Jan. 12, 2016 Show with Daniel R. Hyde on “GOD IN OUR MIDST: The Tabernacle & Our Relationship With God” & Steve Visconti on “Why the Gospel Compelled Me to Leave the Roman Catholic Church”

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This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 12th day of January 2016.

First let me start off the program with a prayer request. You haven't heard me live often since the new year and there have been not only reasons for that due to vacation and also family members in the hospital and so on, but also we had some technical difficulties.

Thanks be to God for my friend Joe Ignacio who did some studio wizardry in here and cleared up the technical difficulties and hopefully forever.

But I haven't had a chance to inform you all over the air anyway about the sad news that my webmaster,

Jason Delgado, reported to me that his five -year -old adopted son,

Anton, who he adopted from Russia, passed away from a life -threatening skin disease that he had and that he battled with and ultimately that ultimately did take his life.

But Jason is a strong believer in the sovereignty of God. He knows that this was a part of God's ordained design for Anton.

So I just ask of you to now pray for Jason and his wife and family as they grieve the loss of this precious boy,

Anton, and pray that Jason is used mightily of God in all things that he leads

Jason to do with his talents and gifts. And pray for Iron Trip and Xyron as we now search for a new webmaster to help us continue running smoothly along for the glory of God and all we do here on this broadcast.

And today we have two guests. Our first guest today is

Daniel Hyde. Some of you may remember Danny Hyde from a previous broadcast we did on the old

Iron Trip and Xyron program, basically giving the outline of what a

Reformed church is. And he is pastor of Oceanside United Reformed Church in Oceanside, California.

Today we're going to be discussing one of his books titled, God in Our Midst, the

Tabernacle and Our Relationship with God. Our second hour we're going to have Steve Visconti, who is not only a member of a church out on Long Island, New York that sponsors

Iron Sharpens Iron, Waiting River Baptist Church on Long Island, New York, who strongly adhere to the doctrines of God's sovereign grace.

But Steve Visconti is also a sponsor of this broadcast as well through one of the businesses he owns.

And he is a columnist for the Narrow Pathway, an Eastern Long Island community journal, which is a secular newspaper.

So it's a very valuable opportunity that Steve has to spread the gospel in a secular newspaper in a very liberal area of the

United States. Eastern Long Island is a very liberal area and very few evangelical witnesses for the gospel of Jesus Christ out in that area.

There are very few biblically sound churches in Eastern Suffolk County. So it's even more a valuable opportunity that he has through this

Narrow Pathway column and he's discussing today why the gospel compelled him to leave the

Roman Catholic Church. That's the second hour with Steve Visconti. But first of all, let me welcome back to Iron Sharpens Iron and welcome for the first time to the all new

Iron Sharpens Iron, Pastor Danny Hyde. Hey Chris, thanks for having me.

It's great to have you on. And before we go into our topic today, God in our midst, the tabernacle in our relationship with God, let our listeners know something about the

Oceanside United Reformed Church and also the denomination that you're a part of, the United Reformed Church of North America.

Sure. Well, the Oceanside URC, we started in 2000 here in coastal

North County of San Diego, where lots of churches, lots of mega churches, in fact, and small churches, but no self -consciously defined

Reformed Church. And so we started 16 years ago in order to bring the fullness of grace and the full counsel of God, we believe, to our area.

And so we've been doing that for quite a while now and teach the Word and preach the

Word, teach the doctrines of the faith, worship God reverently, and try to express that to the world through various means of outreach and evangelism.

And our foundation is United Reformed Churches and very conservative and confessional, so we follow the

Hatterberg Catechism as one of our confessions, and the Canada Dork, where the five points of Calvinism originate.

So those are our main documents, our main doctrines, and try to do that. And we have missionaries across the world, and even though we're a small little group of churches, try to bring the good news to the dying world.

Amen. And the United Reformed Church came into being, did it not? Perhaps I'm wrong on this, but I believe it came into being when the much larger denomination, older denomination, the

Christian Reformed Church, began to become overcome by liberalism, am I correct on that?

That's right, that's right, yeah. And that was a long history, sort of a long downgrade, and eventually the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak, was the opening up the office of elder to women.

So that was the issue that led to the formation of our denomination back in 1985,

I believe it was. And I do believe there are still a handful, at least, of faithful men in the

CRC, but I'm glad that the URCNA was established, and I really am delighted that I know a number of the pastors serving that denomination who are fine brothers in Christ and good friends.

So this book that you have written, God in Our Midst, first of all, what inspired you to write this book?

Well, I had actually preached through the books of Genesis and Exodus, and while I was going through the book of Exodus, there are lots of fine commentaries and works throughout

Church history that deal with Exodus, but I found in my own study that there wasn't a lot of solid material on the actual tabernacle story itself.

You know, for example, a lot of commentaries do a really good job of verse -by -verse, chapter -by -chapter, exegesis, exposition, through Exodus, say, 23, 24, and then you get to 25, the verse of the end, and then all of a sudden there's sort of one big chapter that deals with that entire last 15 chapters and one chapter of commentary.

So when I was preaching through it, I wasn't finding a lot of help out there. I just was reading through the

Scripture myself and piecing together things that I had learned from seminary and books and so forth here and there, and so when

I had finished preaching through that, I just thought it might be a helpful little exercise to kind of formulate my thoughts, take some of those sermons and material from them and adapt them and craft them into a book form to help the average believer who tries to read through their

Bible on an annual basis. You know, here we are in the beginning of the year and people try to do that, but a lot of times you get bogged down in these lengthy narratives that are very long, they're very repetitive, they don't seem very practical, very helpful, so a lot of believers just sort of skip over these sections and don't really derive much meaning and theology and practical application from that.

So that was the big idea, was to provide Christians with some sort of a way to read through the narrative of the tabernacle in a beneficial, helpful way.

And I have learned that I should not take it for granted that all of my listeners are

Christian or that they have been Christian long enough to be thoroughly knowledgeable of the scriptures.

Some of our listeners may only recognize the word tabernacle from the

Mormon Tabernacle Choir because they're on the television and radio so often during the

Christmas holidays especially, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir being, of course, a part of a major cult in the

United States. But what do you mean by the tabernacle? Yeah, great question.

So in the history of Israel, as God delivered Israel out of Egypt when he brought them out into the wilderness of what is today

Arabia, he commanded

Moses and the Israelites to build a tent, not just a tent for themselves to camp in, but to build a large tent called a tabernacle.

That's what a tabernacle is, it's a large tent where God would visibly reveal himself as dwelling among his people.

So it was a temporary way, a very tangible way, a visual way for the Israelites to see that the

God that Moses was proclaiming had delivered them, that he actually was there. And so he was there in the form of a cloud that would overshadow the tabernacle and there was a bright light that they would see inside the

Holy of Holies, which was the innermost room, the sacred room where God's glory dwelt.

So in the history of Israel, this was a temporary way for Israel to see

God, and eventually that tabernacle, that tent, became obsolete when

God commanded Solomon to build a temple in Jerusalem.

And that very permanent structure of the temple then became the dwelling place of God. And that temple, was it not destroyed in AD 70?

That's right, yeah, AD 70, destroyed for the final time, destroyed before hundreds of years before Jesus Christ even lived on earth, destroyed in ancient

Israel, and then it was rebuilt somewhat, and then finally destroyed again by the Romans in 70 AD.

Mm -hmm. And therefore the Jews today, or ever since then, they really have no sacrifice to claim for their atonement, do they?

That's right. Yeah, but some of the interesting parts about Judaism since is the

Torah, the Old Testament, the law of the Israelites commands sacrifice, it commands offering, it commands a priesthood, it commands a whole litany of rules and regulations about, you know, who can touch certain things and who can't, and who can approach and who can't, but that doesn't exist.

And so when I was in college, in fact, when I was doubting my own personal faith and, you know, trying to figure out what

I believed and why I believed it, I would meet with a rabbi of a local

Reform Judaism synagogue, so the more liberal wing of Judaism, and that was one of the questions that I had asked him was, well, how does

Judaism follow the Torah? How do you follow the law of God if there is no place where you can sacrifice?

And so I personally never received an answer that I thought was satisfactory to that. So yeah, the

Temple was destroyed and there's no more place for Jews to sacrifice. And by the way,

I want to announce our email address in the event that any of our listeners want to join us on the air as well with a question of your own for Pastor Danny Hyde on God in our midst.

You may also ask a general question on Reform theology or other doctrinal issue or biblical question.

Our email address is chrizarnsen at gmail .com, that's C -H -R -I -S

A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. And please include at least your first name and include the city and state where you reside and the country where you reside if you live outside of the

United States. That's chrizarnsen at gmail .com. And please only remain anonymous if you have a pastoral question about a personal and private matter that you do not believe would be wise to identify who you are if you're asking

Danny. But if it's not in regard to a personal matter, please give us at least your first name and city and state.

I understand that this book is largely based on Ephesians 2 .22

and in him you two are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by His Spirit.

Well, yeah, that's one of the main New Testament texts that we as believers can look to to help us understand the

Old Testament and how God revealed Himself, first of all, in the tent, tabernacle, then later in the temple, and then here we are as believers in Jesus Christ, claiming that He's the

Messiah, He's the anointed and promised Savior, but we don't have a temple, at least a physical temple.

So how does the New Testament understand Old Testament religion and how have things changed and been transformed in Christ?

So that is really a foundational text for us to look to to get our bearings, so to speak, for reading our

Old Testament. Yeah, well, let's start with some of those key places in the

Old Testament that a lot of people are completely ignoring the

Old Testament these days. They believe that it's really just a helpful tool to understanding history or something, but there are some

Christians who rarely dwell in it unless they're perhaps they're trying to talk about some eschatological view that they may have.

Yeah, yeah. But let's start with God in the tent then and we'll move on to the other key places after that.

Tell us something about that. Sure, yeah. Well, God obviously is a spirit and invisible,

He's unchangeable, He's almighty, maker of the heavens and the earth. This God has revealed

Himself throughout history and He's spoken to people,

He has revealed Himself through visions and through prophets and all sorts of means, which eventually these begin to be written down and codified into what becomes the

Old Testament. This God also reveals Himself in other ways. For example, in the

Old Testament tabernacle, He commands Moses to construct a very large tent of certain kinds of materials.

There's wood, there are cloths of different colors, there's gold, there's silver, there are all kinds of embroidered materials that are used.

And all this is to show the Israelites, as I said earlier, that not only does He dwell amongst them in a tent next to them in their tents, which is really a touching picture about who

God is, and that He comes down to our level, but also with the colors of the cloth and the kinds of gold and the fine gold and silver to show something of an earthly picture of glory to reflect to Israel the infinite glory of Almighty God.

You know, something's interesting about, this just came into my head when you were describing this, there's something interesting about how many today who profess to be

Christian very voraciously reject the doctrines of sovereign grace that you and I believe, nicknamed

Calvinism or Reformed theology or doctrines of sovereign grace. And it's ironic how these same

Christians are fully aware that in the Bible that God has a unique relationship with a certain chosen people that He did not have with any of the other pagan nations, which actually is where the

Yiddish word goyim comes from, the nations. And it's also even doubly fascinating to me and puzzling to me that many of the

Messianic Jewish ministries seem to fully embrace that unique relationship that God had with the people of Israel to the exclusion of all others, and yet somehow totally throw that out the window when it comes to the

New Covenant. But if you could just comment on that. Yeah, yeah, it's always one of those things where trying to talk to people about, you know, what is this

Reformed thing and what do I actually believe, and try to describe to them, you know, what we would call theological terms, unconditional election or predestination, as the

Bible describes it. But how do you describe that in a tangible way that makes sense? And you see it in the

Revelation of God in the Old Testament, where you have, for example, with Noah, and God chooses

Noah. Noah has three sons, Shem, Ham, and Daphis, and of those three sons, he chooses

Shem and Shem's family line to be the line through which

God is going to work His promise and work His grace. And you get a house of Terah, and from this one house of Terah, there's a son,

Abram, or Abraham, and God chooses him out of that house to leave where he lived in modern -day

Iraq, Babylon, and to come across the ancient world to go into what is today

Israel, the promised land. And you see this whole idea of God is the one who chooses.

God is the one who saves. And there's

Israel, as Moses tells the Israelites in Deuteronomy 7, a very small little group of people that are living in Egypt.

They become a vast number of people, but yet still smaller than the nations around them. And the

Lord tells them in Deuteronomy 7 that it wasn't because they were greater, wasn't because they were more numerous, that He chose them.

But what's the reason that He tells them He chose them? He chose them because He loved them. It's God's grace,

His love, His own choice to choose this one particular family and this one particular line, this one particular what becomes a nation.

And then out of that one nation, He chooses, in the very same idea,

He chooses one woman, Mary, through her is born the

Son of God and human flesh, Jesus Christ, so that all the earth, all the nations, will be blessed.

And so God's...the way that God has always worked is that He's chosen a particular person to bless everyone.

And it wasn't like Mary was... Mary didn't create the Son of God in her womb.

She didn't, you know, desire it so much. She didn't just grab hold of Him, so to speak, out of her own, you know, free will or her own power to make it happen.

She's chosen by God, and God uses these lowly people and these solitary people to bring grace and salvation to the end of the earth.

So yeah, that's really the big idea of the Christian faith is that God is a

Savior, a saving God, who chooses sinners who don't deserve it, who aren't desirous of it, but that is of God.

And if we could move on now to God in the tabernacle. Sure. Yeah, and God wanting not just to show

His glory, you know, in the curtains and the colors and so forth, but it's

God who commands Moses to build this tent. He commands Moses the kinds of clothing that the priests are to wear.

God determines, you know, when the sacrifice is to be made, what is the right sacrifice, the right kind of an animal, the times in which these sacrifices are made, and so forth.

So the entire apparatus of Old Testament religion was determined by God to show

Israel God's holiness and His glory and His majesty, which would humble them in awe, but also

God wanting to show His grace by providing a sacrifice for them. And you see that in all the various rites and rituals of that tabernacle.

So that's kind of the big idea. There's a lot of different particularities of the tabernacle, the furniture, the clothing, and the animals, and so forth, but that's the big idea is that it shows us the holiness of God, and it also shows us the grace of God, you know, providing a sacrifice in a way for us to have fellowship with Him.

Yeah, that's another thing that is of interest to me, why there would be any

Jewish Christians, Jewish individuals who follow

Christ who would reject the doctrines of sovereign grace in regards to limited atonement, which is also called a particular redemption and substitutionary atonement, and particular redemption and definite atonement.

The fact that these sacrifices in the

Old Covenant had no blessing connected to them to those outside of Israel.

So it seems odd to me that there would be believers who fully recognize that, not just Jewish believers, but Gentile believers.

But then when it comes to Reformed theology, they reject the notion that God's sacrifice,

His ultimate sacrifice, His atoning sacrifice on Calvary, with the true

Lamb of God dying for the sins of His people, the once and for all sacrifice.

Why would it be such a tragedy or travesty in their minds that this was done on behalf of His people and them alone?

Well, it sounds like you have a book there. Well, doesn't that seem quite to be a paradox there?

Yeah, I mean, that's one of those things where the more, you know, from our sort of side of the fence, if you will, you know, people are listening possibly, and you know,

I will listen online, and you know, when it comes to those Reformed or Calvinistic or whatnot, but you know, from our side of the fence, you know, when you read even back to the

Old Testament, that same idea exists where you have Israel separated out from the nations, and there are very clear rules and regulations about what that looks like.

You know, you have, say, with Abraham in the early parts of the story in Genesis, where God commands

Abraham to circumcise himself and circumcise his sons, and also all the servants in his household and his entire household, and anyone who does not circumcise the males, they're considered to be unclean.

They're considered to be outside of the covenant. And the same thing with Israel. They're in the wilderness, and they're traveling around, and everyone outside of that camp is considered unclean and unholy, unfit to enter

God's presence. And inside, there's sacrifices being offered on behalf of the people. You have the

Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, the day where once a year when there's a great sacrifice that's offered for the sins of people, where you have the high priest, he lays his hand on the head of the one goat, confesses sins.

You're transferring, as it were, imputing those sins to that goat that's sacrificed.

And there's a second goat, that's the one that's sent out into the wilderness to send away their sins. So the whole idea of God's care for his particular people, we know that he cares about the world, he made it, but there's a particular care, and there's a specific redemptive love, a saving grace that he has, not in a general sense, but in a very particular sense, for his people

Israel. And like you said, when Jesus comes, and he's that final Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world, and, you know, we have to understand what that word world means and so forth, but the big idea is that it's

God providing sacrifice, God providing atonement and a propitiation, a turning away of wrath for people, for the particular people that he came for.

As Jesus himself says, he came, that the Father had given him a people, and he came for those people, and he prays for them, as John 15 says, and not for the world.

So we see these things traced throughout the scripture, you know, the

Old Testament itself even shows it in the tabernacle with a sacrifice. We're going to be moving on to the temple after our break right now, and we do have a couple of listeners already waiting to have their questions answered, but we have to go to a break.

If you'd like to join us on the air as well, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com, and don't go away, we're going to be right back after these messages.

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Or visit LindbrookBaptist .org. That's LindbrookBaptist .org. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen.

If you just tuned us in, our guest today is Daniel R. Hyde, and we are discussing his book,

God in Our Midst. And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question about this book that involves discussion on the tabernacle from the old covenant, and if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. And please include at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. And those are for questions on God in Our Midst, the tabernacle, and our relationship with God.

Before we go on to some of the listener questions, let's move on to God in the Temple. Sure.

Similar ideas. The Temple, though, the main difference about the

Temple as compared to the tabernacle would be that it's more permanent, and so it's bigger, obviously, than the tabernacle, but the same idea, priests, sacrifices, the same kind of furniture, the materials are obviously of a higher quality.

It's a larger building, but it's a more permanent structure. But even that, it's never meant to be an enduring building on the face of the earth, and so this is where, you know, at least me speaking personally, this is where modern, you know, broadly speaking

Christian evangelical end times teaching, I would come up against that pretty harshly.

That the Temple was never meant to be continuing, and then when it was destroyed, you know, we shouldn't be spending our money to Israel to rebuild the

Temple. Even if the Temple is rebuilt, and let's say the Israelites, the

Jews of today can figure out through DNA who the line of Levi is, and the priesthood and so forth, and they can find red heifers, and they can find the right kind of utensils and so forth, they're offering animals.

They're offering temporary sacrifices. They're offering pipes, as the

Book of Hebrews is called, and these are pipes. These are shadows of the eternal reality that is

Jesus Christ. So even if all the things that the Old Testament describes could be replicated today in a modern context, from where I sit, it would be futile.

It would be a waste of time. These animals can't make it home for even one cent. And beyond that, wouldn't you say that it's also blasphemous if Christians, those who are worshiping

Christ the Messiah in a future Temple, are offering blood sacrifices? I have been told by some who have that view that they believe that it's going to be like a new version of the

Lord's Supper, but I still have a hard time thinking that that would not be an offense to God.

Yeah, and there are prophetic passages in the Old Testament that describe a new

Temple with sacrifices for atonement, and so your typical person who's reading those texts, they're seeing those as of a future time to come in which there'll be a rebuilt

Temple, and so if you're going to take them in that sense, if you're going to read that literalistically, then you have to say that they are for sacrifices.

They're not just for remembrance, they're not just, you know, for Supper, not just to remember the one sacrifice of Jesus.

No, if you're going to read the Bible that way, you better read it literalistically every way, in every way, whereas, you know, we would look at those texts and say, well, these are pointing forward in Old Testament terms, pointing forward to the coming of Jesus Christ and the glory of that latter

Temple that far exceeds the former. It's not an earthly Temple. This is why

John says that we've seen His glory, the glory of the only Son in John's Gospel, chapter 1, that the eternal

Word of God, the eternal Word, the Son of God, He makes

His dwelling amongst us, and that word there for dwelling is the word that's used in the New Testament to define the

Old Testament term for tabernacling, to dwell, but Jesus Christ is the new Temple. He is the new tabernacle.

He is the dwelling place of God, and so, you know, we look to Him as a place where we worship.

He is the one, the sacrifice. He is the priest. He is the day of atonement for us, and so, yes, for a believer in Jesus Christ to say that we should offer, or that there should be offered more sacrifices, the book of Hebrews warns against that.

The book of Hebrews tells us that the person who returns to the shadow of the Old Testament Temple system, that they are crucifying for themselves the

Son of God all over again, and they are profaning the blood of the covenant, because Christ has been once and for all offered.

So, yeah, I would agree with you, that is, at minimum, it borders our blasphemy,

I would say it is. You're taking God's name in vain, that you're saying that Christ didn't actually do what

He said He did. We have a listener from Lindenhurst, Long Island, CJ, who wants to know, did the sacrifices of animals in the

Old Covenant have any real benefit other than the fact that they were acts of obedience?

So, did they have any real benefit except for, what was that last line? Other than the fact that they were acts of obedience.

Oh, okay, okay. Well, I mean, yeah, there's obviously that, but the benefit is not in the sacrifice itself.

This is what Hebrews says, that the blood of golden goats, the sprinkling, and so forth, cannot take away even a single sin.

So then that's where the question is, well, then what benefit? Well, the benefit is never just the animal, the priest, the temple.

The benefit is that they point forward to the coming final sacrifice, the final offering, which by faith, an

Old Testament believer who believes that this sacrifice is God's provision for me, not just now, but there's going to be a final pouring out of blood.

By faith, that person is receiving the benefits of Jesus Christ way before He comes.

So, yes, there is a benefit. There's a definite saving efficacy, as older theologians would describe it.

There's a saving efficacy, a power, and a strength to those sacrifices.

But again, we've got to keep that in mind in the book of Hebrews, the distinction between a shadowy figure and the reality.

Jesus Christ is the reality. The sacrifice of the Old Testament are shadows, but they're shadows of a real thing.

So it's not the shadow itself that is saving, it's the real thing, Christ. We have

Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, that asks, was there just one temple that all

Jews needed to perform these sacrifices at? What if a

Jew lived too far away to ever participate in these ceremonies at this temple?

Yeah, well, the answer is yes. God says in the book of Deuteronomy, for example, that He would place

His name in a certain location. I believe that's in Deuteronomy chapter 12, that when

He went into the land of promise, God would put His name somewhere, and that one place

His name was, that becomes the place of the temple building. And the law required of all male

Israelites, 20 years old and above, that they had to pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to the place where God put

His name, three times a year. If a believer is too far away to do that while the temple is still standing, they're being disobedient to God's law.

And let's move on to now God dwelling with us in the

New Covenant. Yes, He does. Yeah, that's one of the things

I try to bring out in the book, that the New Testament describes not only

Jesus as the final temple, He's the final dwelling of God, because He is

God in human flesh. But the New Testament describes the church, the body of Jesus Christ in this world as the temple as well.

So we are united to Christ, so He's the head, we're the body, so using that kind of an image, if He is the temple, so to speak, and we are joined to Him as the body to a head, then therefore we too are a temple.

So I try to draw that out in the book, using texts like Ephesians 2 and Corinthians, for example, there's several passages in 1 and 2

Corinthians that describe the Christian church as an assembled body, as a spiritual dwelling place.

So you mentioned earlier from Ephesians 2 where Paul does say that Jews and Gentiles who are gathered together in Christ have become a dwelling place of God, of the

Spirit. Then you also have texts that describe the individual believer as a temple of the

Holy Spirit. So does God dwell with us now?

Does God dwell on earth? The answer is yes, He dwells on earth. How? Well, He dwells in the midst of His people as they assemble together in the

Lord Jesus Christ's name. He also dwells in and with His people when they live detached in their daily lives, when they're not in the church or with the church, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

But when we live our lives individually or as families or couples, you know, apart from the assembly, we still have the promise that God is with us and that He dwells in our hearts by faith.

And we connect, we are connected to that presence of God by the means of His Word and the

Holy Spirit and our faith. You know, we gather together to hear the Word preached, we receive our supper, which is a visible expression of that fellowship with God in this life.

And even when we're detached from that assembly, we still are connected through the body, through the temple, by faith, through the

Word, through the Holy Spirit, through prayer. Now, isn't there a unique way, even though Christ is with us always, if we are a true child of God, isn't there also, though, a very unique way where He is present among us when we are at the

Lord's table? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's, as the Lord Himself says, this is the means, or He described it as saying that He, at the

Last Supper, that He wouldn't partake of the vine until He comes again in His Kingdom.

So this is, for us, the tangible way, most tangibly, you know, most sort of intensely, that we, as we join together as bodies of believers, whether two or three or two or three thousand, this is the means that He's given to us to communicate with us.

And so we talk about communion, right? Paul talks about it in 1 Corinthians 10, that the bread that we break, the cup that we bless, art is not a fellowship and a participation and a communion with the body and the blood of the

Lord Jesus Christ. And so we do believe that in the Lord's Supper, this is the most expressive way and a tangible way for us to experience that presence.

And that's why, you know, that's why I would argue, and I would argue in a good sense, I would explain to people and try to get pastors and members of churches to think more deeply about how often we have a

Lord's Supper, and how we prepare our hearts, our minds to receive that Lord's Supper together as individuals, but also as an entire body.

How can we get ready for that? Knowing what it is, knowing that it is a true fellowship, a real presence of Christ, you can have to call it.

Now, would you agree with me, since our next guest is going to be discussing his conversion out of Roman Catholicism, would you agree that the

Roman Catholic Church has twisted that truth into making it an idolatrous ceremony where the actual elements of bread and wine are worshipped, are actually worshipped?

That's right. Because they believe that is God. Yep, yep. Yeah, in our congregation, as I mentioned earlier, the congregation that we belong to, we confess to believe the

Bible, and we have what's called the Heidelberg Catechism, was written 452 years ago,

I believe, or 453 years ago this month, and this expresses historic

Protestant theology. And in that Heidelberg Catechism, a person can go online and find it for free, and just find question number 80.

Question 80 is a question that asks, what is the difference between the Lord's Supper and the Roman Catholic Mass?

And the difference is that we believe that the bread and wine remain bread and wine, and whereas in the

Roman Catholic Mass, they believe that these are transformed into the actual body and blood.

And like you said, if Christ is actually tangibly there on that table or that altar, as they would describe it, in that, or He is that bread and wine.

He's no longer bread and wine. He is there. That is His body and blood, according to them. You would have to worship that, wouldn't you?

I mean, if Christ were present, you would have to worship Him. I mean, to not worship Him would be a sin.

That would be withholding, you know, from the Lord the glory to His name. And so that's the big difference, is that we do not believe that He is to be worshipped in bread and wine.

He is to be worshipped at the right hand of God by the means of faith. And the

Lord's Supper testifies to us that He's been once and for all offered, as opposed to however the

Roman Catholic Church describes it, the various ways in which they describe it, in terms of what is being offered in the

Mass. Is He being offered to God again? Is it just a re -presentation, as some would say, of that one sacrifice of Christ?

Regardless, He's still, they would say, being offered to God. Whether it's again, or whether it's just in honor of what happened before,

He's still being offered to God, they would say, to turn away wrath and to actually do what

Christ has already done. So, yes, we would have a... That's why we're

Protestant. That's why we're not Roman Catholics. That's why we disagree with them. You know, even if there are true believers in the

Roman Catholic Church, you know, we could call them brothers and sisters. I mean, this is one of the reasons why we would say that a true believer in the

Roman Catholic Church needs to leave, is because they are participating in idolatry.

And now, again, I mean, probably, many of us, myself included, we know people who worship in the

Roman Catholic Church, and even those who consider themselves to be evangelical and believe in Jesus alone for salvation, and they would maybe not understand all the nuances of the

Catholic Mass, and maybe they would say, well, I don't believe that He's being re -presented for my sin.

I don't believe that I'm worshiping Him. Well, you know, it's one thing to say to yourself, but that's what they're saying.

That's what they're teaching. But that's what their doctrine is, and so to be a Catholic, you must be in submission to that.

So, you know, it's just even more reason to leave and to live a Christian life that is consistent, you know, with the

Word, and even a person who may be listening who, again, may be considering themselves evangelical in the Catholic Church, to find a church that lines up with what you say you believe.

And there are Reformed churches that, you know, you know, there is the reverence that people desire.

People don't like the Catholic Church because of the reverence and the historicity. You know, you and I would probably argue, to a blue in the face, that that's what we have.

That's what we have in Reformed worship. We have that reverence and that awe of God. Yeah, and actually, the

Roman Catholic understanding of the Mass being a perpetuatory sacrifice, it really strips the once and for all sacrifice of Christ on Calvary of its power, because they believe that they need to do that over and over and over again in order to even really be atoned for their sins.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, yeah, like I said, you know, even the theologians and the way that Vatican II Roman Catholicism has tried to say that it's not a re -sacrifice, but we're just re -presenting the one sacrifice, it's a different, things without a difference.

It's the same idea, and yeah, that's why you have to have a funeral Mass. That's why you pay a priest to do this for you, because if you do it enough times, you know, you'll get some time off of purgatory.

They don't believe in a once and for all sacrifice of Christ. If they did, they wouldn't believe in purgatory. They'd believe that you either go to heaven or hell right after you die.

All right, and now going to the opposite extreme, you have on one hand, you have the

Roman Catholic who believes that they are safe with God by mere connection in some way to the one true church in their mind, the

Roman Catholic Church. On the other extreme, you have many who are the stepchildren of modern evangelicalism who would say,

I don't need a church at all. I'm a temple of the Holy Spirit, and I like to visit churches now and again, but every one of them

I visit has something that they do or say that I disagree with, so I'm not going to become a member of a church. I'm just going to pray at home.

I'm going to read my Bible out in the park, and I'm going to occasionally visit a church, especially if it has a banging choir and praise team, or during the holidays or something.

But can a Christian have a right relationship with God if he despises

Christ's body? Short answer is no. At best, we would say that's just a very inconsistent understanding of the

Christian faith. We want to distinguish a person that maybe just doesn't know from a person who consciously says they're a believer, but yet consciously rejects fellowship and belonging.

So you have Hebrews tells us not to forsake the assembling together, and I would just use the

Old Testament imagery from the tabernacle or from the temple. At the question was, what about Jews who could make it because they're too far?

Well, the law required that all Israelites needed to travel to Jerusalem three times a year, and that idea of that you need to be connected to the larger assembly.

In the Old Testament, it was just three times a year. That was the minimum, but that's how you showed your connection. That's how you showed that you belonged.

And if you didn't do that, you were considered outside, and you were considered a non -member, as it were, of the covenant people of Israel.

It's the same thing. We as believers, we, yes, we do believe in Jesus, and yes, we do believe that we are a temple of the

Holy Spirit, but we don't exist in isolation from Christ.

And Jesus came, and he has a body on earth, the church, and yes, are there sinners in churches?

Absolutely. All of us. Are there problems in every single church? Absolutely. A person needs to have a right expectation of what the church is before they start to think that they can, you know, divorce themselves from it.

So true believers need to belong to some body that assembles to hear the word, to receive the

Lord's Supper, has baptism, that has a church, a structure where there is accountability and discipline, both in a positive and in a negative sense.

Those are the non -negotiables, you know, from where I stand, that make up a church. Yeah, when sometimes when

I have discussions with folks like that who believe that they are completely fine and in a right relationship with God by just bouncing around from church to church and never joining any of them, they'll typically take the fact that there is a remote possibility that someone could be saved reading the

Bible alone in the woods, and that someone could technically be regenerate and not be a member of a church, but for that to be the general rule and practice of a person's life, they would actually be violating what that Bible teaches.

That's right. To not to not be sitting underneath teachers and to not be a part of the body and forsaking the assembly of the brethren is a sin.

Yep, yep. Yeah, and a lot of people want to make the exception the rule, right? Right.

They want to make the exception of receiving the cross, all of a sudden it becomes the rule, and so everybody receives the cross. Well, if you could,

I want you to give our listeners what you most want etched in their hearts and minds before they leave this program today.

Sure, I would want to exhort people, encourage people, whether believer or not, to pick up the

Bible for themselves, read not just the New, but the Old Testament, and in the

Old Testament to read the story of God's glory amongst Israel in the Old Testament tabernacle, and to see it for what it is.

It reveals the glory of God. It reveals the grace of God. It shows us the beautiful teachings about who the

Lord is, how he's saved by his amazing grace. And I know that your church website is

OceansideURC .org? That's right. And your book,

God in Our Midst, the Tabernacle and Our Relationship with God, I know it can be purchased at Ligonier .org

because Ligonier Ministry is the ministry of Dr. R .C. Sproul. They have their own publishing ministry called

Reformation Trust Publishing, and that's who has published your book, correct? That's right, yeah, it's

Ligonier. You can find the book on Ligonier, you know, Amazon, of course, or any local Christian bookstore.

Even if you don't have it in stock, you could support your local Christian bookstore by ordering it through them.

And I'd like to give a plug to Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service right here in Carlisle.

They sponsor Iron Sharpens Iron. Whenever you win a free book out there, they are the ones mailing it to you.

So we thank them from the bottom of our hearts at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.

Their email address, or should I say their website, is CVBBS .com,

CV for Cumberland Valley, BBS for Bible Book Service dot com. And thank you,

Todd and Patty Jennings, for your faithfulness to Iron Sharpens Iron, and we love you very much.

But I want to thank you very much, Pastor Hyde, for being on the program, and we look forward to your return to Iron Sharpens Iron.

Yeah, thanks a bunch. God bless. God bless you. And don't go away, brothers and sisters and ladies and gentlemen, because we have coming up very soon, we have our second guest,

Steve Visconti, who is going to be addressing his conversion out of the

Roman Catholic Church. And before we hear from our brother

Steve Visconti, we're going to be going to a station break. So if you'd like to join us on the air with a question about Roman Catholicism, or about our guest's personal testimony involving his departure out of it, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. So don't go away, we're going to be right back with Steve Visconti and his conversion out from Roman Catholicism.

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That's wrbc .us. Welcome back.

This is Chris Arns. And if you've just tuned us in, we just finished an hour with Daniel Hyde, who is pastor of Oceanside United Reformed Church in California.

And we were discussing God in our midst, the tabernacle and our relationship with God. Now we begin our second hour with Steve Visconti.

He is a member of the church whose ad you just heard, Wedding River Baptist Church in Eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, where my friend

Pastor Ron Glass is the pastor. He has been of such tremendous value to Iron Sharpens Iron that I can't even begin to describe how

Pastor Ron Glass has blessed me, not only through this broadcast, but my life personally.

But Steve Visconti is also not only a member of that church, but he's a columnist for the

Narrow Pathway in Eastern Long Island's newspaper Community Journal. And he is going to be addressing today why the gospel compelled me to leave the

Roman Catholic Church. And we also thank Steve Visconti for helping to sponsor

Iron Sharpens Iron through his Long Island Galleries company. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron, Steve Visconti.

Thank you, Chris. Considering the people that you have on this program, I'm humbled to be here.

Thank you for having me. Well, it's my honor and privilege, and I do thank you from the bottom of my heart for your very valuable support and sponsorship of Iron Sharpens Iron through the

Long Island Galleries company. And I hope that the Lord blesses us both for many years have come of working together for the cause of the gospel.

All right. Well, first of all, I want to start out with your description of Wading River Baptist Church.

You're a member there. I love Pastor Glass so much that I want you to give your own commendation of that congregation, because I know that you are there for a very good reason.

Well, yeah, and I know a lot of this interview is about my testimony, but I could spend at least an hour talking about Wading River Baptist Church.

The teaching is invaluable. It is thought -provoking.

It is very comprehensive. Pastor Ron is a friend of mine. I live within walking distance of the church, and I can tell you he is a warrior for scriptures.

I have seen him having to go through multiple preps on most weeks, and he is just committed to do the very, very best he can to glorify

God. It's teaching with all due respect to any of the other pastors that are out there who are preaching truth.

I just don't see any other church in the area that is expositing the word with profound implications and the application to those implications as Pastor Ron does.

Yeah, and for anybody who would like to visit

Wading River Baptist Church, perhaps you're going to be visiting Long Island, especially in eastern Suffolk County.

Perhaps you're going to be vacationing there, or perhaps you live there already, or you have friends, family, and loved ones who live in the eastern

Suffolk County area. Go to WRBC .us, WRBC for Wading River Baptist Church .us.

That is their website, and they also have a radio program called

The River of Life, and that features Pastor Glass's sermons every

Sunday, and we'll be giving you more information on how you can listen to that program a little later on during our show today.

But Steve, I want to also make it clear to our listeners, because there is a lot of confusion out there as to why people discuss why a

Roman Catholic would leave that church and find a community in another church outside of Roman Catholicism.

When we begin to speak about that publicly, I have been accused personally of being a bigot, of being a hate monger.

I was raised Roman Catholic myself. I was an altar boy, went to Catholic school for eight years, have many cherished precious memories that I still treasure of my friends in the

Roman Catholic Church and the Roman Catholic school. I do not have a horror story about being severely beaten by nuns or molested by a priest or anything like that.

It was completely for theological reasons that I came to leave the Roman Catholic Church, and hate has nothing to do with it.

But I want to hear your story. First of all, tell us something about your upbringing in the

Church of Rome. Well, it's no different than anything else, than a lot of people's testimony.

I was baptized as a baby. Why? Because my parents were baptized a generation before that and a generation before that, and it was just something that was done.

You go to religious education to get prepared for First Holy Communion, and then when you get older, about 13 or 14 years old, whatever it is, for Confirmation.

I did the sacraments, all of those things, and attended

Mass. Quite frankly, I love my parents. They're still alive at 94 and 91. But they never really didn't have an interest in going.

They dropped us off, and we did the Sunday thing. It wasn't much to it other than showing up for the 45 to 55 minutes, or whatever it was.

I attended until I was 17, and then I guess I was old enough at that point to make my own decisions. I was in the military from 1977 and 1980.

After my wife, Geraldine, and I got engaged at the end of 1989, we connected with her home parish in Whitestone, Queens, which we were going to sign up for the

Precanor class. We started going again. We continued to go after we got married, moved out, had our first home in Long Island, went to her home church then on Long Island, and were attending even the local church over here in Waiting River.

Then something happened in 2001. I woke up one night, and I asked a question to myself about two o 'clock in the morning.

I was about 42 years old, and I asked a question to myself, wow, all right, I'm 42, and this is all the

Lord getting ahold of you. Nobody ever decides to become a Christian, obviously.

I asked myself the question, if I died today, where would I go? Right away, the reasoning begins.

All right, well, I know I've done some horrible things, but I love baseball. I said to myself, all right,

I've done some good things, done some bad things, but even if I pass away right before the end of my life in the last inning, the

Lord, my good will outweigh my bad, and everything will be all right. But the problem with that was,

Chris, that that really never gave me any peace. Fast forward,

I really didn't do much. I couldn't really, I didn't have the frame of mind to do anything about that or really take it any further because I did take ill with thyroid disease.

If anybody is out there listening that knows what Graves hyperthyroidism and eventually hypothyroidism because of the treatment for it, for the

Graves, I was sick on and off for two years, but then in 2003,

I was actually getting ready to play baseball on one Sunday when I had a, I all of a sudden,

I was on flipping the channels at about eight o 'clock in the morning, getting ready to play and in touch ministries with Dr.

Charles Stanley was on, excuse me, and for the first time, something in church as far as speaking really got my attention because, and he was talking, he was preaching the

Bible, and he wasn't talking about any kind of religious tradition or anything like that or catechism or anything like that or quotes from any notables, any human beings, and one thing led to another, and about four months later,

I said, you know what, there's Waiting River Baptist Church right down the block from my house, literally within walking distance, and I said, you know what,

I'm going to go there. We'd always been treated very lovingly by the people that served on the VBS staff, and I went there, can't tell you what

Pastor Glass preached about on that day, didn't come back for a couple of months, but returned sometime in late

October, early November, and then after that, stayed, you know, stayed, made a commitment to follow

Christ at the end of December of 2003, was baptized in April of, actually in March of 2004, and you know, as they say, the rest is history.

Now, did I know exactly what I was committing to? Absolutely not.

Anybody that, you know, babes just don't have a chip installed in their minds, and all of a sudden, you know it all.

What, for me, it was a constant learning of the Scriptures and understanding after, really, a few years, even though I believe

I was saved because in my heart, I made the commitment. I knew Jesus died for me.

That took a huge weight off of me, as far as having to do anything myself, because I knew

I couldn't, but as you start understanding the Scriptures and really internalizing this, and for the first time ever, looking forward to going to church, and both morning and evening services, you realize for the first time, after a while, it's like, wow, you get, and I'm sure you could testify to this too, the more you walk with the

Lord, you realize what it cost Him, and the grace that's involved, and you realize that if anybody,

I mean, I know that I'm the chief of sinners, and I need His grace many times during the day to forgive me.

As far as your question on leaving, I think that really, that's a matter of,

I mean, you see it in 1 Thessalonians 5, 21, I believe, examine everything carefully, hold fast to that which is good.

I think what's happening is the people whom God elects, they search the

Scriptures to see if these things matter. They take a look. They're not afraid to put their lives under the x -ray lamp of Scripture and lay themselves bare, and for me, that's a constant process, and as I said, the difference is, needless to say, and with much respect to our

Roman Catholic friends, and we could develop a dialogue on this if you want, it's all a matter of not just of traditions, but where does it start.

It starts with how people are saved, and that's a big deal.

You could talk about all the other perversions, but really, you, people say, well,

Roman Catholics and Christians start off with the same understanding of who

Christ is, and I would vehemently disagree with that, because obviously, there's two different, same

Jesus as far as the historical facts, but it's totally different as far as salvation is concerned.

Right. You obviously would believe that Christ, just as the

Roman Catholic Church teaches, is fully God and fully man, which is known as the hypostatic union.

You would agree that he was born of a virgin, that he was sinless throughout his entire life, and that he died on Calvary's cross, and that he rose again on the third day and ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the

Father. Obviously, those pinnacle truths about Christ you obviously agree with, being an evangelical

Bible -believing Christian, but the difference, and I'm assuming that you're talking about, is what

Christ accomplished on this earth through his death and resurrection, and how men are made right with him.

I mean, obviously, the Catholic Church teaches that men have to cooperate greatly in order to inherit eternal life, correct?

Yes, absolutely, and I know it's in the Catechism, I believe it's, I don't want to misquote, but it's either,

I think it might be paragraph 2010, I don't have it in front of me, it says, move by the

Holy Spirit, and I'm, not almost, but this is almost verbatim, move by the Holy Spirit in charity, we can then merit for ourselves the graces needed for eternal life, basically, for salvation.

We can merit for ourselves and others, so it's not that we just, it's not that we could just earn our own salvation, that we could earn salvation for others, too.

And you know, in the Roman Catholic system, Jesus is basically, he's like your relay mate in a track race.

He does the saving, he hands it off to you, and you've got to take it the rest of the way in your own efforts, and we as evangelicals would vehemently disagree with that.

It's obviously by God's grace alone, an undeserved gift, through faith alone, you don't put your trust in yourself anymore, all of your works are garbage, and are nothing, as Paul says in Philippians 3, and it's by faith, none of ourselves, it's a gift, so nobody could boast when they get to heaven and said they did it on their own.

Well, I've found that the people that get upset and have their feelings hurt the most when you say anything critical about Roman Catholicism, are those whose a large part of their personal identity is wrapped up in being

Catholic, because it's almost synonymous with their ethnicity, or their national origin, if you follow,

I mean, Italian Catholic, Irish Catholic, Polish Catholic, and people just, you are offending them because in their minds, you are ridiculing, and mocking, and putting down their entire culture, their entire heritage.

What would you have to say about that when somebody would might throw that in your face, that they're offended because basically you're saying their parents and their grandparents were wrong about something very important?

Well, there's two different things, I mean, I think of two illustrations, right, Mark 4, beginning in verse 14, with the sower and the soils, the word's going to be sown to four different minds, and obviously three of those minds have something in the way, and the something in the way of those three minds is an inability to put any biases aside from Scripture.

As I said earlier, examine everything carefully, they don't want to believe that they're wrong.

In contrast, think of John 3 with Nicodemus, he says, how could these things be?

But he came to Jesus by night, this is to me, this is a searching heart, and obviously John 1939 tells us that Nicodemus became a believer, and helped and prepared for the burial of Jesus.

So, but Nicodemus said, how could these things be? And I think the thing that, when you talk about the deep and wide roots of religion,

Chris, basically, obviously you know this, you're talking about a lifetime of following things, and they don't know any better.

And that's why when you think of Nicodemus, he said, how could these things be? You mean that I have to take everything that I believed in since I was a child, and scrub it, and start all over again, and that's why the gospel is so difficult.

And I believe, as some commentators, some pastors have said that it's easier to convert a harlot and a death row inmate than it is a very religious person, because it's very hard to admit that for decades, in some cases, that you had it all wrong.

And that's really hard, and sometimes, and I know if you've probably witnessed the people, even if you present the facts, they just can't wrap their mind around it.

Does that make sense? Oh yeah, of course. And that goes with anybody, that's just not a Roman Catholic situation.

But the thing that is heart -wrenching for people is they really, when they start to contemplate what you're saying, they immediately start to think, are you going to tell me that my parents, and my grandparents, and my great -grandparents, and my entire ancestral line, they are all in hell, you know, and all that kind of thing.

Well, first of all, we don't know the hearts of men, only Christ does. We can't say with certainty who is in hell.

But that being said, we are not to make our own parents' or ancestors' idols and forsake eternal life for their sake, are we?

No, we don't. And tragically, emotions do play into this.

We lost a relative recently, and, you know, here's the thing, though. We are called the befruited inspectors, and it's one thing if you don't know what they believe, and let's say they're entrenched in one of these false religions, right?

You did. But they've really never communicated what they really believe. Okay, that's one thing. We still won't have the right to make a call, because doing that would be stepping on God's throne, which we have no right to do, but on the same token, when somebody says,

I believe in John 14, I know what the Bible says about John 14, 6, but I don't believe it.

I think people are good, and I think there's many pathways that lead to the same God, but this person goes to mass or, you know, they go wherever the false system of religion is.

You know, they've proclaimed what's in their heart. So unless they change that way of thinking, yeah, you could be pretty confident that what they've proclaimed, apart from a change of thinking and direction, would have them cast into the eternal darkness.

And it also makes it more difficult today to have dialogue with Roman Catholics, because in our day and age, especially since Vatican II, they have become the good guys.

They have become the loving, accepting people who view us now as separated brothers, and we are the harsh guys.

We are the bad guys. We are the mean guys, because we're saying that we have the only way truth in life, and they don't.

But the fact of the matter is, I often tell my Roman Catholic friends that the

Council of Trent condemned me to hell, if I don't repent of what

I believe, centuries before I was born, and that Council of Trent is still binding dogma in the

Church of Rome today, regardless of how liberal the Pope is. Isn't that true? Absolutely.

Regardless of how liberal the Pope is, and even if you're a Catholic, if you disagree with one of those decrees, you're cursed.

And obviously it's like a toothless lion, it has no credibility whatsoever, but that's according to their system.

Yeah, and it's very confusing, because the

Church has become so liberal that you have the Pope saying that atheists can go to heaven, and you have in the

Catholic catechism declarations that Jews and Muslims adore the same

God as Christians do, and you also have the more traditionalist

Catholic saying that that's all heresy, and that even if the

Pope is saying it, it's not true, because he's not declaring it as dogma.

So in spite of the Catholic Church's claim that they are a monolithic group that has always taught the same thing since the days of Jesus, they are just splintered and multifaceted, and have warring factions within them as Protestants do.

They have no more unity than we do. It's ridiculous to make such a claim. It is, and I heard

John MacArthur, Pastor MacArthur, say one time that Rome morphs. It could be what it wants to be, just to deceive the precious hearts of souls.

And this Pope is a heretic, needless to say, within his own system, because if they put him up against the template of those decrees, he would be damned several times over.

Yeah, if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com, and please include your first name, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA. And I would love to hear from Catholics especially, because I know occasionally we do have

Catholics who listen and who chime in with their own comments or questions, but this really boils down to, as you said earlier, how we are made right with God.

And the Roman Catholic Church, they don't understand why we get so horrified over their beliefs.

In order for them to include the sacramental system and their own acts of obedience and good deeds to the gospel, they don't even recognize that we're horrified, because it is stripping away the unique, exclusive role of Jesus Christ in salvation and what he accomplished on the cross.

Am I right? Absolutely. And there's always a supporting cast, and I don't mean to sound sarcastic, but it's a supporting cast in the system of Roman Catholicism.

It's not just Christ alone. You always have Mary by his side. You prayed to the saints and all of these things, and that just takes the glory away from the

Godhead completely. Amen. We're going to be going to a station break right now.

If you would like to join us on the air, that email address once again is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. We do already have a couple of listeners who are waiting for Steve to answer them on the air, so we hope you'll be patient with us.

That's chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We're going to be right back.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arns, and if you just tuned us in, our guest for the second hour of this broadcast has been

Steve Visconti. And Steve is a member of Wading River Baptist Church in Eastern Suffolk County, Long Island.

And the River of Life program, which is hosted by Pastor Ron Glass, Steve Visconti's pastor, can be heard anywhere in the world as well as Iron Sharpens Iron.

It can be heard via live streaming at eastgatebroadcasting .com.

eastgatebroadcasting .com. And it is heard on Saturday at 9 .30

a .m. Eastern Time and Sunday at 7 .30 p .m. Eastern Time.

And the church website is wrbc .us for Wading River Baptist Church, wrbc .us.

Steve Visconti is also the owner of Long Island Galleries, whose ad you just heard.

And we thank Steve for sponsoring this broadcast. His support is more valuable than he will ever know.

The topic of our discussion with Steve right now is his conversion from Roman Catholicism to Biblical Christianity or evangelicalism.

And we are taking questions at chrisarnsen at gmail .com. chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

We do have a listener in Amityville, Long Island, New York, Christopher, who wants to know, are you trying to say that everyone who is a

Roman Catholic is going to hell? Steve, do you want to answer that? Sure. God only knows the hearts of the people.

God only knows the hearts. He's omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. I do believe that there's going to be

Roman Catholics in heaven, but these are Roman Catholics that have never left the system, but don't believe in their gospel.

I do believe that. I do believe that there's people that are still in that system, or have been in that system, that do believe that they are helpless to save themselves.

On the other hand, I must tell the truth based on what Scripture persuades me, has persuaded me, that whether it's

Roman Catholicism or any other religion, you see, there's two pathways.

There's countless amounts of religion, but there's really two gates that are marked heaven, and only one of them actually gets there.

Gate number one is human achievement. Gate number two is divine accomplishment.

Human achievement says that I cooperate, I do this, I do that, based on my estimation of myself, or based on following some type of system of man -made religion that either adds or takes away from the grace of God and Jesus Christ alone.

Roman Catholicism is one of those religions. So, with gentleness and respect to the person that's answering, asking the question,

I would say that if anybody, whether it's Roman Catholicism, which teaches a faith -plus -works message of salvation, that if you don't believe that salvation must include works, and as you said before,

Chris, that a person is cursed if they believe it's just faith alone, Scripture makes it clear that salvation is a free gift.

So, I would believe, with much gentleness and respect, being persuaded to 100 % confidence in what the

Scripture says, that anybody who's trusting in following some type of a man -made religious system is perverting the grace of God, and they're trampling on the neck of Christ for his finished work, thinking that they could cooperate somehow in redeeming themselves.

So, yes, with much respect, but very firmly, I must say that anyone who's trusting in any form of religion for salvation would wind up eternally separated in hell.

Yeah, when it comes to the accusation that what we are saying is just coming from bigotry, hatred, and so on,

I have to turn my friends who make those claims, and they're not only

Catholics who will say that, there are many modern evangelicals who are ecumenical with Roman Catholics who would say the same thing.

But I don't know what they do if you go to Paul's letter to the

Church in Galatia, Galatians in the very first chapter, Paul says,

I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel, which is really not another, only there are some who are disturbing you and went to distort the gospel of Christ.

But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed.

As we have said before, so I say it again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, he is to be accursed.

Now, historically, the reason why there was a Reformation, and the reason why the

Roman Catholic Church tortured and burned alive millions of people was because the

Roman Catholic Church officially declared that the gospel of the

Reformation was another gospel. And as I said earlier, the Council of Trent is still a binding council when it comes to dogma, therefore, you and I, Steve Visconti, we have another gospel than they do.

So therefore, how are we to view people who do not believe in the gospel that we believe to be the true gospel, the gospel that Paul preached, the gospel that Jesus Christ preached?

Obviously, they are to be accursed, and if we are to be any kinder than Paul, I don't know how that would be a positive thing, because Paul was inspired of the

Holy Ghost and was an apostle. Yeah, and I think there's even a greater urgency, Chris, because if you think, you talk about those opening verses in Galatians, he's talking about the

Judaizers, right? Yes. And that you had to just continue to keep the law in order to be saved. I mean, if you think about, and that's just one item, you think about all of the roadblocks that Roman Catholic churches put up.

It makes the gospel, the true gospel, unrecognizable. You have to do this.

If you miss Mass, it's a curse. If you don't confess your sins to a priest, these mortal sins, venial sins, praying for people in purgatory, you know, just you could go right up and down the line.

It's just, it reminds me of Luke 11, 52, you take away the key of knowledge, Jesus said.

You don't lift a finger and you basically inhibit people that want to get in. And whether people are doing that out of ignorance in that system, which

I think that's what the case is most of the time, or whether they're just wolves in sheep's clothing,

I don't know, but they don't have the key of knowledge. That's what I do know. And, you know, to treat, we can't, on taking a look at ourselves, we can't look at ourselves as being, having anything to offer.

So to talk in a mean -spirited way to these precious souls is to ruin your testimony, as far as I'm concerned.

You want to plead with them to just examine the scriptures, allow yourself to put aside anything that you've, to examine things in light of what you've read, in light of what you've been taught, but ask yourself the question, do, can

I really know the scriptures if I'm going to Mass all the time and it's just a bunch of ceremony?

How could that even, how could that even be? Or is a person going to allow themselves to be teachable?

And what it really comes down to is who is your authority? That's really what it comes down to. Yeah, and for those of our listeners who may be ignorant of the whole situation that Paul was facing in Galatia, when he was writing such harsh words, the

Judaizers, for all we know, believed almost identically everything that Paul and the

Christian church believed, with the exception of something very crucial, that they had to be circumcised and follow the

Jewish law. They agreed with Paul from what we can see on the deity of Christ and so many other things that Christians all hold to be true.

There is no mention of Paul saying that they denied that Christ was

God or that they denied that he died on Calvary's cross or that he rose again.

There is no mention of those things. It is only that they are adding to the finished work of Christ for salvation to be achieved.

And Paul said that that was a gospel that was no gospel at all. So how are we to view not only that, but many more rituals and many more things that the church of Rome insists upon, and an ongoing sacrifice of the mass?

It's just endless that someone needs to follow that sacramental system until death that heaps on so many things upon the finished work of Christ.

And not only that, the works of the saints. Isn't this, in your opinion, an offense to what

Jesus Christ has already accomplished in a perfect way on Calvary? Well, no question about it.

And I don't want to just so your listeners know, I was not a really diehard

Catholic. I was not a really devout Catholic. I believe the Spirit of God was beginning to regenerate my soul, just evaluating my life and everything like that.

But to be on the air right now and say that I was a devout Catholic, I would not be telling the truth. I was not.

But I do know that I always had my questions about the system. But having questions, you see, the thing is, if somebody has a question and somebody wants to, you know, oh,

I don't like what the priest did to these innocent children. Okay, that's one thing.

But is that a reason to leave a church? You leave a church because you examine what the

Scriptures say, and you say to yourself, hey, you know, for the first time in my life, I'm really allowing myself to be teachable, and I see some contradictions here.

And I'm also seeing that the Bible teaches nothing about the

Immaculate Conception. It teaches nothing about the celibacy of the priesthood.

New Testament teaches nothing about purgatory, and you could go right down the line. So the thing is, you have to...sometimes

I think people just assume, and they go to church, and they go through the...and I do believe that these are perfunctory motions.

I do not believe that the Holy Spirit is present at a Roman Catholic Mass. I do believe it's a pagan sacrifice offered by a priest who's usurped the authority of the finished work of Christ, and as one commentator said, they've rebuilt what

Rome destroyed. And so you have to...you

just have to approach it and say, you know, you believe... people are wondering why we feel this way.

Well, you know, we want to share something with you. We're not looking to condemn with you. They condemn you.

When I write my column every week, people say, well, what are you doing? And my answer all the time is,

I'm just trying to sow the seed of God's Word and get people to get their thinking stirred and think about what they're trusting in for their eternal destiny.

And that's it, and it's always been the same, and that's what evangelism is. You want to spur people on to think and try to engage them in a dialogue if they're going to want to talk to you.

Yeah. Paul, the Apostle Paul, who we were just talking about, commended a group of people known as the

Bereans because they tested every word that he said, according to the Scriptures, to make sure that what he was teaching was true.

He commended them for that. He didn't say, what are you kidding me? I am an apostle.

Who are you to question me? Who are you to check up on me? And the Roman Catholic Church has for centuries said it was a sin to dare defy what councils and popes and bishops have declared to be true.

And obviously your average Catholic doesn't investigate these things, and I'm sure that the multitudes of evangelicals in our modern world out there,

I'm sure that a great number of them, a great percentage of them, don't investigate the truth either.

They're just going along with whatever their pastor says or what have you. But whoever is listening, they're not to be taking the word of their priest or their parents or their grandparents or their favorite

Catholic radio or television commentator or Marcus Grodi of The Journey Home or any of his guests.

They are to be searching the Scriptures to see if what they are hearing is true, am

I right? You're 100 % right, searching the Scriptures, and what's interesting is, again, they don't, and as you said, and I do use the word perfunctory because there's nothing, there's no efficacy, there's nothing.

It's just a whole bunch of religious calisthenics that might make people feel good as far as their feelings, as far as being around what they call an altar, which is blasphemy, the statues, stuff like that, and they're just, they're just,

Chris, if I could just say this, it's almost like people aren't, they're just agreeing.

They're just, these people are trustworthy. They would never lead me the wrong way, and they just go week after week, week after week, no

Bible, no nothing, nothing. Any time that I ever went to Mass, and I wrote about this a few weeks ago, that I would always, you know,

I would always forget what was spoken about in the homily, whatever it was, 10 minutes, by the time

I got back to my car, and people say, well, I want to go out of obligation, you know, I want to go out of obligation.

Well, you know, God knows the person's heart. Why even bother going if your heart's not in it?

It just, the whole thing just doesn't make sense, and in answer to, you know, again, what you said before, I would say that maybe only 1 % of all of these precious souls really are trying to follow that system.

You think that's accurate? I mean, there's a very small percentage that's just doing it as a matter of, because my parents did it, and my grandparents did it.

Who's really doing, I mean, what percentage of people are reading the Roman Catholic Catechism like we read the

Scriptures? You know what I'm saying? Mm -hmm, of course. Now, you love,

I'm sure, your parents who are Roman Catholic, your other family members, your friends.

Isn't your reason for being here today, the 180 degrees opposite of hate or bigotry, isn't it because you are trying to witness them come to Christ in truth, and you want them to experience true salvation, because you fear for their souls, and nothing could be a more loving thing to do than to do everything you can to see those you love rescued from hell.

Isn't that a loving thing? It is a loving thing, and I want to be transparent with you and anyone who's listening.

In the beginning, it wasn't like that with me. There was, again,

I was ignorant, I was a little prideful, putting the Roman Catholic system down, and if I continued to do that today, not only would

I not have a column, but I wouldn't expect anyone to even give me the time of day because nobody wants to listen to somebody who's putting something down and talking like that.

You mean like mockery, silly mockery, making fun of something rather than exegetically disproving its claims, and so on.

Yeah, for the better part of the first year or two, it would wean off, but for the better part of the first two years,

I have to confess to you that my testimony wasn't the greatest.

It really wasn't. As I really began to start growing in the

Lord from infancy on, I realized that, hey, you know what?

I brought nothing to the table. I need to convey that, and I need to speak that way with people, and I want to be able to get people to think about what they're trusting in, as I said a couple of minutes ago, particularly with this world that's getting more wicked and wicked as the days go by.

What kind of a foundation do you have, and can you legitimately trust the system regardless of what that religious system is?

Have you really researched the doctrines? Have you really done your due diligence to see if this system is true, or are you trusting the system because of your parents or your grandparents?

And that could be very, very deceptive, just because my parents wouldn't lead me in the wrong direction.

And I wrote a column about a year ago called The Broken Circle, which

I talked about this whole thing about the religion being a rite of passage, almost.

You know, you were baptized, and you did the sacraments because your family members did it.

Last generation, back, back, back, back, and towards the end of it,

I wrote, well, now that circle is broken in my family. Jesus Christ, by His grace alone, is my

Savior, and the Bible is my only authority for Christian living, and He is my authority.

He's the shepherd. He leads, and I follow. And it was not like that, and I think one of the most dangerous things is that people would say, well, my parents wouldn't.

If it was really a false religious system, my parents would have told me, so I don't believe these other things that are being shared with me by my friends or my relatives or anything like that.

Does that make sense? Yes, absolutely. We have a listener in Perry County, Pennsylvania, Arnie, who says, uh, how do you respond to the

Catholic who says that the Catholic Church has more of the truth because it existed before the

Protestant Reformation and therefore traces itself back to Christ and the early disciples?

How do you respond to that? Well, I would say that length of time, with much respect, doesn't mean anything, because what are they proclaiming?

Again, particularly, and you always have to start from ground zero, how are sinners saved from their sins?

And it doesn't matter if that system's been in existence, you know, for 2 ,000 years.

Really, the first traces of a pope, and I think you would agree, Chris, were Gregory the Great in 590

A .D. Let's say that's 590 A .D. They've never, it's always been an apostate system, right?

It's always believed that the sinner must earn or cooperate with themselves to earn themselves a place of heaven.

And it was even more magnified with these decrees from the Council of Trent in the 16th century.

So, to answer the question, length of time, with much respect to the person that submitted the question,

I would say length of time really doesn't mean anything. What does the Bible say? Yeah, I mean, before,

I was just quoting from the Apostle Paul, who was warning about the

Judaizers. Now, that group of people who identified themselves as Christians existed in the days of Paul.

So, obviously, antiquity is not the sign of pedigree. But secondly, it's very demonstrable and very provable and documented that the

Church of Rome has evolved in its teachings and believes today, even if some of the things they believe today have been believed for centuries, they cannot be traced, many of them, back to the apostolic era, like you just mentioned, the papacy, transubstantiation, the adoration of the elements of the mass, the sacrament of penance, all of these things that are pinnacle parts of their whole system.

In fact, we just had, within the last couple of hundred years and within the last century, some of the things that have been declared as dogma, such as the

Assumption of Mary and a little earlier, the papal infallibility.

The Assumption of Mary, I believe, was in the early 1900s, and the Assumption of Mary was declared as dogma in the 1800s.

So, you're talking about not that long ago. So, yeah, you're right. Even if longevity could prove anything, which it doesn't, they don't even have that.

And I recommend, I strongly urge our listeners to get a hold of a book by William Webster, who's a friend of mine,

The Church of Rome at the Bar of History, which is a phenomenal book that basically clearly demonstrates that many of the

Church Fathers, if not most of the Church Fathers, agreed with what the

Reformers would teach centuries later and what Bible -believing Christians teach today in opposition to the

Church of Rome. So, I just wanted to plug that book, and you can get that book from Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

cv for Cumberland Valley, bbs for BibleBookService .com. Church of Rome at the

Bar of History by William Webster. I really want you to unburden your heart, Steve, so that what our listeners walk away with is what you most want etched in their hearts and minds today before this broadcast is over.

I really believe that, excuse me, Isaiah 5511,

God's Word will not return void. It will accomplish what it sets out to accomplish.

I know this to be true because I could bear personal testimony. God will not let a truly seeking heart that wants to be right with Him twist in the wind.

He will arrange the circumstances by His divine power to align that person with the proper resources where they will hear the message of absolute truth.

I know that because that happened to me, and I know that I do believe in sovereign election, and when

God gets a hold of a person's heart and He's going to save them, He's not going to put them in a system of religion that's confusing and is going to cause somebody to be very, very troubled.

It may take a while, but by His divine grace and by His divine power,

He is going to save that person. And I would just say this, anybody that's out there, I think of Luke 13.

The gate is narrow, obviously, Matthew 7, verses 13 and 14, but this is a profound illustration.

Disciples ask Jesus, our Lord, and there are few who are being saved, and Jesus says, strive to enter through the narrow door.

Why? Because He says, many will seek to enter and will not be able. Now, this is a really graphic illustration of people that are really seeking.

They're seeking, they're seeking, but they're not striving. They're not doing whatever it takes.

And tragically, a truly, as I said, a truly seeking soul will not be left disappointed.

And there's really only two pathways. There is, as I said earlier in the interview, there is human accomplishment, human achievement.

I was a churchgoer. I donated. I did the sacraments.

I, you know, whatever, prayed to Mecca, whatever illustration, whatever human effort illustration that you want to make.

I was a good mother, father, war veteran, whatever. And that is the narrow, that is the broad way that leads to disruption.

Self -effort is the broad way in the context of the Sermon on the Mount. On the other hand, when a person goes through that narrow gate that only admits one at a time, you don't go too wide going through the narrow gate.

When a person goes, they unload everything. They unload their estimation of themselves.

They unload any thought of contributing to their salvation and surrender.

Then the humble get exalted. And as Ephesians 2,

Ephesians 2, 7, I believe, says, they have citizenship currently. And I want your listeners to know that they can have eternal life as a result of surrender and making

Jesus Savior and Lord based on His grace alone for your faith, not in yourselves anymore, but in Christ alone for the forgiveness of your sins.

And God will raise that person up and seat them in the heavenly places right now. I encourage you to read

Ephesians 2, 7. And then also Philippians 3, 20 says, for all believers, while on earth, for our citizenship is present tense in heaven and as we eagerly await the

Lord's second coming. Amen. Well, I want to thank you so much, Steve, for being on the program today. And I want to repeat your church's website where Pastor Ron Glass is the pastor, wrbc .us,

wrbc .us. Don't forget about tuning into the River of Life program on eastgatebroadcasting .com,

eastgatebroadcasting .com, Saturday at 9 .30 a .m. Eastern and Sunday at 7 .30

p .m. Eastern. We look forward to having you back in the future. Steve Visconti, thank you so much. God bless, brother.

Thanks for having me. I hope that everybody listening always remembers that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.