#BaltimoreBibleChurch Q&A with Phil Johnson #GraceToYou #GTY

and we have a special guest with us tonight we have Phil Johnson Phil is the direct executive director of grace to you he's been closely associated with the Ministry of John MacArthur since 1981 at its most of John's major books he's an elder at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley California pastors grace Life Fellowship group which I was there for a year while I was out there at a Grace Community Church he's also a contributor to the pyromaniacs blog also maintains dispersion archive all of church history and Phil and his wife Darlene have three adult sons Jeremiah Jedediah and Jonathan so hello Phil and welcome to Baltimore Bible Church thanks for joining us hey greetings thanks for having me absolutely so just to help our of our folks here at the church just with the personal connection our brother Lance Quinn and Phil Johnson actually used to be neighbors for a while back in the in the 90s I was talking to Phil a little bit earlier about that and also Lance Quinn was the one who encouraged Phil to start teaching adults he was part of a junior high ministry am i right on that it was actually junior boys like underneath junior high kids like 11 and 12 years old right yeah so so Lance Quinn was the one who was encouraging Phil to to start teaching in the adult ministries class so and those of you who are here at Baltimore Bible Church you know that Lance is a dear friend I've had the opportunity to administer with him and in Arkansas and just recently lost his a beloved wife Beth she's at home with the Lord so we know that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord so we know where she is and she's rejoicing but we definitely want to continue to keep our brother Lance and in prayer as well as his families but I just wanted to share that with you for for those of you who know Williams so most of us know Phil because of his close work with John MacArthur and now is the the voice grace to you the radio host for grace to you before a moment I just wanted to go back to your life before your ministry with John MacArthur and I understand that you came to know the Lord in 1971 how did you come to know the Lord that was reading scripture in my room something I never did I had I had grown up in a very liberal Methodist Church and when I got old enough to realize the pastor doesn't actually believe the Bible I had a personal conversation with him where he explained to me they didn't believe most of the stuff in the scripture actually happened that as far as he was concerned it was mostly just moral lessons that we should pay heed to and I said you know if that's the case I'd rather be home watching the NFL pregame show because I'm missing that by coming to Sunday school and so I had I had sort of dropped out of going to church early in high school and and it left it left a void in my life I thought a lot about God I didn't ever doubt the existence of God and just a month before I graduated from high school I one night in particular I was feeling guilty about something I'd done I don't even remember what it was I think I was unkind to my sister or something and realizing what a what a jerk I was turning into and and so I thought I need to do something spiritual and I didn't know what to do so I picked up the Bible and just flopped it open at random which is how I always treated the Bible sort of like you know the the horoscope I would just randomly choose a verse and whatever verse my eyes lit on I would try to draw some lesson from that if it didn't make any sense that's okay neither did most of the fortune cookies I got you know and but it opened that night opened to the first page of first Corinthians which is not where you'd send a 17 year old student you know for an evangelistic lesson but it was the perfect place for me to begin reading when it opened the first page of that book I thought you know I've never read a whole book of Scripture before let's just see what this has to say and the first three chapters of first Corinthians just dismantled my worldview that's where Paul just goes on a tear against human wisdom the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God if any man among you seems to be wise in this world let him become a fool that he may be wise and just devastated me and and and upset everything I ever thought I thought if if God you know was gonna accept me and and bless me it would be because I worked hard was smart understood the best things about human wisdom and art and all of that sort of stuff you know just make myself a really good person and I realized he's saying the wisdom of this world is foolishness I could understand it if God said the foolishness of this world he hated but I realized by the time I got through three chapters that it was saying he hates the very best things about me even that those things aren't good enough and kept reading I think I got through Chapter twelve and so I got stuck where it says in the beginning of chapter twelve that no one speaking by the Holy Spirit calls Jesus accursed and no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit now of course I didn't understand the context of that or what it meant other than that it was very clear that Jesus is Lord he demands to be recognized and worshipped as Lord and somehow I understood in the midst of all of that that I needed to give up my plans for my life and my control of my life and devote my life to Christ and I set out on a on a quest for how to understand salvation and the very next day I decided I'm gonna go get a Bible I can read why not that I understand a modern translation and so on my way to the bookstore walking through the mall a guy handed me a gospel tract nobody had ever given me a gospel tract but this is a pretty good one and he explained the way of justification later that same evening a friend actually wasn't a close friend but a guy who was an acquaintance of mine called me on the phone and said that his church was helping to sponsor a citywide evangelistic crusade and he was required to ask at least one and to come and I realized he picked me because he figures I'm a friend he can afford to lose right but he didn't he didn't know that I was you know serious about trying to discover what God wanted of me and so I said sure I'll go and went to this evangelistic crusade where the preacher preached a really good message on the atoning work of Christ starting in of all places Isaiah 53 and though I didn't know much about the scriptures I knew Isaiah 53 was the Old Testament that that was written long before Christ and when I realized this is describing the crucifixion of Christ I nobody ever showed me that that was in the Old Testament before and I remember that night in particular that any question I had about the authority and truthfulness of Scripture evaporated when I saw the crucifixion of Christ in Isaiah 53 and I've never had a doubt since then and somewhere in the midst of that week I I'm certain I was born again and yeah so that's how it was saved man yeah it's a just interesting we're talking about Providence this morning just started the Book of Ruth and I just seen how the Lord works in all the details of life to get you exactly where he wants you to be at the right time so it's a praise guy for just another example of his work so you began studying at Moody did you do that pretty soon after your conversion I was starting it at Moody yeah yeah I lived in Tulsa Oklahoma which was of course the headquarters of the worldwide charismatic movement that's where Oral Roberts University was and Kenneth Hagin was there Kenneth Copeland was studying there at the time they had a guy named TL Osborn look him up on Google he's a weird-looking character but in those days he was a one of the leading charismatic figures so a charismatic churches all around and and it seemed like the only options were either liberal churches like the one I had grown up in I didn't want to go back there or charismatic churches where you know at least they believed the Bible but it seemed it seemed weird my best friend's father was a charismatic faith healer and he had never given me the gospel he'd tried to get me to speak in tongues but he had never explained the gospel to me so I was wary of that as well and finally found a small Baptist Church just a few blocks from my house actually and visited there on a Sunday morning the pastor recognized this high school kid dressed in a suit as a visitor and he intercepted me before I could leave that morning and and asked me you know who I was and what I was there for and I told him I've just become a Christian and I don't you know I'm looking for a church to belong to he said well you found one he said are you baptized yet and I said no and he said come tonight and I'll baptize you and so I did and in the pastoral interview that I had in his office before the baptismal service that night he asked me what my plans were and I said I I think I need to learn the Bible he said well you need to go to Bible College and he listed about seven or eight possible schools and the last one he named was Moody Bible Institute and it's the only one on his list that I had ever actually heard of and I'd heard of it I didn't know anything about it but I said is that a good place and he said that's where I went to school and I thought that's where I'm gonna go then and so I immediately this was about a month after my conversion sent off for a application it turned out to be a very involved thing to apply for Moody Bible Institute it took me months to get the all the data together and the and the application filled out and I started college in the fall semester there at a state school in Oklahoma but then transferred to Moody the following year so yeah I was about one year old in the Lord when I started when I enrolled at Moody right and you also did a year at a Tennessee temple which was a fundamentalist school and I know yeah that was a big mistake but a year after I graduated from Moody I still needed one more year of liberal arts credits to to get my degree and since I been a year in a state college I thought I let me go to a Christian college and so I looked for a conservative one that wasn't too expensive and ended up at Tennessee temple and hated the year there but it purged me of a lot of legalistic and fundamentalist tendencies so you got it you got to tell the story you said that there was a speaker who literally doused himself with lighter fluid and said yeah on fire yeah what in the world was that the very first Sunday I was there they had this guy come in he preached on hell doused himself with lighter fluid and set it on fire that was his schtick he was called the flaming evangelists who put him somewhere I have a picture of him well he had it time to knew what to do I don't know if he smeared himself with Vaseline first before he put the lighter fluid I don't know what he did but he knew exactly how to do it so that he wasn't burned by it but it looked horrific and you know combined with his vivid descriptions of the fiery torments of hell I suppose it was effective at least in scaring people but yeah that was the first Sunday I was there by then I had my diploma from Moody I had finished the diploma course at Moody and so I had you know three years of a really good Bible instruction and so this appalled me that a preacher would you know resort to shenanigans like that rather than actually preaching the gospel and and like I said as my very first Sunday there it sort of set the tone and for me that year was a miserable year but I did learn a lot in a in a sort of negative way right yeah so for some of our people who might be familiar with you know the fundamentals of the faith but not necessarily that familiar with fundamentalism how would you distinguish between the two and I know there's varieties of people that would say well I'm a fundamentalist but I'm not like that kind of fundamentalist but um but how would you kind of help somebody think through the different yes I mean I believe in the fundamentals but I'm not a fundamentalist right I do have some friends who would call themselves fundamentalist who are not that kind of fundamentalist sent really really good people that I've said it this way often the original idea of fundamentalism was a great idea the idea was that there are certain doctrines justification by faith the deity of Christ as a host of them these doctrines that are essential to Christianity you cannot deny them without seriously corrupting the gospel or overthrowing the faith those are the fundamental doctrines of Christianity's that's where the word fundamental comes from and the original fundamentalist said we'll look we're gonna defend those doctrines because they're worth dying for that's what makes them fundamentals they they contain the essence of Christianity and and so they're worth dying for these are truths we would not deny even on pain of death that's a great idea and it's it's true and in that sense I would classify myself as a fundamentalist but fundamentalism the movement became enthralled with the idea of militancy the idea was you know we'll fight for these doctrines and when they ran out of opportunities to fight for those doctrines they still wanted to keep fighting and so they fought each other and fought other Christians and fought over trivial issues like should women wear makeup should should men wear shorts and and you know how long should your hair be and all that sort of stuff and these are not fundamental doctrines at all but that's what fundamentalism became identified with and meanwhile the leaders and most of the people in the fundamentalist movement literally forgot what the fundamental doctrines are you could take the typical fundamentalist leader the you know the sort of high-profile guys who did these shenanigans like setting themselves on fire single out any of them and and ask them to give an account of the gospel and explain the imputation of Christ's righteousness for example the doctrine of justification they couldn't do it they didn't have a clue what that was to them the most important thing was your dress code and in your behavior code and and and they'd forgotten the fundamental doctrines of Christianity but they still like to fight and so the movement fragmented and ultimately rendered rendered itself irrelevant and only fractions of it exist I would love to see a revival of true fundamentalism his stark fundamentalism but I'm afraid that term is lost to you know use any kind of usefulness even the secular media uses the word fundamentalist as a pejorative a fundamentalist is I mean the word is almost equivalent to not see these days so after a Tennessee Temple you also became an editor at moody press so yeah the reason I went to Tennessee temple was I needed I needed 30 more hours credit hours of liberal arts credits to earn a degree as opposed to my the Diploma that I had but an actual bachelor's degree for Moody Bible Institute you needed liberal arts credits and they didn't they didn't have liberal arts courses but they would accept credits transferred from other accredited schools so I went to Tennessee temple then went back to Moody for a summer term to finish up there and get my degree my bachelor's degree in 1976 and so I was only gonna be there for six weeks during the summer but I needed some spending money and so I was looking for a part-time job just a you know short term thing and and having a hard time finding anybody who obviously want didn't want to hire somebody for six weeks who was gonna leave anyway and I mentioned that to a friend who who had a job as a part-time proofreader at Moody press and she said oh look I wanted to go home for the summer but if I do I'll lose my job and somebody else will take it but if you if you would take my job for six weeks I could go home for the summer and then I get the job back when I come back and to me there's this even the sound of proofreading it just sounded dreadfully boring I really wasn't interested I thought I'd rather work as a night clerk in a convenience store but I didn't want to be rude to her and so I said yeah sure that sounds like a great idea and then she took it on herself to make me an appointment with the chief editor at Moody press and him less Toby and he's still alive still in Christian publishing I went into his office for this interview and thinking I'm gonna be just totally honest with him and so I here's how the interview went it was 30 seconds long I said mr. Staub a I'll be real honest with you Karen wants to go home for the summer and she thinks it'd be great if I took her job temporarily but I said you don't wanna hire me I took the minimum English requirements in college I'm a really bad speller and I have a tendency to fall asleep when I read and and he laughed just like he did and he said okay I get it he said I'll tell Karen you came by it's just not gonna work out he said don't call us we'll call you and so I left thinking while I dodged a bullet there but he did call me about 10 minutes later and he said I got a problem on my hands he said I thought well we'll just send Karen home for a few weeks and you know we can get by without her but I he said I discovered we're way behind on proofreading and I need a second proof reader even if she stays technically you applied for the job he says I'll pay you $12 an hour if you can give us three hours a day this is when minimum wage was like three dollars and 25 cents $12 an hour I couldn't get that anywhere and I thought you know I would let somebody hammer my toenails for $12 an hour so I said sure I'll do it he says well I need you to come up right away so literally within an hour after that disastrous job interview they hired me to be a part-time proofread here and I loved it from the start I sat down with very few instructions and started reading this typeset book that was full of typeset errors and finding all these mistakes and and within an hour I'm thinking to myself this is really fun I was surprised by it I enjoy this I could do this for the rest of my life and ended up basically that's what I did you know people had always said to me Europe you're a you're a glass half empty kind of guy you're a fault finder always negative very critical and now they were willing to pay me money to find other people's mistakes it was it was the perfect job for me you know that's great yeah so that's how I got into editing and they liked my work as a proofreader by the end of that summer they promoted me to be a manuscript editor and so that's what I did that's how I ended up meeting John MacArthur moody press became his publisher and they put me together with him on a project and the rest is history now now is it true that the the first time you heard about MacArthur that you called him Junior yeah he came to speak at Moody while I was there and and I had I had just met this girl who came to work as a secretary at Moody press and and the minute I met her I thought I was smitten and I invited her on a date and we had spent that summer dating and then John MacArthur came to speak for a week of student chapels called spiritual emphasis week and employees could go to we didn't normally go to student Chapel but we could for that week because it was a special speaker and Chapel was an hour instead of normally a half hour and in the years I was a student their spiritual emphasis week was great yeah they had the best speakers best-known speakers and all that but I had never heard of John MacArthur and so when they sent this flyer around I looked at it and thought yeah whatever and I shared an office with another guy and the morning of the first student Chapel with John MacArthur he said are you gonna go down and hear that guy I said who is that again he reads the flyer to me this is John MacArthur jr. he's a fifth generation pastor and today a pastors a church in Sun Valley California today he's speaking on God's will for your life I said no way I'm going to that I said somebody should tell jr. that every speaker who comes to Moody Bible Institute talks about God's will for your life he's not gonna say anything I've never heard and I'm behind on some deadlines I'm gonna stay here and work and so he left said you're really a glass half empty kind of guy aren't you and and thirty seconds later this girl who I had begun dating stuck her head in the door and said I'm going down to student Chapel were you gonna come and I said yeah I was just on my way so that's how I heard John for the first time the girl who I was dating is now my wife Darlene hmm and she is largely responsible for my hearing John MacArthur the first time that's great so what's the that you worked on with them and by the way that first message the it's one of his famous messages that message on God's will has been published as a book called God's will is not lost or found God's will I think God's will is not lost is the name of the tape but it wasn't a bunch of recycled stuff that I'd always heard it was the freshest and most biblical sermon I had ever heard and and I loved his style the clarity of it and the smoothness with which he preached and the clarity with which he dealt with difficult points I was listening to him for maybe 10 15 minutes and I thought this guy needs to be writing books hmmm this is great material and spent the next few years fantasizing what it would be like to be an editor for him so so it's amazing that the Lord worked out the details so that all of that ultimately happened that's what I've given my life to do first book I ever worked on for him the first book that I ever you know exclusively edited I jumped in on a couple of projects that moody had undertaken that weren't going well and helped to finish up his book on the family and I guess it was just his book on the family but I could tell that he was he was sort of growing disaffected with the the editing that some of the some of the editors who had worked on his material had done and so I sort of jumped in and took over the next project which was the book on worship all originally titled the ultimate priority and today it's the the latest addition is just called worship subtitled the ultimate priority that books been continually in print for the past almost 40 years now hmm so I've got a one question about a ministry grace to you and then we'll move on to some kind of theological questions but um the ministry of grace to you actually started in baltimore can you tell us a little bit about that i think some of our people would have be interested to hear yeah that's right the radio station there was playing back in the in the 70s before I ever even heard of John MacArthur the radio station in Baltimore had a even I think was a evening broadcast where they would broadcast conference messages from different speakers and they got a hold of some John MacArthur cassettes and began to play John on a semi-regular basis and John began to get letters from Baltimore saying we love your radio ministry and he was like we don't have a radio ministry and when there was a guy in the church who had sort of gotten onto the end on the ground floor of em way I believe it was one of those you know companies like that and had had basically made enough money on it to retire and he said I want to devote my the rest of my days to helping you get a radio broadcast off the grass name was norm spear and so he was the founder of grace to you radio and his idea was John John John originally was not positive about it anyway his dad had a television and radio ministry and in those days if you wanted to be a someone like Jay Vernon McGee or whatever notice and back to the Bible radio Bible class all of these were taped in studio and they were daily broadcasts were so you'd have to spend a half hour every day making the tape plus all the preparation for that and everything and John basically said I don't have time for a radio ministry particularly a daily radio ministry can't do it if you're gonna put me on radio it's you just got to play my sermons and all the radio stations said you can't have a Bible teaching ministry daily that goes for an hour yeah it needs to be a half-hour slot and so norm said it's okay we'll cut the sermons in half air half of it today half of it the next day and everybody told him that won't work that's not good but that's what he did and more or less invented the format that is used today not only by grace to you but by dozens of similar radio ministries and and so when when he went live with the first half-hour format grace to you broadcasts Baltimore was also one of the first three stations that carried the broadcast it was before my time but if I understand correctly the original programs launched on three stations Baltimore Tampa and Tulsa mmm was interesting my hometown and at the time I I was living in Tampa I spent three years there as an assistant pastor in a church and happened to be there when grace to you started on the radio this was a few years after maybe three or four years after I had first heard John at Moody and so when I heard he was going to be on the radio in Tampa I began to listen and actually planned my days around grace to you so I was one of the original listeners as well and I used to do the same thing I've planned the the my schedule around the broadcast and it's the broadcast still something that's vibrant doing well as far as radio or is it moving more towards internet now or no actually radio is still as as important as it ever was Internet has grown so that our audience is much bigger than it used to be but it hasn't we haven't seen any diminishment in radio every year the numbers go up and we treat the internet like we'd treat a radio station so if you listen on the internet and write to us then we attribute your listenership to the Internet so the internet would be our biggest single outlet we have far more listeners on the internet than we do on any radio station but but none of the radio stations seem to be suffering losing listeners because of the internet that's great so uh got a number of theological questions for you but before we get there I wanted to set this up with the biblical question so mark 9 38 to 40 says John said to him teacher we saw someone casting out demons in your name now we tried to prevent him because he was not following us but jesus said do not hinder him for there is no one who will perform a miracle in my name and be able soon afterward to speak evil of me for he who is not against us as for us and one of the questions that we received is basically could basically be stated you know as long as people are trying to point us to Jesus you know shouldn't we just leave him alone is Jesus teaching his disciples some kind of form of ecumenical ISM here you know as long as there for us you know don't worry about you know where they might be off and could people use this verse as some kind of argument against being discerning trying to make sure that we're you know you know being being discerning concerning doctrine i things like that so how would you answer that yeah I would say in general it certainly encourages us not to be hypercritical not to assume that just because someone's not part of our group that he's not someone or that he's someone we should you know attack or or you know publicly condemn or whatever that's that was the thing they were trying to get this guy to stop ministering and Jesus was saying you know don't don't do that but notice what he says if if he's doing miracles in my name he's not gonna speak evil of me but the assumption is of course Jesus had access to you know omniscient knowledge so maybe he knew who the guy was or whatever but he's certainly not assuming that the guy who teaching falsely there's enough in scripture that tells us to refute those who contradict the truth that we have both duties one is not to be contentious but the other is to defend the truth which does require you to contend earnestly for the faith so you don't be contentious in the sense that you go out looking for trouble and automatically condemning everybody who who isn't one of your personal fanboys but but on the other hand when you see someone teaching error when you see someone actually corrupting the truth then you do have a duty to contend earnestly for the faith as well and I think people swing to one extreme or the other you have people who think discernment means you criticize everybody who's not part of your group they're the hyper discern errs or the people who twist discernment into something ugly and evil but at the other extreme you have far more people who think well you know we just should never argue about doctrine at all let anybody say what they want and leave it between them and the Lord and he'll pull up the tears at the end of the time and and we don't really have any duty in that regard but scripture is clear that we actually do have a duty to to proclaim the truth and defend the truth which means that there are times when we encounter people who in the in the words of the Apostle Paul their mouths need to be stopped so what warnings would you give to people regarding discernment ministries and basically I've been concerned that anybody with the Wi-Fi connection and a laptop can kind of set up you know his own ministry from from home without any you know kind of training or you know being approved for for what he's doing but I know there's people who would consider themselves practicing discernment really having nothing to do with you know biblical clarity doctrinal content but Marilee if you're friends with somebody who's friends with somebody who might be a false teacher then you know you're all just lumped in together so how would you address that that kind of ministry yeah guilt by association arguments are the weakest of all there are times when you incur guilt by association so I wouldn't say that every you know guilt by association criticism is inherently fallacious there are people we shouldn't associate with scripture is clear about that as well but it doesn't mean that you know anybody who can tie you by some chain of relationships to to somebody who's in error has has therefore you know practice discernment that's that's a pretty undiscerning way to do discernment my advice to people is look watch out for anybody who thinks discernment is their full-time calling that that's their spiritual gift and this scripture doesn't list discernment as a ministry there is a gift called discerning of spirits but that that has to do with you know where you can tell whether a somebody who's speaking is speaking by the Holy Spirit or a demonic spirit this is very same thing that Paul was describing in 1st Corinthians 12 but discernment itself is something all of us should practice it's not a full-time ministry it's not a calling you don't see you don't see dis earners listed alongside evangelists and pastors and teachers as you know office an office in the church I think everybody should practice discernment and it's a shame that there are people who become so enthralled with being hypercritical that they've given discernment a bad name so that today and and it's understandably actually when you hear someone boasting about discernment ministry a red flag goes up my antenna certainly goes up and and it's interesting to me also that people who who focus almost exclusively on criticizing other people even though even those who are right most of the time there are people who do that and they're right most of the time but they tend to become hyper critical and fight with one another and some of the most bitter episodes of combat I've seen in in my years as a Christian have been between you know cult awareness ministries and discernment ministries and things like that so indefinitely you have to be careful right so qualifies all of that too by the way when it when it tells us to contend earnestly for the faith or it says elders need to refute those who oppose the truth it always adds almost always adds a caution that you should do it with gentleness and don't treat the person who's in error as an enemy but admonish him as a brother assuming he is a brother if his error is so bad that he's corrupting the gospel and outside the faith then you know he that may warrant a a harsher rebuke or or even strict separation from the guy but a lot of people who claim to be discerning don't seem to have any concept of the scope of various errors that some errors actually corrupt the faith to the point where if you're guilty of that error you you you're not a believer at all but then there are lesser errors where I think all of us probably have some errors in what we teach or say so how does a church and I'd say even an individual guard themselves against false teaching you know particularly in a outside of that just kind of main teaching ministry of the church maybe smaller groups discipleship groups how does a person guard themselves against false teaching it's just as important to to be aware that many false teachers have gone out into the world the world is full of Anti Christ's and lots of them do minister inside the visible Church and and the more it seems to me the more the more churches operate in a way where they're they're trying to gain popularity or win people by making Jesus seem cool the more likely they are to get into error so you you have to in the first place devote yourself to the true gospel and understand that there the gospel itself is a stumbling block there is a cost to following Christ and if you're being faithful the world will hate you you can't assume that you know winning people's admiration is the same thing as winning people to Christ because it isn't you can't you can't be faithful to Christ and win the admiration of the world and I think confusion on that issue underlies a good portion of the errors that we see floating around in the church today so just a couple book recommendations what would you recommend for somebody I'll give you a couple things that I'm looking for it's a doctrine you know somebody who's really trying to get their their arms around doctrine church history and also kind of like the history of heresy to kind of understand you know how that's progressed I know you've done some work on that as well so what would you recommend doctor in church history and understanding heresies yeah people often ask me for a single resource that will help them sort of grasp church history and I honestly don't think that's the best way to study church history I don't think you can survey the entirety of 2,000 years in a simple to understand book and really get a good picture of it you have to read different books on different eras and and so on there's some books when when that question comes to me there's some books I'm obliged to recommend for a basic survey of doctrine obviously I would recommend John MacArthur's book biblical doctrine so it's an easy to read systematic theology when people ask what's the technical systematic theology that you turn to most often like if I if I have a theological question I want to look it up I generally start with Lewis birkoff but I have a shelf full of systematic theology books that I'll generally look through and some of them are good on one topic and not so good on the other and birkoff such a good example he's Presbyterian and I'm a Baptist so obviously don't agree with him on everything but he's easy to read and he'll point you in the right direction on church history I do like to study church history from the viewpoint of historical theology and my favorite single resource on that is a two-volume work by William Cunningham called historical theology it's kind of hard to find I don't I don't think it's currently in print but fortunately you can find it on the internet you can find use books pretty easily historical theology two-volume work you may even find a PDF of the whole thing at Google Books because Google Books scanning whole libraries of stuff that's in the public domain and William Cunningham wrote more than a hundred years ago so his book would be and not under copyright anywhere so you can find it I love his he's a Scottish church historian theologian who summarizes the doctrinal development in church history and and pastes special attention to the heretical movements that have threatened the truth and is a good way to study church history is by by looking at the polemical battles that have taken place over the years because the the errors that we're dealing with today airlie none of them are anything new they're just recycled versions of old errors and in that regard one other book that I would recommend is a little compilation of everything Spurgeon wrote in the last decade of his life on the downgrade controversy it was put together by bob ross not the painter but a guy in houston who republished all of Spurgeon's works in the 70s and started a company called pilgrim publications and they republished as much of Spurgeon's material as they could and Bob Ross put together a collection of everything Spurgeon wrote in his magazine all the sermons he preached and all that in during the downgrade controversy and I think that's the title of the book the downgrade controversy or maybe it's Spurgeon on the downgrade controversy or whatever it was a collection of these articles and what Spurgeon was saying and the reason it's called the downgrade controversy is spurgeon published an article written by an another guy a pastor friend of his name's Schindler Robert Schindler I think it was wrote two or three articles called the downgrade in which he pointed out that there are cycles of heresy that have affected the church at least since the Reformation it's the same heresy over and over again it was originally called so Simeon ISM and then it was deism and and unitarianism and liberalism and modernism and now post-modernism the emerging church all of these have been essentially the same arguments promoting the very same heresies it's so Simeon ISM recycled again and again and again and every new generation and seems to get taken off-guard by it because they're not familiar with the battles that have been fought in the past so somebody attacks substitutionary atonement for example that's usually the the focus of these attacks and the new generation thinks that sounds reasonable because you know the idea of punishing Christ for the sins of other people just doesn't sound nice well that's the stumbling block of the gospel they're trying to get rid of it and and in doing so they destroy the gospel but it's it's the same cycle of error every new generation or so and and Spurgeon's magazine was making that point in these articles called the downgrade and that's what sort of kicked off the controversy that ultimately I think hastened his death and left him at the time of his death fairly well despised by a younger generation of Ministers but all of those guys have passed away and we've forgotten him and Spurgeon's the one we remember and that's a reminder to me that people who you know stand for the truth and stay with the gospel against all of the current trends they're the ones whose ministries will endure mm-hmm I know you've answered this question but maybe you can summarize it with the current pandemic somebody sent me a video where they were trying to make some kind of connection between the corona virus and vaccinations and the mark of the beast and what's what's the problem with making that kind of connection yeah I've seen a lot of talk about that I haven't actually read the arguments on why the corona virus has anything to do with the mark of the beast but it certainly not if he said that there's a there's coming in the the vaccinations and yeah yeah you know there's in the first place there's no clue in Scripture that an RFID chip is is how the mark of the beast is gonna be implanted I that's that's a popular theory but it's a fairly new one I mean comparatively new I actually did a podcast on this on Friday with Doreen Virtue I forget the name of her podcast but if you do a Google search for Doreen Virtue and my name it'll come up and she spent like a half hour asking me about rumors about the Antichrist and the mark of the beast and and I mentioned that I actually have a collection of books that goes all the way back to the 19th century identifying different people as potentially the Antichrist starting with Napoleon and I'm sure that there were people before him well the Pope for example the Reformers called the Pope Antichrist but then you have every world ruler really since Napoleon has been singled out by somebody or another and supposedly fulfills all the signs of the anti-christ you know that even in in our short lifetime people said Bill Clinton was the Antichrist then Obama was the Antichrist now Trump's the Antichrist and hmm and now the mark of the beast is going to be an injection for the corona virus and all this in my view is stupid speculation and superstition and I just don't see any any suggestion in Scripture that it's possible to take the mark of the Antichrist by accident people who do that will know they're doing it that's why it's such a serious wrong thing to do because it involves a pledge of fealty to the Antichrist that's what makes it wrong it's a tent amount to worshiping him and so you know all the speculation for 200 years has been wrong I don't think anybody figured it out in the wake of the corona virus any better than the people who said he used to say that barcodes were the mark of the beast no I knew people who for for a long time wouldn't buy anything that had a barcode on it now everything is required by law to have a barcode on it which in I suppose in somebody's mind proves that's the mark of the beast all that is silly what Scripture teaches about the Antichrist and the mark of the beast is not put there to make Christians fearful and superstitious it's put there to to remind us of the importance of loyalty to Christ and worship of Christ and if you if you love Christ and worship Him and he is the center of your affections you don't have to fear the Antichrist mmm greater is He Who is in you than used in the world a man recently came across the the time article by NT right you know Christianity offers no answers about the coronavirus it's not supposed to first of all what's what's the problem with the article and then what's the problem with NT right well the big problem with the article is the title and I'm told that the title was put there by editors that NT right didn't you know personally authorized that I don't know if I were NT right I would have I would have screamed an objection but I have a feeling he actually kind of thinks that NT right the problems with him start really with his view of justification his he he he sneaky about it he's he's very good at sounding profound being very unclear and I think most people who read him in a fair-minded way would have to acknowledge he doesn't seem to believe even substitutionary atonement he he for example gave a thumbs up and I think an endorsement that was on the book jacket of Steve chalks book where chalk says substitutionary atonement is a form of cosmic child abuse and NT Wright argues against the idea of the imputation of Christ's righteousness he doesn't seem to have an orthodox view of justification or even what the word justification means so problems with him are many the the difficulty with critiquing him is he's respected for his scholarship because he is quite the scholar but that doesn't make you more thaad ox and you know III don't understand the I mean this goes back 20 years actually back in the 1990's I was concerned about people who were enthralled with NT right and some of the stuff he was writing his book what st. Paul really said leaves a huge question mark about where he stands on the doctrine of justification I've done a couple of a couple of reviews of NT right that are available on the web one of them is at Ligonier site and the other one is that I think monarchism dot-com or something like that and then there's a video of a hour-long review I did once at a conference that was sponsored by James White here in Los Angeles so there's plenty of material out there where I'm critiquing NT right in short I don't regard him as an evangelical I don't think he really believes the gospel in a historic in any historic Protestant sense i he's an Anglican who I think has a motive to shade gospel ideas because like many Anglicans he'd like to be closer to Rome than Protestantism puts him in plus I'd like to have the respect and admiration of liberal scholars which keeps him in in several areas from being really a full-fledged conservative so he ill twist and tweak Scripture in order to make it maybe more politically correct another question are you familiar with the house church movement and if so do you know what's behind that yeah I have a short summary of my view on the house church movement on on my website if you do a search for Phil Johnson's bookmarks and I've categorized things good theology bad theology and really bad theology and I think there's even a category called really really bad theology was that the roadkill section or I think you had like something that said roadkill but anyway yeah that's right that's right I think it's subtitle it's Phil Johnson's bookmarks and roadkill from the information superhighway I have to say those pages date back to the 1990s I haven't really kept them updated but I've left them online because they do answer questions about my views on a lot of things and I have a link to some house church movements and basically have said what concerns me about the house church people I know is that they tend to they seem like people who hate the idea of Authority and organization and oh I wouldn't say this is true across the board obviously I'm not talking about I don't think there's anything wrong with a legitimate church meeting in a house hmm lots of churches have been planted in people's houses that's great but the house church movement the movement itself sometimes seems antagonistic towards the idea of any kind of membership office or organization in the church which goes against I think the very central point that Paul was making in 1st Corinthians 14 where he says look God is not a God of confusion that everything needs to be done decent in the church everything needs to be done decently and in and I think the house Church philosophy often works against that can you give me a just a brief history on the para church movement it seems like history consistently tells a story of ministries that start out being gospel centered and you know then quickly turn into some kind of social emphasis and I got a link from Michael Gendron that talked about young life which you know as a ministry that you know focused on the gospel and you know there's people in our church that were saved through the young life ministry but recently they produced a video where they said it's our goal is not to take Catholics from one tradition to another but to help them to grow where they've been planted to help them be more vibrantly Catholic and even more actively Catholic so it's you know produced by the organization itself to say that so can you kind of help us think through pair of Church Ministries and yet why does this talk then what can we do yeah you could say the same things about Campus Crusade as well which when I was in college back in the 70s Campus Crusade had a very fruitful ministry on on college campuses and stuff like that but even then one of the concerns I had about their ministry was it seemed not to have any purpose to connect people with Bible believing churches that they were content to be a campus ministry and almost a surrogate Church you have a pair of church movement I don't see parachurch organizations as necessarily a single movement a unified movement it's not I mean in grace to you is a parachurch organization in the sense that we are not a church and we're not a substitute for the church and we try to make that clear to people you know even to our donors to tell them look your first obligation is to support your local church if you want to support grace to you after that then you're welcome to do that but we're not a replacement for the church and you know even if even if you're having trouble finding a good Church in your area don't look the recorded sermons of John MacArthur as an acceptable substitute for you know actually being part of a fellowship where you are accountable to someone who can give you counsel and marry you and bury you and do the things that pastors do and and and and give you a place to exercise your gifts within the body of Christ the church is unique in that sense and and the churches what Christ died for the church is the Bride of Christ parachurch organizations are just a subset a sort of what's the right word an auxiliary to the church a help to the church and to whatever degree they stopped helping the church and become a competition for the church then I think they're dangerous and they're also dangerous there are let's say there's a danger that lurks in and around many parachurch organizations if they don't have some sense of accountability and responsibility to the church parachurch organizations tend to apostatize much more quickly than churches do and not to say that churches don't apostatize it's pretty hard to think of very many churches that have maintained a faithful gospel witness for more than three centuries churches apostatized but parachurch organizations tend to apostatize even more quickly and and I think some of them because because they undermine the church rather than helping it are just downright dangerous I'm not opposed to parachurch organizations I work for one but but but I do recognize that there are limitations there and the minute they start to think of themselves as a surrogate for the church or an acceptable substitute then they've gone off track can you give us a biblical understanding of legalism and I know there's different ways that people define that so you know some people would say if you take the Bible seriously you're legalist then there's on the other end if you're adding to the gospel you know that's legalism and they say nothing else is and then there's that kind of group in the middle you know where you're adding different requirements to maybe sanctification and that's you know legalism so kind of talking about that middle group you know of people who add rules - you know sanctification outside of Scripture what's the the danger of that and and I guess on the other side you know the people who flaunt their liberties you know what's the danger with that so one is you know the people who tend to add roles become more strict and then the others that you know tend to want to throw off any kind of you know concern for you know brothers and you know there's and things like that you've summarized it very well what you've said is exactly what I would say there there are people who anytime you call them to any sort of obedience or duty that that's laid out in Scripture even though the duty is clearly spelled out in Scripture if you point that out to them they'll accuse you of being legalistic you're preaching law rather than gospel they just don't want to hear the imperatives of Scripture they want it they want to hear the indicative only that's a kind of antinomianism that I think is dangerous legalism on the other hand I see two varieties in Scripture that are condemned one is the the the most serious kind is the is the legalism that adds human works to the work of Christ as prerequisites to justification Roman Catholicism the Galatian error these are the sort of legalism that adds to the gospel and therefore corrupts the gospel it's the the probably the worst kind of legalism but there is no good kind of legalism the other kind that you you said is in the middle and I agree it's the legalism of the Pharisees who did what Jesus said where they try to embellish the law of God they try to make their own commands and traditions in order to like put a safety guard around the liberty of believers so that where as you know scripts in fact this is what the Pharisees did they read in scripture that before they did sacrifices the priests were required to undergo these ceremonial washings and so they invented washings that they required their people to go through before they even ate you know hygienic ly is a good idea but spiritually not required by Scripture and so when they scolded Jesus and the disciples for eating with unwashed hands Jesus scolded them right back for adding to what scripture requires and he told them you know some of your additions some of your traditions that you've added to the law of God actually nullify the law of God because the example he gave was the law says honor your father and mother but you've you've made a rule that he can say a person can say this is a gift to God and he's talking about money that would have been used to support the parents in their old age and the Pharisee said if you if you give that money to the Lord then you don't owe it to your parents anymore and Jesus said you've effectively nullified the commandment that says honor your father and mother by claiming you're making it a gift to God so he scolded them for that and that's that's tantamount to the legalism I spoke of when we talked about fundamentalism where they started to make rules about how long your hair could be whether whether women could wear you know pants even even feminine and slacks they ruled it out they just made all kinds of rules to try to keep people back from the precipice of Christian Liberty that they thought was dangerous but Paul says in Galatians 5 don't let anyone ruin your Liberty don't let anyone take your Liberty from you it's for Liberty that Christ set you free question related to that how would you understand the Christians relationship to you Old Testament law you know obviously all Scripture is inspired by God you know and profitable but how would you understand the Christians relationship to the Old Testament law and particularly to the Ten Commandments yeah I fall pretty solidly in the in the historic Protestant view that I hold to the three threefold division of the law that there are and and not to suggest that scripture lays out these categories so clearly for us that you know there's no question about it but I think it is pretty clear that there are some laws that are ceremonially only the ceremonial laws and the book of Hebrews and Colossians both make it clear that these are not binding on Christians they they were foreshadowings of Christ and once the substance is here the foreshadowing is becomes moot unnecessary so dietary laws laws governing holidays and feast days and stuff like that are not binding on Christians these we would classify as sir ceremonial laws then the civil law at that contain principles that are obviously still in force about you know what's what constitutes fair penalties for crimes things like that the the principles are a reflection of God's view of justice and therefore they those rules at least at the very least have lessons that we can learn from an and apply and then the third category would be moral law so you've got civil law ceremonial law and moral law the moral law is summarized in the Ten Commandments and it reflects the unchanging character of God and therefore by definition it can't change I mean it's clear that there are certain things that can never that they're just not flexible at all God cannot lie he cannot deny himself and therefore to bear false witness or lies is always going to be sinful always murder is wrong in every dispensation you know and the Ten Commandments are pretty clearly a summary of those moral principles the one that's questionable is the Sabbath the fourth commandment because it contains elements that that are clearly symbolic ceremonial elements but the principle of the Sabbath is about the rest we enter into God's wrath he rested on the seventh day of creation and we enter into his rest I think the book of Hebrews makes it pretty clear that that's talking about salvation so for a Christian the Sabbath law the fourth commandment it's it still has a important moral principle that we are to enter into the rest of God and and and all that but I wouldn't impose all the ceremonial elements of Old Testament Sabbath keeping on Christian so in that on that one commandment I would have a different view than the typical Puritan they tended to be Sabbatarians but other than that I'm I'm pretty vehemently opposed to anyone who says the moral law is flexible or the Ten Commandments have no relevance to Christians and how would you understand the New Covenant and who is that given to him the new covenant is given to everyone who believes actually and I think Scripture is pretty clear about that I think it's Jeremiah 33 where he says that the key distinctive of the New Covenant is that you won't have to teach one another know the Lord because they'll all know me and so the the distinctive of the New Covenant is that everyone who's in this is what makes me a Baptist by the way and not a Presbyterian everyone who's in the New Covenant everyone who is covenant it with God under this new covenant is already a believer so that it can't include you know infants too young to believe so like I said that's what makes me a Baptist but I think it applies to every believer and question on the atonement why is it so critical to understand the nature of the atonement specifically the extent of the atonement I mean we agree that it's not a Salvation issue that you understand the extent of the atonement but why is it so important that we have an understanding of particular Redemption or what would be called limited atonement because if you think about it and I don't by the way I'm not one of those who loves to you know wade hip deep into arguments over the extent of the atonement mmm what what I what concerns me is anyone who questions the the vicarious nature of Christ's atonement he substituted for for those who believed he took the penalty they deserve he stood in their place and bore their the wrath of God on their behalf and conversely they are rewarded for his righteousness which is imputed to them so a substitutionary and it involves an exchange double imputation my sins imputed to Christ and he paid for them his righteousness imputed to me and I get credit for it even though I don't deserve it now if you accept that that is how the atonement works then I don't see how you can say it's not you know the Calvinistic view particular reduction that Christ died in a unique way for the elect in a way that doesn't apply to the non elect and the illustration I like to use is this think about I mean one of the few people who scripture basically tells us is eternally punished in hell is Judas Jesus said about him that it would be better if he'd never been born so we know from Scripture that he's in Hell suffering for his sins but Peter was redeemed and he's in heaven right and so there is a why why was Peter redeemed and Judas was sent to hell because both of them denied Christ on the on the night of his betrayal and and the answer is Peter believed Judas didn't but it also means that Christ was a substitute for Peter bore his sins in a way that he didn't for Judas Judas is being punished for his own sins Christ was punished for Petersons and I don't see any way around that if you believe in substitutionary atonement once you once you begin to deny that Christ's death on the cross has a particular application to his people his chosen ones the elect the believers once you deny that then it seems to me of undermined already the foundations of vicarious atonement and last question and this is just a softball if you had an opportunity to share the gospel with somebody somebody doesn't know the the gospel you have an opportunity to share the gospel with them how would you do that I would i generally and it's different with everybody is if if it's somebody who's already clearly under conviction remorseful for his sin or whatever I might not dwell as as long on the beginning part of it as I would with somebody else but the way Paul shared the gospel every time he did in the book of Ephesians in the book of Romans he starts with the reality of sin and and and I think it's pretty easy to get people to acknowledge look we have all sinned what we don't what we don't understand is the exceeding sinfulness of sin that's what the law is supposed to you know teach us and and so I would i generally begin by trying to help people understand the exceeding sinfulness of sin since our sin is a slight against the thrice holy God it's serious and you can tell how serious it is I'm you just look at the biblical account Adam basically ate a piece the forbidden fruit and all the evil in the universe stemmed from that one act doesn't seem like a very serious thing he ate a piece of fruit but all the evil in the universe has its root right there the curse and everything so sin is exceedingly sinful and God says no sin will go unpunished so we're all in trouble and once you once you get someone to recognize that then you're ready to tell them about the death of Christ on behalf of those who believe the free freeness of divine grace the forgiveness that is offered freely to those who repent and call them to repentance I think that's it because I said I've only keep you for an hour so I didn't want to oh wow we've getting we're getting like all kinds of questions and I didn't know that we didn't know we had a whole list here you have time for a couple more sure all right as long as you want alright I'll try to I'll try to make this one quick here what can you devise about John Corson do you know John Corson is know the name is vaguely familiar but I don't remember who it is so I better not say anything ok this question about social justice out is the statement on social justice differ from the social justice we hear in the secular marketplace it seems that some well-known seminaries are really taking in as well yeah I mean I've had quite a lot to say about that I obviously justice the idea of justice is at the heart of the gospel and no one wants to diminish justice but the term social justice has a pretty long and definitive history and it's been used by people with who have ultimately I think nefarious political goals that's not to say that everybody who uses that term consciously is promoting some nefarious political agenda but ultimately that's what the movement the terminology all of that does stem from Marxist sources and you I just don't see anybody made we're all oppressed people in one way or the other some of us more more oppressed than others some of us more privileged than others well but that's always been the case that always will be the case and scripture teaches us to thank God for our privileges and to have compassion for those who are oppressed and I think we can do both of those things without totally derail the gospel which is what what happens I think when when you make it into so that everything is about you know classes of people rather than rather than individual sinners hmm get this question a lot about a Christian holidays Easter Christmas you know trying to link different holidays to pagan roots any any thoughts on on that yeah I you know I think a lot of a lot of the arguments that are made say against Christmas for example that it's it's rooted in Saturnalia and that you know I don't know Christmas trees have some kind of pagan root or whatever I think the truth is the first Christmas tree was made by Luther but you know a lot of the a lot of the objections you hear Easter for example supposed to derive that word is supposed to derive from the name Ishtar there is absolutely no proof of that you you cannot document that anywhere the celebration of Christ's resurrection has been done by the church from you know the beginning of church history as far back as we can go it's not a pagan holiday certain aspects of how it's celebrated have been paganized in the church ought to stand against that and in the New Testament there aren't any holy days so it's not there's no religious obligation to to celebrate one holiday or another but scripture specifically puts the question of whether you celebrate this as this or that holiday in the realm of indifferent things Romans 14 you know one person celebrates the day another person sees all days alike let everyone be persuaded in his own mind that's about as definitive as it comes and so I refuse to criticize people for how they celebrate Chris Christmas you know I mean the exception that would be if if I saw our Christian doing something that's overtly pagan for pagan reasons I might say something but I think there are a lot of it's very much like the superstition surrounding the mark of the beast and the Antichrist there are people who look for things like that to get animated about and often when you scratch under the surface the people who are most agitated about those things have serious spiritual problems that are a lot more obvious and a lot more a lot closer to what scripture actually teaches us then all of the all the fuss they make about people who celebrate Christmas there's an interesting question that said people come with their own presuppositions to scripture to doctrine how do we make sure that we're receiving the the message from God's Word rather than kind of wasting our own ideas ideologies on the scripture that we're receiving you know from Scripture itself great question and and it's a good concern to take to your study of Scripture because it is true that all of us bring presuppositions to scripture there's no way to avoid it I mean I hope you bring certain presuppositions to your study of Scripture I hope that what you studied in the book of Genesis colors how you understand the book of Exodus and Philippians even you know you can't you can't take every single passage and attach attacked it as if you have no presuppositions certainly you do the question is are your presuppositions well grounded or not or the presuppositions you bring to it grounded in other scriptures or are they traditions of men are they superstitions you know where do they come from and those that's what discernment involves it entails a persistent sort of self-examination critical thinking that begins in my own head as I study Scripture am I being fair with this passage read whether people have to say about it and and you know just study as honestly as you can and realize that the biggest hindrance to your correct understanding of Scripture is your own sinful tendencies mmm and let scripture rebuke those those wrong thought instead all of us carry around hmm that's good that's good I think that's gonna be it that I'm getting like all kinds of questions that I could keep you all day but uh but thanks for your time I appreciate you spending this this time with us maybe we'll do it again sometime and great and you know if anybody has a burning question that they they really really need my answer to go ahead and email me it's Phil at gty dot org all right thank you god bless you sir Thanks all right talk to you later

Channel: Baltimore Bible Church

Views: 2,246

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: BALTIMORE BIBLE CHURCH, MARYLAND, JESUS CHRIST, GOD, FAMILY, GOSPEL, EVANGELISM, MASTER SEMINARY, GTY, HOLY, KNOW JESUS, WHO IS GOD?, WHO IS JESUS?, AM I SAVED?, THE GOSPEL, Phil Johnson

Id: NaiZQwEphbk

Length: 78min 57sec (4737 seconds)

Published: Sun May 03 2020