Feb. 2, 2016 Show with Ron Glass on “What Actually Happened on Calvary? Atonement Made Possible OR Atonement Accomplished?”

Iron Sharpens Iron

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April 23, 2016

00:01: Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown
00:08: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,
00:16: Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
00:23: Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
00:32: Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.
00:46: It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
00:57: Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon,
01:18: Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming.
01:24: This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this second day of February 2016 and as all of you heard who tuned in immediately at four o 'clock, we are still having a little bumpy road when it comes to the technological realm, but I'm sure
01:44: God will get us through this broadcast because I'm so delighted to have one of my dearest friends and one of my most important supporters of Iron Sharpens Iron as my guest today.
01:58: This man has been a personal encourager, a
02:04: Barnabas, a real prayer warrior and a help to me in many ways too numerous for me to list, not only just through spiritual counsel and prayer and advice and friendship, but also the financial support of this radio broadcast and the encouragement and urging to relaunch it back in June of 2015 after four years of absence from the airwaves.
02:39: This is my dear friend Pastor Ron Glass of Wading Baptist Church in Wading River, Long Island, New York and we're talking about one of the most controversial issues that separates
02:52: Bible -believing born -again evangelical Christians and including even separates those who profess the name of Baptist, but we are going to be discussing an issue that I think is very important.
03:06: In fact, every Bible believer should believe it is very important no matter which side of the debate you fall on.
03:13: This is the question, what happened on Calvary? Was atonement merely made possible or was atonement accomplished through the blood of Christ?
03:25: And here to discuss this is my friend Pastor Ron Glass. Welcome back to Iron Sharpens Iron, Pastor Ron Glass of Wading River Baptist Church.
03:32: Well Chris, it's a delight and certainly a privilege to be with you today. Your comments are much too kind, but I consider you a real friend as well and certainly support the work of this radio ministry and we look forward to the day when it even has a wider distribution throughout the world.
03:55: So it's a delight to be with you to talk about this important subject. Well I appreciate that more than words can say and before we even get into the vital topic of the atonement, what happened on Calvary's cross 2 ,000 years ago, let's hear a little bit about Wading River Baptist Church for those of our listeners who are hearing you for the first time and are not aware of that congregation and what it is all about.
04:23: Well we're a small church which I believe existed for over 30 years here in Wading River, which is on the north shore of eastern
04:36: Long Island, just south of New Haven, Connecticut, across the Sound. It's a small town, but God has planted this church,
04:47: I believe for the purpose of holding forth the word of life to a community that is in great spiritual darkness.
04:55: The need here is tremendous and the spiritual opposition is also extremely active, so it's a challenging ministry.
05:05: One of the things that I believe we need to do is to restore the expository preaching of the word of God to our area.
05:19: There aren't too many churches that are really doing that. We believe the importance of expounding the word.
05:27: We believe in the importance of God's people -knowing found theology. We unashamedly and unapologetically maintain a conservative and traditional style of worship, and we have a very warm and loving fellowship.
05:47: Those who may be hearing this broadcast somewhere from the middle of the island eastward, we do have people who drive to our location from an hour away.
06:00: We would certainly invite them to come and be a part of our worship or even hopefully a part of our church family.
06:10: We meet at 11 o 'clock on the Lord's Day mornings.
06:16: We have an evening Bible study that meets in homes. We have a Sunday school hour at 9 45, and there are some other things we do from time to time as well.
06:28: I would encourage anybody who might be interested to visit our website, which is wrbc .us.
06:37: We would love to have you explore our ministry as well as listen to sermons that are available through the website there.
06:49: You also are twice a week, every weekend, on Eastgate Broadcasting, which not only has several local
07:01: Eastern Suffolk County radio stations broadcasting your River of Life program, but people anywhere in the world can hear those programs via live streaming at eastgatebroadcasting .com.
07:19: Tell us what times they can hear your program broadcast.
07:25: Their half an hour program can be heard on Saturday mornings at 9 30 a .m.
07:33: and then again on the Lord's Day in the evening at 7 30 p .m.
07:39: Okay, so that's Saturdays 9 30 a .m. and Sundays at 7 p .m.
07:46: 7 30 p .m. 7 30 p .m. So it's 9 30 a .m. and 7 30 p .m. Okay, and that's eastgatebroadcasting .com,
07:53: and if you live in Eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, when you go to that website, you can actually find the radio stations, the
07:59: FM radio stations called Faith FM that actually air that program, and I happen to have the honor and privilege of editing
08:09: Pastor Ron's sermons for that program, and basically what I'm doing is taking one sermon and breaking it into two self -sufficient freestanding programs, and I think that the
08:24: Lord has blessed these programs, and I for one am thoroughly blessed every time
08:31: I get a new batch of sermons to edit because I have to listen to these sermons several times, and that is only to my own personal joy, edification, and benefit because Pastor Ron happens to be one of my favorite preachers.
08:46: So I really urge you to look into his River of Life program.
08:53: Now, Pastor Ron, there seems to be a widespread lack of urgency, certainly in the world, but also in the church over the question of sin and its consequences.
09:04: What accounts for this in your opinion? Well, I think in the church today, we're in a situation where church has become about so many things, fellowship and entertainment and so on, that what has happened is that we have lost the in -depth teaching of the
09:28: Word of God, and as a result of that, we have lost a vital conception and a vital conviction with regard to who
09:41: God is and what God has done. When I say who God is, not just God the
09:48: Father, God the Son as well, and we have lost the urgency of our human responsibility in light of the great sovereign work of God which he has done in his world, central to us, that being the great work of redemption by which
10:15: God has brought salvation to sinners. So I see this sort of superficiality out there in churches today, and that's apparent in a lot of different ways, all the way from the kinds of music churches are using to the way that, and I admit this is sort of a hang -up with me or a point of irritation with me, but the way so many pastors even dress with great informality, almost sloppiness, which it seems to me indicates a deficient view of God and of Christ and of the solemnity of the subject with which we're dealing.
11:05: So I don't really think that people today understand what Christ has done for us, and at the heart of that whole issue is atonement, and that's why we're talking about this subject today.
11:19: Well, many people today claim to believe in God and even to be spiritual, but they have turned their back on religion and the
11:28: Bible, and their spirituality doesn't seem to impact the way they live. Is there a flaw in their thinking?
11:37: Well, yes, I think there is. The problem is that spirituality has been separated from religion, and of course, by religion, most people are referring to an organized form of religious observance, which entails things like going to church.
11:59: And so you have people who genuinely regard themselves as spiritual, but who have rejected the church and rejected so -called religion.
12:10: And what that has entailed is that they've also rejected biblical ethics and morality.
12:20: They've rejected the standards of godly living that are enumerated in Scripture, so that we have this strange situation of people claiming to be spiritual, and even some who claim to be religious to some extent, but what they don't do is pay any attention to what
12:42: God says in his word with regard to how they should live. So you may have them divorcing left and right, or living together out of wedlock, and you have them frequenting worldly places of entertainment and so on, with no apparent understanding that these things don't please
13:07: God. But what's the antidote, it seems to me, that you've got to come back to, again, a realization of what
13:16: God, first of all of who God is, who Christ is, and then what he has done.
13:21: And when you grasp the magnitude of what God has done for us, then you will tend to submit in obedience to the requirements of his word.
13:38: As a pastor, don't you run a danger when you preach theology from a pulpit?
13:44: Don't you risk alienating and confusing people? Yeah, well I think that that's apparently what a lot of preachers think, because theology has disappeared from a lot of pulpits today.
13:59: And if you look at a lot of the literature that's being published by Christian publishers, much of this, especially from this younger generation of pastors, is sermonic material, which has been turned into print.
14:10: And what you find is that a great deal of it is relational, and what we've tended to call psychotherapeutic.
14:20: It gives good advice, it gives counsel. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not so good.
14:26: It tends to focus on a lot of the pressing issues of life.
14:33: But what this does is to ignore the foundational issues. It ignores the kinds of truth that God's word teaches with regard to why we are in the state we are in as human beings, and what
14:49: God has done about that, who he is, and then why it is that we need to respond, and how we should respond to him as a result.
15:01: Now most of that, if you preach that, most of that is what we call theology. Theology just simply being the study of God.
15:10: Now I can't deny that some pastors have brought the skepticism over this kind of preaching upon themselves simply by the fact that they have brought a type of theology into the pulpit that is, frankly, boring, deadening, and that's not a good thing.
15:34: I think when we preach theology, we preach it with excitement and liveliness.
15:41: We preach it with a sense of urgency and with eloquence. Al Martin, a preacher from the last generation, used to say that urgency is the mother of eloquence, and if you do have a sense of urgency, you have a sense of the importance of this subject, then you can teach that subject, even though we would call it theology, you can teach it from your pulpit in such a way that the people grasp onto it.
16:16: I just had an example of this this past Lord's Day. I've just opened a series of expository sermons on the book of Hebrews, and I was in chapter one, verse three, and essentially was preaching
16:31: Christology to the church, and the interesting thing about that was that when
16:39: I got done, the first person to meet me in the foyer was a young man whose family is here on and off.
16:49: They're not here all the time, but he is roughly, I think he's a recent high school graduate, and he came up to me and immediately started asking me what
17:03: I thought about Roman Catholicism, because he had Roman Catholic friends, and he was quizzing me on certain points of theology.
17:11: Now, I have never hardly talked to this young man in terms of anything substantive in the past.
17:19: They're not a family who's an intimate part of the fellowship of the church, but I preach theology to the church, and this young man came up, and immediately, it wasn't directly on the subject
17:32: I was preaching, he began asking me about theology, and that kind of just confirmed it to me.
17:38: You know, when you preach theology to your church, they know that you know what
17:45: God is doing. You know what God's word teaches, and then they will open up to you about some of these profound questions, and that's a really important thing to realize.
17:56: Our people do have theological questions, and they're waiting for answers, and when they see the possibility, they'll even approach you like that.
18:05: Well, the thing that I find interesting is when I hear from a person who is typically a modern evangelical, for lack of a better term, and perhaps even modern
18:18: Vatican II -minded Roman Catholic, but they will say things like, why do you insist on causing division amongst brothers in Christ with all your theology and doctrine?
18:33: Let's just lift up Jesus. But the fact of the matter is, every time somebody opens their mouth about Jesus or about anything that's in the
18:41: Bible, they are talking and they are proclaiming theology and doctrine.
18:47: It just may be very bad or false theology and doctrine, but doctrine and theology are just teachings about God and his word, aren't they?
18:57: Well, yes, and of course division, the root of division is no less than Satan himself, and that started right in the
19:04: Garden of Eden. He divided Adam and Eve from God, and so division, when we preach the truth, when we preach
19:14: God's word, we're not causing division. Division is caused by those who deny the truth and those who don't want to hear what we say.
19:25: My experience is that while it's true when you preach the truth, especially certain aspects of truth that may not be popular, you may have people who leave your ministry.
19:38: They may say, we do not want to hear this, and they walk out, but you will have other people who will cherish this and who will thrive on it.
19:46: Essentially what you're doing when you preach sound doctrine, and nowhere more so than in this doctrine of the atonement, is you're winnowing out the chaff and you are bringing out, bringing to the surface the grains, so to speak, so that you're in a process of growing the saints of God at the same time you turn away those who don't want to hear it.
20:14: And I think that's something that a lot of pastors aren't willing to risk. They're not willing to risk losing significant portions of their congregation as a result of what they preach, preaching the word of God.
20:28: And I've gone through a process of this twice here in our ministry here, where we've lost significant numbers of people, and what it has essentially come down to is the substance of what was being communicated from the pulpit, the word of God.
20:43: Well, the word of God convicting those who are hearing, and those who are hearing saying, this is not what we want to hear.
20:51: We want to live the life that we have chosen. And what you do when you preach truth is you essentially make it uncomfortable for the religious pretenders, the hypocrites, whatever you want to call them.
21:05: You make it impossible for them to stay. And yet I think what happens is you end up purifying the church in the process.
21:13: That's God's way of cleaning up his church and preparing it to be fruitful.
21:21: Well, in light of what you said, what is the most important question facing any person today?
21:29: Well, this is where we want to get in our conversation now, because it seems to me the most important question that any human being can ask is, how can
21:39: I be right with God? Once you have wrestled with the whole issue of God's existence, once a human being has accepted the truth that there is a
21:51: God, and once they've come to a point to realize that the God who exists has revealed himself in his word, and then you begin to see that there is a major problem.
22:07: And that problem, which has been defined by the Apostle Paul very accurately,
22:12: Romans 8, for example, is that there is a natural enmity which exists between human beings and God, so that every one of us who have been born into this world, and we exist, we've been born into this world, we all come into this world as condemned sinners.
22:36: And that's very clear from the statement in Psalm 51, that David makes, and sin my mother conceive me.
22:44: We are sinners by birth, and therefore our nature as human beings is that of a sinner.
22:53: We do not become sinners by our sinful acts, but rather our sinful acts are the result of the outworking of our nature as fallen.
23:03: So what then is to be done about this? Because God has pronounced a serious judgment upon all who have sinned, and he has said in no uncertain terms, all have sinned, there's no exceptions.
23:19: Every one of us has sinned and come short of the glory of God. What is the outcome of that?
23:27: Well, again in the book of Romans, the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our
23:35: Lord. So there is a price to be paid for sin, and it's not just for what we might think as a very sinful life, the life of a criminal or a person who is perpetually morally unclean, that type of thing.
23:54: No, we're talking about anybody who has ever, even in one point, transgressed the perfect will of God as expressed in his law and in his word.
24:07: And of course, every one of us has to admit that we sin multiple times a day, and we even sin when we don't realize we're sinning.
24:17: And so we are all under the condemnation of God. That brings us to this important question, how can
24:25: I be right with God? I've got two alternatives laid before me, one to continue life in my sin, the wages of which, the end of which, the judgment of which is eternal hell, separation from God in a literal place of horrific suffering for eternity with no prospect of relief.
24:48: That is the outcome, that is the destiny of a person who is without Christ.
24:56: The other, of course, alternative is to receive the gift of grace that God has given in the
25:02: Lord Jesus Christ. God made a provision for sinners in Christ, and to receive that free gift is then to be brought into the family of God and given an inheritance in heaven with the
25:18: Lord Jesus and the blessedness of the new Jerusalem, living in the light of his glory and in the splendor of that place with the saints of God for all of eternity.
25:29: Now, on just a superficial basis,
25:36: I think all of us would have to say that's not really much of a choice. We all would like to be in the latter option, but the problem is we have to get there because as natural human beings, we are destined to hell.
25:53: And this is a point at which almost, well, the overwhelming majority of people that I hear today, personally, in the media, wherever, there is an assumption that people are in heaven when they die.
26:11: Even a criminal, they die, people around them will say, well, he's in heaven today.
26:19: Well, we don't just automatically go to heaven. That's a myth. That's Satan's lie.
26:26: And therefore, to put it in biblical terms, we need to pass from a state of death, separation from God, to a state of life or a state in which our relationship with God is right.
26:43: That's the great question today. And so another way we can put that question is how can a perfectly holy
26:54: God accept me, a fallen sinner? And so probably the most important theological truth underlying the answer to this question is the doctrine of the atonement.
27:07: And I would suggest that behind the of the atonement, there lie at least three presuppositions.
27:15: Number one, the perfect holiness and justice of God. God is infinitely holy.
27:23: And because of his holiness, he is absolutely just. By that we mean that God is obligated by his nature as perfectly holy to judge, punish sin.
27:39: Then we also have a second presupposition, which is the utter sinfulness of man, which
27:48: I just talked about. And that's both an Old Testament and New Testament truth. There is none righteous.
27:56: No, not one, says the apostle Paul in Romans 3. All of sin comes short of the third presupposition, then, is that our
28:06: God is a God who has demonstrated both his mercy and his grace. Mercy and withholding judgment from those for whom it is due, and his grace in extending undeserved kindness to those for whom there's no reason he should show his kindness to them.
28:31: They've done nothing to deserve it. Now, when you put all of that together, then we have to ask the question, how is it that God did this?
28:44: How is it that God can be that perfectly holy and just God and still extend mercy and grace, which would seem to argue against his standard of holiness and justice?
28:59: In fact, that's a vital question that we have to pick up right after we return from our first break here.
29:08: So, if you'd like to join us on the air with your own question for Pastor Ron, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,
29:17: chrisarnsen at gmail .com, that's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.
29:24: Please give us your first name, at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the
29:32: USA. And we already heard from Eddie on Long Island, New York, who disagrees with the
29:40: Calvinistic understanding of the Atonement. So, Eddie, we would love to hear an actual question from you, if you're listening still.
29:49: And anybody else, whether you agree or disagree with what's being said today, we would love to hear from you. You may remain anonymous if it makes you feel more comfortable, but we ask of you, please, unless it's a sensitive issue, a personal or private matter, please include at least your first name, city and state, and country of residence.
30:08: We're going to be right back after these messages, so don't go away. Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, For am
30:16: I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man,
30:23: I would not be a servant of Christ. Hi, I'm Mark Lukens, pastor of Providence Baptist Church. We are a
30:29: Reformed Baptist Church, and we hold to the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689. We are in Norfolk, Massachusetts.
30:36: We strive to reflect Paul's mindset to be much more concerned with how God views what we say and what we do, than how men view these things.
30:44: That's not the best recipe for popularity, but since that wasn't the apostles' priority, it must not be ours either.
30:51: We believe by God's grace that we are called to demonstrate love and compassion to our fellow man, and to be vessels of Christ's mercy to a lost and hurting community around us, and to build up the body of Christ in truth and love.
31:04: If you live near Norfolk, Massachusetts, or plan to visit our area, please come and join us for worship and fellowship.
31:10: You can call us at 508 -528 -5750, that's 508 -528 -5750, or go to our website to email us, listen to past sermons, worship songs, or watch our
31:21: TV program, entitled, Resting in Grace. You can find us at providencebaptistchurchma .org,
31:27: that's providencebaptistchurchma .org, or even on sermonaudio .com. Providence Baptist Church is delighted to sponsor
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32:18: Trust, discover, and enjoy the NASB for yourself today. Go to nasbible .com, that's nasbible .com.
32:26: Tired of box store Christianity, of doing church in a warehouse with all the trappings of a rock concert?
32:32: Do you long for a more traditional and reverent style of worship? And how about the preaching? Perhaps you've begun to think that in -depth biblical exposition has vanished from Long Island.
32:42: Well, there's good news. Wedding River Baptist Church exists to provide believers with a meaningful and reverent worship experience, featuring the systematic exposition of God's Word.
32:52: And this loving congregation looks forward to meeting you. Call them at 631 -929 -3512 for service times, 631 -929 -3512, or check out their website at wrbc .us,
33:09: that's wrbc .us. Welcome back.
33:15: This is Chris Arnzen, and we have as our guest today, if you've just tuned in, the pastor of that church that we were just promoting in that advertisement,
33:23: Pastor Ron Glass of Wedding River Baptist Church in Wedding River, Long Island, New York. We are discussing the atonement, and I have posed it in the question as a theme, what happened on Calvary?
33:38: Was the atonement merely made possible, or was it accomplished, actually accomplished, by the shed blood of Jesus Christ?
33:47: If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, whether you agree with what's being said or whether you disagree, even if you're not a
33:54: Christian, we would love to hear from you, and perhaps even especially if you're not a Christian. And our email address is
33:59: ChrisArnzen, at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N, at gmail .com.
34:05: Pastor Glass, before we went to the break, you were posing a very important question about how a holy and righteous
34:13: God reconciles wicked, rebellious, and sinful men to Himself, if you could continue where you left off there.
34:21: Well, let me just say that I think that most Christians today have at best only a vague understanding of what
34:31: Christ actually did on the cross, and so for the past 2 ,000 years of Christian thinking, what we've ended up with is a series of conflicting theological views on the subject of the atonement.
34:47: Frankly, it has become a source of real, in some cases, hostility.
34:54: You almost sense a little of that in the question that your listener wrote, because it's almost like we're willing to have an argument here or a fight here, and that really is not what we want to talk about today.
35:12: Now, I do think it would be helpful just to look at some of the positions that have historically been advocated.
35:23: I think we can define the atonement. Here's my, and I'm going to take a little different view than some do today, but we have, for example, one theologian has defined it this way.
35:37: He said, the atonement is the work that Christ did in His life and death to earn our salvation.
35:45: Now, that's a very broad statement, but it really doesn't define the word atonement, maybe in terms of the way some theologians have handled it, but the word itself doesn't mean that.
35:57: The word atonement actually is from a
36:02: Hebrew word. It's an English adaptation of the Hebrew concept. The word is kefar in the
36:09: Hebrew language, and it means to cover, so we're talking about a covering for sin.
36:17: Now, how has God done that? Well, that's something I hope I can talk about a little bit later, but let me just kind of lay out for you some of the main views on this issue.
36:31: Let me kind of go back in history a little bit and look at some of the earlier views, and I'm not going to spend much time on this, but when you go back into the early history of the
36:48: Church, you go back to Church Father Origen, for example, an early theologian.
36:56: He was from Alexandria and Caesarea. He had something that was called the ransom theory.
37:01: He believed that Christ paid a ransom to Satan, and that as a result of that we've been released from bondage to sin.
37:16: Now, this is not something that I think you can confirm from Scripture. It doesn't really, it's not a view that you can justify exegetically from the
37:27: Word of God. I'll just leave it there. Later in the Middle Ages, you had something called the moral influence theory.
37:35: These are the terms by which theologians refer to these things. This was first put forward by a guy named
37:43: Peter Abelard, who was a French theologian, and he basically said that the atonement was not a matter of God requiring a payment for the penalty of sin, but what
37:53: Christ's death did was to give us a demonstration of how much God loved human beings, and then what that do would be an example.
38:06: Christ would provide us with an example to show us God's love, and again, that does not satisfy the demands of the teaching of Scripture.
38:20: There was also another view called the governmental theory.
38:27: This was set forth by a Dutch theologian who also happened to be a lawyer, and his name was
38:33: Hugo Grotius, and he held that God didn't actually have to make a payment for sin.
38:41: He didn't have to require a payment for sin. He's omnipotent, so God could just overlook sin if he wanted to do that, and so the purpose of Christ's death then was that God would demonstrate the fact that his laws had been broken, and that as the moral governor of the universe, that some kind of penalty would be required from whoever breaks sin.
39:12: So what he did was to suffer to show that when someone breaks
39:19: God's law, there has to be a penalty. That's called the governmental theory.
39:25: Now let me just mention the Roman Catholic view. The Catholic conception of Christ's passion and his suffering on the cross and his atonement is that Christ offered himself up in sacrificial love to the
39:44: Father, that he was obedient unto death for the sins of all men, and in his human will he offered to God a sacrifice of love that was more pleasing to the
39:59: Father than all of the sins of men in all of time, but together we're displeased.
40:07: So in that sense he made satisfaction for our sins. That's an important word, satisfaction.
40:13: We're going to be coming back to that. So the Father was never angry with Christ, and the
40:19: Father never poured out his wrath on his son. It was the passion, the suffering of Christ was an act of great love, the greatest revelation ever seen of the heart of God and glory of Christ.
40:33: So when Jesus was actually on the cross suffering, God the Father was not pouring out his wrath on his son.
40:39: It was Christ's act of self -sacrifice and loving obedience to the Father. So what he did,
40:49: God allowed human beings to inflict all of this pain on Christ, but it was not what we would call penal substitution.
41:04: Deeper than that even, our present sins contributed to his suffering because he grieved over all the sins of the world.
41:16: This was the words of St. Francis of Assisi, he said, nor did demons crucify him.
41:23: It is you who have crucified him and crucify him still when you delight in your vices.
41:29: By the way, I want to just quickly let our listeners know who are just tuning in mid -sentence that these are not positions you are advocating.
41:36: You're going through historical teachings on this. This is a brief description of the
41:42: Roman Catholic view. The Roman Catholic view basically says that the passion and sufferings of Christ is a revelation of the love of God, not of the wrath of God.
41:51: That's an important thing to remember. When you come to Protestant theology, you have some different views.
42:00: One is the view that was taken by those we call Arminian today.
42:06: Essentially, the Arminian view is that Christ provided a universal redemption, or in terms of the controversy that often exists over this, an unlimited atonement, that Christ died for all men and then it's up to the individual to make the decision to take advantage of that.
42:32: Not all that different on that point is another view called Amaraldianism, or hypothetical universalism, which means that Christ died to make all men savable.
42:49: He died in order to make salvation a possibility for all men, but that in fact not all men are truly saved.
42:58: These views basically say that what Christ did was restore the human race to the moral condition of Adam and Eve before the fall.
43:11: When I say moral condition, what I mean is the ability or lack thereof to respond to the grace of God, to the command of God, so that now it is within the realm of the possible for a human being to make that decision on his own to receive the gift of grace from the
43:39: Lord Jesus Christ. Now the Reformed element, the Reformed community, their conception of the atonement is that Christ's passion and death involved
43:52: God pouring out his wrath for the sins of those whom he had chosen, those who were predestined or elect, and he poured those out on Christ's Son.
44:04: So in Christ's passion and death, Christ bore the punishment of the Father's wrath, and that wrath is the wrath that we as human beings deserve for our sins.
44:17: But they believe that the wrath of God was poured out on Christ in behalf of his elect, because in the
44:25: Reformed view, the death of Christ actually did accomplish something.
44:34: It's the effect of the death of Christ was not potential, it was actual.
44:40: So in the Reformed conception then, this is what it means to bear the curse, that is to bear the
44:47: Father's wrath for sin. God the Father, essentially what he did was to transfer all the sins, past, present, and future sins of his elect onto his
44:59: Son. So what God did was to actually punish his Son. He punished Christ for all the sins of the elect of all time.
45:08: And so because the sins of the elect are now paid for through Christ having been punished for them, then the elect can never be punished for any sin that they might ever commit.
45:20: Never subject to judicial punishment, which means they will never go to hell for their sins, and they are never actually punished for the sins.
45:30: Which is why when God deals with us when we sin, he's doing so as a loving
45:36: Father disciplining his child, but not punishing his enemy.
45:41: Yes, he chastises us, but not punishes us. Correct. And so for that reason,
45:47: Reformed theology is required, logically, to maintain that Christ died only for the elect.
45:56: And it's that truth which then raises the hackles of a lot of other believers who don't happen to accept that view.
46:05: Now, the logic behind that is that if Christ died for everyone, this would entail universal salvation.
46:11: And those who take an Arminian position, or the Emeraldian position, or which is popularly referred to as four -point
46:18: Calvinism, those who take that position adamantly say that that is not the case, that men are responsible to receive
46:34: Christ's gift of offer of salvation. It does not mean that everyone is saved.
46:45: But there is a problem there, and I think we'll talk about that in a little bit.
46:51: I think it's interesting that today, many of those among the
46:59: Arminians, and of course, there are quite a number of those who would logically fall into that category, but absolutely refuse to call themselves that.
47:12: You have many Baptists who are, in reality, four -point Arminians.
47:18: They believe that the truly born -again person cannot lose their salvation, but on all the other points of Arminianism, they are in agreement and typically refuse to call themselves
47:31: Arminians. Many of these individuals say that they believe in substitutionary atonement, but they cannot really claim to hold to that view because it is not really consistent with what they view as actually occurring on Calvary, can they?
47:53: I mean, if Christ died as a substitute, then he cannot punish those in hell for whom he died, can he?
48:03: Well, see, that's the point. Many of these other views that have been set forth historically in the
48:11: Church are ways of dealing with the death of Christ without having to resort to the substitutionary view.
48:22: And of course, we believe, and we can get into this in the remaining time, but we believe that the
48:31: Bible teaches that Christ died in the place of sinners, that he actually took the place of sinners.
48:38: And with that view, if you hold to that view, then you have to say that those for whom
48:52: Christ suffered that judgment, that is, if Christ died in my place, that means that God punished me in Jesus.
49:07: He did not punish me directly, he punished Jesus in my behalf.
49:13: Now, the language of both Old and New Testaments point to that fact.
49:20: If, in fact, Christ died for me, in my place, as my substitute, then there is no way that I would ever suffer the judgment of God against my sin.
49:37: Otherwise, you are left with what we would call double jeopardy.
49:44: And nowhere in Scripture do I see any indication that the
49:53: Bible teaches double jeopardy, which means that Jesus paid for my sins on the cross at Calvary, but because I didn't believe in Jesus Christ as my
50:04: Lord and Savior, I end up in hell for eternity, and I pay for my sins there forever.
50:13: If you don't mind, I would like to quote Charles Haddon Spurgeon on exactly what you're talking about, if you don't mind.
50:23: The reason why I'm quoting Charles Haddon Spurgeon, obviously, Charles Haddon Spurgeon did not contribute to the canon of Scripture.
50:30: I do not believe, nor does anybody in their right mind believe that his words are
50:37: God -breathed. He is not inerrant and infallible. But one of the reasons
50:43: I bring up Charles Spurgeon is that he is greatly beloved by people across the evangelical spectrum, even those that are vehemently anti -Calvinist, ironically.
50:54: And here's what Charles Spurgeon said in his defense of Calvinism, which is actually a part of his autobiography.
51:01: Here's what he said about exactly what you were just saying. Spurgeon says, if it was
51:07: Christ's intention to save all men, how deplorably has he been disappointed?
51:14: For we have his own testimony that there is a lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, and into that pit of woe have been cast some of the very persons who, according to the theory of universal redemption, were bought with his blood.
51:31: That seems to me a conception a thousand times more repulsive than any of those consequences which are said to be associated with the
51:40: Calvinistic and Christian doctrine of special and particular redemption. To think that my
51:47: Savior died for men who were or are in hell seems a supposition too horrible for me to entertain.
51:59: To imagine for a moment that he was the substitute for all the sons of men, and that God, having first punished the substitute, afterwards punished the sinners themselves, seems to conflict with all my ideas of divine justice.
52:17: That Christ should offer an atonement and satisfaction for the sins of all men, and that afterwards some of those very men should be punished for the sins for which
52:29: Christ had already atoned, appears to me to be the most monstrous iniquity that could ever have been imputed to Saturn, to Janus, to the goddess of the thugs, or to the most diabolical heathen deities.
52:45: God forbid that we should ever think thus of Jehovah, the just and wise and good.
52:51: I just thought I'd throw that in there because of the great love that people have for Charles Spurgeon on both sides of the theological divide, and especially because many of those who, when they hear you defending particular redemption, definite atonement, or limited atonement, they are recoiling with horror and they hate what you're saying, but at the same time and in the same breath they uphold
53:22: Spurgeon as a hero, and many of them even either out of ignorance or willful deception are spreading the lie that Spurgeon did not believe this.
53:35: So I just wanted to get that out of the way and I apologize for interrupting you, Pastor. No, no, that's good.
53:41: Let me refer back to the Old Testament for a moment, and this is from the famous 53rd chapter of Isaiah.
53:53: Now, my view on the 53rd chapter of Isaiah is, again, somewhat different.
53:59: Frankly, I've never heard anybody else with this view, but I would just put it out there for consideration. I believe this is the message that's going to be proclaimed in the future to the nation of Israel, and the
54:11: Jewish people rejected their Messiah. They crucified their Messiah. But then there's coming a day in the future when the message of the gospel is going to be proclaimed and many
54:25: Jewish people are going to believe. Now, I think this is part of the message that they're going to hear.
54:32: So when we read the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, what we are listening to is a testimony of evangelists in a time yet future, but looking back to the cross and telling the
54:46: Jewish people what it was that their Messiah did for them. Now, here's what it says in the fifth verse.
54:52: He was pierced through for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities.
55:00: The chastening for our well -being fell upon him. By his scourging, we are healed.
55:08: All of us like sheep have gone astray. Each of us has turned to his own way, but the
55:14: Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him. And then in the 12th verse, he was numbered with the transgressors.
55:24: He himself bore the sin of many and interceded for the transgressors.
55:31: In fact, we're going to have to go to a break right now Pastor Ron. I apologize, but we have to pay the bills here.
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59:05: That's the Thriving Story. Welcome back.
59:17: This is Chris Arns. And if you just tuned us in, our guest today is Pastor Ron Glass of Wading River Baptist Church in Wading River, Long Island, New York.
59:26: He is also a former professor or adjunct professor of Bible exposition at Talbot School of Theology.
59:34: Today, we are discussing the atonement. And we are asking the question, what actually happened on Calvary?
59:42: Was atonement merely made possible, or was atonement accomplished once and for all by the shed blood of Jesus Christ?
59:53: And our email address, if you'd like to join the conversation, is chrisarnson at gmail .com.
01:00:00: We were in the middle of a discussion on a text in Isaiah that Pastor Ron was pointing us to.
01:00:06: And let me just quickly interject or inject, I should say, a question, one of several questions that our listener
01:00:15: Eddie from Long Island, New York, who is not a Calvinist, has asked.
01:00:20: And I'm going to ask his last question first, because I think it will perhaps change the atmosphere in the minds of many who are listening, or at least some who are listening.
01:00:32: His question is, do you believe that because I do not believe in limited atonement that I am not a
01:00:38: Christian? If you could answer Eddie's question before returning to Isaiah. Sure.
01:00:46: You know, I grieve that there's been so much poisonous polemics over this whole issue.
01:00:57: I realize that we're at the heart here of the gospel, the heart of what
01:01:03: Jesus Christ did, and the heart of what it means to be a
01:01:08: Christian and to be saved, go to heaven. So of course,
01:01:15: Satan is going to attack at this point. Let me just say personally that I don't talk about myself very often in terms of being a
01:01:28: Calvinist. I just simply go where scripture leads me.
01:01:37: Now, I was a Christian, a born -again believer, a long time before I came to settled convictions with regard to what are today known as the doctrines of grace.
01:01:50: In fact, I still have the Bible that I think
01:01:55: I got when I was a sophomore in high school. I had it all the way through college and seminary.
01:02:01: And I can still go to the page that contains Ephesians 1, which talks about predestination.
01:02:10: And around the margins of that entire page, I wrote every single passage, reference, every single reference
01:02:17: I could find in the Bible, which absolutely proved that predestination could not be true.
01:02:24: And I argued vigorously against that. In time, however,
01:02:30: God led me to see that scripture indeed declares predestination.
01:02:37: And in fact, if it weren't for that, I wouldn't be a Christian at all today. Can a person be a
01:02:43: Christian and not hold to these views? Absolutely. So I would say to Eddie, one thing that I would not do in this conversation is bring your salvation into question.
01:02:57: As long as your faith is placed in the Lord Jesus Christ and what he did for you,
01:03:05: I can say that I think it's possible, I would say likely, that perhaps you don't truly understand, perfectly understand everything
01:03:16: Christ did for you as it's set forth for us in scripture. In fact, none of us perfectly understand.
01:03:22: None of us. No, of course not. In things like this, there's a great deal of mystery attached.
01:03:29: But I do say this, that what God has revealed in his word is for us to understand.
01:03:34: Yes, amen. One of the reasons that I disagree with the idea, and it's not just an idea that we hear with regard to this set of doctrines, but with a lot of other things as well, that, oh well, we can't understand that.
01:03:50: It's too difficult. Or usually the argument goes something like this, because people over here believe this way and people over here believe a different way.
01:04:02: But they're all people who love Christ, therefore we really can never know.
01:04:09: Well, I disagree with that in most cases, because if God has in fact revealed these things in his word, they are there for our understanding, scripture tells us.
01:04:23: And yes, God takes pleasure, I think, in hiding some of these things so that we have the great pleasure and privilege of digging them out.
01:04:34: And there is a tremendous joy in the whole process of discovery as we study the word of God.
01:04:43: Now does that mean that there aren't some things that we don't understand about all these? Yes, and in fact when it comes to the subject of destination, which doesn't happen to be our subject today, but it's related to it, when we come to that doctrine, there is a major question that is totally beyond our comprehension and is not a matter of revelation.
01:05:07: And that is, why does God choose one person over another? There's no answer to that question in God's word, and there's no answer to that question that we can provide.
01:05:17: That is within the inscrutable counsels of God. Maybe someday he'll reveal it, maybe never.
01:05:25: But one thing that we know for certain though, it is unquestionably true that he does not choose anyone because they deserve to be chosen.
01:05:34: That's correct, or he doesn't choose anyone on the basis of who they are or what they have done.
01:05:43: Any goodness of any kind. No, that's right. Even the correct and wise choice of Christ and the choice to follow him is not the basis upon which he looks down the corridors of time and chooses someone, because then he would still be choosing a human being on the basis of goodness in them.
01:06:05: That's a misunderstanding of the word foreknowledge, and so I think we have to just let that question lie.
01:06:18: Someday maybe God will reveal it, but if he doesn't, okay, he doesn't. That's in his inscrutable counsels, and we're content to leave it there.
01:06:27: But God has revealed to us the fact that he did choose some and didn't choose others.
01:06:33: Why individuals? No, but the fact that he did, yes. So the whole matter of the question from the caller comes down to this matter of attitude, and I think that sometimes those who hold to the doctrines of grace have not done themselves any favors by taking either a very militant sort of attitude, we're right, you're wrong, shape up, or a very unloving and kind of ungracious and harsh attitude towards those, sometimes also arrogant attitude.
01:07:12: I think arrogance can be a real problem. Come across as saying, well, we know these things, we've studied these things, we've read all the
01:07:21: Puritans and all the big books, and you poor peons sitting in the pews, you just don't.
01:07:31: While they would never say that, sometimes I think that's publicly communicated in the attitude with which the doctrines of grace are talked about, especially from the pulpit.
01:07:47: The sin of pride exists amongst all men, whether they're
01:07:52: Calvinist, Arminian, or Atheist, or whatever religion they may claim. It's just that those who subscribe to the doctrines of sovereign grace, reformed theology,
01:08:03: Calvinism, however you want to define that or label that, we have less of an excuse because the doctrines we hold to be precious are supposed to humble us, not exalt our pride.
01:08:14: Well, so with that statement that you just made, let me go back to Isaiah 53, and remind you, he was pierced through for our transgressions.
01:08:24: Now there's nothing to be prideful about when we realize it was our transgressions.
01:08:31: He was crucified for our iniquities. The chastening for our well -being fell upon him, and by his scourging we are healed.
01:08:42: All of us, every one of us, like sheep have gone astray. Each of us has turned to his own way.
01:08:48: The Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him. Then verse 12, he was numbered with the transgressors, yet he himself bore the sin of many and interceded for the transgressors.
01:09:00: Now these verses from Isaiah 53 absolutely emanate substitution.
01:09:09: I mean, you can't read them without almost every line saying that what Christ did in behalf of, well, what he did with regard to sin, he did in behalf of sinners.
01:09:22: That is, he stood in their place. The punishment that God meted out on sin fell on him.
01:09:33: Now that's going to be great news to the Jewish people in a time yet future, but throughout
01:09:39: Christian history, and in fact even Jewish history from the time
01:09:46: Isaiah wrote these words in the 8th century BC to the 21st century
01:09:51: AD, we rejoice that in fact we have a substitute.
01:09:57: We have one who stood in our place. And this truth from Isaiah 53 is taught in many other places too.
01:10:09: Let me just remind you of what the Apostle Paul says in one of the most conspicuous examples of this in Romans chapter 5 where he says in verse 8 that God demonstrates his own love toward us in that while we were yet sinners,
01:10:26: Christ died for us. And then in the book of 2
01:10:34: Corinthians chapter 5, the last verse of that chapter, he made him, that is
01:10:39: God the Father, made him God the Son, who knew no sin, that is
01:10:45: God the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, was not guilty of any sin on his own, but he made him to be sin on our behalf so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.
01:10:58: There's no way for us to gain a standing of righteousness apart from the imputed righteousness of Christ.
01:11:09: Now I need to talk a little bit about that word imputed.
01:11:14: This is a word that you don't actually find in scripture, but the concept is very important.
01:11:21: Imputation is a word which refers to accounting.
01:11:27: It means to post to one's account. So anybody who's ever studied accounting knows what it is to post a debit or a credit on a ledger sheet or whatever.
01:11:38: That's what you have here. And the important doctrine of the imputation begins with the fact that Adam's sin in the
01:11:49: Garden of Eden was imputed to the human race. It was posted to the human race because Adam was the human race.
01:11:59: The human race had not become particularized in other human beings. Adam was it.
01:12:04: He was not just the first man. He was the human race, which is one reason he's called
01:12:10: Adam the man. So when Adam sinned, the whole human race became guilty.
01:12:17: Sin was imputed to the human race. Then the sins of God's elect were imputed to Christ.
01:12:25: They were posted to his account, which is the point of 2 Corinthians 5 .21 that we just read.
01:12:31: Our sins were posted as a debit to Christ's account.
01:12:38: And then the righteousness of Christ dying on the cross as an innocent substitute, that righteousness is imputed to repentant sinners.
01:12:53: So you have this sort of cycle of imputation which is very important to understand.
01:13:02: If I could just interrupt for a second, just to clarify something, if you don't mind.
01:13:09: Some of the wording that you're using in these passages, those who reject definite atonement, particular redemption, limited atonement, they will say, see the use of the word, he died for us, for our transgressions.
01:13:29: Everybody can claim that, they'll say, because they think that that word is being used universally.
01:13:37: But doesn't the reader have to understand who is in the audience and who is being discussed?
01:13:43: Because in one of those texts in Isaiah, Isaiah is saying that we are healed.
01:13:52: So therefore, it's not everybody that he is referring to who is receiving the benefit of the stripes of Christ.
01:13:59: It's those who are healed. Am I correct? So therefore, the one who is in hell cannot claim that he was healed by the
01:14:08: Christ? Am I right? Correct. I mean, you have a statement from Jesus, as he put it in Matthew 20 verse 28, just as the son of man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for who?
01:14:28: All? No. Many. Many. For many. And the language, the verses that have the universal kind of language have to be studied, as every verse does, in its context.
01:14:48: So, I mean, Paul talking to Christians in Romans 8, he who did not spare his own son, but delivered him over for us all.
01:14:59: Well, who's us here? We're talking about believers. Right. And that is true of all these other verses too, especially the ones that are constantly used against the viewer talking.
01:15:16: Well, here's one that's a classic. I remember a friend of mine who's a fundamentalist who despises
01:15:22: Calvinism. He said to me, look what it says in John 1 29.
01:15:29: Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And I said, well, you're putting an inflection on the word world, but how about behold the
01:15:41: Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world? Takes away.
01:15:47: So therefore, he cannot be, John the Baptist could not be speaking about every single person who has ever lived because Christ did not take away their sins.
01:15:57: Otherwise, hell would be empty. Am I right? So therefore,
01:16:02: I'm sorry if I interrupted you. No, no, I'm glad to have you contribute like that.
01:16:10: That's right. And John himself in Revelations refers to the world as those from out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation.
01:16:19: So therefore, all kinds of people from all over the planet. That's really what it meant. That's right.
01:16:25: And especially John, the apostle John, in his writing, often uses the world that way.
01:16:33: That, for example, is the same way that it's used in John 3 16.
01:16:39: God so loved the world. Now, you know, I have been challenged by people who don't accept the particular redemption view.
01:16:51: And they have said, well, so you're saying God so loved the elect? No, no, no, that's not what it says.
01:16:58: I'm not going to change God's word. Spirit of God said, God so loved the world.
01:17:04: And God loves the whole world system. He made it and he loves his world.
01:17:11: And by the way, someday, he is going to redeem not just the individuals, but he's going to redeem his world as well.
01:17:24: And Paul talks in Romans 8 about the redemption of all things the world.
01:17:31: But the thing about it is that when you look at the context of our
01:17:37: Lord's conversation with Nicodemus, very Jewish focused, and there was a certain pride of race on the part of the
01:17:47: Jews who had a hard time reckoning the fact that there were Gentiles who would be saved.
01:17:53: And the message of the of the Johannine writings, the gospel, the epistles, the book of Revelation, does emphasize frequently the fact that what
01:18:06: Christ has done, he has done for men of every race and ethnicity and language group, nationality, not restricted to Jewish people, or even to an isolated group of Christians, for example, that I think is part of what he's saying when
01:18:29: John's saying when he writes in 1 John chapter 2, that he,
01:18:37: Christ himself, is the propitiation for our sins, not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world, not just towards those to whom he was writing at that time, which were primarily the
01:18:52: Christian community in Asia Minor, but Christians wherever they are found.
01:18:58: Right. Well, if the word propitiation means to turn away wrath, then how could he possibly have turned away the wrath of those who never come to Christ?
01:19:09: Because therefore you would have to be a universalist in the truest sense, that there is no wrath waiting for the
01:19:17: Muslim, the atheist, the child molester who is unrepentant, etc.,
01:19:23: etc., if you really believe that the sins of all those people who have ever lived and will ever live have been a propitiatory sacrifice for them too, then they have nothing to fear.
01:19:43: Right. If you don't mind, let me shift gears a little bit here, and let me talk about this concept, the word atonement.
01:19:56: What a lot of people don't realize, because of this discussion that's been going on for centuries, is that the word atonement is the translation of the
01:20:10: Hebrew word kaphar. It means covering. Now, the word appears only 11 times in the book of Exodus, 51 times in the book of Leviticus, and 17 times in the book of Numbers.
01:20:24: But now, if you move beyond the it appears one time in Numbers, where our
01:20:30: New American Standard Version has translated it expiation. But it only appears three times in all the historical narratives of the
01:20:39: Old Testament, five times in the book of Ezekiel, in prophecies that frankly concern the future, and it appears once in the book of Daniel.
01:20:48: The important thing here that I'd point out to all of our listeners is that the word atonement never appears in the
01:20:57: New Testament. It is not a New Testament term. It is not a
01:21:02: New Testament concept. Why? Well, atonement refers to the covering of sins committed by guilty sinners by the sacrifice of blood on the part of an innocent victim.
01:21:21: Now, to understand this, I think we have to have a grasp of the
01:21:27: Day of Atonement, which was an annual day of solemn day of worship in the nation of Israel.
01:21:40: It was so solemn that it is the one day, we believe, in which Israel was commanded to fast.
01:21:46: It is the only day in the year when they were to fast. The word is, afflict their souls.
01:21:53: And it was a very solemn day. Now, what happened on the Day of Atonement? Let me see if I can summarize it very quickly.
01:22:01: There were sacrifices that were offered, but the most important sacrifices involved the selection of two goats that would be slaughtered.
01:22:14: One that would be slaughtered. Here's what would happen. They would take two goats. One of those goats would be killed.
01:22:23: And the blood of one of the bulls that was also offered, the blood of that goat would be sprinkled on the mercy seat.
01:22:36: Now, let me just review quickly. In the tabernacle, later in the temple, there was a room called the
01:22:42: Holy of Holies. It was blocked off from the rest of the tabernacle, which was called the
01:22:48: Holy Place, with a heavy curtain. Behind that curtain, in that Holy of Holies, was the
01:22:55: Ark of the Covenant, the gold box containing the stones, tablets with the
01:23:02: Ten Commandments, a couple other items, the rod that Aaron had that had blossomed, and a pot of manna.
01:23:11: All of that was contained in this box. On top of that box was a lid, and mounted on the lid of that box were two sculpted, engraved golden cherubim, angels, images of angels.
01:23:27: Now, that lid was called the Mercy Seat. And the reason it was called the
01:23:33: Mercy Seat, I think, is because it was, remember, in the tabernacle during the wilderness wanderings, later in the temple, the
01:23:43: Shekinah, Presence of God, the Glory of God, dwelt over that Mercy Seat.
01:23:49: It was as though it were the seat where God was sitting, between those two cherubims, on that lid over that box.
01:23:55: That lid separated the very Holy Presence of God, as manifested in that cloud, from the reality of the broken
01:24:05: Law of God, which was contained inside the box.
01:24:10: So, between the broken Law and the Glory of God, there was this lid upon which the blood was sprinkled.
01:24:17: So, the blood was sprinkled there, and then the other goat, the live goat, the priest placed his hands on that goat, confessed the sins of the nation, and sent the goat into the wilderness, never to return again.
01:24:36: This was the ritual of the Day of Atonement. Now, the important fact to see here is that this ritual took place every year, every single year.
01:24:51: It was the premier confession of sin for the entire nation of Israel.
01:24:59: Sacrifices were offered throughout the year, every day of the year, sacrifices were offered.
01:25:04: And that was the major problem that Israel had.
01:25:11: This Atonement, this is what was called Atonement. Why? Because the sins of the nation were covered by the blood.
01:25:21: The blood provided a covering for sin. It was as though God, who is there in His Presence, in that cloud, there in the
01:25:31: Holy of Holies, looked down at the broken Law contained in that box, but he, to put it graphically, couldn't see that because blood had intervened.
01:25:47: And because he saw the blood, he would not then punish the nation.
01:25:54: It was similar to what happened on the Day of the Passover, when the blood was put on the doorpost, and when the angel of the
01:26:01: Lord saw the He passed over that house. Now, with that in mind, think about what we read in terms of the spirit -inspired commentary from Hebrews chapter 9.
01:26:18: Listen to these words. Into the second tabernacle, or the second room, the
01:26:24: Holy of Holies, the high priest enters once a year, not without taking blood, which he offers for himself for the sins of the people committed in ignorance.
01:26:35: The Holy Spirit is signifying this, that the way into the holy place, now listen to this, has not yet been disclosed, while the outer tabernacle is still standing, which is a symbol for the present time, accordingly both gifts and sacrifices are offered, which cannot make the worshipper perfect in conscience, since they relate only to food and drink, and various washings, regulations for the body imposed until a time of reformation.
01:27:09: But, when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things to come, he entered through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation, not through the blood of goats and cats, but through his own blood, having entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption.
01:27:33: The blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling those who have been defiled, sanctified, for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, through the eternal spirit offered without blemish, through God, cleanse your conscience from dead works, to serve the living
01:27:52: God. For this reason, he is the mediator of a new covenant, it's an unorthodox noun there, so it means a new kind of covenant, not like the old one, so that since the death has taken place for the redemption of the transgressions that were committed under the first covenant, those who have been called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.
01:28:18: Christ did not enter a holy place made with hands, a mere copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us.
01:28:27: Nor was it that he would offer himself often as the high priest enters the holy place year by year, that is not his own.
01:28:33: Otherwise, he would have needed to suffer often since the foundation of the world. Here's an important phrase, now once at the consummation of the ages he has been manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.
01:28:50: Later in the 10th chapter, listen to these words, in those sacrifices there is a reminder of sins year by year, day of atonement, for it is impossible for the blood of bulls and listen to it, to take away sin.
01:29:07: So you see what was happening in the day of atonement was sins were merely being covered, they weren't being taken away.
01:29:14: And so Israel's sins were not removed, they were just covered by the blood.
01:29:21: So now he says in verse 14 of the 10th chapter, by one offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified.
01:29:32: So the sacrifice of Christ is a once for all sacrifice.
01:29:38: The day of atonement took place once a year, sacrifices were offered every day of the year.
01:29:45: Why? Because those sins were not taken away, those sins were simply covered by the blood.
01:29:52: They were looking ahead, those things spoke of the sacrifice that someday would come that would take away sin, that was the sacrifice of the
01:30:01: Lord Jesus Christ when he shed his blood on Calvary's cross. So what I'm saying is this,
01:30:07: I think that there's a valid distinction to be made here between atonement in the
01:30:14: Old Testament and what Christ did in the New Testament, which there are a number of different words that refer to different aspects of what he did.
01:30:23: Redemption, he purchased our salvation. You've used the word, I've used the word propitiation, where he intervened to deflect the wrath of God off of us onto himself.
01:30:37: We talk about sometimes expiation, again the payment of the price for sins, and so we have this difference.
01:30:47: Now all of this sounds complicated probably to you who are listening today.
01:30:53: Can I try to make it as simple as I can? I've thought about this for a long time and this is the illustration
01:30:58: I use with our folks. In fact, can you bring the illustration to light when we return from the break?
01:31:05: Absolutely. This is our final break and Eddie, we will get to at least part of your very lengthy question and you know something
01:31:12: Pastor Ron, I think that this definitely demands another program, maybe even next week if you're free, but that's up to you and your schedule and of course
01:31:21: God who is sovereign over the whole thing. But we're going to be going to a break right now and please don't go away because we're coming right back with Pastor Ron Glass and his discussion of the atonement.
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01:34:06: Welcome back. This is Chris Arms and if you just tuned us in, we, for the last 90 minutes, have been interviewing
01:34:13: Pastor Ron Glass of Wading River Baptist Church on the Atonement. And Pastor Ron, if you could continue where you left off.
01:34:22: Well, what I was saying was that at some point there was a startling revelation to me when
01:34:31: I realized that the word Atonement does not appear in the New Testament and the concept of covering of sins does not appear in the
01:34:43: New Testament as well, except by way of referring to the Old Testament, which said to me then that there is a definite difference between the process of expiation of the removal of sins or the removal of the guilt of sins in the
01:35:03: Old Testament and the New Testament. In the Old Testament, blood was shed, sprinkled upon the altar, sprinkled upon the mercy seat.
01:35:13: Blood was shed in order to cover sins. The covering of sins implied only a temporary situation that begged for a permanent solution, which the
01:35:29: New Testament tells us, as I just read a bunch of verses from Hebrews, the
01:35:34: New Testament tells us that's what the Lord Jesus Christ did. So, in a sense,
01:35:41: Atonement was the method by which sin was temporarily swept under the rug.
01:35:49: In other words, God is holy, and so God in his house wants his house clean, so to speak, and so he can't stand to look at sin, so there had to be a sweeping under the rug.
01:36:03: So he swept the dirt under the rug. But as any of us know who were in a situation where mom said, now when
01:36:12: I come home, I want you to have the floor swept and clean, and you swept the dirt under the rug.
01:36:17: When mom saw that, she was not a happy camper. What she wanted was she wanted the dirt removed, swept into a dustpan and then deposited in the trash or carried out somewhere.
01:36:29: So, in God's economy, this sin which was temporarily swept under the rug, the rug covered the dirt just as the blood covered sin.
01:36:43: It could not be hidden or covered forever. The need was for the dirt to be removed, and that's the difference between Old Testament Atonement covering and New Testament propitiation, which is the basic idea of appeasement, but it's related to the
01:36:59: Old Testament mercy, as I pointed out, and also expiation and redemption, which are words that we use for what happened in the
01:37:10: New Testament which happened with Christ. That's why, and I will say to all of you who don't happen to accept the five points of Calvinism, so to speak, and who are right now ready to throw things at the radio,
01:37:27: I would say to you I do not like the words limited atonement, which sometimes are used to refer to this doctrine.
01:37:35: Why don't I? I object to both of those words. First of all, I don't like the word limited because, as many of you would probably say to me, that implies that somehow
01:37:45: Christ's blood, his work of redemption, was not sufficient to save everybody, and of course that's not the view that we take.
01:37:55: John Calvin himself said that Christ's blood was sufficient to save every human being.
01:38:02: Had he so chosen to do that, every person who's ever lived could have been saved on the basis of the blood of Christ.
01:38:10: So it's not that there was any deficiency, any kind of weakness, in the actual atonement or the actual sacrifice that Christ made on the cross.
01:38:22: So I don't like the word limited. It gives the wrong idea. In fact, Spurgeon said that it is the Arminian that truly has a limited atonement because it's limited in its power.
01:38:33: It was intended to redeem the entire universe and yet only a small portion, percentage -wise, out of that universe will be saved.
01:38:45: So therefore, in the Arminian understanding, that is an atonement that has very limited power, whereas the
01:38:54: Reformed understanding of particular redemption or definite atonement is that the power is unlimited because everyone for whom it was intended is redeemed.
01:39:08: That's right. That's correct. The other thing is I don't particularly like the word atonement because, as I've just pointed out, atonement is an ultimate.
01:39:18: What Christ did was not provide atonement. I find myself sometimes catching myself still referring to Christ's atoning work, and it is language that gets into our hymnals and into our pulpits, but I think that it is more accurate to refer to his work of redemption.
01:39:39: I like the designation many have suggested of particular redemption. That is, what
01:39:45: Christ did on the cross, his redeeming work was done for specific persons whom
01:39:50: God had chosen from before the foundation of the world. The illustration that I like to use is that the
01:40:01: Old Testament people were saved on the credit card. Now think about it.
01:40:06: You have a credit card, and you swipe that credit card. What you are doing is making a promise to pay later.
01:40:14: You are actually completing a transaction for which payment has not yet been made.
01:40:21: When you use a credit card, you're not actually paying. What you're doing is promising to pay, and so the payment is regarded as happening in the future.
01:40:33: Now, once the money is paid, once you have put money into your account, you may choose today to use your debit card.
01:40:46: Your debit card is payment. It's actual payment, but it draws on that which has been already deposited in your account, and that's the way
01:40:58: I see it today. Old Testament saints were saved on credit. They swiped the credit card.
01:41:05: Today, New Testament saints are saved by the blood of Christ who paid that price on Calvary.
01:41:14: So when we swipe the card, we're swiping a debit card. The money is already in the bank, and we're just taking advantage of that and paying for our debt now in real money.
01:41:28: So I see it as sort of that kind of a contract. And it is interesting that there are some, in fact, maybe the majority of those who would identify themselves as Messianic Jews, many of them reject the notion of particular redemption, some vociferously and vehemently, and yet they themselves realize that in the
01:41:54: Old Covenant, the sacrificial system, which was to picture the death of Christ, that had no benefit to the pagan nations surrounding
01:42:06: Israel. I mean, that was intended for a unique group of people chosen by God, was it not?
01:42:13: It was, but the thing that we have to remember is that that unique, special group of people who had been chosen by God had a commission to be the priestly nation, which means they were the mediators between God and the nations.
01:42:31: And that was Israel's great failure throughout history. They did not fulfill the plan that God had established when he raised up the nation of Israel, and especially when he constituted them as a nation there at the foot of Mount Sinai, as recorded in Exodus 19.
01:42:50: He said, you are a special treasure. You are my possession, a priestly nation.
01:42:56: Their job was to spread the good news of God's grace, of God's saving power, of God's righteousness, of his word, his law.
01:43:06: They were to communicate all of that to the nations, and they didn't. And before I go to Eddie, and we may have to visit some of Eddie's question until the next time you come on,
01:43:18: God willing, Pastor Ron, but before we go to Eddie, I just wanted to quickly get—Steve
01:43:23: Visconti, our friend in Wading River, has asked, as I listen,
01:43:28: I think, to 2008 when Pastor Ron was preaching through Romans about halfway through the study, there was conflict.
01:43:37: Was that merely coincidence? Pastors must continually preach theology.
01:43:43: If you could just comment on Eddie's comment slash question. Steve? Steve, I'm sorry.
01:43:51: Steve's comment. Well, I have not much to say except yes. I think that the conflict we experienced had a lot to do with the truth.
01:44:02: In fact, the conflict actually took place after I had finished the eighth chapter of Romans, and we had just gone through all of these profound things about Christ.
01:44:16: And yes, I think that was directly related to that. And it wasn't only—actually, your answer would be no, because it wasn't merely coincidence.
01:44:26: It was not merely coincidence. But the answer is yes, preachers need to preach theology.
01:44:32: Absolutely. Yes. All right. Let's try to get to some of Eddie's question, and like I said, if you could come back to address this deep topic further in a week or so or whenever you're available, that'd be great.
01:44:45: Eddie says, after giving you some very high accolades about your brilliance, he says,
01:44:51: I'm not a theologian, but a thinking man with some Bible understanding. I disagree with the doctrine of limited atonement as described by most
01:44:59: Calvinists, although I am still learning. However, I do not see in the doctrine of the atonement a limit to its scope.
01:45:09: I see in Scripture that God laid upon Jesus the iniquity of us all. This all is the all that like sheep have gone astray.
01:45:20: Thus it appears to me that Jesus atones for all sin, thus atoning for every man's salvation.
01:45:27: However, I see all judgment being entrusted to the one who paid it all. Thus he has been given the right to judge men for whom he died.
01:45:37: This appears to me to be the only way to make sense out of passages like 1 John 2 -2 and 1
01:45:45: Timothy 4 -10. If Jesus is the Savior of the whole world, as it says, and especially of those who believe, how can we then say that Jesus is not the
01:45:56: Savior of the unsaved whom he purchased for judgment? We'll have to leave it there because it's a very lengthy email, at least lengthy for a radio program to be answered.
01:46:08: Well, yeah, the nub of this question, the heart of this question,
01:46:15: I think hinges on, and it's a quotation from Isaiah 53, hangs on the issue of who's we, all of us, or us, all of us have gone astray.
01:46:30: He uses the we, us, our through that whole passage. Now you have to look at the context of that, and what you see is that it is the nation of Israel of whom he's speaking.
01:46:45: He is talking about what they did to Messiah. But at the same time, there's not, language is not entirely a universal language.
01:47:06: Verse 11, by his knowledge, the righteous one, my servant, will justify the many.
01:47:14: He will bear their iniquities, not all, but the many, which usually is a word, is a phrase in the
01:47:22: Old Testament prophets that refers to the righteous saints in Israel, the
01:47:28: Jewish people who believe in Christ. He was numbered with the transgressors, yet he himself bore the sins of many and interceded for the transgressors.
01:47:41: So even in Isaiah 53, the language is not universalistic.
01:47:46: And one of the passages that really speaks to election, which obviously is inseparably hinged to a particular redemption, is in John chapter 10, when
01:48:03: Jesus says to the Jews that gathered around him, you do not believe because you are not of my sheep.
01:48:14: My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me, and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.
01:48:25: My Father who has given them to me is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the
01:48:33: Father's hand. I and the Father are one. Obviously, if you can't even believe unless you are already a sheep, people don't become sheeps by believing.
01:48:48: They believe because they are sheep. Am I right in that analogy there, which seems to be clear in that text?
01:48:57: Yeah, his sheep are his people.
01:49:03: Yes. And so they would be his saints.
01:49:09: Yeah. And so therefore, obviously there is a unique relationship that Jesus is saying that the reason why people don't believe is because they're not sheep.
01:49:21: So anyway, there is the danger of viewing everyone on the face of the earth who has ever lived in some kind of equal plane when the scriptures don't teach that, other than the fact that we're all from one lump of sinful clay, as it's taught in Romans 9.
01:49:41: And I would just say to Eddie and to all who are struggling with this issue that we, at least
01:49:50: I believe, and those who hold positions like I do, and even some who hold positions different from mine, would cherish the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement, not dying in our place.
01:50:04: Now, I think that what we often refer to as the Arminian or the free will view, the view that they have of the atonement is not compatible with the substitutionary atonement.
01:50:21: What I mean by that is, if we say that Christ died for every human being without exception, then we have to ask the question, we've already asked it, are all human beings saved?
01:50:35: If you say no, then you have to be prepared to say that God subjects human sin to double jeopardy.
01:50:43: If you say yes, you are denying reality.
01:50:49: We know that not everyone is saved. And not only does scripture tell us that, but our own experience indicates that there are many people who go out into eternity in an unrepentant state.
01:51:02: So the substitutionary atonement says that Christ's cross work actually accomplished something.
01:51:14: It didn't just make men favorable. His work was not, the result of his work was not in the realm of potentiality, but it was real.
01:51:26: It was effective. It was not hypothetical. It was not hypothetical.
01:51:32: And so the question then, if you say, well, but I still, you know,
01:51:39: I believe in this fact that Christ died for all men, and effectually died for all men.
01:51:49: And you see, and Eddie, and any of the others of you, many
01:51:54: Bible scholars have made this distinction, and I think it's a very important one. I've taught my children this when they've asked me questions.
01:52:03: The distinction is between every man without exception versus every, all men rather, versus all men without distinction.
01:52:23: Let me say that again so you get it. And you ought to write that one down. Every man without exception versus all men without distinction.
01:52:34: Did Christ die for all without distinction? Absolutely, he did. We can say Christ died for all men in that sense.
01:52:41: He died for Jew and Gentile men and women, servants and rich people. He died for people from America and England and Tanzania and Zimbabwe and China and Pakistan.
01:52:56: He died for those who speak Farsi and those who speak Swahili. He died for all.
01:53:04: And that is testified. We have that in the hymn that's sung in Revelation chapters 4 and 5 there where we have that great worship service in heaven.
01:53:16: And so Christ died for all men without a distinction.
01:53:23: That's a very different thing than saying he died for every man without exception, which means every single individual.
01:53:34: Well, then the question always comes up, then why is anybody condemned to hell? If Christ died for every man without exception, then why does anyone go to hell?
01:53:45: And the answer that I usually get to that question is, well, they committed the sin of unbelief.
01:53:54: I say, well, what is this? If Christ paid for all the sins of the ones who go to hell, why are they in hell?
01:54:01: And the answer is, well, they didn't believe. Well, now, wait a minute.
01:54:08: Faith is the only thing? Well, that's denied by Scripture.
01:54:15: For example, let me give you Romans chapter 2 verse 6. Well, verse 5 and 6.
01:54:21: Because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.
01:54:29: Now Paul quotes the Old Testament, who will render to each person according to his deeds, plural.
01:54:39: And in Revelation 2013, at the last judgment, the judgment of the great white throne, which is the judgment of all the unbelievers, the books are opened.
01:54:52: What are those books? They are the books that record the deeds of human beings.
01:55:00: Yeah, we read, they were judged, every one of them, according to their deeds.
01:55:08: So it's not just one sin, the sin of unbelief. They are judged for all of their sin.
01:55:13: Why? Because the redemptive work of Christ, the blood of Christ never covered those sins.
01:55:20: And in fact, they would have to admit then, according to their own logic and consistency, that Christ did not die for the sin of unbelief, then.
01:55:33: He did not die for all sin, according to their own understanding of the redemption that took place.
01:55:39: Right, which is a contradiction in and of itself, but they tend to allow themselves that one exception, because something has to be behind the fact that they are in hell.
01:55:50: In fact, Eddie says something here that is, to me, ironic, and I hope Eddie rethinks this, because I think that only people who reject a particular redemption are actually thinking this, even if unconsciously.
01:56:07: He is asking us, is Jesus's accomplishment on the cross limited by the wickedness of sinful people?
01:56:15: No, we believe that Jesus's accomplishment on the cross was intended for a specific people that he designed it for, and that is the
01:56:26: Arminian, or those that reject particular redemption, that are saying that Jesus's accomplishment on the cross is limited by the wickedness of sinful people.
01:56:36: Am I right? Well, and think about this. There are some very, very nice people who are going to be in hell, because they did not receive
01:56:46: Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. They were very polite, kind, wonderful people. And then there are people like the
01:56:54: Apostle Paul, who actually murdered Christians, who claimed that he himself was the chief of sinners, who will be in heaven.
01:57:01: So the extent of a person's sin has nothing to do with whether or not they are the objects of God's grace.
01:57:12: Yes, but obviously if Christ, according to their understanding, died for every single human being that was ever born and ever will be born, then the atonement is thwarted by the will of man.
01:57:28: That God's accomplishment is changed by the will of wicked and sinful people, and that is the accusation that Eddie is hurling at those who believe in particular redemption.
01:57:41: But if you could, surmise and leave our listeners with what you most want etched in their hearts and minds today, before we leave this program in about a minute and a half, because we're running out of time.
01:57:52: Well, we've talked a lot about theology and some technical issues and so on, but my final word to all of those who are listening is the critical importance.
01:58:05: Let me go back to the question with which I opened, and that question is, what is it or how is it that I can be right with God?
01:58:16: And the answer, of course, is believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.
01:58:22: The answer is to accept the revelation of God's Word as to what the
01:58:27: Lord Jesus Christ did on the Calvary. You are not saved by your own work.
01:58:34: By grace you are saved through faith, and that is not of yourselves, writes
01:58:41: Paul. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest you would have the opportunity to boast in yourself.
01:58:49: So it's critical that you receive this gift of grace. Faith is what you have to have.
01:58:56: You must believe. It is a matter of simply reaching out with the hand of the heart, that's what faith is, and taking the free gift of the saving grace of God.
01:59:08: And with that, your life will be transformed and your destiny will be sealed.
01:59:14: And we're out of time, and your website is wrbc .us for Wading River Baptist Church.
01:59:21: We thank everybody for listening, especially Eddie for writing in and Steve Visconti.
01:59:27: I want everybody to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.