Calvinism Quiz (Part 2)

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.

The Calvinism Pre-Quiz and the First Seven Questions

Welcome again to No Compromise Radio ministry. Mike Abendroth, your host today, WVNE 760. You can write to us at the link there and contact us on wvne .net. As I say all the time, that if you'd like to send me an email, how you have appreciated the show or you like the show, you could send that to WVNE and send that to Manny, and he'd be glad to receive that.

And if you get any ideas that you want to send something to the staff or management at WVNE and complain about me, then you send that to WVNE attention Dave Reno. Hello. Anyway, either way, I'm glad you're listening.

As I've said to you many times before, I hope you're listening because you like it. That would be, you know, who wants to do the show? Takes a long time to do the show and takes effort. I have other things to do in my life.

And so I hope you like it. I hope you listen. You know, if only one person was listening, I guess that would be worth it. We do the show for the glory of God and I hope others are listening. I'm sure there are people who listen.

But even if you don't like it, but you still listen, I think I'm going to win you over sooner or later to my way of thinking. And you say not in a million years. That might be true, but at least you're thinking from another perspective or dealing with someone who doesn't think along the same lines as you for your information.

I hear all the time from people, oh, we need that kind of radio. It's just blunt talk. It's just kind of straight up teaching. I didn't really know there was another kind of teaching. When I read Jesus, John the Baptist, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, you just go down the list.

Those men did not beat around the bush. Those men were not some kind of inductive teachers where at the very last minute after you hear them talk, they said, aha, I get it. No, they were very, very deductive.

They were very forceful. They were blunt. Isn't that the way we talk today? Isn't that the way we should do things? Maybe that's not the way we talk today in our postmodern society. We all get to dialogue.

We all kind of come alongside. Maybe people don't like this show because I'm the only one that gets to talk. And on Tuesdays, I let Steve say something half the time. What you don't see on the radio station because it's radio is me kicking Steve.

And that's my notice to Steve to be quiet and it's time for me to talk since it's my show. So today is part two, Calvinism pre-quiz. As you know, last week, the same day, we discussed Calvinism because I'm teaching a class at Bethlehem Bible Church for the New England Institute of Biblical Studies, college level classes that require homework and study.

And I'm teaching a class called the History and Theology of Calvinism. And so I gave the class a pre-quiz just to see what they knew and to show them that this was going to be an interesting class that they could have fun learning about the complete and utter sovereignty of God.

So we are up to question number eight so far. Question one lists the five points of Calvinism. Two, what is a hyper-Calvinist? Three, was Jesus a Calvinist? Four, was Calvin a Calvinist? Five, why is Calvinism so hated today?

Six, can Christians who are not Calvinist go to heaven? Seven, describe Calvinism with one verse. So those are the seven we went through last time and we went through seven because seven is the number of perfection.

No, that's just where we left off. I have 24 minutes and 30 seconds to go for the show. So it's just run and gun. It's the West Coast offense of AM radio, no compromise radio. We are up to number eight.

Famous Five-Point Calvinist Missionaries

List as many, so I want you to take this quiz where you are. List as many five famous five-point Calvinist missionaries as you can. Some people say Calvinists, five-point Calvinists in particular, don't evangelize.

They're hyper-Calvinists. They don't do any kind of missionary work. And friends, I'd like to tell you that the famous missionaries, the very famous ones, to a man were all five-point Calvinists. David Brainerd to the Indians right here in Massachusetts, five-point Calvinist.

Adniram Judson, who left Salem to go overseas to Burma, five-point Calvinist. William Carey to the Indians, five-point Calvinist. Hudson Taylor to China, five-point Calvinist. George Whitefield, in a sense a missionary sent from England to come over here, five-point Calvinist.

Jonathan Edwards was a pastor then went to Stockbridge who became a missionary to the Indians. He was a, any guesses, five-point Calvinist. Now there were some revival people. There are some folks that preach that weren't five-point Calvinist.

D .L. Moody, he wasn't a five-point Calvinist, but I'm talking about the missionaries that you would love to read about in some kind of series on missionaries. Mary Schlester from Scotland sent down to Africa, five-point Calvinist.

And so my point is this. You might say, well, you forgot so-and-so, and what about John Wesley, et cetera, et cetera. Here's my point. Five-point Calvinist, evangelize. Five-point Calvinist, pray.

And if you're afraid of five-point Calvinist, what are you gonna do with somebody like Spurgeon? Are you sure you really like Spurgeon? Type that into Google search. Are you sure you really like Spurgeon?

And then hit Enter, and then get ready for your head to be exploding because you're going to find out that Spurgeon was a Calvinist, and he had actually disparaging things to say about Armenians, things that I won't say, but I'll let Papa Chuck say those things.

When I say Papa Chuck, I almost think of Chuck Swindoll because he wrote that kid's book with Papa Chuck. Number nine, list as many famous zero-point Calvinist missionaries as you can. Feel free to use all the space you need.

That's what I wrote on the little handout. And then I gave the person no room. I just moved number 10 up and gave them no room, no pixel room, no room at all. Use all the space you need because you're not going to find any.

And there are few and far between. Okay, prove me a liar and throw out one, and you found some smaller, less known person in this century or something, okay. I'm just talking about when the modern missionary movement started, who were the zero-point Calvinists?

They weren't the ones, if they were around, they weren't going anywhere. Number 11, are you a Calvinist? Why or why not? If you're listening today, my question to you is, are you a Calvinist? And if you are a Calvinist, you're a Calvinist because of the sovereign grace of God, the same grace of God that saved you.

Open your eyes so that you could understand you contributed nothing to your salvation except sin. You contributed corruption. You contributed a fallen will that was in bondage to sin. That's what you contributed.

And God did all the saving. He did the initiating. He did the atoning. He did the regenerating. And He even gave you faith. Yes, you believed, but you believed not, you weren't saved because of your faith.

You were saved because of God's great love, Ephesians 2 .4. You were saved through faith, a non-meritorious faith, a faith that looked away from self and said, I have nothing in my hands that I bring.

Simply to the cross of Christ, I cling. You were like the person in the Passover where faith put the blood on the doorposts, but it was the bloody sacrifice that saved. The faith didn't save, the bloody sacrifice did.

What was the cause of that redemption, that salvation? It was the blood. You were saved by grace through faith. That not of yourself. And so, if you're not a Calvinist today, we'd love to have you still listen, and we'd love to have you take the class is what we'd love to have you do.

Prayer for Loved Ones and Calvinistic Prayer

Number 12, do you pray for the salvation of your loved ones? If you do pray for the salvation of your loved ones, well, that's a sign that you're a Christian because you want them to be saved from their sins too.

You want them to embrace and honor and glorify Jesus, the God-man, Jesus, the miracle worker, Jesus, the substitutionary atonement for all those who would ever believe, Jesus, the one who has crushed death and has been raised from the dead.

And if you pray for the salvation of your loved ones, I'd also like to say you pray like a Calvinist. How do you pray? We're in the middle of this quiz here on No Compromise Radio with Mike Abendroth, and we are talking about Calvinism, just in general, in the form of a quiz.

That's the outline today, 21 questions. We started with question eight today, and now we're up to 12. Do you pray for the salvation of your loved ones? And if you pray, I think you pray like a Calvinist, and you say something like this.

God save my sister. God save my father. God save my son. God save the person. Don't you say that? And you mean by that, God, the Father, God, the Son, God, the Spirit. Would you do a great work, a sovereign work, a work that you initiate, a work that you do from start to finish, and you're the first and the last, and you're the alpha and the omega, and you're the author and finisher of people's faith, and so would you please author it?

What's it mean to author someone's faith? The author and finisher, and so you do pray like a Calvinist. You don't say, well, Lord, please arrange things in such a way that there's never gonna be kind of like a robot or some kind of puppet, but put together circumstances in such a way that of their own free will with no external influences, no influence from Satan, no influence from the world, no influence from their indwelling sin, no influence from you, but they just freely choose you.

Would you just kind of put those circumstances together? Ah, no, you don't pray like that, do you? I hope you don't, because you can't find prayers like that in the Bible. Maybe you can find prayers like that in Finney's systematic theology.

I can't talk about book burning these days now, can I, with this whole Quran book burning? I will say this, though. When Muslims burn the Bible, I don't see Christians threatening other people. I think it's sad if you burn the Bible, but that's just par for the course.

Practical Implications of Calvinism

Back on track, question number 13. What are the practical implications of Calvinism? Well, the practical implications of Calvinism would be praise and glory and honor, because you didn't contribute to your salvation.

Nothing meritorious. You didn't contribute any wage, you didn't earn anything. God did it alone. He himself saved us, or saved you if you're saved. And as my brother says, when you get to heaven, you're not going to high-five God and say, we did it.

God alone works, monergistic salvation. God alone, not synergistic, not God and you, not just you, not just some kind of Pelagian. You know, I came up with this faith, and then therefore God saved me.

No, you'll give more praise to God if you're a Calvinist than you would if you're an Arminian. Secondly, Calvinists should be humble people, because they should realize how heinous their sins are in light of God's holiness and justice and righteousness, and how difficult it would be to bear the wrath of God forever and eternity.

Yet God, with his steadfast love, his covenant love, his eternal love for his people, sent his Son, and the Son in love went, agreeing with the Father, the Father sending in love, and the Son going in love, to die as a substitutory atonement for those people that God sent him to die for.

And then the Spirit of God regenerates. And so you say, I'm humble. I can't believe it, you know, woe is me. I repent in dust and ashes, combining both Isaiah and Job. It should make you humble. It should also make you, another practical implication, it should make you hopeful.

What's a practical implication of Calvinism? That you'd be hopeful that if you've got a loved one and it's up to them to save themselves, they're dust. They're worse than dust. They're damned. But if God is sovereign, third-class conditional if, since God is sovereign, God is going to save all those that the Father gave him.

The Son is going to rescue all those. One won't be lost, not one. That's the only reason the world hasn't wrapped up itself is because there are some unregenerate elect people out there who don't believe yet.

And God is long-suffering. And you can read 2 Peter 3 about how God's waiting for all these to come. And when they're done, it's over. So what are the practical implications? Many, and you ought to read a book, a little booklet by Al Martin called The Practical Implications of Calvinism.

I think you can type that in Google and get it for free. It's a little banner of truth book. But you can also get it for free, The Practical Implications of Calvinism. And the other book, Lorraine Bettner wrote a book called The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination.

And he has a chapter, I believe it's the last chapter, Implications of Calvinism. Maybe he said practical implications, but nonetheless, that would be very, very helpful. There are practical implications of everything you believe, and the same is true for Calvinism.

Calvinism, Predestination, Election, and the Limits of the Atonement

So, Mike Abendroth, NoCompromiseRadio .com. We are now going through a quiz, a general introductory quiz on Calvinism. Some general thoughts, some notions about Calvinism to wet your whistle, to ask you the question, what is a Calvinist?

What is Calvinism? Am I a Calvinist? Are there Calvinists on WV &E? Oh, God forbid, there might be a Calvinist on WV &E. Well, John MacArthur is a five-point Calvinist. Gulp, he wasn't always, but preaching through 2 Corinthians 5, he then became one.

I heard S. Louis Johnson was in the congregation that day. I don't know if that's true or not, but I heard he was. R .C. Sproul, five-point Calvinist. Alistair Begg, I think five, maybe a four-and-a-half pointer, I'm not sure, but I think a five-point Calvinist.

And so, you've got guys like J. Verna McGee, he's probably a four-point Calvinist. Well, he's in heaven now, so he's a five-point Calvinist. May God richly bless you, my beloved. So, WV &E, I don't think they're against five points of Calvinism.

Where are we in the quiz? Well, in the quiz, we're up to number 14. All Christians believe in predestination. All Christians believe in predestination. The answer is true. The answer is true. You say, well, I don't believe in it.

Well, then you don't believe the Bible, and if you don't believe the Bible, you're not a Christian. You just have a different definition of predestination than the Calvinists, because you believe in it, because Ephesians 1, verse 5, he predestined us to adoption.

In love, he predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to himself, according to the kind intention of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace, which he freely bestowed on us in the beloved.

You believe in predestination. You either believe that God chose you in him before the foundation of the world, or you believe that God saw that you were going to be holy and blameless, and therefore he picked you, more of a post-destination.

But before you were born, your destiny was fixed. Everybody believes in predestination. It just depends on how you define it. Similarly, number 15, question 15, true or false, all Christians believe in election.

All Christians believe in election, God choosing. The answer there is true again. You either believe in conditional election, God picks you and chooses you based on the foreseen faith that you would believe, or he unconditionally chooses you, knowing that you couldn't contribute, Satan certainly wouldn't want to contribute, God alone chooses to save.

And so it says in the text, in Ephesians 1 .4, he chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we would be holy and blameless before him. Not that we were, and then he picked, but he picked us so that we would be that.

So you believe in election. You either believe in a conditional election, conditioned on something that man said or did, or you believe in an unconditional election that God, based on his own will, his own counsel, his own purpose, his own decree, chose.

16, number 16, how you doing so far on the quiz? All Christians limit the atonement. The answer is yes. Every Christian limits the atonement. I'd say you'd limit the atonement by saying Judas is in hell, Goliath is in hell.

Satan's not going to heaven. Doesn't apply to non-people, does it? No, well, that's kind of limiting, isn't it? It doesn't work for everybody because there are some people are in hell. That's limiting.

You're not a universalist, in other words. You limit the atonement's application, don't you? You limit the atonement's application because you say, no, it's just for believers. So you're limiting its application.

And I believe that you should also limit its intention. I believe the intention of God. God the Father chose some, not the all. The Holy Spirit chose to regenerate the same some and not the all. And you mean to tell me in the triune nature of God who co-equal, have the same essence, same mind and will, this same God, one God, the Lord our God is one, that this great God then says, no, the Son will go die for more than the Father has chosen?

Well, that's ridiculous. That's not Trinitarian. So I believe you limit the atonement either in application or by intention. And so all Christians limit the atonement. Christians aren't universalist. If you're a universalist, everybody goes to heaven.

You're not a Christian because Jesus obviously taught about hell. And he taught more about hell than Paul, John, Peter, Stephen, or anybody else. All Christians limit the atonement. Number 17, true or false?

God's sovereignty and man's free will are both true, but hard to reconcile. True or false? Number 17, God's sovereignty and man's free will are both true, but hard to reconcile. False. God's sovereignty and man's responsibility are both true, and they're hard to reconcile.

But since there's no such thing as free will, after the fall, part of the question is false. Therefore, the whole statement, rather, is false. God's sovereignty and man's free will are both true. No, they're not true because man, fallen man does not have a free will.

We are not Pelagian. We are not semi-Pelagian. That's his older brother. We are not Roman Catholic. We do not believe in the freedom of the will like Erasmus, the Roman Catholic scholar. We believe in the bondage of the will.

The will is bound. And we believe that 2 Timothy 2 teaches us that Satan binds the will of the unbeliever. Unbelievers think they're free. Unbelievers think they have free will, yet they're bound to Satan's will.

That's worse than having no will to yourself. That would be bad, but to think you're free when you're enslaved to another is even worse. And Paul says in 2 Timothy 2, verse 24, for the unbeliever to say that they have some kind of free will to choose God or not to choose Him based on their own good purpose and pleasure is a lie.

It's a myth. It's made up. The Lord's bond servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition if perhaps God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth.

Be nice to people and teach them because God might grant them the gift of eternal life. And they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him, the devil, to do his, the devil's will.

Unbelievers do the will of Satan. So how are you free from external forces like Satan if you're doing his will? Answer, you're not free. You've got your fingers in a Chinese finger puzzle is what you've got.

You're in a straitjacket, a satanic straitjacket. Additionally, there's sin that dwells from the inside. Romans chapter six says if you're a sinner, you're a slave to sin. So how free are you if you're a slave?

You know, somebody's on the slave blocks in the first century in Rome, and you say, you know, you're free. No, you're not free, you're a slave. And so if you're a slave, you're not free. How can you be free from internal forces like the fall and sin and dwelling and original sin?

You can't be. You also can't be free from God's holy will because God is God by definition. True or false, God's sovereignty and man's free will are both true but hard to reconcile. False, because it should read God's sovereignty and man's responsibility are both true but hard to reconcile.

It is hard to reconcile the responsibility of man and the sovereignty of God, but both are true, both are plain, both are very patently obvious from Scripture, and we don't need to reconcile them because God never tried to reconcile them.

And we are finite, fallen creatures. How can we understand the infinite nature of God? We can't. And so Spurgeon says, I don't try to reconcile friends. We don't have to reconcile them either. Kuyper said it's like a big pulley that's up in heaven and the two ropes come down, different sides of the same pulley.

The only thing we could see are the two ropes. And if you jump on the one side of the rope without grasping both sides, you're going to slip down. If you grab on the other side of the rope without grabbing the opposite side, you're gonna slip down.

And so you grab onto man's sovereignty alone, you're in trouble. Responsibility alone, you're in trouble. But you grab both and you say both are true. You have a good, firm grip on the teachings of the Bible.

So we didn't get the last few. We are up to number 17. And next time, next week, same bat time, same bat channel and same No Compromise t-shirt. You can order t-shirts, nocompromiseradio .com, $15. Any size, we've got them.

And we'll finish the last few next time. Write us at info at nocompromiseradio .com. What is Calvinism?

Part three coming up next week. 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.