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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said,.
�But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you. In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you.
By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King. Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.
Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. Steve, it�s been a week since we have been in the studio together, allegedly. It seems like it was two seconds ago.
Well, you know, I mean, time is all relative. You know, a day is as 1 ,000 years, and 1 ,000 years is a day. Uh-huh. Sure. That�s right. And two seconds is as of a week, or whatever.
I�m coming up to that passage in 2 Peter chapter 3 about 1 ,000 years and a day and a day and 1 ,000 years and all that. I�m going to call it the theological wormhole. Hmm. Who invented the wormholes, by the way?
I think it was William Shatner. I think maybe. Uh-huh. Did you ever see Shatner in person? No. Okay. I went to a play once that he did, and he wasn�t Kirk, but he, in my mind, was Kirk.
Did he do his whole dramatic pause? Oh, totally. Yeah. You know, overdramatic.
And then I saw, I think you know the story. I saw Leonard Nimoy in a cafe in downtown LA, Gorky�s is what it was called, this Russian avant-garde cafe.
Have you ever told the story where he did the Vulcan nerve pinch right here?
The true story was we�re in this little line, and you have like a tray, and you get your food and then slide down on those metal bars over to the cashier, and then there would be certain things that you could get as you were sliding down to the cafe, to the cashier waiting to pay.
And so he was to my left, and I didn�t know that, and I was working on coffee and creamers and all that stuff, and he said, �Could you pass the creamer I didn�t know who it was. �Could you please pass the creamer
But I knew the voice. And there it was Leonard Nimoy right next to me. And so then I handed him the creamer, and then that�s when he did the mind meld.
Special moments with no co-writer.
Well, you know, there was a time we would say, �Well, when we talked to Sinclair Ferguson or �When we said this to Eric Alexander you know, and then now it�s back to Star Trek stuff. Name droppers.
Are you a Trekker or a Trekkie? I guess Trekker. I kind of got, you know, I stopped following the whole thing when Deep Space Nine came up.
That�s kind of when it lost me. Like I started watching that show, and I�m like, I don�t even get it. It feels like a soap opera in space, so I was done with that. But I did like Star Trek Voyager, and then Star Trek, what was it, Enterprise, or whatever it was, the last one, with Scott Bakula.
Well, the last season is well worth watching, because they wind up in a nebula kind of thing, and it�s pretty cool. And that�s what wound up getting it canceled.
But it was too good. So one of the folks that we appreciate in church history that the Lord has used is a man named J. Gresham Machen. And there are many things that you can read by him that are encouraging.
And so they�ve taken some of his old radio addresses, and some of his old, I think it was published by maybe PNR, and who�s the one that published it? Who�s got his name on there? Probably Daryl Hart, right?
And so this has got some of that stuff with extra stuff. And you�ve got a class with men. You�re on hiatus now, right? Yeah, that�s it. That was the word. That was the word we were both looking for. And so you�ve got, what, 15, 20 guys, and you read Machen, and then what do you do?
And then we talk about it, and, you know, I mean, the discussions sometimes go fairly far afield. I mean, as long as we stay in theology and we don�t start talking baseball or Star Trek, oh! Because in my class, we don�t do no compromise radio.
I think some of our people like our little diversions. Yes, I�m sure they do. And, you know, this is a free show, so they don�t have to charge per download. Well, worth it.
Which you pay for. Yeah. But, you know, we wound up talking last Saturday about things like, you know, the Old Testament�s work in the Holy Spirit�s work in the Old Testament. I don�t even know how we got there.
Maybe I�ll figure it out as we go through this this morning. But it�s just kind of interesting, and I allow a certain amount of rabbit trail, you know, as long as we don�t have some wacky dude come in off the streets like we had one week.
Well, that was not a rabbit trail when he came in. It was a rabbit dropping. Oh, that was terrible. I thought when I filled in after you, if he came, I thought, you know what, I�m going to have to shut this whole thing down.
Not the whole thing, but just that guy.
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. He has to come back. Yeah, that would have been the right thing to do, because he was. Yeah, I don�t expect him to come back. Praise the Lord for that.
Now is that kind of like a driscoll, throwing people under the bus? If you�re not on the bus, we�re going to throw you.
No, I just think, you know, some people� I mean, this guy definitely� I mean, I think this happens to a lot of people when they first get saved. He thought he knew more than he knew, you know, so he wanted to be the teacher.
And you ask him about eternal aspiration, and if he could describe what it is, then you would let him teach. Give me this. What are you talking about, Luke? Okay, so you do a quiz, and you�re in chapter 17, 18, 19, Paul�s view of Christ, chapter 17.
I think we�re still on that. I think last show, I got three out of four correct. Yes. Okay, so I was thankful for that. I was bummed. Well, you know, you have been my student for many years, but on some things, I am your student.
Yeah, it was like, you know, I need to now revise my quiz and make it more difficult. Oh, you were bummed that I got such a high score. I think you were bummed that I didn�t ace it. No, no. I mean, you know, in truth, when I write the quiz, I don�t think, oh, I want to trick everybody up.
I just kind of, I want to make them think a little bit sometimes, which is why I throw the occasional why question in there. Well, you know what I like to do, Steve?
True and false questions. I do, like, nine in a row, they�re all false, and then the tenth one, they�re going to think it�s false. They think every one of these is false. The whammy.
So, what we got? Number five. Number five. True or false. It is possible to deny the truthfulness of the Gospels and still explain the origin of Christianity.
Well, unless that�s a little trick-a-roo, trick-a-rammy. It is possible to deny the truthfulness of the Gospels and still explain the origin of Christianity. I don�t know how you can falsify one in light of the historical evidence of the other.
So, I�m going to say that it is impossible to deny the truthfulness of the Gospels and still explain. So, I guess that�s a false. It is a false. Okay. And how do you say false in German? Falsch. So, the tie-in that Machen is trying to have us make is that the truthfulness of the Gospels, how can we.
Well, here�s what he�s. Oh, here�s the quote. Let�s do that. �Deny the truthfulness of the Gospel picture of Jesus, and you can never explain the origin of the religion of Paul. People want to say that Paul made it up, right?
Paul invented Christianity. I�ve heard that even from relatives of mine. But you can�t say that unless you deny the truthfulness, because there�s no conflict between Paul and the Gospel portraits of Christ.
Why do you think these days, Steve, you�ve got people that want to pit Jesus against Paul? And I�ll give you a little hint, since now this is my quiz. It�s in the realm of Jesus allegedly didn�t condemn certain sins that Paul did.
Right.
I mean, it�s about homosexuality. What they want to do is, you know, �Well, I�m a red-letter Christian. You know, I love what Jesus said, and, you know, I�m not so keen on what Paul wrote. Because Paul was kind of mean and nasty.
I mean, it�s like the same kind of dichotomy they try to do with the Old Testament and New Testament, right? I mean, Jesus is always nice. He�s always the which is true, right? But I mean, essentially, I mean, you love him or you don�t.
But Jesus is nice. Paul was the mean guy, the guy who wrote all the rules, the great rule I mean, forget about Galatians, right?
Well, I just think about an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ. And therefore, if an apostle is a sent one, which they are, and Jesus sent this apostle to say these things, not based on his own, you know, mind, but by the will of God, right?
Then this is what�s the difference between a red-letter Bible and, you know, the. I guess if you want to have all red letters, that�d be fine.
I mean, it might get a little annoying, you know, after a while, just like, �Can I please have some black letters or something, or some blue letters or whatever But this whole idea that even when you were talking about 2 Peter chapter 3 and the idea that, you know, Paul wrote some things that are hard to understand and everything, but Peter never said anything like and none of the other apostles did either.
Well, you know, Paul just got some things wrong. He was wrong.
Petey And it�s the false teachers that were distorting those other scriptures that Peter called Paul�s writings �other scriptures. Can you imagine the background of the Old Testament and how important it was and the transmission of the letters and the scribes to copy, and all of a sudden now what Paul says is scripture?
Pete Yeah. Pete Not everything that Paul said, but when Paul was sitting down to write Romans, this is scripture.
Pete At the same level, you know, as the Old Testament, so yeah. Pete Amen. Pete Okay.
Ready for another one? Pete Yeah. Oh, one last comment. Pete Sure. Pete What do we do, Steve, when people say Jesus never condemned homosexuality? Do you think he condemned homosexuality?
Steve. Yes, he did, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Pete Yeah, and even with the word for sexual sin with porneia, right? It includes all kinds of sexual sin from homosexuality to bestiality, to incest, to fornication, to adultery, et cetera.
Steve I mean, just think about it. If Jesus said, if you look at a woman with lust in your heart, you've already committed adultery. But if you look at a guy with lust in your heart, that's just fine.
Or if you're looking at, you know, I mean, come on.
Pete Well, that's kind of what's happening, though, with revoice and the whole issue with in the PCA and what's happening there in St. Louis, where if somebody said, and you know, this is kind of what they're saying with the revoice, quote, you know, air quote, theology.
If you are a homosexual man, and you're a Christian, and you say, I'm just not going to act on those things. And if you look at a guy riding his bicycle with his shirt off, and you have some kind of thoughts about him, it's not wrong.
But try telling that to your wife. When you see a girl at the beach in a bikini, and she's just an image bearer, and you're just kind of checking her out and kind of admiring her. Would that work with Janet?
Steve Probably not. Pete. Probably not.
I'd probably have a couple of sore arms and maybe a black eye or something.
Steve. I don't think you can get a COVID vax for that. Pete. No, you can't. Steve. Okay. Well, somebody's here delivering something for the workplace, but it's just going to have to wait. Okay, next.
What do we have? Pete. Number six, the personal distinctiveness of the Holy Spirit is very plain in the Old Testament. True or false?
Steve My quiz says the unique nature. Pete Yes. Steve Okay, the unique nature of the Holy Spirit is very plain in the Old Testament. Well, I've been taught by the Old Testament Proverbs not to immediately engage your mouth to talk, but that's, you know, silence on the radio is bad.
Pete Did they? Steve I do believe in progressive revelation. I will say that. So I think we know more about the personal nature of the Holy Spirit in John 14, 15, 16 than we would probably any place else.
And therefore, the unique nature of the Holy Spirit, I don't think is the Holy Spirit plain in the Old Testament, but very plain. I'm going to say no. Pete Okay.
The answer is no. He says, but it must be admitted that in the Old Testament, we have no clear presentation of the personal distinctness of the Spirit of God. We may have intimations of it, as we have intimations of the doctrine of the Trinity, but for clear teaching regarding it, we must turn to the New Testament books.
Steve. Okay. So he's not saying that now looking back, we can't see certain things in the Old Testament that would go, oh, Isaiah 48, 16, or something like that. I'm thinking about Isaiah 42, as you're just, if you talk a little bit, and I'll just try to find it.
But what he is saying is that we wouldn't learn much about the personality, let's say, of the Holy Spirit or his unique function, you know, I mean, other than the way he would rush upon, say, Samson or somebody else, or the way he left Saul, you know, those kind of things.
We wouldn't see much about the unique nature of the Holy Spirit in terms of what he does. Pete. Okay.
I agree with you. I just went to Isaiah 42, behold, my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, and whom my soul delights, I have put my Spirit, capital S, upon him, he will bring forth justice to the nations, he will not cry aloud or lift up his voice or make it heard in the street.
What do you think of this, Steve? Do you, in light of modern controversies, maybe, would it be fair to say that in the Old Testament, we might know something about the eminent nature of the Holy Spirit, that he's God, but that we don't know a lot about his economic functions Trinitarianly, right?
How do we see him working apart from this? I'm just trying, I'm stuttering because I don't want to make a Trinitarian mistake.
Steve. No, I think that would be right. And I think that would be right in the same way that it's hard to, it's really hard to ferret out the exact nature of the second person of the Trinity, right? We see shadows of Christ in the Old Testament, but we wouldn't really, I mean, I don't think the Old Testament saints perfectly understood who Jesus was.
So you know, it takes the revelation, you know, the progressive revelation, the revealing, as it were, to where we can go, okay, I have a much better picture of who the Spirit is and who the Son is in the New Testament than I do just by reading the Old Testament.
And it's interesting to me, Steve, when they probably were living within the Old Testament times as this was all happening, who knows what kind of teaching they had or how they looked at the scriptures.
But for us, I do know that when I read Luke 24 or John 5, I look at the Old Testament and think, you know what, it's a sin to read him out of the Old Testament, right, to the Lord Jesus. I'm supposed to read, I'm supposed to read him in the Old Testament.
I don't know if I want to read him into every verse, but he's certainly there, you know, because he's always been there. It's almost like with Orfield and the Trinity comment that he had, you know, you walk into a dark room and there's all kinds of furniture there, and then you turn on the lights and the furniture's always been there, but you can just see it much more clearly, and the New Testament has given us a clearer, a more filled-out revelation of the triune nature of God.
Agreed. Okay, good.
What have we got next? Number seven, which is just kind of almost a repetition, but I'll read it anyway, true or false, it may seem strange to think of the Holy Spirit as being a unique person in the Godhead.
I don't even know why I wrote that, mostly because I found the content in these chapters a little bit light, so I was like straining, I was like straining for questions.
Well, it's almost similar to the last one, right? The Holy Spirit, he is a unique person. Lots of people want to say things like a force or they call him an it. I really try to make sure I'm careful to call the Holy Spirit he, right?
And I think if our readers want to read the Athanasius Creed, Athanasian Creed, yeah, he didn't really write it, but we call it that. I think that would help them, right? The Holy Spirit. So I just finished the Trinity book by Scott Swain as well, and I thought that was good, and I'd probably encourage people to try to read a book on the Trinity sometime soon.
Okay. Okay.
Okay. And I'll just read this one section from Machen, it's short. For one thing, the great Trinitarian passages in the Bible really imply the personality of the Spirit, in other words. So just kind of backing him up as being a Machen in that question.
Anyway, number eight, true or false, the work of each member of the Trinity is unique unto himself.
Well, my initial take on that is going to be, and I guess we have three gods all uniquely to themselves doing things, but I don't know if he's talking eminent, economic, ad extra, ad intra. What's he doing?
He's not doing any of that. I mean, keep in mind, this is just a talk to you over the radio to a bunch of, I don't think he was like mining that.
Well, I'm going to say, at the risk of being corrected, I'm going to say, while you could find certain things that the Father tends to do, and it's elaborated upon more than other members of the Trinity, there's one God, one essence, one will, and therefore, I don't think the unique part's going to be right.
My guess is Machen might have said unique, but I'm going to say no.
And you are correct. He says, human analogies break down in the presence of the mystery of the Trinity. One cannot separate what the Son does and what the Father does from what the Spirit does, as would be the case with three finite persons.
Hey, there we go. Nice. So. Okay, excellent.
Well, Machen's right and I'm right. I'm thankful for that. And I really think, Steve, that our default probably, because this is such a lofty, infinite idea that we don't really know anything about, except from what's given to us via revelation, that most of the time, I think Christians default into tritheism if they're not thinking rightly.
Or worse, right? I mean, and we'll get into the worse in just a minute. Let me read number nine and we'll just blow by this and go to number 10, but true or false, it is heresy to teach the Holy Spirit as a force.
You already said that, right? And it clearly is a heresy. So, and that's what I meant by worse, right? I mean, how do you get worse than three separate gods? Well, how about two gods and a force?
Well, would it be okay to say it's the Holy Spirit is a wind? Well. How about if he said he's like a wind? I would go for that. Yeah. Because spirit, pneuma, wind, Jesus essentially says in John 3, 8, right?
That you don't know where the wind goes and he's kind of a play on words and you don't know what the Holy Spirit does until you see the effects of it. I see the effects of wind. I see the effects of the Holy Spirit, but I don't, he's sovereign.
He's a sovereign spirit and he does whatever he wants. Bingo.
So, if I said like, I'm covered. I really want to get to number 10 though, because I think number 10 is cool. All right. You're going to trick me, I'm sure. No, I don't think so. But, but it's a cool question.
True or false? New Testament writers spare no effort to establish that there is no contradiction between the teaching of the Trinity and monotheism.
The New Testament writers spare no effort to establish. That means they have a lot of effort to establish there's no contradiction. Well, my first take on that, knowing we only have four minutes to go, is when I read the New Testament writers, Steve, I think, and I'm fallible, but I think they assume it.
I don't think they're trying to break it down. I don't think they're trying to have all kinds of effort to establish that there's a triune nature of God. But the question is, there's no contradiction between the teaching of the Trinity and monotheism.
I think they assume the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God, and there's only one God. And you're right.
But here's why I find that so cool. Because if you think about it, mostly Jewish writers, or in the case of Luke, and I'm trying to think of another, you know, Gentile writers with a definite Jewish influence, right?
For primarily a Jewish audience in most situations. So you would think that if they're speaking to Jews who, you know, the Shema, Hero Israel, Oh, I see where you're going now. So you would think they would have to like really expand on this to sell this new and novel idea, but they don't.
So why is that?
It's interesting. I was listening to Reform Forum or White Horse Inn or some show like that the other day, and they were talking about some of the Jewish writers around the first century, either before, you know, BC or AD, a lot of stuff about the Son and the Son having, you know, the divine essence of the Son, and, you know, all this, I'm thinking, yeah, I think they're looking for the Son.
I mean, you read Daniel chapter seven, and you go, oh, duh, Son of Man.
So I just think that's cool. Because when new religions show up, you know, like if it's Islam or Mormonism or whatever, they have to declare that what went before them was wrong. And here's why it's wrong, and here's what the truth is.
But the New Testament writers don't do that. Why? Because they understood that this is a continuation. It's just a further revelation of the truth that was always there.
That's so good. And what happened was, in the hands of legalistic false teacher Pharisees, scribes, hypocrites, Herodians, and Sadducees. That's a good list. They torqued it all, and the New Testament writers didn't say, oh, there's something brand new, but we're going to recover the true meaning of this, even like the Lord Jesus on earth.
You know, you guys do all these things, but this is the right way to read the Old Testament.
I love,. Machen says, the New Testament writers never seemed to be conscious that one of these two great truths could by any chance be regarded as in contradiction with the other. No contradiction whatsoever.
That'd be a good show, a radio show called No Contradiction Radio.
Well, that's, you know, that's my spinoff.
I think No Compost Radio has already been taken.
I don't want to subscribe to that podcast.
Yeah, but everybody could use some fertilizer, right? Oh, man. Uh-huh. And then, of course, as my friend Troy Johnson says, no content radio on occasion. So we have one minute left, Steve. Would you encourage people to read a biography of Machen?
Absolutely. I mean, you know, his story to me, you know, much like great figures in church history, whether it's Athanasius or whomever, you know, they stand up for the truth and they pay a price for it.
And Machen paid a price for it. And but he wasn't, you know, it's not the issue what the price is. The issue is, am I going to stand on principle or not?
And the people that pay price for Christianity and for truth, we have we have pictures of them to be reminded. And we do shows about them. But the compromisers, we've long forgotten. Who are they? And who and who cares?
Mike Abendroth, Steve Cooley. Don't forget, if you like to go to Israel, February 22nd to March 4th, email us NoCoRadio. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text. Please come and join us.
Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.