Christ's View of the Bible (Part 1)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Why the Bible Must Be Read Through Christ's View of Scripture

Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. It's Mike Abendroth. I haven't taped a show, I haven't recorded a show for I think approximately nine days. I feel rusty. I feel a little bit out of the saddle and need to get back into gear.

So what we do here at the show is we talk about topics that are biblical and provocative, and I try to make sure they're more biblical than they are provocative, but the Bible certainly provokes. Can you imagine the infinite God, the almighty, eternally wise God, when he says something about himself or tells us who he is, what he's done, what he will do, I think that's pretty provocative.

I think in a stale culture of white bread economics, white bread entertainment, and when I say white bread, I mean kind of filling, but not really full of nutrition, has nothing to do with the color, so please no prejudice attacks.

It's just bland, filling, lowest common denominator. Where is the excitement? Actually, the better question is where is the transcendent? We are people who have, according to Solomon in Ecclesiastes, eternity is placed in our heart by God.

I don't really like the God-filled vacuum talk so much, although I understand it. I'd rather think about the need and the yearning for the transcendent, something that's above, something that's over, something that's more unique.

I even hear the phone ringing here in the studio. That's the wrong thing to do here, to call me when I'm taping the show. As I was saying, people want transcendent, and so that's what we try to do at the show.

We try to let you see God from the Scriptures, not according to my own mystical experiences, not to some kind of subjective dreams, but how God has revealed himself, and he's revealed himself in two ways.

Number one, if you look at Psalm 19, he's revealed himself through nature, through creation. You look at the sun and the moon and the stars, you look at a baby being born, you look at the ecosystem, hydrological cycle, and you see that God, just like with Romans 1, he's wise and he has power.

He is a powerful God to hold the oceans at bay, et cetera. And God has also revealed himself in revelation. In revelation, that is specific revelation. That is the Bible. And so we have the Bible to teach us about God.

And so what do people who want to live a life of sin do? Well, they attack those two forms of communication. They attack creation and say, it's not made by God. It has evolved, it has exploded, there's a big bang all the way up through and to theistic evolution, and they attack the creation.

They also attack, guess what? If God communicates through nature generally and specifically through his word, besides attacking creation, they're going to attack the Bible. They're going to attack the Bible.

A long line of people standing there saying, I don't want God to rule over me. I know what the Bible says about sin and salvation, the exclusivity of Christ Jesus, and I don't want that because I like to sin, people think.

And who wants to have a conscience that is beaconing, bellowing, screaming, saying that's wrong? But if we're all a product of evolution, it's not wrong. It's a survival of the fittest, enjoy life while you can, eat, drink, and tomorrow you die.

So today I'd like to talk a little bit about the scriptures and how you can know they're true, how to know the Bible's true. Now, there'd be lots of ways to approach it. I guess some approach it by manuscript evidence.

We have over 5 ,000 full or partial manuscripts of the New Testament, for instance. Some might look at prophecy, see the prophecy that was given in the Old Testament, how it's fulfilled in the New Testament, maybe a prophecy regarding the birth of Christ and he was born in what particular city and what does Micah 5 .2 say about that and Bethlehem?

There's a way to go about looking at that and I think that's probably good for the Christian. But for the unbeliever, maybe he just says, oh, I don't care. So what do we do? What's the best way, I think, to show people, I guess I'm just gonna ask a question then make a statement.

What's the best way to try to help people look at scriptures? The way I do it is I look at Jesus's life and what he thought about the Old Testament scriptures to give me a good example of what I should do with the Old and the New.

So here's my premise. You need to see the scriptures, Old and New Testament, the way Christ saw the Old Testament. So look at Jesus. If you don't know a lot about prophecy and archeology and some kind of evolutionist arguments and Big Bang, Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box, Irreducible Minimums.

If you're not up on all that, just read the gospels and watch how Jesus deals with the Bible, how he deals with the Old Testament. And you need this confidence in the Bible. Confidence of scripture is a non-negotiable for you.

Any inkling that the Bible has a smidgen of fiction is lethal to your understanding of God. There is an inseparable link between your view of God and then your view and method of life, marriage, evangelism, and Bible teaching.

If the Bible is less than inerrant, infallible, God-breathed and sufficient, then why would you study it? Why would you painstakingly teach it? Why would you bother to listen to this radio show? Why bother with the grammatical nuances and the letter of the law when you could just kind of get a bird's eye view?

After all, if fallible man alone wrote the Bible, if it is some human invention alone, then microanalysis will yield only the frail, fragile, and fallible results of sinful mankind. You can put a microscope up to the Bible and what are you gonna see?

If it's written by a sinful man, you're gonna just see that. There was a man named Robert Bratcher, and he was one of the translators for the Good News for Modern Man Bible Paraphrase that I had actually as a kid growing up in the early 70s.

Here's what he said. "'Only willful ignorance or intellectual dishonesty "'can account for the claim "'that the Bible is inerrant and infallible.'". This is a Bible translator. "'No truth-loving, God-respecting, "'Christ-honoring believer "'should be guilty of such heresy.'".

Robert Bratcher, Inerrancy in Christianity Today, in Article 1981, page 12. That's heresy to think that the Bible is inerrant and infallible. You could probably know what he thinks about a lot of other subjects as well, but that is the wrong view.

The sure antidote to that grave and erroneous mistake that Bratcher has, and a lot of others who sing in the same choir, is to ponder the ministry of Christ Jesus and observe his full confidence in and reliance upon the Holy Bible.

When you study the Bible, keep the Savior in view. Oh, you could appeal to prophecy, science, and archeology if you'd like, but nothing, in my opinion, bolsters an exalted high view of Scripture than the public ministry of Jesus, the Son of Man.

And so let's just take a look at Jesus' ministry and find out what he thought of the Old Testament, 70 of what we know as our Bible today. The Bible says in Psalm 138, by the way, verse two, King James Version here, that God has magnified thy word above all thy name.

And so that is a wonderful claim, a true claim. You need to know the Bible is true, or why bother? Spurgeon says, full assurance of the certainty of what we preach in the name of the Most High God is absolutely necessary to making full proof of our ministry.

The Bible is not to be believed to be a supernatural book, infallibly teaching the things which make for our eternal salvation. He who with deliberate falsehood of unbelief, yet uses it as textbook and refers to it as his authority is a trifler with truth and a mocker of sacred things.

That is absolutely true. I affirm what Spurgeon says. Spurgeon goes on to say, if we are ever to see men brought down under the power of the law to a condition of true repentance, if we are ever to see them converted by the Holy Ghost through the gospel of Christ Jesus, if we are ever to see the converted ones sanctified in marching forth to the master's battles as an army with banners, we must preach the truth boldly as we ought to preach it.

And we must say of every jot and tittle, no doubt of it, no doubt of it, from a sermon called No Doubt of It. Let's think about Jesus Christ and what he actually did. I had to back up from the microphone for a second and put on my reading glasses, which is a difficult thing to do with headphones on in a little studio.

So now they're bumping these things. That's just not good. Mike Ebendroth here, No Compromise Radio Ministry. I'd like to ask this question before we see Jesus and what he did. I think it's fair to ask the question, what did Jesus not do?

In other words, what didn't he do? What Jesus didn't do? The most striking reassurance that the Bible is trustworthy is contained in what Jesus did not do. This is not an argument from silence. Jesus, the incarnate God, had ample opportunities to address the inaccuracies in the Old Testament.

It had been over 400 years since God had spoken and the original manuscripts of the Old Testament were long gone. When the Messiah arrived, he would, he could clear up, he should clear up any errors in the minds of the hearers as well as in the text itself.

Wouldn't Jesus, the Messiah, demand the purity of God's word? Oh, the answer is yes. Did you know, true or false, Jesus never quoted an extra biblical source. He never did. Did you know Jesus didn't say things like this?

For too long, you Jewish leaders have thought the book of Esther was God breathed, you're mistaken, this historical book does not even refer to my father one time, it does not bear the stamp of divine authorship.

No, Jesus by his silence and by regularly quoting the Old Testament affirmed the legitimacy of the canon that existed in Palestine during his life. The canon that started with Genesis and ended not with our book Malachi, that ended with 2 Chronicles, which contained Malachi, all of those 39 books.

They wouldn't count them the same, but the same information was there. Jesus didn't quote from some apographa, from some pseudepigrapha, he didn't quote from some rabbinic traditions. Listen to what Leitner says about Christ's view of the Bible.

It is indeed significant that Christ never even so much as referred to extra biblical literature of his day. Many works existed to which he had access and he could have made reference to, but did not do so.

He relied solely upon the canon of Scripture. Christ always assumed the unquestionable truthfulness and complete trustworthiness of the Holy Scriptures. With divine fervency and frequency, he declared its final authority and absolute inviolability.

With divine fervency and frequency, that's exactly right. So Leitner, I think has it correct. He has a good book, by the way, called A Case for Total Inerrancy, How Jesus Viewed the Old Testament. I'd encourage you to get that book.

Well, I could come up about it this way. Jesus never shied from correcting anyone who had a wrong view of Scriptures. Did he? No, he didn't shy from that at all. He would have corrected the people if they had the wrong view.

Jesus didn't come along and say, well, you know, Jonah was a myth, or it's kind of a story similar to Hercules. It's some kind of allegory or parable. It's an illustration of Israel. Jonah's Israel, the ocean's the Gentiles, the fish is Babylon.

And when the regurgitation of Jonah happens, it's Israel's return to the land via Ezra. No, not at all. People in Jesus' day knew only the literal story, and Jesus' silence was deafening. He affirmed that.

You have to look at what Jesus didn't do, and he built upon the Old Testament, endorsed it, accepted it. One of the things that he did do, how do we look at the Old Testament? That's what I'm talking about today, how to look at the New Testament.

You want to look at the New Testament and Old Testament like Jesus looked at the Old Testament. What did Jesus do? One of the first things he did is he used this phrase, it is written. It is written. Jesus used that phrase very often.

It was a pronouncement 20 times in the Gospels, this one Greek word that contains urgency, significance, it's weighty. This one word is a, it denotes a legal attestation of law and Old Testament witnesses.

It's a formula, and it introduces solemn quotations from the Old Testament. It is written. It stands written. Pay attention to what I'm going to say because I'm quoting from the Old Testament. What I say, Jesus says, has ongoing eternal relevance.

It is stable. This is not the big picture. This is not Jesus giving the gist of something. This is Jesus quoting exactly from the text. No room for Bart here with neo-orthodoxy. Jesus, it is written, man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

It is written, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. It is written, you shall worship the Lord your God and serve him only. Just how disingenuous would it be for Jesus to speak with that kind of firm declaration if the scriptures weren't really 100 truthful?

That would be sheer and shrewd audience manipulation. If he were to appeal to an unworthy, untrustworthy authority, he would be guilty of personal gain. It is written, though, proclaims with megaphone-like volume and authority that Jesus believes that Moses, in this particular case, when I quoted Matthew 4 three times, is sufficient, sure, and clear.

If you'd like to have a different view than Jesus of the Bible, then you might want to consider yourself someone who's not a Christian. Show me a Christian and I'll show you somebody that has a proper view of God's word.

How else could you learn about God? Some kind of subjective, mystical feelings? Maybe you could learn about God from some kind of authentic community in some conversation or dialogue? No. One of the things that Jesus did is he used the word, it is written, one word in Greek.

He also used a verb tense to confirm his high view of Old Testament scriptures. Can you imagine? He used a verb tense to talk about the preciseness of God's word. He won a debate with a Hebrew verb. That is amazing.

On that day, Matthew 22, some Sadducees, who say there's no resurrection, came to Jesus and questioned him, asking, Teacher, Moses said, if a man dies having no children, his brother as the next of kin shall marry his wife and raise up children for his brother.

Now there were seven brothers with us and the first married and died. And having no children left his wife to his brother, so also second and the third down to the seventh. Last of all, the woman died.

In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife of the seven will she be? For they had all married her. But Jesus answered and said to them, you are mistaken, not understanding the scriptures, nor the power of God.

For in the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. Jesus did not say of the influential Sadducees, oh, you're to be commended because you're inquisitive.

No, Jesus spanks their malicious attempt to force him to untie some kind of proverbial Gordian knot. They deceitfully give Jesus external respect, calling him teacher, but their true intentions are to discredit the Messiah.

Now watch Jesus, listen to Jesus as he pulls the powerful word out of its scabbard and is unleashed on the dim-witted Sadducees. Matthew 22, but regarding the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was spoken to you by God?

I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. He is not the God of the dead, but the living. When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at his teaching. I love to watch those kinds of confrontations.

They are a joy to watch as Jesus just goes for the jugular. He declares the error of this aristocratic group by quoting from the part of the Bible in which the Sadducees were especially trained. That is the Pentateuch, Pent, five, the first five books of Moses, the five books, the Torah.

He quotes from that. The Sadducees love those books. They were the Old Testament equivalent to the New Testament's Marcionite canon for them. Rebukingly, Jesus says, have you not read? Because they touted themselves as being knowledgeable.

They should have read, they did read. They should have been familiar with this verse Jesus was quoting, namely from Exodus chapter three. I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.

Moses is being addressed by God hundreds of years after Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had been gathered to their fathers. God is the current eternal God to these patriarchs because these men are still alive.

And so is God for that matter. Abraham and his seed are immortal and they have been resurrected. That is to say, when you buried them in the ground, their spirit was still alive. And of course their bodies will be one day resurrected.

MacArthur says it this way in his commentary in Matthew. Jesus's excellent exegetical argument is based on the emphatic present tense of the I am used in that passage from the Pentateuch. After Abraham and Isaac and Jacob were long dead, the Lord was still their God every bit as much as when they were alive.

In fact, in many ways, even more so because they had become perfectly sinless and their souls were experiencing the fellowship of his eternal presence. Boy, that is good. Notice, Jesus does not say, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

No, he communicates the intimacy of God with each of the patriarchs with the refrain, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. God was still their personal God long after they had died.

These men must have been alive because God is the God of the living. Now Luke gives a little bit more information as well. But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed in that passage about the burning bush where he calls the Lord, the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.

He's not the God of the dead, but of the living for all live to him. People were getting amazed by this teaching of God, except some sadly just had this truth from Jesus that served like a truth inoculation.

They just got tired of the truth. They didn't repent, they didn't recoil. These scribal cowards just tried to save face and they ran off. The text says in Luke, for they did not have the courage to question him any longer about anything.

The Sufficiency and Authority of Scripture in Jesus' Ministry

So, Mike Ebendroth, No Compromise Radio. I do get some emails and would love to get more emails, info at nocompromiseradio .com. I just was in Virginia over the weekend and we had some folks down there who were NoCo listeners, No Compromise Radio listeners.

Saw a 12 year old and he had on his iPod, No Compromise Radio. He also had Glenn Beck on there too. I'm just kidding. Sorry, Luke, I'm just kidding, that's a joke. Not my Luke, but it's a different Luke.

That was a 12 year old down there in Virginia. So, Mike Ebendroth, No Compromise Radio Ministry. And we are talking about the scriptures. If the Bible isn't true, if the Bible's not authoritative, if the Bible's not sufficient, then what a waste of time this show is.

What a waste of time WVNE 760 AM in Worcester is. What a waste of time it is to have your Bibles around. I guess they might be good paperweights. What a waste it is to go to church because who knows if the guy's really telling you what the Bible says or not.

I don't need another talking head. I don't need another opinion. I don't need another man's view of things. I want to be told by God who creates with a word, who is wise and infinite and eternal and transcendent to talk to me, to speak to me.

I don't mean out loud, but to show me what he has said. So, if you're looking for something more to life than life itself, you're going to need to look to the transcendent God who reveals himself in nature, but more particularly in scripture.

You need to open your Bible, turn to the book of Mark and begin to read tonight. You cannot be satisfied with what the world offers. Anything less than the world won't satisfy, and that whole world won't satisfy either.

Ask Alexander the Great, ask Hitler, ask anybody else like that. You need the transcendent God to speak to you through and only through the scriptures to understand life, death, eternal life, and God himself, this transcendent God who is holy yet loving, who is wrathful yet he's patient, who is just yet he's kind.

That's the God you need, and that God is epitomized by Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God. You need to believe in him.

Pick up your Bibles. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.

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

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