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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 so that we can have a conversation with you two ways. You can call in if you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith, or you maybe have a disagreement with the host, you want to talk about that, feel free to give me a call.
We have an hour without any commercial breaks to just talk to you and have you talk to me and to our audience. The number to call, if you d like to be on the program, is 844-484-5737.
That’s 844-484-5737.
If you call and get a busy signal, just call a little later in the program and a line will probably open up. I have an announcement to make, as you may know, if you’re a regular listener, I’m speaking a variety of places this weekend, next week, 11 different evening ventures I’m speaking on different subjects. I don’t think I’m speaking on the same thing twice anywhere.
And I’m also teaching in the mornings for Youth with a Mission for these two weeks and doing the radio show. So I’m keeping pretty busy. And if you are in Washington state, and would like to attend any of these meetings, you may look at our website, thenarrowpath.com under announcements, and you’ll find there the locations and subject matter and so forth of all the meetings this weekend, next week in Washington state.
Now, where I’m going to be tonight is in Linwood, Washington. I’ll be speaking at the Maple Park Church from 7 o’clock to about 830. And I’ll be teaching on the subject of discipleship, and that will be followed by a time of Q&A.
So if you live anywhere near Linfield, Washington, and want to join us, you can go to the Maple Park Church. The address is found at our website, thenarrowpath.com. Or you can probably find the address for the Maple Park Church in Linwood elsewhere on the Internet, or maybe you even know where it is if you’re local.
All right, so that’s tonight at 7, and something else every other night. So just want you to know about that before we go to the phone. Our phone lines are full.
So we’ll talk first of all to John from East Meadow, New York. John, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for joining us.
Hey Steve, hi. Yeah, I have kind of like a two-part question. When Jesus resurrected, is it true that he only appeared to those at the Quorum Church and as disciples?
And did, whether that’s the case or not, did the Pharisees and others eventually go to the tomb and realize that Jesus had resurrected? Did the townspeople understand that eventually?
Right. Well, the Bible indicates that Jesus appeared to quite a lot of people. We don’t know all their names, but the impression is that these were people who had been his disciples, with one exception, and that was Jesus’ brother James.
James was not a believer before Jesus rose from the dead, but he later became an important person in the church, and apparently God had a plan for him. So in spite of the fact that James, the brother of Jesus, was not a believer, at the time Jesus appeared to him, and that apparently caused him and the other brothers of Jesus to become believers as well, including Jude. So apart from James, I don’t know of any other unbelievers that were appeared to him.
Now Paul does say in 1 Corinthians 15, that there was one point where 500 people saw him at one time. He doesn’t say where that was, when that was, or who it was. But my impression is that probably happened in Galilee where Jesus had a lot of followers, and he probably was meeting with a gathering of his believers.
So no, he didn’t appear to the Pharisees, or he didn’t appear to, you know, anyone else, except, of course, Saul of Tarsus on the way to Damascus. That was later. Now, did the Pharisees go and check the empty tomb to see if he was risen?
They probably did. I’m sure at least some of them did. They must have at least sent some agents there to check it out because when the apostles began to teach that Jesus was risen from the dead, that was an annoying and troublesome teaching to the leaders of the Jews.
And so they would gladly have wanted to debunk that, which would be an easy thing to do if they could just go to the tomb and find the body of Jesus. So I’m sure that that was one of the first things they did. You know, when they heard that Jesus rose from the dead, in all likelihood, someone was sent from them to go and check and make sure that the tomb didn’t have the body in it.
Because if it did, that would be very advantageous to them in wanting to debunk the teaching of the disciples. So we have to assume that, you know, they did check the tomb. Now, there is a record in Matthew that the guards at the tomb went and reported what had happened to the chief priests.
And the chief priests paid them off to claim that they had fallen asleep and that the disciples had stolen the body. And Matthew says, and that is the rumor that continues among the Jews to this day, meaning by the time Matthew wrote this, that rumor is still around among the Jews. So they apparently, even if they found the body not there, they didn’t give up the faith and become Christians, they instead they made up a story that the disciples had stolen the body.
Which was not a very realistic story, because we have no reason to believe the disciples had an interest in stealing the body. The disciples had become despondent. They weren’t interested in starting a religion.
They wanted to go back to fishing. And if they did want to steal the body, which would be a strange thing to want to do, how could they pull it off when there were guards at the tomb and so forth? So I think the story that the disciples stole the body never did really ring true, but it worked for people who wanted to remain doubters, I would say.
Okay.
Thank you very much, Steve.
Have a good night. All right. All right.
God bless you. Okay. Our next caller is Eddie from Dearborn, Michigan.
Hi, Eddie. Welcome.
Hey, Steve. How are you? I hope you’re doing well.
Okay. So Steve, I don’t want to speak for a long time, so I’m going to ask you my question and then get off the phone. And I want to share your audience a lot of maybe grief.
I recently went through a lot of hardship and turmoil, a lot of suffering. I’ve heard you say that just like David in the Old Testament, how he counted the numbers, just like how God was angry with Pharaoh, that the Lord was already angry with them to begin with. Hence, this is the reason why he blinded their eyes.
And I’ve also heard you say that the Lord has glory, will receive glory by our suffering. I’m suffering a lot, Steve. Is the Lord receiving glory by this?
Because it’s at my expense. And at my expense, I am down and out all day. I just don’t know how to continue on with life.
Right. So you read in the Bible that when we suffer, God can be glorified in it. And you’re suffering.
And so you wonder if God is being glorified. Well, God is not automatically glorified in our suffering. But our suffering is an opportunity to glorify God.
And what that means is if we respond to our sufferings, trusting God, He gives us grace in those sufferings. And therefore, we are strengthened in those sufferings. And God is glorified in that.
Because everybody experiences sufferings. You don’t have to be a Christian to experience sufferings. The world is full of sufferings.
And most people are just Christians. It just makes the Lord look like a sadist.
I’m sorry to interrupt. It just makes him look like a sadist to others that maybe are hearing it. And was he already mad at me before?
Wait, wait, wait.
Why would it make God look like a sadist? Why would it make God look like a sadist? What caused your problems?
How is your suffering? Is your suffering caused by sickness?
I know that it caused me. Yes, me.
Yes.
OK, then how does that make God look bad if you’re causing your own sufferings?
It leads to him going through and approving the decision of Satan to attack me, perhaps, just like he did with Job.
Well, God allows the devil to test everybody, not just you. Everyone’s tests are a different kind, but God is not a sadist by testing us. Just like a professor in a university is not a sadist when he gives exams to his students.
The idea is hoping they will pass them. They might not. They should.
But he hopes they will pass them. And so God gives us that opportunity to glorify him in sufferings and to learn and to gain from it. And Paul said that our light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us a far more exceeding an eternal weight of glory.
While we don’t look at the things that are seen, but the things are not seen. So in our sufferings, we set our eyes not on the things that are seen, but on the things that are not seen, which is of course God and his purposes and his grace. Those things that are not seen are the things that cause our present sufferings to work for us an eternal weight of glory.
Now, we would suffer whether God had any role in it or not. I mean, we bring suffering on ourselves. God didn’t bring suffering into the world, man did.
And the question is whether God allows us to suffer. You notice whether he lets influences that would cause suffering or not, whether he lets them come or doesn’t let them come. Well, he’s under no obligation to stop them.
Where’s my way out? He’s supposed to give me a way out. I’m supposed to be his.
Where’s my way out? How much longer do I have to suffer?
Well, of course, I can’t answer how long you have to suffer or what your way out is. Your way out is into the arms of Christ. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to suffer.
You might suffer every day of your life. There’s many people who do. The Apostle Paul certainly did.
He was beaten, he was imprisoned, he was shipwrecked, he had stripes innumerable from beatings and so forth. And he suffered a lot. And I don’t think he ever got out of his sufferings until he was beheaded and went to be with Jesus.
So when Paul wrote Philippians, he was in a third world jail, pretty miserable. And he said, hey, I’m eager to depart from here and be with Christ. Yeah, that’s kind of you kind of feel that even more when you’re suffering than when you’re not.
So our escape from suffering is not in this world necessarily, though God sometimes in this life does give us periods of relief. But none is guaranteed. This world is not a place of enjoyment.
It’s a place of testing. It’s a place of preparing. It’s where we’re being vetted to reign with Christ in another world at another time.
So when do you get out of it? I’d say when you die. Now, the sufferings you’re going through right now, I don’t know what they are, but they may be temporary.
They may go away at some point. You may be delivered from them or not. I have friends who are in chronic pain.
They’re in excruciating pain all the time, day and night, for years. And I’m sure they’re thinking, you know, when can I get out of this? And you know, we don’t know.
When God wants you to get out of this, when you know. The thing is, it’s hard to be, you know, not thinking about yourself when you’re in great pain. Obviously, when you’re in great pain, it’s hard not to think about relief.
But that’s true whether you’re a Christian or not. The Christian’s life is supposed to be different than a non-Christian because we have God. We trust God.
We believe that nothing is going to happen to us. That can destroy us if we’re trusting him. And that nothing that he allows to happen to us will harm us in any way that he can’t make some good come from it, that makes it worthwhile.
And so again, I don’t have any idea of what form of suffering you’re going through. But obviously, I also can’t predict when whatever suffering you’re going through may be relieved, if at all. But we’re told to be strong and of good courage and to fight like a man.
And what we’re fighting against is the temptation to cave in, the temptation to lose faith, the temptation to compromise because we’re disappointed with God, because he’s letting us go through stuff and not removing it from us. The Apostle Paul had a thorn in the flesh, which apparently agonized him all the time. It was excruciating and apparently for years.
And he prayed three times that Christ would take it away. And Jesus said, No, my grace is sufficient for you. My strength is made perfect in your suffering.
Now, that would be true of you or anybody who’s a believer in Christ, that God gives grace as needed, as we trust him. Now, will we trust him? That’s kind of up to us.
And so how you’ll come out is whether God will be glorified in this suffering of yours, or whether it’ll be wasted suffering and nothing comes of it. That’s kind of up to you to decide if you can trust God, you’re going to glorify God in the fire. That’s up to you.
That’s what every Christian has to decide to do. But the Bible does talk about people suffering in vain. Paul said to the Galatians who are about to fall from the faith because they’re suffering.
He said, have I endured these things for nothing, in vain? In the prophets, God says, I struck you in vain. You didn’t change.
So the issue here is, it’s not on God to decide if he’s going to be glorified in this. That’s on you. You can suffer and not bring glory to God, in which case you suffered for nothing.
But if you suffer and bring glory to God, that’s got eternal consequences of value to you and to God and to others. So I just suggest that you listen to my lectures, Making Sense Out of Suffering. If you have listened to them, I’d say listen to them again.
Making Sense Out of Suffering is four lectures at our website, thenarrowpath.com under the tab that says Topical Lectures. Okay, we’ll talk to Terrence from Little Rock, Arkansas. Terrence, welcome to The Narrow Path.
Thanks for calling.
Revelation chapter 20 verse 5, But the rest of the dead live not again until the thousand years were finished. Who are the rest of the dead in Revelation chapter 20 verse 5?
Who are the rest of the dead who don’t live again until after a thousand years are finished? The answer to that question depends on how you understand what that thousand years is and when it is. If it is talking about a future millennium, as many people believe, that begins when Jesus returns, then the rest of the dead are those who are not part of the first resurrection as it says.
It says he saw the first resurrection. He saw the souls of the saints who were beheaded for Christ, sitting on thrones and reigning with Christ, but the rest of the dead didn’t live again until the end of the thousand years. So the way a pre-millennial view holds this is that Jesus comes back at the beginning of the thousand years.
He sets up a thousand year reign on earth, and he has resurrected only the saints, only the believers, and they are reigning with him for a thousand years. But the unbelievers don’t get raised from the dead until at the end of the millennium. And you find, of course, at the end of that chapter, the sea gives up the dead, and death and Hades give up the dead, and they’re all judged from the things written in the books and so forth.
So if a person takes the thousand years to be a future millennium, the rest of the dead are the people who’ve died throughout history, who will not be resurrected until the end of that time. But that is in contrast to the ones who have at that time been resurrected, who would be the Christians resurrected at the time Jesus returned. And therefore, the Christians would be reigning with Christ for the thousand years, and the other people who were not Christians would not be raised at all until afterwards.
Now, I’m not a pre-millennialist. I believe that the thousand years is a symbol of the period between the first coming and the second coming of Christ. So the age we’re living in, it’s symbolizes.
And Jesus bound Satan at his first coming at the cross, and he’ll destroy him, as it says in Chapter 20, Verse 9, in flaming fire when he comes back in his second coming. In the meantime, John saw in a vision people in heaven who had died who were Christians, and we know it was dead people because he saw their souls. He said, I saw the souls of those who had been martyred.
Well, their souls would be in their bodies if they weren’t dead. He saw their disembodied souls, and that’s where they go when they die. So he sees where the martyrs have gone, who have died during this age, and he speaks of this age as the first resurrection.
And those who are the believers are the ones who had the first resurrection, because Jesus said in John 5, 24, he said, He that hears my words and believes in him that sent me has everlasting life and will not come into condemnation because he has passed from death into life. Now, we who are believers have passed from death into life. Jesus said that’s a resurrection, but it’s a spiritual resurrection.
And so in this present age, believers have experienced a spiritual resurrection. That’s we call it being born again, being regenerated. And this is called the first resurrection because we will also experience a physical resurrection later.
For us, it’s the first. We have something of a resurrection spiritually now. And when Jesus comes back, we’ll have another resurrection.
This will be of our bodies this time. But the unbelievers who don’t experience the first resurrection and they die, they don’t get raised again until the bodies are raised at the end. That’s at the end of the thousand years.
So that’s how I understand that. I realize that can be confusing, especially if you’ve only heard one view, or even if you’ve heard both views, it still might be confusing. But I have lectures on this, on Revelation 20, at our website, thenarrowpath.com.
If you look under verse by verse lectures, you’ll find my lectures through the whole Bible, and there’s lectures on Revelation. And you can listen to one on Revelation 20, and you’ll hear at least what I think it means. You’ll certainly find what other people think it means.
I’m listening to other sources. I appreciate your call, Terrence. Let’s talk to Fred from Alameda, California.
Welcome to The Narrow Path, Fred.
Yes, hi.
I had a friend who referred to Judas as Caryat as the son of perdition. And my question is, is this an accurate label, and what exactly does that mean, the son of perdition?
Yeah, it is an accurate label, and Jesus himself used it when he was praying. He said to the father in Chapter 17 of John, he says, all that you’ve given me, I have lost nothing except the son of perdition. And he’s referring to Judas.
Now, the son of perdition is also used in another place in Second Thessalonians 2 in talking about the man of sin. So both of them are said to be sons of perdition. In fact, some people have thought, since Judas is called the son of perdition, and the man of sin is also called that, maybe the man of sin is Judas come back.
Now, I don’t believe that, but there are some who’ve taken that view because of that. But you see, son of perdition is actually not a proper name or title. The word perdition, the Greek word means destruction.
And to say he’s a son of destruction, that’s a Hebrewism, a Hebrew way of saying, a person is going to be destroyed. A son of some phenomenon in the Hebrew idiom often means somebody who experiences that. We wouldn’t talk that way, but we’re not the Hebrews and the Bible is written in their language, not ours.
So, son of perdition just means someone who’s going to be destroyed, a person who will be destroyed, because perdition means destruction. Now, Judas, of course, was destroyed, and so he was the son of perdition, and so is the man of sin. Now, it might even suggest not only that he’s going to be destroyed, but that he’s destined to be destroyed.
There might be something more than just the fact of what’s going to happen. There may be the insinuation that God has, in a sense, predestined this person for that destruction. And that would be reasonable too, because God has predestined that people who are wicked will be destroyed.
And so, Judas chose to be wicked, so he’s in that category. But the term is used as I say two different people, and I don’t think that means that the two people are to be identified with each other. I think it’s just a phrase that means the one who’s destined to be destroyed.
All right, there’s a lot of noise on your line, but I hope that helps you. See, Dwight from Denver, Colorado. Welcome to The Narrow Path.
Good to hear from you.
Yes, Steve, are there any verses in the New Testament that tells us that Gentiles are also part of or under the New Covenant?
Well, frankly, yeah, we, Paul said in 1st and 2nd Corinthians 3, that he was a minister of the New Covenant. Now, Paul was an apostle to the Gentiles, and the Corinthians he was writing to were Gentiles. So obviously, he’s saying they’re part of the New Covenant.
They’re the product of his ministry, and he’s a minister of the New Covenant. There’d be no reason to distinguish. I realized that Jeremiah said God would make the New Covenant with the House of Israel and the House of Judah.
And so some people think the New Covenant is only for Israel, but that’s not taken into account the fact that Israel never was all Jewish. Even in the Old Testament, a Gentile could be part of Israel. And in the New Israel, which is in Christ, there’s even more Gentiles than Jews.
Israel, whether in the Old Testament or the New, referred to people who were in the Covenant, people of God, and a Gentile could be in there as much as a Jew. And there were Gentiles in there. I mean, you could be a proselyte, a Gentile who converts to Jesus.
Then you’re part of Israel. And it’s true now. Jesus made the New Covenant with the remnant of Israel, the disciples.
They were Jewish. But later Gentiles were allowed to come in when they heard about it. And Paul talks about it.
The Gentiles who have had faith have been grafted into the same tree as the Jews who had faith, which is the New Israel. And so God has made the New Covenant with the house of Israel. Though it only applies to the remnant of Israel, the faithful.
And that, of course, the Old Testament suggested that anyway. So yeah, there’s Gentiles are part of that remnant now, just as they were part of Israel in the Old Testament. Some of them were.
Not all were. But anyone who was faithful to God was part of Israel through the Covenant. Okay.
Thanks.
All right, Dwight. I appreciate your call.
Bye.
God bless you. All right. Before I take another call, I have to notice that we’re at the bottom of the hour, and that means I’m going to have to make an announcement.
We do have calls waiting. We also have a line open if you want to call. The number is 844-484-5737.
At this point, I want you to know that The Narrow Path is a listener-supported ministry. You know, we don’t even have a newsletter. We don’t send out any appeals.
If you contact us, we don’t have an email newsletter. We don’t have any. We just don’t do that.
The way we stay on the air is twice. Once at this point and once at the end of the program, I mentioned to our listeners, we’re listener supported. Now, why would we need any support?
I don’t take any money for this, and neither does anyone else. We have about 20 people who do voluntary things for The Narrow Path all over the country, and none of them is paid, and I’m not paid. Why do we need money?
Well, because radio stations need to be paid. We buy the time just like an advertiser would from the radio stations, only we’re buying an hour, not a minute. And so, our bills, paying for radio stations, come to between $130,000 and $140,000 a month, well over a million dollars a year.
And all of that is paid to radio stations to keep us on there. And none of it comes from sales of products, who we don’t sell any products, nor from sponsors. They just come from people like you, who listen to the program, you think it’s a good program, you want to keep it on, hope other people will be able to hear it in the future, and you want to support it.
Well, if you want to do that, you can write to us at The Narrow Path, PO. Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. That address again is The Narrow Path, PO.
Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. Now, you can also donate from the website, but everything at the website is free. You don’t have to donate, but you can.
It’s at thenarrowpath.com. I’ll be back in 30 seconds. We have another half hour coming.
Don’t go away.
If truth did exist, would it matter to you? Whom would you consult as an authority on the subject? In a 16-letter series entitled, The Authority of Scriptures, Steve Gregg not only thoroughly presents the case for the Bible’s authority, but also explains how this truth is to be applied to a believer’s daily walk and outlook.
The Authority of Scriptures can be downloaded in MP3 format without charge from our website, thenarrowpath.com.
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 about the Christian faith, or you disagree with the host, want to talk about that, feel free to give me a call.
The number is 844-484-5737.
And remember, if you’re in Washington state, you may be near Linwood, Washington, or not, but I’ll be speaking at the Maple Park Church in Linwood tonight at seven o’clock on discipleship. And we certainly encourage you to join us if you’re in the area. The address and the information about all my speaking events here in Washington state this week and next week can be found at our website, thenarrowpath.com, and go to the tab there that says Announcements.
Mary from Santa Cruz is next. Hi, Mary. Good to hear from you again.
Hi, Steve. I have been listening to your Life of Christ lecture series, and that it’s the Christian’s prerogative to go by the teachings of Christ, and not by church traditions, or possibly maybe the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And I want to apply this question as there’s a very, very well-known brother, and this is a big controversy, and probably a lot of people know about it.
I don’t want to mention his name because it’s just going to stir things up. But he received a lot of persecution for advice he gave to a grandmother regarding a wedding.
Oh, yes. I remember the case.
Yes. Well, he encouraged her to go. And when he did this, he did it specifically to her in her circumstance based on compassion and her particular situation.
But he has received horrible persecution, in my opinion.
Still, huh? This happened a while ago, right?
Oh, yes.
I remember it was controversial at the time.
Well, there’s just a video from yesterday. A podcaster said that he absolutely has to repent, and he won’t. He won’t repent of what he did because he said, in another circumstance, I would have given different advice.
And here’s the question. I believe this brother should be given the benefit of the doubt, rather than being thrown off all the many stations that he was on. He’s a wonderful brother.
Yeah.
And the attitude of the Christians doing this to him, I believe, is not according to the teachings of Christ. What do you say?
Yeah, I think Christians can be a little bit too judgmental. I mean, that’s an understatement, obviously. Christians are often too judgmental.
As I understand it, this brother had an older woman, I think her daughter or niece or someone who’s getting married in a same-sex marriage. And it was a transgender. A transgender one.
A transgender.
And so I think he had struggles with it. But given the circumstances, and I don’t remember what they all were, he judged that the thing that would most glorify God in this particular instance would be for her to accept the invitation. I don’t know what other advice he gave her.
He might have said, accept the invitation with these caveats or whatever. Of course, I don’t have the details of the situation. But this man is an evangelical leader.
He’s a very influential brother. Yes, very influential.
And he’s on radio stations all over the place. So he’s a wise Bible teacher in general. I don’t know that I would have given the same advice.
But if I knew as much about the situation as he does, maybe I would have. I don’t know. I don’t think any of us are in the position to judge a man for the advice he gave, if he gave it according to a good conscience.
And he’s not some kind of a reprobate who’s out advising people to do immoral things. I mean, obviously, he’s against transgenderism. He’s against gay marriage.
I mean, he’s an evangelical. He loves the Lord. He teaches the Bible well.
And, you know, maybe he’s making a mistake. I don’t know if he is or not. But if he is, that’s not something to crucify him over.
We have to believe he is making a judgment based on his Christian conscience and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. The Bible, of course, doesn’t say anything directly on the subject of going to a wedding of a transgender person. And therefore, the decision to do so or not is going to come from the way that any given Christian who’s facing that invitation applies their moral values along with all other Christian considerations and tries to do the thing best in the side of God.
Now, not everyone’s going to see it the same way. We might say, what’s the obvious?
This was a grandchild of hers, and she couldn’t figure out the right thing to do. So, of course, she asked him. And my question is, shouldn’t a Christian be allowed to decide something of this nature, a yes or no, based on the exact circumstances that you’re in, based on your own spirit and your own feeling of the leading of the Lord, rather than a principle, a general principle of right and wrong?
So these brothers who are condemning him are saying, you can never, ever show any kind of approval of this sort of thing. And it wasn’t about her showing approval. It was about showing her grandchild love.
I know. Well, here’s what I say. I say there are many things in our society that are sinful, that we as Christians, we can say on principle, we cannot do them.
But when somebody else who’s not a Christian does them, the Bible doesn’t tell us that we have to do a particular thing, one way or the other. In fact, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5, that the standards for Christian conduct are for Christians. He says, I wrote you an epistle not to keep company of fornicators and other debauched people, but he said, I didn’t mean those in the world because you’d have to leave the world if you weren’t going to keep company with fornicators.
If we included those who are in the world, he said, I’m talking about people who call themselves brethren. If a man calls himself a brother and does these things, then don’t associate with them. Now, I don’t know if her granddaughter calls herself a Christian or not, but I think that in the days of Paul, calling yourself a Christian meant something considerably more than it means in modern Western civilization because a person called himself a Christian because he was part of the fellowship of the saints, you know, part of the unity of the saints and so forth.
Today, anyone can call themselves a Christian and not have any connection with Christianity at all, including Christ. So, I mean, I think what Paul is saying is you don’t want the church to seem to be supporting fornication. And therefore, if somebody is a part of the church and they’re fornicating, well, then that’s what matter for church discipline.
But this isn’t even the same kind of question. The girl in question is not the one they’re trying to discipline. She’s the one doing the bad thing.
You know, the grandma is not doing a bad thing. She can stay home and do nothing, or she can go to the wedding and say nothing, or she can go to the wedding and speak to someone about it and say, I don’t care for this. I mean, the Bible doesn’t say what to do in those cases.
You do what you feel led to do that you feel is consistent with your convictions. But going to a wedding, you know, I’ve gone to weddings of people who the person had left their spouse before and married someone else. To my mind, that’s not a marriage.
But I didn’t feel, I mean, the person’s knew how I felt about it. But, you know, going to a wedding doesn’t always mean to everybody that you’re endorsing it. It should.
I believe that, ideally, going to a wedding is your way of celebrating something you endorse and agree with. But that’s not always understood to be the case. So it certainly is not the case that the Bible tells us that going to a wedding, even if it’s not a good wedding, is a sin.
Now, even if the person getting married is sinning by getting married, you going to the wedding is not anywhere in the Bible said to be a sin. So I think that church discipline is to be enacted against people who are sinning. Grandma is not sinning if she goes to that wedding.
Now, if she encourages the sin, she says, hey, I hope you guys have a great marriage and it lasts forever. Well, obviously, you can’t wish that if you have Christian convictions in such a case, but I don’t think she’s doing that. So to my mind, this is to try to separate from a minister because he gave what he thought was good advice.
Even if we think that wasn’t good advice, that’s not good advice. And say he has to repent of that advice. Well, why should he repent if he doesn’t believe it was wrong?
Who are you to judge another man’s servant, Paul said. Now, if he was sinning himself, well, that’d be a different thing. If the minister is sinning, then there’s church discipline.
He’s not sinning. Even grandma’s not sinning. And he’s just talking to grandma.
There’s nothing wrong with that. And if he expresses his opinion, how can a man be, how can a godly man be persecuted for expressing his opinion? He believes it’s, he believes God would have it.
Anyway, I, yeah, I didn’t realize this was still a controversy. I haven’t heard much about it lately. But anyway, I’m, I’m on his side, even though I don’t believe he, I don’t think I would have given the same advice, but maybe, again, I don’t know the situation as much as he does.
So it’s none of my business. But whether he gave good advice or bad advice, I’m certainly on his side against his critics in this case, because I think it’s none of their business. He’s not sinning.
He’s not doing a sin himself. I agree. Anyway, I appreciate your call, but thanks for the update on that.
It’s kind of discouraging. Tony in Orcas Island, Washington. Hi, Tony, welcome.
Oh, hi. Yeah, okay. I’ve listened to your show for quite a while, the last few years, and really like it.
And I don’t know, just a little while back, I think one of your callers mentioned something about, I don’t know how to frame it, maybe God doesn’t really communicate with us or talk to us or whatever. And I thought, yeah, I wouldn’t trust anyone with like, that would say that they have new prophecy from God. But here’s the thing that I’ve experienced.
Let me see, in 1980, I was born again. I was 16. And before that, when I was really little, my mom told me about God and Jesus and sent me to Sunday school.
So I never doubted. Anyway, so over the last several years, every once in a great while, I know it’s from God. I am a gardener.
And there was one time to where it was the very end of the day, the owners of the place left, so there was no one there. And I was tired. And I thought, what can I do for the last few minutes just to make it look good?
And I won’t hear any complaints. And I go home. So I grabbed a rake and started raking under this big pear tree by their garage.
And that’s all I had on my mind. And all of a sudden, it wasn’t an out loud voice. It was almost like, I don’t know, telepathy or God just kind of like hijacked my thoughts and told me to…
It was the exact words I heard and like very quietly were stepped out into the driveway now. And so I did. And as soon as I looked at my boots on the gravel, I was going to start wondering what it was all about.
Well, I didn’t have time. I heard a crack and I looked up in the tree where I had just been standing under and I watched this huge limb break off the tree and sail and hit the ground where I was.
Well, that’s tremendous. That’s tremendous. I believe…
I mean, if you want to tell me that was God speaking to you, I can accept that. I’ve never said it. I’ve never suggested that God doesn’t speak to people.
I’m not sure what call you’re referring to. I don’t even know what the caller was saying because I don’t remember the call. But if you thought that there’s…
that I hold the position that God doesn’t ever speak to people, well, you misunderstand me. I believe God does speak to us. I don’t think he does it as often as some people claim.
I think a lot of people say, God said this to me and God told me this, and I think they say that a lot of times when they’re really just expressing their strong emotions or feelings. But the fact that people say that God told them things when perhaps he didn’t doesn’t mean that there’s never any times when he did. I personally do believe that God speaks to us, so I appreciate that testimony.
Wade from Willamard, California. Welcome. Yeah.
Hi, Steve.
Hey, good to hear from you.
Yeah. Hey, somebody asked me just the other day here about doing, the Bible is not accurate. They’re contradicting itself.
And they were referring to the taking nothing for your journey, neither staff, nor wallet, nor bread, nor money. That was Luke. And then Mark says the opposite.
He says he commanded them that they should take nothing for the journey except a staff only. And then Matt, who on the other hand, doesn’t, says also no staff. So I wasn’t quite sure how to answer that.
I did read somewhere that there’s two types of staff, a short one for defense and a long one for walking. But I was just curious what your thoughts and maybe how I would have answered that.
Yeah, well, that’s of course when Jesus was sending out the 12 two by two to visit villages and evangelize and preach the gospel for short term outreach. And he did give instructions about traveling light and don’t take money and things like that. But you’re right, that is mentioned in two or three of the gospels.
And one of them reads a little differently than the others. I think, as you said, one of them says take a staff, the other says don’t take a staff. Well, what we have to assume is that one of those is representing what Jesus said and the other one isn’t.
Now, let’s just say Jesus said take a staff. And then one of the gospel writers wrote, we find in another gospel, he said, don’t take a staff. Did I just say it that way or the other way?
Anyway, obviously, there are times when the gospel writers don’t give the same details, but even if they do, it’s not always the case that the copyists who copied their writings have copied it correctly. And all the gospels that we have, all the biblical books have come down to us through many copies and textual critics, which are people who study all these different copies to see which ones go back to the original more. They recognize that there are some copyists, that is scribes who made copies of them, who made mistakes.
This is not problematic. This happens every time human beings copy something. I mean, if you have a critic that says, oh, the Bible can’t be true because of this difference, just tell him, why don’t you take a few hours and just copy out the Book of Luke by hand yourself?
And then when you’re done, see if you made any typos, see if you made any mistakes. If you did, then you’re about normal. And the people who copied the gospel for us were about normal in that respect.
So as human beings, they did make mistakes, which means that the manuscripts have come down to us, in some cases, containing these small mistakes. Now, someone says, well, if there’s mistakes in the manuscripts, how can we trust the Bible? Well, let’s not over exaggerate this.
It doesn’t matter to me whether Jesus told them to take a staff or not take a staff on that occasion. It really doesn’t make any difference in my life. It doesn’t make any difference in my belief in Christ.
It doesn’t make any belief difference in my understanding of Christian duty. In other words, if a copyist has made a small error, and it’s 100 percent inconsequential, then to make an issue of it is just to be anal. More anal than is reasonable, you know?
I’m willing to believe that one of those accounts, in disagreement with another of them, may represent what we call a scribal error, of which plenty of them exist. But the great thing about this is that the textual critics who have spent their whole lives studying these manuscripts have said, these textual variations that are made by scribes, they never affect any major issues, you know. It’s like a lot of times it would be that they misspelled a word, or in writing a sentence, they put the words in a different order but didn’t change the meaning.
In some cases, they leave out a word by accident. But in many cases, most cases you can tell where they left out a word because it doesn’t make as much sense without that word or whatever. I mean, there is such a thing as being a Bible student and scholar that you study these things.
If a person is not serious about the word of God, God doesn’t owe it to that person to yield a deep understanding of it. But people who are serious students soon find out that the little mistakes that scribal heirs have made, they don’t really have any impact. There’s no doctrine of scripture that is adversely affected by some questionable scribal variant.
So, I’m willing to believe that the manuscripts as we have them do contain a contradiction there. And it’s not the only case. There’s lots of cases.
But I’m willing also to say that doesn’t mean that any of the gospel writers made that mistake. I mean, it’s possible they all wrote exactly the same thing, but one of them, in the course of being copied, a scribe put a different word in or left a word out, in which case it came down to us to this day with a change in it. That’s not a problem with the original author.
That’s a problem with the process of what we call transmission of the manuscripts. So people sometimes think that we Christians believe the Bible is a magical book, that it kind of fell down from heaven between leather covers in King James English or something. And therefore, if you find anything like that, that’s a problem.
Well, that just disproves the Christian view. It’s obvious that this is not magical. It’s got all the errors that a book written by humans would have.
Well, that’s just it. It was written by humans. And it was not only read by humans, it was copied by humans.
And so, you know, if a person is looking for a magic book, the Bible is not the place to look for one. It’s not. It contains what the New Testament contains is historical records of the life of Jesus Christ and of the apostles in the Book of Acts.
And then it’s got letters written by apostles to various churches. And if you take it as anything other than that, you’re taking it as more than it claims to be. And you’re setting up yourself up for stumbling blocks that are unnecessary.
So I will say this, that when I teach that passage, I have to say, well, there’s a difference here between these two Gospels. One says they were to take staffs, the other says they’re not. So somewhere along the line, one of these things got copied wrong, but it doesn’t matter.
You know, I don’t care if they took a staff or if they didn’t take a staff. You know, when I read the Bible, I’m getting trying to get to know God. I’m trying to get to know Jesus.
And I’m especially trying to get to know what my duties are, what pleases him and what he wants me to do and not to do. That’s the purpose of studying the scripture. And little things like that have zero impact on what I’m looking for in the Bible.
If I’m looking for a magic book, yeah, they’d have an impact. But I’ve already given up that idea.
Yeah. Okay. That’s pretty much how I took it to and after I reflected on it.
But when they asked me, I had not even, I didn’t even know about the discrepancy. It’s really Mark with Matthew and Luke. And I thought I’d just listen to how to answer it.
And then later I read about it and said, well, I was sure I would like to hear Steve’s… Yeah.
Well, there’s a lot of teachers that are more reluctant than I am to admit that there are these kinds of issues in the Bible. But I’ve been studying the Bible for 55 years. You can’t ignore these things.
And why pretend? I mean, if you’re trying to hide something from people, how are you teaching them the truth, you know? It seems to me that we should teach people the truth as it is, the way it is may have to correct some of our superstitions or some of our ideas.
But the real question we have to ask is when all the truth is known, do we have a reliable record of the life and teachings of Jesus, which is what I’m looking for? And the answer is yes. And, you know, if I’m looking for more than that, I may sometimes be disappointed with what I find.
But a lot of teachers don’t want to, they feel like they’re giving up the farm if they say that. They feel like, you know, every word in the Bible is exactly the way the Holy Spirit inspired it. Well, people like that either don’t study the Bible very well or they’re deceiving people because there are little issues like that in various parts of the Bible.
The question has got to be, does that ruin my faith? Or do I just take that and stress it? Okay, now I know that.
Let’s move on and follow Jesus. That would be my approach.
I’m right there, and I thank you for that.
Okay, wait. All right, thank you. Oh, I’m sorry.
I hit the button because I’m moving on, but I’m sorry I missed your last, what you were going on to say. We’re almost out of time here. The show is just about to end.
Sharon in Las Vegas, welcome to The Narrow Path.
Hi, Steve. My name is Sharon, and we met you, my son and I, Tom, met you a couple of times in Las Vegas and went on the Alaskan cruise with you.
Oh, I remember. Sure.
Again, your lovely wife, Dana. And I wanted to call because the gentleman that called was going through such misery, and it hurts because I can relate. And then the other lady that was having the problem with, oh, jeez, when the church, she went to the gay wedding, whatever.
What about… I always… My aunt gave me a scripture to Roman date 28.
For all things work together for good, for those who love the Lord and are called according to His purpose. And for the judgmental ones, which I think is… I kind of feel sorry for them.
Or even when I judge myself, because I’ve been given choices in my life, and I just praise the Lord. And then, I think… And I don’t know scripture for it, if it would be…
I think the Lord is making his ends of diamond pearls for him. How do you make a diamond? How do you make a pearl?
It’s not real, funny games. It hurts.
That’s right. It comes from pain in the oyster and pressure on the coal. So you’re right.
You’re right about that. I appreciate your input. I’m going to try to get one more call in here from Rand in St. Augustine, Florida.
Hi, Rand. Welcome.
Hello, Steve.
Hi.
Hi, Steve. My question has to do with the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the gift of tongues. I’m 78 now, but when I was in my 20s, I received a baptism with the gift of speaking in tongues.
And at that time, I went to a church that they practiced pretty orderly, the gift of speaking in tongues and interpretation. But I never spoke in that regard. My gift, I use as prayer language.
But a lot happened at that time, and I fell away. The last 15 years I’ve come back. I have read all of your literature on tongues and how that is overemphasized quite frequently.
But in my particular case, I use tongues as a prayer language. And when I’m out of words, when I don’t know how to express myself, or I don’t know fully the details of what I’m praying for, I speak in tongues and I pray with all of my heart.
How do you respond to that? I say more power to you. I think that’s fine.
I think that Paul said that if someone wants to speak in tongues in the church and there’s no interpreter, he said, let him speak to himself and to God. So in other words, tongues can be used that way too, to speak just to God, not publicly. So speaking in tongues in the church with an interpretation is not the only use of tongues that Paul acknowledges.
He’s mainly focused on that in 1 Corinthians 14 where he talks about church order and protocols. But he says it is, of course, possible, if there’s no interpretation, to just use it to pray, just pray in tongues. So I would affirm that that’s a biblical thing.
I appreciate your call, brother, we’re out of time. You’ve been listening to The Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg.
Our website is thenarrowpath.com. Check it out. All kinds of free resources.
You can also donate if you want at thenarrowpath.com. We’re out of time, so let’s talk again tomorrow. God bless.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 so that we can have a conversation with you two ways. You can call in if you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith, or you maybe have a disagreement with the host, you want to talk about that, feel free to give me a call.

We have an hour without any commercial breaks to just talk to you and have you talk to me and to our audience. The number to call, if you d like to be on the program, is 844-484-5737.

That’s 844-484-5737.

If you call and get a busy signal, just call a little later in the program and a line will probably open up. I have an announcement to make, as you may know, if you’re a regular listener, I’m speaking a variety of places this weekend, next week, 11 different evening ventures I’m speaking on different subjects. I don’t think I’m speaking on the same thing twice anywhere.

And I’m also teaching in the mornings for Youth with a Mission for these two weeks and doing the radio show. So I’m keeping pretty busy. And if you are in Washington state, and would like to attend any of these meetings, you may look at our website, thenarrowpath.com under announcements, and you’ll find there the locations and subject matter and so forth of all the meetings this weekend, next week in Washington state.

Now, where I’m going to be tonight is in Linwood, Washington. I’ll be speaking at the Maple Park Church from 7 o’clock to about 830. And I’ll be teaching on the subject of discipleship, and that will be followed by a time of Q&A.

So if you live anywhere near Linfield, Washington, and want to join us, you can go to the Maple Park Church. The address is found at our website, thenarrowpath.com. Or you can probably find the address for the Maple Park Church in Linwood elsewhere on the Internet, or maybe you even know where it is if you’re local.

All right, so that’s tonight at 7, and something else every other night. So just want you to know about that before we go to the phone. Our phone lines are full.

So we’ll talk first of all to John from East Meadow, New York. John, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for joining us.

Hey Steve, hi. Yeah, I have kind of like a two-part question. When Jesus resurrected, is it true that he only appeared to those at the Quorum Church and as disciples?

And did, whether that’s the case or not, did the Pharisees and others eventually go to the tomb and realize that Jesus had resurrected? Did the townspeople understand that eventually?

Right. Well, the Bible indicates that Jesus appeared to quite a lot of people. We don’t know all their names, but the impression is that these were people who had been his disciples, with one exception, and that was Jesus’ brother James.

James was not a believer before Jesus rose from the dead, but he later became an important person in the church, and apparently God had a plan for him. So in spite of the fact that James, the brother of Jesus, was not a believer, at the time Jesus appeared to him, and that apparently caused him and the other brothers of Jesus to become believers as well, including Jude. So apart from James, I don’t know of any other unbelievers that were appeared to him.

Now Paul does say in 1 Corinthians 15, that there was one point where 500 people saw him at one time. He doesn’t say where that was, when that was, or who it was. But my impression is that probably happened in Galilee where Jesus had a lot of followers, and he probably was meeting with a gathering of his believers.

So no, he didn’t appear to the Pharisees, or he didn’t appear to, you know, anyone else, except, of course, Saul of Tarsus on the way to Damascus. That was later. Now, did the Pharisees go and check the empty tomb to see if he was risen?

They probably did. I’m sure at least some of them did. They must have at least sent some agents there to check it out because when the apostles began to teach that Jesus was risen from the dead, that was an annoying and troublesome teaching to the leaders of the Jews.

And so they would gladly have wanted to debunk that, which would be an easy thing to do if they could just go to the tomb and find the body of Jesus. So I’m sure that that was one of the first things they did. You know, when they heard that Jesus rose from the dead, in all likelihood, someone was sent from them to go and check and make sure that the tomb didn’t have the body in it.

Because if it did, that would be very advantageous to them in wanting to debunk the teaching of the disciples. So we have to assume that, you know, they did check the tomb. Now, there is a record in Matthew that the guards at the tomb went and reported what had happened to the chief priests.

And the chief priests paid them off to claim that they had fallen asleep and that the disciples had stolen the body. And Matthew says, and that is the rumor that continues among the Jews to this day, meaning by the time Matthew wrote this, that rumor is still around among the Jews. So they apparently, even if they found the body not there, they didn’t give up the faith and become Christians, they instead they made up a story that the disciples had stolen the body.

Which was not a very realistic story, because we have no reason to believe the disciples had an interest in stealing the body. The disciples had become despondent. They weren’t interested in starting a religion.

They wanted to go back to fishing. And if they did want to steal the body, which would be a strange thing to want to do, how could they pull it off when there were guards at the tomb and so forth? So I think the story that the disciples stole the body never did really ring true, but it worked for people who wanted to remain doubters, I would say.

Okay.

Thank you very much, Steve.

Have a good night. All right. All right.

God bless you. Okay. Our next caller is Eddie from Dearborn, Michigan.

Hi, Eddie. Welcome.

Hey, Steve. How are you? I hope you’re doing well.

Okay. So Steve, I don’t want to speak for a long time, so I’m going to ask you my question and then get off the phone. And I want to share your audience a lot of maybe grief.

I recently went through a lot of hardship and turmoil, a lot of suffering. I’ve heard you say that just like David in the Old Testament, how he counted the numbers, just like how God was angry with Pharaoh, that the Lord was already angry with them to begin with. Hence, this is the reason why he blinded their eyes.

And I’ve also heard you say that the Lord has glory, will receive glory by our suffering. I’m suffering a lot, Steve. Is the Lord receiving glory by this?

Because it’s at my expense. And at my expense, I am down and out all day. I just don’t know how to continue on with life.

Right. So you read in the Bible that when we suffer, God can be glorified in it. And you’re suffering.

And so you wonder if God is being glorified. Well, God is not automatically glorified in our suffering. But our suffering is an opportunity to glorify God.

And what that means is if we respond to our sufferings, trusting God, He gives us grace in those sufferings. And therefore, we are strengthened in those sufferings. And God is glorified in that.

Because everybody experiences sufferings. You don’t have to be a Christian to experience sufferings. The world is full of sufferings.

And most people are just Christians. It just makes the Lord look like a sadist.

I’m sorry to interrupt. It just makes him look like a sadist to others that maybe are hearing it. And was he already mad at me before?

Wait, wait, wait.

Why would it make God look like a sadist? Why would it make God look like a sadist? What caused your problems?

How is your suffering? Is your suffering caused by sickness?

I know that it caused me. Yes, me.

Yes.

OK, then how does that make God look bad if you’re causing your own sufferings?

It leads to him going through and approving the decision of Satan to attack me, perhaps, just like he did with Job.

Well, God allows the devil to test everybody, not just you. Everyone’s tests are a different kind, but God is not a sadist by testing us. Just like a professor in a university is not a sadist when he gives exams to his students.

The idea is hoping they will pass them. They might not. They should.

But he hopes they will pass them. And so God gives us that opportunity to glorify him in sufferings and to learn and to gain from it. And Paul said that our light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us a far more exceeding an eternal weight of glory.

While we don’t look at the things that are seen, but the things are not seen. So in our sufferings, we set our eyes not on the things that are seen, but on the things that are not seen, which is of course God and his purposes and his grace. Those things that are not seen are the things that cause our present sufferings to work for us an eternal weight of glory.

Now, we would suffer whether God had any role in it or not. I mean, we bring suffering on ourselves. God didn’t bring suffering into the world, man did.

And the question is whether God allows us to suffer. You notice whether he lets influences that would cause suffering or not, whether he lets them come or doesn’t let them come. Well, he’s under no obligation to stop them.

Where’s my way out? He’s supposed to give me a way out. I’m supposed to be his.

Where’s my way out? How much longer do I have to suffer?

Well, of course, I can’t answer how long you have to suffer or what your way out is. Your way out is into the arms of Christ. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to suffer.

You might suffer every day of your life. There’s many people who do. The Apostle Paul certainly did.

He was beaten, he was imprisoned, he was shipwrecked, he had stripes innumerable from beatings and so forth. And he suffered a lot. And I don’t think he ever got out of his sufferings until he was beheaded and went to be with Jesus.

So when Paul wrote Philippians, he was in a third world jail, pretty miserable. And he said, hey, I’m eager to depart from here and be with Christ. Yeah, that’s kind of you kind of feel that even more when you’re suffering than when you’re not.

So our escape from suffering is not in this world necessarily, though God sometimes in this life does give us periods of relief. But none is guaranteed. This world is not a place of enjoyment.

It’s a place of testing. It’s a place of preparing. It’s where we’re being vetted to reign with Christ in another world at another time.

So when do you get out of it? I’d say when you die. Now, the sufferings you’re going through right now, I don’t know what they are, but they may be temporary.

They may go away at some point. You may be delivered from them or not. I have friends who are in chronic pain.

They’re in excruciating pain all the time, day and night, for years. And I’m sure they’re thinking, you know, when can I get out of this? And you know, we don’t know.

When God wants you to get out of this, when you know. The thing is, it’s hard to be, you know, not thinking about yourself when you’re in great pain. Obviously, when you’re in great pain, it’s hard not to think about relief.

But that’s true whether you’re a Christian or not. The Christian’s life is supposed to be different than a non-Christian because we have God. We trust God.

We believe that nothing is going to happen to us. That can destroy us if we’re trusting him. And that nothing that he allows to happen to us will harm us in any way that he can’t make some good come from it, that makes it worthwhile.

And so again, I don’t have any idea of what form of suffering you’re going through. But obviously, I also can’t predict when whatever suffering you’re going through may be relieved, if at all. But we’re told to be strong and of good courage and to fight like a man.

And what we’re fighting against is the temptation to cave in, the temptation to lose faith, the temptation to compromise because we’re disappointed with God, because he’s letting us go through stuff and not removing it from us. The Apostle Paul had a thorn in the flesh, which apparently agonized him all the time. It was excruciating and apparently for years.

And he prayed three times that Christ would take it away. And Jesus said, No, my grace is sufficient for you. My strength is made perfect in your suffering.

Now, that would be true of you or anybody who’s a believer in Christ, that God gives grace as needed, as we trust him. Now, will we trust him? That’s kind of up to us.

And so how you’ll come out is whether God will be glorified in this suffering of yours, or whether it’ll be wasted suffering and nothing comes of it. That’s kind of up to you to decide if you can trust God, you’re going to glorify God in the fire. That’s up to you.

That’s what every Christian has to decide to do. But the Bible does talk about people suffering in vain. Paul said to the Galatians who are about to fall from the faith because they’re suffering.

He said, have I endured these things for nothing, in vain? In the prophets, God says, I struck you in vain. You didn’t change.

So the issue here is, it’s not on God to decide if he’s going to be glorified in this. That’s on you. You can suffer and not bring glory to God, in which case you suffered for nothing.

But if you suffer and bring glory to God, that’s got eternal consequences of value to you and to God and to others. So I just suggest that you listen to my lectures, Making Sense Out of Suffering. If you have listened to them, I’d say listen to them again.

Making Sense Out of Suffering is four lectures at our website, thenarrowpath.com under the tab that says Topical Lectures. Okay, we’ll talk to Terrence from Little Rock, Arkansas. Terrence, welcome to The Narrow Path.

Thanks for calling.

Revelation chapter 20 verse 5, But the rest of the dead live not again until the thousand years were finished. Who are the rest of the dead in Revelation chapter 20 verse 5?

Who are the rest of the dead who don’t live again until after a thousand years are finished? The answer to that question depends on how you understand what that thousand years is and when it is. If it is talking about a future millennium, as many people believe, that begins when Jesus returns, then the rest of the dead are those who are not part of the first resurrection as it says.

It says he saw the first resurrection. He saw the souls of the saints who were beheaded for Christ, sitting on thrones and reigning with Christ, but the rest of the dead didn’t live again until the end of the thousand years. So the way a pre-millennial view holds this is that Jesus comes back at the beginning of the thousand years.

He sets up a thousand year reign on earth, and he has resurrected only the saints, only the believers, and they are reigning with him for a thousand years. But the unbelievers don’t get raised from the dead until at the end of the millennium. And you find, of course, at the end of that chapter, the sea gives up the dead, and death and Hades give up the dead, and they’re all judged from the things written in the books and so forth.

So if a person takes the thousand years to be a future millennium, the rest of the dead are the people who’ve died throughout history, who will not be resurrected until the end of that time. But that is in contrast to the ones who have at that time been resurrected, who would be the Christians resurrected at the time Jesus returned. And therefore, the Christians would be reigning with Christ for the thousand years, and the other people who were not Christians would not be raised at all until afterwards.

Now, I’m not a pre-millennialist. I believe that the thousand years is a symbol of the period between the first coming and the second coming of Christ. So the age we’re living in, it’s symbolizes.

And Jesus bound Satan at his first coming at the cross, and he’ll destroy him, as it says in Chapter 20, Verse 9, in flaming fire when he comes back in his second coming. In the meantime, John saw in a vision people in heaven who had died who were Christians, and we know it was dead people because he saw their souls. He said, I saw the souls of those who had been martyred.

Well, their souls would be in their bodies if they weren’t dead. He saw their disembodied souls, and that’s where they go when they die. So he sees where the martyrs have gone, who have died during this age, and he speaks of this age as the first resurrection.

And those who are the believers are the ones who had the first resurrection, because Jesus said in John 5, 24, he said, He that hears my words and believes in him that sent me has everlasting life and will not come into condemnation because he has passed from death into life. Now, we who are believers have passed from death into life. Jesus said that’s a resurrection, but it’s a spiritual resurrection.

And so in this present age, believers have experienced a spiritual resurrection. That’s we call it being born again, being regenerated. And this is called the first resurrection because we will also experience a physical resurrection later.

For us, it’s the first. We have something of a resurrection spiritually now. And when Jesus comes back, we’ll have another resurrection.

This will be of our bodies this time. But the unbelievers who don’t experience the first resurrection and they die, they don’t get raised again until the bodies are raised at the end. That’s at the end of the thousand years.

So that’s how I understand that. I realize that can be confusing, especially if you’ve only heard one view, or even if you’ve heard both views, it still might be confusing. But I have lectures on this, on Revelation 20, at our website, thenarrowpath.com.

If you look under verse by verse lectures, you’ll find my lectures through the whole Bible, and there’s lectures on Revelation. And you can listen to one on Revelation 20, and you’ll hear at least what I think it means. You’ll certainly find what other people think it means.

I’m listening to other sources. I appreciate your call, Terrence. Let’s talk to Fred from Alameda, California.

Welcome to The Narrow Path, Fred.

Yes, hi.

I had a friend who referred to Judas as Caryat as the son of perdition. And my question is, is this an accurate label, and what exactly does that mean, the son of perdition?

Yeah, it is an accurate label, and Jesus himself used it when he was praying. He said to the father in Chapter 17 of John, he says, all that you’ve given me, I have lost nothing except the son of perdition. And he’s referring to Judas.

Now, the son of perdition is also used in another place in Second Thessalonians 2 in talking about the man of sin. So both of them are said to be sons of perdition. In fact, some people have thought, since Judas is called the son of perdition, and the man of sin is also called that, maybe the man of sin is Judas come back.

Now, I don’t believe that, but there are some who’ve taken that view because of that. But you see, son of perdition is actually not a proper name or title. The word perdition, the Greek word means destruction.

And to say he’s a son of destruction, that’s a Hebrewism, a Hebrew way of saying, a person is going to be destroyed. A son of some phenomenon in the Hebrew idiom often means somebody who experiences that. We wouldn’t talk that way, but we’re not the Hebrews and the Bible is written in their language, not ours.

So, son of perdition just means someone who’s going to be destroyed, a person who will be destroyed, because perdition means destruction. Now, Judas, of course, was destroyed, and so he was the son of perdition, and so is the man of sin. Now, it might even suggest not only that he’s going to be destroyed, but that he’s destined to be destroyed.

There might be something more than just the fact of what’s going to happen. There may be the insinuation that God has, in a sense, predestined this person for that destruction. And that would be reasonable too, because God has predestined that people who are wicked will be destroyed.

And so, Judas chose to be wicked, so he’s in that category. But the term is used as I say two different people, and I don’t think that means that the two people are to be identified with each other. I think it’s just a phrase that means the one who’s destined to be destroyed.

All right, there’s a lot of noise on your line, but I hope that helps you. See, Dwight from Denver, Colorado. Welcome to The Narrow Path.

Good to hear from you.

Yes, Steve, are there any verses in the New Testament that tells us that Gentiles are also part of or under the New Covenant?

Well, frankly, yeah, we, Paul said in 1st and 2nd Corinthians 3, that he was a minister of the New Covenant. Now, Paul was an apostle to the Gentiles, and the Corinthians he was writing to were Gentiles. So obviously, he’s saying they’re part of the New Covenant.

They’re the product of his ministry, and he’s a minister of the New Covenant. There’d be no reason to distinguish. I realized that Jeremiah said God would make the New Covenant with the House of Israel and the House of Judah.

And so some people think the New Covenant is only for Israel, but that’s not taken into account the fact that Israel never was all Jewish. Even in the Old Testament, a Gentile could be part of Israel. And in the New Israel, which is in Christ, there’s even more Gentiles than Jews.

Israel, whether in the Old Testament or the New, referred to people who were in the Covenant, people of God, and a Gentile could be in there as much as a Jew. And there were Gentiles in there. I mean, you could be a proselyte, a Gentile who converts to Jesus.

Then you’re part of Israel. And it’s true now. Jesus made the New Covenant with the remnant of Israel, the disciples.

They were Jewish. But later Gentiles were allowed to come in when they heard about it. And Paul talks about it.

The Gentiles who have had faith have been grafted into the same tree as the Jews who had faith, which is the New Israel. And so God has made the New Covenant with the house of Israel. Though it only applies to the remnant of Israel, the faithful.

And that, of course, the Old Testament suggested that anyway. So yeah, there’s Gentiles are part of that remnant now, just as they were part of Israel in the Old Testament. Some of them were.

Not all were. But anyone who was faithful to God was part of Israel through the Covenant. Okay.

Thanks.

All right, Dwight. I appreciate your call.

Bye.

God bless you. All right. Before I take another call, I have to notice that we’re at the bottom of the hour, and that means I’m going to have to make an announcement.

We do have calls waiting. We also have a line open if you want to call. The number is 844-484-5737.

At this point, I want you to know that The Narrow Path is a listener-supported ministry. You know, we don’t even have a newsletter. We don’t send out any appeals.

If you contact us, we don’t have an email newsletter. We don’t have any. We just don’t do that.

The way we stay on the air is twice. Once at this point and once at the end of the program, I mentioned to our listeners, we’re listener supported. Now, why would we need any support?

I don’t take any money for this, and neither does anyone else. We have about 20 people who do voluntary things for The Narrow Path all over the country, and none of them is paid, and I’m not paid. Why do we need money?

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And all of that is paid to radio stations to keep us on there. And none of it comes from sales of products, who we don’t sell any products, nor from sponsors. They just come from people like you, who listen to the program, you think it’s a good program, you want to keep it on, hope other people will be able to hear it in the future, and you want to support it.

Well, if you want to do that, you can write to us at The Narrow Path, PO. Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. That address again is The Narrow Path, PO.

Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. Now, you can also donate from the website, but everything at the website is free. You don’t have to donate, but you can.

It’s at thenarrowpath.com. I’ll be back in 30 seconds. We have another half hour coming.

Don’t go away.

If truth did exist, would it matter to you? Whom would you consult as an authority on the subject? In a 16-letter series entitled, The Authority of Scriptures, Steve Gregg not only thoroughly presents the case for the Bible’s authority, but also explains how this truth is to be applied to a believer’s daily walk and outlook.

The Authority of Scriptures can be downloaded in MP3 format without charge from our website, thenarrowpath.com.

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 about the Christian faith, or you disagree with the host, want to talk about that, feel free to give me a call.

The number is 844-484-5737.

And remember, if you’re in Washington state, you may be near Linwood, Washington, or not, but I’ll be speaking at the Maple Park Church in Linwood tonight at seven o’clock on discipleship. And we certainly encourage you to join us if you’re in the area. The address and the information about all my speaking events here in Washington state this week and next week can be found at our website, thenarrowpath.com, and go to the tab there that says Announcements.

Mary from Santa Cruz is next. Hi, Mary. Good to hear from you again.

Hi, Steve. I have been listening to your Life of Christ lecture series, and that it’s the Christian’s prerogative to go by the teachings of Christ, and not by church traditions, or possibly maybe the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And I want to apply this question as there’s a very, very well-known brother, and this is a big controversy, and probably a lot of people know about it.

I don’t want to mention his name because it’s just going to stir things up. But he received a lot of persecution for advice he gave to a grandmother regarding a wedding.

Oh, yes. I remember the case.

Yes. Well, he encouraged her to go. And when he did this, he did it specifically to her in her circumstance based on compassion and her particular situation.

But he has received horrible persecution, in my opinion.

Still, huh? This happened a while ago, right?

Oh, yes.

I remember it was controversial at the time.

Well, there’s just a video from yesterday. A podcaster said that he absolutely has to repent, and he won’t. He won’t repent of what he did because he said, in another circumstance, I would have given different advice.

And here’s the question. I believe this brother should be given the benefit of the doubt, rather than being thrown off all the many stations that he was on. He’s a wonderful brother.

Yeah.

And the attitude of the Christians doing this to him, I believe, is not according to the teachings of Christ. What do you say?

Yeah, I think Christians can be a little bit too judgmental. I mean, that’s an understatement, obviously. Christians are often too judgmental.

As I understand it, this brother had an older woman, I think her daughter or niece or someone who’s getting married in a same-sex marriage. And it was a transgender. A transgender one.

A transgender.

And so I think he had struggles with it. But given the circumstances, and I don’t remember what they all were, he judged that the thing that would most glorify God in this particular instance would be for her to accept the invitation. I don’t know what other advice he gave her.

He might have said, accept the invitation with these caveats or whatever. Of course, I don’t have the details of the situation. But this man is an evangelical leader.

He’s a very influential brother. Yes, very influential.

And he’s on radio stations all over the place. So he’s a wise Bible teacher in general. I don’t know that I would have given the same advice.

But if I knew as much about the situation as he does, maybe I would have. I don’t know. I don’t think any of us are in the position to judge a man for the advice he gave, if he gave it according to a good conscience.

And he’s not some kind of a reprobate who’s out advising people to do immoral things. I mean, obviously, he’s against transgenderism. He’s against gay marriage.

I mean, he’s an evangelical. He loves the Lord. He teaches the Bible well.

And, you know, maybe he’s making a mistake. I don’t know if he is or not. But if he is, that’s not something to crucify him over.

We have to believe he is making a judgment based on his Christian conscience and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. The Bible, of course, doesn’t say anything directly on the subject of going to a wedding of a transgender person. And therefore, the decision to do so or not is going to come from the way that any given Christian who’s facing that invitation applies their moral values along with all other Christian considerations and tries to do the thing best in the side of God.

Now, not everyone’s going to see it the same way. We might say, what’s the obvious?

This was a grandchild of hers, and she couldn’t figure out the right thing to do. So, of course, she asked him. And my question is, shouldn’t a Christian be allowed to decide something of this nature, a yes or no, based on the exact circumstances that you’re in, based on your own spirit and your own feeling of the leading of the Lord, rather than a principle, a general principle of right and wrong?

So these brothers who are condemning him are saying, you can never, ever show any kind of approval of this sort of thing. And it wasn’t about her showing approval. It was about showing her grandchild love.

I know. Well, here’s what I say. I say there are many things in our society that are sinful, that we as Christians, we can say on principle, we cannot do them.

But when somebody else who’s not a Christian does them, the Bible doesn’t tell us that we have to do a particular thing, one way or the other. In fact, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5, that the standards for Christian conduct are for Christians. He says, I wrote you an epistle not to keep company of fornicators and other debauched people, but he said, I didn’t mean those in the world because you’d have to leave the world if you weren’t going to keep company with fornicators.

If we included those who are in the world, he said, I’m talking about people who call themselves brethren. If a man calls himself a brother and does these things, then don’t associate with them. Now, I don’t know if her granddaughter calls herself a Christian or not, but I think that in the days of Paul, calling yourself a Christian meant something considerably more than it means in modern Western civilization because a person called himself a Christian because he was part of the fellowship of the saints, you know, part of the unity of the saints and so forth.

Today, anyone can call themselves a Christian and not have any connection with Christianity at all, including Christ. So, I mean, I think what Paul is saying is you don’t want the church to seem to be supporting fornication. And therefore, if somebody is a part of the church and they’re fornicating, well, then that’s what matter for church discipline.

But this isn’t even the same kind of question. The girl in question is not the one they’re trying to discipline. She’s the one doing the bad thing.

You know, the grandma is not doing a bad thing. She can stay home and do nothing, or she can go to the wedding and say nothing, or she can go to the wedding and speak to someone about it and say, I don’t care for this. I mean, the Bible doesn’t say what to do in those cases.

You do what you feel led to do that you feel is consistent with your convictions. But going to a wedding, you know, I’ve gone to weddings of people who the person had left their spouse before and married someone else. To my mind, that’s not a marriage.

But I didn’t feel, I mean, the person’s knew how I felt about it. But, you know, going to a wedding doesn’t always mean to everybody that you’re endorsing it. It should.

I believe that, ideally, going to a wedding is your way of celebrating something you endorse and agree with. But that’s not always understood to be the case. So it certainly is not the case that the Bible tells us that going to a wedding, even if it’s not a good wedding, is a sin.

Now, even if the person getting married is sinning by getting married, you going to the wedding is not anywhere in the Bible said to be a sin. So I think that church discipline is to be enacted against people who are sinning. Grandma is not sinning if she goes to that wedding.

Now, if she encourages the sin, she says, hey, I hope you guys have a great marriage and it lasts forever. Well, obviously, you can’t wish that if you have Christian convictions in such a case, but I don’t think she’s doing that. So to my mind, this is to try to separate from a minister because he gave what he thought was good advice.

Even if we think that wasn’t good advice, that’s not good advice. And say he has to repent of that advice. Well, why should he repent if he doesn’t believe it was wrong?

Who are you to judge another man’s servant, Paul said. Now, if he was sinning himself, well, that’d be a different thing. If the minister is sinning, then there’s church discipline.

He’s not sinning. Even grandma’s not sinning. And he’s just talking to grandma.

There’s nothing wrong with that. And if he expresses his opinion, how can a man be, how can a godly man be persecuted for expressing his opinion? He believes it’s, he believes God would have it.

Anyway, I, yeah, I didn’t realize this was still a controversy. I haven’t heard much about it lately. But anyway, I’m, I’m on his side, even though I don’t believe he, I don’t think I would have given the same advice, but maybe, again, I don’t know the situation as much as he does.

So it’s none of my business. But whether he gave good advice or bad advice, I’m certainly on his side against his critics in this case, because I think it’s none of their business. He’s not sinning.

He’s not doing a sin himself. I agree. Anyway, I appreciate your call, but thanks for the update on that.

It’s kind of discouraging. Tony in Orcas Island, Washington. Hi, Tony, welcome.

Oh, hi. Yeah, okay. I’ve listened to your show for quite a while, the last few years, and really like it.

And I don’t know, just a little while back, I think one of your callers mentioned something about, I don’t know how to frame it, maybe God doesn’t really communicate with us or talk to us or whatever. And I thought, yeah, I wouldn’t trust anyone with like, that would say that they have new prophecy from God. But here’s the thing that I’ve experienced.

Let me see, in 1980, I was born again. I was 16. And before that, when I was really little, my mom told me about God and Jesus and sent me to Sunday school.

So I never doubted. Anyway, so over the last several years, every once in a great while, I know it’s from God. I am a gardener.

And there was one time to where it was the very end of the day, the owners of the place left, so there was no one there. And I was tired. And I thought, what can I do for the last few minutes just to make it look good?

And I won’t hear any complaints. And I go home. So I grabbed a rake and started raking under this big pear tree by their garage.

And that’s all I had on my mind. And all of a sudden, it wasn’t an out loud voice. It was almost like, I don’t know, telepathy or God just kind of like hijacked my thoughts and told me to…

It was the exact words I heard and like very quietly were stepped out into the driveway now. And so I did. And as soon as I looked at my boots on the gravel, I was going to start wondering what it was all about.

Well, I didn’t have time. I heard a crack and I looked up in the tree where I had just been standing under and I watched this huge limb break off the tree and sail and hit the ground where I was.

Well, that’s tremendous. That’s tremendous. I believe…

I mean, if you want to tell me that was God speaking to you, I can accept that. I’ve never said it. I’ve never suggested that God doesn’t speak to people.

I’m not sure what call you’re referring to. I don’t even know what the caller was saying because I don’t remember the call. But if you thought that there’s…

that I hold the position that God doesn’t ever speak to people, well, you misunderstand me. I believe God does speak to us. I don’t think he does it as often as some people claim.

I think a lot of people say, God said this to me and God told me this, and I think they say that a lot of times when they’re really just expressing their strong emotions or feelings. But the fact that people say that God told them things when perhaps he didn’t doesn’t mean that there’s never any times when he did. I personally do believe that God speaks to us, so I appreciate that testimony.

Wade from Willamard, California. Welcome. Yeah.

Hi, Steve.

Hey, good to hear from you.

Yeah. Hey, somebody asked me just the other day here about doing, the Bible is not accurate. They’re contradicting itself.

And they were referring to the taking nothing for your journey, neither staff, nor wallet, nor bread, nor money. That was Luke. And then Mark says the opposite.

He says he commanded them that they should take nothing for the journey except a staff only. And then Matt, who on the other hand, doesn’t, says also no staff. So I wasn’t quite sure how to answer that.

I did read somewhere that there’s two types of staff, a short one for defense and a long one for walking. But I was just curious what your thoughts and maybe how I would have answered that.

Yeah, well, that’s of course when Jesus was sending out the 12 two by two to visit villages and evangelize and preach the gospel for short term outreach. And he did give instructions about traveling light and don’t take money and things like that. But you’re right, that is mentioned in two or three of the gospels.

And one of them reads a little differently than the others. I think, as you said, one of them says take a staff, the other says don’t take a staff. Well, what we have to assume is that one of those is representing what Jesus said and the other one isn’t.

Now, let’s just say Jesus said take a staff. And then one of the gospel writers wrote, we find in another gospel, he said, don’t take a staff. Did I just say it that way or the other way?

Anyway, obviously, there are times when the gospel writers don’t give the same details, but even if they do, it’s not always the case that the copyists who copied their writings have copied it correctly. And all the gospels that we have, all the biblical books have come down to us through many copies and textual critics, which are people who study all these different copies to see which ones go back to the original more. They recognize that there are some copyists, that is scribes who made copies of them, who made mistakes.

This is not problematic. This happens every time human beings copy something. I mean, if you have a critic that says, oh, the Bible can’t be true because of this difference, just tell him, why don’t you take a few hours and just copy out the Book of Luke by hand yourself?

And then when you’re done, see if you made any typos, see if you made any mistakes. If you did, then you’re about normal. And the people who copied the gospel for us were about normal in that respect.

So as human beings, they did make mistakes, which means that the manuscripts have come down to us, in some cases, containing these small mistakes. Now, someone says, well, if there’s mistakes in the manuscripts, how can we trust the Bible? Well, let’s not over exaggerate this.

It doesn’t matter to me whether Jesus told them to take a staff or not take a staff on that occasion. It really doesn’t make any difference in my life. It doesn’t make any difference in my belief in Christ.

It doesn’t make any belief difference in my understanding of Christian duty. In other words, if a copyist has made a small error, and it’s 100 percent inconsequential, then to make an issue of it is just to be anal. More anal than is reasonable, you know?

I’m willing to believe that one of those accounts, in disagreement with another of them, may represent what we call a scribal error, of which plenty of them exist. But the great thing about this is that the textual critics who have spent their whole lives studying these manuscripts have said, these textual variations that are made by scribes, they never affect any major issues, you know. It’s like a lot of times it would be that they misspelled a word, or in writing a sentence, they put the words in a different order but didn’t change the meaning.

In some cases, they leave out a word by accident. But in many cases, most cases you can tell where they left out a word because it doesn’t make as much sense without that word or whatever. I mean, there is such a thing as being a Bible student and scholar that you study these things.

If a person is not serious about the word of God, God doesn’t owe it to that person to yield a deep understanding of it. But people who are serious students soon find out that the little mistakes that scribal heirs have made, they don’t really have any impact. There’s no doctrine of scripture that is adversely affected by some questionable scribal variant.

So, I’m willing to believe that the manuscripts as we have them do contain a contradiction there. And it’s not the only case. There’s lots of cases.

But I’m willing also to say that doesn’t mean that any of the gospel writers made that mistake. I mean, it’s possible they all wrote exactly the same thing, but one of them, in the course of being copied, a scribe put a different word in or left a word out, in which case it came down to us to this day with a change in it. That’s not a problem with the original author.

That’s a problem with the process of what we call transmission of the manuscripts. So people sometimes think that we Christians believe the Bible is a magical book, that it kind of fell down from heaven between leather covers in King James English or something. And therefore, if you find anything like that, that’s a problem.

Well, that just disproves the Christian view. It’s obvious that this is not magical. It’s got all the errors that a book written by humans would have.

Well, that’s just it. It was written by humans. And it was not only read by humans, it was copied by humans.

And so, you know, if a person is looking for a magic book, the Bible is not the place to look for one. It’s not. It contains what the New Testament contains is historical records of the life of Jesus Christ and of the apostles in the Book of Acts.

And then it’s got letters written by apostles to various churches. And if you take it as anything other than that, you’re taking it as more than it claims to be. And you’re setting up yourself up for stumbling blocks that are unnecessary.

So I will say this, that when I teach that passage, I have to say, well, there’s a difference here between these two Gospels. One says they were to take staffs, the other says they’re not. So somewhere along the line, one of these things got copied wrong, but it doesn’t matter.

You know, I don’t care if they took a staff or if they didn’t take a staff. You know, when I read the Bible, I’m getting trying to get to know God. I’m trying to get to know Jesus.

And I’m especially trying to get to know what my duties are, what pleases him and what he wants me to do and not to do. That’s the purpose of studying the scripture. And little things like that have zero impact on what I’m looking for in the Bible.

If I’m looking for a magic book, yeah, they’d have an impact. But I’ve already given up that idea.

Yeah. Okay. That’s pretty much how I took it to and after I reflected on it.

But when they asked me, I had not even, I didn’t even know about the discrepancy. It’s really Mark with Matthew and Luke. And I thought I’d just listen to how to answer it.

And then later I read about it and said, well, I was sure I would like to hear Steve’s… Yeah.

Well, there’s a lot of teachers that are more reluctant than I am to admit that there are these kinds of issues in the Bible. But I’ve been studying the Bible for 55 years. You can’t ignore these things.

And why pretend? I mean, if you’re trying to hide something from people, how are you teaching them the truth, you know? It seems to me that we should teach people the truth as it is, the way it is may have to correct some of our superstitions or some of our ideas.

But the real question we have to ask is when all the truth is known, do we have a reliable record of the life and teachings of Jesus, which is what I’m looking for? And the answer is yes. And, you know, if I’m looking for more than that, I may sometimes be disappointed with what I find.

But a lot of teachers don’t want to, they feel like they’re giving up the farm if they say that. They feel like, you know, every word in the Bible is exactly the way the Holy Spirit inspired it. Well, people like that either don’t study the Bible very well or they’re deceiving people because there are little issues like that in various parts of the Bible.

The question has got to be, does that ruin my faith? Or do I just take that and stress it? Okay, now I know that.

Let’s move on and follow Jesus. That would be my approach.

I’m right there, and I thank you for that.

Okay, wait. All right, thank you. Oh, I’m sorry.

I hit the button because I’m moving on, but I’m sorry I missed your last, what you were going on to say. We’re almost out of time here. The show is just about to end.

Sharon in Las Vegas, welcome to The Narrow Path.

Hi, Steve. My name is Sharon, and we met you, my son and I, Tom, met you a couple of times in Las Vegas and went on the Alaskan cruise with you.

Oh, I remember. Sure.

Again, your lovely wife, Dana. And I wanted to call because the gentleman that called was going through such misery, and it hurts because I can relate. And then the other lady that was having the problem with, oh, jeez, when the church, she went to the gay wedding, whatever.

What about… I always… My aunt gave me a scripture to Roman date 28.

For all things work together for good, for those who love the Lord and are called according to His purpose. And for the judgmental ones, which I think is… I kind of feel sorry for them.

Or even when I judge myself, because I’ve been given choices in my life, and I just praise the Lord. And then, I think… And I don’t know scripture for it, if it would be…

I think the Lord is making his ends of diamond pearls for him. How do you make a diamond? How do you make a pearl?

It’s not real, funny games. It hurts.

That’s right. It comes from pain in the oyster and pressure on the coal. So you’re right.

You’re right about that. I appreciate your input. I’m going to try to get one more call in here from Rand in St. Augustine, Florida.

Hi, Rand. Welcome.

Hello, Steve.

Hi.

Hi, Steve. My question has to do with the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the gift of tongues. I’m 78 now, but when I was in my 20s, I received a baptism with the gift of speaking in tongues.

And at that time, I went to a church that they practiced pretty orderly, the gift of speaking in tongues and interpretation. But I never spoke in that regard. My gift, I use as prayer language.

But a lot happened at that time, and I fell away. The last 15 years I’ve come back. I have read all of your literature on tongues and how that is overemphasized quite frequently.

But in my particular case, I use tongues as a prayer language. And when I’m out of words, when I don’t know how to express myself, or I don’t know fully the details of what I’m praying for, I speak in tongues and I pray with all of my heart.

How do you respond to that? I say more power to you. I think that’s fine.

I think that Paul said that if someone wants to speak in tongues in the church and there’s no interpreter, he said, let him speak to himself and to God. So in other words, tongues can be used that way too, to speak just to God, not publicly. So speaking in tongues in the church with an interpretation is not the only use of tongues that Paul acknowledges.

He’s mainly focused on that in 1 Corinthians 14 where he talks about church order and protocols. But he says it is, of course, possible, if there’s no interpretation, to just use it to pray, just pray in tongues. So I would affirm that that’s a biblical thing.

I appreciate your call, brother, we’re out of time. You’ve been listening to The Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg.

Our website is thenarrowpath.com. Check it out. All kinds of free resources.

You can also donate if you want at thenarrowpath.com. We’re out of time, so let’s talk again tomorrow. God bless.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 so that we can have a conversation with you two ways. You can call in if you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith, or you maybe have a disagreement with the host, you want to talk about that, feel free to give me a call.
We have an hour without any commercial breaks to just talk to you and have you talk to me and to our audience. The number to call, if you d like to be on the program, is 844-484-5737.
That’s 844-484-5737.
If you call and get a busy signal, just call a little later in the program and a line will probably open up. I have an announcement to make, as you may know, if you’re a regular listener, I’m speaking a variety of places this weekend, next week, 11 different evening ventures I’m speaking on different subjects. I don’t think I’m speaking on the same thing twice anywhere.
And I’m also teaching in the mornings for Youth with a Mission for these two weeks and doing the radio show. So I’m keeping pretty busy. And if you are in Washington state, and would like to attend any of these meetings, you may look at our website, thenarrowpath.com under announcements, and you’ll find there the locations and subject matter and so forth of all the meetings this weekend, next week in Washington state.
Now, where I’m going to be tonight is in Linwood, Washington. I’ll be speaking at the Maple Park Church from 7 o’clock to about 830. And I’ll be teaching on the subject of discipleship, and that will be followed by a time of Q&A.
So if you live anywhere near Linfield, Washington, and want to join us, you can go to the Maple Park Church. The address is found at our website, thenarrowpath.com. Or you can probably find the address for the Maple Park Church in Linwood elsewhere on the Internet, or maybe you even know where it is if you’re local.
All right, so that’s tonight at 7, and something else every other night. So just want you to know about that before we go to the phone. Our phone lines are full.
So we’ll talk first of all to John from East Meadow, New York. John, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for joining us.
Hey Steve, hi. Yeah, I have kind of like a two-part question. When Jesus resurrected, is it true that he only appeared to those at the Quorum Church and as disciples?
And did, whether that’s the case or not, did the Pharisees and others eventually go to the tomb and realize that Jesus had resurrected? Did the townspeople understand that eventually?
Right. Well, the Bible indicates that Jesus appeared to quite a lot of people. We don’t know all their names, but the impression is that these were people who had been his disciples, with one exception, and that was Jesus’ brother James.
James was not a believer before Jesus rose from the dead, but he later became an important person in the church, and apparently God had a plan for him. So in spite of the fact that James, the brother of Jesus, was not a believer, at the time Jesus appeared to him, and that apparently caused him and the other brothers of Jesus to become believers as well, including Jude. So apart from James, I don’t know of any other unbelievers that were appeared to him.
Now Paul does say in 1 Corinthians 15, that there was one point where 500 people saw him at one time. He doesn’t say where that was, when that was, or who it was. But my impression is that probably happened in Galilee where Jesus had a lot of followers, and he probably was meeting with a gathering of his believers.
So no, he didn’t appear to the Pharisees, or he didn’t appear to, you know, anyone else, except, of course, Saul of Tarsus on the way to Damascus. That was later. Now, did the Pharisees go and check the empty tomb to see if he was risen?
They probably did. I’m sure at least some of them did. They must have at least sent some agents there to check it out because when the apostles began to teach that Jesus was risen from the dead, that was an annoying and troublesome teaching to the leaders of the Jews.
And so they would gladly have wanted to debunk that, which would be an easy thing to do if they could just go to the tomb and find the body of Jesus. So I’m sure that that was one of the first things they did. You know, when they heard that Jesus rose from the dead, in all likelihood, someone was sent from them to go and check and make sure that the tomb didn’t have the body in it.
Because if it did, that would be very advantageous to them in wanting to debunk the teaching of the disciples. So we have to assume that, you know, they did check the tomb. Now, there is a record in Matthew that the guards at the tomb went and reported what had happened to the chief priests.
And the chief priests paid them off to claim that they had fallen asleep and that the disciples had stolen the body. And Matthew says, and that is the rumor that continues among the Jews to this day, meaning by the time Matthew wrote this, that rumor is still around among the Jews. So they apparently, even if they found the body not there, they didn’t give up the faith and become Christians, they instead they made up a story that the disciples had stolen the body.
Which was not a very realistic story, because we have no reason to believe the disciples had an interest in stealing the body. The disciples had become despondent. They weren’t interested in starting a religion.
They wanted to go back to fishing. And if they did want to steal the body, which would be a strange thing to want to do, how could they pull it off when there were guards at the tomb and so forth? So I think the story that the disciples stole the body never did really ring true, but it worked for people who wanted to remain doubters, I would say.
Okay.
Thank you very much, Steve.
Have a good night. All right. All right.
God bless you. Okay. Our next caller is Eddie from Dearborn, Michigan.
Hi, Eddie. Welcome.
Hey, Steve. How are you? I hope you’re doing well.
Okay. So Steve, I don’t want to speak for a long time, so I’m going to ask you my question and then get off the phone. And I want to share your audience a lot of maybe grief.
I recently went through a lot of hardship and turmoil, a lot of suffering. I’ve heard you say that just like David in the Old Testament, how he counted the numbers, just like how God was angry with Pharaoh, that the Lord was already angry with them to begin with. Hence, this is the reason why he blinded their eyes.
And I’ve also heard you say that the Lord has glory, will receive glory by our suffering. I’m suffering a lot, Steve. Is the Lord receiving glory by this?
Because it’s at my expense. And at my expense, I am down and out all day. I just don’t know how to continue on with life.
Right. So you read in the Bible that when we suffer, God can be glorified in it. And you’re suffering.
And so you wonder if God is being glorified. Well, God is not automatically glorified in our suffering. But our suffering is an opportunity to glorify God.
And what that means is if we respond to our sufferings, trusting God, He gives us grace in those sufferings. And therefore, we are strengthened in those sufferings. And God is glorified in that.
Because everybody experiences sufferings. You don’t have to be a Christian to experience sufferings. The world is full of sufferings.
And most people are just Christians. It just makes the Lord look like a sadist.
I’m sorry to interrupt. It just makes him look like a sadist to others that maybe are hearing it. And was he already mad at me before?
Wait, wait, wait.
Why would it make God look like a sadist? Why would it make God look like a sadist? What caused your problems?
How is your suffering? Is your suffering caused by sickness?
I know that it caused me. Yes, me.
Yes.
OK, then how does that make God look bad if you’re causing your own sufferings?
It leads to him going through and approving the decision of Satan to attack me, perhaps, just like he did with Job.
Well, God allows the devil to test everybody, not just you. Everyone’s tests are a different kind, but God is not a sadist by testing us. Just like a professor in a university is not a sadist when he gives exams to his students.
The idea is hoping they will pass them. They might not. They should.
But he hopes they will pass them. And so God gives us that opportunity to glorify him in sufferings and to learn and to gain from it. And Paul said that our light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us a far more exceeding an eternal weight of glory.
While we don’t look at the things that are seen, but the things are not seen. So in our sufferings, we set our eyes not on the things that are seen, but on the things that are not seen, which is of course God and his purposes and his grace. Those things that are not seen are the things that cause our present sufferings to work for us an eternal weight of glory.
Now, we would suffer whether God had any role in it or not. I mean, we bring suffering on ourselves. God didn’t bring suffering into the world, man did.
And the question is whether God allows us to suffer. You notice whether he lets influences that would cause suffering or not, whether he lets them come or doesn’t let them come. Well, he’s under no obligation to stop them.
Where’s my way out? He’s supposed to give me a way out. I’m supposed to be his.
Where’s my way out? How much longer do I have to suffer?
Well, of course, I can’t answer how long you have to suffer or what your way out is. Your way out is into the arms of Christ. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to suffer.
You might suffer every day of your life. There’s many people who do. The Apostle Paul certainly did.
He was beaten, he was imprisoned, he was shipwrecked, he had stripes innumerable from beatings and so forth. And he suffered a lot. And I don’t think he ever got out of his sufferings until he was beheaded and went to be with Jesus.
So when Paul wrote Philippians, he was in a third world jail, pretty miserable. And he said, hey, I’m eager to depart from here and be with Christ. Yeah, that’s kind of you kind of feel that even more when you’re suffering than when you’re not.
So our escape from suffering is not in this world necessarily, though God sometimes in this life does give us periods of relief. But none is guaranteed. This world is not a place of enjoyment.
It’s a place of testing. It’s a place of preparing. It’s where we’re being vetted to reign with Christ in another world at another time.
So when do you get out of it? I’d say when you die. Now, the sufferings you’re going through right now, I don’t know what they are, but they may be temporary.
They may go away at some point. You may be delivered from them or not. I have friends who are in chronic pain.
They’re in excruciating pain all the time, day and night, for years. And I’m sure they’re thinking, you know, when can I get out of this? And you know, we don’t know.
When God wants you to get out of this, when you know. The thing is, it’s hard to be, you know, not thinking about yourself when you’re in great pain. Obviously, when you’re in great pain, it’s hard not to think about relief.
But that’s true whether you’re a Christian or not. The Christian’s life is supposed to be different than a non-Christian because we have God. We trust God.
We believe that nothing is going to happen to us. That can destroy us if we’re trusting him. And that nothing that he allows to happen to us will harm us in any way that he can’t make some good come from it, that makes it worthwhile.
And so again, I don’t have any idea of what form of suffering you’re going through. But obviously, I also can’t predict when whatever suffering you’re going through may be relieved, if at all. But we’re told to be strong and of good courage and to fight like a man.
And what we’re fighting against is the temptation to cave in, the temptation to lose faith, the temptation to compromise because we’re disappointed with God, because he’s letting us go through stuff and not removing it from us. The Apostle Paul had a thorn in the flesh, which apparently agonized him all the time. It was excruciating and apparently for years.
And he prayed three times that Christ would take it away. And Jesus said, No, my grace is sufficient for you. My strength is made perfect in your suffering.
Now, that would be true of you or anybody who’s a believer in Christ, that God gives grace as needed, as we trust him. Now, will we trust him? That’s kind of up to us.
And so how you’ll come out is whether God will be glorified in this suffering of yours, or whether it’ll be wasted suffering and nothing comes of it. That’s kind of up to you to decide if you can trust God, you’re going to glorify God in the fire. That’s up to you.
That’s what every Christian has to decide to do. But the Bible does talk about people suffering in vain. Paul said to the Galatians who are about to fall from the faith because they’re suffering.
He said, have I endured these things for nothing, in vain? In the prophets, God says, I struck you in vain. You didn’t change.
So the issue here is, it’s not on God to decide if he’s going to be glorified in this. That’s on you. You can suffer and not bring glory to God, in which case you suffered for nothing.
But if you suffer and bring glory to God, that’s got eternal consequences of value to you and to God and to others. So I just suggest that you listen to my lectures, Making Sense Out of Suffering. If you have listened to them, I’d say listen to them again.
Making Sense Out of Suffering is four lectures at our website, thenarrowpath.com under the tab that says Topical Lectures. Okay, we’ll talk to Terrence from Little Rock, Arkansas. Terrence, welcome to The Narrow Path.
Thanks for calling.
Revelation chapter 20 verse 5, But the rest of the dead live not again until the thousand years were finished. Who are the rest of the dead in Revelation chapter 20 verse 5?
Who are the rest of the dead who don’t live again until after a thousand years are finished? The answer to that question depends on how you understand what that thousand years is and when it is. If it is talking about a future millennium, as many people believe, that begins when Jesus returns, then the rest of the dead are those who are not part of the first resurrection as it says.
It says he saw the first resurrection. He saw the souls of the saints who were beheaded for Christ, sitting on thrones and reigning with Christ, but the rest of the dead didn’t live again until the end of the thousand years. So the way a pre-millennial view holds this is that Jesus comes back at the beginning of the thousand years.
He sets up a thousand year reign on earth, and he has resurrected only the saints, only the believers, and they are reigning with him for a thousand years. But the unbelievers don’t get raised from the dead until at the end of the millennium. And you find, of course, at the end of that chapter, the sea gives up the dead, and death and Hades give up the dead, and they’re all judged from the things written in the books and so forth.
So if a person takes the thousand years to be a future millennium, the rest of the dead are the people who’ve died throughout history, who will not be resurrected until the end of that time. But that is in contrast to the ones who have at that time been resurrected, who would be the Christians resurrected at the time Jesus returned. And therefore, the Christians would be reigning with Christ for the thousand years, and the other people who were not Christians would not be raised at all until afterwards.
Now, I’m not a pre-millennialist. I believe that the thousand years is a symbol of the period between the first coming and the second coming of Christ. So the age we’re living in, it’s symbolizes.
And Jesus bound Satan at his first coming at the cross, and he’ll destroy him, as it says in Chapter 20, Verse 9, in flaming fire when he comes back in his second coming. In the meantime, John saw in a vision people in heaven who had died who were Christians, and we know it was dead people because he saw their souls. He said, I saw the souls of those who had been martyred.
Well, their souls would be in their bodies if they weren’t dead. He saw their disembodied souls, and that’s where they go when they die. So he sees where the martyrs have gone, who have died during this age, and he speaks of this age as the first resurrection.
And those who are the believers are the ones who had the first resurrection, because Jesus said in John 5, 24, he said, He that hears my words and believes in him that sent me has everlasting life and will not come into condemnation because he has passed from death into life. Now, we who are believers have passed from death into life. Jesus said that’s a resurrection, but it’s a spiritual resurrection.
And so in this present age, believers have experienced a spiritual resurrection. That’s we call it being born again, being regenerated. And this is called the first resurrection because we will also experience a physical resurrection later.
For us, it’s the first. We have something of a resurrection spiritually now. And when Jesus comes back, we’ll have another resurrection.
This will be of our bodies this time. But the unbelievers who don’t experience the first resurrection and they die, they don’t get raised again until the bodies are raised at the end. That’s at the end of the thousand years.
So that’s how I understand that. I realize that can be confusing, especially if you’ve only heard one view, or even if you’ve heard both views, it still might be confusing. But I have lectures on this, on Revelation 20, at our website, thenarrowpath.com.
If you look under verse by verse lectures, you’ll find my lectures through the whole Bible, and there’s lectures on Revelation. And you can listen to one on Revelation 20, and you’ll hear at least what I think it means. You’ll certainly find what other people think it means.
I’m listening to other sources. I appreciate your call, Terrence. Let’s talk to Fred from Alameda, California.
Welcome to The Narrow Path, Fred.
Yes, hi.
I had a friend who referred to Judas as Caryat as the son of perdition. And my question is, is this an accurate label, and what exactly does that mean, the son of perdition?
Yeah, it is an accurate label, and Jesus himself used it when he was praying. He said to the father in Chapter 17 of John, he says, all that you’ve given me, I have lost nothing except the son of perdition. And he’s referring to Judas.
Now, the son of perdition is also used in another place in Second Thessalonians 2 in talking about the man of sin. So both of them are said to be sons of perdition. In fact, some people have thought, since Judas is called the son of perdition, and the man of sin is also called that, maybe the man of sin is Judas come back.
Now, I don’t believe that, but there are some who’ve taken that view because of that. But you see, son of perdition is actually not a proper name or title. The word perdition, the Greek word means destruction.
And to say he’s a son of destruction, that’s a Hebrewism, a Hebrew way of saying, a person is going to be destroyed. A son of some phenomenon in the Hebrew idiom often means somebody who experiences that. We wouldn’t talk that way, but we’re not the Hebrews and the Bible is written in their language, not ours.
So, son of perdition just means someone who’s going to be destroyed, a person who will be destroyed, because perdition means destruction. Now, Judas, of course, was destroyed, and so he was the son of perdition, and so is the man of sin. Now, it might even suggest not only that he’s going to be destroyed, but that he’s destined to be destroyed.
There might be something more than just the fact of what’s going to happen. There may be the insinuation that God has, in a sense, predestined this person for that destruction. And that would be reasonable too, because God has predestined that people who are wicked will be destroyed.
And so, Judas chose to be wicked, so he’s in that category. But the term is used as I say two different people, and I don’t think that means that the two people are to be identified with each other. I think it’s just a phrase that means the one who’s destined to be destroyed.
All right, there’s a lot of noise on your line, but I hope that helps you. See, Dwight from Denver, Colorado. Welcome to The Narrow Path.
Good to hear from you.
Yes, Steve, are there any verses in the New Testament that tells us that Gentiles are also part of or under the New Covenant?
Well, frankly, yeah, we, Paul said in 1st and 2nd Corinthians 3, that he was a minister of the New Covenant. Now, Paul was an apostle to the Gentiles, and the Corinthians he was writing to were Gentiles. So obviously, he’s saying they’re part of the New Covenant.
They’re the product of his ministry, and he’s a minister of the New Covenant. There’d be no reason to distinguish. I realized that Jeremiah said God would make the New Covenant with the House of Israel and the House of Judah.
And so some people think the New Covenant is only for Israel, but that’s not taken into account the fact that Israel never was all Jewish. Even in the Old Testament, a Gentile could be part of Israel. And in the New Israel, which is in Christ, there’s even more Gentiles than Jews.
Israel, whether in the Old Testament or the New, referred to people who were in the Covenant, people of God, and a Gentile could be in there as much as a Jew. And there were Gentiles in there. I mean, you could be a proselyte, a Gentile who converts to Jesus.
Then you’re part of Israel. And it’s true now. Jesus made the New Covenant with the remnant of Israel, the disciples.
They were Jewish. But later Gentiles were allowed to come in when they heard about it. And Paul talks about it.
The Gentiles who have had faith have been grafted into the same tree as the Jews who had faith, which is the New Israel. And so God has made the New Covenant with the house of Israel. Though it only applies to the remnant of Israel, the faithful.
And that, of course, the Old Testament suggested that anyway. So yeah, there’s Gentiles are part of that remnant now, just as they were part of Israel in the Old Testament. Some of them were.
Not all were. But anyone who was faithful to God was part of Israel through the Covenant. Okay.
Thanks.
All right, Dwight. I appreciate your call.
Bye.
God bless you. All right. Before I take another call, I have to notice that we’re at the bottom of the hour, and that means I’m going to have to make an announcement.
We do have calls waiting. We also have a line open if you want to call. The number is 844-484-5737.
At this point, I want you to know that The Narrow Path is a listener-supported ministry. You know, we don’t even have a newsletter. We don’t send out any appeals.
If you contact us, we don’t have an email newsletter. We don’t have any. We just don’t do that.
The way we stay on the air is twice. Once at this point and once at the end of the program, I mentioned to our listeners, we’re listener supported. Now, why would we need any support?
I don’t take any money for this, and neither does anyone else. We have about 20 people who do voluntary things for The Narrow Path all over the country, and none of them is paid, and I’m not paid. Why do we need money?
Well, because radio stations need to be paid. We buy the time just like an advertiser would from the radio stations, only we’re buying an hour, not a minute. And so, our bills, paying for radio stations, come to between $130,000 and $140,000 a month, well over a million dollars a year.
And all of that is paid to radio stations to keep us on there. And none of it comes from sales of products, who we don’t sell any products, nor from sponsors. They just come from people like you, who listen to the program, you think it’s a good program, you want to keep it on, hope other people will be able to hear it in the future, and you want to support it.
Well, if you want to do that, you can write to us at The Narrow Path, PO. Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. That address again is The Narrow Path, PO.
Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. Now, you can also donate from the website, but everything at the website is free. You don’t have to donate, but you can.
It’s at thenarrowpath.com. I’ll be back in 30 seconds. We have another half hour coming.
Don’t go away.
If truth did exist, would it matter to you? Whom would you consult as an authority on the subject? In a 16-letter series entitled, The Authority of Scriptures, Steve Gregg not only thoroughly presents the case for the Bible’s authority, but also explains how this truth is to be applied to a believer’s daily walk and outlook.
The Authority of Scriptures can be downloaded in MP3 format without charge from our website, thenarrowpath.com.
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 about the Christian faith, or you disagree with the host, want to talk about that, feel free to give me a call.
The number is 844-484-5737.
And remember, if you’re in Washington state, you may be near Linwood, Washington, or not, but I’ll be speaking at the Maple Park Church in Linwood tonight at seven o’clock on discipleship. And we certainly encourage you to join us if you’re in the area. The address and the information about all my speaking events here in Washington state this week and next week can be found at our website, thenarrowpath.com, and go to the tab there that says Announcements.
Mary from Santa Cruz is next. Hi, Mary. Good to hear from you again.
Hi, Steve. I have been listening to your Life of Christ lecture series, and that it’s the Christian’s prerogative to go by the teachings of Christ, and not by church traditions, or possibly maybe the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And I want to apply this question as there’s a very, very well-known brother, and this is a big controversy, and probably a lot of people know about it.
I don’t want to mention his name because it’s just going to stir things up. But he received a lot of persecution for advice he gave to a grandmother regarding a wedding.
Oh, yes. I remember the case.
Yes. Well, he encouraged her to go. And when he did this, he did it specifically to her in her circumstance based on compassion and her particular situation.
But he has received horrible persecution, in my opinion.
Still, huh? This happened a while ago, right?
Oh, yes.
I remember it was controversial at the time.
Well, there’s just a video from yesterday. A podcaster said that he absolutely has to repent, and he won’t. He won’t repent of what he did because he said, in another circumstance, I would have given different advice.
And here’s the question. I believe this brother should be given the benefit of the doubt, rather than being thrown off all the many stations that he was on. He’s a wonderful brother.
Yeah.
And the attitude of the Christians doing this to him, I believe, is not according to the teachings of Christ. What do you say?
Yeah, I think Christians can be a little bit too judgmental. I mean, that’s an understatement, obviously. Christians are often too judgmental.
As I understand it, this brother had an older woman, I think her daughter or niece or someone who’s getting married in a same-sex marriage. And it was a transgender. A transgender one.
A transgender.
And so I think he had struggles with it. But given the circumstances, and I don’t remember what they all were, he judged that the thing that would most glorify God in this particular instance would be for her to accept the invitation. I don’t know what other advice he gave her.
He might have said, accept the invitation with these caveats or whatever. Of course, I don’t have the details of the situation. But this man is an evangelical leader.
He’s a very influential brother. Yes, very influential.
And he’s on radio stations all over the place. So he’s a wise Bible teacher in general. I don’t know that I would have given the same advice.
But if I knew as much about the situation as he does, maybe I would have. I don’t know. I don’t think any of us are in the position to judge a man for the advice he gave, if he gave it according to a good conscience.
And he’s not some kind of a reprobate who’s out advising people to do immoral things. I mean, obviously, he’s against transgenderism. He’s against gay marriage.
I mean, he’s an evangelical. He loves the Lord. He teaches the Bible well.
And, you know, maybe he’s making a mistake. I don’t know if he is or not. But if he is, that’s not something to crucify him over.
We have to believe he is making a judgment based on his Christian conscience and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. The Bible, of course, doesn’t say anything directly on the subject of going to a wedding of a transgender person. And therefore, the decision to do so or not is going to come from the way that any given Christian who’s facing that invitation applies their moral values along with all other Christian considerations and tries to do the thing best in the side of God.
Now, not everyone’s going to see it the same way. We might say, what’s the obvious?
This was a grandchild of hers, and she couldn’t figure out the right thing to do. So, of course, she asked him. And my question is, shouldn’t a Christian be allowed to decide something of this nature, a yes or no, based on the exact circumstances that you’re in, based on your own spirit and your own feeling of the leading of the Lord, rather than a principle, a general principle of right and wrong?
So these brothers who are condemning him are saying, you can never, ever show any kind of approval of this sort of thing. And it wasn’t about her showing approval. It was about showing her grandchild love.
I know. Well, here’s what I say. I say there are many things in our society that are sinful, that we as Christians, we can say on principle, we cannot do them.
But when somebody else who’s not a Christian does them, the Bible doesn’t tell us that we have to do a particular thing, one way or the other. In fact, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5, that the standards for Christian conduct are for Christians. He says, I wrote you an epistle not to keep company of fornicators and other debauched people, but he said, I didn’t mean those in the world because you’d have to leave the world if you weren’t going to keep company with fornicators.
If we included those who are in the world, he said, I’m talking about people who call themselves brethren. If a man calls himself a brother and does these things, then don’t associate with them. Now, I don’t know if her granddaughter calls herself a Christian or not, but I think that in the days of Paul, calling yourself a Christian meant something considerably more than it means in modern Western civilization because a person called himself a Christian because he was part of the fellowship of the saints, you know, part of the unity of the saints and so forth.
Today, anyone can call themselves a Christian and not have any connection with Christianity at all, including Christ. So, I mean, I think what Paul is saying is you don’t want the church to seem to be supporting fornication. And therefore, if somebody is a part of the church and they’re fornicating, well, then that’s what matter for church discipline.
But this isn’t even the same kind of question. The girl in question is not the one they’re trying to discipline. She’s the one doing the bad thing.
You know, the grandma is not doing a bad thing. She can stay home and do nothing, or she can go to the wedding and say nothing, or she can go to the wedding and speak to someone about it and say, I don’t care for this. I mean, the Bible doesn’t say what to do in those cases.
You do what you feel led to do that you feel is consistent with your convictions. But going to a wedding, you know, I’ve gone to weddings of people who the person had left their spouse before and married someone else. To my mind, that’s not a marriage.
But I didn’t feel, I mean, the person’s knew how I felt about it. But, you know, going to a wedding doesn’t always mean to everybody that you’re endorsing it. It should.
I believe that, ideally, going to a wedding is your way of celebrating something you endorse and agree with. But that’s not always understood to be the case. So it certainly is not the case that the Bible tells us that going to a wedding, even if it’s not a good wedding, is a sin.
Now, even if the person getting married is sinning by getting married, you going to the wedding is not anywhere in the Bible said to be a sin. So I think that church discipline is to be enacted against people who are sinning. Grandma is not sinning if she goes to that wedding.
Now, if she encourages the sin, she says, hey, I hope you guys have a great marriage and it lasts forever. Well, obviously, you can’t wish that if you have Christian convictions in such a case, but I don’t think she’s doing that. So to my mind, this is to try to separate from a minister because he gave what he thought was good advice.
Even if we think that wasn’t good advice, that’s not good advice. And say he has to repent of that advice. Well, why should he repent if he doesn’t believe it was wrong?
Who are you to judge another man’s servant, Paul said. Now, if he was sinning himself, well, that’d be a different thing. If the minister is sinning, then there’s church discipline.
He’s not sinning. Even grandma’s not sinning. And he’s just talking to grandma.
There’s nothing wrong with that. And if he expresses his opinion, how can a man be, how can a godly man be persecuted for expressing his opinion? He believes it’s, he believes God would have it.
Anyway, I, yeah, I didn’t realize this was still a controversy. I haven’t heard much about it lately. But anyway, I’m, I’m on his side, even though I don’t believe he, I don’t think I would have given the same advice, but maybe, again, I don’t know the situation as much as he does.
So it’s none of my business. But whether he gave good advice or bad advice, I’m certainly on his side against his critics in this case, because I think it’s none of their business. He’s not sinning.
He’s not doing a sin himself. I agree. Anyway, I appreciate your call, but thanks for the update on that.
It’s kind of discouraging. Tony in Orcas Island, Washington. Hi, Tony, welcome.
Oh, hi. Yeah, okay. I’ve listened to your show for quite a while, the last few years, and really like it.
And I don’t know, just a little while back, I think one of your callers mentioned something about, I don’t know how to frame it, maybe God doesn’t really communicate with us or talk to us or whatever. And I thought, yeah, I wouldn’t trust anyone with like, that would say that they have new prophecy from God. But here’s the thing that I’ve experienced.
Let me see, in 1980, I was born again. I was 16. And before that, when I was really little, my mom told me about God and Jesus and sent me to Sunday school.
So I never doubted. Anyway, so over the last several years, every once in a great while, I know it’s from God. I am a gardener.
And there was one time to where it was the very end of the day, the owners of the place left, so there was no one there. And I was tired. And I thought, what can I do for the last few minutes just to make it look good?
And I won’t hear any complaints. And I go home. So I grabbed a rake and started raking under this big pear tree by their garage.
And that’s all I had on my mind. And all of a sudden, it wasn’t an out loud voice. It was almost like, I don’t know, telepathy or God just kind of like hijacked my thoughts and told me to…
It was the exact words I heard and like very quietly were stepped out into the driveway now. And so I did. And as soon as I looked at my boots on the gravel, I was going to start wondering what it was all about.
Well, I didn’t have time. I heard a crack and I looked up in the tree where I had just been standing under and I watched this huge limb break off the tree and sail and hit the ground where I was.
Well, that’s tremendous. That’s tremendous. I believe…
I mean, if you want to tell me that was God speaking to you, I can accept that. I’ve never said it. I’ve never suggested that God doesn’t speak to people.
I’m not sure what call you’re referring to. I don’t even know what the caller was saying because I don’t remember the call. But if you thought that there’s…
that I hold the position that God doesn’t ever speak to people, well, you misunderstand me. I believe God does speak to us. I don’t think he does it as often as some people claim.
I think a lot of people say, God said this to me and God told me this, and I think they say that a lot of times when they’re really just expressing their strong emotions or feelings. But the fact that people say that God told them things when perhaps he didn’t doesn’t mean that there’s never any times when he did. I personally do believe that God speaks to us, so I appreciate that testimony.
Wade from Willamard, California. Welcome. Yeah.
Hi, Steve.
Hey, good to hear from you.
Yeah. Hey, somebody asked me just the other day here about doing, the Bible is not accurate. They’re contradicting itself.
And they were referring to the taking nothing for your journey, neither staff, nor wallet, nor bread, nor money. That was Luke. And then Mark says the opposite.
He says he commanded them that they should take nothing for the journey except a staff only. And then Matt, who on the other hand, doesn’t, says also no staff. So I wasn’t quite sure how to answer that.
I did read somewhere that there’s two types of staff, a short one for defense and a long one for walking. But I was just curious what your thoughts and maybe how I would have answered that.
Yeah, well, that’s of course when Jesus was sending out the 12 two by two to visit villages and evangelize and preach the gospel for short term outreach. And he did give instructions about traveling light and don’t take money and things like that. But you’re right, that is mentioned in two or three of the gospels.
And one of them reads a little differently than the others. I think, as you said, one of them says take a staff, the other says don’t take a staff. Well, what we have to assume is that one of those is representing what Jesus said and the other one isn’t.
Now, let’s just say Jesus said take a staff. And then one of the gospel writers wrote, we find in another gospel, he said, don’t take a staff. Did I just say it that way or the other way?
Anyway, obviously, there are times when the gospel writers don’t give the same details, but even if they do, it’s not always the case that the copyists who copied their writings have copied it correctly. And all the gospels that we have, all the biblical books have come down to us through many copies and textual critics, which are people who study all these different copies to see which ones go back to the original more. They recognize that there are some copyists, that is scribes who made copies of them, who made mistakes.
This is not problematic. This happens every time human beings copy something. I mean, if you have a critic that says, oh, the Bible can’t be true because of this difference, just tell him, why don’t you take a few hours and just copy out the Book of Luke by hand yourself?
And then when you’re done, see if you made any typos, see if you made any mistakes. If you did, then you’re about normal. And the people who copied the gospel for us were about normal in that respect.
So as human beings, they did make mistakes, which means that the manuscripts have come down to us, in some cases, containing these small mistakes. Now, someone says, well, if there’s mistakes in the manuscripts, how can we trust the Bible? Well, let’s not over exaggerate this.
It doesn’t matter to me whether Jesus told them to take a staff or not take a staff on that occasion. It really doesn’t make any difference in my life. It doesn’t make any difference in my belief in Christ.
It doesn’t make any belief difference in my understanding of Christian duty. In other words, if a copyist has made a small error, and it’s 100 percent inconsequential, then to make an issue of it is just to be anal. More anal than is reasonable, you know?
I’m willing to believe that one of those accounts, in disagreement with another of them, may represent what we call a scribal error, of which plenty of them exist. But the great thing about this is that the textual critics who have spent their whole lives studying these manuscripts have said, these textual variations that are made by scribes, they never affect any major issues, you know. It’s like a lot of times it would be that they misspelled a word, or in writing a sentence, they put the words in a different order but didn’t change the meaning.
In some cases, they leave out a word by accident. But in many cases, most cases you can tell where they left out a word because it doesn’t make as much sense without that word or whatever. I mean, there is such a thing as being a Bible student and scholar that you study these things.
If a person is not serious about the word of God, God doesn’t owe it to that person to yield a deep understanding of it. But people who are serious students soon find out that the little mistakes that scribal heirs have made, they don’t really have any impact. There’s no doctrine of scripture that is adversely affected by some questionable scribal variant.
So, I’m willing to believe that the manuscripts as we have them do contain a contradiction there. And it’s not the only case. There’s lots of cases.
But I’m willing also to say that doesn’t mean that any of the gospel writers made that mistake. I mean, it’s possible they all wrote exactly the same thing, but one of them, in the course of being copied, a scribe put a different word in or left a word out, in which case it came down to us to this day with a change in it. That’s not a problem with the original author.
That’s a problem with the process of what we call transmission of the manuscripts. So people sometimes think that we Christians believe the Bible is a magical book, that it kind of fell down from heaven between leather covers in King James English or something. And therefore, if you find anything like that, that’s a problem.
Well, that just disproves the Christian view. It’s obvious that this is not magical. It’s got all the errors that a book written by humans would have.
Well, that’s just it. It was written by humans. And it was not only read by humans, it was copied by humans.
And so, you know, if a person is looking for a magic book, the Bible is not the place to look for one. It’s not. It contains what the New Testament contains is historical records of the life of Jesus Christ and of the apostles in the Book of Acts.
And then it’s got letters written by apostles to various churches. And if you take it as anything other than that, you’re taking it as more than it claims to be. And you’re setting up yourself up for stumbling blocks that are unnecessary.
So I will say this, that when I teach that passage, I have to say, well, there’s a difference here between these two Gospels. One says they were to take staffs, the other says they’re not. So somewhere along the line, one of these things got copied wrong, but it doesn’t matter.
You know, I don’t care if they took a staff or if they didn’t take a staff. You know, when I read the Bible, I’m getting trying to get to know God. I’m trying to get to know Jesus.
And I’m especially trying to get to know what my duties are, what pleases him and what he wants me to do and not to do. That’s the purpose of studying the scripture. And little things like that have zero impact on what I’m looking for in the Bible.
If I’m looking for a magic book, yeah, they’d have an impact. But I’ve already given up that idea.
Yeah. Okay. That’s pretty much how I took it to and after I reflected on it.
But when they asked me, I had not even, I didn’t even know about the discrepancy. It’s really Mark with Matthew and Luke. And I thought I’d just listen to how to answer it.
And then later I read about it and said, well, I was sure I would like to hear Steve’s… Yeah.
Well, there’s a lot of teachers that are more reluctant than I am to admit that there are these kinds of issues in the Bible. But I’ve been studying the Bible for 55 years. You can’t ignore these things.
And why pretend? I mean, if you’re trying to hide something from people, how are you teaching them the truth, you know? It seems to me that we should teach people the truth as it is, the way it is may have to correct some of our superstitions or some of our ideas.
But the real question we have to ask is when all the truth is known, do we have a reliable record of the life and teachings of Jesus, which is what I’m looking for? And the answer is yes. And, you know, if I’m looking for more than that, I may sometimes be disappointed with what I find.
But a lot of teachers don’t want to, they feel like they’re giving up the farm if they say that. They feel like, you know, every word in the Bible is exactly the way the Holy Spirit inspired it. Well, people like that either don’t study the Bible very well or they’re deceiving people because there are little issues like that in various parts of the Bible.
The question has got to be, does that ruin my faith? Or do I just take that and stress it? Okay, now I know that.
Let’s move on and follow Jesus. That would be my approach.
I’m right there, and I thank you for that.
Okay, wait. All right, thank you. Oh, I’m sorry.
I hit the button because I’m moving on, but I’m sorry I missed your last, what you were going on to say. We’re almost out of time here. The show is just about to end.
Sharon in Las Vegas, welcome to The Narrow Path.
Hi, Steve. My name is Sharon, and we met you, my son and I, Tom, met you a couple of times in Las Vegas and went on the Alaskan cruise with you.
Oh, I remember. Sure.
Again, your lovely wife, Dana. And I wanted to call because the gentleman that called was going through such misery, and it hurts because I can relate. And then the other lady that was having the problem with, oh, jeez, when the church, she went to the gay wedding, whatever.
What about… I always… My aunt gave me a scripture to Roman date 28.
For all things work together for good, for those who love the Lord and are called according to His purpose. And for the judgmental ones, which I think is… I kind of feel sorry for them.
Or even when I judge myself, because I’ve been given choices in my life, and I just praise the Lord. And then, I think… And I don’t know scripture for it, if it would be…
I think the Lord is making his ends of diamond pearls for him. How do you make a diamond? How do you make a pearl?
It’s not real, funny games. It hurts.
That’s right. It comes from pain in the oyster and pressure on the coal. So you’re right.
You’re right about that. I appreciate your input. I’m going to try to get one more call in here from Rand in St. Augustine, Florida.
Hi, Rand. Welcome.
Hello, Steve.
Hi.
Hi, Steve. My question has to do with the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the gift of tongues. I’m 78 now, but when I was in my 20s, I received a baptism with the gift of speaking in tongues.
And at that time, I went to a church that they practiced pretty orderly, the gift of speaking in tongues and interpretation. But I never spoke in that regard. My gift, I use as prayer language.
But a lot happened at that time, and I fell away. The last 15 years I’ve come back. I have read all of your literature on tongues and how that is overemphasized quite frequently.
But in my particular case, I use tongues as a prayer language. And when I’m out of words, when I don’t know how to express myself, or I don’t know fully the details of what I’m praying for, I speak in tongues and I pray with all of my heart.
How do you respond to that? I say more power to you. I think that’s fine.
I think that Paul said that if someone wants to speak in tongues in the church and there’s no interpreter, he said, let him speak to himself and to God. So in other words, tongues can be used that way too, to speak just to God, not publicly. So speaking in tongues in the church with an interpretation is not the only use of tongues that Paul acknowledges.
He’s mainly focused on that in 1 Corinthians 14 where he talks about church order and protocols. But he says it is, of course, possible, if there’s no interpretation, to just use it to pray, just pray in tongues. So I would affirm that that’s a biblical thing.
I appreciate your call, brother, we’re out of time. You’ve been listening to The Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg.
Our website is thenarrowpath.com. Check it out. All kinds of free resources.
You can also donate if you want at thenarrowpath.com. We’re out of time, so let’s talk again tomorrow. God bless.