Crazy Letters and Arianism

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.

Opening Banter and the Anonymous Letter

Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and it is the last day of 2020 in real time. By the time you hear this, it�ll be probably mid-January, but that�s just the way the proverbial ball bounces.

I�m sorry, I have to make a confession today that my real name is Miguelito, and I have a kind of Hispanic background, and I�ve just been faking the Nebraska accent, the Midwestern accent, for the last 11 years, along with Mrs. Baldwin and Mrs. Warren and others.

I�m sorry that I�ve had to fake this my entire life just to get a larger audience, and so I please accept my apologies. We live in a crazy world, do we not? So today, I needed to record some shows on Nahum and look at that a little bit, and I decided to come in here to the studio office, the study, and I received a letter, and it could tell there was some card in it, no return address.

And when I get the mail, I�m careful, not because of anthrax or bombs or anything, but I�m careful because if it�s a letter sent to the church, oftentimes it�s got a check in it, and I don�t want to see what the amount is or who sent it.

I think probably in 23 years, I�ve seen a handful that are just by mistake, but I don�t want to know. And therefore, when I opened this up, it was like a Christmas card, but again, no return address, and it said Bethlehem Bible Church and didn�t say, �Attention Financial Secretary, Attention Pastor Steve or Mike or Secretary or anything.

So I opened it up, and inside of it was a card, and the card is a generic card. There�s nothing except it says Hallmark, and it says, �This card is made with paper from well-managed forests. Hallmark .com.

And it looks like it�s a picture of Venice. There's some boats in the water. I forgot what you call those boats with the man sitting there in the back and steering them, these little, I don�t know, Venetian boats.

And you open it up, and the left-hand side is blank, nothing written. The right-hand side was printed blankly, but something was written, and here�s what it says. �Just some information as to why I don�t believe that God, the Almighty, and Jesus are the same person or deity.

That�s it, that�s all it said. Now unlike Matt Chandler, I�m not going to go off on a screed because it was anonymous, and I don�t know if you heard that or not, it was kind of Tom Cruise-like, as it was said several, it was quite a while ago, but he was responding to an anonymous text.

I think they had a service or something where you could text in a question, and I guess the guy didn�t give his name, and he, Matt, lit into him. And when I think of Matt Chandler, I also think of when he wanted to try to hire some new elders at the church there at the village, they hired some firms to help them pick elders.

That�s a whole other discussion, is it not? And then the firm, one of the firms, asked him if we find, if memory serves me, if we find a black 7 and a white 8, ranking, you know, 1 to 10 on skills and I guess matching up to scripture, would you rather have the black 7 or the white 8?

And he said, �I�ll take the black 7. And I just thought, this wokeness is just driving me crazy. Here�s the good news with awokeness and CRT, social justice, just bald-faced liberalism. We are now seeing who believes what, and that�s good.

Providence, Wokeness, and Celebrity Christianity

You know, everybody wants to trash 2020. Were there trials in 2020? Yes. But I think we ought to be counting in all joy. I think we ought to be rejoicing and understanding who God is and how He�s on the throne and how He does whatever He pleases and what the nations are like to Him in terms of a drop of a bucket.

Isaiah 40, Psalm 2. So I�m not going to just say, �Well, this is such a horrible year. There are tragedies in every year. It seems like there were more difficulties, that�s for certain, but lots of other wonderful things that have happened.

All that to say, the wokeness stuff, it�s a great revealer. My friend Evan and my friend John and I are on a little mini-messaging deal together. This is a great revealer. We get to know exactly what people think, exactly how they operate, Southern seminary, Southeastern seminary, what they do at Southwestern seminary, what Al Mohler does, what people do across the spectrum, Ligon Duncan, Presbyterians, crazy people within the PCA, of course they�re not all crazy, they are becoming exposed.

They can say a lot of things, but dear friends, over time you get to see what�s happening. By the way, that�s why with the media that�s been around for a while, we have seen a lot of celebrities pop up.

I think Mark Driscoll became who he was in terms of influential. A lot of it has to do, in my opinion, with media and how you could promote things and have the right band, the right look, the right website, the right building, the right everything, the right people to write your sermons, docent group, and other things like that.

You could get the look. The bad news for that is if you become a mega superstar in anything in life, including Christianity, you just can�t bear that. I don�t know how many people can bear that. Certainly, if you�re younger, it�s almost impossible to bear.

If you�re younger and immature, and you don�t even really know sound doctrine, how do people stand it? I think if praise is given to someone, that�s a good litmus test of what they really are. With Christianity and the celebrity-driven nature of it and selling things and books.

When I wrote books in the old days, I still might have a couple more that I might do. I don�t know. The people want to know. Even if I want to interview certain people, when I wanted to interview Wayne Grudem, for instance, they want to know, his handlers want to know, how many people listen to Inoko, how many watts the station has, how many affiliates we have.

Right now, we are being played in Wyoming, and we�re being played in Alaska, and those are just kind of like church radio stations, and Alaska got my permission. I can�t mention who it is in Wyoming who didn�t get my permission.

But he�s from Omaha. Anyway, it�s just crazy. It�s just all backwards with celebrity Christianity. Therefore, some of the people who have stood the test of time and never fallen into grave sins, I think it was an incremental growth.

As their ministries grew by the grace of God, they also grew in maturity and sanity and all those other things. Well, anyway, I received this letter in the mail, and she said, �I think it�s a she. The writing looks like a she.

I could be wrong. I don�t know that many people that write that nicely. I�ll give them at least credit for nice writing. I don�t believe that God, the Almighty, and Jesus are the same person or deity.

Now, I would imagine this is a Jehovah�s Witness, some type of Arian, some type of, �Well, we don�t believe in the triune God. Now, we have Unitarian churches around here, and it could be from a Unitarian church, but my hunch is they�re less evangelistic, if you will.

They don�t have good news. So let�s say they proselytize less than Jehovah�s Witnesses do because there�s not this kind of pecking order of the 144 ,000 that the Jehovah�s Witnesses have, and now they can�t go door-to-door as much.

Who wants door-to-door people with COVID? So they have to find other ways, and recently I�ve received a letter from Jehovah�s Witnesses about something. I think I did a show on it. Well, here�s another one.

The Trinity, the Incarnation, and Why Jesus Is God

Right off the very beginning, they do not understand God, His essence, His persons, right? God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Here it says they�re not the same person. I don�t believe they�re the same person either.

Is the Father the Son? Are they the same person? I don�t believe that, but they don�t even know. But I do believe that Jesus is God. I do believe the Holy Spirit is God. I look at Colossians 1, Jesus is God.

I understand that if you use that acronym that I�ve learned about HAND, H, Jesus receives the honor of God, and He didn�t say, �Stop worshiping me. He accepted that, unlike the angels in the book of Revelation, when John the Apostle started to worship an angel, you know, �Get up, don�t worship me.

Jesus received honor and worship, so that�s the H. The A, if memory serves me, the attributes of God, His omnipotence and His omniscience, and certainly there was the kenosis, and He did lay aside divine privileges.

No, He laid aside divine prerogative for those privileges, and sometimes He didn�t exercise those, but He was never less than God. That would be a fatal heresy to somehow say Jesus, because of the Incarnation, was less than God.

No, He was the Eternal Son, and He added humanity. He added human nature, but He never became less, even though He did not use everything available to Him because of the Incarnation. And here we have this person who wants me to believe that essentially Jesus isn�t God, right?

So, how would you prove Jesus isn�t God? Well, the Jehovah�s Witnesses, the Arians, and the other cults of the world that do that do it from a biblicistic perspective. They have no systematic theology.

They have no continuity between Old and New Testaments, and understanding the Holy Spirit as the main driving author behind everything else, right? I believe in dual authorship, that�s true, but if I have to pick one over the other, or, you know, which one�s on first, it�s certainly the Holy Spirit and not Luke, for instance, with the Book of Luke and Acts.

And they, these cultic people, cultish people, they�re in these theological cults, I don�t mean they�re sociological, although maybe there�s some of that stuff involved, I don�t know. Depends on who the leadership is.

But when I look at this list, she gave me a little insert, �If Jesus is God that�s the title, and then there�s 20 questions. And I haven�t read through all the 20 questions yet, but he, or she, gave me this list.

Somehow, I�m going to change my mind because of that. Well, I guess I give them props, I think you should at least write your name down, right? I think that�s pretty, that�s weak sauce, but I�m not going to go into the Matt Chandler tirade slash Tom Cruise stuff.

But I�m just going to read you a few, and the obvious answers I will give, I�m not going to use notes or anything, but the whole thing comes from a biblicistic perspective, and that is no systematic theology, no understanding of historical theology, no concise way to look at how God operates from the Old Testament and the New, with one divine author, where nothing can conflict, right, and there�s no contradictions in the Bible.

We might have a manuscript issue, and we might have a contradiction in our mind, or it looks like a seeming contradiction, but God�s Word is true and reliable and unified because He, God, writes it, or had written it.

And so, when I just look at this, I just say �biblicist. That�s why when the Jehovah�s Witness, and here�s a practical thing, when the Jehovah�s Witness comes to your door and says, �What about this verse

I just want you to know that they�re just taking a verse out, just out, and there�s no context to it, and if you don�t know the answer, you should go study, but the best thing to do is just read the passage that contains that verse, and just ask yourself a few simple questions, like what�s the context, what�s the immediate context, what�s the book trying to say, how have interpreters interpreted this in the day, right?

How did Luther or Calvin or someone like that interpret it? What about scholars today? There are answers. What does the Heidelberg Catechism say about such and such? You don�t have to just come to it on your own.

And that�s the problem, by the way, with Jehovah�s Witnesses and Arians, that ilk. They look at a verse, they go, �Oh, see They don�t know the Greek, they don�t know the background, they don�t know anything, and they see the verse.

Firstborn of All Creation Means Preeminence

Here�s question number one. Why is he called the firstborn of all creation, Colossians 1, Revelation 3, John 1, 14? I mean, isn�t that just a �duh� moment? Oh, he�s firstborn, then it�s a time designation.

There was a time when Jesus wasn�t, and maybe there wasn�t a whole lot of time when Jesus wasn�t, and maybe there�s a lot of time between when Jesus was and everything else coming into being, but see, he�s subordinate and he�s not God because there was a time when he was not.

Why is he called the firstborn of all creation? And again, that�s just such a �duh� moment because I can just think, even without my Bible open, protodocus for firstborn, we�re talking about preeminent.

We�re talking about preeminent. We�re not talking there�s a time when he wasn�t, we�re talking about he�s the preeminent of all creation, and the rest of Colossians 1 talks about that very thing. As a matter of fact, I know you tune into this show for many things, maybe a laugh, maybe interesting, maybe the opening song.

I�m trying to change that, but I just can�t get everything done that I want to get done. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for by him all things were created in heaven and earth, visible and invisible, thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities, all things were created through him and for him.

He is before all things, and in him all things held together, and he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead. By the way, right there, the firstborn from the dead, were other people raised from the dead in the New Testament?

I�ll just tell you, Lazarus, Jairus�s daughter, I mean, just off the top of my head, you think, I think it was Elisha that raised from the dead, the widow, 2 Kings 4, if I recall. I could be wrong on that one.

He is the head of the body, beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent, for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. You mean to tell me that if you�re right, Jehovah�s Witness Arians, that God creates Jesus and then he, God, has the fullness of him dwelling in the Son, and then he is going to give his glory away somehow to a created firstborn of all creation?

You�ve got to be kidding me. It doesn�t match up. So, if you want to just look at a Bible verse and go, �Oh, English word �firstborn�, that�s the same error that somebody could make with this word �foreknowledge.

And you look at foreknowledge and you go, �Oh, to know before. God knows before because he looks down the quarters of time. You�re forgetting what the Bible is written in, different languages, three, but two in particular, mainly, and then you�re also forgetting that there�s Bible language to know someone.

Someone knows their wife. I know my wife and I know my wife, right? I know her and I know her. I�m intimate with her, right? And so, Adam knew his wife and he knew about her and he knew her, and to foreknow is to forelove.

Sent by the Father, Exalted, and Mediator

Well, anyway, that�s the first question. That�s just at the top of the list. That�s just, to me, as dumb as you get. Number two, why did he say he did not come of his own initiative but was sent forth?

John 8. Duh! Seriously, how stupid must you be? And the answer is, very, because they�re dead in trespasses and sins. I�m not mad at this person. But they�re also blinded by Satan, 2 Corinthians chapter 4.

Their minds are hostile, Colossians talks about. And therefore, their mind�s broken, Ephesians chapter 4. The futility of their mind. Why was Jesus sent forth? Huh? Answer? Because He, the Eternal Son, was commissioned by the Father in the Pactum Salutis, the covenant of redemption, to go rescue the elect.

And therefore, He already was alive, He existed, and then He�s sent forth. Only one time Jesus talks about Him being born, and then it�s almost like He makes sure Pilate understands that it�s more than that, He�s been sent forth.

He does the will of the Father, because if you don�t say about me, Mike Ebendroth on May 12, 1960, was sent forth, because I didn�t exist before that. I was born, that�s why. This is amazing, to me, what these people say.

Who spoke to Jesus at the time of His baptism, saying, �This is my Son Matthew 3, 17? The Father, and then the Son was there, and the Spirit of God descends. Golly. How could He be further exalted to a superior position, Philippians 2, 9, right?

He becomes obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross, right? And God�s going to highly exalt Him. Answer? Because He was sent forth, He did what He was supposed to do, He lived a perfect life under the law, He died for lawbreakers, the ones that the Father had chosen, and He was raised from the dead, and mission accomplished, and God the Father honored Him for that.

Who does He refer to as my God in John 20? The Father? Duh. The Father? Answer? I�d ask this question. Why is He called my God? Why does the Son call the Father my God, when all the other times He calls Him Father?

Answer? Because He�s now sin-bearing. The Son is sin-bearing, and so the relationship is not Father-Son, the relationship is judge and the one being judged. But the Father still, even at that moment, loved the Son perfectly, because the Son was doing exactly what the Father told Him to do, while He was hating the sin that was being born by the Son.

There�s no greater thing that the Son could ever, ever do. What does John say? Why does John say, �No man has seen God at any time. Answer? Because no man has seen God at any time. God�s a spirit, you can�t see a spirit.

And then the second person in the Trinity adds humanity, then you can see Him. Why did the people not die when they saw Jesus? Exodus 33. Because His Shekinah glory was cloaked, my friend. What else does it say here?

How can He also be the mediator between God and man, 1 Timothy 2 .5. I mean, you listeners, you already know the answers to these two. You don�t need Mike Ebenroth for this. This is, you know, some shows in the old days I had all studied and prepared and everything else.

Today I walk in, I get the mail. I�m looking for chocolates and nuts and stuff and Pete�s coffee in the mailbox, and I get this letter. I just open it up and go, �Okay, here we go. How can He be also the mediator between God and man?

Answer? Because Jesus is the God-man. Truly God, truly man. Perfectly God, perfectly man. Right? We�ll use that qualitative language instead of quantitative language like fully God, fully man. 100 God, 100 man.

Even though I used to say that, and it was said in an American gospel, but I would never say it again. Thanks, Brandon. I�m going to be on American Gospel TV, AGTV, five-part series, Law and Gospel. I�ve got two recorded.

Ben Mercedes recorded those two. They look sharp. I don�t know if Brandon�s going to like the material. If he likes it, we�ll put him up, and if he doesn�t, I�ll change it. I�d like to think I�m a big boy and could do that.

Jesus is representative, and so therefore He is the mediator. He is the advocate, 1 John 2, 1 and 2. In this mediatorial role of the Lord Jesus, it�s reminiscent of Job chapter 9. Job needs someone who can put his hand, as it were, on God and put his hand on Him and to be the bridge builder, the pontifus maximus, the ultimate bridge builder, to use those words.

I�m not using those words of anybody else, by the way. We see Jesus as the mediator because He can mediate for us because He�s man, still is by the way, and He can mediate on God�s side because He�s divine.

If He wasn�t, then He, Jesus, would need a mediator, and it would be then Job, Jesus, something else, somebody else, and then God, the Father. He�s the mediator. Notice how all these things seem to have a common thread.

They don�t understand the Incarnation. They don�t understand the eternal nature of the Son, and they just don�t get it. How does He sit at God�s right hand, Psalm 110 .1. That�s a good question. Answer?

Because He�s God. Why did He not ask to be called good, saying, �Nobody is good except one God Luke 18. He didn�t have to ask because that was His point. That was what He was trying to get the rich young ruler to even talk about.

If you don�t understand the Incarnation, you�re really smoked. If you don�t understand the triune nature of God and submitting to Scripture in that, you�re really smoked. If you don�t understand historical theology and understanding that there is a proper tradition that is the Holy Spirit working in the life of the Church and Her scholars and theologians and things like that, if you take the Bible and open it up and make that verse run on all fours, walk on all fours, drive on all fours, stand on all fours, you�re going to get this firstborn of all creation thing.

You�re going to say, �Well, Jesus said, �The Father is greater than I am John 14. Duh! There�s an Incarnation. Anyway, my name is Mike Abenroth. There�s no Compromise Radio. And so, if you�re listening and you�re a Jehovah�s Witness, then you gave me some stuff for a radio show today.

That works out really nice. Next time, though, why don�t you tell me your name, and I�ll only use your first name on the radio, and then I can write you back. But I can�t do that if you don�t tell me who you are.

So, I�m not going to go on the screed, but it�d just be better. So, why don�t you write your name, I�m not afraid of that. My name is Mike Abenroth. I�m a Jehovah�s Witness, and I�m not afraid to tell you who I am, and I�m a Jehovah�s Witness.