The Beza Briefing - The Son

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. My name is Mike Abendroth, and I�m in the real studio today. It looks like there�s about a foot of snow out there in real time. It is 1243 p .m. on Friday, December 18th, and I think I�m out of quarantine.

So there you have it. I wonder if you need a daily affirmation.

It might work. I declare that you will use your words to bless people. You will speak favor and victory over your family, friends, and loved ones. You will help call out their seeds of greatness, telling them, �I�m proud of you.

I love you. You�re amazing. You�re talented. You�re beautiful. You will do great things in life. I declare you�ll use your words to bless people. There you go.

Isn�t that nice? I�m going to use my words today to bless you. That was affirmation number 16. It�s now paused. What do I have? I have the typical things I say every time. The slogan is always biblical, always provocative, always in that order.

I was reading the iTunes reviews the other day for podcasts, and most of them were pretty good, nice, better than I deserve, and a few of them were, �It sounds like he�s talking to himself, and he laughs at his own jokes, and it�s too scattered, and it could be better edited.

Well, there�s no editing at all, so I stand with the reviewer for that one. I think the one gave me two stars, one star for me and then another star for Jesus, they said. Let�s see what else. Laughing at my own jokes, that�s true, and then it sounds like I�m talking to myself.

Well, I try to imagine sometimes you�re here. Steve is often here, but there�s nobody else here in the studio, i .e. my study, i .e. the office, so it probably sounds like I�m talking to myself. That�s exactly true.

Anyway, I don�t know how many listeners we get, 1 ,000, 2 ,000 a podcast, something like that. I have no idea. I think when I interview people, it jumps up to 4 ,000, 8 ,000, 14 ,000. The other day, I was looking at the YouTube channel for No Compromise Radio, and I don�t have the password to get into it anymore, but I used to think it was a big deal if one of the videos got 1 ,000 views, and I think the T .D. Jakes one or Mark Driscoll or something, maybe they�re together.

I think it�s 50 ,000 views, something like that, 50 ,000. I should have done a better job if I would have known that many people were going to view it. Anyway, Israel 2022, what could I talk about today?

I could talk about the election. I could talk about loving your neighbor by getting the vaccination. By the way, it�s also true that if somebody says that to you, you should love your neighbor and get a vaccination.

How would you respond? What if I love my neighbor enough that I�ll let them do what they want with their own body in terms of their own choices? I�ve never gotten vaccinations over the years, even flu vaccinations.

Well, let me strike that. I�ve gotten the ones that you�re supposed to get, MMR and whatever those things are. But the elective ones, at least in my mind elective, I never have received, but I have some borderline blood issues.

So therefore, my blood doctor, the blood lady, she said you should get a shingle shot, you should get a pneumonia shot, and you should get a flu shot. So for you anti-vaxxers out there, you�re going to think I shouldn�t have done that.

But anyway, I should be able to decide what I want to do with my own body, correct? My body, my choice. And anyway, people are like, well, you should love other people and get a vaccination. Well, you should love other people and let their consciences be their own guides and stay out of their business.

That�s another version of love. You should love people and not go outside. How about you should love people that are trying to open their restaurants and businesses so they can stay afloat. I mean, I just want you to think through this a little bit more and don�t buy some kind of company line, whether your company is Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Progressives, Fascist, Neo-Marxist, Critical Race Theory, or Calvinists.

Those are not all in the same genre. Today on the show, The Beza Briefing. The Beza Moment. Christian Faith by Theodore Beza. And as you know, I said I was going to try to do this and after my quarantine for the last 14 days, it has been harder to do.

But Theodore Beza wrote a nice little, what I would call kind of like a primer on systematic theology. First published in Geneva, 1558. And what he wanted to do is he wanted to have a kind of a mini systematic theology, almost like what we would say is a statement of faith.

Something concise. I remember Concise Theology by J. I. Packer, which actually was pretty decent, if memory serves me. He, Theodore Beza, moves to Geneva in 1559 and he works with Calvin and then succeeds Calvin who died.

Calvin died in 1564. What I do in The Beza Briefing is simple. I read what he says and then I talk about it. That sounds like the show, doesn't it? I read what the Bible says and talk about it. I read what current events and evangelicalism say and then I talk about it.

Could there be anything, before I read this section three, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, could there be anything less gospel-y than the Gospel Coalition these days? It is absolutely crazy, but that's another subject.

All my friends that love the Gospel Coalition, I'm sure I'm in good graces with them. Section one, the Trinity. Section two, God the Father. And now section three, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The other sections were shorter, so I'm probably going to have to do two parts to this one and not just one part.

Today, I'm going to read a little bit from The Beza Briefing and then I'm going to make some comments. I think what I'm going to have to do is, since the other sections were shorter, I would read the whole thing, then go back and comment.

What I think I'm going to have to do here, for sake of knowing where I'm at and I don't have an editor, I mean, Spencer's a hard worker and he uploads it and I think he does some editing, but he's not the technical editor because if he was, I wouldn't tell you because then that person would criticize my editing.

And if you're going to criticize anyone, you should obviously criticize me, not behind the scenes super worker, Uber worker Spencer, as one person called him, Ken. That is an inside, inside, inside joke and not a daily affirmation either.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Theodore Beza. I'll tell you what I'm going to say that are his words and then my words, okay? His words, 3 .1, the divinity of the Son. We believe that Jesus Christ, as to his divine nature, is the unique Son of the Father, without mother, eternally begotten and not made, one God in essence with the Father and the Holy Spirit, co-eternal, consubstantial, equal with God, his Father in all and through all.

John 1, John 14, John 17, John 20, Romans 9, Philippians 2. By the way, you can order this online, not at No Compromise website, but I have a printing by Crawford in Edinburgh. It's blue, but I think there's a newer one out translated by James Clark.

So there you have it. Let me read another section, 3 .2, before I make some comments. The Son eternally established as the sole mediator between God and the elect. It is him alone that the Father decreed eternally to unite to the human nature in order to save his elect through him.

1 Timothy 2, 2 Timothy 1, 1 Peter 1, Revelation 13, and Ephesians 1. 3 .3, God is perfectly righteous and merciful. God is perfectly righteous. It follows that he does not wish nor is able to leave any injustice unpunished.

He is also perfectly merciful. It follows that all the good that he does toward men, he does it all of grace. And then the last one, before I make any comments, 3 .4, God is immutable, Theodore Beza. God is immutable in his decrees.

In these, he cannot make a mistake. Nor be at all prevented from executing them. It follows that all that happens to men has been ordained eternally by him, following what we have said about his providence.

And I think there was an earlier section that God was the preserver of all things and something about providence. Okay, Mike Abendroth here making some comments about Theodore Beza in the sections of divinity, eternally established as sole mediator, and perfectly righteous and merciful, Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Now, when I drive around New England in the car with people, and they're out-of-towners, they're out-of-staters, not that I would ever host anyone that was from out-of-state after a 14-day quarantine, but if they were theoretically, and in the past before all this happened, we would see the town common.

And to incorporate a town, I believe, in New England back in those days, you had to have a piece of land in the center of town or somewhere close. You know, not in the outskirts of town. There are certain laws for all this.

And you had to have a common ground, Boston Common, right? West Boylston Common. And that everyone could use. It was common to everyone. Nobody owned it. And then you had to have a congregational church there.

I think that was the rule. Maybe the rules changed over the years, etc., but that was the rule. That's why when you go to a small town here, or larger town like Boston, you'll see the common, and then you'll see a church, and sometimes more than one church, adjacent to that common.

And most of those congregational churches, because of their dislike of Calvinism and difficult doctrines, began to go liberal in the 1600s, middle of the 1600s, especially C .N. Douglas' Feminization of American Culture.

And you had universalism, everybody goes to heaven, and Unitarianism fill the void, because once you gut Christianity, what do you have left? Therefore, when we would drive through the town, I would give this little explanation, and then I would say, just think of the words.

Now, I know you're no-compromise radio listeners, so you know better than this, but universalist, okay, and with the rainbow flag there, everybody goes to heaven, universal. Jesus died for everyone in the universe, and they will all go to heaven.

Nobody goes to hell. Imagine. Then there's Unitarian, and sometimes there's Unitarian Universalist, but Unitarian Church, okay, Unitarian. Well, at least you can get the uni part right, right? You got that one, like a unicycle, and then you've got the Trinitarian, not Tritheism, but Trinitarian, and so the Unitarian Church doesn't believe that Jesus Christ is God.

That's what they don't believe. They believe other things, they disbelieve other things, but that's really the issue. Jesus, the divine son, they don't believe that, and last night I was reading a book about some ancient creeds and confessions and interpretation of the Bible by the church fathers, and Athanasius, he was the star, and Arius, he was the bad guy.

Arius, kind of like a modern-day Jehovah's Witness, a Unitarian denying the deity of Christ, Arius had a lot of good things to say about Jesus along with Jehovah's Witnesses, and he's not like third born or 18th born or whatever.

He's the firstborn, and then he did this, and he did that, and he did the other, and some fairly exalted things said of Jesus, but of course, anything less than he is the divine son without mother, eternally begotten and not made, one God in essence with the Father, co-eternal, co-substantial, equal with God and the Father in all and through all, if you deviate from that, then you have a creature, you have a lesser being, you have someone that's not God, and Jesus is the eternal son, and he is divine.

What gets people is when they read the Bible in a Biblicist fashion, and they just look at a verse, and they don't see the context of the passage in the passage, and they don't see the context of the passage as the Holy Spirit has helped men understand the Bible throughout the centuries and millennia, and they just take it baldly like cults do, and it's just me and the Bible, and whatever it says, it says, and if it says that Jesus Christ is, you know, the Father's greater than he is, then somehow the Father has to be greater.

Not thinking, okay, we have to think in terms of what was the difference after the incarnation. There's no difference in the essence of God, but Jesus now has human nature that he didn't have before, and so how do we work through this when Jesus doesn't know something, only the Father does, and therefore, if you're not careful, you slip into things, and that's why the Beza briefing is helpful to remind you on a regular basis some systematic theology.

I like to read John Owen. I try to read eight pages of Owen a day. I have rarely missed that lately, rarely lately, because if I go out of town, I'll just make copies of my eight pages times how many days I'm gone, or I'll just make it up later or earlier, but I'll try to, so far since I've made the promise to myself or my resolution law, that I would get that done.

By the way, lots of law resolutions in January 1st, right? More law coming. You like law? There's nothing wrong with law, but there's more coming. That's another subject. Jesus Christ, the divine Son.

Therefore, you have to be careful on how you read the Bible, and I wouldn't try to read the Bible by yourself in isolation. Of course, if you're a desert island, you have your Bible, and that's it. I'm happy for that, but people tend to make errors if they're not careful, and this, the Beza briefing, will help you as you just read systematic theologies.

I've been reading Turretin and Wilhelmus A. Braeckel to help me. Sometimes I read Pilgrim Theology by Horton. I just like to read systematic theologies because it helps me read the 1689, read the Three Forms of Unity, Westminster Confession, whatever you want, but that will help you.

Jesus, unique Son of the Father, eternally begotten. It says, it is in Him alone, or it is Him alone that the Father decreed eternally to unite to the human nature. This was not something that was decided upon later.

This was not an afterthought. This is the eternal decree for Jesus to unite with human nature, and He did that for a particular purpose, obviously to glorify the Son, glorify the Father, those kind of things, but in terms of the end toward us that the elect would be saved.

He is the sole mediator, and as a sole mediator, He has to be righteous and merciful. So, how does this work? You've got every sin has to be punished, but also God's merciful and gracious. I'm reading in Nahum this week about He's not going to leave any sin unpunished.

I think this is a reflection of Exodus chapter 34 and numbers, I think, 14, where you've got this God who, in our mind, has these attributes, although He really technically is the attributes. God is love.

God is wrath. God is jealous. So, the third section here, you've got the Trinity, God the Father, now we're in God the Son. You can imagine the next person in the Trinity will be our next section, although not our next show.

God is immutable in His decrees, therefore He doesn't make any kind of mistake. He's powerful right and wise, and so there's nothing that's going to stop Him. I have written a book about a chapter on this, The Decree of God, and I wrote it when I was not very reformed, but I think it would stand the test of time.

What I argued for was the singular decree. Often in Scripture, you'll see decree of God, purpose of God, will of God versus the decrees of God, and when we use decrees, it's simply accommodation terms.

Scripture uses words of accommodation to try to help us understand, because how could we understand the infinite God? God is immutable, and He's wise, and He can execute whatever kind of decree He would want to decree, singularly, right, even though it says here, decrees, God is immutable in His decrees.

Thankfully, though, in 3 .5, it says, the decree of God does not exclude second causes. Beza, that does not prevent, but establishes second causes through which all things happen. For God, in decreeing eternally, that which must take place at each point of time, has also decreed the means through which He is pleased that something may take place.

Thus, even when there would be found some corruption in the second cause, there is no corruption in the eternal decree of God. So, this is important, is it not? Now, this is Mike Ebendroth talking. It's important when it comes to secondary causes.

It is going to protect God's holy name, and it's also going to explain things like, let's just make it easy. I know we're talking about triune issues here that are very difficult, but let's just make it easy.

Secondary causes, prayer, evangelism. My evangelism has corruption in it, does it not? I wish it didn't, but it does. But the decree that the person that I was evangelizing to and then evangelizing and who responded positively, the decree to save that person, that elect person, that was incorruptible.

There's nothing wrong with that. Of course, God is the one doing it, but He uses secondary causes, and you'll find corruption there. And we're going to talk in later episodes about how that's very helpful because we have primary causes, secondary causes, and we want to make sure we don't mess those up because we really want to make sure we talk about God's justice and His righteousness and how we want to.

I'm looking outside and I see Bob Uloh out there plowing. He's not really plowing, he's putting sand down. Do you know we have to have different kinds of bicycles here? If you are intense into bicycling, you have a winter bike that you can get all sandy and salty, and then you have your other bikes that you would never ride in the salty sand because it's going to corrode your bicycle, just like cars get corroded here.

If you see a really nice 1970 K5 Blazer, you're going to realize, oh, that wasn't from here. That was shipped from Florida or California or something like that. I kind of wish I had my K575, K570 Blazer, 1970 Blazer.

It's cool, but it needed tinkering. I'm not the best tinker, although I'm trying. And then finally, 3 .6, man created in order to manifest the justice and mercy of God. Beza, there shall be those saved and those damned, and all of them for the glory of God, as all scripture testifies.

Since nothing happens by chance and God never changes His mind, it follows, see, ideas have consequences. Therefore, that God has not only foreseen, but eternally decreed to create man in order to manifest His glory, in saving by His grace those whom He is pleased to, and condemning the others by His just judgment.

Therefore, now this is Mike Abendroth talking, you will notice language of, it doesn't happen by chance, and therefore it follows. And what I'd like to just say here, although every one of these points could be, we could talk about it for hours, not only foreseen, but also to decree.

Let's once and for all get rid of the foreseen faith and foreseen actions and foreseen deeds. God is certainly not going to learn anything if He foresees and then chooses. This is no eternal decree. And to foreknow the language of foreknowledge that you might see in 1 Peter 1 and Romans 8 is to love before, to know before.

That's the language. And it's not used of deeds and actions, although He would know that too, of course. Reading Turreton last night about middle knowledge and molism, we can talk about that another day.

But God knows the person. He loves the person ahead of time. Even if you're a minion and you're listening to me today, look up the times in the Bible in context of salvation, largely speaking of salvation as a general topic, and find foreknowledge and tell me if it's used of God foreknowing an event or person.

God knows ahead of time. He loves ahead of time. If you think Adam knew his wife, you would be correct. And it was this love, an intimate love. And so, God foreknows us. It's not talking about language of what we do.

It's this decree that's eternal. And God wants to manifest His glory by saving people and others get judgment. And we're not talking about infra and supra at the moment, although we could do that at another day.

Well, my name is Mike Ebendroth. This is going by fast. This is the Beza briefing, section three on the Son of God, 3 .1 to 3 .6, and we'll pick up 3 .7 whenever I feel like it. I just hope I remember where I left off.

You can always write me, mike at nocompromiseradio .com, or you can go to info at nocompromiseradio .com. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Ebendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's Word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text. Please come and join us.

Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.