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Good afternoon, and welcome to The Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve gregg, and we’re live for an hour each weekday afternoon, taking your calls so that you can join us on the air. You can ask any question you have about the Bible or the Christian faith, we’ll talk about it.
I hope you notice I didn’t say I will answer every question. That would require that I know the answers to every question, which is not very likely to be the case, but we can talk about it intelligently, I hope. And perhaps give an answer if I happen to know.
And if someone thinks I give a wrong answer, feel free to call in and tell us what the right one is. The number is 844-484-5737.
So right now, our lines are full. You may not want to dial now, but you may want to put this ready to dial and dial in a few minutes, and we get through 844-484-5737.
A week from today, I’ll be in Washington State speaking. And I’m going to speak over the next two weeks, a lot of places in Washington State. I’m going to be speaking in Arlington, Monroe, Linwood, Polesbo, Mercer Island, Mill Creek, Bellingham, Kenmore, and Lake Stevens.
And one of those places I’m speaking 10 times during that time. So I’ll be pretty busy the next couple weeks. But if you happen to live anywhere near any of those cities and want to join us and you wonder where it is that I might be speaking, that information is posted at our website, thenarrowpath.com.
That’s thenarrowpath.com. There’s a tab that says Announcements. Look under that and you’ll see where all those gatherings are going to be.
By the way, about a week after I get home, or less than a week after I get home, I’m going to go to Nashville. And I’ll be speaking in Nashville. We’ve got a lot of listeners there.
And then I’ll come home from that. And I believe shortly after that, or actually, is it before Nashville? I’m going to Sacramento before Nashville, right?
I’m all confused. I’m going like four different places. I’m going to Arkansas, too, before November is over.
So, okay, Tennessee is first, then there’s going to be Sacramento, and then there’s going to be Arkansas. So, and I’m coming home between all those to Southern California. You know, when COVID came and they didn’t let you fly if you didn’t have a vaccination, I didn’t fly because I didn’t get a vaccine.
And I just figured, I guess, I’m done flying for my life. I’m old, I’ve done lots of flying. I don’t much like airports anymore.
So I’m glad not to do any more travel by air. I’ll just drive places or stay home. That hasn’t really exactly worked out.
I’m still doing a lot of travel. And as I said, in the next two months, I’ll be speaking and I’ll be traveling in four different states and speaking. So if you live in those areas and you want to join us for our gatherings at any of the places I’m speaking, you might want to look at our website, thenarrowpath.com under announcements and see where those places are.
Our first caller today is Mark from Eagan, Minnesota. Hi, Mark. Welcome.
Hello. Thank you. I have two questions.
I’ll do it quick so I know you have other callers. Genesis 1.3 says, then God said, let there be light and there was light. And God saw the light was good and it was good.
And God divided the light from the darkness. But then we go to verse 16 and says, then God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. So my question is, what were the lights that he created in Genesis 1.4?
I don’t think he created light in Genesis 1.4. I think he was the light. He allowed, I think he was the source of light before the sun and the moon and the stars were assigned with that task.
So, it’s like in the New Jerusalem. It says in Revelation 21, the city has no need for the sun or the moon to shine in it because the glory of God and of the Lamb is the light of it. I believe that God was the first light the earth ever saw.
And, you know, assuming his light was sent to the earth directionally, then just as today, half the earth would be in the light and half in the darkness, and as it turned on its axis, you’d be getting a day and night, which you do have from day one in Genesis 1. Later, even after plants were made, and this seems to be deliberate because everyone even in ancient times knew that this light was necessary for plant life and that the sun, in fact, most societies in ancient times worshiped the sun, knowing it was the source of life. And yet plants were made before the sun is said to have been made.
In my opinion, that was deliberate. I think that God made the sun after he made life, for the simple reason that he wanted to demonstrate that the sun is not the source of life. He is.
And so after he had sent light to the earth, and divided the waters and then made dry land appear, and even had plant life appear, then he assigned the ongoing illumination of the earth to these heavenly bodies. And that’s what we read about on the fourth day, when he made the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night.
Okay. Second question. Do you think God created hell before or after Adam and Eve?
And if before, why would he need to?
Well, I don’t know when hell was created. But let’s just say, let’s say he made hell before he created Adam and Eve. I don’t know that that’s true.
But on that theory, your question would be, why would he need to? Well, there was already a devil. And the Bible says that those who are thrown into the eternal fire in Matthew 25, 41, it says they’re going into eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
So my guess is, and this is an educated guess based on this passage, hell was not prepared for man initially, but for the devil. And so the devil existed before man fell. I don’t know when the devil began to exist, but God apparently made hell for the devil.
It’s prepared for the devil and his angels. But because man followed Satan, there will be people who are thrown into that same fire that was prepared not for them, but for the devil and his angels, but they’ll end up there anyway. So that’s maybe my understanding.
I can’t tell you exactly when hell was created. It’s not something created in the physical world, in my opinion. And Genesis 1 only talks about the creation of the physical world.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you for your call. Okay.
Brian from New Ipswich, New Hampshire. Welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.
Yes. Hi, Steve. I have a verse I want to read out of Romans, but I want to preface it with the state that this country has turned into, where we punish our innocent, unborn children by killing them, and reward our illegals and criminals coming over the border, and our very expensive public schools have become such great educators.
They don’t even know the difference between a man and a woman. And then top of it, they blame the whole thing on Trump, which is all backwards. And the verse I want to read is in Romans 1, 28, and it says, And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind to do those things which are not convenient.
My question is, is that verse being fulfilled today? And if not, how could it not be?
Well, I believe that what Romans describes is, in fact, a pattern that many societies go through. My own belief is that he’s quite subtly speaking of what happened to the nation of Israel in Chapter 1. And he springs, he doesn’t say it obviously enough for them to recognize it so that he gets their approval.
He’s talking about the wicked who have turned to idols and they knew better and they knew God, but they didn’t want to retain the knowledge of God. So, he gave them over. And a Jewish reader would be inclined to say, oh yeah, boy, that’s true, those Gentiles are all just like that.
I agree with you, Paul. And then in Chapter 2, verse 1, he says, therefore you are inexcusable, you who judge people for that because you do the same things. And then in Chapter 2, verse 17, he identifies those same people as, indeed, you are called a Jew and you rest in the law, and you make your boast in God.
But then he goes on and says, do you not do the things that you condemn others for doing? So I think that Chapter 1 is a subtly laid trap describing Israel’s history. And Chapter 1 is full of phrases that the Old Testament uses when describing Israel’s history, especially the frequent reference to, he gave them over, he gave them up.
That’s a phrase from the Psalms about what God did with Israel when they went to idols and so on. So anyway, I think this is a specifically referring to the history of Israel’s apostasy. But I also believe that any nation that goes through the steps that Israel went through, knowing God and then not wanting to know God and replacing God as the one that is worshiped, replacing him with idolatry, and then of course, dipping into great immorality and perversion and things like that.
Paul describes all of that. And certainly, yeah, we’re living in a time like that. And I don’t know that, you know, I’m not sure that in history, there haven’t been other nations that went through that progression too.
I think Paul is primarily talking about Israel because of the way I think he’s developing his case in the first part of Romans. But certainly, Israel is not alone in having gone through this process. And America in particular has certainly had a very similar process because, you know, America was founded by people who knew about God and who knew God’s ways and so forth.
So in a sense, they started out, we started out a lot like Israel did with God, you know, revealing himself to them. But then we’ve gone through the same kind of degradation of first of our beliefs and then of our morals. So, yeah, I do believe that, I do believe we’re living in time like that.
Thanks for your call. Jacob from Tacoma, Washington. Welcome to The Narrow Path.
Hi, Jacob.
Hi, Steve.
We have as a subject the rich root of the olive tree.
It is said that there were branches that were of Israel or Israelites, and they are grafted in Gentiles.
Is the root Israel or just the branches? Are we grafted into Israel or something else?
Well, the olive tree is Israel. The root, the rich root, I don’t think commentaries would agree necessarily what the root is, but they’d all agree it is something like a reference either to Abraham as the root of the tree, or we might say the Abrahamic Covenant, and all the branches on the tree are participating in the benefits of the Abrahamic Covenant. Some might say that Jesus is the root of the tree, and all the branches of the tree are participating in the benefits of Christ.
In other words, the tree itself is Israel. The branches that Paul describes, and you’re talking, of course, about Romans 11, 16 and through 26. The branches are the believers, and the original branches, the first branches, historically speaking, were Jews.
The first people who knew about Christ were Jewish. But also, there were Jews who knew about Christ, and they didn’t receive him, and they were broken off because of their unbelief. So the first step in the process that Paul describes is that, Israel, you know, Christ revealed himself to Israel, and some of the Israeli or Jewish branches got broken off the tree because of their unbelief.
Now, not all of them did. A lot of branches stayed on. You know, there were thousands and thousands of Jews who received Christ.
Three thousand on the first day of the church in Acts Chapter 2, and it grew after that. So sometimes you can say, you know, the Jews rejected Christ. Well, most of them did, but thousands and thousands of them did not reject him.
But the ones who did reject him were broken off the tree, and only the believing Jews remained. And then Paul says, and then Gentiles who believed in Christ were also grafted into the tree and became part of it and became partakers of the root and the fatness or the fat root, the rich root of the olive tree. Again, the rich root of the olive tree, it could be a reference to Christ, as some would suggest.
It could be a reference to the patriarchs. But if it does refer to the patriarchs, I would think it specifically is referring to the covenant God made with the patriarchs. The tree is what has grown out of that covenant.
And everybody who’s part of the tree is a beneficiary of that covenant. And I would say that’s the Abrahamic covenant. But that doesn’t rule out Christ being the root too.
I mean, we’re rooted and grounded in him, the Bible says in the New Testament. So I wouldn’t go to the mat with anyone who wanted to argue one way or the other about what the root is. Clearly, Paul’s referring to that which is the root of Israel, whether it’s the cosmic root, which would be God and Christ, or whether it’s the genealogical root, which would be Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
It wouldn’t matter because, frankly, Christ is the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant. So, yeah, I don’t know if any, I mean, different commentators will nail it down differently. I say to each his own.
I mean, it’s actually a possibility that could be one or two or three options. But the important thing to note is that the life and benefit that has come to the tree, that is to Israel, is shared by all believers, Jews and Gentiles who are like branches grafted in either natural branches or foreign branches grafted in. And that the natural branches that didn’t believe, they’re not in it anymore.
So Paul is saying that an unbelieving Jew who rejects Christ is not part of Israel anymore. But the believing Jews and the believing Gentiles who are in Christ are part of Israel now. So that’s the point he’s making to root.
There’s room for disagreement as to the exact thing that he’s referring to. And he might not even have one of those options in mind. He might be simply saying that which makes Israel what it is, the root from which the tree grows, you know?
Or he may be specifically, I’m inclined toward the idea that he’s talking about the Abrahamic covenant. But other possibilities are decent also. Okay, let’s talk to Tim from Texas.
Tim, welcome to The Narrow Path.
Hi, Steve. How are you doing? Enjoy your show very much.
Look forward to hearing it every day. Just a question. I was a dispensationalist for years and years.
Actually, I was over in the California area for many years of my life, whatever, and under the Chuck Smith teachings and all that. Since then, I became a partial predator the last year or so. I’m just trying to find out different questions, really intriguing.
Now, the rapture thing is thrown off the door, but there’s a gathering up. We’re going to be caught up with Jesus in the air, and then we’re going to come down with him. And at that time, I was wondering, is that when the New Jerusalem is going to be coming down as well, or we’re going to be waiting for the great, great throne and…
I’ll tell you, when we see the description of the New Jerusalem as it’s given in Revelation 21, it seems to be a very symbolic kind of a description of the church itself, because an elder says to John, come with me and I will show you the bride, the Lamb’s wife. Now, that would have to be the church, right? And so John says, I went and he showed me the New Jerusalem, the heavenly Jerusalem, descending as a bride prepared for her husband.
So the New Jerusalem is identified with the bride, and certainly the Lamb’s wife or the bride is the church. And when you see the description of the New Jerusalem, you find it has 12 foundation stones, and each one has the name of one of the 12 apostles. Remember, Paul says in Ephesians chapter 2 that the church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets.
So it’s also a cube shape, which is like the shape of the Holy of Holies in the temple. The Holy of Holies is where God met with, you know, with the privileged high priest to meet in his presence. And that cube shape, the city, it’s not illuminated by any natural or artificial light.
Only the glory of God is there, which was also the case of the Holy of Holies. It had no windows.
That was kind of the answer. Also, the first guy that called in earlier were Genesis. It was the lamb that was going to be illuminated.
Right.
So in other words, it’s a symbolic description of the church is itself like the Holy of Holies. It’s the place where God dwells. We’re illuminated by his glory, built on the foundation of the apostles.
We are the lamb, the lamb’s wife and so forth. So it strikes me that it is a type in a shadow, or not a type in a shadow, but it’s simply a figurative way of depicting the church. And by the way, the heavenly Jerusalem’s only mentioned two other places in similar language in the Bible.
One of those is in Galatians chapter four. And there he says in Galatians 4.26, the Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all. Now, the mother church, in other words, the mother of us who are Christians is the church.
It’s God’s wife, you know? And so the heavenly Jerusalem, the Jerusalem which is above is said to be our mother. And then in the other place it’s mentioned is more explicit.
In Hebrews, Chapter 12 and verse 22 through, we’re going to say, I’ll just read 22 and 23, that goes longer. He says, You have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, to the heavenly Jerusalem. And then he says in verse 22, the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are registered in heaven.
So we have come to, he says, the heavenly Jerusalem, which he also identifies as the church of the firstborn, the church of Christ. So the Jerusalem is the church. Jesus is speaking to his disciples on the Mount of Olives, said, You are the light of the world.
A city set on a hill cannot be hit. So his community, his people are likened to a city in all these places.
Now, so when we come down with Jesus, that is, we need them and then we come down. That will be the new Jerusalem.
That’s what I understand.
It will be established right then.
I believe so. Now, here’s what I think is happening since you’re trying to transition from a dispensational frame of mind, which I did that myself some years back. When Jesus comes back, the resurrection occurs and the rapture occurs.
The dead are raised and the living are raised to meet the Lord in the air. But this is simply a welcoming committee. We’re not going to go fly off into outer space with them.
Right, for seven years, for seven-year tribulation. Yeah, that ball out the window now for me.
Yeah, that’s not taught about in the Bible. So we’re going to go up and meet him, and then we’re going to come back down. Now, I can’t say this is certainty because there’s no place in the Bible that really lays out a chronology of all the events.
But as I understand all the things that are supposed to happen, it seems to me this is probable. That’s all I can say. The most I can say is this is probable.
And that is that while we’re in the air, that’s when the earth is burned over and remade. As far as I’m concerned, instantly. And then we, the New Jerusalem, we descend from heaven, from the sky, to the earth, which is what John sees in Revelation 21.1.
So that’s what I think is happening.
It sounds good to me. I sure appreciate that, Steve, very much.
All right. It works for me. I don’t know of any detail that doesn’t fit into that paradigm, but it may not.
I mean, since the Bible doesn’t really give us a play by play, it just gives us in one passage, some of the things that are going to happen, and in another passage, some things are going to happen. It never really puts them all in a chronological order, but that particular scenario makes the most sense to me.
Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
All right, Tim. Thanks for calling. Good talk to you.
All right, Michael from Denver, Colorado. Welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.
Oops, I thought there was a button.
Hi.
Hi, Steve. Good to be with you again. How are you?
Good.
Good.
So my question today kind of centers around Luke. In the story of the collapse of the Tower of Siloam, which killed 18 people, Jesus was saying that we should not assume that because these 18 suffered this fate, that they were more wicked than the others. And it’s interesting because Jesus doesn’t go into more detail about why bad things happened to good people.
Obviously, he could. What did you take away from that passage and kind of the story of the Tower of Siloam?
Okay. Well, that’s in Luke chapter 13. And it starts out with, in the first two verses, someone tells Jesus about Galileans that were slaughtered while they were innocently offering their sacrifices in the temple.
And he says in verse 2, do you suppose these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered such things? I tell you no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Then he says, and those 18 on whom the tower of Cylon fell and killed them, do you think they were worse sinners than all others who dwelled in Jerusalem?
He says, I tell you no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. What he’s saying is this, we tend to think that bad things happening to people suggest that God’s specially angry at them because specially bad things happened. Remember, Job’s friends assumed the same thing about him.
They figured he must have done something really bad because look how much God’s allowing him to suffer. They were wrong. Now, these people who perished, not all of them were even bad people at all.
Some of them were offering their sacrifices in the temple and they just got slaughtered as martyrs by the Romans. They’re not bad people. Now, both cases, Jesus said, the people who died in these two instances were not worse people than others.
But all of you in Jerusalem are going to perish similarly. He says, likewise, which means in the same way. He says, if you don’t repent, you’re all going to likewise perish.
He’s saying that Jerusalem is going to be destroyed. The whole population of Jerusalem is going to be wiped out by the Romans. People will die from falling bricks and falling walls as the Romans knocked them down and towers and so forth.
And many will be slaughtered by Roman soldiers in the temple. That did happen. That did happen within 40 years of Jesus saying this.
So he’s basically saying, the whole city is doomed. These people aren’t worse than the rest. This, they’re just, they’re just representatives of the city.
Experiencing some things early on that the rest of you will experience if you don’t repent. And so I see him saying, it’s tragic as this may be. It’s not uniquely tragic.
These were not unique cases where they were uniquely evil and therefore uniquely bad things happened. The whole city is basically under God’s judgment. And unless they repent, this will happen to everyone there.
Which is what, that’s what I take from that particular story. Now, we can also take, of course, the general rule that when we see disasters happen, it doesn’t mean that we can conclude that God is judging, you know, New Orleans or, you know, some place especially because of their evil. He might be.
We don’t know. But we can’t assume that. Bad things do happen.
Not just to good people, but to all people. Listen, I need to take a break, but I appreciate your call. We have another half hour coming up.
But I’d like you to know that The Narrow Path is a listener-supported ministry. If you’d like to help us out, you can write to The Narrow Path, PO. Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593.
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Welcome back to The Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve gregg, and we’re live for another half hour, taking your calls. If you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith you’d like to raise for conversation, feel free to give me a call.
The number is 844-484-5737.
One announcement, or I guess there’s two for the same day that I should make, is that this Saturday is the third Saturday of the month. And because it is, we have a couple of events in Southern California that we only have on the third Saturday of each month. One of them is a Men’s Bible study in Temecula.
That’s in the morning, Saturday, this Saturday morning, eight o’clock, Men’s Bible study in Temecula. And in the evening, we have a general Bible study for everybody who wants to come in Buena Park, which is in Orange County. And that meeting, we’re going to be talking about the Book of 1 Peter, a great, great book.
And we’re going to be having an introduction and overview of the whole book. So you may be interested in that if you’re in the area. You can find out the locations, times, and all of that at our website, thenarrowpath.com, under the tab that says Announcements.
All right, we’re going to talk next to Vivian from LA, California. Hi, Vivian, welcome.
Hi, Steve.
How are you doing? Go ahead.
Can you hear me?
Yes, go ahead.
Oh, okay. Great. Steve, I wanted to ask, can prayer sway God’s decision?
And my best example is when people ask for healing on behalf of, or we pray for healing on behalf of people we love or our neighbors. And I would just like to know if God has the decision, if his will will be done, does prayer for healing sway his decision?
Well, prayer is an interesting thing with reference to the will of God, because there’s some people who think the will of God is always going to be done no matter what, whether we pray or not. And they would say prayer doesn’t change God at all. It’s simply, well, he knows we’re going to pray, and if he’s going to answer the prayer, then he knew he was going to do that before he prayed.
And therefore, it’s really part of his whole plot line that he’s going to answer that prayer or not. And therefore, when we pray, we’re just kind of filling in a predestined factor in a larger plan. And so, our prayers, they would say, are not going to determine anything that happens.
They’re going to just, we’ll pray and God will either answer or He won’t. And His answering or not will be what he pre-planned to do. And even our prayer was in his pre-planning, but he doesn’t always answer prayers.
There are, of course, conditions that are stated in Scripture to expect answers to prayers. Now, I’m not one of those people who thinks that. People like that sometimes say, prayer doesn’t change anything, it just changes you.
Now, these are people who believe, generally speaking, that anything that God wants to happen is going to happen anyway. Therefore, your prayers aren’t going to move the needle at all. Nothing’s going to change because you prayed.
But it changes you. But I want to ask people who say that, well, isn’t changing me, isn’t that changing something? I mean, if God has predetermined everything that’s going to happen, then even the change that you’re claiming prayer makes in me would have happened whether I prayed or not.
So it didn’t make that change at all. This idea that everything is predestined down to the last detail is simply not what I understand the Bible to teach about the God’s sovereignty. I believe that God interacts with people.
God says, I’ll honor those who honor me. I’ll those who despise me will be lightly esteemed. And it definitely says that prayers are answered.
I mean, James said, you do not have because you did not ask. Now, that very clearly is saying, there are some things that you don’t have, but you would have had them if you’d asked. The only reason you don’t have them is because you didn’t ask for them.
And that means asking for them would have changed things. The Bible certainly indicates that prayer changes things. It doesn’t always change things because, as I said, there are conditions.
We have to pray according to the will of God. We have to pray in faith. We have to pray in the name of Jesus.
We have to pray with right motives. All of those things are listed in different passages, and we have to take the whole panoply of passages together to know how God understands our prayers. But our prayers can change things, yes.
But it’s not always the case that they will change them in the way we want them to. Because prayer is not a way for us to try to persuade God to change his mind. He might do something differently because we prayed, but if it was his will that, let’s just say we’re praying for a sick person, and everybody’s going to die at some point, and some people are going to die sick.
Some will die in accidents, some will die suddenly in their sleep, some will die in violent crime or war. There’s lots of ways people die, but some people will die sick. And the person we’re praying for, you know, we want them not to die now.
We want them to be healed, and we should definitely approach God about it and ask him to do it if it’s his will. But remember, even Jesus, when he prayed about the cross, he said, Father, if it’s possible, if it is your will, let this cup pass from me. And it helped me not to have to do this.
But God didn’t say yes to that. And that was Jesus praying. And Jesus instead died instead of being delivered from death at that point.
In 2 Corinthians chapter 12, Paul says that he had something going on, a thorn in the flesh, which was apparently a great torment to him. And he said, I prayed three times that the Lord had taken away from me. And the Lord said, my grace is sufficient for you.
You know, my strength is made perfect in your weakness. In other words, no, taking that away from you is not really in the plan. You having that is in the plan.
It’s good for you. I’m glorified in it. My strength is made perfect in your weakness.
Paul even says that thorn was given to him so that he might not be exalted above measure. That’s a positive thing, not to be exalted above measure. So the Bible teaches that sickness and suffering can be in the plan of God.
But sometimes healing is also. And we don’t know in advance, generally speaking, if this is a case where he will heal. And I think we have every reason to ask him.
But we ask him as we would, as a child would ask a father for a special favor. My father and my mother provided for me when I was a child. And I didn’t even have to ask for most of the time, three meals a day were served without my even asking.
You know, a roof over my head, clothes, you know, all kinds of things were provided without my asking. But I sometimes would ask my dad for something that wasn’t just routine, something that I would, a special thing that I wanted him to do or provide for me. And very often he would, though there were times when he didn’t, because he didn’t see those things as beneficial to me and to the rest of the family as I imagined them to be.
And that’s how God is with our prayers. He provides for us every good thing, every good gift we have. It comes down from above, from the Father of lights.
And special requests are also entertained. I mean, he hears our requests, he listens to our requests, and if it’s a good thing, he grants it. That is good in his sight.
If he doesn’t have a better plan, then he does grant it. Lazarus’ sisters asked Jesus to come and heal their brother when he’s sick, but he didn’t. He let him die.
That’s not what they wanted. And they were kind of angry at Jesus for that, but then he raised him. Not because they prevailed upon him, but because that was his plan from the beginning.
He had a better idea. Healing Lazarus was, you know, the short-sighted sisters. They couldn’t think of anything better than for Jesus to heal their brother.
But God had a better idea. And I would say that whenever we pray for the sick, or pray for anything for that matter, it’s either something that God will see as a positive thing, or not as good as his alternative ideas. His alternative idea may be that we don’t get better, that the paralytic remains paralyzed all our life, like Johnny Erickson taught him.
Many people have prayed for her. She’s been paralyzed from the neck down since she was 19 years old. She’s a godly woman, very godly woman, also a cancer survivor, but she’s been paralyzed all the time.
And she’s kind of famous for it. But I mean, God apparently felt he was glorified more in her staying in that condition. But God is glorified in healing.
Sometimes God is glorified in somebody’s death. You know, Peter, it says in John chapter 21 that Jesus spoke to Peter about the death by which Peter would glorify God, which is interesting. I mean, we who are Christians want nothing so much as the glory of God.
There are moments when we maybe want something a little more than that just because we have our own ideas of what would be best. But ultimately, as Christians, we have decided that God’s glory is more important than anything else. And if what I’m praying for is not going to bring the most glory to God, then I want God to veto it, because I want him to do what’s going to glorify him most and promote his plans most.
And that is a subtext in all of our prayers, whether we state it or not. But we should probably state it. If it is your will, God, if it’s your will, please do this.
And God knows we’re asking. God cares, just like a father listening to his child’s request. He hears it, he considers it, and he grants it if it’s something he believes is the best thing.
And I can always assume that if I’m praying for something and God doesn’t grant it, that is if I’m praying in faith, I’m praying in Jesus name, I’m praying in what I would think would be his will, but I don’t know perfectly his will. I always assume if he doesn’t grant it because he has a better idea. And I always want him to have his way, not mine.
That’s right. When Jesus taught us to pray, the first request was, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. I’ve got some preferences too, God.
I’d like to tell you about, but your will be done. That’s what our prayers are for. So when we pray for the sick, it may be that God will heal him.
And I don’t think our people should remain sick or die sick for lack of our having prayed about it. But when we do pray, we always have sort of the unspoken aspect. You know, God, of course, if you’ve got a better idea, feel free to veto my poor instructions.
All right, well, thank you very much. Dustin from Terrell, Texas. I guess it’s Terrell.
Hi, Dustin, welcome.
Hey, Steve. Thank you so much for your time, man. I really appreciate the work that you do.
I just had a quick question, it may be kind of silly, but I was reading a book in Nehemiah, and I noticed that through there, it lists long lists of Jewish names that are obviously Jewish names. And I go to look at the New Testament, and I see Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and these don’t sound like Jewish names to me. But I was just wondering if you could shout out a lot on that?
Sure. Yeah. The Jews who came back from Babylon in the time of Nehemiah had only been in Babylon a short time, and their Jewish parents had given them Jewish names.
Obviously, they weren’t planning to be permanent Babylonians. Although in some cases, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the Babylonian king had given them Babylonian names. Even Daniel was given a Babylonian name, though we don’t know him by that so well.
So in Babylon, most of the Jews just kept their Jewish names, and that’s what we read about in Nehemiah. They came back from Babylon and they had Jewish names. Now, in the time of Christ, the Jews had been conquered 300 years earlier by the Greeks, and the Greek language was made the universal language of the Mediterranean world, including Israel.
And so they lived under a Greek-speaking culture. They also spoke Aramaic. They also had some familiar…
They had Hebrew as their more… I’m not sure if we should say their local dialect. But they spoke Greek, and there’s also, of course, Latin, because the Roman Empire had conquered them 70 years before the time of Christ, too.
And so there were lots of languages, and a lot of the names in the New Testament, even though they are names of Jewish people, have a Greek form. And sometimes the same people have a Hebrew form, for example, Peter. The name Peter is Greek for a rock.
It’s actually Petros, but we have it as Peter in our Anglicized form. So the name Peter is a Greek form of the name rock. But the same man was also called Cephas, which is the air or Cephas.
Some would say Cephas was the Aramaic word for rock. It’s the same name. So he’s sometimes called Peter, which is Greek, and sometimes Cephas, which is Aramaic for the same name.
Many names had a Greek and a Hebrew form. For example, the name Jesus, that’s a Greek form of Joshua. And I’m sure that his Aramaic speaking parents and siblings called him Yeshua, which is a bit of a pronunciation problem before it.
But in the Greek form, which we have it because the Gospels were written in the Greek language, he’s called Jesus. So the names of the people in the New Testament, a lot of them have Hebrew names, but they also have a Greek form of their name. And then other people simply have Greek names or Roman names.
You know, Marcus, you said Mark, that’d be a Latin form, I imagine.
What about John? Because John sounds like an awfully English thing to me, but is there a Latin or Greek derivative of that?
Yeah, John is the Anglicized form of Yohanan, which is Yohanan, I think, is based on the Hebrew form. I have a complete Hebrew Bible on my shelf that has all the New Testament names in their Hebrew forms because the translator was obsessed with all things Jewish. Yeah, I mean, everybody in Israel probably had a Hebrew form name, but it may not have been the one that went by mostly.
To have multiple names was not uncommon. Remember, Matthew also was named Levi. Now Levi is a very Jewish name, a Levitical name.
One of the disciples of Jesus had three names. He was called Judas, not Iscariot. He’s the second Judas.
Judas is the Greek form of Judah. And he was also called Thaddeus. And he was also called Lebius.
I don’t know much about the name Thaddeus or Lebius. Those might be Latin forms. I’m not positive, but, or Greek, but the same man had multiple names.
It was not unusual for people to have multiple names and nicknames and from different languages. Because people were, generally speaking, and many people would be trilingual in Israel. They’d know Aramaic, which is typically like Hebrew, and they’d know Greek certainly, and they’d also know Latin in many cases.
Right.
Well, that’s fascinating, man. I really appreciate it.
Thank you for your time.
All right. Thanks for your call. Good talking to you.
Dan from Phoenix, Arizona. Welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.
Yes. I have a couple of questions. Maybe they’re out of the box, usual box that you have your followers ask you.
My questions are, Jesus is denied and not recognized by Jews, and yet we continue saying he’s a Jew and he’s this and that. We built the entire religion on Judaism, on Jews’ history, yet all Jews deny. They think, I mean, anybody can ask any Jew, they’ll tell you, hey, we don’t know about Jesus.
This Jesus is, go ask Christians, they know, they made them up. Second thing about the stories of the Bible. One story touched me personally is the Jonah story, because it happened in Nineveh, and I happened to be born and raised in Nineveh.
I’m an Assyrian and I lived from about five minutes from the mosque that the Isis grew up. There was named Jonah’s mosque or temple, whatever. Actually, there are some Assyrian artifacts underneath that mosque.
So do your followers ever think about verifying this information? Because according to the Jonah story, they say it happened in the time of Piglet’s philosopher II, our king, and we go to our history and archaeology, we can’t find anything about Jonah there. Do your people, do your customer, I mean the followers, care about verifying this information?
Is it really true that this thing really happened? Or you keep denying, when Jews say we don’t know who Jesus is, we say, no, no, no, you don’t know what you’re talking about. They’re Jews.
They should know what they’re talking about.
I don’t know of any Jews who say they don’t know who Jesus is. In fact, the Talmud, which is the principal religious book of the Orthodox Judaism, it mentions Jesus several times, not favorably. They don’t like Jesus.
They call him a bastard. They say he’s going to burn in hell. They say he was a sorcerer.
They believe he was crucified righteously because he was guilty of crimes of leading the people of Australia. I mean, this is what the Talmud says. It’s about Jesus.
So, no, I don’t know of any Jews who ever said, I don’t know who Jesus is. What do you mean this Jesus or you guys made him up? No, I don’t think Judaism does not teach that Jesus was made up.
They just do not believe that he was the Messiah. And that’s what Christians believe. So, Jesus was Jewish, just like, I mean, being Jewish can mean one of two things or both.
It can mean that you are descended from the 12 tribes of Israel, or particularly from Judah. That would have to do with your lineage and your race and your ethnicity, that you’d be Jewish that way. Or you might not be ethnically Jewish, but you could be converted to the Jewish religion, in which case you’re considered Jewish.
So being Jewish can be a religious description, whether you’re ethnically Jewish or not, or it can be an ethnic description, whether you’re religious or not. Of course, many Jews are both ethnically and religiously Jewish. So the word Jew is a little ambiguous in that respect, but Jesus was both ethnically and originally, well, religiously a Jew also.
As were his disciples. He came through the Jewish line. He was descended from David, who was descended from Judah, who was descended from Abraham.
So Jesus was an ethnic Jew, and he worshiped at the temple with the other Jews of his time. The difference between Jesus and the Jewish religion, or the modern Jews who are not believers, is that the Jews who did not receive Christ as Messiah were looking for something else in a Messiah. They were expecting the Messiah, but they thought he would do different things than what Jesus did.
And because Jesus didn’t do what they thought the Messiah should do, they reject him as the Messiah. Now, thousands of Jews did not reject Jesus and do not. There are hundreds of thousands of Jewish people today who believe Jesus is the Messiah.
We call them Messianic Jews. We also call them Christians. These are Jewish people who have become believers in Jesus.
Now, they are certainly outnumbered by the Jews who don’t believe in Jesus, and they’re also outnumbered by the Gentiles who do believe in Jesus, but they are still a considerable number. Well over 100,000 certainly Jewish people believe in Jesus as the Messiah. So it’s not quite correct to say the Jews don’t believe in Jesus.
Most of them do not follow him, but they all know who he was. Any Jew who says, we don’t think Jesus existed is simply not in step even with Judaism. The Jews know about Jesus, they just don’t like him.
They especially don’t like him because a lot of Jewish people by the thousands in the early days, accepted him as the Messiah, and the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin and the ruling Jews at the time did not. And so, there was conflict over that, and persecution, things like that, and things got worse. Actually, when the Christians became powerful in Europe, many times they persecuted the Jews who were not believers.
And so, there’s been bad blood sometimes between the Jews and the Christians. Not necessarily so much now. Most Christians are fairly friendly to Jews, and a lot of Jews are friendly to Christians, but the Jewish, the Orthodox Judaism still says the same things about Jesus.
It’s still in the Talmud. No one has removed that. So that’s why.
Now, you wondered whether the people who listen to my show are interested in verifying things historically, like the story of Jonah, or apparently you’re thinking of the story of Jesus, like you’re saying Jews don’t even know who he was. Why do we even think he existed? Well, Jesus is definitely a historical character.
The Roman historians mention him. The Talmud mentions him. Josephus mentions him.
The four gospels written by people who either knew him, as in the case of Matthew and John, or traveled with people who knew him, as is the case of Mark and Luke. These people were very close to the situation. They were good historical sources.
There’s no question that Jesus was a historical character. And the Jews don’t deny that. The Jews acknowledge he was a historical character, but just not the Messiah.
And that’s a matter of opinion, obviously. Now, Jonah is a little different. We can’t really verify whether Jonah lived or not, although there is a historical record that mentions him in Second Kings.
He is mentioned as being a prophet who lived during the time of Jeroboam II in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, who is a known entity. So, I mean, Kings mentions Jonah prophesying during the time of Jeroboam II. But the book of Jonah has many features in it that could never be verified except from the book itself.
I mean, that a man would be thrown overboard in the Mediterranean as swallowed by a whale and vomited up three days later. Where would we find confirmation of that? You know, I mean, how many people wrote about it?
How many people were there to see that and to write that? There’d be no monuments in the ocean to point out that that happened. Perhaps the one thing we would expect to have some verification of is that it indicates that the people of Nineveh all repented of their evil ways through the preaching of Jonah.
And I don’t think we have any particular reference to that in secular history, but not surprisingly, we don’t have everything. And of course, the Jews and Christians would think that the people of Nineveh, you know, giving up their sinful ways for, you know, a few years would be a wonderful thing worth them mentioning. And that’s why it’s mentioned in Jewish documents.
And even Jesus mentions it too. So it’s mentioned in the Old and the New Testament. But the people of Assyria wouldn’t necessarily find that to be a major news story.
And, you know, when the history of the kings are written up, not everything is mentioned. And something like this strikes me as not necessarily something you’d have. So many of the stories, of course, can’t be verified outside the Bible.
Though within the Bible, they sometimes have more than one person mention it. We’ve got the Second Kings mentions Jonah, the Book of Jonah mentions him, and Jesus mentions him. So anyway, yeah, we Christians are very interested in looking into the historical veracity of the stories that we believe.
And frankly, archaeology has been very good to us in this respect. So many things that the Bible claimed that had not been verified elsewhere have been confirmed by archaeology. I have, unfortunately, no time to talk about them now because I’ll be cut off here in 10 seconds.
Thanks for calling. You’ve been listening to The Narrow Path. Our website is thenarrowpath.com.
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