explicitly mentioned in Scripture.

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Surely you know the arguments about this from Baptists. I did do a pretty in -depth study of it about 10 years ago.

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It would have been 2015 that I gave the most intense study to infant baptism versus credo baptism and really came away frankly convinced from what the

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Scriptures say. There's nothing in the Bible that talks about infant baptism. It's never mandated because it's not commanded.

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It can't be a sin if you don't do it. All of the examples that we have of baptism in the

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New Testament, especially in the book of Acts, are from people who profess faith and were baptized. We don't have a single example of anyone being baptized as an infant.

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Even when you want to read households being baptized, the household of Stephanas or the household of the Philippian jailer or the household of Lydia.

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If you see households being baptized and you're inferring from that, well, infants in those households were baptized, you're still reading that upon the text.

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There's nothing explicitly that says anything of the sort. So in my own study of this and challenging myself in my own

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Baptist tradition, I came away even more cemented in my credo Baptist position than I was before.

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And Jeffrey Johnson has asked this particular question with regard to infant baptism.

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Is Christ the federal head of your unconverted children? And if the answer to that question is no, then why are you baptizing them?

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If baptism is supposed to be a sign of one who has been buried with Christ and risen again to walk in newness of life and has as their federal head

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Christ and not Adam. But if Adam is still your unconverted child's federal head, then why are they being baptized?

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Which is why baptism should be for those who profess faith, those who are children of Abraham who have faith, according to Galatians 3, 7.

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It is those who are faith who are the children of Abraham. And then later on, what is it? Verse 25. If you are

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Abraham's children, then you belong to Christ. Well, I mean, if if they believe in the it's the rebirth, then that puts a whole different spin on things like like a different approach completely.

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Right. So, I mean, there would be more to dive into. Yeah, there's a lot more to cover there, especially especially when we talk about the regeneration side of things.

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Right. But consider this. I'm going to run down what we find in church history with regard to infant baptism and understand what

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I'm coming at here. What I'm going to read here actually comes from a pedo

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Baptist. This is Steve Meister, who is a fellow reformed Baptist like myself, but he is summarizing a list of conclusions taken from Kenneth Stewart, who is a pedo

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Baptist, from his book, In Search of Ancient Roots, pages 129 to 131.

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OK. So you're kind of getting this third hand because it's not me having read Kenneth Stewart.

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It's reading Steve Meister who read Kenneth Stewart. Sure. But these summations, based on what we find in church history, come from somebody who is from the pedo

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Baptist tradition. OK, so what can we conclude about the history of infant baptism and the early church?

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The biblical paradigm for baptism in the early church was Jesus baptism, not the apostolic pattern in Acts.

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Jesus never commanded the baptism of infants and his blessing of children, like we have here in Luke 18 or in Mark 10, 13 to 16, was not used as a proof text for pedo baptism until the 7th or 8th centuries.

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Oh, wow. We don't have any commentary using those passages for pedo baptism until that far into church history.

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Wow. Household baptisms in Acts 16 and 1 Corinthians 1 do not bear the weight advocates of pedo baptism want them to.

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There can be no certainty as to the ages of any children included. There is no support for infant baptism in the

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Didache or the writings of the apostolic fathers. In fact, if you were to follow the instructions in the Didache, I believe that you would come away with more of a credo

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Baptist understanding of baptism rather than pedo Baptist. Meister says no one before Cyprian in the 3rd century connected the

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Old Testament practice of circumcising of infant males with the baptism of infants. Augustine later developed this idea.

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No major early Christian writer substantially addresses the baptism of children before Tertullian in the 3rd century, and he was critical of the practice of pedo baptism.

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So we know that it was going on then in the 3rd century, but Tertullian being the first early church father to write about it was critical of it.

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Meister says there is no biography in the early centuries indicating that any church father raised in a

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Christian family was baptized as an infant. Infant baptism probably arose from infants suffering from life -threatening conditions conjoined with the belief that most

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Protestants would later come to reject that baptism was absolutely necessary for salvation. Under normal circumstances, early

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Christian baptism followed extensive catechists and teaching, ensuring that the baptismal questions were answered by the candidates.

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Early Christian architecture indicates that until the 5th century, the normal sites for baptism were pools or baths supplied by moving water, with baptism administered by immersion or pouring, which makes it highly unlikely that the regular tradition would have been pedo baptism.

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Right. Exactly. So again, that list of conclusions summarized by Steve Meister was taken from Kenneth Stewart in his book,

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In Search of Ancient Roots. This was covered recently by Gavin Ortland in a video that he did entitled,

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How Did Infant Baptism Begin? A Story of Five Centuries of Church History. And he is reading a book entitled

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Baptism in the Early Church by Everett Ferguson. So let me play you just a portion here in which he summarizes from church history where infant baptism came from and its roots are not apostolic.

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In the sense that we don't find any conclusive evidence of the apostles or even the first or second century church practicing infant baptism.

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So where does it come from? And that's the question that Gavin answers right here. He kind of summarizes it in this portion of the video.

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Here we go. If infant baptism doesn't go back to the apostles, how did it arise and spread like this?

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Ferguson's argument is that we get a clue in tomb inscriptions from around this time, especially early third century, because we have a lot of these and they suggest in many cases of infant or child baptism, that's an emergency procedure, kind of deathbed procedure.

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So here's an example from the Catacomb of Priscilla. Florentius made this monument for his well -deserving son,

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Apronionus, who lived one year, nine months and five days. Since he was dearly loved by his grandmother and she saw that he was going to die, she asked from the church that he might depart from the world a believer.

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So this means, that means being baptized. So the scenario is baby boy, almost two years old, sick and about to die.

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Grandmother requests baptism. There's lots of other examples from tombstones around this time and including with Christian parents.

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You find a lot of these examples that Ferguson is drawing attention to. Here's another one. Quote, her parents set this up for Julia Florentina, their dearest and most innocent infant, who was made a believer.

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She was born a pagan on this day. I'm not going to give all the details here, skipping ahead. She lived 18 months and 22 days and was made a believer in the eighth hour of the night, almost drawing her last breath.

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She survived four more hours. So this is obviously different from many. This reflects a theology that's different from many contemporary views, both

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Creto -Baptist and Paito -Baptist, that don't conceive of baptism as making someone a believer.

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But it also is a challenge to infant baptism, because obviously a child who's getting baptized when they're 18 months old, didn't get baptized right when they were born.

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And there's so many inscriptions like this. Ferguson says, the inscriptions

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I propose are the key to understanding the origin of infant baptism. When we recall the high infant mortality rate of the ancient world, it is easy to understand how an emergency practice eventually became a normal practice.

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Now, this strikes me as a plausible theory, though we can't nail it down with certainty. I mean,

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I think we have to be honest. When we get to historical data, we just have to make our case, but acknowledge the limitations and the historical evidence is not absolutely conclusive for different views on this.

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So there you go. Yeah. I mean, you can find evidence from it in scripture. And historically, we don't even see infant baptism becoming a regular practice until a couple of centuries into the church.

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And so for that reason, I am not pedo -Baptist. I am firmly credo -Baptist and won't ever change, frankly.

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And you may feel the same way about your own pedo -Baptist leanings. Where do we land on this again, as brothers and sisters in the

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Lord? I think you're in error in your practice of infant baptism, but that is no reason for us to not fellowship with one another.

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I think it's a significant disagreement. Let me put it that way as well. So this isn't just kind of a, it's not the same as having differing views of the end times.

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Okay. Because you can still have a different view of the end times and worship in the same body of believers, the same congregation.

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Oh, yes, yes. But infant baptism is significant enough in a practice of the ordinances, how the ordinances are handled in the church, that I could not in conscience, in good conscience, be a pastor of a church in which infants were being baptized.

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I personally would not be able to do it, nor would I be in agreement with it because I think that it is a practice that is not reflected in scripture.

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We're always going to be different congregations, always going to be different denominations in that sense. Yes. We have pedobaptists, whether that's

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Presbyterian, Anglican, or Lutheran, I don't think we have anybody Lutheran, but we have people who are of a pedobaptist tradition that come to our church on Sunday nights.

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Yes. And the reason they come on Sunday evenings, because we have a Sunday night service and their own

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Presbyterian or Reformed church does not have a Sunday night service. And so they come to ours.

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Right. And we've had those conversations before, like, you guys are more than welcome to come. We're never going to do the

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Lord's Supper and never going to do a baptism in that service on Sunday night. We actually do our baptismal services on Sunday evening, but it's at a different location.

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Yes. And we can't do it in the building that we have because we don't have a baptism. We don't have the, yeah. We go to a place where we can get somebody all the way under, not just sprinkling them with a bowl or otherwise.

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Yeah. So, but anyway, they're welcome to join us. If you want the singing, the prayer that we do, if you want to hear good teaching, you're more than welcome to join.

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But there are still significant differences between us when it comes to the proper practice of the ordinances that I understand why there must be different bodies and why there always will be.

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Yeah. Until Christ returns, there's always going to be Presbyterian and Baptist. That's just the way it'll be.

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Or Lutheran in your case, John. And I do appreciate you listening once again. And I thank you for asking your question and I hope that was satisfactory for you, at least telling you where I come from on how

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I understand those things and practice them according to my Baptist disciplines.

25:49

I thought you were going to say something there. Yeah. What else am

25:55

I supposed to say? Like I've been saying yeah a lot. I don't know. Yeah, I know. Let me say it again.

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I know there was a pause where I just said, I thought you were going to chime in with something and no. I thought about it, but I held my tongue.

26:06

Okay. Gotcha. It's on repeat. Becky's on repeat again. Becky's still letting you know she's here.

26:11

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Hmm. Hmm. All right.

26:20

This was a comment that came from our video on Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child. Let me see if I can get this to play.

26:27

Okay. Because we've been having some issues with our audio here. Let me try this once again. Yeah. Nope. It's not going to go.

26:34

Oh. That's a bummer. All right. I am going to dub in the audio for this video, and then on the other side of the video, we're going to respond to the comment that we got.

26:48

Proverbs 13, 24 says, whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.

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Is the Bible seriously advocating spanking with this verse? Yes, it is. Physical discipline, corporal punishment, whatever you want to call it, it is a common instruction in the book of Proverbs, because folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him.

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But understand the motivation behind this form of punishment. It is not anger, but love.

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He who loves his son will discipline him. Spanking should not ever be something a parent uses to vent their anger.

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It is to lovingly teach a child. Make sure your child understands why they're being punished. This will help to bring them to an awareness of their sin, then use that to point them toward the saving power of the gospel.

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The harshness of the rod in Proverbs is not spared in the New Testament. Hebrews 12 uses the same words from Proverbs to describe the

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Lord's discipline. My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him, for the

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Lord disciplines the one he loves and chastises every son whom he receives. If not for his discipline, we'd be illegitimate children.

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All discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

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It's true that there are a lot of cultural stigmas against spanking, but do not be intimidated. Spanking is not child abuse.

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As Proverbs 23, 13 says, if you strike him with a rod, he will not die. In fact, when used lovingly and biblically, it will help to save your child from death when we understand the text.

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So from that video, we got this comment from Berenika, who appears to be from Poland.

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Okay. It's a pretty name. She said, no wonder people have religious trauma. I'm a

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God -fearing and God -loving woman, and my parents disciplined me, sure, but never through physical punishment.

28:38

You're going to give the kids severe psychological damage if you hit a child and then quote a

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Bible verse about sin. Most people I know that grew up like that have really bad views on religion and the church.

28:51

Well, Berenika, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I was spanked growing up, and I turned out just fine.

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Me too. A lot. Now, my children, we have also spanked our kids growing up, and my kids attend a

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Christian school. And in our church and in the school that they attend, we get a lot of high comments about how well -behaved, polite, and adjusted they are.

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So it is not true that if you spank your child, they're going to grow up with all this religious trauma. Right.

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It is quite plainly what the Bible says, and I laid out those verses.

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They could not be clearer than that. So yes, there is a biblical instruction that is given about spanking your child.

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Now as I have advocated regarding spanking your child, it's better to do it younger than older. The younger you spank them, you will get to a point where you will not have to do that nearly as often.

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And they may not even remember. That's true. They may not even remember the number of spankings that they got when they were two or three years old.

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And when you reprove them for bad behavior, they are more willing to listen and be corrected and even apologize for those bad things that they have done because of the correction, the spanking correction that you had offered them when they were younger.

30:11

Yeah. Now it's not like whenever I spank my kids, I'm sitting down and I'm like, okay, let's have a devotional lesson about why you're getting a spanking.

30:19

Right. Sometimes that spanking happens first, and then we'll talk about it. Right. After things calm down a little bit.

30:25

Yeah, because, you know, my two -year -old, he's now four, but when he was one or two, you couldn't spank him and then have a conversation with him.

30:34

He didn't really understand you. Right. But you could speak some very simple things.

30:40

Why did you get spanked? Yes. Why did that happen? Just asking simple questions and then explaining it to them and continuing to do that even as they get older, it gets in and they understand it.

30:51

Yes. So sometimes that conversation happens after the spanking. The first thing that needs to happen is a punishment so that you see that your behavior in this situation or you're doing something that you've been told not to do has consequences and they face the painful consequences.

31:07

Right. God gave us a padded backside for a reason. Swat that. Swat it with the wooden spoon or the rod or whatever it is.

31:15

Yeah. And yes, the Bible does guarantee that will yield fruit. And we have seen that with our children as I saw with myself as well.

31:24

And to be fair, we have some children that required a little bit more spankings than the others.

31:32

Yeah. And one in particular, I can hardly ever remember spanking.

31:38

Hardly ever. Right. But it still came to that point once or twice maybe that I can recall off the top of my head that it was necessary for that child to learn that is not going to fly.

31:52

Yeah. And it's not biblical. It's not obedient. And it's not the way

31:58

I'm going to allow her to go. Right. Because I love her. And I've said that to my children many times.

32:05

I'm spanking you because I love you. And I want you to know the right thing to do that you would not continue in the wrong thing without realizing there's going to be consequences to this behavior.

32:17

Someday you're not going to be at home anymore. You're going to be out in the world on your own. Right. And you're going to recognize the difference between right and wrong because your parents taught you that way.

32:25

Sometimes telling you this is right and this is wrong. But sometimes having to punish you when you do the wrong thing so that you will know there can be very painful consequences to the bad decisions that you make.

32:37

Yes. This is to keep you from making worse bad decisions. Yes. That could lead you. When you're older.

32:42

Yeah. It could lead you to hell if you were to continue in that sin and wickedness. Yeah. And this is why

32:48

Proverbs says that you will not kill your child by punishing their backside.

32:55

In fact, you will save their soul from death. And indeed, that is the peaceful fruit of righteousness that is yielded from a consistent discipline.

33:05

And praise God that he disciplines us. Amen. We would be illegitimate sons and daughters if we weren't being disciplined by God.

33:12

And I mean, culturally, because she is from Poland. Yes. Culturally, I'm sure it's different than here in the

33:21

United States, which makes a difference. Because you have more than one person correcting your child that it might not have to go to a spanking.

33:32

You know what I mean? Okay. Like in the more family -oriented setting.

33:38

I don't know what Poland's like, but yeah, I know what you're talking about. I'm not saying it's Poland. I'm just saying that some places.

33:45

Yeah. They are that way. And you have more backup of more than one person or more than two people telling your child how to rightly behave.

33:56

Yeah. And that helps tremendously. Right. And so, sometimes it doesn't help.

34:03

It depends on your outlook. I remember at what point my mom realized that she couldn't spank me anymore.

34:10

Oh, yeah? There was one time where I was harassing my siblings, and we were on the way out the door to go to school.

34:16

I was a teenager. I cannot remember how old exactly. It might have been 14 or 15. But I'm picking on my siblings, and they're getting mad at me, and they're yelling.

34:24

And mom grabs the spoon that she had hanging on the door jamb right by the back door.

34:31

And she grabbed that spoon, and she swatted my backside with it. And I just looked at her, and I went, really?

34:38

Well, your mom's a little bitty thing, too. She is. That's true. A little

34:43

Southern woman. But, yeah, at that moment, she realized, okay, that's not going to work on Gabe anymore.

34:48

And then after that, I started getting groundings. That's what I was thinking. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So there did come a point where the spanking wasn't working anymore, but punishment still continued.

34:57

Yeah. And I do not carry any scars whatsoever. I am very thankful for my upbringing and that my parents were diligent to discipline me when

35:05

I did wrong. I'm grateful that my parents were stubborn enough to keep at it, because I was that child that you had to keep over and over and over, same thing, repeating and repeating and repeating.

35:18

Yeah. I was awful. Oh, my goodness. Such a wretched child. My poor parents.

35:24

There does need to be a consistency to it. They were, though. They were pretty good about it.

35:31

Because children are sinners, and they'll test your limits. Oh, my goodness. Yeah.

35:38

Like I said, my poor parents. Yeah. I probably aged them, like, 20 years. Yeah. Now, I did have a brother who was very foul -mouthed, and he had to go through something

35:49

I never had to go through, and that was getting his mouth washed out with soap. Oh, I had that. Yeah.

35:54

I never had to do that. That was gross. Because then it was a bar of soap, obviously, and the teeth, because I didn't want it to go any further in my mouth, so I clenched down on my teeth.

36:06

You clenched down on it. And she pulled it back out. Oh. Yeah, that's not wise.

36:12

You know, that can cause blindness. What? Yeah. Soap poisoning. What? There are people listening that know exactly what

36:19

I'm talking about. I have no idea. I'm completely lost. I'll tell you about it later. Okay. I'm missing out, apparently.

36:29

Okay, so right here, we're actually having some audio problems, and I have a video queued up to respond to a question regarding John Mark Comer.

36:38

I said that I was going to talk about his teaching here in a little bit. Because the audio is frozen up, and I'm going to have to reboot my system,

36:46

I'm going to let Becky go. Oh. So you're done for this episode, because I've got to figure this out and get it kind of rolling again.

36:54

Yeah. For whatever reason, my videos aren't playing anymore. Aw. But, babe, I love you, and thank you for joining me this week.

37:00

I love you, too. The listeners love you, also. Aw, I love you guys, too. I'll play another video here, and then we'll talk about John Mark Comer on the other side.

37:10

All right. There is, however, a denial of the sufficiency of Scripture.

37:18

Indeed, I think there are several different kinds of the denial of sufficiency of Scripture that are current in our contemporary evangelicalism.

37:29

They are present at one level in the scholarly world, where the sufficiency of Scripture is minimized by the weight that is attached to natural revelation outside of Scripture, or events in history outside of Scripture, or to scientific investigation outside of Scripture, and where the

37:54

Scriptures are fitted into a new mold of another source of revelation.

38:01

That's certainly true in a different way, at a totally different level, in what I think of as charismatic immediatism.

38:11

We have the Word of God. I've had it said to me, we have the Word of God. The Word of God is expounded to us, but we have this, as well.

38:19

We have these revelations that God gives to us. You Reformed Christians, you have the

38:24

Word of God, but you don't have this. We are preaching the Word. We are expounding the Scriptures. We are studying the

38:30

Bible just as much as you are. My dear friends, that may be true in the first few years of the first generation, but it never lasts beyond the first generation.

38:40

Why? Because as soon as you propose an immediate source of revelation, be it holy church or holy charismatic revelation, as soon as you propose a more immediate source of revelation, it is psychologically inevitable that that second source of revelation will become the tail that wags the dog.

39:07

Why on earth should I spend my hours studying the Scriptures, trying to find out from my commentaries what the

39:15

Greek or the Hebrew might mean coming to conferences like this, if God can speak to me right here and now with the same divine authority?

39:26

There isn't a human being under the sun who isn't psychologically likely to give to that second source of revelation an immediacy of canonical authority for living the

39:43

Christian life, that they do not, have not, and would not give to the pages of sacred

39:52

Scripture. And there's a very simple way to test it. How well do you know your

39:58

Bible? This next question comes from Austin in Illinois, not

40:06

Texas, but Austin in Illinois. He says, Pastor Gabe, I have heard you speak before about John Mark Comer.

40:13

I believe it had something to do with a preaching workshop that he was doing. Have you seen his latest post announcing the death knell of penal substitutionary atonement?

40:23

I have some friends who really like him, but just looking through his Instagram, this teaching looks very shady.

40:29

I appreciate you asking the question, Austin, and you have good reason to be concerned. So it was back in April when

40:35

I first got a question about John Mark Comer, and it had to do with a book of his that I had not read, but I was familiar with him through an advertisement that I was getting on Instagram for a preaching workshop that was led by John Mark Comer.

40:51

Now, seeing some of his associations, I had my doubts about how good this workshop really was.

40:58

Some of the names that were advertised in this workshop included Charlie Dates, who is a heretic and black liberation theology from Chicago.

41:08

He is the pastor of Progressive Baptist Church, if that tells you something right there, with the name

41:14

Progressive pretty much announcing that we're liberal right there in the title. It also contained

41:19

Brian Loritz and Jenny Allen of the IF conferences. I've warned about her stuff. So has Michelle Leslie.

41:25

You can find information about Jenny Allen on her website. And so just seeing those associations,

41:30

I knew that John Mark Comer was trouble. I've had the chance since then to listen to some sermons of his.

41:36

His sermons are really not very good. I know that he's popular. People really like listening to him.

41:42

I've seen numerous clips from him since then. Maybe I was seeing those clips before, but just wasn't paying attention to them until I had somebody ask me about this teacher named

41:52

John Mark Comer. But then, of course, there was this controversy that erupted at the beginning of August, so just about a month ago now, when he was promoting a book entitled

42:02

Lamb of the Free. And he says about that book, this is what he posted on Instagram. One of the most important academic books

42:10

I've read in years. Next, I'll read rebuttals, but this seems to be the final biblical slash exegetical knockout blow to PSA, meaning penal substitutionary atonement.

42:23

Who would have guessed it would have come not from liberals, but from scholars of Leviticus.

42:29

Highly recommend for your thoughtful consideration. Now, I knew that from some other clips that I've seen of John Mark Comer, I knew that he was anti PSA.

42:40

He comes from the same school that Tim Mackey comes from. Tim Mackey is the guy behind the

42:46

Bible Project. And I've been very critical of the Bible Project because of their misrepresentation and therefore dismissal of the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement.

42:56

I've done videos on this. Probably my most watched video, in fact, was calling this out from the

43:01

Gospel Project. Comer's theology sounds identical to Tim Mackey's.

43:08

And Comer, even in his delivery and his voice and his posture on stage and the way that he crafts sermons, they sound like they're cut from the same cloth.

43:18

They could almost be brothers. Wouldn't be surprised to find they were actually roommates in college, and that's why they sound almost exactly like one another.

43:25

It's almost a version of Rob Bell 2 .0. Not exactly, because I would say their theology is a little bit on the better side than Rob Bell.

43:38

It's not saying a lot, though. Not just because of his dismissal of penal substitutionary atonement as being unbiblical and it needs to have a death blow, a knockout punch afflicted to it or something like that, but also because in some of the things that he's written in the past, as I was kind of investigating him,

43:55

I came to find this out. His theology sounds like open theist. So he doesn't really believe that God knows the future.

44:03

God has actually closed himself off to the future so not to interfere with human free will.

44:09

And so whatever decisions that we make, God didn't know that we were going to make them until we made them. And so he knows all that can be known, but the future is just not one of those things that can be known.

44:20

So Comer's theology seems to lean on that side of things, and open theism has been dismissed as heresy.

44:27

Comer is a heretical teacher, and so therefore I would strongly urge you not to learn from John Mark Comer.

44:35

Plenty of other teachers out there, plenty of other good teachers that you don't have to be listening to him. Now, not just taking my word for it,

44:41

I want you to hear what he has to say about the gospel. When it comes to learning about a teacher and what it is that they teach, one of the best places to start is finding out what they believe the gospel is.

44:55

As Providence would have it, John Mark Comer did an entire series on what the gospel is.

45:00

I'm still listening to it. I still have more parts to go, but I've been through parts one and two, and he did this series back in 2020 after COVID hit and some people were still probably hunkering down at home.

45:11

John Mark Comer, in case you don't know, is up in the Pacific Northwest, especially in the Portland area, and so he was in a part of the country that is especially afflicted by political liberalism.

45:22

So he makes cracks about that. In fact, there are some things that are more on the politically conservative side of things that I agree with him on, and so I appreciate his approach to some things, whereas Rob Bell probably was completely, you know, totally a liberal, even in the moral and political sense.

45:41

John Mark Comer sounds a little bit more conservative in his ethics. Let me come to this message.

45:46

This message is called Preaching the Gospel, Part 1, What is the Gospel? And it's John Mark Comer teaching from Mark 1, verses 14 and 15, where it says,

45:55

Now, after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God and saying,

46:00

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel.

46:06

That's important because Comer is going to come back to that. Before jumping in here, let me briefly say, because I had mentioned that Comer was hostile toward penal substitutionary atonement.

46:16

What is that? It's the understanding that Christ, when he died on the cross for our sins, actually took the penalty that we deserved upon himself, satisfying the wrath of God.

46:26

That is what is meant by propitiation. In Romans 3 .25, he is the propitiation for our sins.

46:32

By his death, he satisfied the wrath of God that was against us because of our rebellion against God.

46:39

In Isaiah 53, verses 5 and 6, we read, He was pierced for our transgressions.

46:44

He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.

46:52

All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way, and the

46:58

Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Also verse 10 from the same chapter,

47:05

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him. He has put him to grief when his soul makes an offering for guilt, not his guilt, but ours.

47:16

He shall see his offspring. He shall prolong his days. The will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

47:23

So it's really from Isaiah 53 that we get the deepest understanding of penal substitutionary atonement, although we can certainly draw it from other passages as well.

47:32

But just to provide that for you, so you know where we come from in this understanding of the atonement.

47:37

It's not that other views of the atonement are wrong. We certainly believe that Christ was a victor on the cross, the

47:44

Christus victor view. We also believe that Jesus is our example, even by his death, his sacrifice on the cross for our sins.

47:51

But it is the view of penal substitutionary atonement that supports those other views of the atonement, not dismissing them.

47:59

Those who hold the other views would outright dismiss, though, penal substitutionary atonement.

48:04

Some will hold like the Christus victor view, and they'll say that PSA is even heretical. They'll call it cosmic child abuse.

48:10

They will say that it has pagan origins, and John Mark Comer does the same. He said the same thing.

48:15

So we might get to something later on about what he thinks of penal substitutionary atonement.

48:20

I know that he talks about it a little bit in part two. But here in part one of this message, where he just very simply lays out what is the gospel.

48:28

Now, I'm going to start this message at a portion where I actually agree with him.

48:34

But then we'll get to the point where he says some things about the gospel that are very much not the gospel.

48:40

So again, great way to find out what a teacher believes and whether or not he's trustworthy is to look up if that teacher has preached about what the gospel is.

48:49

That's a good place to start. Let me begin here on this message. Again, this was preached in 2020.

48:54

It's entitled Preaching the Gospel, Part One. And he gives kind of some basics about the gospel right here.

49:01

I'll break in and make some comments. But most of what he says here in the very beginning, I agree with, with the exception of a certain word and the way that he defines it.

49:11

But let me start right here, and we'll go from here. For our generation, preaching the gospel, and it says, for our generation, preaching the gospel, unlike previous practices such as Sabbath or silence and solitude or simplicity, is an emotionally loaded idea for a lot of us.

49:31

On one hand, we came of age in a secular culture where postmodern moral relativism has penetrated deep into the nervous system of the

49:39

West. And ideas like, speak your truth, or which does not even make sense in grammar, or you do you, or who am

49:48

I to judge, have become cliche. It feels, and not at a rational level, but at an emotional level, it feels immoral to preach the gospel to a pluralistic culture where one of the highest moral values is tolerance.

50:04

Nevermind that all around us, people are preaching other gospels constantly. So he's kind of talking about there how the culture will gaslight us and make us feel guilty for preaching the gospel when they're pushing their own gospels, put that in italics, and he does.

50:21

I think he uses the term in the right way. They're preaching their own gospels, their own false message, really, forcing that upon us, even legislating it, that we have to agree with them.

50:31

They'll make us feel like it's wrong for us to preach the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, while they're forcing these other ideologies down our throat.

50:39

And Comer lays out a few of them. Like I said, it sounds like that he's politically and morally on the conservative side with some of the things that he says here.

50:47

The gospel of upward mobility, or careerism, or science, or sexual identity, or gender identity, or political identity, or postmodern gender theory, or you fill in the blank.

50:58

Not just preaching, but working hard to legislate in Salem or D .C. and shove down the throat of any who dare to disagree with a potent mix of shame, fear, and legal fiat.

51:10

On the other hand, we also came of age in a global reckoning over racial injustice.

51:16

As a church, we do not identify as evangelical. That word, in my opinion, has lost all positive meaning in our culture, and it's not a word used by Jesus or the writers of the

51:26

New Testament, or really anywhere in church history until very recently. Now, he does this, and this is gonna happen again, where he will try to say that this word is not used in the

51:36

Bible, it's not used by Jesus or anywhere else, and that's really not true. I mean, there's some truth to that, but not really, because the word evangelical comes from the

51:49

Greek word evangelion, and Comer's even gonna get to this a little bit later on. He's gonna mention that word and have everybody repeat it.

51:56

So this is where the word evangelical comes from. It means gospel. It means good news. And so evangelical comes from that word.

52:04

So while it's true that in English, you're not gonna find the word evangelical in your Bible, you will find gospel, which is translated from the same word that we get evangelical from.

52:14

Now, I have encountered this quite a bit among certain teachers trying to distance themselves from whatever evangelical is.

52:21

We don't identify as an evangelical church. Sure, my church doesn't either. I don't know that I've ever presented

52:28

Providence Reformed Baptist Church in Casa Grande, Arizona, or even any of the other churches that I pastored.

52:34

I've never presented them as, we are an evangelical church. What we believe is right there on our sign.

52:41

We're Reformed Baptist. So we'll present ourselves as Reformed Baptist in our conviction, in our statement of faith, and not present ourselves as evangelical.

52:50

That word evangelical is largely used in our culture for a constituency. You understand what

52:57

I mean by that? So a constituency is a voting block. Whenever you hear the word evangelical, it's usually in that context, isn't it?

53:06

Evangelicals voted this way in the last election, or in a poll of evangelicals, most of them believe like this.

53:12

Because it's that label, you really can't avoid it. As much as John Mark Comer wants to say, we don't identify as evangelical, doesn't really matter.

53:22

The culture is going to label you as evangelical. There's nothing that you're going to be able to do to shake the label. As much as you want to say of yourself, well,

53:28

I'm not really evangelical, you know, the Roman Catholics, they're still going to call you evangelical. Or any of the secularists, even on their news programs that are promoting secular humanism, they're still going to refer to a voting block that is called evangelical.

53:42

I remember Thabiti Anywabwili, who was much more hostile to the term than Comer is being here, but I remember him making an announcement that we as a church have decided that we're not going to identify ourselves as evangelical anymore.

53:55

Okay, not really up to you, frankly. So, sorry. When the polls want to include your numbers into their polls as the voting block of evangelicals, you're kind of stuck with that and there's nothing that you can do about it.

54:08

I agree with Comer that the word is, it's so loaded.

54:13

It's loaded whenever you use the term evangelical. He calls it empty. I don't think it's empty. It definitely has meaning to it, but it's a loaded term.

54:21

And so for that reason, I don't apply it. I don't self -apply it, but you can't really decide we're not going to identify as evangelical.

54:30

The culture is going to put you in that box anyway, whether you like it or not. But this, if anything, was to respond to his claim that this is not a word that's been used by Jesus or the

54:41

Bible anywhere. And I don't think that's entirely honest because it is used with regards to the gospel.

54:48

And if we love the gospel, this is the way that I would hope the word evangelical would be used.

54:53

If we love the gospel and we want others to hear it and we want them to come to faith, believing in Jesus Christ, we want to convert our culture if we could.

55:01

That makes us evangelical. That should be the mark of an evangelical. All right, going on with John Mark Comer, preaching from Mark.

55:10

And our loyalty isn't to a word that's not even in the Bible. It's to Jesus as Lord. And okay, stopping there for a moment again.

55:18

Yeah, this kind of has that air of anti -confessionalism. Like we're above all of this.

55:24

So we're not going to identify with things that are not really in the Bible. We just identify with Jesus as Lord.

55:31

Agreed? So do we. Even though on our church sign, Providence Reformed Baptist Church.

55:37

Yet, we want to be known by the Savior, the God that we worship. That's what we want to be known by.

55:44

But we're still a confessional church and here is our confession. And you want to know what we believe? Here's our confession of faith right here.

55:50

Historically tied to those who have come before us and have thought through these doctrines and have laid them all out in this easy to read and understand summary of the truth that we believe and teach.

56:01

But this kind of has that air of like, we're really above all of that. So we're not going to be associated with that.

56:07

And his church does kind of come from that kind of tradition. So going on. But we come out of the evangelical tradition as a church.

56:16

I grew up in that. And most church historians argue that evangelicalism's great contribution to church history is its emphasis on evangelism, hence the name, and the great missionary movement of the 18th and 19th centuries.

56:31

But that move of God, and it was a move of God, was so tarnished by its connections with colonialism that it's become almost a pariah for our generation.

56:43

Connections to colonialism. So he wants to distance himself from the term evangelical because the culture has connected that with colonialism.

56:58

And frankly, I don't really care. I don't really care what the culture associates that with. I mean, are you going to stop calling yourself a

57:05

Christian because the culture associates Christian with, oh, you guys hate gays or something like that?

57:12

So if the culture labels us that way, and we want to have this, we want to have the reputation of loving those who are in sin so that they would turn from their sin to Jesus Christ and not perish and go to hell.

57:25

That's what I want you to think. So don't associate me with Christian. I'm a Christ follower, but I'm not a

57:31

Christian. You see, we can play this label game until we're blue in the face. Doesn't really change anything.

57:36

They'll just take the new label that you have attributed and they'll gaslight you because of that label.

57:42

So we can't play these word games constantly back and forth. I really don't care if the culture labels me a certain way.

57:49

You know, they're going to associate colonialism with evangelicalism. Frankly, I think most

57:55

Christians give more thought to that than the average person in the culture. Maybe that's an academic somewhere, like university professors who were thinking, oh, evangelicalism, colonialism.

58:07

But the average Joe is not thinking about these words in such ways. Then you have the post -World

58:13

War II kind of distortion of the gospel as a kind of ticket to heaven, what

58:18

Bonhoeffer called cheap grace, is what I grew up in, the kind of knock, knock, knock. Hi, if you were to die tonight, which is maybe not the best lead -in to like a neighbor relationship.

58:28

Let's start with apple pie or something, not hell, you know? Now that was the, that was the, oh, it was

58:36

D. James Kennedy's book. Oh, it escapes me all of a sudden. The Evangelism Explosion, that's what it was.

58:42

Yeah, I still have that book. It's in one of my boxes somewhere, but I know I have that book. But my parents did that.

58:48

So when they were in college, D. James Kennedy's Evangelism Explosion was one of the books they had to read through.

58:54

And their college class would like drop them at the mall and tell them, okay, go evangelize to people, go share the gospel with them.

59:02

Like when you're out doing evangelism, it's a perfectly fine way to kind of break the ice with a stranger and say, hey, if you were to die tonight, where would you go?

59:09

Heaven or hell? I've had that question asked of me before. And I appreciated somebody asking me that question.

59:15

I've asked that question either to a complete stranger or to a group of friends when we were sitting around and having a conversation.

59:22

It's a good icebreaker to start talking about eternal things. Nothing wrong with that, even though he dogs on it here.

59:31

Add to that the resulting, or I will never forget when I was a kid, walking along the sidewalk and there was a $100 bill that somebody left and I was so excited and I picked it up and it was fake.

59:41

It was actually a track with the four spiritual laws inside. Now, I agree with him on that one, and I don't use those bill tracks, especially not to put them on a table.

59:51

When you have gone out to eat at a restaurant and you leave them on the table and it like teases a waiter or waitress, that's just mean.

01:00:00

Although I will say this, there's those tracks from, oh, who is it? It's Ray Comfort's ministry,

01:00:06

Living Waters. And it's like a, I don't know what it is, a billion dollar bill. It just has a crazy huge number on it.

01:00:13

And it's not the size of an actual bill. So that one's okay, because you can look at that one and know that it's fake.

01:00:19

And it's got a good track on the other side and will probably get your attention. But yeah, those tracks that are like a folded up 20, and then when you open it, it's not even the full size of money, but it has a track on the inside, that's a little mean.

01:00:31

Let's not do those. That is just so not, well he wasn't into money, so maybe that is Jesus -y, I don't know.

01:00:38

Add to that the resulting rise of the megachurch movement and the proliferation of a kind of self -help -y, for the most part, shallow

01:00:45

Christian spirituality. And for a lot of us, the idea of preaching the gospel, or God forbid we call it evangelism, is in West Coast language, a trigger.

01:00:56

A lot of us are just emotionally, ah, I don't know. Last year, I was having trouble breathing, and I found out to the doctor, and I'm like, is this a panic attack?

01:01:06

What is going on with me? I can't breathe. I got really scared. And I found out that I'm allergic to cedar and alder trees, meaning

01:01:14

I'm allergic to organ. Not helpful. And I thought, this is so messed up, how can

01:01:23

I be allergic to something so good and beautiful? But a lot of us are emotionally allergic to the gospel of Jesus, or to the idea of preaching the gospel of Jesus.

01:01:36

And I really think that that's the mark of a soft culture, if I must say.

01:01:43

Because it's really silly to say that whenever we start preaching about the gospel, we get apprehensive.

01:01:49

Maybe you get a little nervous about it because, yeah, it can be a scary thing just walking up to strangers and talking to them about something that Jesus tells us in the

01:01:57

Bible people are going to hate us for. It's assured that people will hate you for preaching the gospel.

01:02:05

Our Savior said so. So, yeah, I get that there can be a little bit of nervousness about it. I was listening to a conversation just recently between Kosti Hinn and Jeff Durbin, who are both pastors in the

01:02:18

Phoenix area. And Jeff was talking about the ministry that Apologia does around abortion clinics and stuff like that in Phoenix.

01:02:26

And there are days that it just feels awful being out there. No babies get saved. No people get saved.

01:02:32

People just hate you and curse at you and throw things at you and will pull a gun on you and threaten your life.

01:02:38

And it can be a pretty scary thing sometimes. And that's when we have to run back to Scripture and continue to be assured by the words of Christ.

01:02:48

When people hate you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account, rejoice and be glad.

01:02:54

For great is your reward in heaven. For so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

01:02:59

We read that in Matthew chapter 5. So we have assurances from our Lord, even when we suffer in this way.

01:03:06

But that's not really what John Mark Comer offers here. But all that to say, our timidness about the gospel, and it doesn't come from the hate that I just outlined there, like what

01:03:18

Jeff Durbin experiences, but just a triggering feeling sensation kind of reflective of how soft we become, especially as evangelicals in America.

01:03:27

So going on. We prefer to just kind of put our head down and follow Jesus in private, not in public, or maybe post something on Instagram but not say something in person at all to our coworkers, or just mow the neighbor's lawn and hopefully figure out that Jesus is

01:03:40

Lord of the universe. Edge really good on the side, you know. Let me fast forward a little bit.

01:03:47

So let's get to the actual part here where Comer gets to his definitions of the gospel and things like that.

01:03:53

So this is about 16 minutes into this sermon. He really is very wordy. And I know

01:04:00

I get the sense that he's doing that because he's trying to relate to his audience, but for me, when

01:04:05

I want you to get to the point, I struggle. I struggle listening to this, which is why, as I was saying before about his preaching workshop,

01:04:14

I don't think that anybody's going to glean anything truly helpful about preaching from John Mark Comer.

01:04:20

But anyway, skipping ahead to this point, and we'll go from here. Anyone who has good news about anything, a new

01:04:26

TV show or film series, Ted Lasso season 2, coming out in just a few weeks. Don't watch that.

01:04:33

Anyway. Doesn't matter what it is. If we have good news, what do we naturally do? We share it. Hey, do you know what's coming out?

01:04:39

Did you see season 1? Did you hear the vaccines? Did you hear we just reached? We can't help. There's something deep in the human personhood when we come across good news.

01:04:48

We can't help but share it. Same is true of the gospel. Jesus was that way about the kingdom.

01:04:56

In Luke 4, he said, I must preach the gospel of the kingdom of God. Was he saying that in a duty kind of,

01:05:02

I must preach it? Or was he saying, I must. I can't help but tell people about the kingdom of God.

01:05:09

As disciples of Jesus, we must do the same. As the Bolivian scholar

01:05:14

Mortimer Arias put it, every generation has to be evangelized. That is, confronted with the good news of the kingdom in Jesus Christ.

01:05:23

And every generation of Christians has the unique and non -transferable responsibility of sharing the good news with its own generation.

01:05:34

The church is never more than one generation from extinction. Not true. I hear that all the time.

01:05:42

My whole life, I've heard certain preachers that will say something like that. And it's not true.

01:05:47

It's never, ever going to happen. The church will never be extinct. God is not going to allow it to happen.

01:05:54

In fact, it is built into what Jesus said about his church in Matthew chapter 16. I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

01:06:04

The church is never that close to extinction. Ever. Even when the Protestant Reformation happened in the 16th century, it was not close to extinction.

01:06:14

Now, your own particular church, like your church body, your congregation, it might just be a few years away.

01:06:21

Just a few bad doctrines away from becoming apostate and no longer walking in the truth.

01:06:28

That may be the case with an individual congregation. But it's not true of the church that the church is just, you know, a few years away from extinction.

01:06:38

So anyway, going on. You and I have the unique and non -transferable responsibility of sharing the good news with our own generation, with our family, with our friends, with our co -workers, with our neighbors.

01:06:52

Otherwise, all we will do is have a really great 50 years together and then die. Now, I appreciate the urgency that he puts behind that.

01:07:00

We do have a responsibility to share the gospel. We have a really short window, all things considered, to share the gospel, especially with our friends and our loved ones.

01:07:10

Even when you're thinking not so much about your own lifespan or their lifespan, but even the small window of time that you have together in this life.

01:07:18

And then a day will come when you live over here and they live over there, or you've become so ideologically different that you're not spending time together anymore.

01:07:25

You really have just a short window to share the gospel with those whom you love when you think about it.

01:07:31

So I appreciate him saying that, but I think this concept of his that the church is just a generation away from being extinct,

01:07:40

I really think that his open theism plays into that. So once again, this idea that God really doesn't know the future.

01:07:47

He's deliberately decided that he doesn't know the future so not to interfere with human free will.

01:07:53

And that's Comer's position on God's view of the future, being an open theist in that sense.

01:07:59

That may be the reason why he has this belief about the church being so near extinction.

01:08:05

The Global Missions Movement defines an unreached people group as less than 2 % Christian. Gerald said something about that last week.

01:08:12

By that definition, Portlanders are theoretically an unreached people group.

01:08:18

Just a minor piece of pushback here, but I would call that apostate and not an unreached people group.

01:08:25

Portland has definitely had the gospel. And there have certainly been many great churches up in the

01:08:31

Pacific Northwest, but they've gone further and further away from God. And those churches either being abandoned, having lost the gospel, or there being fewer and fewer churches than there used to be before.

01:08:42

There are still some good teachers up there. I know some teachers in Portland and around Oregon. But that's a definition that would be closer to being an apostate area rather than an unreached people group.

01:08:55

Now there's differences there, but you do the math. And there is an opening right now for the gospel in our city.

01:09:01

As the myriad of secular gospels are fractured and failing, as the bankruptcy of secularism is being exposed, that it turns out money, pleasure, it's just not enough to live a meaningful life.

01:09:16

Human beings need much more than that. It simply does not have the moral and spiritual and communal resources that we need to draw on in times of hardship like the last year.

01:09:28

Not all, but some of our secular neighbors are open right now to another gospel than one of the myriad of secular gospels that right now are letting all sorts of people down.

01:09:40

Open to another narrative about what life is actually about. I mean, that's a valid point to consider that if we're not sharing the gospel with people, then what are they listening to?

01:09:51

And they're going to be searching for something, and they're going to end up grasping for something out there that's deadly, that will send a person to hell.

01:10:02

I don't really think, though, that John Mark Comer believes in hell, but that's a conversation for another time.

01:10:08

So today, we kick off an eight -week summer practice of preaching the gospel.

01:10:14

Not a year late, but just the right time. Come on, you know it.

01:10:19

I'm not a Calvinist, but maybe I am right now. I don't know. Now, to start with the rest of our time this morning.

01:10:25

Not only is he not a Calvinist, I don't even think he really understands what the

01:10:31

Reformed tradition believes and teaches, which that might come out for you in a little bit here when he starts offering some definitions.

01:10:38

We need to ask a very simple question for the next, kind of, just to open this teaching series.

01:10:44

And that is, what is the gospel? Now, that may sound like a stupid question to you. You may be thinking, don't waste my time on that.

01:10:51

I know what the gospel is. But if I were to go around the room with a mic and have 10 different people here stand up and say, hey, articulate the gospel to me in 30 seconds, which by the way is not a good idea.

01:11:03

But, you know, articulate to me, like, summarize it for me. I would likely get 10 different summaries.

01:11:10

Not wildly different, but kind of, sort of, different. I don't know why he said it's not a good idea to do that.

01:11:20

That's kind of what I want to hear from him. Like, if we were doing an interview, I would just straight up ask him, tell me what the gospel is.

01:11:27

What is your definition of the gospel? I've asked that question of every single member that I've interviewed.

01:11:34

Like, a potential member for our church, I've asked that question, what is the gospel? Been doing that for years.

01:11:41

So, it's fine to ask somebody to give you a 30 second definition of the gospel. Kind of strange that he said it's not a good idea to do that.

01:11:47

Is the gospel that Jesus died on the cross for my sins, so that I can go to heaven when I die? Is it the gospel that Jesus can do it, but you can't, and so put your faith in him?

01:11:57

Is it Jesus come to dismantle the hierarchy of oppression? Is it Jesus came to make you healthy, wealthy?

01:12:03

I mean, what is the gospel? Well, the best place to start with that is, what is the gospel that Jesus himself preached?

01:12:12

If we don't start with the gospel that Jesus preached, we may very well end up with the gospel that Jesus did not preach.

01:12:18

You have Mark chapter 1 open in your lab. Before we read our text, take a look at the title of the book at the top of your page.

01:12:26

Depending on your translation of the Bible, it more than likely says, the gospel of Mark.

01:12:33

Or in Greek, it's euangelion kata markos. It can be translated the gospel of Mark, or the gospel according to Mark.

01:12:42

Now, all four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all have this same formula of kata,

01:12:48

Matthew, or Mark, or Luke, the gospel according to, and then the biographer's name. New Testament scholar

01:12:54

Scott McKnight, in his excellent book, The King Jesus Gospel, makes a very simple point that blew my mind.

01:13:01

Scott McKnight, somebody else I would caution you against as well. He writes, quote, the gospels are the gospel.

01:13:09

This is what they pay me the big bucks for. This is why I went to seminary, right here.

01:13:15

Meaning, the entire story, open in your lap, from Mark chapter one, verse one, all the way to the end, the last paragraph, all of it is the gospel.

01:13:27

This is simple but revolutionary. It means the gospel is likely much bigger and deeper and longer than many of us were led to believe, and it could be even a little bit different.

01:13:38

I regularly get asked, John Mark, why don't you preach the gospel? I'm happy to admit that's a weakness in my preaching.

01:13:46

That's kind of bad. Like, you acknowledge that you don't regularly preach the gospel?

01:13:52

It's a weakness in my preaching that I don't regularly preach the gospel. I can't remember ever preaching a sermon where I didn't preach the gospel.

01:14:00

So, strange admission from this guy, but even by his own confession, he is not a gospel preacher.

01:14:08

Very bizarre. Some people, what most people mean by that is, why don't you preach a

01:14:14

Calvinistic view of the atonement? There is no Calvinistic view of the atonement. So, like I said a moment ago, you're going to hear from, when he starts defining his terms, that he really doesn't even understand what

01:14:26

Calvinism or what the Reformed tradition is. So, if he thinks that there is a Calvinistic view of the atonement, then he doesn't understand

01:14:36

Calvinism. I would even argue he doesn't understand the atonement. Now, what

01:14:41

I know he means by that, because I've listened to later sermons, when he says

01:14:47

Calvinistic view of the atonement, he's talking about penal substitutionary atonement. He hates it, doesn't like it, thinks that it's unbiblical, and that as I read from that post on Instagram a moment ago, needs to be dealt a death blow so that nobody's believing in it or preaching it in the church anymore.

01:15:05

That's John Mark Comer's view of penal substitutionary atonement. Believes that it came out of Calvinism.

01:15:11

But you know what, folks? I grew up in a very Arminian kind of background. The preachers that I listened to were very much on the free will side, whether that's

01:15:21

Charles Stanley or Chuck Swindoll or Adrian Rogers or Woodrow Kroll on Back to the

01:15:29

Bible, J. Vernon McGee, any of these guys, Chuck Colson, James Dobson, there's a lot of Chucks in there if you didn't notice.

01:15:38

Anyway, those were the teachers that I listened to growing up. They weren't Calvinists, and yet I heard from them penal substitutionary atonement.

01:15:47

So I had always heard that view of the atonement when I was growing up. It is not a Calvinist view of the atonement.

01:15:53

There is not a view of the atonement that is categorized as the Calvinist view.

01:15:59

So he's simply wrong in the way that he is therefore trying to qualify this version of the gospel that he is preaching.

01:16:06

You know, when people press me on that, why don't you preach the gospel? Typically what they want to hear is a Calvinistic view of the atonement.

01:16:13

So right here, even you're starting to hear from his response that he doesn't have an understanding of what the gospel is either.

01:16:21

Continuing on. Or, why don't you end your sermons with an appeal to put your hand up and go to heaven when you die?

01:16:26

Yeah, I don't agree with that one either. But my understanding of the gospel is anytime I preach Jesus, anytime

01:16:32

I announce anything about Jesus, His birth, His death, His incarnation, His teachings, His miracles,

01:16:38

His parables, His resurrection, His ascension to the right hand of the Father, the coming of the Holy Spirit, the great tradition of discipleship thousands of years old, in His name

01:16:47

I am preaching the gospel of Jesus. Now if he's preaching about Christ's death and resurrection, and he's talking about what that means, and he's telling people that in order to be forgiven your sins you must believe in this, then yes, absolutely he's preaching the gospel.

01:17:00

But notice there that in that whole sort of robust definition of what he believes to be preaching the gospel, he included discipleship.

01:17:10

Discipleship's not the gospel. So he's kind of taking these categories and he's flattening them out and saying, see, all of this is the gospel.

01:17:18

You don't get to discipleship until after you put your faith in the gospel.

01:17:23

After you believe in Jesus Christ through the preaching of the gospel that has been spoken to you.

01:17:29

Now you are brought into the church and you continue to grow being sanctified through discipleship, being discipled.

01:17:38

But discipleship happens after you believe the gospel. And you continue to be reminded of the gospel, certainly, but discipleship itself is not the gospel.

01:17:48

It is a fruit or a result of hearing the gospel and putting faith in Jesus. And if you search for some of the most popular summaries of the gospel in the

01:17:57

American church, such as what Dr. Gary Beshears calls the John 3 -16 gospel, which is basically you're a sinner going to hell but Jesus died on the cross for your sins so that you can go to heaven when you die.

01:18:08

If you search for that in the gospel in front of you, the gospel in front of you, you are hard -pressed to find anything remotely close to that in any of the four gospels of Jesus.

01:18:22

That is just a lie. And he contradicted himself like within two sentences.

01:18:31

Talks about the John 3 -16 gospel, gives a summary of that gospel, and then says you won't find it in your

01:18:36

Bible. You find it in John 3. Let me quote to you John 3 -16. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

01:18:50

Verses 17 and 18. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him whoever believes in him is not condemned but whoever does not believe is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only son of God.

01:19:10

What does it mean to perish? What does it mean to be condemned? It means to go to hell. Verse 36 later on there in John 3.

01:19:19

Whoever believes in the son has eternal life. Whoever does not obey the son shall not see life but the wrath of God remains on him.

01:19:27

What is the wrath of God? Hell. Who is it that preached about hell more often than anyone else in the

01:19:33

Bible? Jesus. He was a fire and brimstone preacher. We have the deepest, most thorough understanding of hell because of what

01:19:43

Jesus has taught about it than anybody else. And Jesus talked as much about hell as he did so that you would not go there.

01:19:52

So that you would put faith in Jesus Christ and be saved. But here John Mark Comer has directly said that gospel is not in the

01:20:02

Bible. He is lying. And that is a horrible thing to say leading everybody who is listening to him astray.

01:20:10

Maybe everything that I've played up to this point you might have thought of as being minor disagreements.

01:20:15

You could have even thought of me as being kind of nitpicky with some of the criticisms that I was making. Some things were just points of clarification.

01:20:22

But this statement right here really is the worst of everything that he has said. The John 3 .16

01:20:28

gospel you won't find in your Bible. You find it in John 3 .16.

01:20:34

Let's continue on here a little bit more of this. In fact, second, on the opening page

01:20:40

Mark summarizes the gospel that Jesus preached into one paragraph.

01:20:46

And it's a very different summary than what a lot of us grew up hearing. Read with me chapter 1 verse 14 through 15 one more time.

01:20:55

After John was put in prison Jesus went into Galilee it's up in the north of Israel proclaiming or that can be translated preaching the good news or the gospel of God.

01:21:07

Okay, what is it? Here we go. The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near.

01:21:16

Repent and believe the good news. No, that's not the gospel. Because if you're going to give a definition of a word you can't include the word in your definition.

01:21:26

So right there he even included the word. The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand.

01:21:32

Repent and believe in the gospel. That's not the definition of the gospel. This is what

01:21:38

Jesus is proclaiming about the gospel and then you read the rest of the gospel of Mark to come to an understanding of what the gospel is.

01:21:46

This is like a header. This is the way that Mark is beginning to talk about Jesus' earthly teaching ministry.

01:21:53

It's not Mark giving a definition of the gospel. So John Mark Comer doesn't even have a proper understanding a proper exposition of Mark 1 verses 14 and 15.

01:22:04

There it is in one line. The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. That is the gospel according to Jesus.

01:22:10

Well, it's certainly true that the time has come and the kingdom of God has come near. But what does that mean?

01:22:16

Again, this is just a header that Mark is putting or you might consider it like the lead. So you have a headline on a news article and then the lead is that first thesis opening sentence that leads you into the rest of the article.

01:22:30

A lead is not spelled the same way. Anyway, so this is like the lead to the gospel of Mark.

01:22:36

Jesus saying the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel.

01:22:42

And then you go on to find out what it means that the kingdom of God is at hand and what the gospel is.

01:22:48

That statement right there is not the gospel. Let's piece this apart word by word.

01:22:54

First the phrase good news is one word in Greek. It's euangelion. Can you say that?

01:23:01

It's a nice Greek word. It's where we get the English word evangelism or evangelical. Contrary to what you might think euangelion wasn't a religious word in the first century.

01:23:11

It was a, for the most part, political word. To evangelize or to preach the euangelion was to bring good news to the

01:23:20

Roman Empire about a great event such as the enthronement of a new emperor or his victory in war or a new era of peace.

01:23:29

Okay, so going on from here this really doesn't open it up for us anymore. He's going to get really historical and like providing historical context.

01:23:37

And a lot of this I don't disagree with. But we have a definition of the gospel here that he has given that is not the gospel.

01:23:44

First of all he's dismissed what the actual gospel says and then he says Mark 1, 14 and 15 is the gospel but it's not.

01:23:52

And then doesn't really define it even though he says so let's pick apart these terms and understand what it means.

01:23:57

Yes gospel means good news but as he's going into this historical context he really doesn't provide a definition that Mark gives.

01:24:05

So the historical context but not the biblical context of what the gospel truly is.

01:24:11

Now I'm going to come back to some stuff that he teaches a little bit later. Maybe we'll do a part two of this.

01:24:17

We'll go to his preaching the gospel part two because there he starts to confront some of these what

01:24:24

I mean essentially he will say are false gospels and he'll try to kind of qualify that very charitably and say that's not necessarily wrong but when it comes down to it what he's presenting to you as the true gospel he's calling a false gospel.

01:24:39

And so again this is the big reason why John Mark Comer is dangerous can't even get the gospel right doesn't even understand what proper exposition is, doesn't represent other views properly.

01:24:53

So these are reasons why I say chuck the whole teaching. Don't have anything to do with John Mark Comer.

01:24:59

If you need more convincing though or you just want to hear more so that you're equipped with good arguments in case you need to respond to somebody else hang tight

01:25:06

I may come to part two in another week. Alright thank you guys so much for listening and once again if you want to submit a question to the program you can send it via email whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com

01:25:18

or go to www .utt .com and send us a voicemail. My appreciation again to John up in New York sending us a voicemail this week and this email that I responded to from Austin Austin in Illinois.

01:25:34

Presently in Atlanta Georgia right now hoping to be back in Arizona by Monday God willing and we'll continue our study in the gospel of Luke.