The Supernatural - (Part 1)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. My name is Mike Abendron. Glad to have you with us. You can write me, Mike, at nocompromiseradio .com. Cancer Is Not Your Shepherd, new book, 31-Day Guide to Suffering, should be out on Amazon.

If you want to order a bunch of copies, let me know. And we can work out a deal, a special deal just for you, as we used to say. I think the first time I was wheeling and dealing, maybe I was selling crawdads.

We were up in Yankton, South Dakota, and we would catch crawdads and sell them to the local bait shop. And I've got a deal for you. It was fun having Luke on the other day. I hope you listened to the show, the heir to No Compromise Radio Ministry.

He better give a slice of this huge pie to his sisters. Crazy. Today on No Compromise Radio Ministry, I also want to tell you that Sexual Fidelity, revised and updated, with a little more law gospel and a little more duplex gratia, is there.

I didn't include any Theodore Baezer, but for the most part, you know what I'm talking about. I've been thinking a lot about resurrection because we have a special holiday around this time of year that is called Lord's Day, 52 of them.

And I'm thinking, you know, all right, what do I want to talk about on No Compromise Radio? So today I want to talk about resurrection. Probably by the time you hear this, Easter slash Resurrection Sunday formally, let's see, March 31st we celebrated in 2024.

It'll probably be over, but that's okay because we have lots of Resurrection Sundays to look forward to. And while it's wonderful to highlight the one, we don't want to minimize the other 51 Lord's Days or Sundays every year.

Naturalism or Supernaturalism

So here's my strategy for today. There are many supernatural events recorded in the Bible. The world disdains supernatural. They think only in terms of natural. And if you want to have two worldviews, it's pretty much supernaturalism or naturalism, supernaturalism or liberalism.

I don't mean political liberalism. And that's probably a good way to boil down the way people think through those lenses. You either believe in the supernatural or you don't. No surprise there. And of course, Easter, Resurrection Sunday, and of course, some people don't like it.

If we say Easter, they think that's the pagan origin, and we never should say that. It's a sin to say it. And I say both. I mainly say Resurrection Sunday, but I say Easter because that's just the nomenclature.

And if I say it, you know what I'm talking about. It has nothing to do with, I don't know, maybe the same people that say you're not allowed to say Easter, say you can't have Christmas trees either because of the Jeremiah passage.

Maybe, maybe they are the same people that say for Halloween, you can't take your grandchildren out asking for candy and having them dress up like, I was going to say Mork and Mindy. A, that would date me.

B, nobody dresses up like... I bet you there were some people who dressed up like Mork back in the day, in the late, I'm guessing late 70s, early 80s. Would that be proper for time purposes, time range?

About the same time where we would have to go find a bar that would play the Mike Tyson fight, right? Because you didn't have pay-per-view in those days. At your home, I think you had, maybe you did.

I don't know exactly what it was, but it certainly wasn't like it is today. Supernatural or natural, supernatural or liberal. I want to look at some supernatural events in Matthew 27 that then make it logical, sensible, normal, that the resurrection would happen.

In other words, you're not confronted in the Bible with the resurrection out of nowhere. Nothing else supernaturally has happened. It's almost as if the Spirit of God is leading you and guiding you, teaching you with supernatural events found in scripture, and of course happened in real life.

And then you say to yourself, oh yeah, of course, one after another, after another, and the fifth domino falls, and it's easy to see the sixth one falling because it's just a chain reaction. So, No Compromise Radio Ministry today, I want to talk about spiritually perceived supernatural events that lead up to the resurrection.

Now, I have five of them, but there's no possible way I'm going to get through them today. Now, over the years, I've tinkered with different ideas on No Compromise Radio. I think my brother Pat and Mike Grimes do a great job on the Pactum, and they have one episode a week.

That would probably make it easier for me if it was one episode a week, and you would maybe desire that I'm only on once a week. Probably many of you only listen to me once a week. You just pick and choose the titles, but I should probably get better titles enticing you.

Nonetheless, I'm still now committed to five days a week, the current format, plenty of reruns, and I think we've got some good shows for you coming up that I'll have to talk about another time. Five supernatural events leading up to the resurrection so that you can more easily, as it were, see it with your own eyes, believe it with your own mind, and embrace it with your heart by faith.

Sound good? With my desire and prayer for you to say not just Jesus is the Savior, but He's my Savior. Not only to say Jesus is the Lord, but He is my Lord, with Thomas, my Lord and my God. I want you to learn, as Luther said, to know Christ and Him crucified.

Luther said, learn to sing to Him and say, Lord Jesus, you are my righteousness. I am your sin. You have taken upon yourself what is mine and given me what is yours. You have become what you were not so that I might become what I was not.

Martin Luther. I don't think he studied. Stuttered. Correct. I'm having a hard time, Spock. You belong in the circus, Spock. I know. I probably do, too. Now, in Matthew, of course, you know this is a gospel about Jesus, and it says, behold your King.

That's basically the theme of this gospel, the Lord Jesus, the King. And early on, you see that he has the pedigree of the King. He's the son of David. As with most royal places, there's the treachery behind the scenes.

Kings have forerunners, i .e., John the Baptist. There's a challenge to the throne. The King has a manifesto, that is, the Sermon on the Mount. You see the power of the King in chapters 8 and 9. The King delegates.

They reject the King. The King instructs his men. There's a coronation of the King. There is predictions of the King's return, right? Olivet discourse, the King's passion, that is, Gethsemane and the cross, and then the proof of the King's credentials, that is, the resurrection.

Therefore, this is all about Jesus, the King. And in chapter 27, Jesus is, just looking at the ESV liner notes there, he is delivered to Pilate. Judas hangs himself. Jesus comes before Pilate. Pilate gives the option, and the crowd chooses Barabbas and not Jesus.

He then, Pilate delivers Jesus to be crucified, and then Jesus is mocked, right? They put crown of thorns on his head. They're mocking him. I mean, we might think of it kind of like as a dunce cap or something like that.

I heard it said once they're treating Jesus like, what do you get when you cross a phony with a king? That type of thing. Hail, Emperor Caesar, except you're the king, and we're going to pretend like we're somehow honoring you with laughter and mocking and pummeling and beating.

And obviously, this is a warning for all the public, Jews included, to obey Rome. Then the Lord Jesus, in Matthew 27, 32 and following, he's crucified. And they divided his garments among them by casting lots.

They sat down and kept watch over him there. Fascinatingly, in this section, you are not going to find anything about physical agonies of crucifixion, pressure on the medial nerves or the full weights on the nail, the searing agony of the nerves and metatarsal bones of the feet, the arms fatigue and cramps, and throbbing pain, can't breathe very well with the lungs, the twisting, the partial intermittent asphyxiation.

You don't get any of that. And just with just brevity, it's just simple. It says, and when they crucified him, that's it. And when they crucified him, of course, you would put the crimes over the head of the crucified victim and probably chalk, some type of chalk they would use, and they would write up there.

And it says in verse 20, chapter 27, verse 37, and over his head, they put the charge against him, which read, this is Jesus, the King of the Jews. Kind of like his rap sheet. It's a little piece of wood.

You could use chalk on wood, flat wood, smooth wood. And if you put every gospel account together, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it would read, this is Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. And of course, the Jewish leadership, they were mad because they wanted that taken down.

At least you could say, this is what he claimed to be. This was his self-identification or proclamation, right? The Jews were saying to Pilate in John 19, do not write the King of the Jews, but that he said, I am the King of the Jews.

And of course, there were robbers who were crucified with him. Hey, you saved others. Some of the priests and elders and scribes were mocking, but you can't save yourself. He's the King of Israel. Let him down from the cross and we'll believe in him.

He can't save himself. I don't know if you've thought about that. And we're working our way up to the first supernatural thing, but I don't know. We're taking time. We're taking our time to get there.

We're in no rush. As far as I know, I have 3 ,900 more shows to do. How long have I been on the air? 16 years, right? We're in Belize, we're in Alaska, and we're in Wyoming. Those are the three main places to be, right?

They have the Reader's Digest top places to live. I think those would be the places, Alaska, Wyoming, and Belize. I heard Belize was kind of dangerous in certain places, but then so is Los Angeles and New York and Boston and others.

He cannot save himself. Is that true or false? Let's just think about that for a minute. He can't save himself. Could Jesus save himself? Did he have the power to save himself? His divine nature is omnipotent.

I hope he has the power to save himself. But what was he sent to do? He was sent to die on the cross. He was sent to fulfill what God the Father had sent him to do in his messianic mission, and therefore he couldn't save himself.

And as Warren Weirsbe said, I used to think Warren Weirsbe didn't really offer that much because he was devotional like J. Vernon McGee or I don't know who else was devotional, Guy King, some of the pastoral epistles.

But Weirsbe, I think, is really, really insightful because he takes difficult things and makes them easy, and that's really the sign of someone who knows the word well or a good teacher in general. Weirsbe says, save yourself has always been the world's cry, but give yourself is the Lord's command to us.

That's exactly what Jesus did. He gave himself. Save yourself, he's giving himself. He's denying himself for the sake of the glory of his Father and the sake of the salvation of all those sons and daughters throughout time.

The Darkness of Judgment

Now we come to the first supernatural event. You could call it a miracle. Obviously, supernatural things are miracles, and these are to prepare you to point you to the resurrection in a way that will make you say, oh, of course, one after another after another, these supernatural things happened, and so I shouldn't expect anything less than the resurrection.

So today, again, on No Compromise Radio, it's a lead up to the resurrection with supernatural things surrounding the death of our Lord Jesus Christ. And therefore, after he dies and he is entombed, you ought not to think this is the end of the story.

And of course, you don't think it's the end of the story because you've read the end of the story, but for us to kind of work through it, almost like we're there, what's happening, how can we make this account, telegraph, portray, emphasize that in fact there are supernatural things happening?

Supernatural sign number one, the darkness of judgment, Matthew 27, 45. Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. Noon to three. So you start counting at 6 a .m.

So at the sixth hour, 6 a .m. plus six hours is noon, was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour, that is three o 'clock. So you've got a lot of stuff going on in this particular area. Golgotha will have many people walking by, soldiers, crucified people.

When you walk by crucified folks, people would shout and utter blasphemies against those that are crucified. And at noon, there's darkness. People say, well, it's an eclipse. Of course, there's the eclipse that probably just happened here locally by the time this show airs.

My wife and I did buy glasses for that. You know, I didn't want to buy the cheap $2 glasses because what if they didn't work? But then I probably got suckered into buying the $20 glasses because I was afraid of the $2 glasses.

But for eyesight, I thought, well, I'd rather spend 10 times the amount, $2 to $20. And then I can save those glasses. They'll last all the way because they're real frames. They'll last all the way till 2090 when the next eclipse is happening.

I will, my body will be eclipsed by then. That's for certain. Maybe it was a black Sirocco that came over from North Africa or a dust storm or something from the Arabian desert. The sun was darkened. That's what Luke says.

The sun was darkened. What is that? Well, that's a supernatural sign. It doesn't get dark at noon. Especially when you consider the timing of it all. If you said, well, there's a storm or it's an eclipse or it's a Sirocco or something else, this is the exact timing.

From the sixth hour, there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. So when Jesus breathed his last breath, immediately there was light again. At the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, that is my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And as Esau's Johnson says, the darkness explains the cry and the cry explains the darkness. Did you know, dear listener, I think you did know. I think you do know. I think you do know that when you see darkness in scripture, it is often, especially with the context.

I mean, it's dark outside. But in context, often darkness is linked to judgment. Joel 2, the sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the great and awesome day of the Lord and when he comes.

Amos 5, alas, you who are longing for the day of the Lord, for what purpose will the day of the Lord be to you? It will be darkness and not light. Amos 8, and it will come about on that day, declares the Lord God that I shall make the sun go down at noon and make the earth dark in the broad daylight.

Darkness representing God's judgment. Now, I don't know about all these dates and sometimes people, I don't know if they, not that they stretch it, but I think they want to have an exact explanation for every little thing that happens.

And I don't really need that. But there's one well-known commentator that says, this cannot be an eclipse because Passover always fell on a full moon and a solar eclipse would be out of question during the full moon.

That certainly could be. Darkness, noon, out of the blue, perfect timing, stops when Jesus dies. What's going on? As darkness is spreading over Egypt, hmm, God judging. What was God judging? Our sins.

Jesus didn't sin. Who was God judging? The Lord Jesus. I read, quote, during those three hours of darkness, the sin question was settled. All that our sins deserve fell on the sacred son of God. And he was absolutely silent like a lamb dumb before his shears.

Until just as the three hours were coming to an end, it seemed as though his great heart burst with the agony of it all. And then came the cry in which the psalm begins. He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

Here is God displaying publicly as a propitiation in his blood. This is the demonstration of his righteousness at the present time that he might be the just and justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

Forsaken by the Father. The cup not removed. He had to drink the cup. This is what we call penalty substitution. The just for the unjust. He himself bore our sins. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us.

He was here bearing the sins of many. The lamb of God taking away the sin of the world. Because God is holy and God is just. In Psalm 55, God hates all those who do iniquity. So Jesus, never being a sinner nor sinning, has the iniquities of all of us, all who would ever believe, laid upon the Lord Jesus.

Jesus giving himself as an offering in his sacrifice to God for a sweet smelling savor. The death of Jesus, of course, he showed a great example of love. Of course, justice had to be meted out. Of course, Jesus was victorious over all the cosmic powers.

But at the center of it all, in this diamond of the atonement we have, penalty substitution. And Jesus cries out with a loud voice and yields up his spirit. Of course, there was probably happiness and laughter and glee with the chief priest and the scribes.

He's done. He's not going to do anything anymore. S. Lewis Johnson, it says he yield up the ghost or the spirit. Now, you know, if we were to declare an intermission and I were to put in your hands a concordance so that you could look up the expressions which the scriptural writers give us concerning the death of our Lord.

And if you were able to also look at the harmony of the gospel, you would discover a rather interesting thing in the descriptions of the Lord's death given in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In any one of the cases, stress rests upon the fact that the Lord's death was a voluntary death.

Mark and Luke say that he breathed his last. The idea is simply he breathed his last breath. John says he delivered over his spirit. Matthew uses a slightly different word, but essentially means to release or dismiss.

To render it, he dismissed his spirit. It stresses the voluntary character of our Lord's death. Now, here's the part that I really think is fascinating on No Compromise Radio via S. Lewis Johnson. No evangelist, not one of the gospel writers says that our Lord died.

Isn't that interesting? Not one of them says that he died. That might suggest that he was a prisoner of circumstances. That might suggest that he was forced to do something that he did not wish to do.

Each one of them stresses the voluntary character of our Lord's death. He dismissed his spirit. He was the conqueror of the moment of his death. And of course, if you study history, you'll find out that about three o 'clock in the afternoon, the ninth hour, that's when they started to slay the lambs for Passover.

Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. A wonderful, sovereign moment. Supernatural sign. Do you see it? It's dark at noon. It stops when Jesus dies. Coincidence? Co-winky-dinky?

I think not. Supernatural sign number two on No Compromise Radio ministry. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. So, we have the darkness of judgment and now the curtain torn in two.

Now, this curtain of the temple that separated the holy place and the most holy place was a woven fabric, yes, the study Bible says, of 72 twisted plates of 24 threads each. It was 60 feet high and 30 feet wide.

Now, as you know, the high priest, you go into that room, through that curtain, I was going to say veil, but same, once a year, once a year, there's a separation. Remember, God's holy. He's holy, holy.

And the text says here that it's torn from top to bottom. And you've heard Bible teachers, of course, say that's because if it was torn from the bottom up, could have been a human tearing it, right? Could have been Peter sneaked in there or something.

Peter was sneaking off doing something all right, and that is being a coward. It's the ladies who are the courageous ones. Can I get a witness? Ladies? Ladies, what's your response to the ladies being the courageous ones and the men being...

There's that extra one right here, right there. NCA Marsh Madness Shield. There's a guy on YouTube and the channel that he has is awful coaching regarding basketball. And he doesn't look like a basketball player, but he knows what he's talking about with X's and O's, and he dissects the Celtics and the other pro teams and college teams and atrocity of coaching and awful coaching.

Here we have the curtain torn from top to bottom. God tore the curtain. Jesus dies, and all the curtain is automatically torn right then, same time. You can't just wander into God's presence. You can't just saunter into God's presence.

I mean, Israel learned the lessons, clean and unclean, right? All the different sacrifices. Now it's open. What's that signify? Supernaturally torn asunder. It's pretty thick too, I heard. And now you say the holy place is open.

It's open to anyone. It's not just the high priest. It's not just priests. It's not just Jewish men. It's not just Jewish women. But even after this, we see the centurion Gentile get saved. It's open to everyone.

Everyone has entrance into God's presence. You have a mediator, you have an opportunity to be in his presence. You can do it any time you'd like, because you have a mediator. Torn in two. Hebrews 10, 19, having therefore brethren boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus by new and living way, which he has consecrated for us through the veil, that is to say his flesh, and having a high priest over the house of God, let us draw near.

Instead of don't go in there, you're going to die. With a true heart and full assurance, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water. Divinely rent. Well, people say, well, that just means the temple is no longer needed.

The temple is going to be destroyed. No, this is an opening into the very presence of God. Matthew talks about it. Mark talks about it. Luke talks about it. From top to bottom, God did this. The presence of God opened for all those who would believe.

At the exact right timing, at three o 'clock, this happened. At the timing of the evening sacrifice, and everybody's doing all their things in the temple. Yes, yes, and yes. Jesus' sacrifice was perfect.

It was done with finality, and now we are reconciled to God, and we have access to the Father. Two supernatural things down, working our way to the resurrection. My name is Mike Abenroth. This is No Compromise Radio.

Time flies when you're having fun. I'm having fun. Stay tuned for three more supernatural events next time on No Compromise Radio Ministry. Are you getting used to the music?