Hi, I'm Dr. Abidan Shah, and I'm excited and honored to become one of the newest featured leaders on Pray.com. It's a privilege to be part of a platform dedicated to encouraging and strengthening people in their faith.
Our mission at Clearview Church is to lead all peoples into a life-changing, ever-growing relationship with Jesus Christ. And so, I'll be on Pray.com sharing Biblical insights, devotionals, and messages that I hope will inspire and challenge you to live out your faith with confidence. Whether you're seeking wisdom, encouragement, or a deeper understanding of Scripture, I'm looking forward to seeing you all on Pray.com. Download the Pray.com app right now and join this incredible community of believers with us. Together, we will grow closer to God and strengthen one another through His Word.
And don't forget to support Pray.com by sharing it with your friends and family. You're listening to Clearview Today with Dr. Abidan Shah. I'm Ryan Hill. I'm John Galantis. And welcome, welcome, welcome to the Clearview Today Show.
Dr. Shah, it's so good to have you on the show today. Everything's going nice in the studio. Man, we're getting good. We've got some lights. We've got some plants in here. We've got a little candle. I didn't know if that was a candle that you brought from home. I just thought the room was smelling good.
I just noticed that. You're asking me if I brought it? Yeah, but I didn't know if you brought that from home. I didn't. Did somebody else bring it?
Someone else did. Well, Dr. Shah, welcome to the show. It's good to see you. It smells good in here. It does smell really good, actually. I mean, it makes you feel sort of warm and, you know, just different.
Just kind of does something. It's a little cozy conversation. Yeah, it's nice.
It's nice. Cozy conversations. You know, we've been having a lot of cozy conversations here on the Clearview Today Show, but I wanted to ask you, Dr. Shah, we had someone write into the show. They have not asked this in a good little while. I've gotten a backlog of these. This was from Darren P. from South Carolina. He wanted to know, for $1 million.
This one I thought was really good. For $1 million, for the next year, every sermon you preach, that's 52 sermons, you have to open with a SpongeBob illustration, like a SpongeBob-related illustration. Can I get how much? A million.
Absolutely. I would do it for half. For half?
I would do it for one-fourth. Like, the sermon does not have to be all about SpongeBob. You can just not have, like, when you open up a sermon. Oh my goodness. Just the illustration. And I know some people believe SpongeBob was the enemy's tool, but I don't think so. I think SpongeBob was just at a time when people were, I don't know, all those dumb stuff was coming out, the dumb movies were coming out. You know, it fit perfectly in that time period. It was part of the time. It was a reflection of our culture. Yeah, exactly. It's not the gospel.
It's not the gospel. So imagine, like, starting a service, right? And you're getting up there and you're like, morning, church, family. So can I do it?
Yeah, please. Thank you so much for being here today. We really appreciate you visiting with us. Praise God.
Thank you. And make sure you fill out the connect cards. Today's sermon, we're talking about procrastination. And procrastination is something that we all struggle with. And we need to get with it. Whether you need to get saved, it needs to happen now. Whether you need to repent, it needs to happen now.
Whether it needs to be obedient to God in some place. Think about that one episode where SpongeBob was writing a paper. And he kept making excuses to get started.
Mary Lou. Did he just talk about SpongeBob? Yes. So here he is. And he starts his essay. And then all of a sudden he's like, oh, I have to do this.
I have to do that. And then it's like he plays with his chair some. And then finally when he starts and the pencil comes down.
And it's the only word that you get out of that is duh. Mary Lou. Mary Lou. Bessie, I'm trying to list him.
I'm trying to list him. Sermon number two. We need to care about our young people. And our young people, men, they have some things to contribute to the church body.
Yes, absolutely. You all remember the episode where this older guy wanted to help the captain? Kept trying to interfere and, you know, and he's just like, I love the young people.
Okay, this is out of character now. That's one of my favorite moments. I love the young people. Oh, so you like kicking butts, do you old man?
I love the young people. So 52 sermons. Oh, easy. That's easy. I can keep going.
You've already got like several. Oh, yes. So this is this is sort of a question that will tie into what we're talking about here today. But but when you choose sermons, like like, how do you choose an illustration?
Is it just something that's coming in from your life? Or is it like this is going to get into my main point? Like your structure, your sermons are structured in such a way where like your main point is first. And then you find do you find topics, not topics, do you find passages that like kind of lay into that and then your illustration comes last?
Or do you think of the illustration first and then go from there? I prefer preaching expository book by book. OK, there is expository where you take passage and just kind of exposit that passage. Gotcha, gotcha. OK, but I prefer book by book because you maintain a sense of continuity. You maintain a sense of context, you know, so you're not like each time starting out the message with a completely different context.
Right. For right now, we're going to the book of Romans. So I begin with, you know, at Rome, Paul wrote the letter to the church in Rome in the first century that was made up of Gentile background and Jewish background.
Believers. So it helps when you are preaching book by book, makes things easier. So when I come to a passage, it's already laid out.
This is what I'm going to preach on. So I'm not starting with a topic and then filling the sermon up with scripture. No, it's with a passage. And then I ask the question, you know, what is it that it meant to those people and what is it means to us today?
So you don't go into it with like, I have something I want to say. No. I'm going to find passages of support. You're saying we're in Romans. Here's what Romans says.
This is what the text says. Now, I will at times begin that way. OK, so Valentine's Day is around the corner or Mother's Day is coming up or Memorial Day is coming up. So what can I preach on that would be relevant to the people right there? So I may begin with that.
But then when I come to a book or passage or a chapter, let's say John 17, Jesus is a high priestly prayer. OK, how do I now break this passage down for a three week series or a four week series? So I'll begin with that. And then introduction is important to me because this is where you're capturing the attention of the people.
You don't want it to be too wild and you don't want it to be too soft. It needs to be really engaging. Sometimes a statistic can do that. Sometimes a question can do that. Sometimes humor can do it.
So I've done it always. And humor is really, really good if you can do it. What do you do about, so like today, for instance, we're talking about God's wrath, right? We're talking about the wrath of God because that was a message that you preached really recently that I don't want to say to my surprise, but I was surprised how well people received it.
I thought that would be something that people kind of rejected. They're like, oh, I don't want to hear about God's wrath. How do you go into a sermon on that? You know what I mean? Like, how do you start something knowing that we're going to end up at a place of the wrath of God? So, I mean, this one, we began with that illustration on stage, which I rarely ever do it.
I mean, if you were to add up all the times that I have done what I did this past weekend. And it was not a SpongeBob illustration. It was not SpongeBob. That's just a joke, folks. I don't want anybody to think it was like, you were SpongeBob. No, it was just supposed to be a joke. We watched it with the kids and it was like, at times it was like, what is this? And other times it was like, this is funny. We're kind of playing with fire here because we've got so many new listeners on Pray. I'd hate for someone to be like, oh, yeah, Abaddon, that's the SpongeBob preacher.
If it gets their attention and it keeps them coming back, you can call me SpongeBob. What is the other one? Patrick. Patrick. Mr. Krabs.
Money, money, money, money. Put them all in. So, I began with that illustration of this container with a layer of sand in it, black sand.
And then we bought some fake jewelry from a dollar store and we kind of sprinkled the jewelry, the necklaces, the bracelets, the rings in there. And then we covered it up with another layer of sand. Right. And the point was, these doctrines that we're discussing at Clearview in this series through the book of Romans, like righteousness of God or faith or sin or law or death. These are not doctrines that we are creating. We're simply rediscovering what God has already placed in his word. Right. I think that was such a good picture.
I'm a visual guy, so I love being able to see an illustration and connect with something visually. So, to see these things already existed, it's not like we're making new things or we're not dropping these into the mix. They were already there. It's just a matter of finding them and pulling them out of obscurity. And it helps with a complicated topic like wrath because I think people are already disinclined. Maybe when we come back from the break, we can talk about why this is, but people are so already disinclined to lean in to God's wrath.
I think they're like, oh, I don't want to talk about that. That's cool. That's archaic. So, to make that point like, hey, this is not something that I'm reading into the text. This is something that has always been there.
Always been there. And by whatever circumstance, this has been covered up by time. Yeah.
I would say more intentionally than unintentionally, the doctrine of the wrath of God has been covered up. I mean, think about the British scholar C.H. Dodd.
C.H. Dodd, by the way, was a tremendous scholar. I mean, he wrote on the Gospel of John. He wrote on the book of Romans. I mean, these are heavy, heavy books. And he wrote some magisterial works on these key New Testament doctrines.
Brilliant man. But when he came to the wrath of God, he had a tough time with it. He did not like that.
Do you think that's like a lot of Christians today? Yeah. This was because C.H.
Dodd was very well versed in Greek literature. And so he saw in that phrase, wrath of God, ancient Greek gods and goddesses, you know, losing their temper and destroying humanity. He was trying to distance Yahweh from those gods.
Yes. He said there's no way that our God is this God who, you know, to use our contemporary terminology, he just flips out or he just, you know, goes crazy and kills people. There's no way our God. So he did not like that. And here's a big word. Anthropopathism. Anthropopathism. Pathism. Pathism.
Yeah. So you have anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is when you ascribe human characteristics to God. Like God used his hand. His hand was mighty against the Moabites. Well, God doesn't have hands. But you have used human imagery, action, and he applied that to God.
Anthropopathism is where you're using human emotions, you know, pathos, and ascribing it to God. Now, are you saying this is how it is, or this is C.H. Dodd's argument?
C.H. Dodd was saying that this anthropopathism is not a good thing to ascribe to a God of grace and mercy and love and truth. And so we need to sort of find a better explanation. Got it.
Got it. And the better explanation that he came up with was this. He said it's this wrath of God thing. It's not really the rage that you see in the ancient Greek pantheon. What it is is it's really an inevitable process of cause and effect in a moral universe. So forget about all this God up there just angry with fire coming out of his eyes and just, you know, his eyebrows are furrowed and he wants to just destroy him.
Forget about all that. It's simply the inevitable process of cause and effect. So what does that mean? Well, if you do bad things, bad things will happen to you. If you do good things, the good things will happen to you. In our Western world, I believe they ignorantly use that term karma. Because I don't think karma means that. Right.
Okay. But anyways, they say, oh, it's all karma. By the way, it's not karma. It's karma. Karma. Karma. Karma. Karma.
Karma. It's like a Carfax. Carfax.
A little fox. We're going to dig into this some more after the ad break, but guys, we'll be back with our verse of the day. If you want to check in with us, write in those check-ins to 252-582-5028. We're going to read your check-in live on the air, and Dr. Shah will be happy to give you some daily encouragement.
Don't go anywhere. We're going to take a quick break and be right back with more Clear V Today. Hi, I'm Dr. Abidhan Shah, lead pastor at Clear V Church and host of the Clear V Today show. Every day, we bring you bold biblical truth to help you navigate life with clarity and confidence. We tackle the tough questions, dive deep into God's work, and bring a fresh perspective on faith, culture, and the world around us.
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That's right. Dr. Shah, verse of the day is coming to us from Romans chapter 5 and verse 9. It says, Much more then, having now been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. And I think that's so interesting because we're talking about wrath either way, but we forget that that's what we were saved from.
And I like the way that you put this as well. God's not like having a temper tantrum. It's his judgment coming after us. It's a wrath that pursues. When you misunderstand that, you think about wrath being God's temper tantrum. It's like God loses his temper, but now he's going to protect you from him losing his temper. And it just sort of falls apart. It doesn't really make any sense.
But it's because we don't really understand what the wrath of God truly is. I saw a, this is not really funny, but I saw a Facebook post one time that was sort of like a meme. It was saying, behold, I stand at the door and knock. And it was saying like, let me in so I can save you. And the guy said, I was like, save me from what?
So what I'm going to do to you if you don't let me in? I said, Oh my gosh. But I know that's sort of like a, that's sort of like a tongue in cheek joke, but I mean, truly, he is there to save us from God's wrath. And I think people are like, why can't God just forgive us? I thought he was just a God who loves. He's not a God of wrath.
D.A. Carson, although he's not the primary one to work on this doctrine of the wrath of God, but he wrote, he's, he gave a series of lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary back in the nineties. And it was later published in the Bibliotheca Sacra. This is a theological journal from Dallas. And in this, he talks about the wrath of God and he says, the wrath of God is a function of God's holiness. The wrath of God is a function of God's holiness.
It's not something that exists on its own just to exist. It's because he's holy that he has to have wrath. So I would say you don't say God is love. God is merciful. God is loving, merciful, gracious, powerful, wise, angry.
It doesn't go like that. It is not an attribute that you say God is. It's a function of God's holiness.
It is connected to, I believe, the fundamental doctrine of God or the attribute of God, which is his holiness. That's a good point. That's a good point. Because if you tell, because if someone gets angry, they can get angry and you'd be like, well, what happened?
You know, you want to know more. And it's like, oh, someone wronged that person. Someone abused that person.
They got angry. That's completely, that emotion is justifiable. But if I were to say that's an angry person, then you automatically go, yeah, that's bad. He shouldn't be an angry person.
She shouldn't be an angry person. And God's wrath is different from his love. His wrath is not something that is inherent in himself. Like you just said, it's an extension or a function of his holiness. So then God isn't a wrathful God. Wrath just becomes an extension of his holiness. And people try to do that where they think that wrath contradicts love.
If you get angry with someone, you can't love them. And you put it that way and it's like, well, that's not right. You've never had kids, huh? You've certainly never had kids.
You must be a hermit and you live by yourself. But I think, like you said, Dr. Shai, it's also, it is a function of his holy and his justice. Like, you know, I think about a judge, like if a judge were, because God is the ultimate judge, right? And if a judge has a criminal standing before him and he says, you know what, you did a lot of bad stuff. You killed a lot of people. You robbed banks. You hurt people. But I'm a loving judge.
I'm going to let you go. We wouldn't be like, what a good judge. We'd be like, that guy's corrupt.
That judge is corrupt. And that's Islam. Islam laughs at and scoffs at the idea that God wants blood in order to forgive you. So there is not really much wrath of God in this Islam? I mean, there may be wrath of God, but God will forgive you if you ask him to.
He doesn't require, he doesn't require justice. There is no, I mean, it's a lot of confusion in Islam. So yes, they have the Baqarah Eid and all these, you know, sacrifice, sacrificial months and festivals. But at the same time, they don't believe that, that God has to see blood in order to make a remission of sins.
Like what the Bible says, Old Testament, New Testament, that without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins. So that is not accepted in Islam. Let me ask this then, because you've shared before about how your dad was talking to his grandfather about Islam, about, you know, obviously you're a devout man. You know, Allah will have favor on you and you'll be in heaven. And your great grandfather said, you know, there's no guarantee.
There's no guarantee that he'll forgive me. If Muslims believe that all we have to do is ask for forgiveness and Allah will grant it, what happens when he doesn't? Did you hear what I said a few moments ago? There's confusion? There's a lot of confusion in Islam and it does not make any sense. Now they try to make it sense, they try to systematize it, but it's really, it doesn't work because on one hand you're forgiven, all you have to do is ask, okay, then that means I'm entitled to go to heaven.
And the answer is no, no, that's not connected. So I can still be sent to hell. Even though you've been forgiven. So yeah, forgiven of your trespass or transgression, but that doesn't mean you're going to heaven. No. Gotcha.
So Allah's forgiveness of you has no bearing on where you end up in a term. Right. It's just, hey, he's, you're good with him. Yeah.
Just a pat on the head. Okay. Then you just need to bow and submit. I mean, Islam is really submission. That's what it means.
Wow. Islam means submission and I believe in submission. I believe that we are to submit our lives to God, consecrate yourself to God.
Submission goes, in my opinion, goes even beyond submission is like completely surrendering to God, but not surrendering to the point that reason ceases to be. Yeah. That's a good point because I think that that shows a critical, critical, critical difference between Islam and Christianity where God's wrath has salvation connected to it. There's there's, it's not like I even think about like Noah's flood and I'm not saying that's a way of like salvation in a dispensational way. I'm just saying like it's an imagery of wrath, but also hope.
Right. Like there's salvation or the chance of salvation connected to God's wrath. It's not like, all right, you sin and now I'm about to punish you.
It's like there's always, but there's a way and yeah, that's, that's sort of where I'm seeing this, this difference between the two. Well, keep in mind, we're not just talking about Christianity. We're also talking about our Judeo Christian faith.
And when I say Judeo Christian, I'm not talking about Judaism. I'm talking about Old Testament and New Testament connection, that one story. And the one story is that God will forgive sins when there is a substitute and the substitute cannot just be anybody. The substitute has to be a person who can take the wrath of God upon themselves, but not for their sins. They should be substituting for your sins and everybody else's sins.
That idea is Old Testament and New Testament and old, it is promised and new. It is fulfilled that there will be someone coming who will become a substitute for our sins because he is able to take the punishment of God's wrath. And he is able to die for our sins, even though he is not taking the punishment for his sins. And he is not dying for his sins. He's doing it for you.
He's doing for me. He is doing for all human beings. And because he is perfect and because he is God, he will die, but he will come back to life. That's the heart of our faith. But we're also looking at it in a sense of like end times prophecy, because I think there would be people, and maybe you can sort of address this, I think there would be people who are like, since he did that, God's wrath is no longer on us. But for those who don't accept Christ, are they still under God's wrath? Is God's wrath subsided forever because of the cross? Or do you think it's, I mean, I know what we believe, but I'm saying for people who are listening, it's not that God's wrath is done away with forever, just because Jesus died on the cross.
He still has wrath and there's still a promise of coming wrath. Right, because there are people who will not accept him and not because God has made them that way. I think it's that double predestination doctrine is a terrible doctrine. I don't believe it's biblical. They are misunderstanding what Paul says in Romans 9 through 11 about the potter and pharaoh and all of that.
I think it's misunderstanding. This is about calling here. But everybody has an opportunity, and either they can receive the substitute and live, or they can be their own offering and die. Because none of us can stand before the wrath of God.
We are human. We cannot face that amount of punishment. We will die.
We will be obliterated. What would you say to someone who's like, I really, I'm having a hard time? Who is the scholar that you said up front that had the hard time accepting the wrath of God? C.H. Dodd. C.H.
Dodd. Someone's like, I kind of get where he's coming from. Like, I really don't think this is something that I want to spend a lot of time thinking on. Either because it- I'm having a hard time believing that God can be both loving and still have expressions of wrath. Yeah. How would you, how would you challenge that?
I would say very simple. If God were to back away from his wrath, he would have to back away from his holiness. And if God were to back away from his holiness, which is his fundamental attribute, he would have to back away from his very being, his essence. And if God backed away from his being and essence, he sees us to be God. Which means this entire universe is over. Right.
Which means lights out. If it weren't for God's wrath, we're not here. We're not here. We're not here.
We don't exist. Man, that line of reasoning, it just, it changes the way that you think about not just God's wrath, but really God's character. Everything that God is and how he interacts with us and how we interact with him.
In history, the Bible, it changes everything. And I like that we're, I like that we're using that word wrath because it is such a striking, provocative word. And I think people have done what you said, Dr. Shaw, where they try to soften that word where it's not God's wrath. It's God's justice.
You know, God is calling for justice because he's just, justice is good and wrath is bad. Right. But at the same time, that's the word the Bible uses. Right. Right.
Right. So let's talk about Thummas and Orgeh. Orgeh is this very intentional anger. And Thummas is just this thoughtless outburst. But both the Orgeh and Thummas are used as synonyms in the Bible, in the New Testament.
So what do they mean here? They simply mean just the wrath of God, just the anger of God against him. I feel like people run into that problem when they think about God's anger in our, in our understanding, in our terms, God's wrath. Wrath is bad when it comes from us. Yeah. Because we are wrathful. Nothing good comes from that.
Yeah. I get angry. I get angry like when my foolish pride gets hurt or when things don't go my way or when they put like the cheese on like on the bottom of the cheeseburger instead of why would you do that? Are you a psycho?
You deliberately betrayed me. Put it on top so that the cheese can melt and run down the burger and envelop it in a cheesy hug. I know we're, I know we're laughing, but that makes me angry when I, when I put the cheese, when someone puts the cheese on the bottom of the burger. You just eat the burger upside down? Yeah. I just plopped up. I don't know why, but I can't, I can't do it. You got to feel it in the top of your mouth. Exactly.
The first thing I need, it needs to be bread, cheese, beef. Order of the layers matters. But I'm saying like, of course, when we think like when you contextualize anger like that, of course it's foolish and of course it's silly. Yeah. Cause ours usually is. God's anger. And I like how you put this, God's anger is just different than ours. It's holy. It's a holy righteous anger. That's right. That's right. And so he is different.
He is not like us, but thank God he is God because since he is God, we actually get to exist in his world. And you know, I shared a little bit of a quick story about how I had ordered this battery case and somebody stole it. Not from our porch because we have cameras, but it was stolen somewhere. Like somewhere before it got delivered to you.
Yeah. They just ripped up the, or the cut through the bottom of that package. So the top of the package with the label state intact, but the bottom was cut open and then they resealed it. But they put the packaging back in, but took away that battery pack cover. And so imagine my frustration, my anger when I opened that box. It was an empty box.
Empty box inside with just the leftover cartridge or whatever. But no, none of this. How much did you pay for the case?
Seventy dollars. Golly. Yeah. I'd be angry too. Yeah. It's pretty frustrating.
Imagine opening up an empty box. And so I was angry, but then I turned around and I asked the audience on Sunday, I said every day you and I steal from God. We're stealing his water. We're stealing his air. We're stealing his land. We're stealing his gifts.
He said, what do you mean by stealing? He's given it to us. Now, what he expects from us is to acknowledge him. That's what he expects from us is that we would worship him and serve him. What he expects from us is to receive by faith his son, Jesus, as our savior, as our king. Great point.
Instead, we disregard him, reject him and do things our own way. That's called stealing. Can you imagine for $70 I was angry. Imagine how much countless things that people have stolen from God. Wow. And imagine how much anger he is justified to have. I guess that's why the Bible calls him long suffering. He's very patient, very, very patient with us. Yeah. Man, so good, so helpful for us in understanding God's character and his wrath and how that plays out in our understanding of really salvation in our place in God's story.
That's right. Make sure you guys join us same time, same station tomorrow. We're going to be diving into another great topic here on the Clear Read Today show. Thanks again to our sponsors for making today's episode possible, and don't forget that you can support us by subscribing to the show on iTunes if you want to re-listen. You can always support us financially at Clearveetodayshow.com.
Jon, what do you want to plug as we close? Definitely just want to plug Pray.com. Dr. Shah is a featured leader on there. We've been seeing lots of followers, lots of people giving to the ministry. Thank you for doing that. If you're listening to this on Pray.com right now, congrats. You've stumbled onto our Pray Live, what is it? The Pray TV.
Yeah. So thank you for watching right there. If you do, make sure you go download Pray.com, follow Dr. Shah as a featured leader. You can give, you can support all of his books, all of his articles and videos.
Basically, all of Dr. Shah's content is on Pray.com, so make sure you go follow right now. That's right. Make sure you guys join us same time, same station tomorrow. We love you guys. We'll see you tomorrow on Clearview Today.
