Angry Darkness

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the apostle
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Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.
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In short, if you like smooth, watered down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.
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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her king.
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Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry, Pastor Stephen Cooley in the house.
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People said we weren't talking loud enough, so I A, turned this up, and B, we should probably speak in the microphone, so.
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I'm gonna talk a lot louder because I want to make sure everybody hears what I have to say. Yeah, that's right.
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Steve, I want to give you a message moment, and I like to do message moments on No Compromise Radio because A, they fill time, and B.
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Honesty is the best policy. Now, but here's my question before I read the message moment.
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Steve, have you gone to Eugene Peterson privately, a la Matthew 18, to talk to him why you say things about his translation?
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Well, I will confess, no, I have not. Okay. And if I did,
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I'd just go, dude, how could you even call this a translation? And I would say dude. Oh, you would say dude, okay.
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Well, better than calling a girl dude. They call my wife dude in California, and I just was at the
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Church of the Cross in Pine Grove, California, and was with some younger folks, and the young lady called,
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I think, her mom dude. Just say, I prefer doctor. Doctor, doctor.
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Steve has been preaching through the gospel of Jesus Christ, according to John, and I know he's just finished chapter three, so I thought we would do a message moment from John chapter three.
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John. The one that God sent speaks God's words, and don't think that he rations out the spirit in bits and pieces.
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The Father loves the Son extravagantly. He turned everything over to him so that he could give it away, a lavish distribution of gifts.
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That is why whoever accepts and trusts the Son gets in on everything, life complete and forever.
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And that is also why the person who avoids and distrusts the Son is in the dark and doesn't see life.
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All he experiences of God is darkness, and an angry darkness at that.
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That's horrible. That's horrible. I mean, that's the end of chapter three, and that is abominable.
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That is a horrid translation, and if Eugene Peterson were here right now, it would be all I could do to just restrain myself from saying dude.
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Steve, let me just read to you John chapter three, the real version.
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For he whom God has sent utters the words of God, for he gives the spirit without measure. The Father loves the
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Son and has given him all things into his hand. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever does not obey the
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Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him. Now let's talk about the difference between the wrath of God, that I just read from the
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ESV and is quoted from the Greek text, Orge, and the angry darkness.
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What's the difference between the angry, he's an angry darkness. Well, first of all, angry darkness.
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Angry darkness, what is that? Yeah, I don't know, but it just, you know, it sounds like a bad novel title.
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But you know, I think that's a name for the show. We're gonna entitle today's show, An Angry Darkness. I mean, it certainly doesn't imply eternity in hell.
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It would not give you any kind of, you know, in fact, it sort of sounds temporal. You know, God's really angry and he's just gonna walk away from you for a little while and kind of get his composure back.
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Well, Steve, as you know from your study of the word wrath, this Orge, what does
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Orge come from in terms of the root word? It was something that meant a swelling, a kind of a,
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I think of it, if I was gonna describe it to kids, Steve, if you take a balloon and blow it up too hard and it pops, right, it gets so tight, so tight, so tight, full of air or helium, whatever you put in it, and eventually it explodes.
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And here is God's displeasure at sin. And it is not a sinful seething, but if you just think about the word seething, it is in fact that very thing.
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Because God is holy, he hates sin infinitely. And because of his holiness, he has to do something about sin.
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And there's a wrath, it's a personal thing to God because he's personally been affronted by sin.
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And then he personally, yes, after long suffering and after great patience, but then there's a time where the wrath of God is revealed like Romans chapter one.
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And so to take away this personal wrath that God gives upon unrepentant sinners and turn it into a non -persona, it is a personified darkness here, but it has nothing to do with the person of God, angry darkness, it takes away
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God's hatred for sin and destroys part of the passage and who God is. Exactly.
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And in this sense, I think you could compare the wrath of God to an oven in that you turn it on and it takes a while to heat up.
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Well, in that sense, God's wrath was turned on when Eve and Adam first threw a couple, they got the sparks going.
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And ever since then, mankind has just been throwing another log and another log and another log and just kind of building that blaze.
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And God's full wrath has not yet been exercised, but it will be. And it's going to be exercised forever on those who refuse to obey and to believe the son.
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And it's interesting that those two ideas are very much linked in the gospel of John. You cannot believe and not obey.
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Steve, I was studying Romans 1, and it says, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.
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And even here in Romans 1, this is an active attribute of God. This is because of God's holiness, then he is actively against sin.
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I think it was Michael Horton who talked about God's holiness and man's sin coming together. And it's like a nuclear winter.
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And so this is a, what Peterson tries to do is he tries to take away and protect
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God's attributes by saying he's not full of wrath because wrath really isn't too popular.
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It is in Arthur Pink's book, The Attributes of God, The Wrath of God is a chapter. But we've got to protect that.
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And you know, this God who's angry and maybe flies off the handle, the same thing is done with propitiation.
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They try to turn it into expiation only. Instead of God's wrath being assuaged by the son as an advocate, and he steps in our place for what we deserved, let's just turn it into sins go away, they're expiated because this wrath deal doesn't fly well with modern sensibilities.
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Well, back to John 3. You know, it's interesting because it says right at the end there that the wrath of God remains on him, meaning that it was there.
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And that for some people, it gets diverted and it gets diverted to the person of Jesus Christ. But for the rest of them, it rightly remains on them.
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It's not moved. It doesn't budge. It's fixed on them. It stays on them. And it's not going to leave just by virtue of, you know, some people want to say that by virtue of death, you get to heaven.
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There are a lot of ways that people believe now that you know, you can ascend to heaven. But the bottom line is
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God's wrath remains on those who reject the son. And that's not a place where anybody wants to, how can you think that that's not eternity in hell?
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How can anyone think that? It's just darkness. Angry darkness. Steve, what happens when people,
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I assume he's trying to protect the integrity of God in his name by not having him be a wrathful
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God. But what they end up doing at the end of the day is, Steve, they steal away my thankfulness and my joy that even though I deserve the wrath,
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Jesus took it in my place. And so when Romans 5, 9 says, since therefore we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.
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Now let's just translate it into Eugene Peterson's version before I look up his version, be saved by him from the angry darkness.
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Well, let's see how consistent he is. But I mean, this whole idea that somehow, well, not only does it protect
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God, I guess, from Eugene Peterson's viewpoint, but it also suggests that we're not really so bad.
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Why should God remain angry with us? Because it really misses the point.
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It downplays the sinfulness of sin. And it suggests, this whole idea suggests that maybe sin isn't as bad as we think it is.
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You know, that God just needs to get over some of it. And you know, in time with a little bit of thoughtfulness on his part, you know, so we can work this out.
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Well, Steve, we really aren't sinners in today's environment. We just are dysfunctional.
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We have illnesses, we got some boo -boos, and we aren't really corrupt. Adam's fall wasn't really credited to us all.
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I have some emotional struggles. Okay, so I do have, and by the way, the reason we do this, besides it being low -hanging fruit, besides Steve and I have nothing else to talk about today, so we pick up the message and see where the
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Spirit of God leads us, not through the message, but in spite of the message, but because people out there, probably not no -compromise listeners, maybe some
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WV &E listeners, who knows, people still like the Message Bible because there are times where it seems to be more relational and comforting and feel -good and K -love moments and Mother's Day sentimentality and kind of this ooh and ah, but when pastors throw it up on a screen or a
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PowerPoint presentation, like they do now, like they did last Sunday, we're still gonna talk about it in no -compromise radio.
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You know, you're talking about K -love. I kind of think that this would be Delilah's Bible, you know? Delilah.
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You're listening to Love Songs with Delilah. Do you know what one of the most interesting things to me is in life, and now that I have
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Sirius Radio, it doesn't really happen, but I'm driving someplace, I don't wanna put a CD in,
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I don't wanna take the time to hook up my iPhone or iPad or whatever it is hooked up, and so I just scan through the stations.
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And, you know, if it's not 3 .30 to four o 'clock when NOCO's on, I wanna listen to something.
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And so I scan through and then it seeks and finds a station and then I hear
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Delilah's voice. And then I think, well, you know what? What guy in the universe would listen to Delilah?
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Right, that's my first thought. Then I hit it again. Eugene Peterson. Then I hit it again,
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Steve. And she is on so many stations. The next station that comes up, it's
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Delilah again, but it's about four seconds behind, so I hear the exact same thing. It's Delilah in stereo, on my stereo.
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She's like Casey Kasem. Yeah, she's everywhere. You remember Casey Kasem? I do remember.
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American Top 40. Yes, I used to listen to that on Sunday nights, I believe. And I was happy that Cliff Richard was number one again with Devil Woman.
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Those were the days. All right, so here's Romans chapter five.
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You know, the Message Bible is like the original manuscripts. There's no numbers put in like in the 12
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Bibles. Oh, so it's very authentic. Christ arrives right on time to make this happen. He didn't and doesn't.
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Wait for us to get ready. He presented himself for the sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready.
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And even if we hadn't been so weak, we wouldn't have known what to do anyway. We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice.
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But God put his love on the line for us by offering his son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him.
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Now five, nine. Now that we are set right with God by means of the sacrificial death, the consummate blood sacrifice, there is no longer a question of being at odds with God in any way.
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At odds with God. Steve, how can you get around the wrath of God, A, textually, and B, even with his talk about bloody sacrifice?
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What do you mean bloody sacrifice? What do you mean the violent, vicious, vicarious, sacrificial death that includes bloodshed?
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I'm just still trying to, I mean, here's what I want to know. What year was the message written? Because I'm just,
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I'm listening to it, and I'm going, you know what? I think I wrote a little bit better than this in maybe the fifth grade, and I'm thinking
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I probably missed out on a fortune here. Because if you're going to say it's like 1970 or later,
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I should have done this. Well, Steve, the New Testament exegetical consultants for this book were
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William Kline, Daryl Bach, Donald Hagner, Moises Silva, Rodney Whitaker.
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I have a song for all those guys. Hang down your head. The message,
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New Testament Psalms and Proverbs, I think he started off with one book and then it expanded, 1993 through 95.
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Or, you know, other disease. Malware. Anyway.
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It starts small and then it just kind of keeps growing. I just have to say, you know what? If it wasn't for the message,
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I would never use words like this in Proverbs 31. Festoon her life with praises.
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Oh, festoon. You know what? That could be like a word of the day. We could pick out a new word of the day from the message
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Bible with angry darkness. You know, Steve, tell me the -
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I think we'd probably spend a lot of time on the message almost every week. We'd have to fill the time because the relentlessness of day after day,
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Tuesday after Tuesday, Saturday after Saturday. Steve, now in the movie Toy Story, didn't we have one of those potato heads with angry eyes?
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So maybe it's the angry darkness. The angry darkness. Who was the man's voice for the potato head?
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Was that Don Rickles or somebody like that? No, you know, I think it's the guy from Cheers or whatever. I think it's -
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Angry eyes. You know, I don't even remember. It's been a while since I've watched Toy Story. Your kids are a little bit younger than my kids, so.
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I think that sounds like a pop hit too. Your kids are younger than my kids. Your kids are younger than my kids.
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All right, Steve, let me read to you from John Murray. Now, John Murray has written a lot in his collected writings.
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Banner of truth. He says this. Okay, wait a second. I want to make sure
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I get this right. All right. A little Germanic pause, a fold of the paper.
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Okay. This comes from guidance of the Holy Spirit, which is quite apropos today because I felt
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God leading us to talk about the message. Steve's hand is up right now. Oh, I know what
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I want to do before I read this. There's the YouTube channel we have now, No Compromise 90.
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So 90 seconds worth of me pontificating about issues rehashed from No Compromise Radio the last four years.
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90 seconds, wow, that's a real time filler. So I want you to begin to write to Tuesday Guy at No Compromise Radio and insist that Steve tries this.
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We have to have a few with Steve. Just to start off with one. 90 seconds of Pastor Steve, because when
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I saw him put his hand up, it made me think you need to see that. I see that hand and I want you to see that veritable hand.
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My first No Compromise 90 will be called Nine Dunker. When I was in California though, many people came up to me and insisted that I say hi to Tuesday Guy.
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Well, that's very nice of him. I say hi right back. Okay, well, here we go.
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John Murray. Let's see. Well, let's see. I mean, where do I want to start? We're in such an event conceiving of the
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Holy Spirit as giving us some special and direct communication, be it in the form of feeling, impression, or conviction, a communication, our intimation, our direction that is not mediated to us through those means which
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God has ordained for our direction and guidance. In the final analysis, this construction, our conception of the
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Holy Spirit's guidance is in the same category as that which holds to direct and special revelation.
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And that for the reason that it makes little difference whether the intimation is in the form of impression, or feeling, or conviction, or in the form of a verbal communication.
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If we believe that the experience which we have is in a direct and special intimation to us of what the will of God is.
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Now, that's John Murray speak. Let's put it into normal speak. If you say that impressions, feelings, or any other kind of leading like that is from God directly, then what's the difference between verbal communication, special revelation?
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And scripture, yeah. You're putting it on par with scripture. Steve, can you have feelings though?
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Can't you have some like hunch, or intuition, or gut feel? Yes, and I'll give you an example.
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A few years ago, Apple stock was at $88. And I thought, you know, I really should buy some.
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And I didn't. So in other words, you need to confess that because God told you and you said no to that.
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Yeah, apparently. Steve, why don't we just make a little rule on No Compromise Radio?
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Like rule 92. We can do some like NCIS thing. Rule 92, Gibbs 92.
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Here's what we do. Rule 92. If you have a hunch, or impression, or a feeling, just call it a hunch, or a feeling, or an impression, and don't call it from God.
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God told me. Yeah. Just don't do it. I have intuitions and hunches about things, but I just don't wanna ever say they're from God because first of all,
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I think it's lame. Second of all, if it doesn't come true, then who am
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I really going to blame? Third of all, in Act Rule 94.
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Well, and it comes down to several things. People say all the time, how about this? I felt impressed, or the
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Lord led me, or sometimes people won't even say it's an audible voice, but I just had a real peace about, who cares?
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You know, and we've said this one before, but think about it. Jonah was told by God to do
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X. Instead, he did Y. And guess what? He then went to sleep soundly. He had a real peace about it, and people take their impressions, their gut feelings, their sense of things, and they wanna attribute it to God.
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Well, you know what? It might have nothing to do, and it most likely has nothing to do with God, and it's just you being you.
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So why blame God? Since we are sinful people, we can analyze the world sinfully, analyze ourselves sinfully, analyze other people sinfully, analyze our emotions and feelings and intuitions sinfully, because our minds have been affected by the fall.
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We like to talk about how our will's affected by the fall and how people's wills are not free from indwelling sin,
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Satan, or the world, or stuff like that, but our minds have been affected. So let's push you listeners to the sufficient, authoritative, infallible guide given that's outside of us, given by God, the
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Scriptures. That's all I'm after, is pointing people to the Scriptures. I mean, let's put it this way, another way.
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Is it wrong to ever go with your gut, to ever follow your feelings? No, I mean, sometimes it's right.
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I mean, we have to say to ourselves, I know I could deceive myself, that's why I should talk to someone else about this, but I just happen to have a hunch, it's a business decision, or I've got kind of just an intuition, or I think
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I should do this, there's somebody I should witness to, and then you find out they've been praying that someone would come to their house, and blah, blah, blah, blah.
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Yes, but I'm just not going to say, I think this is from God right now. What I'd rather do is look back in time, and then say, now, after some time,
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I see how God orchestrated that whole thing, and through providence, look at how wonderful that is.
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Well, I mean, it's true that God is in it one way or the other, right? If it turns into a disaster, then God was in it because He wanted us to learn a lesson, and if it turns out to be great, then
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God was in it because it was part of His positive plan. But the idea that God told me, or God led me, or whatever, it's just false.
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Steve, people can even read providential acts of God wrongly when we had the
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Vatican, St. Peter's, I believe, got hit by lightning several hours after Benedict resigned.
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We could read that a lot of different ways, right? That God was judging the Roman Catholic Church for forcing him out.
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Yeah, he wasn't pleased with that. That strike while it's hot, lightning strikes once a week.
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Lightning only strikes, yeah, it could strike twice. And if it does, then that means that the
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Pope needs to come quickly. Yes, and so, yeah, lightning was affirming.
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God affirmed the choice of the conclave and the consista story, or whatever those words are that they use. Or maybe there's a cardinal with the last name of lightning.
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Maybe we should look for that, and I think they're found in a third world country. Or Bolt, you know, like Usain Bolt's dad could be.
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Steve, I know they might have the Pope out by the time this show airs, but I've read enough about what goes on in the
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Vatican that I don't think it's going to be from a third world, the Pope's going to be from a third world country.
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I think he's going to get voted out, and there's going to be, my guess is, here's my prediction, wait a second,
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God has given me a blissing brain. An impression. Uh -huh, yes, yes, Lord. A leading, a leading. Yes, Lord, I understand,
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Lord. Okay, yes, that it's going to be an Italian. I think it's going to be an American. The first ever
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American Pope. Well, maybe. Who would that Pope be?
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Probably you. Steve, there's something about people kissing my ring and calling me
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Papa that I'd probably enjoy. Yeah, you'd like a lot. I always say to people, you know, because if you say something from the pulpit or something, you try to say it with authority.
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After all, it's God's word. And then people expect, you know, maybe that you act that way outside of the pulpit.
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And I say, I never try to get people to kiss my ring, but I'd have to let them do it then, wouldn't
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I? You know what, if they make me the first Pope, you know what the first thing I'm going to do is? I'm going to sign a decree releasing everyone from purgatory.
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I think that'd be good. Right away, I'm just, you know, I'm just going to close purgatory down.
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Now watch the faces of all the other Cardinals. They'd probably come get me. Then I'd go, okay, my next move,
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I'm going to get rid of a lot of our money. A lot of people in our Roman Catholic countries all around the world are starving to death.
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I'm going to give that money to them so that they can live. Steve, I think you're talking now about angry darkness.
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Well, I'll tell you who's going to be angry and looking quite dark at the College of Cardinals. They're going to be hiring people to kill me.
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No more white smoke. It'll be angry, dark smoke. Ooh, spooky. Spooky world. Mike Abenroth with Steve Cooley, No Compromise Radio.
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You can write us at info, nocompromiseradio .com. Steve, good to see you again. Yeah, and if you'd like to nominate me for Pope, feel free.
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I see that hand. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abenroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.
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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.
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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.