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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.
In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.
Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.
Scottish reformer John Knox once said, with God, man is always in the majority. What did he mean by that? We're gonna study that concept today. Welcome to No Compromise Radio. My name's Steve Cooley, and I'm sitting in for the vacationing Pastor Mike Abendroth.
I am Mike's associate pastor and sometime a sidekick here, foil, I think he calls me, on No Compromise Radio. Well, it's a blessing to be with you here today on a Thursday. We started talking about spiritual warfare yesterday, and I thought we might just continue talking about some of the things that we mentioned yesterday, including 2 Corinthians 10, verses three to four.
And then I'm going to discuss a few other passages, and if we have time today, we'll get to those. If we don't, then we wait till the next time I'm up. But anyway, let's look at 2 Corinthians 10, verses three to five.
It says, for though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.
Now, when John Knox said that with God, man is in the majority, he wasn't talking about some political formation. He was mentioning, of course, the very concept of spiritual warfare. When we have God on our side, I mean, it's not a question of political, you know, politically having God on our side or anything else, but when his word is on our side, when we have him in essence on our side in discussions, when we're using the Bible against the reasoning of men, we're going to win because we're in the majority.
And it's not because we have the right idea. You know, that's something I really, let me just address that for a moment. Something I really despise is when people say, well, you know, that's your opinion, or I'm glad that works for you.
If you're reading the Bible to someone, or if you're quoting the Bible to someone, it's not your opinion. It's probably not even a matter of your interpretation. When someone says, well, you can make the Bible say whatever you want.
And I suppose that's true. You can make the newspaper say whatever you want with enough scissors and enough tape and enough glue. You can make anything say whatever you want it. But when you are teaching or when you're walking through a context, there is no kind of multiplicity of understandings of scripture.
The original author had one intention, and that's what we are always striving for, is to understand correctly what the original author meant. And in 2 Corinthians, when he's defending his ministry, he certainly understood what spiritual warfare was.
And you'll notice nowhere in 2 Corinthians does he start binding demons or being worried about casting demons out of Christians or anything like that. He defends his ministry. Often he defends his integrity.
And here he's talking about, listen, when you come up against people who are teaching false doctrine, you don't want to use your own opinions. You don't want to use some clever, I'll just put it in current terms, some clever Fifth Avenue, New York advertising strategy.
It's not about that. It's about bringing the truth of God to bear on a particular issue. I don't care if the issue is evolution. I don't care if the issue is the existence of God. I don't care if it's the issue of free will, whatever somebody wants to debate with you.
When you bring the Bible into the discussion, it ought to end it. And if both people are believers, it will ultimately end it. Because no matter what I might think, what I might feel, I want to submit myself to the word of God.
I'm a Christian and I say, I love Christ. I prove that by obeying him, by obeying his word. And so in looking at 2 Corinthians 10, verses three to five, we have to understand some things about spiritual warfare.
And basically, when you read about the spiritual or these fortresses that we are to destroy, they are ideas. They are false ideas. And they are, as one writer says, where evil is entrenched and from which the gospel is attacked.
In other words, the enemy is held up in these, hold up? Yeah, he's holed up in these fortresses and he's ready to attack the truth. That's what this is. It is a battle of ideas. Another writer says this, any human act or attitude that forms an obstacle to emancipating knowledge of God contained in the gospel of Christ, crucified, and therefore keeps man in an oppressive bondage to sin, that's what we are fighting.
And what does that mean? That means any enslaving idea. For example, years ago, we were having a yard sale in California and these two young female Mormon missionaries came around and they were just wandering around the neighborhood.
It was kind of a neighborhood sales event. And my friend who was with me stopped the two ladies and he said, hey, what are you guys doing today? And they said, oh, we're just going around, you know, giving people the good news.
And he said, really, and you know, what's the good news? You know, and then he gave them the gospel. He said, you know, is your good news that God hates sin, that he sent his son to redeem sinners, that he raised him on the third day, and that if you believe and trust fully in the Lord Jesus Christ, you'll go to heaven forever?
And they said, well, no, not exactly. And he said, oh, that's too bad. You don't have good news. In fact, you have really bad news. In fact, you're going door to door to giving people spiritual poison.
That is spiritual warfare, my friends. When you are talking about ideas that enslave, that would actually drag people to hell, that is spiritual warfare. And what we do is we bring the Bible, God's revealed word against those things.
This writer goes on to say this, every human machination, in other words, every little clever device or foul design that temporarily frustrates the divine plan, that's what we are to destroy. He says, the picture seems to be that of a military operation in enemy territory that seeks to thwart every hostile plan of battle.
How do we do that? I mean, just think about it. If we were to look at all the different false ideas out there and we were to come up with a really clever strategy to defeat each one, how much time would that take?
I mean, people say, to witness to a Mormon, to witness to a Catholic, to witness to a Jehovah Witness, to witness to a Buddhist, to a Hindu, to a Jew, to a Muslim, you have to know what they believe and kind of defeat it.
Well, no, you don't. Yeah, I mean, it can seem like a really mind-boggling exercise, but here's all you need to know. You just need to know the gospel. No matter what they are saying, here's what you need to understand in your mind, that what they believe has enslaved them, has made them a slave to sin, and that what you can tell them, what you can proclaim to them is liberation, is the truth.
And when God so works through what you say, through the presentation of his word, when he does that, he sets the prisoners free. He breaks down the hold that those fortresses have had on him. When we think about these false doctrines, these doctrines of demons, these fortresses, these speculations, when we talk about them, they're all from Satan, the father of lies, and he has the weapons of deceit, lies, subterfuge, guile, intimidation, compulsion, and force.
But followers of Jesus Christ who have been redeemed by him have been set free, and they fight evil that the devil and his followers perpetrate. How do we do that? We use his weapons, his armaments, and among those are truth, honesty, integrity, justice, holiness, faithfulness.
I mean, what do we do? We tell people the truth in love. Why? Because we want to see them set free. We must do this with spiritual weapons. But again, just talking about Satan, what does he resort to?
We talked about, or I mentioned briefly, deception. Well, what do we mean by deception? We looked at what the Bible said in the Garden of Eden, Genesis 3, I mentioned that briefly yesterday. How does it describe Satan?
It says the serpent was more crafty. He was more clever. He was very kind of tricky, and he went up to Eve and he threw her what should have been a softball to hit out of the park, and she just completely whiffed on it.
But this is what Satan does. Even with Ananias and Sapphira in the early church, they knew what to do. They knew what everyone around them was doing, and yet they tried to deceive the Bible to us in Acts.
They tried to deceive even the Holy Spirit. They were in sin because they believed Satan. But he also uses just pure force. Read a book not too long ago about Hitler and the cross by Erwin Lutzer, and then he just describes how Hitler just completely cowed.
That is, he kind of scared much of the German church into submission, so they replaced the cross ultimately with a swastika. They replaced the gospel with some Nazi propaganda, and many didn't bow the knee to that, and they wound up paying the price for it.
But Satan can use force to try to stop the gospel for years and years in the Soviet Union. The gospel was illegal. You weren't allowed to do it, and it's so touching when you talk to Russians who lived through those times and to hear about the underground churches they had and how they would have to meet in houses.
There was a state church where the gospel wasn't preached, and you could go to those. But to actually hear the gospel, you had to go to a home church, which was against the law. To hear the word taught, you were a criminal.
And what would happen from time to time, the KGB would come up, and they would break up those churches, and they would take the pastor to jail for preaching the gospel. Now, just imagine that the next Sunday, when they got together, who would step forward?
What man would step forward to be the next pastor, knowing that his head would be the next one on the chopping block? That's persecution, and that is spiritual warfare. That is Satan trying to stop the progress of the Bible, which, of course, ultimately, he cannot do.
But that is what he is all about. But when the gospel is preached, what does it do? What is it about the gospel? I mean, I think about my own life. How many times did I hear the gospel, and it had no effect on me whatsoever, except for maybe to make me mad?
And then one day, I heard it, and it was like I'd never heard it before. It was like, I can't even explain it. But all of a sudden, I knew that it was true. Everything that I just kind of ignored before, or that it made me angry, or that it made me feel, sometimes, even sorry for Christians, especially when I was a Mormon, I thought, well, those poor people only have part of the truth, but I have the whole truth.
But to hear that for the first time was just an amazing, amazing experience, and life-transforming. When God so broke through my stubbornness, my sinfulness, and transformed my heart, there was a significant change.
I was never going to be the same. And that's what we do when we bring the gospel into people's lives. We destroy those things that have been holding them captive. Paul, when he was dealing with the Corinthians, he had to destroy false doctrine, the false teachers, and he had to break down their reasonings when their theories ultimately were defeated, when their strongholds were knocked down.
The gospel is able to advance and flourish, and sinners were set free. Now, this would be true not only in Corinth in ancient days when Paul was doing this, but it's true today. We need to proclaim Christ.
We need to proclaim the gospel, and that is true spiritual warfare. If we think about spiritual warfare in terms of the area of philosophy, when we think about spiritual strongholds and all this other language here that he uses, that Paul does, to destroy strongholds, to destroy arguments in every lofty opinion.
Think about that language, lofty opinion. I mean, people can sound so smart. You know, you just listen and you go, I don't want to argue with that guy. He's so much smarter than I am. Look at all the letters he has after his name.
But the truth is, the wisdom of the wise is destroyed by the foolishness of God. We present what seems to be absolute foolishness to them, and if God is pleased to do so, he opens their eyes, he unstops their ears, and they believe.
And there's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. We don't have to worry about getting in an argument with somebody. I don't want to debate, you know, all the principles of evolution and everything like that.
I mean, I don't have to take the time to do that. I don't have to defend the existence of God. You know, the Bible never does that. The Bible never once says, let me prove that God exists. It just says, in the beginning, God.
And then it talks about what he did. It never says where he came from. It doesn't talk about where he's going, or what he consists of, or how he subsists. It doesn't do any of that. It just says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
That's all we need to know to debate, allegedly, debate some evolutionist, or somebody who has these lofty ideas, because we can't debate them. We don't want to get into the mud with them, as it were.
I don't want to study the Quran. I mean, some people do this, and you know, great for them. I don't need to study the Quran. I don't have to memorize the Book of Mormon. I don't have to go to the Holy Book of the Hindus.
I don't have to read, you know, the seven principles of this, or the nine principles of that. I don't have to do all that. I tell people the truth, and I do it in a loving way, so that I'm not the obstacle.
But if God is pleased to save them, he will. Now let's just move on, and I want to read another passage. And I think this is a passage that is so often, as much of the Bible is, so often misapplied. I hear one popular political, you know, guy kind of refer to this a lot.
But John 8, John 8, verse 32, and this is the Lord himself speaking. He says, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. How many times have you heard that? Probably a lot. Did you ever wonder, set me free from what?
Set me free from what? I mean, you know, in context. I mean, for us, it's one thing, but what about in context? What is the context? Now listen to verse 31. So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him.
Now, you think, you're thinking to yourself, well, these are probably Christians. They must be Christians. And he says, if you abide my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
Now listen to what his quote, unquote, disciples, these believers, said in verse 33. They answered him, we are offspring of Abraham, and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say you will become free?
In other words, they're like, give me a break, pal. We are, you know, we are the chosen ones. How is it that you say, you know, and we've never been enslaved to anyone. How is it you say we're going to become free?
Well, it's interesting, because they could not have meant in a political sense, because clearly the Jewish nation, the nation of Israel had been enslaved in several times, several occasions by different, by different countries.
I mean, when we think about Egypt, certainly they were in slavery there. Assyria, Babylon, they were conquered by Alexander the Great. And even at this time, you know, who was in control of Israel? Who was in control of Jerusalem?
It wasn't the Jews. It was the Romans. The Romans were in control. Now they let the Jews worship as they please, as long as they didn't cause any trouble. And interestingly enough, for those of you who know history, they did cause trouble.
They rebelled and the city of Jerusalem was sacked in 70 AD and the temple was destroyed. But you know what? It's even, I think it's about 50 years later, about 120 AD that they started rebelling again.
And the Romans came back and sacked Jerusalem again. But this time they did something different. They removed all the Jews, all the Jews from Israel. They took them all out. And they renamed the place.
You know what they renamed it? Palestine. Now, if you wanted to know how the place got its name, Palestine, as Paul Harvey used to say, now you know the rest of the story. But moving on here in this context, John writing the words of Jesus.
So we know it wasn't political freedom that he was offering because they weren't even politically free then. Well, was it spiritual liberty? Is that what he was talking about? Why would they say that they were free?
Well, obviously, if they were believers, they would be free, but is that what he's talking about? Well, here's why they would say it. Judaism taught that the study of the law made a man free. In other words, if you studied the law enough, you were free.
But John's gospel, Jesus himself, says that the law points to him. Everything in the Old Testament pointed to him. And that he himself, remember John 14, 6, I am the way, the truth, and the life. Everything about him was the way.
That he was full of grace and truth, that'd be John 1, 14. And that's the way that we would know freedom. So if he's offering freedom, well, what kind of freedom was he offering? It wasn't political freedom.
It wasn't physical freedom because they were not technically slaves. And they wouldn't think of it as spiritual freedom, but that's exactly what it was. That's exactly what it was. They were slaves. If we go on in the context here, in verse 33, they ended it by saying, how is it that you say you will become free?
Jesus answered them, truly, truly, I say to you, everyone, this is in direct response to that, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever, the son remains forever.
So if the son sets you free, S-O-N, son sets you free, you will be free indeed. I know that you are offspring of Abraham, yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you. Now keep in mind how this started.
Verse 31, so Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, so whatever belief means there, however you understand that, one thing it clearly does not mean is that they did not believe in him in a saving way, otherwise they would be spiritually free.
That's what he says, if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed. I know that you are the offspring of Abraham, yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you. Well, his word had no place in them, why?
Because they were not Christians. They had not yet believed. Verse 38, I speak of what I have seen with my father and you do what you have heard from your father and he goes on, I mean, this is so great.
They answered him and said, you know, with great pride still they answered him, Abraham is our father. Now listen, Jesus did not, you know, give them some kind of spiritual hug. He was not cruel to them, but he spoke the truth and this is what we do when we are waging spiritual warfare and we need to understand the people we come in contact with just like these Jews in this situation are enslaved to sin.
That is spiritual warfare. They have something that is obstructing them from Christ. We need to remove that and how do we remove it? We remove it by showing it to them. We hold up the mirror and we let them see the mirror of the word of God as it were and we let them see who they really are.
People think they're good, they think that they're right, they think just like these Jews did. Listen, verse 39, they answered him, Abraham is our father. Jesus said to them, if you were Abraham's children, you would be doing the works Abraham did and what did he do?
What were his works? He believed God and so Jesus is saying, you guys don't believe God, you don't believe him. Verse 40, but now you seek to kill me a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God.
This is not what Abraham did. You are doing the works your father did and here's the reveal. They said to him, we were not born of sexual immorality. We have one father, even God. In other words, they're saying our father is God.
We were not born of sexual immorality, implying that he was insulting him. And 43, he says, why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father, the devil and your will is to do your father's desires.
He was a murderer from the beginning. Can you imagine these people who think that God is their father, who think that they are spiritually free and Jesus doesn't affirm them in that. He doesn't pat them on the back.
He doesn't say, well, you know what? You're doing pretty well, try to do better. He says, you are of Satan. Satan is your father. You have believed a lie. You are enslaved to sin and to the lies of sin.
This is No Compromise Radio. My name's Steve Cooley. You can write to us, info at nocompromiseradio .com.
No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Ebendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.
Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.
The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE in staff or management.