Join Nicole McBurney and Pastor Bob Enyart as they delve into the foundations of Christian beliefs, deconstructing common cliches that often mislead the faithful. This episode of Theology Thursday explores the critical difference between genuine doctrine and popular but shallow sayings that have infiltrated Christian culture. From understanding judgement and forgiveness to dissecting God’s immutable nature, this conversation invites listeners to examine their own beliefs and challenges them to seek a deeper understanding of their faith.
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country, and welcome to Theology Thursday. I’m Nicole McBurney. Every weekday we bring you the news of the day, the culture, and science from a Christian worldview. But today, join me and Pastor Bob Enyart as we explore the source of our Christian worldview, the Bible.
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And if we forgive everyone, we’re teaching the world that God will forgive everyone without repentance. Whereas Jesus said, if someone sins against you, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, Luke 17 3. If he repents. So we could throw that out too, because that doesn’t fit in with the cliche that the body of Christ has accepted, because we’ve set aside the Bible for these easy, super spiritual rules, which contradict the scriptures, but they make us feel good. Sort of makes us feel self-righteous. Takes me out of the battle. Hey, I can’t judge anybody. Besides, I forgive them anyway. Well what do you forgive them for? You can only forgive someone that you’ve judged to be wrong. So the cliches tend to contradict themselves. Does that make sense? How can you forgive someone if you don’t think they’re wrong? And how could you think they’re wrong if you can’t judge them? So judge not and forgive everyone is a contradict, where truth doesn’t contradict. Truth is non-contradictory. All sins are equal. That’s a cliche. Makes it easy, right? If somebody is apathetic about killing unborn children, and then, hey, that’s the same as stealing a Tic Tac. And so what’s the difference, really? And I hear that kind of thing on Christian radio. So all sins are equal. That’s what the Bible says, right? The Bible says, all sins are equal, thus saith the Lord. No. Jesus said some people have the greater sin. In fact, that guy there, he has a lesser sin than these guys because to whom much is given, they’re more accountable. And so you have a whole… a whole chunk of the teaching of the Bible that shows that some sins are far more grievous to God than other sins. That’s why there’s a judgment day. Judgment day is not to determine who’s going to go to heaven, who’s going to go to hell. That’s determined when somebody dies. And when they die, then they’re separated. Those who go to hell, they die and they go to Sheol, to Hades. The believer dies and he goes to be with the Lord. So Judgment Day is not to decide your eternal residence, but Judgment Day, Jesus said, some will be punished intensely, others will be punished less so, and it will depend on many factors. So if you sin and you’re not forgiven by Christ, you’ll suffer for that sin. But what if you teach others to commit the same sin you did? Then you’ll suffer worse. And these are all fundamental principles of Scripture that are contradicted by the cliches. But the cliches go unchallenged. And one reason is because they take the Christians out of the spiritual battle. And the Christians no longer are a challenge. So if you have a large church, and the church is sort of uninvested from the battle that’s raging around it, for example, with our godless public schools. So giving your child a godless education, I believe, is inherently sinful. It’s inherently wrong. So you have a big church, a megachurch, thousands of members. How many send their kids to public schools? Well, a lot. So if the pastor stands up and says it’s a sin to send your kids to public school, then what happens? Those people all leave, and then you can’t meet your budget, and you have 20 people on staff and property, eight acres and building. So what happens is the kind of thing that goes for doctrine today is really superficial cliches that are false. And all sins are equal, so it really doesn’t matter. Even if it’s wrong to put your kids in public school, who are you to judge and forgive everyone? So what does it matter? And pretty soon, the only thing that matters is tithing, putting it in, but not taking it out. And if you’re not supposed to judge, then when the plate comes by and you took out, would the church that says don’t judge, would they somehow all of a sudden find a backbone and be very critical? Say, we’re not going to tolerate that. Well, why not? Don’t judge. Forgive. So you can very quickly find out where people stand when it comes to money quite often, sort of follow the money. Don’t call anyone a fool. The Bible does frequently. Jesus, David, Paul, they call people fools. But you can’t call anybody a fool. That’s more important than do not commit adultery. More important. Hate the sin, love the sinner. We paraphrase that, hate the gin, love the dinner. When God sends people to hell for all of eternity, is he sending their sin or is he sending the sinner? Who goes to hell? Is it the sin or the sinner? It’s the sinner. It’s not their skin that gets judged. It’s not the finger that pulls the trigger that kills an innocent person. It’s not the action that gets judged. It’s the sinner. And so hate the sin, love the sinner. Of course, God loves the whole world. But he also hates those who shed innocent blood. He hates those who sow dissension unnecessarily. So God can hate and love at the same time, and we can too. We can hate the person who kills the innocent, but love them enough to share with them that they need God, and Jesus Christ will forgive them. So you could do both. You could hate the perversion, the homosexual who is trying to undermine the truth of God, but love him enough to share the gospel with him. You could do both. And the Bible calls on us to do both. God has a plan for your life. So, you know, what car do I have to buy? What job do I take? Who do I marry? So, God told me to marry this person, and everybody’s so happy, and then a year later, there’s a divorce. And what happened? God told me to divorce this person? No, it’s just we make claims and we attribute our own decisions to God as though God is the one who got me into this mess. And why? And that’s common in prison if you have a jail ministry. Everybody who’s in jail because of their own sin and decisions and actions say, why did God do this to me? God has a plan for my life. This is part of his plan for me. Why? Why? Why does he have nicer plans for other people and my life is miserable? You see how it’s a victim mentality. It’s not biblical. God’s plan for our lives is very general. It’s an umbrella plan. It is that we would love him, serve him, become conformed to the image of Christ, love and serve our family and our friends. That’s God’s plan for my life. Now, which car I buy, the myriad of decisions I make day to day, every year, God is not micromanaging my life. As our kids become adults, we don’t want them to call us and ask every decision they make, should I do this? Should I do this? Should I do that? What should I do on every decision? Because then they would never grow up and mature. So God, he doesn’t want to make every decision for us. He’s given us a mind, faculties, so that if we honor him, we could make decisions that are good. They don’t have to be the perfect decision. Like, am I hiring the perfect person? That’s no such thing. That’s a make-believe thing. Am I marrying the perfect person? Am I buying the perfect car? That’s all make-believe. Right? God gave Adam Eve, and they fell into terrible sin. So, what? If God would have given Adam someone else, then… It’s not God, if only God will show me the right person to marry, then my life will be great. That’s false. There’s only one person for me to marry in God’s perfect plan. If I find that person, then everything will be great. Is that true? Well, what if you find the wrong person? You marry, some guy marries the wrong woman, right? She was supposed to marry another guy. Now that poor slob, his life is ruined. Because some other guy he never even met married a woman he never met that he was supposed to marry. So now he’s stuck with second best. Isn’t that absurd? And then just within a few iterations of that, everyone in the world has married the wrong person, everybody. But if we have no free will, if we have no will, and everybody has to marry whoever God picked, then God is picking all these people and it’s a catastrophe because divorce is epidemic. So all these superstitious ways of trying to simplify the Christian life, they’re all cliches that are so popular because we’re lactose intolerant. The body of Christ can no longer even handle the milk. Forget the meat, we can’t handle the milk. So it’s easier to get someone who’s an unbeliever and bring them to the Lord and then build them up than it is to take a Christian who’s already been ruined by 20 years of teaching and try to help them to grow. If they want to grow on their own and come along, great, but you can’t force feed to someone who’s an adult. God does not change in any way. Utter immutability, of course that’s not true. God the Son humbled himself, became flesh, took on the sin of the world. The Father poured out his wrath on the Son. All those were terrible changes, important changes, but terrible. God became nicer in the New Testament. Old Testament, he was mean. New Testament, he’s nice. And that contradicts the God cannot change attitude. cliché. So clichés tend to contradict each other. God is the same in the New Testament and the Old Testament. People think in the Old Testament is where God said that the wicked will be punished in hell. That’s hardly ever mentioned. It’s mostly in the New Testament, Jesus teaching how bad hell will be and that it’ll be forever. That’s a New Testament teaching. It’s in the Old Testament, but you’ve got to search. The New Testament hits you right in the face. So those are examples of the cliches that are popular because the body of Christ is lactose intolerant. So we need to ask God to help us to not be dull of hearing, but to focus on his word, have the attention span that’s necessary to study and really learn what is true. How do I live my life as a Christian? Verse 14, but solid food belongs to those who are of full age. That is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil. So if someone is told that it’s a sin to judge, they’re told that it’s a sin to judge, If they’re mature and they could discern between good and evil, they will identify very quickly that that’s wrong, that’s false, that’s evil. To say to Christians you can’t judge is a horrific false teaching, yet it’s reasonably common. And so if we’re mature, if we’re of full age, then… By reason of the use of our senses, we talk about common sense. God has given us the ability to use our minds, to be rational. And so we take the things he says in his word and we can apply them to our daily lives in so many ways. And so we should be able to do that. We should be able to discern good and evil. Some people have such an extraordinary knack for coming down on the evil side of any question, that if you’re ever really at a loss for what to do, call them and ask them. Whatever they say, do the opposite and you’re probably going to be safe. Now that’s lactose intolerance. Let’s go to chapter 6. This chapter brings up the question of losing your salvation. And, of course, there’s an enormous debate among Christians about is it possible to lose your salvation. And here we find out, well, in verse 6, if you read, if they fall away, that it’s impossible to renew them again to repentance since they crucify again again. the Son of God. And so it speaks about if they fall away. So there’s a question that arises, is it possible for Christians to lose their salvation? And that’s a very contentious question. And Christians, different denominations, have strong opinion on that. I’ll read a few verses to you of the verses that are quoted by those who say you can lose your salvation. And While I believe in the dispensation of grace for us Gentiles and Jews that the New Testament says was given to Paul for us, it is called the dispensation of the grace of God that we are no longer under the law. Therefore, even if we sin, we can’t be condemned by the law, so we can’t be separated from God because we’re identified with Christ, we’re in Christ. And he would have to deny himself in order to deny us because we’re in Christ. So I believe that, but that began with the body of Christ. That is not the covenant of circumcision in the Mosaic Law. That was all a covenant of law, not a covenant of grace. And there was grace that undergirded Mount Sinai and the covenant of circumcision, but it was still a covenant of law. So I’m going to read you a few verses that seem to say that you have to endure to the end if you want to be saved. If you don’t endure to the end, you won’t be saved. And those verses are pretty common, and they’re rather blatant about it. But the Baptist-type Christians, who I’m close to Baptist, but I’m not Baptist, who believe in eternal security, they say, no, no, no, none of those verses mean that you can lose your salvation. In each one, they have to apply a different kind of twist to try to get it to say what they want it to say. It’s much easier to allow the text to speak for itself. So I’ll give you a few examples. First, in Matthew 24, verse 13, Jesus said, “…but he who endures to the end shall be saved.” complete sentence. But he who endures to the end shall be saved. That seems to indicate that it’s a possibility that if you don’t endure to the end, you will not be saved. Peter, Jesus is speaking for three years of Peter, James, John, the twelve, and those other disciples. So Peter is inspired by the Holy Spirit to write his epistles. And in 2 Peter chapter 2, starting in verse 20, he writes this. if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. So it’s speaking of people who’ve escaped the sin of the world through the knowledge of Jesus Christ. If after they escape that sin, if they are again entangled in that sin and overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning. for it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than having known it to turn from the holy commandment delivered to them. So that’s Peter. First we heard from Jesus, then Peter, who was the head of the 12 disciples, back in the Old Testament. And the things Jesus said on this topic are consistent with the Old Testament because he came teaching the Mosaic Law. He came under the covenant of circumcision. So he was circumcised, as were his disciples. In Ezekiel chapter 18, beginning in verse 24, when a righteous man turns away from his righteousness and commits iniquity and does according to all the abominations that the wicked man does, shall he live? all the righteousness which he has done shall not be remembered because of the unfaithfulness of which he is guilty and the sin which he has committed because of them he shall die. But then the text says, but if the wicked man turns from his wickedness and is righteous before God, then he shall live. So that doesn’t mean he’ll live forever and never die. It’s not talking about physical life. It’s talking about spiritual life. Because the righteous die. They die. There’s no promise from God that if you live a righteous life, you’ll never die physically. Of course. The righteous die. So when… Ezekiel says that if a righteous man turns away from his righteousness and commits iniquity, his righteousness will not be remembered. By who? By the janitor who works at the church? No, by God. His righteousness will not be remembered by God, and instead he will die. So that is consistent with what Jesus said, that you must endure to the end to be saved. These kinds of verses, we could see them throughout, from the covenant of circumcision in Genesis throughout to the middle of the book of Acts. We see that. We see that kind of teaching in Chronicles, and we mentioned Ezekiel. In the New Testament, in Matthew, Mark, John. In James and Peter and Jude and Revelation, we see these warnings that you have to endure to the end if you want to be saved. And if you turn back, then you’re lost. On the other hand, God gave to the Apostle Paul, we know this because we read it in the New Testament, God gave to Paul the dispensation of grace for us. Now that simple statement is mostly not known to the body of Christ at large. Christians at large don’t know that. Even though it’s explicitly stated that God gave to Paul the dispensation of grace for us. It’s not known. And so instead, we have potluck where they mix the specific doctrine of grace in Paul’s epistles with the covenant of circumcision and the Mosaic law in the Gospels and throughout the whole Old Testament. They mix it all up. And so how could you possibly discern what is true for today when you’re taking two different dispensations and just picking and choosing whatever seems right at the moment? So when you have the Apostle Paul writing we see things that we never saw under the covenant of law. For example, in Ephesians 1, that we trusted in Christ… after we heard the word of truth, the gospel of our salvation, in whom also having believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession. What a beautiful teaching that comes to the world through Paul. because Paul was given the gospel of grace, the dispensation of grace. So David, the Holy Spirit would come on David, then he’d pray, Lord, take not thy Holy Spirit from me, because the Holy Spirit would only come on a prophet or a judge or a king or a priest temporarily to perform a mighty act of God or to write some of the scriptures, and then the Holy Spirit would depart. So David would pray, Lord, don’t take your Holy Spirit from me. I’ve never prayed that prayer. I hope you guys have not prayed that prayer, because that would be a prayer from unbelief. And anything that is not a faith is a sin. So we should. When we’re ignorant and young and we don’t know the Word of God, that’s different. But once we know, or once we should know… then if we pray and ask God to forgive us, and he’s already forgiven us, what does that prayer itself do? That prayer weakens my faith. I begin to doubt the very gospel by which I’m saved because I’m forgiven of my sin, but I’m asking God to forgive me. So I’m all confused because I’m taking the Mosaic law, the covenant of circumcision, and I’m trying to apply it today in the dispensation of grace, and I have confusion. So we’re sealed with the Holy Spirit until the day of redemption. He is the guarantee of our inheritance. That’s pretty good. You’re going to buy a house. You put a down payment on the house. That’s your earnest money. And so then could somebody come and buy it instead of you? No, that’d be a violation of the law. That’s an agreement. There’s a down payment. And that’s just money. Imagine when the down payment is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the guarantee of your inheritance because we’re sealed by the Holy Spirit. That’s quite a guarantee. That’s neat. There was no guarantee under the covenant of law. There was no guarantee until after the person died. Paul also writes to Timothy, I know whom I have believed and I am persuaded that he is able to keep what I have committed to to him until that day. I know that God is able to keep that which I’ve committed. He is able to keep that. I’m persuaded that he is able to keep me until that day when we see him in glory. To the Galatians, Paul wrote this, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I, who live, but Christ lives in me. In the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God. It’s actually by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. So I’m identified with Christ. So even when I sin, I cannot be held guilty by the law because I’m dead to the law because Christ died on the cross. And Paul writes that God nailed the law to the cross, Colossians 2, when Jesus died. So how could I be found guilty by the law if I’m dead to the law, no longer under the law? The law was nailed to the cross. And in Romans, Paul says that only those who are under the law can be judged by the law. We’re not under the law. And then in Romans 8, who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress? yet we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. So we find this in Paul’s writings to the Galatians, the Ephesians, the Corinthians, to the Romans, to Timothy. It’s there. And so some Christians, not taking Paul’s counsel, when he said, if you want to be a workman of God who needs not to be ashamed, you must rightly divide the word of truth. What does that mean? Rightly divide the word of truth. That’s another unknown Bible verse to the masses of Christians. They don’t know that we have to rightly divide the word of truth. Paul says that’s how you’ll not be ashamed if you do that. So you divide between law and grace. Israel and the body. You divide between works and faith. You divide between those covenants. We are not Israel. Replacement theology is… based in racism, and it’s a false teaching, and it causes Christians to have a bad attitude toward Jews. It causes anti-Semitism. It’s false. You can see the fruit of it. We’re not Israel. We’re the body. God loves Israel. He’s going to go back to Israel and graft them back in again when he completes his effort with the Gentiles. So There are two covenants, two covenant peoples, and the one covenant people, they’re identified by the law and circumcision, which means to cut off. And we’re identified by grace, which is unmerited favor. So we’re identified with Christ. We will not be cut off. Now, it is true that As a Christian, if I don’t live in a godly way, that God will deny me, we read this in Timothy, 2 Timothy 2, God will deny me rewards. But even if we are faithless, he remains faithful for he cannot deny himself. That is, he can’t deny his body. and I am in Christ. I’m identified with Christ. So it’s no longer by my faith, but by his faith that I am saved. So we’ll continue, we’ll pick it up there, Lord willing, next week with Hebrews 6.1. And the first six verses then bring up this topic of can you lose your salvation? And because the book of Hebrews is written to who? To the Gentiles. No, to the Hebrews. Therefore, we should not be surprised if we find a warning that you need to heed that you don’t lose your salvation. That’s not a surprise when we read it in Peter, or we read it in the Gospels, or we read it in the book of Hebrews. God bless you guys.
