"Free willy" (Part 2)

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.

Pop Culture, Free Will, and the Idol of the Human Will

Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and Steve and I are in the studio today, and we had a quick take of about a five-minute break. We taped the last show that you probably heard last week on Free Will, and I had to play for Steve the Dire Straits MTV song so he could think about free will, and then I told him I need to put my headphones on with the chord to the left, and then Pastor Steve said, to the left, to the left.

I don't even know where that's from, I have no idea.

I think it's a Beyonce song, to tell you the truth, but we're equal opportunity employers, and we like to talk about pop culture, partly because we are influenced by pop culture. We are influenced by advertisements, and people run around saying they've got free will, and they wonder why they have to drive to Taco Bell after they watch a commercial, and I think that's one reason why they are so influenceable.

And so, I don't know what I'm talking about right now. We're just talking about pop music. Now who sang that? I have no idea. I think that was some kind of Muzak or something like that. They were talking about pop music.

I thought you were probably going to give me some kind of Thomas Dolby kind of song next. Blinded me with science.

You know what we were talking about last week, talking about why do you guys keep talking about this and everything, and I said to you off the air, I said, you know what? Why did the Old Testament prophets constantly warn the people about going after false gods?

Why were they always talking about the Molochs and the Ashtoreths and all these other false gods? Well, it's because that was the problem, and the problem with evangelicalism today is, as Pastor Mike has said on many occasions, the idol of free will, that somehow it's so sacrosanct.

And you know what? No Compromise Radio, maybe we're kind of iconoclasts. In other words, we're here to destroy idols. We're here to break down the false images, the icons that people have built for themselves in their own minds and worship, and one of those is definitely free will.

Well, Steve, I was thinking about your resolve to say to people, if you believe in free will, just give us some verses. And so I want to make sure I give the call out, the shout out as well. When it comes to free will, we just dare people to try to defend free will with the Bible.

And so I, with Elijah, will call out and I will mock you. Call out with a loud voice, for he is a god. Either he is occupied or gone aside or is on a journey or perhaps he's asleep and needs to be awakened.

And so if you believe in free will, please tell us, but we haven't got any phone calls yet. Maybe the idol of free will is occupied, going to the bathroom, gone outside. And so what happened in the text in 1 Kings 18?

So they cried out with a loud voice and they cut themselves according to their custom with swords and lances until the blood gushed out on them. Now, please give the disclaimer, Steve. We don't want relief.

No, we don't want that.

We don't like cutters. Absolutely not, no. No, I've seen that in my lifetime, not fun stuff.

But here's what we want. We want you to say, if the Bible teaches something, I'll believe it, even though it might be uncomfortable, unpopular. And I'd like to construct a theology in my mind that is a mirror to what the Bible teaches.

And certainly the God who created the universe with words, with his mind, is not going to want humans to come alongside of God and say, aren't we glad we saved each other? God, thank you for doing your job.

I did my job and now we both worked and it was a joint effort and off we go. No God alone is to get the glory. And that was one of the great monikers of the Reformation. Sola Deo Gloria. God alone gets the glory.

And so today we're going to talk one more time about free will, which is a mini series within a mini series because it relates directly to unconditional election. So let's get right to the quiz. What do you say?

Okay. All right. The number to call is BR5149 or whatever. What was that on hee-haw? The number to call is BR5149. What was that? I don't know. They didn't show it in California. Oh boy. Can you believe that I've been saved?

I've been saved out of watching hee-haw.

And I'm very glad that happened. At least you weren't saved while you were watching. Hee-haw. BR549, that's it. So those of you who want to write in, BR549.

Regenerate and Unregenerate People Act According to Their Wills

Okay. Question number five, the regenerate and unregenerate act according to their respective wills. Let me repeat that one more time. The regenerate, born again people, and unregenerate, the lost, act according to their respective wills.

Absolutely true.

I mean, what else would they do? But again, you know, and I've said this on a number of occasions, maybe I should actually read it, but it's very clear that there are two states described in the Bible with regard to our wills.

One is slavery to sin and the other is slavery to righteousness. And we cannot say or think that somehow we have both of these.

Maybe it's kind of a schizophrenic deal, Steve. It's a bipolar disorder with wills and you're a slave to one and a slave to the other and you can take some kind of spiritual bipolar deal.

Yeah, we're being pulled apart by both. No, that's no. Romans 6 .17 says, but thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed.

Well, what form of teaching would that be? Well, I suppose that might be the gospel. And having been freed from sin, listen, held in its chains, held by Satan to do his will, you've been freed from that by the work of Christ.

And listen, you became slaves of righteousness. Now, where, oh, where is the free will in that?

Okay, let me, I'll be the tractor, Steve.

You be the detractor. Is that the retractor? Yes. The tread tractor.

Let big tractor. Let me say this. Do you know the Bible is written by men, of course? Oh, allegedly. God doesn't want us to be robots. And that would be found where? Isn't it so funny, Steve, where people use these inane, insane arguments that never deal with the text.

So here's what we want at No Compromise Radio. We'll tell you a text, Romans 6, slave to sin, slave to righteousness, slave to Satan to do his will, 2 Timothy 2. And then could you please explain to us the original intention of God when he wrote those verses?

Was he trying to teach free will? Or can you explain those texts in any way, shape, or form? That's what we want you to do before you do the hop, skip, and jump. We did the triple jump when we were younger.

I don't think they do the triple jump in the Olympics anymore. Yeah, they still do. Oh, they do? Yeah, they do. Okay, so don't do any triple jumps to somehow talk about philosophy, robots,.

Or, you know, NASCAR. Just don't do that. Yeah, and I mean, in John 6, verse 44, when Jesus says, no one can come to me except that the Father draws him. I mean, no one can. What does that mean? Everyone can?

Well, that's what you ultimately, if you say that everybody has a free will, then Jesus was just wrong. You either have to submit to scripture or ride over scripture.

Yeah. People act according to their wills. If you believe freedom of the will is defined by Jonathan Edwards' terms, the mind choosing, the nature choosing, the will choosing, that is to say you do what you are, you make decisions according to your nature.

So if you have the nature of an unbeliever, you always sin. If you have the nature of the believer, you choose righteousness, or sometimes you choose sin, but you have the ability to choose those things because you have that nature, then that's fine.

The mind choosing is a good definition. But most of the time, freedom of the will today means that you are free to say no to God saving you, and God can't save you until you do something first. At best, freedom of the will is a vacuous, misunderstood term that needs to be jettisoned for something else.

And so people do choose, but they choose according to their will.

Well, you know, I mean, the Arminian might say something like, well, you know, you just have to stop fighting God. You have to let him in. And again, I would just say, well, wait a minute, you know, let's think about it.

We've talked about, you know, how God opened Lydia's heart. What we don't see anywhere in there is a description of how Lydia fought him off for many, many years, and then suddenly she made the decision to let him in, and that's when God opened her heart.

No.

Well, too bad that for a long time, she was trusting in her own heart. She loved her own heart. She followed her own heart. She loved Disney movies in her own heart, because that's what they all do. And then

Just follow your heart. And then one day God said, I will open your heart, and even though you have turned away from the call of Christ and following the one true God, I'm going to change your nature, and now that nature will do what all natures do, make decisions according to its own nature, and this time it'll be a redeemed nature.

Necessity, Moral Responsibility, and the Denial of Self-Salvation

We better move on to number six. Necessity does not destroy moral responsibility. We touched on this a little bit last time, so let's just make it brief. Necessity does not destroy moral responsibility.

There are many commands in the Bible to repent. There are many commands to believe. So man is responsible for that, but the fact that he doesn't have the capacity to do that does not change a thing. As I said before, you know, Jesus says, be perfect.

Well, do we not have to do that? Do we not have to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbor as ourselves, always, perfectly? And even though we can't do that, is God going to say, you know what?

That's okay, I didn't really mean it.

You know, I was just joking around. Go ahead and go into heaven. The Rod Stewart song just came into my mind from the 70s. I was only joking, my dear, trying to hide my fear. Thank God I was rescued from horrible music, too, but that's another point.

The theologian Shedd, I believe he was a Baptist theologian, S-H-E-D-D, not the marriage writer. W-G-T Shedd. That's exactly right. He wrote Roughshod. He wrote some interesting articles and a systematic theology, and he said that the operative term when you discuss this will is that God made these people willing.

That was the kind of language of Scripture, the tenor of Scripture, that God makes them willing to do what God requires, what God wants, and so left to themselves, unbelievers aren't made willing because they have Adam's will, fallen will, and they always choose the opposite.

Oh, it might look externally like it was a good choice towards God, but never with the internal motives, ambitions, and heart that it would be proper. Let's go on. We believe that God is holding people responsible even though they're not able because of the fall, and let's ask another question.

Next question. Sola gratia denies man's ability to save himself. Sola gratia denies man's ability to save himself.

What is sola gratia? Well, it is Latin, or Latin, and it means grace alone, and that would be the Reformational doctrine that it is grace alone that saves, the grace of God, and so sola gratia denies man's ability to save himself is absolutely true because we don't generate ourselves grace, right?

We don't generate grace ourselves. It's not by my own grace I am saved.

Yes, but other people have stored up works of grace for me, and then they can be doled out to me through indulgences and through the prayer of the saints, and maybe Mary could dispense a few graces to me.

I have a word for you. It's Galatians 1 .8. That is a different gospel. Sola gratia. It came about because people were denying grace alone, and it's very insidious. It's very tricky. The enemy is very smart.

You can talk to many people today, and they will say, you are saved by grace through faith. Matter of fact, Roman Catholics, that's what they teach. You are saved by grace through faith, and actually, the text sometimes would even use that kind of language, but it doesn't mean the text used the language in what the Roman Catholic Church is saying.

By grace alone, Galatians 1, was trying to prove if you bring anybody else in who says his works, it's going to be anathema. By faith alone, not sacraments. Faith isn't alone. It works once it's been granted, but faith alone, grace alone, were responses to those external forces that said, it's just grace, add a little bit of merit.

It's just faith, add a little bit of works, and so if you believe that God's sovereign grace saves you, then how can you believe you save yourself? Almost seems like a dumb question.

And I just have to get back to this treasure of merit thing because this idea of a treasury of merit, with all due respect to those false teachers who would send you to hell if you believe in it, is the idea that someone, a human being, a mere human being, would have excess merit, and that somehow that excess merit, and how could you ever be more than perfect if God's standard for getting into heaven is perfection?

And you say, well, I have achieved not only perfection, but perfection plus, and I'm willing to give that plus into this bank of merit, which then can be doled out. Well, that's just rubbish. No one can be perfect, first of all, and secondly, no one can exceed perfection.

That idea is crazy.

When it comes to merit plus, that makes me nonplussed.

That makes me want my MTV, I mean, that's crazy.

Here's what we're doing, info at nocompromiseradio .com. You can write us. We don't get too many emails, but we will take any of the emails and try to get back to you on the topics and subjects.

Just don't put us on your spam list. You know, that's all we ask. Yeah, yeah, no spam.

You remember, what does spam actually mean? Remember my father used to eat spam, or your dad did too? It's an acronym for something. Yeah. What does it mean? Special ham. I don't know. Special ham? It contains no ham.

Spam, it makes me want to go into some Monty Python skit. Yeah, let's not do that. So, well, here's what we're after. We're after the biblical teaching that says, because of the bondage of sin that affected the whole person, Adam, and all his progeny, all those in Adam, including everybody who's listening to me today, sin is so detrimental.

Sin is so pervasive. Sin has invaded every nook and cranny of the person, including the will. There's no island of Gilligan's righteousness there, Gilligan's island of righteousness, that somehow is not affected by the fall.

And since that fall was complete, and total, and damning, and causing death, someone had to come with a conquering chariot, as it were, over the hills to say, the prince is here to make right the wrong.

And that Prince Christ Jesus, the author and finisher of our salvation, worked a great work, not in people that needed a little help. That would have been good, and he would have been applauded. But Christ worked in people that were lost, dead, children of wrath, and slaves to Satan.

And they had their will bound so much, it was in a spiritual straitjacket, and Jesus Christ came and rescued them, delivered them, paid the price for their sin, and rose triumphant on the third day. And we are jealous to keep his glory.

God is jealous, and you ought to be as well. Here's what I wanna ask you, listening audience. Are you jealous for the glory of God? And if you are, how can you be, and still defend the doctrine of free will?

I mean, what are you trying to say,.

That we don't make choices? Is that what you're trying to say? I mean, come on, we all make choices every day. Thus, we have a free will.

Well, we're talking about the spiritual reality that you cannot, as an unbeliever, make the choice to say, I will now believe in God with no external inducements, no internal compulsion. I just will decide to believe, and I'll let God save me.

We are not saying that unbelievers can pick Ben and Jerry ice cream flavors out of their own volition, of their own human agency, but they cannot choose God. God must initiate, God must choose, God must save.

God must, as you love to quote 1 Peter 1, cause people to be born again.

Well, I do love that, because it's just a tremendous picture, and he doesn't cause us to be born again out of some kind of malice. In fact, 1 Peter 1 goes on to say that it's because he has given us an inheritance which awaits us and is preserved and cannot be damaged in any kind of way, and so it's a great promise.

Well, let's talk about John 3 for a minute, Steve. When Jesus was saying to people, you must be born again, literally, you must be born from above, you've been born the first time out of your mother's womb, you need to be born the second time out of the womb of God, as it were, out of his mind, out of his will, he was the originator, and so what kind of similarities can we see about a child born out of a mother on earth to divine regeneration?

And I don't think there's been one kid who's climbed out of the womb and the birth canal on their own, have they?

No, they don't decide when they're gonna be born, they don't decide anything in the entire process. You know, I mean, I recently, you know, just between me, you, and the listeners here at No Compromise Radio, just found out not too long ago that I'm gonna be a grandfather.

You know, people are congratulating me all the time, and I'm like, I had nothing to do with it. You know, and the same way, when that little baby comes into this world, he's not gonna look up at the doctor and give the doctor a high five and go, yeah, buddy, you know, we did it, me and you, pal.

I can just imagine some kind of, you know, resistance by the baby. Let's not just say the baby's even neutral. Let's just say the baby is going to resist the birth. There is nothing in that baby that's going to cause resistance, because everything has been built by God, the Creator, and the hormones and the body of a woman to push that baby out in due time.

And that baby will be forced, compelled, pushed out, and there's nothing they can do to stop it.

Well, don't you think that that's just a metaphor and that Jesus didn't really literally mean, you know, that somehow, you know, God was going to impose his will on us?

You should have seen Pastor Steve's face when he was doing that. He kind of gave some kind of a emaciated, kind of a feminine look there. Like I always say, Pastor Steve, there's nothing wrong with femininity in women.

It is, you know, by the way, when I think of this kind of doctrine, Pastor Steve, that is sovereign grace instead of free will. When I see people grab a hold of this truth, it shakes them because it causes thankfulness.

It causes them to glorify God. It causes them to say, I should have gone to hell, but God, you saved me. I was no different than my friend who died and went to hell. And all of a sudden, that kind of doctrine for women, it matures them, certainly.

But we live in a day and age where most churches are populated with women. And I think when you grab a hold of a guy and teach them this doctrine that God is everything and man is sinful, yet God in his love sent his son to die for sinners like that and rose from the dead, I think that is appealing to men.

And why is there a Christianity that's promoted today that only women go for? And that's the liberal kind of Christianity that denudes Christianity from all its masculinity. And why the same God has men and women who follow.

And you preach this kind of doctrine that God is sovereign,.

Men will follow that kind of king. Well, let me take a little different tack here. Just imagine, I mean, I often think, I mean, I just rejoice constantly at all the grace that God has shown me and how he transformed me.

Now, just imagine that I thought about things differently and I thought, boy, I'm so glad I made the choice I made. Well, what am I thankful to God for? That he provided me the opportunity, but I had to seize the opportunity.

You know, God made it possible, but if I hadn't done it, boy, it would have been just a big waste of time. I just look at the choices I made, the way I lived my life, everything about me was against God for myself.

And he transformed me, not because I was thinking, oh, you know, I'd really like to make some changes in my life, but because when the truth became apparent to me, it was a no-brainer. I fled, I fled my old way of living and ran to the cross.

And now when I look back on it, I rejoice, not because I ran to the cross, but because he enabled me to run to the cross. He gave me the faith, he gave me the desire and the insight to want to do that.

Well, what happens, Pastor Steve, is some people die and will go to heaven the whole time believing in free will. Essentially, if you look at their doctrine, they'll deny it in some way, shape, or form, because they'll realize they're saved by grace, Christ's work, but they hold on to this doctrine of free will like they hold on to some kind of bad luggage.

They just can't want to part with it. And so I think it's not a doctrine that you say to me, well, you know, I'm going to go to hell because I believe in that. I don't think you're going to go to hell.

Of course, if you're saved, you're not going to go to hell no matter what kind of errant thinking you have, because we all have sinful thinking. But here's what I am saying. I'm saying that if you look in your life right now, we think you're getting robbed from joy, from thankfulness, from peace, from worship, because you're holding on to this man-made doctrine.

And we want you to get rid of it. We want to excise it. We want you to cut it away and say, you know, there's no reason except for pride that I believe this. And we want to teach you and tell you there's liberation in truth.

And we want to be like the B -24 bombers. And we want to liberate you from this man-centered truth. God is no gentleman standing at the door, knocking at the door of your loved one's heart, hoping they might let him in.

If that was the case, your loved one would never get saved. But when the God of the universe opens the heart of people, they then respond with belief and faith and trust. And they make decisions to say, I will follow Jesus.

Well, that's such a great way of putting it. I mean, think about this. When you pray for your loved ones, and I've said it this way, or I've said it other ways, let me try this. When you pray for your loved ones, do you just pray like this?

Lord, I would ask that you just continue knocking, wooing, hoping, and just kind of beckoning on my loved ones. Because someday I hope that they'll see your beckoning and respond with their free will.

See, doesn't that sound like such a girly man Jesus? Some kind of long-haired, I don't want to go Mark Driscoll in anybody right now, but some kind of long-haired effeminate Jesus that shaves once every four months because he doesn't have any hair on his face.

It is insane.

And frankly, it's insulting. I mean, if God is sovereign, then he draws those he chooses to draw. He saves those he chooses to save.

No Compromise Radio, there's only one being in the entire universe with free will, and you're not him.

Amen. God bless you. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth 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, its staff or management.