Why Four Gospels

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 it's not supposed to have more than 10 people in a room, and so therefore there's only just me and you.

Just you and me. It reminds me years ago when I had just lost my mother.

She died, I think, 12 years ago now, and it was a slow, painful death and morphine and all that stuff, and I got back home here in Massachusetts.

This is not good lighting here, but that's all right. It gives me some kind of aura. I remember coming back to Massachusetts after my mom died, and someone at our church called me and said, my mother's dying, and I'm here at the assisted living home.

Could you please come and be of support? I called all the elders and said, you know, I could do this, but I don't really want to do this.

I just had to do this with my mom, and it's still pretty fresh and tender, and therefore I would prefer not to, and I could not get a hold of them, the other elders.

So I thought, well, you know, buckle up, and I drove down to the assisted living place, and I walked into the room and saw the son, a 40 -year -old son, kind of up holding down his mother, who was losing her mind, and he had the

Bible. He was reading some of the Psalms to her while he was kind of holding her down with his body weight, half his body weight, and she just kept shouting, it's just you and me.

It's just you and me. It's just you and me, and I just thought, oh, you know, Lord, help me.

What am I going to do? I'm still reeling from my own mother dying and seeing things like that, although not exactly that.

So he looked at me and said, what do I do? And I said, just keep reading the Psalms. So I just tried to encourage him as he read the

Psalms to his mom, as the mom just kind of screamed out, it's just you and me. So I don't know why

I'm telling you that story, but every time I just say, it's just you and me, it's Mike Ebendroth and the two people watching.

By the way, if you're listening on radio, I'm talking to the faces of the people on Facebook because we're just doing a double deal here.

It is Friday, what is it, the 20th? It's about 5 o 'clock

PM, Eastern Standard Time. Right now, we still hope to go to Israel next

February 24th. If you want to write me, Mike, at No Compromise Radio, we will send you the itinerary and we should have, the flight should be pretty cheap, don't you think?

By now, the flight should be super cheap. What is this strange look? I don't know how to keep, this keeps changing with the sun,

I guess. So if you want to write and go there, that would be great. Right now, I'm just here at the church office in my studio to just kind of work through a few things.

I'll be preaching this Sunday via live stream. By the way, if you're watching and you don't attend Bethlehem Bible Church, I guess you can virtually attend this

Sunday, bbcchurch .org. I'll be preaching a very famous passage and I think you'll be encouraged by it.

I have been encouraged as I've studied it this week and then I'll be back to Hebrews March 29th.

March 29th, that's my daughter's turning 21 and what do you do then?

Both Maddie and Gracie, my two kids in Los Angeles at university, they flew home last week and surprised me.

I walked out into the main room there and I saw like a flash that went by, just kind of like somebody running, sliding across the hardwood floors with their socks, kind of like skidding across and I'm like, what is going on?

Who's there? And it was my two daughters. They surprised me and flew home, so I was glad to have them home.

My son, Luke, is still in California, but he's a man and he has his own job and place to live and he's not the college student, so he'll have to Teddy Roosevelt up.

I have just got done recording a show about study Bible articles and the analogy of scripture and the analogy of faith.

If you have not listened to that, you ought to listen. It should be online sometime next week. The good news is, even though I can't be in person with people,

I can still do some radio interviews. Steve Whitmore just probably that one played here and I'm encouraged by that.

Just a couple articles sitting on my desk, I'm just going to kind of ramble a little bit. The first one is, why does the Bible have four gospels?

And Nick Batzig wrote an article and that's probably something you should think about. Why are there four gospels?

There are lots of questions that you can think about. Gospel means good news. It's a proclamation. It's a heralding.

And why would we need four? Of course, in the mind of God, if he determined that one was enough, of course, that would be enough if we had only

Matthew, only Mark, only Luke, only John. And of course, remember my pet peeve is, whenever you talk about a gospel,

I guess I have two pet peeves in particular today. One pet peeve is, we just say the gospel of John, okay,

I know what you mean. I won't correct you in person, but it's the gospel of Jesus Christ according to John, right?

Or according to St. John. It is the gospel of Jesus Christ according to St. Mark. This is good news about God, from God, through a human author.

And of course, each one has, I can't believe it's in the light and ceiling because you're causing the washout.

Well, I'm going to turn off that light right now and see what happens. So let's just, let me lip across the thing and I'm going to come right back over and then see if that is better.

I think that's better, although we're still kind of limping around. I did ride the stationary bike today for 30 minutes with basically no resistance.

So that was kind of good. So Jeremy has just helped. Why four gospels? Oh, my second pet peeve is that when you read a gospel, don't look for yourself.

Don't do the kind of the, where's Waldo approach that Sinclair Ferguson talks about.

It's about Jesus. Now there are some times where you can go, oh, that would be smart for me to do.

Or I see the example of Jesus washing feet, and that's a good example. I see that Jesus gives a direct command, what we call the great commission in Matthew chapter 28.

Okay. That's for me because it's to the disciples and apostles then to me and all that. But typically people just go to the gospels and they see themselves in it versus this is good news about Jesus.

So you believe or you keep believing. So everything that Matthew is going to write is so that you believe. Everything Luke is going to write.

So when he talks about 10 lepers and nine come back, or nine do not come back, they do not thank him, but one does.

We are so twisted on ourselves, curved in on ourselves, as Luther would say.

He would say it better than I would in Deutsch and in German. But we end up saying, you know what this, you better be a thankful person.

No, that has nothing to do with thankfulness as the main point. If you want to make a sub point as a preacher and we ought to be thankful, who'd like to be like that?

Well, that's fine. How do you know that Jesus is the Messiah? By the way, Jeremy, this didn't work.

It's still, it's still everywhere. I'm going to try one more time.

All right. We're going to open this up. You know, Todd Friel never has to do this. Sometimes when people will email me,

I don't want to, I don't want to go back and forth. I can't type that fast. I just say, give me your number. And I call them. And then

I always say, well, Todd Friel never calls people on their cell phones, but I will. We're hard up for listeners.

How do you know the Messiah is going to come? The gospel of Jesus, according to Luke says, among other things, when he heals lepers, you'll know he's the

God man. Therefore, when you study the gospels, make sure you are looking for the main character, the only hero in the

Bible, Jesus. Batzig's article, Why Does the Bible Have Four Gospels? If I were to ask you the question, why do you think the

Bible has four gospels? Let me give you Batzig's answers, and then

I'll kind of wax on them. I'll kind of elaborate a little bit.

Number one, it takes more than one man's record to capture the glory of the infinite Savior.

Isn't that good? Even that, to me, was worth the article. I think, well, why does

God do what he does? I mean, he has reasons for it. There could have been eight gospels. There could have been two.

There could have been one. There could have been none, because we just might have learned about Jesus through Acts and some of the men like Paul and Peter preaching, so we could learn about Jesus through their preaching and records, or we could learn about Jesus through the book of Revelation.

Yet we have four. It says in the article,

Batzig quotes B. B. Warfield, and by the way, all good theologians are known by their first two initials.

That's why I'm changing my name today to M. L. Abendroth. Warfield, no one man could stand above the mountain of grace and write out for us a description of what it is and of all the streams that flow from it to make glad the country spread at its base.

Neither were we to be confined to the view of it that one man from his lower standpoint could obtain.

This would indeed have been an inestimable blessing. What one man illuminated in his spirit by the

Spirit of God could understand of the signs and deeds that Jesus did and directed in his hand by the same

Spirit's inspiration could record of what he saw would be enough to make us believe that Jesus is the

Christ, the Son of God, and to bring us life in his name. Those are long sentences from B.

B. Warfield. Warfield goes on, but this was not at all the Spirit could give, and it is not all that he has given.

He has, as it were, stationed Spirit -led men around the foot of the mountain and bidden them to look and write.

In other words, here's how God has ordained it all, that the Lord Jesus is so fantastic, so wonderful, so great.

You've got to have different men stationed watching him because there's so much glory, and you've got to make sure you get it all recorded.

That's a good truth. And of course, when you look at the Gospels, there are three that are very similar.

Remember, we call that synoptic. You think about the root words, sin and optic.

It's a sin to look. That's so dumb. S -Y -N, you look through, you see together.

They're similar. And then we have, of course, the Gospel of John, which is kind of a different gospel, but a wonderful one at that.

Number two, what does Batshig say? The Gospels are suited to different audiences. Okay, that's the one you probably know.

That's the one that would probably be my reflex if somebody said, why are there four different Gospels? Well, he's writing for different purposes,

I would say, and there are different audiences. And so the first one is good.

The second one is good. I would miss the first one that Batshig said. His first wouldn't be my first, but now since his first is better than my first,

I'm switching to his first instead of my first. So my first is his second. I decided to stock up on some protein drinks because you never know if you have to live off these things.

And since they don't have other things at Costco, I decided I would stock up on these. I did just say there's a new

Richard Baxter volume out, and then I said something on Twitter about Costco now has toilet paper, but people don't get the no -co -humor.

But you know how that works. Number two, the Gospels are suited to different audiences. Okay, now think about this for a second.

Matthew, that is the first book placed in the New Testament canon, right?

So you follow Malachi to Matthew, and wouldn't it not make sense for Matthew to have the most

Old Testament quotes? Now, of course, Mark and Luke and John allude to and quote the

Old Testament. I'm not saying they don't, but the one that is populated with the most Old Testament quotes is the one that's up front closest to the end of the

Old Testament, which begins the New Testament, the book of Matthew, because he's trying to tell the Jewish people this is, in fact, the

Messiah. Now, when you talk about Jesus the servant, there's not a big genealogy in Mark, because servants don't really have genealogies.

You look at John, there's not a human genealogy, because the genealogy in John is a divine genealogy.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. That's the divine genealogy.

So, everyone starts out differently, because there are different audiences. Luke starts off with a technical, detailed account of why the writer is writing, and you think of doctors, physicians, how detailed, precise, and skilled they are.

Well, it should not shock us, then, Luke the physician is going to write out in such a way that it's very clean and clear.

Let me just read to you Luke chapter 1, verses 1, 2, and 3, and it makes it very simple, as I think of Luke's introduction to the gospel.

All right, here it is. Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, talking about who

Jesus is, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the

Word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, Luke the physician, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time in the past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent

Theophilus. I'm going to write to you Gentiles so you understand. Why? That you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.

You've already been taught these things, but you want to have a backup? You want to have the Word to firmly fix and adhere to?

That's why we're going to write it. So, not only do you need more than one to show the glories of Christ, but number two,

Batsik said, the gospels are suited to different audiences. Now, I just looked at the top.

I don't know what he exactly said, but I don't have to quote it in any way.

Let's see, does he have a good quote? John Calvin, as all of them had the same object in view, to point out

Christ, the three former exhibit his body, if we may be permitted to use the expression, but John exhibits his soul.

Now, there's a long quote there. I put that in there. If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't have read that quote. He was talking about what the synoptics were and why

John was different. That's all. Number three, Nick Batsik.

Why four gospels? Number three, the gospels. You're not going to anticipate this one.

I didn't either, but I'm really glad I read it because I want it locked in here now, which is getting harder to do.

My memory is shot. I turned 60 in two months. My memory is shot. The gospels form a trustworthy witness.

Okay, I like that. Old Testament, Deuteronomy, how many witnesses do you need?

Two or what? Two or three witnesses. So, now we have four witnesses.

Batsik, if only one man had written a record of the earthly ministry of Jesus, it might have been called into question as being suspect.

Just as scriptures everywhere stress the importance of every word being established on the mouth of two or three witnesses.

Deuteronomy 17, Matthew 18, 1 Corinthians 14, 2 Corinthians 13, 1

Timothy 5, Hebrews 10. So, our God, Nick writes, has supplied us with ample witness to the details about the life and ministry of Christ through the fourfold witness of the evangelist.

This is no insignificant observation. When Jesus was questioned by the

Jews of his day concerning the veracity of his messiahship, he pointed to a fourfold witness.

That is really, really insightful, and I'm glad for that. Why four Gospels? For lots of reasons.

One is because we have multiple witnesses to this same account, the person and work of the

Lord Jesus. And even in the Gospel of John, Batsik was hinting that you've got not just Jesus saying, you know what, this is who

I am and what I've done, but John the Baptist, the Father's works through Christ, the

Holy Spirit, the Old Testament, all witness to the person and work of Christ.

Batsik, while there is no doubt more rationale for why our God has given us four Gospel records of Christ, the three reasons we have considered suffice to show the divine purpose and wisdom in giving us the fullest picture that he wishes to have for our faith in the person and saving work of Jesus.

Well, what's the point, dear listener, dear viewer? I would like you to just read your

Gospels. Read the Gospels. Now, lots of times when we're around an unbeliever, we'll say, oh, you should read the

Gospel of... Most people say, John, it's a fine Gospel to read. Why would I say no to that?

I usually tell people to read Mark, though. And I tell them, just read Mark and watch what Jesus says and what he does.

And you'll start saying to yourself, there's nobody like Jesus. He doesn't talk. Nobody talks that way. Nobody does those things.

He is a unique man. As a matter of fact, he's the God -man, right?

He is God in the flesh, Emmanuel, God with us. But for the

Christian, I think we, you, also ought to read the Gospels regularly. It's easy to read a proverb in the morning.

Some Psalms, some of the Epistles, tells you what to do in the Epistles. That's fine. But I'd like you, the

Christian, to regularly read the Gospels. If I'm reading something in the book of Hebrews, which is technically the fifth

Gospel in my mind, since it's all about Jesus, I still, when I'm getting ready and dressed in the morning, making the bed and stuff like that, getting ready for the day,

I'll put on my Bible app in the background and have the Gospels on. I've been listening to John 7, 8, 9, and 10 over and over and over just to try to get that embedded in my mind, and Jesus, I'm the light of the world, and the man born blind, and then the good shepherd, and pretty soon you go, oh, chapter 9, the man born blind, everybody's after him, his parents, the

Jewish leaders, that sheep is going to be lost. Chapter 10, no, he's not, because Jesus is a good shepherd, and Jesus is a good shepherd who will not lose that man born blind, because that man born blind is one of his sheep.

And so it's good for us, too, as Christians, right, to read the Gospels. The other thing that I want you to do, whenever you're teaching through one of the epistles, sometime in your sermon, or your home group, or your

Bible study, or if you're a dad or mom teaching your kids, go to the Gospels and then show the personal work of Jesus there.

I don't have to jam Jesus in to some imperative, but I can show you why you should obey when

I'm preaching through an epistle and I take people through a Gospel. Additionally, when I'm in the Gospels and I'm preaching the

Gospels, and I'd like for the people to do something, instead of saying, what would Jesus do, you do it, I would say, well,

Jesus also went on to tell people what to do in light of who he is and what he's done for them, and here's some of the commands.

So it helps me balance out Gospel and law, because when you think of the Gospels, of course,

Jesus gives some commands in those for certain people, sometimes not for us at all in any way, shape, or form, but to particular people like Peter.

But in general, the Gospels are good news, and so we would say they're Gospels.

The Gospels are Gospel. I'm not surprised, the first book of the

Bible that was written was James, full of law. 104 verses, 52 imperatives, not much about Jesus.

Some in chapter 2, but not his death and burial and resurrection, soon return, but his glory, that's certainly important.

But why do you think that is? Why is James so full of imperatives and not much about Jesus? Is it a right -straw -y epistle, as Luther would say?

Should it not be in the canon at all, because it doesn't have the indicatives and the Gospel account of who

Jesus is, his person, his work, the triune nature of God, God the Father, God the

Son, God the Spirit? What's going on in the book of James? Well, friends, while the Gospels had not been written, they were written after James, they had occurred.

Everything in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had occurred before James wrote, and so the people had understood.

And even when we come to Luke chapter 1, verses 1 through 4, this orderly account, they knew about the orderly account.

They knew what happened. Let's say you say, well, it wasn't that orderly, but they still knew what Jesus said, did, taught, healed, walked on water, was raised from the dead, said he's going to come back, he ascended into heaven.

They knew all that. Well, so what's the first thing you tell people to do? Well, here's law in light of that.

Since God has done this, since God has taken care of your guilt, because of his grace, you respond by obeying with gratitude.

You want motivation for obedience? It's found in the Gospels. That's the great thing. Law can't give you anything except good job, bad job.

It can give you no motivation. Law is law. It's good. It's holy. It's right, but it's not the motivator.

And that's why I think you'll see when the book of Romans lays out guilt, grace, gratitude,

Heidelberg Catechism has the same format. What's the motivation for obedience? What's the motivation for law?

Well, it's Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It's who Jesus is. And of course, you can see Jesus in Isaiah.

You can see Jesus walking in the garden in Genesis chapter 3, right? In the cool of the day, that day, the judgment day, the spirit of the day.

It was judgment day for them, Adam and Eve. You can see him everywhere in the Old Testament. I don't mean every verse, but I'm just saying he's there in the

Old Testament. You don't have to look very far to see Joshua 5 and the captain of salvation.

You don't have to look very far to see that Jacob was wrestling with a pre -incarnate theophany, and that is the

Lord Jesus. Anyway, my name is Mike Abendroth, and I'm just thinking about Gospels today.

So therefore, what are the motivations in life? Well, the motivations in life are who Jesus is and what he's done.

Where can you find that? In your bosom? In the clouds? No, we go to the

Gospels. And there are four Gospels because there are different focuses, different audiences.

You have to have four people to record the glories of who Jesus is. You can understand that there's multi -witnesses to make sure that everything is credible.

And therefore, you should read the Gospels. As Wendy just said on Facebook, we obey God because of his great love for us.

That's right. But deep down inside of us, we still have that legal temper, like that one son.

You know what? I do these things, and then you'll be kind to me.

But that's not right. God has done those things because he is kind to us, and we respond with gratitude, obedience, with contentment, with thankfulness, with a heart that wants to honor

God with our holy lives. But that has to be the order. So, I have some good news for you. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Enjoy those as they focus on who Jesus is. And if you only study epistles, you only study

Proverbs, you only study Old Testament accounts, may I just add a little bit of flavor to your life that is

Jesus Christ incarnate in the Gospels? 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.