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Join Steve Gregg as he addresses listener queries about the interpretation of Revelation 20:7 from the amillennial perspective. Explore the symbolic nature of Satan's binding and how it contrasts with premillennial interpretations. In response to inquiries about recommended Christian apologetics books, Steve offers insights into top picks for both introductory and in-depth exploration of faith, providing a thoughtful guide to navigating spiritual literature.
SPEAKER 01 :
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. We have an open phone line so that you can call in through this hour with your questions about the Bible or the Christian faith that we can discuss here, commercial free, no breaks, except at the bottom of the hour I do take a break to let you know how to reach us. But, yeah, we don't have anything for sale. We have no sponsors. We just use this whole time to take your calls. And you can call if you have questions or if you have a disagreement with the host about something that's happened, been said on the program. The number to call, by the way, it looks like I'm looking now at this full switchboard, so don't call right now, but call in a few minutes. Lines do open up. The number to call is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. Now, we have a couple of things happening tomorrow in Southern California, for those of you listening in that area, which is where I live. Once a month, we have a men's Bible study on Saturday morning in Temecula. And that's happening tomorrow morning, 8 o'clock, for men. And that's held at a location you can get the address at our website for. And then in the evening, in another location in Southern California, in Orange County, we have a Bible study in Boynton Park. And that's going to be about the book of 1 John. It's going to be an overview of the whole book of 1 John. And that's tomorrow night. So if you're interested in these meetings, you can go to our website, thenarrowpath.com. Look under announcements. By the way, the meeting tomorrow night is 6 o'clock. It might be a little earlier than you'd be expecting, so I don't want you to show up late if you're coming. It's at 6 o'clock. And the men's Bible study is at 8 in the morning in Temecula. All right, so check that out. If you'd like to join us, we'd love to see you. Go to thenarrowpath.com. Look under announcements, and you'll see the time and place of these gatherings. We're going to go to the phones now and talk to Justin in Topsham, Maine. Hi, Justin. Welcome to The Narrow Path. How are you doing, Steve? Can you hear me well? Yes, sir.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, so speaking of 1 John, in 1 John 3, verse 6, no one who lives in him keeps on sinning. I know the rest of the book, there's some parts where he's talking about practicing sin. So my first question is, should we view the book of 1 John as kind of a whole? That way it doesn't seem a little weird. And then secondly, the second question has to do with cessationism. What is the – I have a good friend of mine who is a cessationist, and I – I have yet to get an answer from him about the passages that speak of the ceasing of gifts. And I'll take my answer off the air, if that's okay, sir.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right. Well, thank you for your call. Good to talk to you. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you. Well, you know, in 1 John, there's about three or four places that it says that people who are born of God or people who abide in him or people who, you know, are Christians don't sin. And yet every Christian knows that they have sinned since becoming a Christian, which seems to make it seem unrealistic. Or else, of course, makes it seem like maybe we're not Christians because we do sometimes sin. But the New Testament writers had a view of things which we should have, but many modern Christians don't. And that is that there's two ways to live your life. One is to live in sin. and the other is to live in obedience to God. Now, this is a decision that you make when you become a believer, that you're going to live in obedience to God. And therefore, you make that your aim, and you make that your habit. Now, to say we live... If we say somebody lives in sin, that doesn't mean that everything they do is sin. It doesn't mean they never do a good thing. You know, a person who is a sinner may still... Love his mother and take care of her when she gets old or something. There are people who do good things, although they are living in sin. To say that someone lives in sin doesn't mean everything they do is a sin. Likewise, to say we live in obedience to God doesn't mean that there are no exceptions in our behavior. It doesn't mean we never, ever do the wrong thing. But we don't live in sin. If a person is living in sin, then they're not following Christ. And if they're not following Christ, they're not what the Bible regards as a Christian. So John assumes his readers know this because, you know, in those days, they didn't have a Christianized culture outside the church. In the Roman Empire, everything was pagan. Their morals were atrocious and so forth. They were idolaters. They were immoral. And so when a person became a Christian, their course changed. And it was very obvious. They're not living in sin anymore like the rest of the world does. And so when John says he that is born of God does not commit sin, he means he has given up his life of sin. It doesn't mean he never stumbles. The Bible makes it very clear we all do stumble. And when we do stumble, we do sin. But then we repent and we go back to living obediently again. And when we do sin, it's something we really didn't really want to do. I mean, there was something about us that wanted to. Obviously, our flesh wanted to. But our hearts and our minds didn't. really don't want to. That's what Paul talked about where, you know, I do the things I hate and the things I want to do I don't do. He says, I see this in my mind. I agree with the law of God. In other words, I'm in favor of doing the right thing. I really want to do the right thing. But I see that I have some force, some law in my members that brings me into bondage to sinning. So from time to time, a Christian does stumble into sin. But even when they do, It doesn't represent the way they want to live their life. They've had a weak moment. And because it's not the way they want to live their life, as soon as they've done it, they repent. They don't live in sin. They may fall into sin, but they don't live in it. So that's what John means. And he assumes that all people of his generation knew that. That's what it was. You're a sinner, a pagan, living in idolatry and immorality and dishonesty and all those evil things that pagans in the Roman Empire lived in until you become a Christian. And when you become a Christian, you renounce those things. You stop living that way. Your life goes in another direction from what it was doing before. And, yeah, you might fall into sin once in a while, and John is not denying that. In fact, John acknowledges that because he says in the same book, in 1 John 2, verse 1, My little children, these things I write to you, that you may not sin. I'm writing to you so that you don't sin. But if anyone does sin, he says, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. So he does say, you know, sometimes we do sin. We don't want to. I'm writing to you so you won't. I'm writing to you so that sin will no longer be a part of your life, but if you stumble into sin, thankfully it's not the end of the path for you. we have a redemption in Christ. But notice a couple of verses later, he says in 1 John 2, 4, he who says, I know him and does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. Now, keeping God's commandments is living obediently. And anyone who says they know Christ and they don't live obediently, they don't know Christ. He says they're lying. They may be lying to themselves. Or their pastor may have lied to them. Their pastor may have told them they're a Christian, even when they've never departed from their sinful life. But he says it's a lie, whether you're lying to yourself, lying to others, or someone else has lied to you. If you think you know God, but you're living in sin and disobedience, you don't. You don't know God. And that's made very unambiguous. So several times throughout the book, John does say, you know, those who are born of God, those who he dwells in and so forth, those who abide in him don't sin. But he's not saying it never happens that we sin. It just means that our life is the opposite of a life of sin. It's a life of obedience, which is unfortunately punctuated by failures on occasion. And so that's what he means by that. Now, about cessationism, for those who don't know that word, you asked about it. Cessationism is the doctrine that the gifts of the Holy Spirit... at least what some people might call the sign gifts of the Spirit, healing, prophecy, miracles, that kind of thing, tongues, interpretation of tongues. Some people say that those gifts have ceased. That's why it's called cessationism. Cessation means ceasing, the ceasing of the gifts. And many people believe that this happened when the New Testament was completed. Or they don't put such a fine point on it. They just say after the apostolic age. Now, I don't know if they would say this happened the moment John, the last surviving apostle, died. Suddenly all the gifts disappeared. Or if there's some more generic or general area in their mind called the apostolic age. One thing I can say, though, is whatever they're thinking of, it's not in the Bible. There's nothing in the Bible that speaks of an apostolic age after which the gifts will go away. Paul did not seem to be aware that the gifts would ever be taken from the church. In fact, he said in 1 Corinthians 1.7 that you lack in no gift while you're awaiting the revelation of Jesus Christ. That's why we're waiting for Jesus to come. We don't lack any of the gifts. I'm still waiting for him to come. So I believe the church still has the gifts, and there's certainly nothing in the Bible that would indicate otherwise. Why do so many people think that the gifts have ceased when there's not one verse in the Bible that says it? Well, I think it has a lot to do with our tendency to look at our own church and say, well, we don't have these things going on in our church, so I guess they're not supposed to, because certainly we couldn't be deficient. We can't be at fault. We can't be the ones who are negligent of something we shouldn't be neglecting. So I guess the fact that we don't see these things in our church must mean we're not supposed to. It must mean that those aren't for today. And that's what a lot of people, I think, are reasoning. But they're not reasoning from Scripture. Now, many of them, of course, do cite 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul says that the gifts are that we prophesy in part and we know in part. That is, we have only partial imperfect functioning of the gifts. But he says, but when that which is mature or perfect has come, that which is in part will be done away. Now, some people say, well, that which is in part is the gifts. And therefore, when that which is perfect is come, Paul says, then the gifts will be done away with. Well, he doesn't say the gifts will be done away with. He said when that which is mature comes, then that which is partial will be done away. But that might mean, you know, when we are mature enough that we function in the gifts in a mature way, then this immature functioning and this incomplete functioning of the gifts will pass, and we won't do that that way anymore. Because the next words he says are these. He says, when I was a child, I spoke as a child. I acted as a child. I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things. Now, why does he say that? He's just said that the gifts, we operate the gifts in a partial way, but when that which is mature comes, then that partial way of doing things will be done away. Now he says, I was a child once, but when I grew up, I put away the childish things. Now, what did he do as a child? He said he thought as a child, he acted as a child, and he spoke as a child. So is he saying speaking and acting and thinking are things that he stopped doing once he ceased to be a child? No, he stopped doing it in a childish way. He says, I put away childish things when I became a man. But what he put away was not thinking, but thinking as a child. It was replaced with thinking as an adult. Same thing with acting and speaking. He did put those things away, the childish ways, but he didn't stop thinking and speaking. He just stopped doing it like a child. He started doing it like a mature man. And that's what Paul says, that we currently are using our gifts in an immature way. At least they are, the Corinthians were. And he says, but... The truth is that maturity will come. When that which is mature comes, then this childish stuff will be done away with. So he's not saying that gifts will be done away with necessarily. Now, if he is, as some people think, if he is saying the time is going to come when that which is perfect has arrived, whatever that is, something else, and then the gifts will be ceased. I mean, that's what cessationists think he means. Well, then what is that? What is the thing that's perfect that has to come that will cause the gifts to be taken away or to cease? Well, if Paul is talking about such a thing, the best way to understand it would be Jesus coming back. When Jesus comes back, the gifts will be able to be ceased. Just like Paul said in 1 Corinthians 1.7. You lack in none of the gifts while you're waiting for the coming of Christ. But the cessationists often will say something like, well, that which is perfect is a reference to the completed New Testament. When Paul was writing, most of the New Testament was not yet written, but of course it has been now. And we now have a perfect revelation from God in a complete New Testament canon. And that's the perfect. And when the New Testament was completed, therefore, and the canon of the New Testament was full, then the gifts were taken away. Well, That is like 100% arbitrary. I mean, there's not one line in the Bible that would suggest that the coming of the New Testament would do away with the gifts. That is simply assuming that when Paul generically or vaguely speaks of that which is perfect, that he means a completed New Testament canon. But why should he have meant that? Did he even know there was going to be one? Did his readers know there was going to be one? There's no evidence in the Bible that Paul knew that someday... All his letters will be collected along with Peter's and John's and James' and Jude's and the book of Revelation and the four gospels and the book of Acts. They're all going to be gathered together into what we call the New Testament canon. I mean, Paul, as far as we know, didn't know about that. And if he did, he never mentioned it. And if he did know it, there's no reason to believe the Corinthians would know. So if he's speaking to them in terms he expects them to understand... And he says something vague like, when that which is perfect comes. And what he's talking about is a completed New Testament canon, which they've never heard of, and he doesn't explain, and which he's probably never heard of either. This is the most arbitrary interpretation of that that could be imagined. It's one of those interpretations of necessity. If you want to prove the gifts are going to go away in the apostolic age, you've got to find some marker. You've got to find something. That's when they went. Now, what's interesting is the New Testament canon was completed in the first century, but it wasn't settled, what books belonged to it, until almost 400 A.D. So, I mean, at what point then? There's a 300-year range there when the gifts could have ceased, if that's what they're looking for in the New Testament canon. I will say this, the early church fathers... Many of them had not gotten the memo if the gifts had ceased because they talked in the 2nd and 3rd century, they talked about prophets coming to the churches. They talked about healings. Apparently they didn't know that the gifts had ceased, although Calvin, I think, is the first one to suggest it. And he was in the 16th century, late. So I believe the cessationist doctrine originated with John Calvin. I went looking for the origins of it once. I believe that's what we nailed it down. I think Calvin's the one who taught it. Luther didn't believe that. Luther was a generation earlier than Calvin, and he didn't believe in cessation. In his song, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, he has this line, The spirit and the gifts are ours. We have the spirit and we have the gifts, he said. That's just a generation before Calvin. But then Calvin came up with the idea, apparently, that the gifts had ceased sometime in the Apostolic Age. And frankly... He didn't have any scripture for it. I think he just hadn't seen any gifts, so he just decided, well, they must have gone somewhere. Maybe we should go looking for them, you know, if they've gone somewhere, because they're supposed to be around, according to scripture. All right. Let's talk to, let's see who's been here longest. It looks like Kathy from La Hopper, California has been waiting longest. Hi, Kathy. Hello, Kathy.
SPEAKER 08 :
Yes. Hi, Steve. I have a question. Let me run away.
SPEAKER 01 :
Kathy, I don't know what your question is yet.
SPEAKER 08 :
Yes. My cousin's on the phone. I'm running away so he doesn't hear me asking this question. The last time I got to talk to him was about 35 years ago. Only this two weeks because Daddy, just 89 years old, just went to be with Jesus. But he doesn't I don't think he knows Jesus yet. Do you recommend which book I can introduce to him? Because I don't know if he knows Jesus yet. He is 59 years old and he was a graduate of Yale and he was an MD in the ER room and currently he is practicing private clinic And he is an open-minded, intelligent, I'd say like ten times higher IQ or five times higher IQ than me. A very humorous man.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, as far as what book to recommend, you have to realize I've read about a thousand books. And I'd say maybe about 50 of them would be equally humorous. Good for a book.
SPEAKER 08 :
Do you recommend the book Is God Real by Lee Strobel or Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell? But I don't know which edition for Josh McDowell because when I go on Amazon, I don't know which edition to recommend to him. When I tried to buy it for friends, I couldn't find which one.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I know that Josh McDowell's first edition of Evidence That Demands a Verdict came out around about 1970, and it's been revised. There's also a second volume called More Evidence That Demands a Verdict that came out some years later. And there might be more. I don't know how many he's put out now, but I would just say whatever one is the current one. You know, he put out a smaller version of that. Not everyone's going to be interested in reading the kind of book that evidence that demands a verdict is unless they're really hungry to know the truth.
SPEAKER 08 :
He's a great reader.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, yeah, that's a good book. That's a good book. Or you could get him a more abbreviated version by the same author called More Than a Carpenter. Josh McDowell wrote a smaller book for people who don't want to read such a big book called More Than a Carpenter. That's a little book. He could probably read it in one sitting. You mentioned Lee Strobel. His books are usually pretty good. I mean, I like Lee Strobel fine. I'd like everybody to read my book, Empire of the Risen Sun, which I think could be helpful, though it doesn't really provide arguments for Christianity like some of these other books do. But I think it'd be valuable for someone exploring Christianity to read. But there's lots of books out there. Literally, I probably have read 30 to 50 books that would be good for a non-Christian to read to introduce them to the evidence for Christianity. And so it makes it kind of hard for me to just pull one out, especially since I don't really know him. If I knew what he's struggling with, maybe I could.
SPEAKER 08 :
He's okay with the dad passed away because Mom passed away first, and then wife passed away, and he said he's fine because this is unfortunately not his first time, even though he's the only child.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, well, again, any of the books we've mentioned would be fine. And as I said, I wish everyone would read my book, not because I want to sell them. I don't ever sell them. I give them away, but... You know, my book, Empire of the Risen Sun, I think would be of value to most people. I'll tell you what, there's a pretty good author who wrote recently a couple smallish books that when I read them, I thought, oh, these would be really good for an unbeliever to read. And the author's name is Peter J. Williams. Peter J. Williams, okay. And one of them, which I thought was quite good, was called Can We Trust the Gospels? And he wrote another one. I don't remember what the title of it is. Something like Is the Bible True or something like that. I don't remember. But if you looked up his name, Peter J. Williams, say at Amazon, I know that his book Can We Trust the Gospels is a good book. And it's not a very long book, but he's good at summarizing the information.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 01 :
And he's a real scholar. He's a real scholar.
SPEAKER 08 :
Do you recommend me also to have him look up Passover and also give him a copy of the Book of John?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, reading the Book of John is always good. As far as the Passover, what do you mean, studying the Passover?
SPEAKER 08 :
Just look it up because Passover is the blood of the Lamb.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, there's, I mean, Passover is one of many, many, you know, dozens of topics that could be of value for him to read about. It's, you know, I mean, there's so many books. There's just too many books for me to know what to recommend. So just the ones I mentioned are the ones I'm going to recommend, and I could recommend other ones, but we need to take other calls, and we can't survey the whole field of Christian apologetic literature at this point.
SPEAKER 08 :
Yes. Okay. Okay.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, Kathy, thank you. Let's talk to, let's see, Gene from Gainesville, Florida. Gene, welcome.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hey, good afternoon, Steve. First, I want to take a second and thank you and your wife and your team there for your ministry. It really encourages us to search the scriptures and be brilliant.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, thank you. By the way, your phone is probably on speakerphone. There's a lot of road noise coming through it.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, let me go to see if I can go to handheld here. But real quick, my question is about, from the perspective of someone who was raised in the premillennial tradition, and it has to do with the call you took on Tuesday in reference to Revelation 20, verse 7, with the unchaining of Satan for a brief time. Sure. I've been examining the differences between premillennialism and amillennialism for the last few years, and your response provoked in me to question the amillennialist perspective on your interpretation of Revelation 20, verse 7, based on the writings of three New Testament writers.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, I'm going to have to put you on hold here because we're at the bottom of the hour. Maybe you can get your phone off of speakerphone. We can hear you a lot better if you do. And I'll put you back on in about a minute or so. So stay tuned, and we'll come back to you. I just need to let our listeners know that The Narrow Path is a listener-supported ministry. We pay for lots of money to be on the radio. It costs a lot of money to buy time from radio stations. If you'd like to help us stay on the air, you can write to The Narrow Path, P.O. Box 1730. Temecula, California, 92593. Or you can donate from the website. That's thenarrowpath.com. It's got lots of resources. They're all free. But you can donate there if you wish at thenarrowpath.com. I'll be back in 30 seconds. Don't go away. We have another half hour.
SPEAKER 02 :
In a 16-lecture series entitled The Authority of Scriptures, Steve Gregg not only thoroughly presents the case for the Bible's authority, but also explains specifically how this truth is to be applied to a believer's daily walk and outlook. The Authority of Scriptures, as well as hundreds of other stimulating lectures, can be downloaded in MP3 format without charge from our website, thenarrowpath.com.
SPEAKER 01 :
Welcome back to the Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg, and we're live for another half hour taking your calls. Our lines are full, and we'll probably occupy the remaining half hour, so I'm not going to give out the phone number at this time. But so that we might hope to get through all of these calls, I'm going to just ask the callers to do something that we haven't had done today very much. It's always nice when people call up and say, My question is, and then give me a question, especially since you're calling to ask a question. Just ask a question. You don't have to give me a bunch of background for it. If I want background, I'll ask you. But we have a lot of people waiting, very little time. So whenever I put you on the air, if you don't mind, just say my question is. Or if you don't have a question, just say my disagreement is. But that way we can actually get to the question soon enough and hopefully get more callers in. We were talking to Gene from Gainesville, Florida, before the break, and he didn't get his question out, so we'll put him back on here. Hi, Gene. Welcome back.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hi, Steve. Yeah, thanks. Hopefully this is clear now. So my question is in regard to the Amelios perspective on Revelation 20, verse 7, and your explanation earlier this week. So the three New Testament writers, Peter, Paul, and James, all write about during their time period the ongoing and active role of Satan. He's prowling around like a roaring lion. He's an adversary to us, is what Paul thought, an active adversary, and then James talks about
SPEAKER 01 :
I'm aware of it. Go ahead.
SPEAKER 03 :
What is your question, then? So the question is, from an Amalanus perspective, how is that reconciled with the aspect that the thousand-year reign of Christ is really a figurative aspect and that Satan is unbound at the end of that? Therefore, theoretically, he would still be bound in the time period
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, I got you. I got you. Okay. Yeah, that's about the most, frankly, the most common question people have when they first hear about amillennialism. Because amillennialism holds that Revelation 20 is symbolically describing the time between the first and the second coming of Christ as the so-called thousand years. Of course, it's a lot more than a thousand years, but the number thousand years is thought to be simply symbolic for a really long time without any suggestion of how long that would really be. Now, during that time, according to amillennialism, that time began when Jesus was here the first time, and it will end at the end when Jesus comes back. So we're kind of living in that thousand years. But the big question that people have, probably more often than any other, is isn't Satan supposed to be bound during the thousand years? After all, he's loosed again at the end for a little while. That would mean that he was bound forever. when the New Testament writers wrote about Satan roaming about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, or those kinds of things, or even now. Is Satan around now? Of course he is. Of course he is. So how could he be bound? Why would someone believe that the binding of Satan took place at the first coming of Christ and that he's still bound until the time at the very end when he's loosed for a little while? The confusion here comes from, I think, misunderstanding what the imagery of Revelation is trying to say. Revelation is not telling us that Satan is literally nowhere around. This is written in a vision to make the point that Satan has been bound in one activity in particular. Yes, the pictures of him as a snake or a dragon with a chain and a bottomless pit. I mean, this is all the imagery of the vision. But the point that it keeps making is he is bound, it says in verse 3, so that he should not deceive the nations anymore until the thousand years are finished. And then in verse 7 it says, and 8, when the thousand years have expired, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out and deceive the nations. Okay, so this is simply a description of Satan being bound with respect to his ability to deceive the nations. It's not saying he's literally bound somewhere. I mean, when Jesus said he had bound the strong man in Matthew chapter 12, meaning Satan, he had bound Satan and was spoiling his house. He didn't mean that Satan was literally in a closet tied up with the door locked somewhere and he couldn't get out. This is simply making the point that Jesus was plundering Satan's domain and Satan was as helpless to stop him as if he had been bound and was simply watching as a home invader stole all this stuff and couldn't resist. The imagery of these things is not saying that Satan literally tied up somewhere or chained somewhere. You know, Jesus was explaining in Matthew 12 that, you know, although Satan is not literally bound somewhere, he's as helpless as if he was bound. He's, you know, Jesus is coming into the devil's territory, taking his stuff, loosing the people who are demon-possessed and letting them go. That's plundering Satan's house. And Satan couldn't stop him any more than a man who owns a house who's tied up could stop a home intruder. Now, the same kind of imagery here, I mean, it's a different image. It's a dragon instead of a man. It's a chain. It's not bound in his own house. But the idea is that Jesus at his first coming has rendered Satan helpless in areas that he was not previously helpless. Now, when he's loosed again, he will not be helpless in this respect anymore. The binding of Satan refers to him being rendered incapable of resistance or incapable of doing something. that he could do before. Yes, it looks very absolute. You know, the dragon's in a pit, the lid's on there, and so forth. He's got a chain on him. That's all the, I mean, that's no more literal than the beast is literally an animal with the mouth of a lion and the feet of a bear and the body of a leopard. and has seven literal heads and ten literal horns that have crowns on horns. No one takes that literally. No one believes that's a real animal fitting that description. That's how Revelation talks. That's how Revelation describes things. That's how visions are. Zechariah has visions like that. Daniel has visions like that. They are never in literal terms, but they are impressionistic. They have all kinds of details in the vision because a picture is worth a thousand words, and it might take a thousand words to describe the picture, but the picture itself is getting across an idea. And the idea is, before Jesus came, the nations, that means the Gentile nations as opposed to Israel, were under the deception of Satan. They were his domain. Only Israel had been selected by God to receive the law, to receive prophets, to receive revelation. The rest of the nation was left to Satan, of the nations. The Gentile nations were under Satan's blindness. They were all worshiping demons, sacrificing their children to idols and things like that. Satan kept them in blindness and darkness, and no one challenged him. Well, Jesus did, because when Jesus came, he defeated Satan at the cross and sent his disciples out to disciple the nations, that is, the Gentiles, and to tell them the gospel. So Satan could no longer keep the nations in deception. Now, somebody said, well, doesn't he still deceive the nations? Well, he deceives people. That's the point. He deceives people. He's the deceiver, to be sure. He roams about like a roaring lion speaking. But he can't deceive the nations as a whole anymore. In other words, there was a time when all the Gentile nations other than Israel were Satan's rightful domain. God allowed him to deceive them. God allowed them to be in darkness. That time has ended. The light has come. And the true light now shines. And it's going out to all the nations. Satan cannot keep them in darkness anymore. Now, can he deceive individuals? Of course. Of course he can. And in every nation, there are people who are deceived by Satan. In fact, even Christians get deceived by him some of the time. That's not what this vision is talking about. This vision isn't talking about whether Satan can deceive people or not. It's talking about he's been stripped of any right to keep the nations in deception. anymore they are no longer his domain they're jesus's domain jesus said all authority in heaven and on earth have been given to me therefore go to the nations and make disciples of all the nations so the church age is the time when satan cannot keep the nations in deception anymore though he can he can deceive anyone who wants to be deceived and apparently plenty of people want to be But, you know, those people who live in these nations who didn't have any access to light, to truth, previously, now it's come to them. And that's what this age is about, bringing that truth, bringing that light to the nations. So Satan can't take that whole... block of humanity and just say, they're mine, I'm in charge, they're going to stay deceived. No, the truth has come. Now, the losing of Satan seems to be a reversal of that. Seems to be, you know, that the truth is somehow hindered again, and Satan manages to get a lot of nations in blindness again. Now, I don't think that's happened yet necessarily, but I think that that's something that will happen at the end. But to say, well, but doesn't the Bible say the devil still tempts us? The devil, you know, he still lies. He still... You know, we're to resist the devil and he'll flee from us. He's like a roaring lion seeking. Yeah, yeah, it's all those things. And it was those things even when Jesus said he had bound the strongman in Matthew 12. Jesus had bound the strongman. He said so. But that didn't mean Satan was literally bound somewhere. It's making a point. And to try to extend it to all activities of Satan is simply to go beyond what the passage is trying to say. So the amillennialist doesn't think the devil is literally bound. you know, has a chain and he's in a pit and locked up somewhere. We're not saying that's literally happened. We don't think Revelation is literal at all. It's like Daniel. Daniel's not literal either. And Zechariah's not literal. I mean, these kinds of visions are always given in symbolic imagery. There's not one of Daniel's images that are given in literal imagery. So, and same thing with the Revelation as far as I'm concerned. So, anyway, that's how I understand it. Okay. Thank you, Gene. Good talking to you. Okay, we'll talk next to Kerry from Dallas, Texas. Kerry, welcome.
SPEAKER 05 :
Hi, Steve. Hi. Just something on your last point there. When Jesus did announce that he bound the strong man, afterwards, did he not still cast out demons? Yes.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes. Yes, he did. In fact, he said that's why he was able to cast out demons, because he had found the strong man. Yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, my question is about Romans 11, 25, and 26 again. You've helped me a lot here, but I still have some more questions. About three. First of all, Paul's use of Israel in 25 and his use of Israel in 26, don't seem to be the same Israel. One seems to be national Israel, the other seems to be repentant Israel. And then Paul makes the statement that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. Would that not indicate that this hardening is continuing today? and also with the word until, does that not leave open a space between the fullness of the Gentiles and maybe when that hardening is removed and maybe leaving room for a millennial kingdom?
SPEAKER 01 :
All right. First of all, your question about Romans 11, 25 and 26, is Paul using the word Israel differently in those two verses? Well, yeah. Yeah, he is. In verse 25, he says, For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion. That hardening in part has happened to Israel, meaning the nation or the race of Israel. until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And so, or in this way, all Israel will be saved. Now, we know he doesn't mean national Israel will be saved, because he's denied that earlier, in chapter 9, in verse 27. In chapter 9, verse 27, he quotes from Isaiah, chapter 10, which says, though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea. Okay, there's a lot of people who are descended from Israel. It says, only the remnant will be saved. So, not all of the Jews will be saved. And by the way, if Paul did predict that someone other than the rent would be saved, he sure missed his mark because the vast number of Jewish people who've lived at his time and since have not been saved. All Israel will be saved. Now, see, some people think he's talking about just one generation of Israel at the end times will be saved. But he doesn't say anything about the end times. He doesn't say anything about... He doesn't really say anything about the future at all. He just says that all Israel, the true Israel, will be saved. But only a remnant of national Israel will be saved. The true Israel is a smaller portion of national Israel. And that's what he began his whole discussion in chapter 9, verse 6, saying they are not all Israel who are of Israel. So he's made a distinction between two Israels at the beginning. Now, I've talked to people who disagree with my view on this, and they say, well, yeah, he did mention an Israel within Israel in Romans 9.6, but after that he only talked about the nation of Israel, and so he has to be talking about the nation of Israel in verse 26, all Israel will be saved. Why would that be true? Wasn't there a reason for him saying what he said in chapter 9, verse 6? I mean, it would be very crazy if Paul just as an offhand throwaway line said, not all are Israel who are of Israel. But never mind that. Let's just talk about those who are of Israel and forget about the Israel that not all of them are it. No, he's made the whole argument through chapters 9, 10, and 11 is the nation of Israel as a whole have not been saved and never will be. Isaiah said only the remnant of them will be saved. Therefore, only the remnant are the true Israel that will be saved, and not all who are descended from Israel are in that true Israel. So he's made a distinction, the whole chapter 9, is distinguishing between two Israels. One is a vessel for wrath, one is a vessel for honor, he said. You know, and one is just a remnant, a small portion of the other Israel. So... So Paul has introduced this idea there's two Israels right from the beginning. And to suggest that he forgets that in chapter 10 and 11 and never mentions again that fact is to ignore the fact that chapter 9 is setting up the whole chapter 10 and 11. It's not a throwaway line when he says they are not all Israel who are of Israel. It's the theme. It's the theme of the whole three chapters. And so when he comes to the very conclusion, he says, well, you know, that Israel that are not the remnant, they have been hardened. Of course, that's only part of Israel. That's why he says hardening in part has happened in Israel. Part of Israel has been hardened. The other part has not. That's the Israel within Israel. That's the remnant has not been hardened. And he's already made that point just a few verses earlier, because he says in verse 7, Romans 11, 7, he says, What then? Israel, that is the whole nation, has not obtained what it seeks, but the elect have obtained it, and the rest were hardened. Okay, so hardened, some of them were hardened. Who weren't? The elect, the remnant, they weren't hardened. So the nation of Israel, Paul has been talking all the way through here. There's two parts of the nation of Israel. There's those who can only be called children according to the flesh, and there's those among them who can be called children according to promise. The first group is just every ethnic Jew. The second group is that portion within ethnic Jews who happens to also believe. And he introduces that distinction, you know, several verses introducing that idea in chapter 9. And that's how he closed it. So Paul has used the word Israel throughout this discussion to refer either to the whole nation in some cases or to that portion of the nation that are the elect, the remnant, the vessels of honor, whatever. I mean, he uses these different words for it. And so it's not a strange thing for him to use the word Israel two different ways. within a few lines of each other. He used it two different ways in one verse, in chapter 9, verse 6. Here we have him using it two ways in two successive verses. Verse 25, hardness in part has happened to Israel. Okay. That's the group that's, they're Israel, but they're not believers. They're not the remnant. But the Israel that will be saved is the remnant. Now, when he says, and so all Israel will be saved, so means in this way, What way? What way will all Israel be saved? Well, he's just described it. This is the conclusion of a description that began in verse 16 of an olive tree. It had Jewish branches because the olive tree is Israel. But the unbelieving Jewish branches have been removed, so they're not Israel anymore. They're not on the tree anymore. And then Gentiles who believe have been added to the tree, so they're part of Israel now. So the believing branches that were not broken off are Jewish believers. And the Gentile branches have been added to them. Now the tree is Jewish believers and Gentile believers. And in this way, all Israel, the Jewish branches and the Gentile branches, will be saved. That's what Paul says. Now, you said the word until. Does that mean until today? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, look around. Most Jews don't believe. So part of Israel has been hardened. until the fullness of the Gentiles have been fulfilled. Now, does that suggest that after the fullness of the Gentiles are fulfilled, something else will happen? Maybe the Jews won't be hardened anymore? This is what many people think, but Paul doesn't say that. Paul does not describe anything happening after the Jews are partially, you know, no longer hardened. The word until doesn't always mean he's predicting the end of something. To say this will be true until such and such just means it won't change before this happens. Will it change after that? Well, maybe, maybe not. It's not predicting that unless it does. It doesn't predict anything after that. So, I mean, when God said to Jacob, I will not leave you or forsake you until I have fulfilled all my promises to you, Does that mean, okay, but then I'm going to leave you and forsake you. After I've fulfilled my promise, I'm going to forsake you. No, to say this won't happen until this doesn't mean, okay, and after that it will. It means this will not cease to be true until such and such a point. And it may not cease to be true at that time either. But this is the end point we're looking at. The end point we're looking at is the fullness of the Gentiles being come in until that happens. Still, only part of Israel will be hardened. Will they be unhardened once the Gentiles come in? There's no mention of it. Not even a hint of it, actually. The truth is, I think if the fullness of the Gentiles will come in means until the last Gentile actually gets saved, that probably won't happen until the last day. In which case, there won't be much time for anything else to happen. Jesus will be coming. So I don't see anything here that necessitates... Someone saying, well, you know, the Jews are getting saved. There'll be a millennium and so forth after that. Let's see. We've got a lot of calls. Nicole from the Bronx, New York. Welcome. Not there? Nicole? Okay, I'm not hearing Nicole, so I'm going to have to move on. Joshua from Dallas, Texas. Welcome. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I hit another button. David from Andover, Kansas. Hopefully we can get to Joshua, too. David, are you there?
SPEAKER 06 :
Hello.
SPEAKER 01 :
Hi.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yes, can you hear me?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yes. Okay, great. My question is, who are the inhabitants of the sea in Revelation 12.12? I assume they are the fish. Okay.
SPEAKER 07 :
Okay, so when it says, woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea, for the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows the time is short, that's just the fish and the sea creatures there.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, it could mean the fish and the sea creatures. I mean, there's great disruption on the world. As you read the book of Revelation, you see that the sea turns to blood. The fishes die. The ships sink. You know, the islands disappear. Those kinds of things happen. So, I mean, it's hard to say. I mean, certainly it could mean the sea will suffer in such ways that, you know, fish will die. Anyone there? Or it could, of course, there's a possibility it could mean people who are sailors and who they basically live on the sea in ships. That's a possibility. It's a strange way to speak about them, those who dwell in the sea. But, you know, it doesn't really clarify. So it's basically saying that the sea – now, by the way, I will tell you this. The sea can be symbolic also for the Gentile nations. In the Old Testament, there are a few places in the prophets where Israel is compared with land, and the Gentile nations are called the sea. So I don't know if there's a previous place in Revelation where that was used that way, but it might mean that there. So there's a variety of possibilities. Okay. Thank you. That's very helpful. All right. Thanks for your call. Now, Joshua, we've got to you from Dallas. Welcome. Hi. Hey, thanks for having me.
SPEAKER 10 :
So, yeah, based on the way I understood the word called in the parable of the wedding feast in Matthew 22, where the Lord says many are called, few are chosen, my understanding of that word called has historically been meant to mean called via the gospel, like, you know, hearing the gospel. Yeah, but so my question then is if I look at 1 Corinthians 1.24, where it talks about Christ being crucified, being a stumbling block to the Jews, falling to the Gentiles. And then verse 24 says, but to those who are called, the Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, the wisdom of God. So I just wanted to know how you understood that word called there in that passage.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, in 1 Corinthians 1.24, the Calvinists generally believe that it refers to an effectual call, that all people are called through evangelism. But not all people are effectually called. They would say only the elect are effectually called. And the effectual call really would refer to irresistible grace. Basically, they would say if someone's of the elect, God calls them in a different way than he calls others in a way they can't essentially resist because of irresistible grace. And they would read this verse that way. Any Christian, we are the called. They would also see it that way in Romans 8.28. All things work together for good to those who are the called according to his purpose. And it says in verse 29, Whom he foreknew, he also predestinated to be conformed to the image of his Son. Whom he predestined, he called. And whom he called, he justified, and so forth. So there's reference to Christians as called. And, you know, it seems to be referring to something other than just the whole world. The whole world is being called by the preaching of the gospel. But Christians are called in a different sense. My understanding, and this may not be the correct one, but my understanding, I'm not a Calvinist, but my understanding is simply that this means those of us who've heard the call, those of us who have received the call. And I do believe there is something to a more effective call than just hearing with your ears. I mean, People can be driving down the road listening to the radio and hear the gospel and ignore it completely, where others, they hear the gospel and it just grabs them. It grabs them, and they're riveted. They're hearing it at a different level than the others are. But this would not mean that they are now being irresistibly called. Persons can be very gripped and very convicted by the message and still walk away from it. But all of us who have been converted have been gripped by the message like that, at least. And we didn't walk away from it. We received it. So I just think when he talks about us as the called, he's focusing on the fact that we are Christians because we heard that call. And we identify with it. And didn't resist it. But, I mean, Calvinists see it a little differently. And I can see how they would. But I just reject their whole system.
SPEAKER 09 :
Thanks, Steve.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right, brother. This is Mark. Thank you. Good talking to you, brother. I'm out of time for the show today. You're listening to The Narrow Path. We are listener supported, as I mentioned earlier. You can write to us, if you wish, at The Narrow Path, P.O. Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. Or from our website, thenarrowpath.com. There's a place to donate there, thenarrowpath.com. Let's talk again tomorrow, Monday.
Christian call-in talk show, where you can ask any question, share your opinion and even express a disagreement with the host, all in a freindly open atmosphere. RSS: https://tnp.theeggbeater.net/dircaster.php
Join Steve Gregg as he addresses listener queries about the interpretation of Revelation 20:7 from the amillennial perspective. Explore the symbolic nature of Satan's binding and how it contrasts with premillennial interpretations. In response to inquiries about recommended Christian apologetics books, Steve offers insights into top picks for both introductory and in-depth exploration of faith, providing a thoughtful guide to navigating spiritual literature.
SPEAKER 01 :
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. We have an open phone line so that you can call in through this hour with your questions about the Bible or the Christian faith that we can discuss here, commercial free, no breaks, except at the bottom of the hour I do take a break to let you know how to reach us. But, yeah, we don't have anything for sale. We have no sponsors. We just use this whole time to take your calls. And you can call if you have questions or if you have a disagreement with the host about something that's happened, been said on the program. The number to call, by the way, it looks like I'm looking now at this full switchboard, so don't call right now, but call in a few minutes. Lines do open up. The number to call is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. Now, we have a couple of things happening tomorrow in Southern California, for those of you listening in that area, which is where I live. Once a month, we have a men's Bible study on Saturday morning in Temecula. And that's happening tomorrow morning, 8 o'clock, for men. And that's held at a location you can get the address at our website for. And then in the evening, in another location in Southern California, in Orange County, we have a Bible study in Boynton Park. And that's going to be about the book of 1 John. It's going to be an overview of the whole book of 1 John. And that's tomorrow night. So if you're interested in these meetings, you can go to our website, thenarrowpath.com. Look under announcements. By the way, the meeting tomorrow night is 6 o'clock. It might be a little earlier than you'd be expecting, so I don't want you to show up late if you're coming. It's at 6 o'clock. And the men's Bible study is at 8 in the morning in Temecula. All right, so check that out. If you'd like to join us, we'd love to see you. Go to thenarrowpath.com. Look under announcements, and you'll see the time and place of these gatherings. We're going to go to the phones now and talk to Justin in Topsham, Maine. Hi, Justin. Welcome to The Narrow Path. How are you doing, Steve? Can you hear me well? Yes, sir.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, so speaking of 1 John, in 1 John 3, verse 6, no one who lives in him keeps on sinning. I know the rest of the book, there's some parts where he's talking about practicing sin. So my first question is, should we view the book of 1 John as kind of a whole? That way it doesn't seem a little weird. And then secondly, the second question has to do with cessationism. What is the – I have a good friend of mine who is a cessationist, and I – I have yet to get an answer from him about the passages that speak of the ceasing of gifts. And I'll take my answer off the air, if that's okay, sir.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right. Well, thank you for your call. Good to talk to you. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you. Well, you know, in 1 John, there's about three or four places that it says that people who are born of God or people who abide in him or people who, you know, are Christians don't sin. And yet every Christian knows that they have sinned since becoming a Christian, which seems to make it seem unrealistic. Or else, of course, makes it seem like maybe we're not Christians because we do sometimes sin. But the New Testament writers had a view of things which we should have, but many modern Christians don't. And that is that there's two ways to live your life. One is to live in sin. and the other is to live in obedience to God. Now, this is a decision that you make when you become a believer, that you're going to live in obedience to God. And therefore, you make that your aim, and you make that your habit. Now, to say we live... If we say somebody lives in sin, that doesn't mean that everything they do is sin. It doesn't mean they never do a good thing. You know, a person who is a sinner may still... Love his mother and take care of her when she gets old or something. There are people who do good things, although they are living in sin. To say that someone lives in sin doesn't mean everything they do is a sin. Likewise, to say we live in obedience to God doesn't mean that there are no exceptions in our behavior. It doesn't mean we never, ever do the wrong thing. But we don't live in sin. If a person is living in sin, then they're not following Christ. And if they're not following Christ, they're not what the Bible regards as a Christian. So John assumes his readers know this because, you know, in those days, they didn't have a Christianized culture outside the church. In the Roman Empire, everything was pagan. Their morals were atrocious and so forth. They were idolaters. They were immoral. And so when a person became a Christian, their course changed. And it was very obvious. They're not living in sin anymore like the rest of the world does. And so when John says he that is born of God does not commit sin, he means he has given up his life of sin. It doesn't mean he never stumbles. The Bible makes it very clear we all do stumble. And when we do stumble, we do sin. But then we repent and we go back to living obediently again. And when we do sin, it's something we really didn't really want to do. I mean, there was something about us that wanted to. Obviously, our flesh wanted to. But our hearts and our minds didn't. really don't want to. That's what Paul talked about where, you know, I do the things I hate and the things I want to do I don't do. He says, I see this in my mind. I agree with the law of God. In other words, I'm in favor of doing the right thing. I really want to do the right thing. But I see that I have some force, some law in my members that brings me into bondage to sinning. So from time to time, a Christian does stumble into sin. But even when they do, It doesn't represent the way they want to live their life. They've had a weak moment. And because it's not the way they want to live their life, as soon as they've done it, they repent. They don't live in sin. They may fall into sin, but they don't live in it. So that's what John means. And he assumes that all people of his generation knew that. That's what it was. You're a sinner, a pagan, living in idolatry and immorality and dishonesty and all those evil things that pagans in the Roman Empire lived in until you become a Christian. And when you become a Christian, you renounce those things. You stop living that way. Your life goes in another direction from what it was doing before. And, yeah, you might fall into sin once in a while, and John is not denying that. In fact, John acknowledges that because he says in the same book, in 1 John 2, verse 1, My little children, these things I write to you, that you may not sin. I'm writing to you so that you don't sin. But if anyone does sin, he says, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. So he does say, you know, sometimes we do sin. We don't want to. I'm writing to you so you won't. I'm writing to you so that sin will no longer be a part of your life, but if you stumble into sin, thankfully it's not the end of the path for you. we have a redemption in Christ. But notice a couple of verses later, he says in 1 John 2, 4, he who says, I know him and does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. Now, keeping God's commandments is living obediently. And anyone who says they know Christ and they don't live obediently, they don't know Christ. He says they're lying. They may be lying to themselves. Or their pastor may have lied to them. Their pastor may have told them they're a Christian, even when they've never departed from their sinful life. But he says it's a lie, whether you're lying to yourself, lying to others, or someone else has lied to you. If you think you know God, but you're living in sin and disobedience, you don't. You don't know God. And that's made very unambiguous. So several times throughout the book, John does say, you know, those who are born of God, those who he dwells in and so forth, those who abide in him don't sin. But he's not saying it never happens that we sin. It just means that our life is the opposite of a life of sin. It's a life of obedience, which is unfortunately punctuated by failures on occasion. And so that's what he means by that. Now, about cessationism, for those who don't know that word, you asked about it. Cessationism is the doctrine that the gifts of the Holy Spirit... at least what some people might call the sign gifts of the Spirit, healing, prophecy, miracles, that kind of thing, tongues, interpretation of tongues. Some people say that those gifts have ceased. That's why it's called cessationism. Cessation means ceasing, the ceasing of the gifts. And many people believe that this happened when the New Testament was completed. Or they don't put such a fine point on it. They just say after the apostolic age. Now, I don't know if they would say this happened the moment John, the last surviving apostle, died. Suddenly all the gifts disappeared. Or if there's some more generic or general area in their mind called the apostolic age. One thing I can say, though, is whatever they're thinking of, it's not in the Bible. There's nothing in the Bible that speaks of an apostolic age after which the gifts will go away. Paul did not seem to be aware that the gifts would ever be taken from the church. In fact, he said in 1 Corinthians 1.7 that you lack in no gift while you're awaiting the revelation of Jesus Christ. That's why we're waiting for Jesus to come. We don't lack any of the gifts. I'm still waiting for him to come. So I believe the church still has the gifts, and there's certainly nothing in the Bible that would indicate otherwise. Why do so many people think that the gifts have ceased when there's not one verse in the Bible that says it? Well, I think it has a lot to do with our tendency to look at our own church and say, well, we don't have these things going on in our church, so I guess they're not supposed to, because certainly we couldn't be deficient. We can't be at fault. We can't be the ones who are negligent of something we shouldn't be neglecting. So I guess the fact that we don't see these things in our church must mean we're not supposed to. It must mean that those aren't for today. And that's what a lot of people, I think, are reasoning. But they're not reasoning from Scripture. Now, many of them, of course, do cite 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul says that the gifts are that we prophesy in part and we know in part. That is, we have only partial imperfect functioning of the gifts. But he says, but when that which is mature or perfect has come, that which is in part will be done away. Now, some people say, well, that which is in part is the gifts. And therefore, when that which is perfect is come, Paul says, then the gifts will be done away with. Well, he doesn't say the gifts will be done away with. He said when that which is mature comes, then that which is partial will be done away. But that might mean, you know, when we are mature enough that we function in the gifts in a mature way, then this immature functioning and this incomplete functioning of the gifts will pass, and we won't do that that way anymore. Because the next words he says are these. He says, when I was a child, I spoke as a child. I acted as a child. I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things. Now, why does he say that? He's just said that the gifts, we operate the gifts in a partial way, but when that which is mature comes, then that partial way of doing things will be done away. Now he says, I was a child once, but when I grew up, I put away the childish things. Now, what did he do as a child? He said he thought as a child, he acted as a child, and he spoke as a child. So is he saying speaking and acting and thinking are things that he stopped doing once he ceased to be a child? No, he stopped doing it in a childish way. He says, I put away childish things when I became a man. But what he put away was not thinking, but thinking as a child. It was replaced with thinking as an adult. Same thing with acting and speaking. He did put those things away, the childish ways, but he didn't stop thinking and speaking. He just stopped doing it like a child. He started doing it like a mature man. And that's what Paul says, that we currently are using our gifts in an immature way. At least they are, the Corinthians were. And he says, but... The truth is that maturity will come. When that which is mature comes, then this childish stuff will be done away with. So he's not saying that gifts will be done away with necessarily. Now, if he is, as some people think, if he is saying the time is going to come when that which is perfect has arrived, whatever that is, something else, and then the gifts will be ceased. I mean, that's what cessationists think he means. Well, then what is that? What is the thing that's perfect that has to come that will cause the gifts to be taken away or to cease? Well, if Paul is talking about such a thing, the best way to understand it would be Jesus coming back. When Jesus comes back, the gifts will be able to be ceased. Just like Paul said in 1 Corinthians 1.7. You lack in none of the gifts while you're waiting for the coming of Christ. But the cessationists often will say something like, well, that which is perfect is a reference to the completed New Testament. When Paul was writing, most of the New Testament was not yet written, but of course it has been now. And we now have a perfect revelation from God in a complete New Testament canon. And that's the perfect. And when the New Testament was completed, therefore, and the canon of the New Testament was full, then the gifts were taken away. Well, That is like 100% arbitrary. I mean, there's not one line in the Bible that would suggest that the coming of the New Testament would do away with the gifts. That is simply assuming that when Paul generically or vaguely speaks of that which is perfect, that he means a completed New Testament canon. But why should he have meant that? Did he even know there was going to be one? Did his readers know there was going to be one? There's no evidence in the Bible that Paul knew that someday... All his letters will be collected along with Peter's and John's and James' and Jude's and the book of Revelation and the four gospels and the book of Acts. They're all going to be gathered together into what we call the New Testament canon. I mean, Paul, as far as we know, didn't know about that. And if he did, he never mentioned it. And if he did know it, there's no reason to believe the Corinthians would know. So if he's speaking to them in terms he expects them to understand... And he says something vague like, when that which is perfect comes. And what he's talking about is a completed New Testament canon, which they've never heard of, and he doesn't explain, and which he's probably never heard of either. This is the most arbitrary interpretation of that that could be imagined. It's one of those interpretations of necessity. If you want to prove the gifts are going to go away in the apostolic age, you've got to find some marker. You've got to find something. That's when they went. Now, what's interesting is the New Testament canon was completed in the first century, but it wasn't settled, what books belonged to it, until almost 400 A.D. So, I mean, at what point then? There's a 300-year range there when the gifts could have ceased, if that's what they're looking for in the New Testament canon. I will say this, the early church fathers... Many of them had not gotten the memo if the gifts had ceased because they talked in the 2nd and 3rd century, they talked about prophets coming to the churches. They talked about healings. Apparently they didn't know that the gifts had ceased, although Calvin, I think, is the first one to suggest it. And he was in the 16th century, late. So I believe the cessationist doctrine originated with John Calvin. I went looking for the origins of it once. I believe that's what we nailed it down. I think Calvin's the one who taught it. Luther didn't believe that. Luther was a generation earlier than Calvin, and he didn't believe in cessation. In his song, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, he has this line, The spirit and the gifts are ours. We have the spirit and we have the gifts, he said. That's just a generation before Calvin. But then Calvin came up with the idea, apparently, that the gifts had ceased sometime in the Apostolic Age. And frankly... He didn't have any scripture for it. I think he just hadn't seen any gifts, so he just decided, well, they must have gone somewhere. Maybe we should go looking for them, you know, if they've gone somewhere, because they're supposed to be around, according to scripture. All right. Let's talk to, let's see who's been here longest. It looks like Kathy from La Hopper, California has been waiting longest. Hi, Kathy. Hello, Kathy.
SPEAKER 08 :
Yes. Hi, Steve. I have a question. Let me run away.
SPEAKER 01 :
Kathy, I don't know what your question is yet.
SPEAKER 08 :
Yes. My cousin's on the phone. I'm running away so he doesn't hear me asking this question. The last time I got to talk to him was about 35 years ago. Only this two weeks because Daddy, just 89 years old, just went to be with Jesus. But he doesn't I don't think he knows Jesus yet. Do you recommend which book I can introduce to him? Because I don't know if he knows Jesus yet. He is 59 years old and he was a graduate of Yale and he was an MD in the ER room and currently he is practicing private clinic And he is an open-minded, intelligent, I'd say like ten times higher IQ or five times higher IQ than me. A very humorous man.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, as far as what book to recommend, you have to realize I've read about a thousand books. And I'd say maybe about 50 of them would be equally humorous. Good for a book.
SPEAKER 08 :
Do you recommend the book Is God Real by Lee Strobel or Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell? But I don't know which edition for Josh McDowell because when I go on Amazon, I don't know which edition to recommend to him. When I tried to buy it for friends, I couldn't find which one.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I know that Josh McDowell's first edition of Evidence That Demands a Verdict came out around about 1970, and it's been revised. There's also a second volume called More Evidence That Demands a Verdict that came out some years later. And there might be more. I don't know how many he's put out now, but I would just say whatever one is the current one. You know, he put out a smaller version of that. Not everyone's going to be interested in reading the kind of book that evidence that demands a verdict is unless they're really hungry to know the truth.
SPEAKER 08 :
He's a great reader.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, yeah, that's a good book. That's a good book. Or you could get him a more abbreviated version by the same author called More Than a Carpenter. Josh McDowell wrote a smaller book for people who don't want to read such a big book called More Than a Carpenter. That's a little book. He could probably read it in one sitting. You mentioned Lee Strobel. His books are usually pretty good. I mean, I like Lee Strobel fine. I'd like everybody to read my book, Empire of the Risen Sun, which I think could be helpful, though it doesn't really provide arguments for Christianity like some of these other books do. But I think it'd be valuable for someone exploring Christianity to read. But there's lots of books out there. Literally, I probably have read 30 to 50 books that would be good for a non-Christian to read to introduce them to the evidence for Christianity. And so it makes it kind of hard for me to just pull one out, especially since I don't really know him. If I knew what he's struggling with, maybe I could.
SPEAKER 08 :
He's okay with the dad passed away because Mom passed away first, and then wife passed away, and he said he's fine because this is unfortunately not his first time, even though he's the only child.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, well, again, any of the books we've mentioned would be fine. And as I said, I wish everyone would read my book, not because I want to sell them. I don't ever sell them. I give them away, but... You know, my book, Empire of the Risen Sun, I think would be of value to most people. I'll tell you what, there's a pretty good author who wrote recently a couple smallish books that when I read them, I thought, oh, these would be really good for an unbeliever to read. And the author's name is Peter J. Williams. Peter J. Williams, okay. And one of them, which I thought was quite good, was called Can We Trust the Gospels? And he wrote another one. I don't remember what the title of it is. Something like Is the Bible True or something like that. I don't remember. But if you looked up his name, Peter J. Williams, say at Amazon, I know that his book Can We Trust the Gospels is a good book. And it's not a very long book, but he's good at summarizing the information.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 01 :
And he's a real scholar. He's a real scholar.
SPEAKER 08 :
Do you recommend me also to have him look up Passover and also give him a copy of the Book of John?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, reading the Book of John is always good. As far as the Passover, what do you mean, studying the Passover?
SPEAKER 08 :
Just look it up because Passover is the blood of the Lamb.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, there's, I mean, Passover is one of many, many, you know, dozens of topics that could be of value for him to read about. It's, you know, I mean, there's so many books. There's just too many books for me to know what to recommend. So just the ones I mentioned are the ones I'm going to recommend, and I could recommend other ones, but we need to take other calls, and we can't survey the whole field of Christian apologetic literature at this point.
SPEAKER 08 :
Yes. Okay. Okay.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, Kathy, thank you. Let's talk to, let's see, Gene from Gainesville, Florida. Gene, welcome.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hey, good afternoon, Steve. First, I want to take a second and thank you and your wife and your team there for your ministry. It really encourages us to search the scriptures and be brilliant.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, thank you. By the way, your phone is probably on speakerphone. There's a lot of road noise coming through it.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, let me go to see if I can go to handheld here. But real quick, my question is about, from the perspective of someone who was raised in the premillennial tradition, and it has to do with the call you took on Tuesday in reference to Revelation 20, verse 7, with the unchaining of Satan for a brief time. Sure. I've been examining the differences between premillennialism and amillennialism for the last few years, and your response provoked in me to question the amillennialist perspective on your interpretation of Revelation 20, verse 7, based on the writings of three New Testament writers.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, I'm going to have to put you on hold here because we're at the bottom of the hour. Maybe you can get your phone off of speakerphone. We can hear you a lot better if you do. And I'll put you back on in about a minute or so. So stay tuned, and we'll come back to you. I just need to let our listeners know that The Narrow Path is a listener-supported ministry. We pay for lots of money to be on the radio. It costs a lot of money to buy time from radio stations. If you'd like to help us stay on the air, you can write to The Narrow Path, P.O. Box 1730. Temecula, California, 92593. Or you can donate from the website. That's thenarrowpath.com. It's got lots of resources. They're all free. But you can donate there if you wish at thenarrowpath.com. I'll be back in 30 seconds. Don't go away. We have another half hour.
SPEAKER 02 :
In a 16-lecture series entitled The Authority of Scriptures, Steve Gregg not only thoroughly presents the case for the Bible's authority, but also explains specifically how this truth is to be applied to a believer's daily walk and outlook. The Authority of Scriptures, as well as hundreds of other stimulating lectures, can be downloaded in MP3 format without charge from our website, thenarrowpath.com.
SPEAKER 01 :
Welcome back to the Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg, and we're live for another half hour taking your calls. Our lines are full, and we'll probably occupy the remaining half hour, so I'm not going to give out the phone number at this time. But so that we might hope to get through all of these calls, I'm going to just ask the callers to do something that we haven't had done today very much. It's always nice when people call up and say, My question is, and then give me a question, especially since you're calling to ask a question. Just ask a question. You don't have to give me a bunch of background for it. If I want background, I'll ask you. But we have a lot of people waiting, very little time. So whenever I put you on the air, if you don't mind, just say my question is. Or if you don't have a question, just say my disagreement is. But that way we can actually get to the question soon enough and hopefully get more callers in. We were talking to Gene from Gainesville, Florida, before the break, and he didn't get his question out, so we'll put him back on here. Hi, Gene. Welcome back.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hi, Steve. Yeah, thanks. Hopefully this is clear now. So my question is in regard to the Amelios perspective on Revelation 20, verse 7, and your explanation earlier this week. So the three New Testament writers, Peter, Paul, and James, all write about during their time period the ongoing and active role of Satan. He's prowling around like a roaring lion. He's an adversary to us, is what Paul thought, an active adversary, and then James talks about
SPEAKER 01 :
I'm aware of it. Go ahead.
SPEAKER 03 :
What is your question, then? So the question is, from an Amalanus perspective, how is that reconciled with the aspect that the thousand-year reign of Christ is really a figurative aspect and that Satan is unbound at the end of that? Therefore, theoretically, he would still be bound in the time period
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, I got you. I got you. Okay. Yeah, that's about the most, frankly, the most common question people have when they first hear about amillennialism. Because amillennialism holds that Revelation 20 is symbolically describing the time between the first and the second coming of Christ as the so-called thousand years. Of course, it's a lot more than a thousand years, but the number thousand years is thought to be simply symbolic for a really long time without any suggestion of how long that would really be. Now, during that time, according to amillennialism, that time began when Jesus was here the first time, and it will end at the end when Jesus comes back. So we're kind of living in that thousand years. But the big question that people have, probably more often than any other, is isn't Satan supposed to be bound during the thousand years? After all, he's loosed again at the end for a little while. That would mean that he was bound forever. when the New Testament writers wrote about Satan roaming about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, or those kinds of things, or even now. Is Satan around now? Of course he is. Of course he is. So how could he be bound? Why would someone believe that the binding of Satan took place at the first coming of Christ and that he's still bound until the time at the very end when he's loosed for a little while? The confusion here comes from, I think, misunderstanding what the imagery of Revelation is trying to say. Revelation is not telling us that Satan is literally nowhere around. This is written in a vision to make the point that Satan has been bound in one activity in particular. Yes, the pictures of him as a snake or a dragon with a chain and a bottomless pit. I mean, this is all the imagery of the vision. But the point that it keeps making is he is bound, it says in verse 3, so that he should not deceive the nations anymore until the thousand years are finished. And then in verse 7 it says, and 8, when the thousand years have expired, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out and deceive the nations. Okay, so this is simply a description of Satan being bound with respect to his ability to deceive the nations. It's not saying he's literally bound somewhere. I mean, when Jesus said he had bound the strong man in Matthew chapter 12, meaning Satan, he had bound Satan and was spoiling his house. He didn't mean that Satan was literally in a closet tied up with the door locked somewhere and he couldn't get out. This is simply making the point that Jesus was plundering Satan's domain and Satan was as helpless to stop him as if he had been bound and was simply watching as a home invader stole all this stuff and couldn't resist. The imagery of these things is not saying that Satan literally tied up somewhere or chained somewhere. You know, Jesus was explaining in Matthew 12 that, you know, although Satan is not literally bound somewhere, he's as helpless as if he was bound. He's, you know, Jesus is coming into the devil's territory, taking his stuff, loosing the people who are demon-possessed and letting them go. That's plundering Satan's house. And Satan couldn't stop him any more than a man who owns a house who's tied up could stop a home intruder. Now, the same kind of imagery here, I mean, it's a different image. It's a dragon instead of a man. It's a chain. It's not bound in his own house. But the idea is that Jesus at his first coming has rendered Satan helpless in areas that he was not previously helpless. Now, when he's loosed again, he will not be helpless in this respect anymore. The binding of Satan refers to him being rendered incapable of resistance or incapable of doing something. that he could do before. Yes, it looks very absolute. You know, the dragon's in a pit, the lid's on there, and so forth. He's got a chain on him. That's all the, I mean, that's no more literal than the beast is literally an animal with the mouth of a lion and the feet of a bear and the body of a leopard. and has seven literal heads and ten literal horns that have crowns on horns. No one takes that literally. No one believes that's a real animal fitting that description. That's how Revelation talks. That's how Revelation describes things. That's how visions are. Zechariah has visions like that. Daniel has visions like that. They are never in literal terms, but they are impressionistic. They have all kinds of details in the vision because a picture is worth a thousand words, and it might take a thousand words to describe the picture, but the picture itself is getting across an idea. And the idea is, before Jesus came, the nations, that means the Gentile nations as opposed to Israel, were under the deception of Satan. They were his domain. Only Israel had been selected by God to receive the law, to receive prophets, to receive revelation. The rest of the nation was left to Satan, of the nations. The Gentile nations were under Satan's blindness. They were all worshiping demons, sacrificing their children to idols and things like that. Satan kept them in blindness and darkness, and no one challenged him. Well, Jesus did, because when Jesus came, he defeated Satan at the cross and sent his disciples out to disciple the nations, that is, the Gentiles, and to tell them the gospel. So Satan could no longer keep the nations in deception. Now, somebody said, well, doesn't he still deceive the nations? Well, he deceives people. That's the point. He deceives people. He's the deceiver, to be sure. He roams about like a roaring lion speaking. But he can't deceive the nations as a whole anymore. In other words, there was a time when all the Gentile nations other than Israel were Satan's rightful domain. God allowed him to deceive them. God allowed them to be in darkness. That time has ended. The light has come. And the true light now shines. And it's going out to all the nations. Satan cannot keep them in darkness anymore. Now, can he deceive individuals? Of course. Of course he can. And in every nation, there are people who are deceived by Satan. In fact, even Christians get deceived by him some of the time. That's not what this vision is talking about. This vision isn't talking about whether Satan can deceive people or not. It's talking about he's been stripped of any right to keep the nations in deception. anymore they are no longer his domain they're jesus's domain jesus said all authority in heaven and on earth have been given to me therefore go to the nations and make disciples of all the nations so the church age is the time when satan cannot keep the nations in deception anymore though he can he can deceive anyone who wants to be deceived and apparently plenty of people want to be But, you know, those people who live in these nations who didn't have any access to light, to truth, previously, now it's come to them. And that's what this age is about, bringing that truth, bringing that light to the nations. So Satan can't take that whole... block of humanity and just say, they're mine, I'm in charge, they're going to stay deceived. No, the truth has come. Now, the losing of Satan seems to be a reversal of that. Seems to be, you know, that the truth is somehow hindered again, and Satan manages to get a lot of nations in blindness again. Now, I don't think that's happened yet necessarily, but I think that that's something that will happen at the end. But to say, well, but doesn't the Bible say the devil still tempts us? The devil, you know, he still lies. He still... You know, we're to resist the devil and he'll flee from us. He's like a roaring lion seeking. Yeah, yeah, it's all those things. And it was those things even when Jesus said he had bound the strongman in Matthew 12. Jesus had bound the strongman. He said so. But that didn't mean Satan was literally bound somewhere. It's making a point. And to try to extend it to all activities of Satan is simply to go beyond what the passage is trying to say. So the amillennialist doesn't think the devil is literally bound. you know, has a chain and he's in a pit and locked up somewhere. We're not saying that's literally happened. We don't think Revelation is literal at all. It's like Daniel. Daniel's not literal either. And Zechariah's not literal. I mean, these kinds of visions are always given in symbolic imagery. There's not one of Daniel's images that are given in literal imagery. So, and same thing with the Revelation as far as I'm concerned. So, anyway, that's how I understand it. Okay. Thank you, Gene. Good talking to you. Okay, we'll talk next to Kerry from Dallas, Texas. Kerry, welcome.
SPEAKER 05 :
Hi, Steve. Hi. Just something on your last point there. When Jesus did announce that he bound the strong man, afterwards, did he not still cast out demons? Yes.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes. Yes, he did. In fact, he said that's why he was able to cast out demons, because he had found the strong man. Yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, my question is about Romans 11, 25, and 26 again. You've helped me a lot here, but I still have some more questions. About three. First of all, Paul's use of Israel in 25 and his use of Israel in 26, don't seem to be the same Israel. One seems to be national Israel, the other seems to be repentant Israel. And then Paul makes the statement that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. Would that not indicate that this hardening is continuing today? and also with the word until, does that not leave open a space between the fullness of the Gentiles and maybe when that hardening is removed and maybe leaving room for a millennial kingdom?
SPEAKER 01 :
All right. First of all, your question about Romans 11, 25 and 26, is Paul using the word Israel differently in those two verses? Well, yeah. Yeah, he is. In verse 25, he says, For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion. That hardening in part has happened to Israel, meaning the nation or the race of Israel. until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And so, or in this way, all Israel will be saved. Now, we know he doesn't mean national Israel will be saved, because he's denied that earlier, in chapter 9, in verse 27. In chapter 9, verse 27, he quotes from Isaiah, chapter 10, which says, though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea. Okay, there's a lot of people who are descended from Israel. It says, only the remnant will be saved. So, not all of the Jews will be saved. And by the way, if Paul did predict that someone other than the rent would be saved, he sure missed his mark because the vast number of Jewish people who've lived at his time and since have not been saved. All Israel will be saved. Now, see, some people think he's talking about just one generation of Israel at the end times will be saved. But he doesn't say anything about the end times. He doesn't say anything about... He doesn't really say anything about the future at all. He just says that all Israel, the true Israel, will be saved. But only a remnant of national Israel will be saved. The true Israel is a smaller portion of national Israel. And that's what he began his whole discussion in chapter 9, verse 6, saying they are not all Israel who are of Israel. So he's made a distinction between two Israels at the beginning. Now, I've talked to people who disagree with my view on this, and they say, well, yeah, he did mention an Israel within Israel in Romans 9.6, but after that he only talked about the nation of Israel, and so he has to be talking about the nation of Israel in verse 26, all Israel will be saved. Why would that be true? Wasn't there a reason for him saying what he said in chapter 9, verse 6? I mean, it would be very crazy if Paul just as an offhand throwaway line said, not all are Israel who are of Israel. But never mind that. Let's just talk about those who are of Israel and forget about the Israel that not all of them are it. No, he's made the whole argument through chapters 9, 10, and 11 is the nation of Israel as a whole have not been saved and never will be. Isaiah said only the remnant of them will be saved. Therefore, only the remnant are the true Israel that will be saved, and not all who are descended from Israel are in that true Israel. So he's made a distinction, the whole chapter 9, is distinguishing between two Israels. One is a vessel for wrath, one is a vessel for honor, he said. You know, and one is just a remnant, a small portion of the other Israel. So... So Paul has introduced this idea there's two Israels right from the beginning. And to suggest that he forgets that in chapter 10 and 11 and never mentions again that fact is to ignore the fact that chapter 9 is setting up the whole chapter 10 and 11. It's not a throwaway line when he says they are not all Israel who are of Israel. It's the theme. It's the theme of the whole three chapters. And so when he comes to the very conclusion, he says, well, you know, that Israel that are not the remnant, they have been hardened. Of course, that's only part of Israel. That's why he says hardening in part has happened in Israel. Part of Israel has been hardened. The other part has not. That's the Israel within Israel. That's the remnant has not been hardened. And he's already made that point just a few verses earlier, because he says in verse 7, Romans 11, 7, he says, What then? Israel, that is the whole nation, has not obtained what it seeks, but the elect have obtained it, and the rest were hardened. Okay, so hardened, some of them were hardened. Who weren't? The elect, the remnant, they weren't hardened. So the nation of Israel, Paul has been talking all the way through here. There's two parts of the nation of Israel. There's those who can only be called children according to the flesh, and there's those among them who can be called children according to promise. The first group is just every ethnic Jew. The second group is that portion within ethnic Jews who happens to also believe. And he introduces that distinction, you know, several verses introducing that idea in chapter 9. And that's how he closed it. So Paul has used the word Israel throughout this discussion to refer either to the whole nation in some cases or to that portion of the nation that are the elect, the remnant, the vessels of honor, whatever. I mean, he uses these different words for it. And so it's not a strange thing for him to use the word Israel two different ways. within a few lines of each other. He used it two different ways in one verse, in chapter 9, verse 6. Here we have him using it two ways in two successive verses. Verse 25, hardness in part has happened to Israel. Okay. That's the group that's, they're Israel, but they're not believers. They're not the remnant. But the Israel that will be saved is the remnant. Now, when he says, and so all Israel will be saved, so means in this way, What way? What way will all Israel be saved? Well, he's just described it. This is the conclusion of a description that began in verse 16 of an olive tree. It had Jewish branches because the olive tree is Israel. But the unbelieving Jewish branches have been removed, so they're not Israel anymore. They're not on the tree anymore. And then Gentiles who believe have been added to the tree, so they're part of Israel now. So the believing branches that were not broken off are Jewish believers. And the Gentile branches have been added to them. Now the tree is Jewish believers and Gentile believers. And in this way, all Israel, the Jewish branches and the Gentile branches, will be saved. That's what Paul says. Now, you said the word until. Does that mean until today? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, look around. Most Jews don't believe. So part of Israel has been hardened. until the fullness of the Gentiles have been fulfilled. Now, does that suggest that after the fullness of the Gentiles are fulfilled, something else will happen? Maybe the Jews won't be hardened anymore? This is what many people think, but Paul doesn't say that. Paul does not describe anything happening after the Jews are partially, you know, no longer hardened. The word until doesn't always mean he's predicting the end of something. To say this will be true until such and such just means it won't change before this happens. Will it change after that? Well, maybe, maybe not. It's not predicting that unless it does. It doesn't predict anything after that. So, I mean, when God said to Jacob, I will not leave you or forsake you until I have fulfilled all my promises to you, Does that mean, okay, but then I'm going to leave you and forsake you. After I've fulfilled my promise, I'm going to forsake you. No, to say this won't happen until this doesn't mean, okay, and after that it will. It means this will not cease to be true until such and such a point. And it may not cease to be true at that time either. But this is the end point we're looking at. The end point we're looking at is the fullness of the Gentiles being come in until that happens. Still, only part of Israel will be hardened. Will they be unhardened once the Gentiles come in? There's no mention of it. Not even a hint of it, actually. The truth is, I think if the fullness of the Gentiles will come in means until the last Gentile actually gets saved, that probably won't happen until the last day. In which case, there won't be much time for anything else to happen. Jesus will be coming. So I don't see anything here that necessitates... Someone saying, well, you know, the Jews are getting saved. There'll be a millennium and so forth after that. Let's see. We've got a lot of calls. Nicole from the Bronx, New York. Welcome. Not there? Nicole? Okay, I'm not hearing Nicole, so I'm going to have to move on. Joshua from Dallas, Texas. Welcome. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I hit another button. David from Andover, Kansas. Hopefully we can get to Joshua, too. David, are you there?
SPEAKER 06 :
Hello.
SPEAKER 01 :
Hi.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yes, can you hear me?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yes. Okay, great. My question is, who are the inhabitants of the sea in Revelation 12.12? I assume they are the fish. Okay.
SPEAKER 07 :
Okay, so when it says, woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea, for the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows the time is short, that's just the fish and the sea creatures there.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, it could mean the fish and the sea creatures. I mean, there's great disruption on the world. As you read the book of Revelation, you see that the sea turns to blood. The fishes die. The ships sink. You know, the islands disappear. Those kinds of things happen. So, I mean, it's hard to say. I mean, certainly it could mean the sea will suffer in such ways that, you know, fish will die. Anyone there? Or it could, of course, there's a possibility it could mean people who are sailors and who they basically live on the sea in ships. That's a possibility. It's a strange way to speak about them, those who dwell in the sea. But, you know, it doesn't really clarify. So it's basically saying that the sea – now, by the way, I will tell you this. The sea can be symbolic also for the Gentile nations. In the Old Testament, there are a few places in the prophets where Israel is compared with land, and the Gentile nations are called the sea. So I don't know if there's a previous place in Revelation where that was used that way, but it might mean that there. So there's a variety of possibilities. Okay. Thank you. That's very helpful. All right. Thanks for your call. Now, Joshua, we've got to you from Dallas. Welcome. Hi. Hey, thanks for having me.
SPEAKER 10 :
So, yeah, based on the way I understood the word called in the parable of the wedding feast in Matthew 22, where the Lord says many are called, few are chosen, my understanding of that word called has historically been meant to mean called via the gospel, like, you know, hearing the gospel. Yeah, but so my question then is if I look at 1 Corinthians 1.24, where it talks about Christ being crucified, being a stumbling block to the Jews, falling to the Gentiles. And then verse 24 says, but to those who are called, the Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, the wisdom of God. So I just wanted to know how you understood that word called there in that passage.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, in 1 Corinthians 1.24, the Calvinists generally believe that it refers to an effectual call, that all people are called through evangelism. But not all people are effectually called. They would say only the elect are effectually called. And the effectual call really would refer to irresistible grace. Basically, they would say if someone's of the elect, God calls them in a different way than he calls others in a way they can't essentially resist because of irresistible grace. And they would read this verse that way. Any Christian, we are the called. They would also see it that way in Romans 8.28. All things work together for good to those who are the called according to his purpose. And it says in verse 29, Whom he foreknew, he also predestinated to be conformed to the image of his Son. Whom he predestined, he called. And whom he called, he justified, and so forth. So there's reference to Christians as called. And, you know, it seems to be referring to something other than just the whole world. The whole world is being called by the preaching of the gospel. But Christians are called in a different sense. My understanding, and this may not be the correct one, but my understanding, I'm not a Calvinist, but my understanding is simply that this means those of us who've heard the call, those of us who have received the call. And I do believe there is something to a more effective call than just hearing with your ears. I mean, People can be driving down the road listening to the radio and hear the gospel and ignore it completely, where others, they hear the gospel and it just grabs them. It grabs them, and they're riveted. They're hearing it at a different level than the others are. But this would not mean that they are now being irresistibly called. Persons can be very gripped and very convicted by the message and still walk away from it. But all of us who have been converted have been gripped by the message like that, at least. And we didn't walk away from it. We received it. So I just think when he talks about us as the called, he's focusing on the fact that we are Christians because we heard that call. And we identify with it. And didn't resist it. But, I mean, Calvinists see it a little differently. And I can see how they would. But I just reject their whole system.
SPEAKER 09 :
Thanks, Steve.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right, brother. This is Mark. Thank you. Good talking to you, brother. I'm out of time for the show today. You're listening to The Narrow Path. We are listener supported, as I mentioned earlier. You can write to us, if you wish, at The Narrow Path, P.O. Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. Or from our website, thenarrowpath.com. There's a place to donate there, thenarrowpath.com. Let's talk again tomorrow, Monday.
The episode also delves into an intriguing discussion on the practice of exorcism, the authority of Jesus, and the broader implications of spiritual warfare. Noteworthy themes also include a thoughtful debate on celebrating life versus mourning death, and an insightful interpretation of Revelation 12:11's concept of overcoming. Lastly, Steve touches on the significance of the gospel in evangelism and the Kingdom of God, prompting a reevaluation of traditional notions about heaven and the role of faith.
SPEAKER 1 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 02 :
Good afternoon and welcome to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we're live for an hour each weekday afternoon taking your calls. If you have questions about the Bible you'd like to call in and talk about or about the Christian faith, about Christian history, Christian theology, Christian behavior, any of that stuff, or if you have a disagreement with the host and want to say so and say why, we welcome your calls today. Right now our lines are full but they do open up throughout the hour so Let me give you the number, and if you call in a few minutes, you may very well find a line has opened. The number is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. All week I'm making this announcement because it has to do with this Saturday. Once a month in Southern California, we have a couple of meetings on the third Saturday of the month. And that's coming up this Saturday. One of them is a men's Bible study in the morning in Temecula. If you're anywhere near Temecula, you may want to join us for that. Eight o'clock Saturday morning, just once a month. And that's this Saturday. And I'm teaching a Bible study, which I do. I've been doing that for many years. Then in the evening, in another location, in Boyna Park in Orange County, California, We have a meeting that's also once a month, and we go through a book of the Bible each time. Now, I guess I went through 1 Peter last time. We skipped because of the holidays. We generally speak and cancel the meetings during the holidays, and so it's been a couple months. But I have to say I forgot what the last book we did was, and I thought it was 2 Peter. So I've been announcing we're going to do 1 John, and that's what we're going to do because I've been announcing it. We're going to do 1 John this time. But apparently the last time I did it, I only did 1 Peter, which means I have yet to do 2 Peter, and we'll do that, I guess, after the next month. So we'll do 1 John this month, and we'll do 2 Peter the following month. So very little out of order. First time we've done that, but it's just because of my forgetfulness. Anyway, we've been doing this thing through the Bible for probably five years or six years, but we only do it once a month, so it takes forever. Anyway, that's happening this weekend. If you want to join us for that on Saturday, either the morning or the evening gathering, go to our website, thenarrowpath.com, and look under announcements, and you'll see the place and time for those gatherings, and you can join us if you're in the area. All right, we're going to go to the phones now. and talk to JB in Tacoma, Washington. Hi, JB. Welcome.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hello, Steve. I have a question regarding how we should be praying when we are confessing our sins to the Father. It talks a little bit in 1 John 1.9. I was taught my whole life as a child, and now being 44, that I must list out my daily sins and repent. But I've just kind of been, you know, learning a lot about the Bible and the Word. And just recently I've learned that this could be more about repentance of our sinful nature as in the sinful state. Is there a need for us to continue our continuous repentance of this roller coaster of our actual actions?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, I believe that the time will not come in our lifetime when we are totally exempt from sinning. We may have days and maybe series of days where we don't have any sins that we're aware of and we don't have anything specifically to name out or confess. It's only when we know of a sin that we've committed that I think that we would confess it. Although, of course... In the Lord's Prayer, which Jesus designed to be prayed every day, and we know he did intend it to be prayed every day because one of the things is give us this day our daily bread. So each day we pray for our daily bread, and we also pray forgive us our debts or our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us. Now, I take that to be a generic statement. Like, you know, I don't know how much I may have sinned since, you know, since a lot of sins are very subtle. Sometimes I experience temptations and I don't think I've sinned because temptation is not a sin. Sometimes temptations feel like sin. Sometimes you feel kind of dirty just for having had a temptation that you feel like you shouldn't have. Obviously the devil uses that kind of thing to condemn you. But to me, I don't know anything in the Bible that says we have to list out all of our sins every day. I think that if I'm convicted of a particular sin, of course I'm going to confess that and and basically apologize for that. Prayer is simply our relationship with God. It's not like if you don't confess a given sin, somehow you're going to go to hell for that. You have a relationship with God based on abiding in Christ, and that doesn't change unless you stop abiding in Christ. But you know, any number of sins that are committed are not enough to overcome the grace of God when you're counting on Christ to save you. But on the other hand, it's sort of like any number of ways I might offend my wife are not going to cause her to divorce me because she's a Christian. I know people who call themselves Christians get divorced over the smallest things sometimes, and they can call themselves Christians if they want to. The question is whether God calls them that, and they'll find out on the Day of Judgment But Jesus said lots of people say, not everyone, I mean, Jesus said, not everyone who says, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he that does the will of my Father in heaven. So there's a lot of people who are not really saved and do things they shouldn't. But what I'm saying is my wife and I are followers of Christ, and that means we will not get a divorce. Now, that being so, I'm secure in the marriage, and so is she. But how many times can I offend her? How many times can I do things that she's disappointed with me about or even angry about? Now, most of them, I don't know those things because she doesn't express any anger to me, so I don't know if I did anything to make her angry. But I know this, that if I know I've done something, I apologize. Why? Well, because I have a relationship with her. If I know that there's something that I did that's I mean, anytime you have a relationship with somebody that matters to you, you're going to apologize if you realize, wow, I wronged you. I offended you. Sorry about that. Forgive me. On the other hand, I may be unaware of a hundred little ways in the course of our marriage, which I've done things that were a disappointment to her that she never mentioned and it never occurred to me. And so I probably won't end up confessing those. Now, we're going to stay married forever. In any case, and this is like our relationship with God, we have a covenant, like a marriage covenant with God. And he's not going to dump us because we offended him in some way, unless we dump him. I mean, there is such a thing as apostasy. If you depart from Christ, of course, all bets are off. But if you're still trying to walk with Christ, and out of weakness, as James said, we all stumble many times, well... When you know you've stumbled, of course, just like when you know you've offended your wife, you apologize. You confess it to God. And that just clears the air. It doesn't get you saved all over again. It doesn't mean that you were lost until you did that or that if you die before you've confessed of your most recent sin that you're going to hell. This is not what that's about. This is about maintaining a relationship on good, you know, friendly terms and a loving thing to do. It's just maintaining your connection with God. And, you know, I can be offended at someone to the point where I don't want to speak to them for a while. It doesn't mean I'm going to. And let's say they're my children. I'm not going to disown them for it. So God's not going to disown you if you forget to, you know, confess some sin you've done. But you still want to, if you know about it, you want to confess it. You want to get the air cleared of it. You want to make it very clear to God that, That's something you realize you didn't and you wish you hadn't and you're sorry about it. So now, again, I do believe we should confess individual sins when we are convicted of them, when we're aware of them. But we don't have to worry that if we forgot something or never knew that something we did was a sin, that somehow, you know, if we don't get around to confessing it specifically, that that's going to be a problem with us on the day of judgment. I don't think so. But, of course, when we pray every day, forgive us our trespasses or sins or debts, whichever translation you're going to use. Well, we're kind of covering all the bases. We're saying, I recognize I may well have done some things today that are very offensive and imperfect things, sinful things. I don't know what they all are, but I'm just asking you to forgive me for them all. And so, yeah, this idea of listing out all your sins, I don't see that. Now, I used to read some devotional writers back from the Puritan days, and some of them recommended at the end of every night you should sit on your bed when you go to bed and review the day and try to think of all the things you've done wrong and confess them to God and clear the air that way. Well, I guess if you... I guess if you've been so busy that you haven't been reflective at all, and it may be that you've done many sins that you just didn't notice because you're so busy, that might be a good way to recollect. But if you're walking with Jesus, generally speaking, if you're trying to follow Christ, I think the Holy Spirit will convict you of any sins that he wants you to confess. I was just reading something on Facebook today, and I've heard people say this on other radio programs, that you never have to confess your sins because when Jesus died, You know, he paid the price for all of our sins, past, present, and future, and therefore we never have to confess our sins. Yeah, but John apparently didn't hear about that. He didn't get that memo because he wrote 1 John 1.9, as you mentioned. And, of course, Jesus told us, when we pray, say, forgive us our sins. So it doesn't sound like that doctrine, as often as I hear it from people, has a biblical basis.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, that's what I was going to kind of bring up to you next is I've heard a lot of people talk about Jesus' sanctification was not enough for our continuous repetitiveness of like a confession of, you know, something that we're struggling with, a certain sin, you know, if it's like gossip or, you know, just judgmental, it's just always continuous, repetitive, that people have said, well, Jesus' sanctification was for that, for past, present, and future.
SPEAKER 02 :
They sometimes say, when Jesus died for your sins, all of your sins were future, because you weren't even born yet 2,000 years ago. So he covered all your sins for your whole lifetime 2,000 years ago, so why would you ever have to confess? Well, that's, to my mind, not a very well thought out argument. Because in that sense, he died for all the sins of all people 2,000 years ago, and no one ever has to repent. I mean, everyone's saved because he died for all their sins. Well, no. They'd say, well, you have to come to Christ. You have to ask for forgiveness. Well, why? He already did it. I mean, he already died for your sins. Why would you have to ask? Well, because that's how you acknowledge to God forgiveness. your intentions and your desire to please them and your sorrow for not doing so. And I think that continues to do as long as you have a relationship with anyone. Now, I realize that there's a certain kind of teaching about this that I think sees salvation strictly as transactional. Like, you know, you've got money in the bank, you're rich. All you have to do is acknowledge it and you're good. But I don't see it as merely transactional. Certainly there is a legal aspect, so to speak, of the payment of sin and all that. But our relationship with God is a lifetime interaction with God. And I think a lot of people don't know that. Salvation isn't simply a transaction that takes place when you go forward and say a sinner's prayer or get baptized. salvation is a relationship, and relationships are maintained day by day, unless you don't care about them. And if you don't care about your relationship with Jesus, eventually you probably will depart from it, because you have to value him in order to maintain such a relationship, especially given the cost of it, of discipleship.
SPEAKER 03 :
Thank you, Steve. Appreciate it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, JB. Thanks for your call. Good talking to you. All right. Peter from Bedford, UK. Hi, Peter. Welcome.
SPEAKER 10 :
Hi, Steve. I decided to move out of the city. You moved out of London? Yes.
SPEAKER 02 :
Where's Bedford? Is that like a suburb?
SPEAKER 10 :
Is Bedford a suburb? No, it's a small town on the outskirts. So, yeah, it's much more peaceful. So... My question is, most of our information about casting out demons comes from the New Testament. And I was reading a scenario when the Pharisees were accusing the Lord of casting out demons by Beelzebub. And Jesus said to them that, oh, if I cast out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your sons sin? I was just wondering, how did the Pharisees even practice exorcism when, I mean, the only thing I can think of in regards to the eyeball sort of revealing about perhaps... spiritual activity is just when Saul was being tormented by an evil spirit. So how did they actually practice it to do it?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, we don't know how non-Christians in the past or even in the present might have any ability to cast out demons. We do know that demons respect the name of Jesus and are fearful of the name of Jesus and if we are operating in as agents of Christ in his name, we have solid authority over them to command them to come out, and they're required to do so. We know that because of the authority of Jesus. Now, we don't know what other things short of the name of Jesus might also chase off demons. I don't know. You know, it's clear in the Old Testament we don't have any exorcisms, per se, though when Saul was affected by the evil spirit and was kind of acting... crazy David's music seemed to calm him down might have even made the evil spirit go away briefly I don't know that not exactly an exorcism I don't think but but uh you know just David of course his music was for the glory of God he didn't know the name of Jesus but you know worshiping God had an impact on the demons and and we do know that the Pharisees uh did cast out demons some of them did um And there are some people in certain denominations we might not really respect very much that cast out demons occasionally. In fact, there are apparently witch doctors who on occasion manage to cast out demons. So in addition to the authority of Jesus, which is the one thing that the demons cannot ignore, there are apparently some spiritual practices that on occasions have been known to cause demons to go away. I wouldn't count on any of them. Because, you know, frankly, demons sometimes can be stubborn. And even David's music didn't make the evil spirit go away from Saul permanently. It just gave him some relief. But remember, Jesus' disciples came to him and said, Lord, we saw some people casting out demons in your name, and we told them to stop. And Jesus said, don't tell them to stop. No one can cast a demon out in my name and soon speak evil of me, so let them do it. But who were these people? They weren't followers of Christ, apparently. But they apparently believed in him at a distance, and they used his name, and it worked. On the other hand, the sons of Sceva in Acts chapter 19, they tried to cast out demons in the name of Jesus, whom Paul preaches, is the way they used the term. And the demons said, we know Jesus, we know Paul, but we don't know you. So, you know, it didn't work for them. It worked for some others. And obviously, Jesus said in Matthew 7 that many will say to him in that day, Lord, Lord, We cast demons out in your name and prophesied your name and did many mighty works in your name. And Jesus said, I'll say to them, I never knew you. So there are people who don't know him. You know, Jews, Pharisees, possibly people of other religions. You know, I don't know. I don't have a total catalog of all the cases of exorcism that have happened around the world throughout history. But I do know this, that missionaries have gone to uneventualized lands One of the common places of their reports are there are demon-possessed people that nobody seems to be able to help. The witch doctors can't help them. Nobody can help them. And then a lot of times they go for the Bible man or the Bible woman to come to the village and do it. And the name of Jesus works every time. So, you know, the name of Jesus is definitely the... kryptonite against demons, but we don't know that nothing else in any case can mitigate a demon's influence or whatever. I mean, I'm not saying anything other than the name of Jesus brings salvation, but apparently there are people who don't know Jesus who have been known to cast out demons, or at least who appear to. You know, when Jesus said, they will say, Lord, we cast out demons, your name, and he'll say, I never knew you. There's a possibility that they thought they cast out demons and they were mistaken, but that's not – he doesn't explain it. You know, it sounds – I mean, at face value, it sounds like they did, you know.
SPEAKER 10 :
Yeah, and I guess that's what made Peter stand out is because he had authority, which that's probably what it meant.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, only Jesus has the authority. And I think sometimes people who use his name, even if they're not Christians, perhaps sometimes have some results simply because the demons recognize the name of Jesus as something they cannot dishonor. Although, of course, the sons of Sceva were using the name of Jesus sort of in a second-hand way, and the demons didn't respect them. But they did respect Jesus and Paul, but they just didn't respect these guys. So anyway, there's a lot of mystery about those things. There's not any place in the Bible that gives a systematic teaching about demon possession or about exorcism. So all that we know, at least biblically, comes from anecdotes of Jesus and the apostles. There's not really much teaching on the subject. And, of course, if you read a lot of missionary stories, and I have, I've read about scores of cases of demons being cast out of people on the mission field and things like that. But these are always in the name of Jesus, done by Christians. But the Bible does indicate there might be some people who aren't exactly Christians at all, but still on occasions have success. And I don't know what that would be. I don't know how to explain it.
SPEAKER 10 :
Yeah. No, as always, Steve, it's a pleasure to speak to you. And, yeah, God bless you. Thank you. You too, Peter.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thanks for calling, brother.
SPEAKER 10 :
All right. God bless you. Bye-bye.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, Kathy in Orange County, California. Welcome.
SPEAKER 09 :
Hello. Can you hear me okay?
SPEAKER 02 :
I can. Thank you.
SPEAKER 09 :
Oh, thank you. Hi, Steve. Thank you for taking my call. I have a question on Revelation chapter 12, verse 11. Mm-hmm. Just from my memory to quote it is that they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.
SPEAKER 02 :
And they loved not their lives unto the death.
SPEAKER 09 :
Yes. My question is on the word of their testimony. I'm not very clear on what does that mean. Does it mean our personal testimony or does it mean by the truth that we
SPEAKER 02 :
proclaim that jesus is alive that's a fair question fair question because uh when i was growing up i heard this quoted a lot and people assumed it was us giving our testimony is what overcomes the devil and by the way giving a christian giving a testimony can be a very powerful thing i know i'm always blessed when i hear someone give their testimony when they've been radically saved and stuff and i know that I'm sure that has an impact on the people that are Satan's people who are listening to and may convince them. But in the book of Revelation, the word witness or testimony, they're the same word, witness, martia. It's used to refer to the gospel. The gospel is the testimony of the church. We see that right at the very beginning in Revelation chapter 1. John says, I... I was on the island of Patmos for the testimony of Jesus Christ. He means for preaching the gospel. That's what it means. And, you know, the two witnesses we see in Revelation 11, the years of their testimony are three and a half years. And then when their testimony is complete, you know, they're killed by the beast for three days and a half. So the idea of the testimony is, In Revelation, it's a common word used. I mean, I just gave a couple examples. I imagine there's probably one form or another of that word. It's probably found 10 or a dozen times in the book of Revelation because it's a very common theme of the book of Revelation. I haven't counted them, but there's quite a lot of them. And it generally refers to the preaching of the gospel. Sometimes it's equated with the word of God. The word of God and the testimony of Jesus are mentioned together quite a few times in Revelation. But the word of God, meaning the gospel, the word of the gospel and the testimony of the church about the gospel. So in that case, Revelation 12, 11 and others in Revelation, I don't believe it's talking about you giving your own story, your own testimony of how you got saved, which is what I grew up thinking of the word testimony that way entirely. You know, if someone's going to give their testimony at church, they're going to tell us how they got saved. And that term. I think is widely understood that way in modern usage. But we should recognize that in Revelation, it's a very common word for the gospel itself. And I think that's saying they overcame the devil by the blood of the lamb, which is how they overcame his accusations. Because in the verse before that, he's called the accuser of the brethren is cast down and woe to the inhabitants of the earth because he's been cast down to you. Well, the devil's only called the accuser of the brethren one time in Scripture, and it's there. And the next verse says, and they overcame him. Who? The accuser. By the blood of the Lamb. Well, how's that work? Well, because the blood of Jesus cancels out the legitimacy of any accusations. Although we have done things wrong and can be rightly accused of it, Christ has forgiven. Christ has covered it. And because of that, no accusation can stick. So the accuser of the brethren is defeated by our appeal to Christ's blood as our righteousness. That's what that famous hymn means, where it says, just as I am without one plea, but that your blood was shed for me, you know, I come. The only plea I have is the blood of Christ when I'm accused. And the accuser, brethren, when he attacks your conscience, when he attacks you spiritually with your guilt and your sin and accusations, you defeat him by appeal to the blood of the Lamb. And then, The word of your testimony is when you turn the tables on him and start penetrating his territory with the gospel and start taking stuff from him. You see, all warfare has offensive and defensive aspects. You go on the offense because you want to take territory from the enemy and you need to defend yourself so you don't become a casualty. So the blood of the lamb is the defensive against his attacks and accusations against us. And our preaching the gospel in his spirit in the world that he is in, takes territory from him, and that's our offensive against him. So that's what that verse, I think, is talking about. I need to take a break, but I appreciate your call. We've got another half hour coming, so don't go away. You're listening to The Narrow Path. We are listener-supported. You can help us if you want by going to thenarrowpath.com. Everything there is free, but you can donate there at thenarrowpath.com. I'll be back in 30 seconds.
SPEAKER 01 :
If you enjoy the Narrow Path radio program, you'd really like the resources at our website, thenarrowpath.com, where hundreds of biblical lectures and messages by our host, Steve Gregg, can be accessed without charge and listened to at your convenience. If you have not done so, visit the website, thenarrowpath.com, and discover all that is available for your learning pleasure.
SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome back to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg, and we're live for another half hour, taking your calls. If you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith, maybe you have a disagreement with the host, want to talk about that, The number to call is 844-484-5737. Our next call comes from Millie in Boise, Idaho. Hi, Millie. Welcome.
SPEAKER 08 :
Hi, Steve. I wanted to get your commentary on a relatively new phenomenon of relabeling funerals to celebrations of life, which seems to me like it contradicts what's really going on. and knowing that Jesus' fated death is the final enemy to be conquered. And I was wondering what your thoughts are on this terminology that the church has seemed to grab onto and started in general society.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, I mean, turning a funeral into a happy occasion is... We can see why that would be a popular thing to do. And I would say... When a Christian dies, there definitely is a mixture of mourning, to be sure, because you lost somebody you love and you'll miss them, and it's going to be sad for a while to remember that they're not here anymore. On the other hand, of course, you know that they've gone to be with the Lord if they're a believer, and that's an exciting thing. I remember Chuck Smith, back in the Jesus movement, Chuck said he went to a funeral of a pastor friend of his on the weekend. And the next Sunday he was telling us about it. He said that the pastor's teenage son was walking around smiling and saying, this is a promotion day for my dad. It's like definitely putting a Christian's perspective on it, which is true. I would expect that it's a mixture. When you're a Christian and you lose someone who's a Christian, obviously you feel sorry that they're gone. partly because any contribution they may have made to the kingdom of God or even to your own life has come to an end, not going to be happening. But also you're going to be happy for them too. So I can see both things. You know, a memorial service could be seen as a celebration of life. You know, it might be that the burial itself should have some kind of somberness about it. Because, I mean, mourning for the dead is legitimate. Stephen, when he was stoned, Christians, it says, mourn for him. Let me see what it actually says. I'm trying to remember how it says it in Acts chapter 7 or 8. He died in chapter 7, but chapter 8 tells us something about it too here. I'm just looking that up because I've never actually looked this up before. Yeah, chapter 8, verse 2. This is after Stephen was stoned and obviously went to heaven. It says, And devout men carried Stephen to his burial and made great lamentation over him. So they made lamentation over him. They lamented the loss. Now, just before Stephen died, he saw Jesus in the sky. He saw the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. I mean, that's one of those glorious things a person could see transitioning from this life to the next. So, you know, I'm sure they knew that, wow, Stephen sure is lucky he's with Jesus now. But they made great lamentation over him, partly because, well, partly because they're going to miss him. And he was a great minister. And you've lost the service of him. It says in the Psalms, precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. And the word precious means expensive, costly. So it's costly to God for his saints to die. Why? Because there's few of them and we need more. The world needs more of them. And they're worth a lot. And when they die, that's a costly thing to the kingdom, you know, the great work they were doing or could do in the future. is suddenly cut off. So there's a sense in which there's a grief about it. It's a costly thing. There's something to mourn. On the other hand, we're not mourning for them per se. We're mourning for the world and for us left behind. So there's a sense in which I think there's appropriateness about it when somebody dies to show some sobriety and some grief over the loss. And that might be, I'm not sure, maybe that's what you would do at a funeral, and then maybe you should have a memorial service separately, which is a celebration of that person's life, where people gather and say how much that person meant to them and so forth. But, I mean, just turning a funeral into a party so that you never really, you never even allow the loss of, to sink in or to dawn on you is perhaps missing an important aspect of death. I mean, Jesus wept. We read of Jesus weeping at the tomb of Lazarus, even though he knew he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead in the next few minutes. Jesus knew that. And so he knew that Lazarus wasn't really gone for good. But I think that it's just death is a sobering thing. Death shouldn't be here. There shouldn't have been death. If there was not sin, there would not be death. And therefore, death is simply, you mentioned Paul refers in 1 Corinthians 15 to the last enemy that will be destroyed is death. Now, I was debating a Christian theologian about something. Actually, he was a full preterist. And he was trying to tell me that, well, I won't tell you what his position was, but he asked me, is death for the Christian, is it a friend or an enemy? Now, he was trying to trap me because on one hand, and I knew immediately he was trying to trap me because I knew that Paul said, For me to live is Christ and to die is gain. I have a great desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better, he said. That's in Philippians 1. And in 2 Corinthians 2, he said that we are eager to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord. So obviously, we could say death is in one sense kind of a welcome thing. When we get to transition, go be with Jesus. And yet Paul did say that death is the last enemy that must be destroyed. So the man was trying to get me to commit to death being either a friend or an enemy. Well, I think it's both in a sense. It's an enemy of Christ because it takes out his agents. It takes out his guys. It takes down his soldiers. Death is an enemy of Christ, but it's not the enemy of the Christians. in the sense that Christians benefit from it, but the world doesn't, and God's enterprise in the world doesn't. And so, you know, there's a positive side, something to rejoice about, and there's a negative, something to mourn about, and even Jesus mourned over it. So I think, you know, I won't say that if I went to a funeral and everyone was saying this is a celebration of life, that I don't think I'd take a whip of small cords and drive out everybody or anything like that. And I don't know if I'd even be really offended. But I do think we lose out on something of the experience that people have always had when they lose loved ones. If we kind of just mask over the grief and just say, oh, well, there's a good side to this. This is the silver lining. That person's in heaven. We're not going to think about how sad we are because we don't want to be sad. so anyway it's a hard call I wouldn't judge either but I think maybe both are a good idea maybe have a funeral where it's solemn where you know the widow can weep or whatever and you know the loved ones can weep and be sorrowful and others will weep with them mourn with those who mourn Paul said and then maybe after that when people you know after the mourning is done then have a a memorial, which would be, as you say, a celebration of life. That would be the best of both worlds, I think.
SPEAKER 08 :
Thank you so much. That really deepens my perspective and gives me some things to think about. Thank you, Steve.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, Millie. Thanks for your call. God bless you. All right. Our next caller is Tracy from Portland, Oregon. Hi, Tracy. Welcome.
SPEAKER 07 :
Hi, Steve. Thanks. You took a call yesterday on John Chapter 2, the Wedding in Cana, the miracle of water to wine. And I may not be in agreement with you on your answer, and I just don't like that. So I wanted to run something by you.
SPEAKER 02 :
Feel free.
SPEAKER 07 :
What is it? I think I've heard over the years that woman, in the case that Jesus used it there, was generally respectful. That's right. It wasn't like, woman, make me a sandwich. It was a respectful term. And I've wondered if possibly Father God maybe wanted to bless Mary in that situation by kind of making her a conduit to inform Jesus that, yes, indeed, it was his time to begin. Because it seems to me from the reading that he just kind of went straight ahead and did it, even after he asked her that question. What do you think? Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, we're not told that he went straight away and did it. The next thing we're told is that he did it. But a wedding feast would go on for a week or two usually. Now, it may be as soon as he made that remark to Mary that he went ahead and just did it because that was his father's instruction. Or it may be that, you know, other things went on for a while, maybe even days past or hours, and then it was the time. So he told the people to fill the water pots, you know. I don't know. I don't know that you've said anything I disagree with. Like I said, the word woman, addressed to a woman, I mentioned yesterday. It was a respectful term, just like saying madam or ma'am. Oh, okay. And Jesus addressed several women that way when he addressed them. Oh, woman, great is your faith, he said, you know. And he spoke to men that way, too. He says, man, who made me a judge of you? Man... You know, Paul said, oh, man, you know, who are you to answer against God and stuff like that? Oh, man, this is addressing a man. And woman is evocative way of addressing a woman and very common in the New Testament. So there's nothing abrupt or or or short about it. But I guess what you're saying is that it really was his time. Well, but he said it wasn't. That's the point. I mean, when she asked, she said there's no wine there. He said, woman, what has your business got to do with me? He said, my time has not yet come, or my hour has not yet come. So he said it wasn't his time at that moment, but maybe it was a little later, and maybe the narrative skips over whatever unimportant things happened in between and then tells us about the miracle. But I wouldn't, yeah, I don't know. On the woman thing, I agree with you on that.
SPEAKER 07 :
I just thought that it sounded like she just kind of turned immediately and said to the servants, do whatever he tells you, like she was expecting him to do it. I mean, that's just kind of how I saw it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, I don't see how she could possibly have expected him to turn water into wine since he had lived in her home for 30 years and never done any miracles. We're told in John chapter 2, after he turned the water into wine, it says this was the first of his miracles, or the beginning of his miracles. So it seems to me that although, of course, his birth was a miracle, everything from his birth on to age 30... He conducted himself in the home just like a good son, you know, a good son, but not like a god in the flesh, apparently.
SPEAKER 07 :
But you think maybe she was just expecting him to do something practical, like do something just to get some wine instead of actually doing a miracle.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, okay. Yeah, I mean, like I said, I think she had become accustomed, especially after Joseph's death, to coming to Jesus about the kind of things that a woman might normally go to her husband about. You know, oh, we're out of this or that. And so, you know, she tells her husband so he can do something about it. Okay. The door's hanging loose on the hinge, honey. You know, in other words, well, I'm putting the balls in your court now. And, you know, but not necessarily expecting the person to do a miracle, but to... But to take the, I don't know, take the responsibility or at least take the burden off of her of caring about that.
SPEAKER 07 :
Okay. Well, thank you. All right.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay. Great talking to you, Tracy. God bless.
SPEAKER 04 :
You too. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
SPEAKER 02 :
Felix from Phoenix. Those words go together well. How are you doing, Felix?
SPEAKER 05 :
Hey, Steve. How are you doing? Good.
SPEAKER 02 :
Good.
SPEAKER 05 :
I just wanted to ask really quick. So I was watching a couple of videos last night, and they were referencing, I believe just once or twice, the book of Enoch. Obviously not biblical scripture or anything, and I have never read it, but it does kind of intrigue me a little bit. So I was just wondering if you've read it, or is that something that you think people should read maybe just for context, or do you think it's just something that we should disregard since it's not considered biblical scripture? Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, I haven't read the whole book. Actually, there's several books of Enoch. I think, if I'm not mistaken, I think there's four books of Enoch. But 1 Enoch is the one most people refer to. That's the one that Jude quoted from. And that most people, when they talk about the book of Enoch, they're talking about 1 Enoch. I haven't read the whole thing. It doesn't interest me enough. I have looked some things up in it because on certain websites – Some people have listed things that they say that the New Testament was quoting Enoch. And I know, of course, I know that Jude quoted Enoch. He actually says, Enoch said this, you know. But there's apparently maybe a dozen or so other places where people claim that Paul or Jesus or someone else is quoting Enoch. And so I have the book of Enoch, so I've looked it up and stuff, and I thought, well, that's a stretch. In many cases, for example, Jesus would be quoting some Old Testament passage, and Enoch also quotes that Old Testament passage. So in my mind, Jesus is quoting the Old Testament. In their mind, they say, well, see, he's quoting Enoch, because Enoch has that in there too, which is kind of an absurd argument. But You know, as far as reading Enoch, I don't see anything against it, except people who do read Enoch sometimes get really into believing what Enoch said. For example, the whole explanation of Genesis 6, that the sons of God who took the women as wives, that those were fallen angels and so forth. Well, there's nothing in the Bible that says they were fallen angels, but But Enoch said that, and that's where the church got it. The church got the idea, and many Christians have gotten it from there. And the Jews got it from there, too. Enoch said that those were angels. Well, maybe they were, but I have my doubts about it, and I'm certainly not going to assume it just because Enoch said so. I think the evidence from Genesis 6 would be against it. But anyway, that's another story. I don't care whether they were or not. The point is that a lot of people read Enoch, and they feel like Enoch is somehow filling things in in the biblical stories of the Old Testament, which there's always people who don't know the difference between the Bible and something else that's talking about Bible subjects. And that's why, you know, the Book of Mormon has convinced a lot of people that it's genuine because it has, you know, it uses language about the Bible. It mentions Jesus and so forth. But it's not the Bible. But a lot of people don't have the discernment. And I think that, you know, I think it's safe to read it if it's safe to read it. The early church read it. The early church liked it. And so I don't have any reason to say that it can't be read. But I don't see any reason to read it either because it's not written by Enoch. If it was written by Enoch the prophet, well, I'd be very interested in knowing what he had to say. But since it was written, you know, by someone else thousands of years after Enoch walked the earth and claiming to be him, I think, well, why should I be very interested in what they have to say? I can read the Bible myself. I don't need them guessing about things for me. So that's one reason I've never taken the time to read the whole book. I'm not that interested. Some people have gotten very interested in it in the last decade or so. I think Michael Heiser's teaching has gotten a lot of people interested in Enoch, but also others are using Enoch more. You know, read it if you're curious. But just know you're not reading scripture. You might as well be reading, you know, the Lion, the Witch, and the War Room, you know, which is edifying also. And Enoch can be edifying too.
SPEAKER 04 :
Awesome. Thank you, Steve. I appreciate it. I'll probably check it out, but definitely take it with a grain of salt. So thank you.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, Felix. God bless.
SPEAKER 04 :
God bless. Thank you.
SPEAKER 02 :
Bye now. Okay. Let's see. Benjamin from Greenville, Ohio. Welcome. Welcome.
SPEAKER 06 :
So I'm going through some studies with a couple of friends on the kingdom of God. And I feel like they're both on board with what's being said. But as soon as we start talking about evangelizing, they go rogue and talk about getting into heaven. They kind of resort back to evangelism. I feel like it's being dismissed. I was wondering if you could give any advice on how to redirect them back.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, you know, people often are fascinated with heaven and hell. And there is a heaven and there is a hell, so it's not something that needs to be ignored or should be ignored. My emphasis is, I mean, when I talk about it, that the Bible very seldom speaks about going to heaven or going to hell. There's a few verses about hell in the Bible, and there's a few verses about going to heaven. And then there's thousands and thousands of verses that have nothing to do with going to heaven or hell. They have to do with living a life pleasing to God, fulfilling the purpose God made for us, and especially in the New Testament, about the kingdom of God. Now, because so many people assume the kingdom of God means heaven, They have, you know, they read so much in the Bible about the kingdom of God that they assume that it must be always talking about heaven. And that interests them. It interests, well, I don't know about your friends. I'll say it interests a lot of people to talk about heaven and hell because they don't want to change their life very much, but they don't want to go to hell. So they'd like to know what is the message that will get me into heaven. And they don't ask, what is the information in the Bible that will tell me how to live a life pleasing to God and fulfill God's purposes in the world so that I don't live a wasted life? They already know what they want to do with their life on many occasions. I'm talking about Christians as well as non-Christians. A lot of Christians just want the bare minimum. Tell me how to get to heaven. Oh, I accept Jesus in my heart? Okay, good. I'm going. Oh, you've got to be baptized too? Well, I've got that box checked too. And we'll check the boxes and say, okay, I've got that done. Now let me live my life the way I like it. Let me spend my money the way I want to spend it. Let me have my relationships and my entertainment and my deity, my gods, or my idols in this life, you know, because I've checked the box and I'm going to heaven. And I think a lot of people, including Christian people, are looking for a very non-intrusive religion, something that can give them at the lowest cost the greatest assurance of benefit in the next life. And, you know, I don't know how to get that out of them. I mean, if there's nothing wrong with wanting to be prepared for the next life, everyone should. Everyone should be concerned to be prepared for the next life. But we have to understand that's not what the gospel is about. I believe Abraham, who never heard the gospel as we have, I think he died prepared for the next life. I think Jacob and Moses and David, I think they died prepared for the next life, but they didn't know the gospel. Going to be with the Lord is a good thing, but that's not what the gospel is about. The gospel is a message about the kingdom of God. Sure. So, you know, how to get people to realize that heaven, going to heaven when you die, is for people who are citizens of the kingdom of God, which is something you become now. And once you become a citizen of the kingdom of God, your life has a purpose to be fulfilled. And you're supposed to live in agreement with the king and follow his orders. And it's like you're in the army now. You know, that's what the Bible says. It's like you've been drafted into a mission. And your king has a plan for you. Now, when you get drafted in the army, of course, we don't have a draft here anymore. We did when I was young. When a person is drafted in the army or when they join on their own, they give up their civilian life for the time being. And that's what Paul said in 2 Timothy 2. He said, no man that wars... entangles himself in the affairs of this life, that he might please him who called him to be a soldier. So, you know, if someone goes into the army, you know that they're going to have to be under the command of their commanders. And it's not like being a civilian. And being in the kingdom of God is you become part of a king's forces, and you're at war. He's at war with the kingdom of darkness, and you're now engaged in a battle for the rest of your life, And assuming you're faithful unto death, you get to go to heaven when you die, too. But, you know, I don't think people should never think about heaven. I think about it once in a while. That is, when I think about dying. When I think about dying, I think about heaven. You know, because I look forward to seeing Jesus. But I don't think about dying all the time. I know in the back of my mind all the time I could die today. I could die any moment. And I'm quite happy to know that if I do die, I'm ready to go be with Jesus. But... I'm not necessarily expecting to die this week. And if I don't, I've got to do something with my life. In fact, if I don't die for another 30 years, I've got to do something with my life that time. So the gospel is not about how to get a ticket to heaven. The gospel is about how to enter the kingdom of God and be a participant in God's plan. you know, mission here. And I don't know if, you know, I don't know why, maybe your friends are not shying away from that, but maybe they think that unbelievers don't want to hear about that. If they want to talk, you know, if they want to evangelize, people say, well, you know, you need to go to heaven when you die. They may be assuming that that's how Jesus would talk to an unbeliever. But I've never read of Jesus ever talking to an unbeliever about going to heaven. Or the apostles either.
SPEAKER 06 :
They've actually mentioned that as far as saying, well, I mean, they feel like they have to give someone something to get to heaven before they would be a servant. I feel like they're getting it backwards.
SPEAKER 02 :
They definitely are getting it backwards. So are they saying that they would do nothing for their wives if they're not going to get anything back for it? I mean, don't they love their wives? I mean, people should serve God because they love God. And if they don't love God... I don't think they're going to go to heaven. They wouldn't like it there. If you don't love God, you're not going to want to be there. You're going to be having to love and worship him and obey him. You're going to be gritting your teeth because you never loved him. No, Jesus is looking for people who love him like he loves us. And the Bible says we do love him because he first loved us. God's looking for a love relationship with people. And when people love each other, they love to make sacrifices to please the other. They love to... Always be concerned about what is going to bless the other person. They're not thinking, what can I get out of them? And so, you know, if there are people who respond to an evangelistic message, that is, just do this little thing, jump through this little hoop, and then God will give you heaven in the future. And, you know, what if I don't love God? That's okay. Just say this prayer, you know, and you'll go to heaven. It's like a bargain deal. It's like making a bargain with God to indebt him to send you to heaven, when Jesus never talked about that. Jesus just never talked about that. Jesus talked about the need to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as you love yourself. And if you do, you're going to want to serve God. You're going to want to serve people. You're not going to be asking, what am I going to get out of this? Now, you will get something out of it. That's the point. But that's not going to be what you require. in order to do it. If you love someone, you will please them. And, you know, you'll get something out of it, too, probably, in most cases, but that's not what you're thinking about. Anyway, that's not what Jesus said. Actually, neither Jesus nor the apostles ever brought those subjects up when they evangelized. Jesus did talk to the disciples about it. Okay, well, thanks for your call. Good talking to you. We're out of time for today's show. You've been listening to the Narrow Path radio broadcast for 28 years. We've been on daily doing this very thing. We are listener supported. If you'd like to help us stay on the air, you can go to the website, thenarrowpath.com, and see how to donate. Thanks for joining us.
Steve Gregg takes listeners on a compelling journey through Scripture, addressing both time-honored traditions and contemporary moral dilemmas. From the divergent interpretations of Revelation to the implications of indulgence versus charity within Christian practice, this episode invites believers to reflect deeply on their faith and actions. Additional topics include the mystery surrounding Jesus' hour not yet coming at the wedding in Cana, and how that extends into our personal callings and divine timing. This is a must-listen for anyone grappling with complex theological concepts while seeking practical applications to their spiritual lives.
SPEAKER 1 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 01 :
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. And we're taking your calls, as we usually do. And if you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith, we take your calls. We talk about them on the air. Right now, the lines are full. But you can call in a few minutes and almost certainly find a line open sometime before the hour is over. The number to call is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. If you'd like to call the program today, we'd be glad to hear from you. This Saturday we have a couple things going on in Southern California. One is in Temecula. The other is in Buena Park in Orange County. In Temecula we have a men's Bible study in the morning Saturday, 8 o'clock. That's a men's Bible study. And we're in the book of 1 Timothy. In the evening in Buena Park, we have a study through the book of 1 John. It's going to be an extensive overview and introduction to the whole book of 1 John. And that's this Saturday night in Buena Park. If you're interested in joining us for any of those gatherings, you can go to our website, thenarrowpath.com. and look under Announcements, and there you'll find the time and place of those gatherings. That's only once a month we have these meetings. So if you're interested, that's this Saturday morning and evening, two different meetings. You can look at thenarrowpath.com under Announcements. And with that, I have nothing else to announce except that we'll go to the phones and talk to Ryan from Spartanburg, South Carolina. Hi, Ryan. Welcome.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hey, Steve. Thank you for taking my call. I understand that you have a view of abolition, that most of it has taken place in the past. And that was kind of counter to what I had been taught as a kid all my life. But I guess the place I was wondering... if that's true that most of Revelation has already taken place since John had the vision, what is left that has not yet taken place and still would need to occur?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, that's going to be a matter of opinion among different interpreters, and there are almost as many interpretations as there are interpreters. My own view is, that the primary subject of most of Revelation is the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D.
SPEAKER 1 :
70.
SPEAKER 01 :
I believe that up through about chapter 9, it's pretty much focused on that. And then also from chapter 14 through 19, I believe it's focused on that. That's my opinion. Now, in between those two sections, there's chapters 10 through 13. Now, there's a reason to, I won't give it now because it'd take too long, but my lectures certainly do give my reasons for this. I believe that those are not specifically about 70 A.D., but I think that they talk about the period after 70 A.D., the present age. of the church symbolically. And likewise, I see the same thing about chapter 20 and following. So I'm thinking that, you know, the second coming of Christ, which is, of course, still future. is seen in chapter 11, in my opinion, when the two witnesses are dead and they rise to their feet alive and they're caught up into heaven. I take that to be a picture of the rapture of the church. And then I believe that the second coming of Christ is seen also in Revelation 20 and verse 9, when fire from heaven comes down and destroys Satan and all of his confederates. And those passages coincide with other passages about the second coming of Christ and lead me to believe that's what what that's talking about. I personally think that the new heavens and new earth in chapters 21 and 22 are essentially a future new creation, though I do believe that, as the writer of Hebrews says, we have already tasted of the powers of the age to come, and that in some senses, those chapters depict, in a spiritual sense, the experience of Christians who, if any man is in Christ, he is a new creation, and therefore the new heavens and new earth, the new creation, in some sense has happened already, in our lives, but there is, in my opinion, a literal new heavens and new earth also coming when Jesus returns. So, now that's me. You're going to find lots of different interpretations of Revelation, but you asked me my opinion, and I'm the world's greatest authority on my own opinion. So, I do see some references to the second coming of Christ in a couple of sections, in the middle section and in the end section of the book.
SPEAKER 03 :
All right. Thank you, Steve. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, Ryan. By the way, if you're interested in my reasons for these things, obviously at thenarrowpath.com under verse-by-verse lectures, you can listen to my verse-by-verse lectures on Revelation, and you'll get a very full explanation of the reasons for all those things. Okay, thank you very much. Okay, Ryan. God bless. Okay, we're going to talk next to John from Dearborn, Michigan. John, welcome to The Narrow Path. Hello, Steve. Hello.
SPEAKER 02 :
I am interested in gaining some perspective on what the lesson is from the story in the Bible of the woman who brought expensive oil to be used on Jesus and the criticism that was made by certain people regarding... All right. the use of that oil rather than selling it and feeding it and fostering the welfare of poor people and I'm thinking of this in terms for instance of expensive cathedrals such as Notre Dame being built to glorify God and at what point is that a waste and at what point is it justified as a The glorification of God.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right. Well, in the future, you might want to turn your radio down on the phone because I'm sure it confuses you to be talking in real time and hearing the radio, which is, of course, a delay of something like 30 seconds. So anyway, I'm glad we got through your question. So there was this time when Jesus was about to be buried and Mary, Bethany came and he was sitting in the house with the disciples and with Mary and Martha. And Mary came in with some very expensive oil or perfume. The estimated value of it was like a year's wages for a working person. And she broke the container and poured the oil over his head and possibly his feet also. There's some different Gospels that give some different details. So The gospel tells us that the disciples complained about this. And one of them, I think it was John, tells us specifically that Judas complained about this. And said, what a waste. That oil was worth a lot. Now it's worth nothing. I mean, it's been poured out. You can't regather it. While it was in its bottle, you could have sold it, gotten a lot of money for it, and given it to the poor. Which sounds like a good thing. But the Bible tells us that Judas didn't care about the poor. He was the guy who carried the bag of money for the disciples, and he was, I guess, like their treasurer. And he pilfered from the bag. So he would have loved to have all that money in the bag to pilfer from. So we're told he didn't really care about the poor at all. Now, Jesus did care about the poor, but he said, the poor you have with you always, and you can do good to them whenever you want to. Frankly, some people have mistakenly said, we don't have to help the poor because Jesus said, the poor you have with you always. And their reasoning seems to be, well, you know, you can't eliminate world poverty, so why try? You know, which is ridiculous. Jesus didn't say, because you'll always have the poor, never help them. He said, because the poor will always be there, you'll always have opportunity to help them. And you can help them all the time, anytime you want. And certainly he believed that was a very important thing to do. But on this occasion, he defended the woman for what seemed to be a waste of her, probably her, life savings, and, you know, it didn't really accomplish anything except, you know, to make Jesus smell like perfume, which I'm not even sure he wanted to smell like perfume. So, you know, it does seem like she made kind of an extravagant, almost silly waste of that perfume. And yet Jesus defended her because he knew her heart. And he said, don't criticize her. You can give to the poor whenever you want to. If that's really what you're concerned about, Judas, you can go out and give to the poor any day you wish. But this woman was doing something unique. Now, what he said was that she was anointing him for burial. Now, when people were buried, they would be sometimes anointed with perfumes or spices and things like that, just sort of as a final honor to the corpse before it is put in the grave. And Jesus was saying she anointed him for burial. Now, he was going to be dead within a few days. This was just a few days before he died. So he was saying that she was doing something appropriate for someone who's going to be buried shortly. Only you usually do it after the body's dead, not while they're still living. Now, it's not clear whether she understood that's what she was doing. She may have just seen it as an act of lavish affection on Jesus, and Jesus appreciated it for that reason. But she may have understood that he was going to die. And she may have been, in a sense, doing this to honor him before his burial. Though it doesn't seem likely that she knew that. That would be actually pretty premature for anointing a body that's not dead yet. Jesus may be simply saying, this works out fine because I'm going to be buried and this is anointing me for burial. In other words, he might be saying that she understood this to be the case. If she did, she was way ahead of the disciples because they didn't understand it. They didn't understand he was going to be buried. He told them, but they still didn't understand it. But she might have. You know, Mary is the one who sat at Jesus' feet listening when Martha was serving in the house. Mary may have been perhaps a more sensitive person than the disciples, picked up on things that Jesus was saying that they didn't pick up on. So we don't know if she deliberately was doing it for his burial or if he just said, you know, this is going to work out this way because I'm going to be buried. And, you know, this is, of course, you anoint the dead. So this is a previous to my burial. And that might have been perplexing to her. She might not have even known what that meant. We don't know. But you're asking, well, there's been a lot of lavish and expensive projects that have been dedicated to God. which could have, the money could have been used to feed the poor, should we think, how should we think about them? Should we think, as Jesus thought about this, that this is a good use of this perfume? Well, I mean, Jesus can think whatever he wants to and say whatever he wants to and evaluate however he wants to any given act of generosity. And I know he certainly saw this as an act of love from this woman and thought that was a very good thing. Now, people who design sculptures and cathedrals and all kinds of elaborate, expensive, you know, worship art and architecture, that's very expensive. And we might say they're doing it out of love for Jesus. And maybe they are. Or maybe they're doing it because they're commissioned to do it and they're getting paid to do it. I mean, a lot of times I don't think that the Sistine Chapel ceiling was painted for free. I think these artists were, they made their living at this kind of thing. So they may have loved Jesus or they may not have. The thing would have gotten done anyway because it wasn't specifically a project necessarily done out of the love for Jesus by the artists. Though it could have been. I'm not saying it wasn't. I mean, Bach wrote his music to the glory of God. No one can know what was in the hearts of an artist or a composer who wrote or drew something or built something for the glory of God. We don't know how good their motives were or were not, and God will evaluate that. We might ask, though, whether the whole project even makes sense in a world where there's so much poverty. Why would you spend that much on that? I know people used to say that when a rocket was sent to the moon and they brought back moon rocks. People thought, well, there must be valuable rocks to have because they cost billions of dollars to get them. And that money, many people said, could have been given to the poor. And that is true. It could have been. I personally, the way I understand stewardship, would not lavish any funds that could be used to help the poor on a merely religious structure or piece of art for the simple reason that I'm not sure that that's right-headed. I mean, it was a tremendous expenditure of perfumes. that this one poured out, but it was directly on Jesus. It was directly, obviously, an act of love for him. She didn't plan to get anything out of it. She wasn't paid for it. I mean, Jesus recognized that as a true act of worship and a very expensive one for her. And God's going to have to evaluate, you know, these other things. Notre Dame, Sistine Chapel, you know, all the religious statues and all those things. I don't know how God feels about those, and it's because other people's money were used for it. If someone took my money and used it for that, I would say, well, I'd rather use my money for the things of God the way I value them. And I value the lives of people, like poor people, for example, or the souls of people who could be evangelized, more than I value it. pretty buildings and paintings and such. But that's me. I mean, it's not like God is against art. And as I understand it, in the Middle Ages, a lot of people believed that these buildings did really glorify God and help the people, help elevate the people's minds in a time where they're in grinding dirt and poverty and so forth to kind of go into one of these cathedrals and kind of have their thoughts lifted to heaven and because of the beauty and so forth, this is something that wouldn't work for me, but I'm not saying it wouldn't work for anyone. So, you know, I never will, well, I won't say never will, but generally speaking, I do not judge another person's stewardship. Now, if a television evangelist says he needs, you know, $50 million to get his third jet, private jet, I'm critical of that because he clearly doesn't need three private jets. He probably doesn't even need one. if he thinks he needs one, then one should be enough. Why does he need two more? And these are $50 million, $30 million jets. I think, okay, listen, that's a lot of money. That's money that could really do something good besides give you the status of owning three jets. And, you know, I will judge that kind of thing because there's no possible excuse for it. But when people do things and say, this is for the glory of God, and I look at it and say, well, I would have never used the money that way. I would have used it to help the poor or get the gospel out or do something else. I have to say, well, if they're doing it for the glory of God, who am I? I don't know. God's going to judge their heart. Maybe he's pleased. Yeah, it depends on what their motives were. And they are definitely in a different place mentally than I am about such things, so I'm not really in the position to judge their hearts because I don't understand that particular priority. I don't even particularly care about architecture at all, whether church or otherwise, but But some people do, and it's an art. I mean, God did create art. He made us artists. And so I'm not going to say people who do that are all bad or doing the wrong thing. But I will say I would prioritize differently if I had that kind of money to invest in something. But God will judge. And each one obviously needs to answer to God for their own stewardship. But I understand you asking that question because it does seem a little strange to spend that kind of money on a church or something when there's thousands of starving people living around it in the neighborhood. Let's talk to Alice from San Francisco, California. Hi, Alice.
SPEAKER 06 :
Hi. I've never called in before. Nice to talk to you. I met you a long time ago near San Cruz. You were over there. Anyway, I was wondering if you could possibly tell the man that called in and said that he has ALS. to get retested again because he might have long COVID. So ALS is a, you know, deadly disease, but long COVID is not treatable. And so thank you for letting me.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, Alice, I appreciate that info.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yes, it could be long COVID. It's treatable. I hope he's listening. Anyway, I'm wondering about John, too. Verse number four. Why does the Lord say, Woman, what does your consent have to do with me? My hour has not yet come. What does it mean that his hour has not come yet?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, you know, the expression that his hour had not yet come, that phrase occurs several times in the book of John. And in all the other times, in the book of John, it's talking about the hour of his death. But in John 2, it's not obvious that he'd be talking about the hour of his death because that doesn't seem to be in the context. She's telling him that they've run out of wine. She's not asking him to do anything, but she's certainly implying could you do something about this? She's kind of trying to send him on an errand of some kind, go get some wine for him or something. She's not Not specifying, but she's clearly implying that she kind of would expect him to maybe step up and do something. And by the way, I think this is probably how she was used to relating. He'd never done miracles before. He just left home. This is one of the first things he did when he left home. And he'd been living at home, you know, for 30 years. Joseph had died recently. sometime in the previous several years. And so probably Mary had gotten used to coming to Jesus with problems. Hey, you know, the kitchen sink has a leak. You know, that kind of stuff you go to your husband about. Well, she didn't have a husband, and Jesus was the oldest son. So probably they had a relationship all their life, all Jesus' life, where he was called upon by Mary to step up and do the kinds of things that, you know, a man might be asked to do. So she was accustomed probably to approaching him with this kind of thing. Some people think she wanted him to work a miracle, but he'd never worked any miracles. It's not clear whether she even knew he could. He'd never done it before. She'd lived with him for 30 years, and he'd never done any. So I don't know that she was saying, please do a miracle and make wine. But I think she was concerned this wedding was some relative of theirs, it would appear. And Mary was obviously directly concerned with the catering in some way. And they'd just run out of something very vital. You need a lot of wine at a wedding, especially since the weddings in those days went on a week or two long. And you couldn't easily predict how much wine you'd use. So they ran out. And so she doesn't make any specific suggestion, but she does come to Jesus as if she's kind of laying this burden for him to handle. Now, he did handle it, you know, but he first tells her, woman, now, the fact that he called her woman, in our English usage, sounds a little harsh. Like, it doesn't sound affectionate. However, throughout the Gospels, we find that Jesus always addresses women as woman and men as man. Man who made me a judge over you, he says in one place. And, you know, this is the way people address each other. You know, just man, woman. It's like us saying sir or madam. And it is interesting that he used a word for her that might be comparable to us saying madam. Because you don't usually say madam to your mom, though it's not disrespectful to you. Madam is a respectful term. But it might be a way of distancing himself from the previous way their relationship was conducted. You know, that is to say, he had always been a son in the house, the oldest son in the house, the go-to guy. When mom needs something done, she comes to him. And he's saying, not anymore. I'm on another mission now. My hour is not, I think what he's saying is my time is not at my discretion. I'm not available simply to jump whenever you have something you want me to do, as we have always done in the home previously. I've now left home. I'm now on my father's schedule. I have to do what he says. And I think when he says, my hour has not yet come, I think it has the implication of, you know, I'm not really – I don't sense my father telling me to do anything right now about this. But hang around. Maybe something will change. And it did. Sometime later – Apparently, he did receive instructions from his father to do something about it. But he couldn't move just because his mom wanted him to anymore. He had to act on his father's instructions. And he finally did act, but not because Mary told him to. But obviously, as Jesus said, I can do nothing but what my father tells me to do, what I see my father do. So I think my hour has not yet come with just simply saying it's not time yet for me to do anything about this. I'm not sure it will be. But it's a way of saying, my time is not at my discretion, and I have to move on the schedule that God gives me. I think that's what he's suggesting. Now, all the other times in John's Gospel, when it talks about his hour had not yet come, and there are several others, it is specifically referring to the hour of his death. So it's kind of strange that in John chapter 2 it would be used in some other way. And I've read some commentators try to use it even in Chapter 2 to kind of connect it to his death. But I'm not seeing it. I myself have not seen it. I think that he's just telling his mom, you know, I can't just do things whenever I want to. I've got to do things on God's schedule. And I think that's what that phrase is communicating there.
SPEAKER 06 :
What about when he or the Apostle Paul were trying to escape persecution? They were going to stone them. And doesn't it also say that their hour hasn't come or something like that?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, that wasn't said of Paul, though there was a time when people did stone Paul. And there was a time when they plotted to kill him and God spared him. And we could say his hour had not yet come. But there were a number of times in the Gospels where they took up stones to stone Jesus because they didn't like something he said. And it says, you know, he passed through them unharmed and went away and hid himself or something because his hour had not yet come. In other words, they were about to kill him. But it wasn't time for him to die yet. Like I was saying, most of the time when the Gospels say his hour had not yet come, it means the hour for him to die. And there's a very strong temptation to give it that same meaning in John chapter 2 simply to be consistent with the usage of that term throughout the book. But I'm not seeing an easy way to make it mean that in chapter 2 in the context. So some commentators have tried to do that, but to my mind when I read it, I thought they were being a little strained. So I think it is just another way of saying it's not my... I'm not on my own time schedule here.
SPEAKER 06 :
Okay. Thank you. That's what I do.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right. Great talking to you. Thanks for your call, Alice. All right. We have some more calls waiting, and we have another half hour coming up. We're kind of at the end of our first half hour. There's a couple of lines that have opened up. If you want to get on for the second half hour, you can call right now, the number 844- 484-5737. The Narrow Path is a listener-supported ministry. And each half hour of it, you see we go through. It's commercial free. We don't have any sponsors. And we don't sell anything. So we don't have any promotions for anything for sale. But we do promote our website, which is free. And everything on it is free. Thousands of lectures. MP3 files you can download. Lots of other resources there that you can have for free. And we recommend you check it out. But we are listener-supported. And if you'd like to help us stay on the air, you can write to The Narrow Path, P.O. Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. Or go to our website, thenarrowpath.com. You can donate there, too. I'll be right back in 30 seconds, so don't go away.
SPEAKER 05 :
Small is the gate and narrow is the path that leads to life. We're proud to welcome you to The Narrow Path with Steve Gregg. Steve has nothing to sell you today but everything to give you. When today's radio show is over, we invite you to visit thenarrowpath.com where you'll find topical audio teachings, blog articles, verse-by-verse teachings, and the archives of all the radio shows. Study, learn, and enjoy. We thank you for supporting the listener-supported Narrow Path with Steve Gregg.
SPEAKER 01 :
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'd like to be on the program with any questions you might want to raise about the Bible or the Christian faith, feel free to do that. And the number to call is 844-484-5737. It kind of looks to me like the lines might be full, so if you don't get through, just call a few minutes later. Lines are continually opening up. And by the way, we get more calls every day in most cases than we can put on the air just because there's too many and we have too little time. If you can't get on the air, feel free to email me. And say, you know, I have a question I'd like you to answer on the air. And I can get to it that way. If you have difficulty getting through or even if you have difficulty speaking on the radio, feel free to write to me, email me. My email address is at our website, thenarrowpath.com. And you can go there and see where to email me and just send me a question that way. All right, let's talk to Mickey from Everett, Washington. Mickey, welcome.
SPEAKER 08 :
Hi there. Thank you for taking my call. I have two questions that stem from Revelations 9, 20 and 21, but starting with Mark 9, 14 through 29. And so my question there is how might unclean spirits or demons possess young children? Because I think the father's response was, that he had been like that since he was a child. And then, yes, my other question is, most of the demon possessions or non-clean spirits that Jesus addressed, they were doing self-harm to the individual. I don't recall, and my question is, do you recall where there are individuals who do harm to others because they're In my professional work, I'm seeing that happen where people are doing harm to other people. For example, the nurse that did harm to the babies in the NIC tube. And then my last question is when it's referencing Revelations 9, 20, and 21, because I'd like to believe that we all have an innate ability or sensitivity to harming others. So when I read Revelations 9, 20, and 21, and murders are accepted, sexual sins are accepted, pornography is accepted, dishonesty is accepted. So is this like some kind of spell that Satan has over all of us in the last days?
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, thank you. Well, as far as the first question from Mark 9 about the boy who was demon possessed, it does appear that children can be demon possessed. In fact, I've heard of cases where children appear to have been born demon possessed. Now, one case I knew of, both parents were Satanists and the child was, was seemingly born demon-possessed. At least that's what she said when I met her. And she had crazy problems, I mean, until she became a Christian. And that really totally, she got delivered. But as far as demons making people do harm to other people, we don't really read about that too much, except when Saul was possessed in the Old Testament. He hurled javelins at David, so we can see that he wasn't just doing self-harm. You are right that most of the people in the New Testament who are demon-possessed seem to only do things harmful to themselves or just things that are kind of crazy. But there is an exception, the man of the tombs in the Gospels, the man who could break chains when they tried to chain him up and so forth. It doesn't really tell us that he hurt anybody else, but it does that people were afraid to go by there because he was so fierce. So I don't know if he was just so fierce that he cursed people and shot at people and, you know, intimidate them, or if he was so fierce that he would attack them. It may be that nobody got close enough to ever try to find out. We don't have any example of even him hurting anybody, but if his fierceness caused people to avoid him for the most part, it may be that because sometime earlier he had hurt people. I'm not really sure. But the case of Saul in the Old Testament hurling a spear at David when an evil spirit came upon him does indicate that they may do harm to other people. Now, I personally think that those who deal with the demon-possessed are vulnerable to any kind of crazy or harmful behavior that the possessed person does, I would take it as an exception that a Christian who's walking in the spirit of God and trusting God and trusting Christ would be, I would think, exempt. But I'm not sure. But I have heard of many cases of Christians dealing with very ferocious, demon-possessed people and even being threatened by them and so forth, and yet not anyone laying a glove on them. I remember when I lived in Santa Cruz, a really whacked out, demon-possessed guy was outside our Christian coffee house there, and I went out to talk to him. And he picked up a rock from the ground and was kind of menacing with it. He said, this is my magma. You need to respect my magma or something. It's just kind of nuts. And, you know, the way he was acting and holding that rock, it looked like he might strike me with it. And I just figured, well, he might. But I don't think God would want me to run away from it. I mean, this man is a man in need. Not that I was able to help him. He didn't seem to want help. But I just thought, well, I can trust God for my safety. And it didn't do anything to me, though he seemed like the type of angry guy who might do something. He just didn't. And so I don't know if I was just protected because I'm a Christian or what the reason was. In any case... I don't know if I've ever heard of a strong Christian being physically hurt by somebody who was demon-possessed. That doesn't mean it never happened. Now, as far as the demons coming, I believe the locusts in Revelation 9, I think they represent demons. However, the verses you mentioned where the people did not repent, it says, of their murders, their sorceries, their sexual immorality, or their thefts, It does not necessarily say that these are the demon-possessed people. The previous verse, verse 20, says, "...the rest of mankind who were not killed by these plagues did not repent of their works, of their hands, that they should not worship demons, and idols of gold, silver, brass, and stone, which can either see or so forth, and they didn't repent of their murders, sorceries, or sexual immorality of their thefts." It does say that these people had been worshiping demons. It's not clear, however, whether this is simply referring to the idols as demons. It says the works of silver and gold, the works of their hands. In the Old Testament, in Deuteronomy, Moses said that those who worshipped idols were worshipping demons. And Paul said the same thing in 1 Corinthians. I think it's chapter 10, verse, I don't know, 20, if I'm not mistaken. He said the sacrifice that the heathen offered to their idols, they're offering to demons. So, Idol worship is demon worship in a sense, though worshiping demons hasn't always led to people being demon possessed. So it certainly makes, they're certainly taking a risk of that because I think worshiping demons can definitely open you up to demon possession. But people who worship demons are not necessarily demon possessed and therefore these people who had all these bad behaviors mentioned are not necessarily said to be demon possessed people. I believe that No matter how badly a person can act when they're demon-possessed, I think people can act just about as badly just from their own native evil, their own evil hearts. The evidence of demon possession would not be seen specifically in really, really bad behavior because undemon possessed people, people who are not demon possessed, can do just about as much bad behavior as anyone else. But I think demon possession would be noticeable more in, let's just say, paranormal behavior. You know, just clairvoyance, you know, just things that are really, you know, showing some kind of supernatural evidence of something. Not that this is the only thing, but that's where I would have some confidence. I'm dealing with a demon-possessed person if they're doing like paranormal type things. Anyway, there are mysteries about demon possession that the Bible does not explain. I think that when we encounter demon-possessed people, we need to be led by the Holy Spirit, and that's going to be the only hope we have of knowing what to do. But as far as your other questions, I hope I've answered them. Some of them are a little hard to answer, but children can be demon-possessed, and it would appear that demon-possessed people on occasion can hurt other people, or at least can try to and want to. So people who've murdered their children and so forth because they said God told them to do it, You know, almost certainly they're listening to demons. Probably they're demon-possessed, so it's, you know, I'd have to know more about each case to be sure. Marina in Detroit, Michigan. Welcome.
SPEAKER 07 :
Hi. Would you please share your thoughts and some scriptures about the topic of slavery, scriptures that support God allowing slavery in the Bible? And I understand a bond slave, what that means, but maybe other scriptures that were supported. I don't know if there were brutal slaves that were treated brutally. So what scriptures can you share to support that? Why was it permitted?
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, yeah. Well, first of all, treating slaves brutally was not permitted. Those specific instructions in the Bible tell people who happen to have slaves that to treat them fairly and like brothers and so forth, and not treat them brutally. It's actually forbidden to do that. It says, let's see here. I'm trying to figure where Paul talks about that. He talks about Ephesians 6, among other places. He talks in Colossians also, but let me take you to Ephesians 6 and 4. and read what he says to them there. He writes to slaves, and he writes to masters. And after he writes to the slaves, he says this in verse 9. This is Ephesians 6, 9. You masters do the same things to them, giving up threatening, knowing that your own master also is in heaven, and there's no partiality with him. There's a few places in Paul's letters that he talks to masters about slaves. And that's what James is talking about. James is not talking about having faith plus works. He's talking about having a faith that works. The works are what is generated from faith, like fruit is generated from a fruit tree. If you say, that tree in my front yard, that's an avocado tree, but it doesn't ever bear any avocados. In fact, maybe it bears something entirely different. Maybe it bears oranges. Well, then you're going to say, well, that's not an avocado tree. And if someone says, well, you can make it one by stapling up some avocados on some of those twigs there, then you'll have an avocado tree. No, you don't. You don't add fruit to the tree to make it a fruit tree. If it is a fruit tree, it produces the fruit. You don't make your faith genuine by adding artificial works in a legalistic way to your life. If you have a genuine salvation, those good works will be generated from your life. Because you will have a new life, and a new life is, you know, God says he writes his laws on your heart and in your inward parts so that your heart is emanating obedience to God. See, Zane Hodges and Charles Ryrie and a few others like them have argued that you don't have to have any good works to be a good Christian. And that just doesn't agree with any writer of scripture. It certainly doesn't agree with Jesus. Jesus said, he that hears these words of mine and does not do them, is like a foolish man who builds his house on sand.
SPEAKER 04 :
Right.
SPEAKER 01 :
But he that hears these words of mine and does them is like a wise man who builds his house on rock. And what happens? The man who builds his house on sand, it collapses in the judgment. The man who builds his house on rock, he survives the judgment. What's the difference between building your house on sand and building your house on rocks? It's when you hear what Jesus said and you do it or you don't do it. Jesus never gave instructions just to interrupt the silence, just because he thought it was too quiet, and so he thought he'd give out a few commands. He gave commands to be obeyed because he's the Lord. St. Hodges doesn't insist that people must recognize Jesus as Lord, in which case he teaches a gospel that's contrary to anything Paul or Jesus or Peter or James or the writer of Hebrews or any other biblical writer. No biblical writer teaches that you're saved by faith apart. from any kind of change in your life. Faith that is a saving faith changes your life. A faith that doesn't change your life is not a saving faith. That's why James says, you know, the demons also believe and tremble.
SPEAKER 04 :
What he's saying is... Like James says, what good is that faith?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, what good is that faith? He's saying the devils have a certain kind of faith too. Obviously, it's not the kind that saves anyone because it doesn't change the way they live. And anyone who says they have faith and the way they live hasn't changed doesn't have that faith. Now, if Zane Hodges says, well, now you're adding works as a necessity. No, I'm not adding any works. I'm saying you need to have that faith. If you have that faith, those works will be there. Just like if you have life, you'll be breathing and your heart will be beating. I mean, there will be the evidence of life. There will be vital signs. Good works are the vital signs that show that a person is saved. They don't save them. One could argue that breathing and heart beating makes people alive and therefore generate life, but I don't think so. I think it's the fact that we're alive that makes the heart beat and makes the breathing take place. Obviously, if you stop breathing, your heart stops beating, you're going to die, but it won't start up again unless you come alive again because presence of life in you has evidence. Presence of eternal life has evidence too, and that's in person's works. when Zane Hodges says, but then that's not sola fide. Well, where in the Bible does it say we're supposed to determine who's right and wrong by some appeal to some Latin phrase, sola fide? Sola fide says faith alone. That is, we're saved by faith alone. Well, maybe we are saved by faith alone.
SPEAKER 04 :
That James contradicts. If you interpret it the way what you're saying, then it contradicts what Paul is saying. By faith alone it saves us. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
SPEAKER 01 :
No, no, no, no, no, no. I just showed you. Paul said the same thing.
SPEAKER 04 :
I agree with what you're saying. I'm just bringing up their argument because I've been dealing with both of these elders and I'm trying to sort through their arguments and I am leading toward what, I mean, it makes sense what you're saying, you know, and I want to know how to, and you're bringing up a lot of good points for me to talk with this elder.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, so if they think that faith without works will save, then they've got to go against what James said and against what Paul said and against what Jesus said and against what the writer of Hebrews said. Look at Hebrews 11. It talks about all the people who had faith and who were saved by faith in the Old Testament. It says, by faith they, what? By faith Noah built an ark. Why? Because God told him to. He obeyed God. By faith, Abraham left his homeland. Why? Well, because God told him to. By faith, these people obeyed God. That's the point. As you go through the Old Testament hall of faith in Hebrews 11, what you see is these people who had faith, it says, by faith they did something. And what they did happened to be what God told them to do. So because they had faith in God, they obeyed God. And that's the point the writer of Hebrews is bringing up. But there simply is no writer in the New Testament, least of all Paul, who says you can be saved by faith if you have no works. When Paul talks about works in a negative sense, he's talking specifically about the works of the Jewish law. And by that he means the ceremonial law. He's talking about circumcision. He's talking about keeping festivals. He's talking about keeping the ceremonies. Because whenever he's talking against works, he's talking against Judaizers. And the Judaizers were the ones who were trying to say, yes, okay, you can be saved by faith, but you still have to get circumcised. You still have to eat a kosher diet. You still have to keep the Jewish festivals. You still have to be a good proselyte to Judaism. And Paul said, none of those works matter. You're saved by faith without any of those works. You know, that's what Paul's getting at in those few places where Paul seems to say something negative about works. He's not talking about good works generally, which is basically a shorthand way of saying good behavior, good dealings. Listen, let me show you what Paul says in Titus. Take these verses down and show them to your friend. Paul wrote Titus, right? And it talks about certain wicked people. In Titus 1, 15 and 16, it says, To the pure all things are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure. Even their mind and their conscience are defiled. They profess to know God, but in works... They deny him. Okay? Titus 1.16? Well, yeah, that's Titus 1.16. In works, they deny him. So by disobeying God, they prove that their profession of knowing him is false. But then look down in chapter 2, verses 11 and 12. It says, For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us. that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present age. What teaches us that? He says the grace of God teaches us that. And then look at what he says about Christ in verse 14. Titus 2.14, he says that Christ gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for himself his own special people, zealous for good works. Okay, doesn't sound like Paul's against good works there. Then in chapter 3, verse 1, Titus 3, 1, Paul says, Remind them, meaning the Christians, to be subject to rulers and authorities, to obey and to be ready for every good work. I mean, it's like Paul's again and again saying that we should be, look at Titus 3, 14. Paul says, And let our people also learn to maintain good works. To meet urgent needs. So, I mean, Paul is not against good works. There's six times in these three chapters Paul says that Christians should have good works and that people who profess to know God, but their works deny him because they don't have good works. He says they're deceivers. They're wicked people. So, I mean, Paul never had a doctrine that you can be a Christian without good works. What he taught was you're saved by faith, not by sin. having done enough good works, but that the faith that saves you is a faith that works through love. Let's talk to Craig from Roseville, California. Hi, Craig. Welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.
SPEAKER 09 :
Hi, Steve. Thanks. I had a question on the amillennial view. How much time is there between the rapture, when the dead rise first and then the living follow, and the second coming, when... He comes in all his glory and sets his foot upon the Mount of Olives. How much time in between? Because on the dispossessional view, there's basically the seven years. I was curious on the all-millennial view of how much time.
SPEAKER 01 :
Right. The all-millennial view sees essentially no time in between. It's the same day. Now, there might be minutes between or something like that. But Jesus said he will raise his people up on the last day in John 6, 49-50. excuse me, John 6.40, and also John 6.44, and John 6.54, and actually several times in John 6, Jesus speaks about his people and says he will raise them up on the last day. Now, raising them up, I take to mean the resurrection and the rapture, because Paul puts those in very close proximity in 1 Corinthians 15 and in 1 Thessalonians 4. Both places he speaks of the dead shall be raised, and then he talks about the living, being changed or caught up to meet the Lord in the air with them. That all occurs, apparently, on what Jesus called the last day when he raises them up. Now, there's different theories of an alternative sort that have arisen in reasonably modern times. You're right, the dispensationalist usually places seven years between the rapture and the actual physical second coming of Christ to earth. There are some mid-tribulations who place three and a half years as the interval between And then there's pre-wrath rapture people who place a shorter time, shorter than three and a half years in between. But the Bible doesn't really place any period of time in between, really. John 5, 28 and 29, Jesus said, The hour is coming in which all who are in the graves will hear his voice and come forth. Those who've done good to the resurrection of life, that'd be Christians. Those who've done evil to the resurrection of condemnation, that'd be the non-Christians. Now, the non-Christians... are raised on the last day also. According to John 12, 48, which says, you know, he that rejects my words has one who condemns him or judges him. The words that I've spoken unto you will judge you in the last day. So in the last day, the wicked will be judged by Christ's words. And in the last day, the righteous will be raised, Jesus said. So we've got the resurrection of the righteous and the wicked on the same day. In fact, John 5, 28 says in the same hour. So, you know, I don't know the exact number of minutes between, but anyone who places more than a day in between seems to be going beyond what the Scripture's language would authorize.
SPEAKER 09 :
It doesn't give you enough time to get your hair done or anything before coming back down.
SPEAKER 01 :
No, it doesn't. It doesn't give us any time at all like that. Well, the idea of the rapture in the Bible, unlike that in dispensational theology, is of a meeting the Lord as he's descending. As he's descending... we go up like a welcoming committee from earth to meet him in the air and to descend the rest of the way with him. This is actually the word that is used in 1 Thessalonians 4, where it says, in verse 17, we shall meet the Lord in the air. The word meet is a word that's used two other times in scripture. One is Matthew 25, 1. where it says the ten virgins went out to meet the bridegroom. Now, if you know the Jewish bridal customs, they were going out to meet him, to accompany him the remainder of his journey. He's coming from wherever he is to the bride's house. And these people are at the bride's house, and they're going to go out and meet him like a welcoming committee and accompany him on the last leg of his trip. And that's what the word meet means. Also, we have the same word used in Acts 28, when it says that Paul, who was shipwrecked in Malta, actually walked north to Rome, and the Christians in Rome heard that he was coming, and they went out to meet him. Well, again, going out to meet him meant going out to welcome him and to accompany him on the final leg of his journey into Rome. So meeting, this particular word meet, which is used three times in Scripture, always means to go out as a welcoming committee, as it were, to meet somebody who's on a journey and to accompany them on the final stage of that journey. So as Jesus is coming from heaven to earth, we, the church, will go up to meet him in the air and to continue with him on the final stage of his journey back here. Okay. Thank you. God bless you. You've been listening to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg. We're on Monday through Friday at this same time. And we continue some of these discussions, and we have new discussions day by day. If you'd like to help us stay on the air, we are listener supported. We do buy the time on the radio stations that we're on. If you'd like to help us pay for that time and stay on the air, you can write to The Narrow Path, P.O. Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. Or go to our website, thenarrowpath.com. You can donate from there or take any of the resources that are all free at thenarrowpath.com. Thanks for joining us.
In this episode, delve into the origins of Satan with Steve, as he challenges traditional views and explores biblical narratives. Engage in a comprehensive discussion on free will and predestination, and unpack profound insights on Revelation 20's symbolism. With engaging caller questions, Steve offers a rich tapestry of biblical understanding, leaving no stone unturned.
SPEAKER 1 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 01 :
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. And taking your calls, as always. Right now I'm looking at a mostly open switchboard. It's a very good opportunity for you to get through if you're interested in being on the program. If you have questions you'd like to ask and have discussed, about the Bible, about the Christian faith, problems you have with Christianity, maybe just problems you have with something the host has said, feel free to give me a call. We'll be glad to talk to you. The number to call is 844. That's 844-484-5737. And I want to remind you, if you are in Southern California, which a lot of our listeners are, but we've got listeners all over the country, so I guess the rest of you can tune out for just about 30 seconds here. There are a couple of things happening this Saturday that happen once a month in Southern California. One of them is our men's Bible studies this Saturday morning at 8 o'clock in Temecula. And the other is Saturday evening in Buena Park. We're going to have an overview and introduction to the book of 1 John. We're going to look at the whole book. And it's a great book. So if you're interested in that, that's what we're doing. This Saturday morning, men's Bible study at 8 in the morning in Temecula. And the overview of the book of 1 John in Buena Park in the evenings. And the information specifically about the locations of those places is posted at our website, thenarrowpath.com, under the tab that says announcements. All right. Well, we're going to go to the phones now and talk first of all to Carrie from Fort Worth, Texas. Hi, Carrie. Welcome. Oops. I thought I hit your button. Hi. How are you doing?
SPEAKER 06 :
Hi, Steve. Steve, I need some help with Romans 11.
SPEAKER 01 :
25 and 26.
SPEAKER 06 :
All right. And if I could, if I could read the passage and then tell you the way I understand it, and then you can maybe straighten me out if you need to. Okay. I'm reading from the New American Standard. It says, For I do not want you, brethren, to be uninformed of this mystery, lest you be wise in your own estimation. that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And thus, all Israel will be saved, just as it is written. The way I'm kind of reading this and the way I see it punctuated, when he talks about the mystery, I do not want you to be uninformed of this mystery. To me, he has explained the mystery already. in the previous passages. And then he says, I do not want you to be, lest you be wise in your own estimation, that a partial pardoning has happened to Israel until the fullness of gentleness has come in. So I'm thinking that he is explaining the estimation that after the comment that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And the way I'm kind of reading this is that that's not what Paul wants them to believe, that there has been. He does not want them to believe that there's been a partial hardening. Why would you read it that way?
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, here's what he's saying. He says, let me read it to you, and we'll see where you're getting caught here. I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own eyes. So he wants them to be aware of a mystery. And he says, this is the mystery. That blindness, in part, has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in, and thus all Israel will be saved. Now, that's the truth. That's the mystery that he doesn't want them to be ignorant about.
SPEAKER 06 :
Okay. I was kind of taking that as that he was explaining what the estimation in their own eyes would be.
SPEAKER 01 :
No, no, no, no. So where he said, lest you be wise in your own eyes or in your own opinion. I see. So you thought he was saying that their opinion was that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness has come. No. No, he's affirming that. You see, the whole purpose of Romans 9 through 11 is to explain the question, why is it that the Old Testament prophets said, when the Messiah comes, Israel will be saved. And yet Jesus has come, and according to the Christians, Jesus is the Messiah, and yet Jesus has come and gone, and Israel is not saved. So, what's up with that? That's the problem. And Paul actually says, well, all Israel will be saved in this way. Thus means in this way. How? By the elimination of those in Israel who don't belong in it. And he's just explained that in the verses just immediately previously, where He talked about Israel as an olive tree, and the branches are the people. And some of the branches, he said, have been broken off because of their unbelief. So they're not part of Israel anymore. They're not part of the tree anymore. Of course, those who did not reject Christ, and that was many thousands, many tens of thousands of Jews, did accept Christ. And they are branches that were not broken off. So they're still Israel. The believing Jews are still part of the Israel tree. But the Jews that rejected Christ and their unbelief, they were broken off the tree. So Israel has been reduced to only include the faithful remnant of Israel. Now, Paul says that Gentiles also who have believed have been added to the tree. Of course, that was even true in the Old Testament. If a Gentile wanted to become part of Israel, they could. In that case, they'd have to be circumcised because of the Old Covenant. But there were many Gentiles who became part of Israel in the Old Testament. So have there now. In fact, there's a lot more. that have joined the believing Israel. Believing Gentiles have been grafted in the tree. Now, the tree is Israel, always has been. And so he's now saying Israel is comprised of a portion of the Jews, namely the portion that believed. And those who are not believers have been broken off. They're not part of Israel anymore. And now Gentiles have been added to them, and they're one organism. And this is the mystery that Paul teaches about not only here but elsewhere. For example, in Ephesians chapter 3, he talks about the mystery. He does elsewhere too. But he says in chapter 3, verse 3, how that by revelation Christ made known to me the mystery, as I've briefly written already. by which, when you read it, you may understand my knowledge of the mystery of Christ, which in other ages was not made known to the sons of men. He says, verse 6, that, here's the mystery, that Gentiles should be fellow heirs of the same body and partakers of his promises in Christ through the gospel, meaning fellow heirs with the Jews. So what was not clear in the Old Testament, even though it's always been the case that Gentiles could be converted or proselytized It was not clear that they would be formed into one body that is the body of Christ. And that body of Christ is an organic image. We are collectively the body of Christ. We are the members of the corporate body of Christ. Paul shifts the metaphor in Romans 11 to be another kind of organism, a tree, which is also made up of individual members, branches. It's very parallel to the idea of a body of Christ, but the reason he uses the olive tree in Romans is because he's talking about it from the side of, what about Israel? Isn't Israel supposed to be saved? They are. They are. This is how they're saved. A portion of them, as unbelievers, have been removed. And then, of course, the Gentiles have been added. So Israel is made up of believing Jews and believing Gentiles, which is also what we call the church. And that shouldn't surprise us because Israel in the Old Testament was called the church also. In the Septuagint, the word ekklesia, which is what we translate as church in the New Testament, The word ekklesia in the Greek Old Testament referred to Israel. So the word ekklesia originally was a term for Israel, and it still is. But, of course, what Paul said in Romans 9-6 at the beginning of this discussion was they are not all Israel who are of Israel. That is, not all those who have Israeli roots or, you know, ancestry. Not all of those who are racially Jews are Israel, as God counts it. And in Romans 9, 27, he says, even Isaiah said, only a remnant of the numerous Jews. He said, though the children of Israel be as the sand of the seashore, meaning very numerous, only the remnant will be saved. So now Paul started his discussion by making that point. Not everybody who's Jewish is really Israel. And the Jews who are not of the remnant will not be saved. Only the remnant will be saved. So at the end of the discussion, the same discussion in chapter 11, verse 26, where he says, in this way all Israel will be saved, he doesn't mean the unbelieving Israel. He's already said they're not included. It's the remnant of Israel that will be saved. But they are joined in the same olive tree by believing Gentiles. And in this way, all Israel, including the Gentile branches, and that is not just Jewish believers, excluding some, but including all the believing Gentiles, this olive tree, which is Israel, is all saved. And it's all made up of believers. So this is how it happens. Some of the Jews are cut off because they're hardened. Some are included. Then Gentiles come in. As a result, all Israel is saved, just like the prophet said it would be. But you have to redefine Israel, which is what Paul does. And he says he wasn't the first to do it. Isaiah did it first. Isaiah did it first where he said only the remnant will be saved. So Paul's not making something up. He's pointing something out that any Jew who wanted to pay attention could have seen. So anyway, that's what he's saying. And so the mystery is the mystery, frankly, of the church, of the Jew and the Gentile being one body, or in this case one tree, one organism sharing the same destiny, which was not something the Jews really ever focused on or quite understood, I think. I appreciate your call, Kerry. I hope that helps. Rick from Los Angeles, California. Welcome. Hi. Thank you for taking my call.
SPEAKER 09 :
I appreciate your ministry. You are truly a blessing in many people's lives, including my own. Thank you. This weekend, I kind of let my imagination run wild, and I was thinking about the Garden of Eden and the temptation. But more of that was my question, rather, I should say. My question is, where would you place the fall of Lucifer in the creation narrative as far as that's concerned? And how was the dynamic between his fall and his involvement in the Garden of Eden?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I think the most common view that Christians hold is that Satan fell. He was an angel and that he fell. before Adam and Eve were created. And there's been a lot of speculation. You said you're letting your imagination run wild. Actually, theologians have done exactly the same thing. And as a result of their imaginations running wild, they've come up with a scenario like the following that is not taught anywhere in Scripture. They say Lucifer was one of the three top angels in heaven, along with Gabriel and Michael. and that a third of the other angels were kind of under their supervision. And Lucifer was, they say, a beautiful and skilled musician, and he was the worship leader of the angels, something the Bible never says anywhere, of course. But, I mean, this is their imagination going on. And so he became very vain and very proud, and he decided to go off on his own independently of God and to rebel against God. And he failed in that, but the third of the angels that he had been overseeing fell with him, and they became perhaps the demons. Some would say the demons are some other entities, but the point is that Lucifer then, according to this view, became the devil. And they would say the reason he attacked Adam and Eve and the rest of us who are Christians is that he had spite toward God. He resented God. you know, having lost this conflict with God. Now, some would even say, and this too is all speculation, it's not in the Bible, some would say that he was jealous of man. that man was given higher honor than he was. And so he wanted to destroy man, corrupt man. Some say that he wanted to cause man to fall so that he could argue against his own punishment because he had fallen. If God's highest creation could fall too. then how could Satan be blamed for that? Now, let me just say, nothing that I've just said is anywhere in the Bible, nor even to my mind even implied anywhere in the Bible. It's based on, as I understand it, a misunderstanding of a couple of Old Testament passages primarily. one of them being Isaiah 14, 12 through 15, and the other is Ezekiel 28, verse 12 through something or another, through many, many verses. Now, these passages do not mention the devil. And one of them, the one in Isaiah, does mention Lucifer in the King James Version, and it treats it like it's a name, like it's the devil's name. And we often think of it that way because of the way the tradition. But actually, the word Lucifer is not a biblical name at all. Lucifer is a Latin word. Now, the Bible, the Old Testament was written not in Latin, but it was written in Hebrew. And the word in Hebrew is one that means the bright shining one or the morning star or the light bearer. These are terms that the Hebrew word can be translated as well. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Latin in the 4th century A.D. or 5th by Jerome, he used a Latin word that means light bearer. And in Latin, that's the word Lucifer. So the word Lucifer was in the Latin Bible simply as a translation of the Hebrew word for light bearer. Now, when the King James was made, and they translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew, for some reason they retained the Latin version of the word lightbearer instead of the Hebrew one. And they treated it, Lucifer, which is a Latin word, as if that is a name. But in the Hebrew it wasn't a name. It wasn't anyone's name in the Hebrew Old Testament. It was just calling the king of Babylon Lucifer. A bright light there. And that's sort of just a flattery of royalty. There's all kinds of terms people used to call royalty as flattery. And that's one of them. But the passage in Isaiah 14, and that chapter is the only chapter in the Bible that even has the word in it, which the King James translates Lucifer. That chapter tells us in the earlier verses it's talking to the king of Babylon, not to an angel. So there's actually nothing in the Bible that would identify Lucifer with the devil at all. Or with an angel. It's a term that was mistakenly brought over into the English Bible as if it is a proper name. When in the Hebrew it was not at all. In fact, the word Lucifer isn't even in the Hebrew Bible. Because it's not a name, it's a word. And so there's no mention in the Bible of Lucifer being an angel. Certainly there's no mention of the devil being an angel anywhere. So this is all tradition. Now, I will say this. If, indeed, the devil was an angel and fell, then we would have to say that was before Adam and Eve were created. That would have to be before probably the six days of creation or as part of it. or maybe immediately after it. But it would be, obviously when Adam and Eve were created, they were then tempted by the serpent. If he was a fallen angel, that fall would have taken place sometime prior to that. But the origins of Satan lie enshrouded in mystery. There's absolutely no discussion in the Bible of where Satan came from. We would have to say he was created by God, simply because everything was created by God. At one time, there was only God. Everything else that came into being was created by him. So the most we can say about Satan is what we can say about everything. He and everything else was a creation of God. But whether he's created good and went bad, or whether he's created evil, neutral and went bad or created bad. You know, people have different theories about that, but the Bible doesn't really address that at all. So much of what you've heard and probably most people listening have heard, it's just not in it. It's just not in the Bible. So that's about, you know, the most we can say about the subject. All right. Let's talk to Ryan from Spartanburg, South Carolina. Ryan, welcome.
SPEAKER 04 :
Hey, Steve. Thank you so much for taking my call. I have a question on free will. It's a question that was posed to me, and I just didn't know how to answer it or where to go. But I was arguing with a friend that, you know, obviously people go to hell because of the free will choices that they make. And he said, If God knows everything and he knows who is going to choose him and not choose him, the first order of operation is that God chooses to create you first before you have a choice to reject or accept Jesus. So if he knows you are going to reject, like say that I'm going to reject Jesus, I'm going to go to hell and I'm going to make that choice. If God knows that ahead of time and his choice comes first to create me, The question was, is he not choosing then to create me knowing that I'm going to reject him anyways? And so he's choosing to create me to send me to hell. Okay, go ahead. The only rebuttal I could think was that perhaps I have kids and they go to know God or something I do in my life affects someone else that happens to know God. But barring that, that somebody doesn't and they just die without having kids or something, how would you, I guess, rebut that?
SPEAKER 01 :
I'm not sure what your rebuttal was.
SPEAKER 04 :
I was pushing back and saying that perhaps if I was to have kids and I choose to go to hell, but my kids accept Jesus and they go to heaven, that God would still make me knowing that. I got you. I got you. Yeah.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay. Yeah, well, that's definitely the case. I mean, if God knows that somebody's going to be doomed and go to hell by their own choice, but that they're going to have children or grandchildren or descendants somewhere, they're going to be children of God, going to follow Christ. and maybe be very important people, the idea that, well, God shouldn't make the person who he knows is going to go to hell is kind of imposing on God a tremendous restriction that doesn't make much sense. I mean, well, if a person chooses to go to hell, that's their choice, right? I mean, a person has that choice. And if they choose to do that, we can say, well, God shouldn't have created them then because he knew they were going to do that. Well, but maybe he knows also some other things, and that is that by them being created and existing, there's going to be some other people in the world down the line descended from them who are going to change the world in a good way. I mean, we can't really, you know, if God knows the future, he knows all of it. And, you know, we can't say that God is obligated not to make someone because they are going to reject him. Now, of course, the argument is if God knows for sure that certain people are going to reject him before they're ever born, then they don't really have a choice to do anything else. And philosophically, that sounds correct. Philosophically, that's a conundrum. How is their will free if God already knows before they make the choices what they're going to do? Well, I mean, those who say that that's unanswerable simply are pretending to know a lot more about God than is available for us to know. I don't know how God existed forever and ever and ever without having a beginning. That's kind of above my pay scale. I don't know how God is everywhere at once attending to the prayers of people all over the world simultaneously. That too is above my pay scale. If God knows all future things, That too, how he does that, I don't know. Now, there are some people who say God knows the future because there's like three different answers. One is that because he's going to make it happen, that he's ordering everything, he's ordained everything, so he knows what he's going to make happen, and so obviously he knows what's going to happen because it's determined by his decision to make it happen. That's like the Calvinist view. Another view is, would be that God doesn't make it happen, but he's able to trace the present trajectory of things infinitely far into the future, so that he can see like a chain reaction, or like if there's dominoes lined up, a thousand dominoes in a whole strange configuration, that God knows by this domino falling, he can predict where the last one's going to fall. You know, because it's just going to happen. Again, he's not, in a sense, dictating everything if he didn't set the dominoes up himself. But he can see when one domino falls where it's all going and can predict it. That's another thing. Now, there's also a Greek idea, which the church has mostly adopted. And that is that God is outside of time. He lives in some kind of continuous eternal zone where there's no such thing as past, present, and future. But what is past, present, and future for us belongs to a realm that was created by God. which he does not necessarily inhabit. Time is a creation of God just like matter is in space, and God is transcendent to it. And their suggestion is he can see the past, present, and future simultaneously just like, I mean, in a way that we cannot. So, you know, if he has some power to just see it and know it, but he's not causing it, then obviously the choices can be still free choices, but he's simply aware of them before they happen. He didn't cause them. He didn't interfere with the freedom of the person making it. Now, again, if somebody says, well, if he knows these people are going to do wrong, why doesn't he just not, you know, how can they do anything else? They can't be free. And my thought is, If he knows they're going to freely make a choice, it's because they're going to. It's not because he makes them do it. It's because that's exactly what they are, in fact, going to do. Now, if they say, well, he knows they're going to, so why doesn't he stop it? Well, if he stops it, then they're not going to do it. So he doesn't know they're going to. God doesn't, you know, if God knows I'm going to do something, it's because I'm actually going to do it. If he prevents me from doing it, then that's not going to be part of history at all. That's not going to even happen. So, of course, he doesn't even know it. If something has to actually be real in some realm. potentially real or actually real in order for it to be known. And so, you know, if God just took out everybody who was going to choose to reject him, well, they'd never exist and they'd never reject him. So he wouldn't know they're going to reject him because, frankly, they're not. They don't exist. So this is philosophically confusing to us. So what we have to do is figure that, you know, there's many things about God that, frankly, are quite above our ability to understand and explain. But if he says that he knows certain things or demonstrates that he does, and he also demonstrates that we have a choice and we are seen to make them, and God shows disappointment when we make bad choices, then we have to just take it all and say, well, God understands that, and frankly, he's the only one who needs to. Why would I need to understand it? You know, maybe curiosity killed the cat. It might kill the Christian, too. You know, if you're trying to understand things that are beyond our kin and beyond our, you know, legitimacy to know. Hey, I need to take a break here. But we have another half hour coming up. You're listening to The Narrow Path. We are listener supported. Our website is thenarrowpath.com. Check it out. And I'll be back in 30 seconds. Don't go away.
SPEAKER 03 :
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SPEAKER 01 :
Welcome back to the Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg, and we're live for another half hour, taking your calls. Our lines are full at the moment, but if you want to try to get through in a few minutes, there may be an open line for you at this number. Here's the number, 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. Our next caller is Todd calling from Sacramento, California. Hi, Todd. Welcome. Hi, Steve. Hey, before I answer my question,
SPEAKER 02 :
I just wanted to tell you that I listened to your teaching on the kingdom of God, and it was just amazing, brother. I really appreciated it. Thank you. Praise the Lord. All right. So, anyway, I've just recently changed my position from being a dispensationalist, premillennialist, and I'm having trouble understanding Revelations 20, verse 7, I think it is, where it's talking about Satan being released. And outside of an all-millennial perspective, I can't make it make sense to me at all. Could you give me your slant on that and what you believe that is all about? And I'll take my answer off the air. Appreciate it.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right, sure. Well, Revelation 20 is taken differently, obviously, by pre-millennialists than the way it is taken by all-millennialists. Pre-millennialists believe the 1,000 years described in Revelation 20 is a future period of time that will begin when Jesus comes back. So he's going to come back and establish the 1,000-year reign on earth. The amillennialists believe that this is symbolic. of what Jesus established when he came the first time. So the difference between an amillennialist and a premillennialist is about when this thousand years takes place. They all agree that it's established by the coming of Christ, but the question is, is it the first coming or the second coming? Now, I'm amillennial, so I believe it's established at the first coming of Christ, and the premillennialists, dispensationalists, and others who are premillennial believe it's going to be established in the future. Now, Both have to deal with the fact. that Satan is said to be bound for the majority of this time, but then he's loosed for a little while at the end, and he goes out to deceive the world again. And the result is he gathers the nations against the beloved city, which is a term for the people of God, the community of Christ, what we might call the true church. And therefore there's a persecution of the church, which apparently is global because it involves all the nations of the world, it says. So that's something worse than... for the church that has never happened before. Because although the church has been persecuted terribly by the Roman Empire and by communists and by you know, other groups that were anti-Christian. It never was global. It was always, you know, possible, for example, for Christians to live in some other part of the world and be exempt from whatever terrible persecution was going on somewhere else. But it looks to me like it's describing a global persecution of the people of God. Now, the premillennialists believe that's in the future, that is to say the whole thousand years is in the future, and that the little while that Satan has loosed to give us trouble, will be at the end of that future thousand-year period of time. The amillennialist believes the present age is symbolically represented as a thousand years, but that at the end of it, there will be such a time when Satan is loosed again for a little while. We don't know what a little while looks like. We'd like to think it's very short, but we don't know. Obviously shorter than the lengthier period that's called a thousand years. But both premillennials and omelettes would have to deal with the fact that after Satan's been bound for a long time, he's loosed again. to cause trouble for Christians. Now, it doesn't come to anything because it says in Revelation 20 and verse 9 that, you know, fire from heaven comes down and destroys Satan and those who are with him. So the church is vindicated, rescued. I take that as anomalous. I take that to be the second coming of Christ that that happens. That's when the Bible says that the wicked will be judged and Satan will be judged and so forth. So that's, you know, I guess if we say, well, why? Why is Satan loosed again once he's been put out of commission? I would say on the amillennial position. It would simply be a final sifting. You've got the whole 2,000 years or whatever by that time it will have been of harvesting, bringing in the grain, and then there's a time of sifting, wheat from chaff. And that's what Satan is best at, and that is sorting out. Remember, Jesus told Peter, Satan has requested of God, or actually he said demanded, that he be able to sift you disciples. Sifting them means put them in a sieve so that the grain is preserved and the chaff falls through. Now, Satan had approached God with the desire to sift the disciples that way to see if there's any bad ones in there. And of course there was. There was Judas. And Peter himself appeared to be one too when he denied Christ three times. But Jesus said, I prayed for you and when you repent, when you're converted, strengthen your brethren. So, You know, the sifting takes place. It took place of the disciples themselves. It was the work of Satan. I think that many times after a revival, there's persecution and that persecution sifts out. But those who came in the revival, some of them are the real deal, real converts. Some are just kind of following the crowds and joining up with the religious, you know. And then comes the testing. And the testing sifts out the wheat from the chaff. And that's what God has done again and again throughout history. And that looks like what's happening at the very end of this age before Jesus comes back. There's one final sifting, a global one. And that purifies the church. Of course, it removes the chaff and leaves only the good wheat. And therefore, when Jesus comes, he has a pure people to take to himself. So that would explain why this would happen at the end of the present age. Now, after Jesus comes back, if he sets up the millennium at that time, like the premillennial thinks... And Satan's bound for a thousand years. And the world is in righteousness with Christ on earth with his disciples in Jerusalem. That's what the premillennials believed. I'm not sure why Satan would be let out. And frankly, I'm not sure why it would do Satan any good if Jesus is here on earth in his glorified form. I mean... In Revelation chapter 20, it says that I saw him that sat on the throne from whose face the heavens and the earth fled away and there's no place for them. The face and the glory of Christ that is coming is, you know, it's irresistible. I mean, you're not going to have some kind of, you know, rebellion against him after that. In fact, it says in 2 Thessalonians chapter 2 and verse 8 and following, it says that Jesus is going to come in flaming fire, taking vengeance on those who don't know God. and who don't obey the gospel. In 2 Thessalonians 2, it says the man of sin will be destroyed at the brightness of Christ's coming. Christ's coming is so glorious. It's hard to imagine that, A, anyone would survive it that wasn't preserved by him, and, B, that if someone did survive it, that they'd think for a moment that they could overthrow him, you know? So, I mean, to me, I'm not really sure how the loosing of Satan after Jesus had been here for a thousand years and was still here. how that would be a threat to anyone. After all, realize that when Jesus comes back, we're all raised from the dead. We're all glorified bodies. We're all, you know, we're immortal. And whoever isn't a Christian isn't. So in the premillennial scheme of things, at the end of a thousand years, Satan's loosed, and there's gazillions of unbelievers who are still mortal because they're not glorified. They're not nonbelievers. And they're coming against a company of people who are all immortal, and Jesus among them. You know, how in the world is this supposed to be a threat to anybody? It just doesn't make sense to me. It once did. I mean, I can't say it really once did. I once believed it. I'm not sure that I can say I've sorted through those particular questions, but perhaps if I had, I would have given up on premillennialism earlier, but... Yeah, Satan being loosed is a mystery of sorts. I mean, why would God let him loose? I've heard people ask that a lot. But I think if it's at the end of this present age, just before Jesus comes back, it's a time of final sorting, sorting out between the wheat and the chaff and so forth. So that would be my guess. I mean, it's an educated guess, I hope. Anyway, I hope that's helpful to you. All right, our next caller is Ben from Richardson, Texas. Ben, welcome. Thanks for calling.
SPEAKER 07 :
Hey, Steve, I have a disagreement with you, which is rare, but when Adam and Eve were told to be fruitful and multiply, I'm thinking they probably did so they had children. Yes, they did, many children. And then they sinned and had at Cain and Abel.
SPEAKER 01 :
Now, why would you think they had a lot of children before they sinned?
SPEAKER 07 :
Because God tells them now you will have pain and childbearing. Yes.
SPEAKER 01 :
So they had childbearing before without pain. Well, he didn't say that. He didn't say you'll have more pain now than you've had in the past. He just said you will have pain in childbearing. That apparently would not have been... the case, if they hadn't sinned. But it doesn't say whether or not they'd had any children previously without less pain. That's reading something into the text I'm not willing to read into it. See, the Bible indicates that death and sin came into the world through Adam. And if he had children before he sinned, and then he sinned, well, his children were innocent then. I mean, his children would be unaffected By that, it seems to me. Whereas the Bible seems to pin a lot on Adam in that respect of humans' plight and fallenness. You know, if Adam sinned and there were other people that he'd already fathered and who were living independently of him, then his sin wouldn't have any effect on their fall. You know, I mean, I'm not sure how it would. In any case, there's no need to see it that way because right after Adam and Eve were created, we read of them sinning. Now, they may indeed have, it may have been a little while after they were created that they sinned, but there's no suggestion of a period of time. or of enough time for them to have children. I mean, that's guessing too much. It says in Genesis 5 that Adam lived 130 years until Seth was born, and then it mentions he had sons and daughters. So the command God gave them to be fruitful and multiply, they did fulfill. But that's not recorded before the fall. That's after the fall. So I don't really see an argument there. But, you know, I'm not going to – I wouldn't fight you over it. I just don't – I don't find that persuasive.
SPEAKER 07 :
I'm saying it – did I get cut off? No, you're there. Oh, okay. If my theory is right, which we're going to find out someday, right, which is kind of funny, then Adam's birth – or his timeline started when he sinned. So he was – He was going to be, well, he wasn't going to be eternal, but immortal. And his time started when he sinned. So that's my theory.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, I wouldn't accept that either. I think his time started when he started, which was on the sixth day of creation he began. And then days and years and months were already being measured. It says that on the fourth day God made the sun, moon, and stars, and they were to register times and seasons and months and years. So I would think that the measurement of months and years and so forth began on the fourth day when these things were created. And Adam was created the sixth day. It seems to me that his time was measured in months and years from the point that he began, just like everything else that was created after that. So I think that when it says he lived to be 930 years old, That would be from his creation, not from his fall. Now, you're arguing that he was made immortal. I don't think he was made immortal. I don't think anyone was immortal except God. It says that in 1 Timothy 6.16. It says God alone possesses immortality. Now, we can participate in his eternal life in Christ. And that's what it says in 1 John 5, verses 11 and 12. It says this is the message that God has given to us, eternal life. This life is in his Son. He that has a son has life, and he that does not have the Son of God has not life. So only Christ has the eternal life. But if we are in him, that's also where the eternal life is. It's in him. So we have. eternal life in Him. If we abide in Him, we live forever as He does. That's what I understand to be taught. Now, Adam and Eve could have lived forever because there was a tree called the Tree of Life, and God specifically said in Genesis 3 that if they would eat of that, they would live forever. But it's obvious that He was saying that if they don't eat of it, they won't live forever. So they weren't naturally immortal. But they could be. They were potentially immortal, just like we are potentially immortal. We're not naturally immortal either. But if we have Christ, we will not perish, but we'll have everlasting life. And so immortality is a gift from God bestowed on conditions, in our case, in the condition of our clinging to Christ and abiding in him. In Adam and Eve's case, the condition was that they eat the tree of life, and then they would live forever. But neither we nor they were created immortal. At least the Bible would say we weren't. So, you know, I think some of the assumptions you're making are just different ones that I'm making, but it doesn't bother me for people to think that way. I just would register my own disagreement from that. Okay, let's talk to Chuck from Honolulu. Chuck, I'm going to give you another chance. Let's see how you do. Hello.
SPEAKER 08 :
I wanted to ask you about the Trinity. There's the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. And is the Father the head God, and then the second member, the Son, is basically the son of that?
SPEAKER 01 :
father and the father is actually the unapproachable god well uh that's not how i understand the trinity uh there probably are people who would think that way um but the trinity doctrine would not say that god is the chief god they'd say that god is father son and holy spirit that the three persons are all part of who god is um Now, many Trinitarians, probably most, would say that Jesus was the eternal Son of God. For all time, he was always the Son of God. The Bible doesn't actually say it that way. The Bible says he was the Word. He was always one with God. He was with the Father, and he was God. And he's the Word. And the Spirit was there, too, right at the very beginning of creation, we read. So, We don't read of a father-son connection between the word and the Father. But when Jesus was born on earth, he had no earthly father. God was his father by God, and therefore he's called the Son of God. And that's what the angel told Mary in Luke chapter 5. when he announced that she was going to have a child. She said, how can this be? I've never known a man. And the angel said to her, well, the Spirit of God will come upon you, and the power of the highest will overshadow you, and therefore that holy thing that will be born of you will be called the Son of God. Okay, so she said, I don't have a man to be the father of my child. And the angel said, that's okay. God will do that. God, his spirit will come upon you and his power will overshadow. And that which is conceived will be not the son of a man, but the son of God. And God will take the place of a man in fathering this baby. But the baby that was born and was forever after to this day referred to as the son of God was prior to that referred to in the Bible as the word. And so the word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we beheld his glory as of the only begotten son of a father, it says. So anyway, yeah, there are some kind of mysterious things about the Trinity. And some of the things that are commonly said, I would say them differently because I don't see the traditional explanation actually confirmed in Scripture. But I do agree with the Trinity doctrine in general, which says that God is one. There's only one God. And that in another sense, he is divisible into three. the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit. And if that's hard to understand, well, we can make up our own religion if we want to, and people do it all the time. Or we can just say, well, there's many things about God that simply are beyond my akin. I can't understand fully. Thank you for your call. Let's talk to James from Hartford, Connecticut. James, welcome.
SPEAKER 05 :
Hello.
SPEAKER 01 :
Hi, a lot of crackling on your line. Yes, uh-huh.
SPEAKER 05 :
I'm sorry.
SPEAKER 01 :
We've got a bad line. We've got a bad connection. There's a lot of cracking. Could you get to your question quickly and then we'll hang up and I'll answer it if I can. Go ahead.
SPEAKER 05 :
Sure. Okay. So it was about the... I was listening about what you had said about Satan and the things you were saying, well, this isn't in the Bible, that isn't in the Bible.
SPEAKER 09 :
Right.
SPEAKER 05 :
And it says in the Bible, though, that And John, the last chapter of John, the last few lines, that there are so many things that Jesus did that they can't all fit in the Bible. So that is sort of the... I'm coming from an Orthodox, a Greek Orthodox type of teaching here. And they say that the Holy Tradition is about 50% of of the faith, and a lot of things are not. So I was very intrigued. I sort of got the end of this thing about Satan, that he wasn't an angel. But then Jesus says in the Bible, I saw Satan fall. I saw him fall.
SPEAKER 01 :
How do you know better where that is? Yeah, that's Luke 10, 18, I think it is. Yeah, well, you know, he didn't say he saw an angel fall. He said he saw Satan fall. And we see Satan fall also, for example, in Revelation 12, verse 9, where he's defeated and he's cast out of heaven, but he's a dragon. He's not an angel. We even have Jesus saying, as he's going to the cross, in John chapter 12, I think it's verse 31, he says, Now is the judgment of this world. Now shall the prince of this world be cast out. So at the cross, we do see Satan being cast out, falling and so forth. I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Jesus, I think, saw that, as it were, prophetically, in the fact that the demons were being cast out by the disciples, which is the context in Luke 10. Anyway, the crackling is really bad on your line, but let me just say this, that I never said that Satan is not a fallen angel. All that I said, and what I said is true, is that the Bible doesn't ever mention him being a fallen angel or even an angel at all. Now, that is true. There's no mention in the Bible of Satan ever being an angel. And there's never really a clear reference to him having his beginning as the evil one by falling from being something better. Jesus said, you know, the devil is a sinner from the beginning. Or he said the devil is a murderer from the beginning. In 1 John 3.8, it says the devil sinned from the beginning. So, I mean, we don't have any reference to the devil being better than he was. But there are passages that people use to say that he was, and I believe they're misusing the passages. You know, Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28 are the famous, most popular passages. But they don't really say anything about an angel there, and they don't say anything about Satan directly. So my position is not that Satan is not a fallen angel. My position is if he is, well, that is a possibility. It's at least one possibility, but it's not taught in Scripture. Now, you mentioned that as a Greek Orthodox, you recognize that not everything that you believe is in Scripture is. and that you said that the holy traditions make up probably 50% of your faith, well, then that explains it. That's one of the things. The idea that Satan is the fallen angel is one of those traditions that makes up part of your faith. I'm not Greek Orthodox or Catholic. I'm pretty standard Protestant, and I believe the Bible is the ultimate authority. The Bible does not tell me with certainty that the devil is not a fallen angel, so he might be. But it doesn't tell me that he is. So he might not be. In other words, there's many things the Bible doesn't say. Theologians throughout history have tried to fill in the gaps of what the Bible doesn't say with things that they think make sense to them. Well, fine. People may have that tendency to do that. But I'm not going to teach anything as a doctrine that God didn't tell me, especially about something like that, which we could never know without him telling us. That's the thing. I mean, anything that we say about the origin of Satan that we can't find in the Bible is It's obviously people coming up with an idea about something that people have no knowledge of unless God tells us about it. And so my position is I don't care if the devil's a fallen angel or not. I don't say that he is or isn't. I'm just saying the nature of the data is that, you know, the Bible doesn't tell us that. I appreciate you, you know. Check into that. Your line is too bad to continue this call. We're almost out of time. In fact, I'm sorry to say we probably are out of time, but I'm always tempted to let one more person have a little say if they can do it in a minute's time. We do have about a minute, Dan, from Atlanta, Georgia. If you can use that, you're welcome to. I'll try to answer quickly if you can ask quickly.
SPEAKER 11 :
Steve, long-time listener, first-time caller, thanks for what you do. I'll be quick. Got a discussion with a relative of mine who's asking or was thinking that Jesus still had his earthly body while he's in heaven. What type of body does he have in heaven? Yes, sir. Thank you. I'm going to hang up and let you work your magic.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you. Well, Jesus has a body. He has a resurrected body, which is glorified. It's not exactly what I'd call a worldly body. The earthly body he had before he was crucified was obviously a mortal body. We know because it died, and immortals can't die. So, Jesus had an immortal body. He was in one place at a time. He was restricted in that respect, unlike before he came to earth where he was everywhere at once. That's what God is. Jesus was in a body that got tired. God never gets tired, but his body got tired. That was a body like ours. But then when he rose from the dead, he had a body not like ours. We're told he was raised immortal. He was raised glorified. We see that his body had capabilities of doing things that ours do not, like appearing somewhere and then disappearing before people's eyes. I mean, his body was different. But it was the same body. It was just the same body that had undergone change. We know it was the same body because otherwise the tomb wouldn't be empty. It's the same body that was in the tomb and came out. And it also still had the marks of nails in his wrists and of the spear in his side. So we know this is not a different body. It's just a body that had become different. It had been glorified. And it's immortal. And because it's immortal, obviously, it's still alive now where he is at the right hand of God. That would be my understanding, and I think most Christians' understanding of that. I appreciate your call. I'm sorry we couldn't take more time with it. You've been listening to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. We are listener supported. If you'd like to write to us, the address is The Narrow Path, P.O. Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. Our website, everything's for free, but you can donate from there if you want to. It's thenarrowpath.com. Thanks for joining us. Let's talk again tomorrow.
The discussion takes a turn as listeners explore the density of recorded miracles in biblical times compared to today, invoking contemplation on divine purpose and occurrences. As the episode progresses, listeners also receive information about how listener contributions keep the ministry running, emphasizing the unique independence of The Narrow Path. Join in as various callers touch upon diverse theological discussions, aiming to deepen understanding and interaction within the Christian faith community.
SPEAKER 1 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 02 :
Good afternoon. Welcome to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg, and we are live for an hour, as we are most weekdays. Almost every weekday we are, unless something comes up that prevents it. And because we're live, we can interact in real time, you and I, if you have a telephone and I have time to take your call. Feel free to give me a call here in the next hour. If you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith, I'll be glad to discuss them with you. By the way, I'm looking at an empty switchboard. So if you'd like to be on the program, this would be a good time to call in. And I'd be glad to take your call. You can be right up at the front of the line if you call right now. This number, 844-484-5754. That's 844-484-5737. It's not very common for me to look at an empty switchboard, so I'm not really sure if there's something wrong with my viewing here. It looks to me like we don't have any calls right now, so, oh, no, it's working now. Someone's calling in now. So, again, the number to call is 844-484-5737. 37. Now, tomorrow morning, I'll be speaking in Temecula at a gathering. It's called Coffee and Conversations. A friend of mine named Bill puts this on two weeks each month, Saturday mornings, at his home. It's a pretty good sized group of men. And I've never spoken there before, but they asked me to come and speak, if I would, about the subject of the Jesus Revolution, the Jesus Movement, which of course occurred back in the 70s, especially in Southern California, but it reached all around the world. And since I was there from the earliest times of that movement and got to see a lot of the things that people are curious about, they wanted me to come and talk about it and answer questions about it. So I'm doing that tomorrow morning, but you'd be welcome to join us if you happen to be in Temecula or nearby, 8 o'clock in the morning. It's for men, I believe only. And the information about it can be gotten by going to our website, thenarrowpath.com, under the tab that says Announcements. Now our lines are full. So we're going to talk first of all to Todd in Sacramento, California. Todd, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.
SPEAKER 06 :
Hey, Steve. I appreciate the ministry. I love what you do and how you do it. My question is, Well, basically about the rapture, you were talking, I think you said you were all millennials. So, you know, I've been raised in the church learning about the rapture, I guess dispensationalism. And, you know, I was listening to you and I was like, this guy is kind of weird, but The more I said it, I'm like, I'm swinging that way. And now my mind's kind of blowing. And I'm like, could you explain to me how the all-millennials view works without a rapture? Does it have a rapture? I'm not certain. And I'll take my answer off there if that's all right with you.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. Sure. That's fine. Thanks, Todd, for your call.
SPEAKER 06 :
All right. I appreciate you.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. Thank you. Well, you're correct. I am an amillennialist. I was dispensationalist. I was raised dispensationalist. I began my ministry as a dispensational teacher. I taught dispensationalism for several years. I also studied the Bible the whole time because I was teaching Bible studies in the Jesus Movement, and we were going verse by verse through various books of the Bible, and that required that I actually take verses in context. It's hard to teach verse by verse and ignore context. So some managed to do so, I've noticed, but I couldn't. because all the verses that I had to support the pre-tribulation rapture, it was easy to see when I taught verse by verse, I was taking them out of context. These were not passages that were talking about the pre-tribulation rapture. I mean, in some cases they were talking about the rapture, but there was nothing in the passage to suggest pre-tribulationism. The rapture simply refers to the phenomenon of Jesus, when he returns, raising... the living Christians to meet him in the air after he has raised the dead Christians to meet him in the air. But around the same time, it appears to be in rapid succession. Paul says the dead in Christ shall rise first, then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up to meet the Lord near. The word caught up is the word which in the Latin Vulgate Bible is based on the word for rapture. So in theology, the church has always taught that there's a rapture because Paul mentions it, But what has not always been taught, and wasn't taught really until fairly recent times in church history, was the idea that this rapture would occur some years before the actual second coming of Christ. The dispensational view that arose in the 1800s teaches that the rapture occurs, that is the living Christians are caught up into the air to meet the Lord there, seven years before he actually comes back. which results in the world's history going on for another seven years after the Christians are zapped out. Now, on that view, of course, there will come a day when all the Christians just apparently disappear. That is, to the eyes of those left on earth, the Christians will have just disappeared, but we will have been caught up to meet the Lord in the air. This is described in the dispensational system as, as if this is kind of a secret rapture. In fact, the word secret is often attached to it. Though, the only passage that really describes that phenomenon is 1 Thessalonians 4, and it doesn't sound secret at all. It says, "...the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, and the voice of the archangel, and the trumpet of God." That doesn't sound very quiet or secret to me. It sounds like it's going to be very noisy, something that people can't miss. And he says, "...the dead in Christ shall rise first, then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up to meet the Lord in the air." So, This will happen quite noisily, and it will happen when the Lord himself descends from heaven with a shout. In other words, at the second coming. This is not sometime prior to the second coming. This is at the second coming. This is what happens. Now, amillennialists have always believed this. So have premillennialists before dispensationalism. There was a premillennial view back in the early days of the church. We call it historic premillennialism. Lots of the church fathers held to that view, but they didn't include the pre-tribulation rapture. They believed that the rapture was part of the second coming of Christ. And this is also what the amillennialists believe. This is pretty much, to my mind, a fairly indisputable Christian view until Darby's time, who invented dispensationism. And he's the one who placed a seven-year interval between the rapture and the actual second coming of Christ. And that's what I used to teach because I was dispensationalist, but of course you can't read the scriptures without your dispensational glasses on and still believe that the Bible teaches that. Because I had 20 verses I used to prove the pre-trib rapture, but when I read them without my dispensational glasses on, I realized that, wait a minute, if I didn't already believe in the pre-trib rapture, none of these verses would teach it. None of these verses actually provide it as a taught doctrine in the Bible, you have to be told that it's there, and then you can read it into these passages, but that's not the way you're supposed to do biblical studies. You don't decide before you study the Bible what you're going to find there, and then shoehorn whatever you find there into what you've already decided it's supposed to teach. And yet that's what dispensationalism does, and that's why they believe in a preacher rapture. There's nothing in the Bible that says there will be a preacher rapture. But it doesn't, believing in a rapture is not strictly a dispensational thing. It's only the pre-tribulation rapture that is. All Christians, or almost all Christians, including all millennials, have believed historically there will be a resurrection and a rapture at the second coming of Christ. And if one wonders where that is found in, let's say, the amillennial understanding of Revelation 20, it's found in verse 9, where fire from heaven comes down and consumes... the wicked, and that's the second coming of Christ. In the amillennial scheme, that's the second coming of Christ, and that's when Jesus raptures and resurrects the church, too. In fact, that's the very thing you read about next in Revelation, about that, that the grave gives up its dead, and so forth. We know that the resurrection happens just before the rapture, according to Paul, and therefore, when you see the resurrection... there at the end of the thousand years, that's where you'd also find the rapture. Because, again, resurrection and rapture happen essentially at the same time. All right. I appreciate your call, brother. Let's talk to Brandon from Linwood, Washington. Hi, Brandon. Welcome.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thanks, Steve. My question is kind of on the extent of grace and getting your thoughts. Like, I've been doing a lot of world religious studies, and there's just a lot out there that teach mercy and compassion and kindness and justice. And, you know, I think of verses like, many will come saying, Lord, Lord, but they're not getting in. And things like, you know, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, and that just judgment will be on the deeds that were done in the flesh. And I just wonder if the grace of God and Christ's sacrifice extends to those who've never heard the gospel and maybe followed other things. And not to say that their works would get them there, you know, but Yeah, take it from there. You know, that's just kind of my thought. You know, can Taoists be saved even though they've never heard of Christ because they've practiced mercy and justice and Christ's sacrifice extends to them?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, one thing the Bible makes very clear is that nobody is ever saved apart from the merits of Christ. It is also clear in saying that people who reject Christ will not be saved. On the other hand, it doesn't say what will happen to people who've never heard of Christ. The Bible simply doesn't describe those people because it's not written to those people. The assumption, if someone's reading in the Bible, they've heard of Christ. So the Bible does not talk to people who don't know of Christ or tell much about them. A person who hears about Christ and rejects him has given up on the hope of salvation in Christ. unless they, of course, repent later and come back to him. But people have never heard of him. The Bible doesn't really describe them, except that they do need to hear about Christ. We know that they need to, and that's why the church has made it a priority in many centuries, the earliest and the latest, to reach out and try to reach the unlost. Now, some people think that because we are supposed to reach the unlost, that this implies that if we don't reach them, they can in no way go to heaven when they die. Now, the Bible doesn't say that. It doesn't actually talk about going to heaven much. It doesn't even talk about us going to heaven very much. There's occasional references. It's not the focus of Scripture. The focus of Scripture is the kingdom of God, and that God calls us to be part of his kingdom. That's now. We'll continue to be in his kingdom when we die, in heaven, of course, but... But the focus of the Bible is not, generally speaking, what happens after people die. The Old Testament says virtually nothing about it, although it covers 4,000 years of history. It's like there's almost nothing in it about what happens after people die. In the New Testament, there's a few more things said about that, but not very many. I mean, if you take all the verses of Scripture that teach things, I'd say you've got ten times as many passages talking about how we're supposed to live for Christ and in his kingdom now for every verse that there is that says anything about the next life. So the focus of the Bible is not on the next life. So it doesn't tell us, you know, if people don't hear the gospel, then in the next life such and such a thing will happen to them. We're not told that. It doesn't talk about that. What it does say is people need to hear the gospel because, of course, Christ's kingdom is to fill the whole earth. And Christ calls all men to be part of his kingdom. And if we don't preach the gospel, they won't hear about it and they won't become part of his kingdom. Now, what happens after they die is going to be God's decision. I think what we see in the Old Testament before Jesus came, there were people who went to heaven when they died, I think. or at least who were saved. They died saved. We call them the Old Testament saints. We know many of their names. Now, were there people besides them who died saved in the Old Testament? Yeah, I think probably so. I mean, I don't think that Isaiah was the only man of his generation, or that, you know, Joshua was the only one of his generation who was a saint. I think there were Jews who were faithful to God, and Gentiles too, actually. But they had never heard of Jesus. But But Jesus saved them anyway. You see, the point we have to understand is that no one can be saved without Jesus doing it. Only he is the Savior. There's no other Savior besides Christ. But we don't know that he can't save somebody who's never heard of him, especially if he sees in them a heart that is likely to receive him if they heard. Or, as some theologians say it, The people have responded positively to the light that God gave them. The light that God gave them in this life, if they lived in a country that was never evangelized, might not include hearing the gospel as we hear it. But that doesn't mean they don't have light. All people have some light. And the response to the light appears to be what determines if God is favorable or unfavorable toward them. Job, for example, Job had never heard the gospel. Job had no Bible, so he hadn't read any scripture. But God thought very highly of him. He said he was a just man, a righteous man, who sought to avoid evil. And we know that Job was seeking to worship God. And much of the God that he worshipped was not well known to him. He had a picture of God being a just and good God, but he didn't have a Bible, never heard of Jesus. But on the other hand, God thought well of him. And no doubt there would be others in that category. But nobody is saved by a different religion. Let's say, could a Buddhist be saved by being a good Buddhist, or a Hindu by being a good Hindu, or Muslim by being a good Muslim? No, because those are religions, and religions can't save anyone. Even the Christian religion can't save anyone. Christ saves, not religion. No one's going to get saved by religious activity, but people who are parts of various kinds of Churches, for example, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, different kinds of Protestant churches, though their theology is different from each other, they may have hearts for God that God recognizes as, you know, they're not his enemies. And we don't know that he doesn't see people elsewhere in the world who have never heard the gospel that way. We're not told. But it wouldn't matter to us. I mean, it matters to God, and he'll sort that out, fortunately. But for us... even if we did believe that God has a way of reaching or responding to people who look for him in other societies and who die without finding him, if we could say, well, God will see that they responded to the light they had in a way that pleases him, and Christ, who is the only Savior, will save them because of him, because he did die for everybody after all. And so if they didn't reject him and they sought God but didn't have much access, then why can't Christ save them? I mean, doesn't he want to? I mean, some people think that God doesn't want to save anybody, but he's kind of forced to if we get to them with the gospel first and they receive it. But God doesn't want anyone to be lost. What the Bible says is God doesn't want anyone to perish. He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. It's not that God is looking to damn whoever he can unless they squeak through this little narrow portal because they had the good luck of hearing the gospel at a time when they're vulnerable to it. Now, God doesn't want anyone to be lost, though some will be. But certainly, if there are people who are seeking him and would have loved him, but through no fault of their own, they never heard of him, but they responded rightly to the light he gave them, it's very difficult for me to know how Christ, who died for them, would not recognize them. You know, that's a different thing than hearing about Christ and rejecting him. So, I don't answer for God about what he's going to do about those cases. But if you ask, do I think it's possible there will be some people in heaven who never heard the gospel? Well, I know there are, because all the Old Testament saints are, and they never heard the gospel, not as we know it. So, yeah, there's people in heaven who've never heard the gospel. But that doesn't mean they don't need to hear it if they can. The more people who can hear it, the more can respond and become part of God's kingdom and play a role. in his kingdom mission here on earth and fulfill the role that he created them for. Also to be part of the body of Christ. Also to be delivered from their sin and their demons, which they can't without Christ. I mean, let's face it, going to heaven isn't the only advantage of knowing Jesus, although maybe some Christians have never thought about any other advantage. It is certainly not the advantage that God mentions or emphasizes most in Scripture. Rather, being freed from sin being delivered from darkness, being able to serve God and please God in this life. Those are the things that are emphasized throughout Scripture, in all the epistles, in all of Jesus' teaching. And so, you know, the part about whether they go to heaven when they die, that's the smaller part of the question, and the Bible says the least about it. But even if I thought they could, God has a plan for them in this life, and if we don't reach them, if they don't hear about Christ and their life is wasted, then that's a loss to Christ himself because he had something he hoped for them to do, and they didn't do it because they never heard about it. So it's on us. It's on us that people don't hear. But it's on God to decide what he does with those who don't, and he will do the right thing in every case because he never does wrong. Thank you, Brennan. Okay, let's see. Danny from Dallas, welcome. Welcome.
SPEAKER 07 :
Steve, appreciate your ministry. I've got a question for you. Maybe I heard it on your station or from you. The Bible records in Jesus over three years of ministry. The Bible records, what, 30, 40, 50 days of his stuff, of the stuff he did?
SPEAKER 02 :
About 39. About 39 days.
SPEAKER 07 :
About 39? Okay. Okay. Any ideas on about the others? I remember John wrote, you know, if everything was written and done, there's not enough books and libraries to hold it all. And I've kind of figured that as a guideline, but I was trying to remember what that number was. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Go ahead. Well, yeah, all of the Gospels admittedly give us a very abbreviated life of Christ. I mean, if I was going to write your biography, I'd do some research and try to find out where you were born, maybe who your parents were, how you were educated, what your goals were as a young man, what education you got, what you did at the beginning of your career. I'd want to cover a lot of things because that's what biographies usually concern themselves with. Two of the Gospels don't even mention the birth of Jesus, nor his childhood. And the two that do mention his birth tell us nothing about his childhood except the first few years. And one exception is that Luke tells one brief story about Jesus when he's 12. Then it skips over 18 years. And many of the Gospels just start when Jesus is 30 years old. So it's obvious they're not trying to give us a complete biography of Christ. Well, what are they trying to do then? Well, John, as you mentioned, near the end of his gospel, he says, there's lots of other things Jesus said and did besides those that are written in this book. He said, but these are written so that you might believe that Jesus is the Son of God. You might have life in believing. Now, the other gospels didn't tell us exactly why they wrote, but we might assume that they all wrote for a similar purpose. and that is to give a reader who is not otherwise aware of Christ an acquaintance with him sufficient for them to responsibly place their faith in the fact that he's the Son of God and that they can have life through him. And I believe that all the Gospels do that quite well. Apparently, they, I mean, Jesus, lots of times it says in Matthew, it's a summary statement, it's like, Jesus went through all the villages of Nazareth healing all their sick and casting out demons. Well, those are perhaps scores of miraculous healings that simply are not recorded in detail. They're just summarized. Healing everybody, you know. So, I mean, there's obviously a lot more miracle stories that could be told, but the Gospels choose to tell a select few. And they choose them for purposes of making some kind of a point of who he was, In many cases, like in John's gospel, John specifically selected miracles that would underscore what Jesus said about himself. So, in John 15, Jesus said, I'm the true vine. And in John 2, it records that Jesus turned water into wine, which is what vines do. He did it miraculously, though. In chapter 6, he says, I'm the bread of life, in the context of actually feeding people with multiplied loaves and fishes. In the case of Raising Lazarus from the dead in chapter 11 of John. This is to illustrate what Jesus said earlier, a few verses before he raises him, saying, I am the resurrection and the life. And, of course, he said, I'm the light of the world. In John 8, I believe it's in John 8, and then in John 9, he heals a blind man, gives him light, you know, as it were. So there's these different miracles here. John almost matches these miracles one for one with sayings that Jesus made about himself. And these miracles are symbolic. I mean, they're true miracles, but they symbolize him being, you know, the light of the world. He's the light of the world in a non-literal sense, but he literally heals a blind man to demonstrate that symbolically and so forth. Now, the other Gospels don't connect the miracles of Jesus one and one for one with things Jesus said necessarily. But no doubt they had the same intention. They didn't need to record thousands of miracles, even if you did them. No doubt many miracles were a lot like others. But they give us a sampling of various kinds of miracles, you know, walking on water, walking. stilling a storm, healing various kinds of sickness and blindness and leprosy, casting out demons in different situations. I think they don't intend to give us a catalog of everything Jesus did. They wrote a very selective, in each case, a very selective biographical treatment to provide only enough information as would be helpful to us in getting us to see and able to believe responsibly, as I said, that Jesus is who he is. And so... It is surprising to us that a man who lived such a short life, such a significant one, would have even of that short life only a few days recorded. But apparently all the authors thought that the things they recorded were sufficient to make their points.
SPEAKER 07 :
Man, I sure appreciate it. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right, Danny. God bless you. Good talking to you.
SPEAKER 07 :
Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye now.
SPEAKER 02 :
Let's see here. Oh, we've got a break coming up here, but we have another half hour or two. We've got a lot of calls waiting, and we'll get to all of them. In the next half hour, The Narrow Path is a listener-supported ministry. We pay lots of money to radio stations, and we're on a lot of radio stations across the country, and they're not cheap. But you notice we don't have any commercial breaks. Even this is not a commercial break. We have nothing to sell. You can't buy anything from us at our website. We sell nothing over the air. We don't sell anything at all. We are simply listener-supported. So if listeners keep supporting it, we'll stay on the air. Otherwise, we don't. I will say this, though. The money that is given to The Narrow Path all goes to paying for radio time. When I say all, I mean like maybe 0.5% of it might be used on office supplies or things like that. But we have no salaries, no overhead, nothing. And so the gifts that are given, they go to the radio so people can hear the program just like you're hearing it right now and hopefully can benefit from it. If you'd like to donate to us, you can. You can go to The Narrow Path, P.O. Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. Or you can do it at our website, thenarrowpath.com, where everything is free. That's thenarrowpath.com. I'll be back in 30 seconds. Don't go away.
SPEAKER 03 :
The Narrow Path is one feature of the teaching ministry of Steve Gregg. Steve's philosophy of teaching is to educate, not indoctrinate his listeners. He believes that Christians should learn to think for themselves about the Bible and not be dependent on him or any other teacher for their convictions. We hope to teach Christians how to think, not what to think about the Bible.
SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome back to the Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg, and we're live for another half hour taking your calls. We have one line open right now. If you'd like to call, the number is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. 844-484-5737. And if you're not familiar with the program, people call in because we talk about the Bible here. If you have questions about the Bible, maybe you have a different view of the Bible than I have. You're welcome to call and say so. I'd be glad to talk to you. It's an open forum about really biblical stuff. So feel free to call if you have questions. 844-484-5737. Our next caller is David from New Mexico. Hi, David. Welcome. Hi, Steve. How are you?
SPEAKER 08 :
Good. I had a couple questions. The first question, if you haven't heard about it, then I'll just move to the second question. But I was wondering, have you heard about a video that's on YouTube called Messiah 2030? Do you know anything about that, who it's from and what it's about?
SPEAKER 02 :
No, I have never heard of it. Never heard of it.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay, well, just give me a little rundown, because you may hear about it later on. Someone forwarded to me, and basically it's this idea that even though we can't know the day or the hour of Christ's return, supposedly they've done this biblical chronology that you can know the year. And so, of course, they're claiming that Jesus will return in 2030. So it's a very lengthy video, but if you ever want to check it out, It is on YouTube.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, I haven't the least interest. David, let me ask you just out of curiosity, how long have you been a Christian?
SPEAKER 08 :
Oh, I've been a Christian for a long time, and I'm not calling because I believe this video.
SPEAKER 02 :
The reason I ask is if you're a Christian long enough, you will have heard this very claim made about a dozen or more different dates over the years. I've been in the ministry for 55 years, and I literally have heard at least a dozen dates that were calculated by Bible experts and so forth and different years and so forth. And they've all been perfectly wrong. And there's not the slightest reason to believe that anyone in the future will get it right. You know, if they do, it's only by chance, not by their expertise. Because Jesus said, it's not for you to know the times or the seasons that the Father's put in his own power. So that people would make an effort to try to calculate the times or the seasons that the Father's put in his own power. When Jesus said, that's not for you to know. It just means they're in a rebellion. That's rebellion against him. He says, listen, don't worry about that. Don't think about that. That's not for you to know. But I'm going to spend a lot of time calculating that. I'm going to have a whole website about it. I know whole radio programs that almost every day, that's their focus. Oh, we're living near the end and so forth. And I think, why would you want to have a whole ministry in rebellion against what Jesus said? I don't understand that.
SPEAKER 08 :
Exactly. I hear what you're saying. Yeah, I understand what you're saying. The only other question I was going to ask you real quick was I hear a lot of people talk about the chronological Bible, and I realize that it puts things in chronological order, but I guess what I kind of wonder about is when we obviously look at our regular Bible from Genesis to Revelation, obviously it begins at the beginning of the world, the creation of the world, and it goes forward in somewhat of a chronology of a history. So How different is a chronological Bible in that regard to putting things in order, and do you believe those are helpful?
SPEAKER 02 :
Apparently they're helpful for some people, and I could see how they would be. I mean, if a person's not familiar with the Bible, they might get a little confused. You see, here's why our Bible doesn't read strictly chronologically, and that's because some books are parallel to other books. For example, the books of 1 Chronicles, for example, is parallel in its material to the books of 1 and 2 Samuel. So, you know, if you read through the Bible, you're going to read 1 and 2 Samuel. But later on, you're going to come to the same stories and same information, much of it, in 1 Chronicles. And likewise, when you read 1 and 2 Kings. you'll read that, and then eventually you'll come to 2 Chronicles, and it's going to be the same stories that are in 1 and 2 Kings. Now, when I say the same stories, I don't mean identical, but it's the same time period, and many of the same stories are there. Chronicles will have different details, but many of the same ones, too. It's like they're telling the same history, but including and excluding different parts. It's like reading the four Gospels. If you read the Gospel of Matthew... You do have a chronological story, a roughly chronological story of Jesus. But then when you read Mark, you're going to start at the beginning again and get the same story. Mark doesn't follow chronologically after Matthew. It parallels it, and so does Luke. So this is why, and then when you have the epistles of Paul, they're not arranged in our Bible in the order they were written. They're generally arranged in order of descending size. So the larger epistles of Paul are near the front, and then they dwindle down to Philemon, which is the smallest. But, I mean, the Psalms, for example, you're not going to run into the Psalms until you've finished all the history books of the Old Testament. But the Psalms, of course, belong to some of those historical periods you've already read about in the historical section. David was, you know, the story of David's in 1 Samuel and Chronicles. So you're going to be interlacing the Psalms. with those stories. So that's why chronological Bibles have moved things around to be you encounter them at the right time in the overall narrative. Now, I have never used a chronological Bible. Once you're familiar with the Bible, you know what time period you're reading about. And so you realize, oh, yeah, this is all sort of talked about over here. But for people who are maybe just getting acquainted with the Bible, it may be helpful. There were not chronological Bibles through most of church history, so Christians had to get to know their Bibles without that aid. But it can be an aid to some people, I suppose. So I wouldn't say not to do it. It might, however, be that if you're reading only a chronological Bible, you would not pick up, as you would just reading your Bible through, sometimes what the contents of a given book is. Because you're going to have the book of Jeremiah interlaced with with stories in Kings, you know, and Chronicles. And same thing with Isaiah. Whereas you might not, if you read through the whole book of Isaiah or the whole book of Jeremiah as a single book, as you're reading through the Bible, you may remember, oh, this was in Isaiah or this was in Jeremiah. And, you know, just by reading through the Bible, you remember, oh, it was in the Psalms I read this or, you know, in Amos or whatever, you know. But if it's all laced together as you're reading through it, you're not really getting a sense of when you've changed from one book to another and which book contains which. But it has its place. It has its place. And I would say that someone who's never read through the Bible might want to read through a chronological Bible in their first time. I'm not saying they should, but they might want to. But if they do, I wouldn't do it again. I would probably just start reading through the Bible ordinarily. Get acquainted with each book. Oh, gee.
SPEAKER 08 :
All right. Well, thanks. I appreciate your insight.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. God bless you, David. Good talking to you. Let's see. Esther from Long Beach, California. Welcome.
SPEAKER 05 :
God bless you, sir. Thank you. I hear a lot of the programs that come on. They're saying, Paul said this, Isaiah said this, but I think As nemesis and as Christian, we need to let that sinner out there know that God wrote the Bible. God told Paul what to say. And all those writers and all the 66 books in the Bible. And that's what I hear a lot on the radio. Paul said this. John said this. Isaiah said this. And another thing that I heard a lot of during the Christmas said that Mary was 13 years old. I don't believe that. Because Mary and Elizabeth lived many, many miles. And Mary went to visit Elizabeth. And if she had been 13 years old, I don't think they would have had the conversation or the closeness that they had. And our Bible tells us that Mary, after she left Elizabeth's home, she stayed there until John was born. And she went to her own home. And I never believed, I don't care what the traditions were back then those days, that Mary was only 13 years old. To me, that's a baby. And I wonder sometimes if that's why some men think they can molest a 13-year-old. No, I believe that Mary was a woman. The Bible says she was born of a woman. And when Isaac was carried up on the mountain by Abraham, he was 13 years old. And I do not believe that Mary was a 13-year-old.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. Well, you're certainly entitled to that belief. The fact is that you say to you, 13-year-old is a baby. Yeah, I think in our society, some people who are 35 are still infantile because people aren't made to grow up in modern society. Some of them do, and some just don't. And in our society, we have this category called adolescence. You've got children who are prior to adolescence called children, and then they reach an age which in old times they would have been called adults. But we call them adolescents, and they get about 10 years there of adolescence almost. And they're neither children or adults, and we don't treat them like either. We don't treat them exactly like children, and we don't treat them exactly like adults. That's our culture, though. And, of course – whatever our culture has done for decades and generations is going to seem natural to us. So to us, a 13-year-old girl seems like a child. In almost all cultures previous to ours, a 13-year-old girl was a woman. But she wouldn't be like our modern 13-year-olds because our modern 13-year-olds aren't raised to be women at 13. They're raised to be adolescents, and they get to live kind of an irresponsible, childlike life but they have a little more privileges than childhood. Adolescence is a very artificial category. But if you lived in a society where it was understood, when you reach puberty, you're now grown up. And that's why in the Jewish society, which is, of course, the society the Bible is written to, a boy at age 13 is bar mitzvahed. And the word bar mitzvah suggests he's now a son of the covenant. He's like a responsible adult. When he was up to 12 years old, he was under his parents' spiritual umbrella, as it were. But then when he's 13, he takes on adult responsibility, not only before God, but in many cases in business. I mean, they might take over the family business. I mean, there are children in places like India and places like that today who are not any older than that, and they run shops because, I mean, that's what they're raised to do. So culture is different in different places. And I do believe that it was commonplace in biblical times and in probably many parts of the world today for young women especially, who are 13, to actually get married. Now, you said you wonder if that belief is what causes men to think it's okay to molest children. I doubt if men who molest children are basing their actions on any biblical belief at all. I have a feeling they're just being jerks and evil. And people who do that aren't really following their interpretation of the Bible, generally speaking. They're just doing evil things they want to do. But a good man will not molest a little girl even if he does believe Mary was 13, even if he believed that in biblical times 13-year-olds usually were married or did get married shortly after that. Because that seems to be culturally the case. historically known, but it doesn't provide any excuse for anyone to molest a child or to molest anybody, even an adult. But I appreciate your thoughts there. That's certainly why we have an open line.
SPEAKER 05 :
Could I say this? Could I say this?
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, quickly. I have more people to take. Could I say this?
SPEAKER 05 :
Could I say this?
SPEAKER 02 :
Please do.
SPEAKER 05 :
When I go by, the Bible says he was born of a woman. And she went to her own home.
SPEAKER 02 :
I heard that. Yes, I heard you say that.
SPEAKER 05 :
She went to her own home. Uh-huh.
SPEAKER 02 :
No, her own home. You mean that she owned a home? No, she didn't own a home. She wasn't married yet. She would be living with her family until she was married. That was always the case in biblical times. Yeah, I think you're, again, it's natural enough to be kind of thinking of a 13-year-old in terms that we think of 13-year-olds, right? And you say, well, a 13-year-old wouldn't have her own home. Well, her father's home was her own home. That was her home. Her home was with her parents. She went to be with her relative, Elizabeth, for a while, and then she went back to her own home, which was her parents' home. And girls that age would live with their fathers. In fact, even older women would live with their fathers until their fathers died or until they got married. But most girls got married before their fathers died. But, yeah, I mean, and it does say she was a woman, exactly. But what I'm saying is in that culture, a girl who had reached puberty was now regarded as a woman, and a boy who had reached puberty was regarded as a man. We just prolong infantilism in children longer than they need to be. Other cultures didn't indulge in that so much, partly because they were poorer than we are. Parents can afford to raise their kids until they're in their 20s or 30s in many cases in America. In ancient times, families were dirt poor. And so you've got a kid who can carry adult responsibility, they start carrying it. They start helping to support the family and so forth. They're not kept infantile like we keep our children so many times. Anyway, thank you for your call. Good talking to you. I didn't hear what you just said. It sounded like you said you're not through, but that's for me to decide. And I think you are. But thank you. I appreciate you calling. Let's talk to Peter from Avon, Connecticut. Hi, Peter. Welcome. Hi, Steve. How are you?
SPEAKER 01 :
Good, thanks. Hey, I'm kind of in a tough situation. I wanted to call and talk to you about miracles and what advice you can give and maybe some direction. I was just diagnosed with ALS. I'm sorry.
SPEAKER 07 :
Oh, wow.
SPEAKER 01 :
Horrible, horrible. I know. Horrible disease. I know it is. And there's so many miracles in the Bible. They don't appear to me to be as numerous nowadays as they were in the Bible. I understand Jesus was trying to build this community, and, of course, he had to prove to people that he was God. But I don't know if he's still doing the amount of miracles, but I certainly need one because I really don't look forward to what lies ahead of me.
SPEAKER 02 :
I don't blame you. I mean, I know. I know what ALS is like. I had a friend who I lost my age with that. And, of course, I know of other cases. Well, I'll tell you, I certainly would wish a miracle for you. But to answer you very honestly, the Bible does not present miracles as the norm. In the Bible, there are seasons where God did a lot of miracles and seasons where there were centuries between miracles. For example, I mean, God did a lot of miracles. Probably the first time he did a lot of miracles was when he delivered Israel from Egypt and took them through the wilderness and brought them with Joshua into a promised land. There are a lot of miracles associated with that. But then after that, we don't read of miracles much until the time of Elijah. And Elisha. Now, Elijah and Elisha were like, what, 600 years after the Exodus, something like that, 600, 700 years later. There are a lot of miracles there, too. But there were centuries in between where we don't read of any miracles or many. And then after Elijah and Elisha, there's another 700 years or so before Jesus comes along. And before Jesus comes, John the Baptist comes. And the Bible specifically says John the Baptist didn't do any miracles at all. But Jesus, of course, did a lot. So did his apostles. So, we don't really see miracles as the norm in the Bible. And even in Jesus' ministry, we were just talking to an earlier caller, Jesus did a lot of miracles. But he lived 33 years, and he didn't do any of them until he was 30. So, all the miracles he did in his ministry were confined to the last 10% of his lifetime. And the first 90% was... not particularly miraculous except at birth. So, you know, we do read a lot about miracles in the Bible because those miracles are associated with significant events, and those are the significant events that the Bible wants to talk about because of their significance. Now, miracles still happen. I know that miracles still happen. The Bible doesn't ever say that the age of miracles has passed. But it also, you know, the age of miracles was not passed in the days of Jeremiah. But no miracles were being done. But, you know, there are seasons where God does miracles and seasons where he doesn't do so many. Now, I would not want to discourage you from trusting God for a miracle. I also wouldn't want to give you a falsehood and say there's a guarantee of miracles. The Bible does not guarantee miracles to us. So... I mean, if I were running things, I would certainly want to provide a miracle for everyone who's in such a terrible circumstance. But I will say this, when God doesn't provide miracles, I have to assume that he could, and the fact that he doesn't means he has something better in mind. I'm sure that Paul's thorn in the flesh was not as severe a condition as Lou Gehrig's disease, but it But it was a torment to him, apparently a constant torment. He begged God to take it away from him. And even though God worked miracles of healing and even raising the dead through Paul's ministry, he denied Paul a miracle in this case. He said, my grace is sufficient for you. My strength is made perfect in your weakness. Now, Paul still believed in miracles, but not in his case. He felt God had told him, no, I've got a better idea. I've got something better in mind. And, you know, when we're suffering... A horrible situation that only God can fix. We ask him to do it. We can't imagine that he'd have something better in mind or that there could even be such a thing as something better than for us to be healed. But even those who don't get, you know, debilitating sicknesses go through trials which seem like there can be no good in them. And yet God has promised he'll bring some good from it. Now, Obviously, some diseases greatly shorten people's lives or greatly diminish their quality of life before they die. And ALS, obviously, is one that typically does that. And I'd hate to have it myself. I hate that you have it. Of course, if hating something made it not exist, we wouldn't have any troubles at all in the world. But let me just say that If you can trust God when you're healthy, you can trust him when you have a disease as well, because he doesn't change. We trust God because he's faithful. We trust him because he's good, because he always does the very best thing that he can imagine for his plans, for each individual who's trusting him. And so the best we can do is trust him. It is not impossible for him to heal. I know of people who were healed of cancers that were said to be incurable. I've heard of people cured of all kinds of amazing things. But again, it's not the norm. If God wants it to happen, it can happen. And I would certainly pray for that. I'd certainly pray for your healing. But I'd also pray, if I were you, for God to bring you close to him so that you will do well In this test, whether you receive a healing or not, I don't say that with any callousness at all. My heart breaks for you. I just know. I'm a realist. I know that sometimes when it's our time to go, God takes us all different ways. And sometimes he takes us sick. But he never does anything wrong. And so miracles, yeah, miracles are something God can do and sometimes does do. But it's people who guarantee you that if you have enough faith, you'll have a miracle are probably going to disillusion you. It's better to just take the Bible for what it actually does say. Even Paul couldn't get a miraculous healing, even though he raised other dead people. You know, he couldn't help his friends from chronic illnesses they had, like Timothy and like Trophimus. So we live in a world that if we could work miracles, we'd do a lot more of them probably than God does. But we're not as wise as he is either. So many... I'm sure that we have thousands of people listening who are praying for you right now, and I hope many of them will remember to pray for you. But you did call to ask about a miracle, and I'm just saying ask God to give you the miracle of grace to glorify him in the midst of whatever his will may be for you and to heal you if it's his will. And then I would leave it at his door because it's only he can do anything about it. No man can. So I just leave it with God, and I would trust him to do what he sees as the right thing. I'm terribly sorry to hear about your circumstance, Peter.
SPEAKER 01 :
It's not pretty. No, it's not. And that's what I'm looking for, as I told you, direction. And you've given me some that I... Don't feel all that enthusiastic right now.
SPEAKER 02 :
I don't blame you. I don't blame you. Peter, let me recommend something. Have you been to our website before?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay. If you go to thenarrowpath.com under Topical Lectures, there's a series there called Making Sense Out of Suffering. It's only four lectures long, but I would suggest you listen to those lectures. It might be helpful.
SPEAKER 01 :
And what is it called again? I didn't quite catch that.
SPEAKER 02 :
Making Sense Out of Suffering.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay. Okay.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, at thenarrowpath.com, there's a tab that says Topical Lectures, and those series are listed in alphabetical order.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay. All right. So at this point, there's just not much for me to do except to try to keep my faith.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, don't just try. Just put your faith in Christ. Maintain your faith in Christ. And we all need to do that. And all of us, at some point, will come to the end of our lives. So it may not be. We may be younger or older than other people, but we'll all have the same test at the end, and that's whether we're hanging on to Christ and trusting in him when life has kind of dealt us our final day. Or God can heal. It's up to him.
SPEAKER 01 :
I'm sorry. I didn't hear that.
SPEAKER 02 :
I said, or God can heal you. It's up to him. We need to trust him to do it right there.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right. Well, brother.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, God bless you. Thank you, Steve, and I appreciate your prayers.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, and again, there are thousands of people listening. I'm sure many of them are praying for you right now. And probably a lot of the people listening to us are people who do believe that miracles are guaranteed. And I don't believe they're correct, but maybe according to their faith, be it unto you. Maybe God will honor it. All right?
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you, Steve. Appreciate it. Nice to talk to you.
SPEAKER 02 :
God bless you. Have a good weekend. Bye now. Well, we have our lines almost full still, and I'm looking at a clock that's going to say I'm off the air in about two minutes. I usually don't do this, but I'm going to see. I mean, sometimes I do. Someone's been waiting a long time. Connor from Bradford, Pennsylvania. Can you do anything with two minutes or one? Oh, I'm sorry. I had less. I had one. I apologize. The music's playing. I'll be cut off here in less than a minute, so my apologies. Feel free to call Monday, and I'll try to take all the calls then. God bless you. You've been listening to The Narrow Path. My name is Steve Gregg. I always try to squeeze in as many calls as we can, but sometimes I miscalculate how many we can get in. Anyway, we are a listener-supported ministry. As I said earlier, if you'd like to help us stay on the air, you can write to The Narrow Path, P.O. Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. Or you can go to our website. Everything at our website is free. The series I recommended to Peter just now, we have lectures, hundreds of them. If you go to thenarrowpath.com, look under the tab that says Topical Lectures and click on Making Sense of Suffering. The website, thenarrowpath.com. Have a good weekend.
Join Steve Gregg on this engaging episode of The Narrow Path as he explores a variety of captivating topics with his listeners. Dive deep into a thought-provoking discussion on Amillennialism, where Steve unravels the complex history of the Rapture and the Second Coming in the Christian faith. Explore how different interpretations of biblical literature shape these views and what the mainstream has taught over the centuries. The episode also sheds light on the extent of grace in Christianity. How can grace extend to those who embrace other religions or have never heard the gospel? Steve carefully navigates these questions, offering insights into the interplay between divine mercy, salvation, and human understanding. Additionally, this episode touches on the intriguing topic of a chronological Bible, offering listeners a new way to approach biblical literature. In a heartfelt conversation with a listener facing ALS, Steve discusses the nature of miracles and faith amidst life’s toughest challenges. Together, they reflect on the role of miracles in biblical history and today. Tune in and immerse yourself in this enlightening dialogue on faith, life, and the power of God’s word.
SPEAKER 1 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 02 :
Good afternoon. Welcome to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg, and we are live for an hour, as we are most weekdays. Almost every weekday we are, unless something comes up that prevents it. And because we're live, we can interact in real time, you and I, if you have a telephone and I have time to take your call. Feel free to give me a call here in the next hour. If you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith, I'll be glad to discuss them with you. By the way, I'm looking at an empty switchboard. So if you'd like to be on the program, this would be a good time to call in. And I'd be glad to take your call. You can be right up at the front of the line if you call right now. This number, 844-484-5754. That's 844-484-5737. It's not very common for me to look at an empty switchboard, so I'm not really sure if there's something wrong with my viewing here. It looks to me like we don't have any calls right now, so, oh, no, it's working now. Someone's calling in now. So, again, the number to call is 844-484-5737. 37. Now, tomorrow morning, I'll be speaking in Temecula at a gathering. It's called Coffee and Conversations. A friend of mine named Bill puts this on two weeks each month, Saturday mornings, at his home. It's a pretty good sized group of men. And I've never spoken there before, but they asked me to come and speak, if I would, about the subject of the Jesus Revolution, the Jesus Movement, which of course occurred back in the 70s, especially in Southern California, but it reached all around the world. And since I was there from the earliest times of that movement and got to see a lot of the things that people are curious about, they wanted me to come and talk about it and answer questions about it. So I'm doing that tomorrow morning, but you'd be welcome to join us if you happen to be in Temecula or nearby, 8 o'clock in the morning. It's for men, I believe only. And the information about it can be gotten by going to our website, thenarrowpath.com, under the tab that says Announcements. Now our lines are full. So we're going to talk first of all to Todd in Sacramento, California. Todd, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.
SPEAKER 06 :
Hey, Steve. I appreciate the ministry. I love what you do and how you do it. My question is, Well, basically about the rapture, you were talking, I think you said you were all millennials. So, you know, I've been raised in the church learning about the rapture, I guess dispensationalism. And, you know, I was listening to you and I was like, this guy is kind of weird, but The more I said it, I'm like, I'm swinging that way. And now my mind's kind of blowing. And I'm like, could you explain to me how the all-millennials view works without a rapture? Does it have a rapture? I'm not certain. And I'll take my answer off there if that's all right with you.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. Sure. That's fine. Thanks, Todd, for your call.
SPEAKER 06 :
All right. I appreciate you.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. Thank you. Well, you're correct. I am an amillennialist. I was dispensationalist. I was raised dispensationalist. I began my ministry as a dispensational teacher. I taught dispensationalism for several years. I also studied the Bible the whole time because I was teaching Bible studies in the Jesus Movement, and we were going verse by verse through various books of the Bible, and that required that I actually take verses in context. It's hard to teach verse by verse and ignore context. So some managed to do so, I've noticed, but I couldn't. because all the verses that I had to support the pre-tribulation rapture, it was easy to see when I taught verse by verse, I was taking them out of context. These were not passages that were talking about the pre-tribulation rapture. I mean, in some cases they were talking about the rapture, but there was nothing in the passage to suggest pre-tribulationism. The rapture simply refers to the phenomenon of Jesus, when he returns, raising... the living Christians to meet him in the air after he has raised the dead Christians to meet him in the air. But around the same time, it appears to be in rapid succession. Paul says the dead in Christ shall rise first, then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up to meet the Lord near. The word caught up is the word which in the Latin Vulgate Bible is based on the word for rapture. So in theology, the church has always taught that there's a rapture because Paul mentions it, But what has not always been taught, and wasn't taught really until fairly recent times in church history, was the idea that this rapture would occur some years before the actual second coming of Christ. The dispensational view that arose in the 1800s teaches that the rapture occurs, that is the living Christians are caught up into the air to meet the Lord there, seven years before he actually comes back. which results in the world's history going on for another seven years after the Christians are zapped out. Now, on that view, of course, there will come a day when all the Christians just apparently disappear. That is, to the eyes of those left on earth, the Christians will have just disappeared, but we will have been caught up to meet the Lord in the air. This is described in the dispensational system as, as if this is kind of a secret rapture. In fact, the word secret is often attached to it. Though, the only passage that really describes that phenomenon is 1 Thessalonians 4, and it doesn't sound secret at all. It says, "...the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, and the voice of the archangel, and the trumpet of God." That doesn't sound very quiet or secret to me. It sounds like it's going to be very noisy, something that people can't miss. And he says, "...the dead in Christ shall rise first, then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up to meet the Lord in the air." So, This will happen quite noisily, and it will happen when the Lord himself descends from heaven with a shout. In other words, at the second coming. This is not sometime prior to the second coming. This is at the second coming. This is what happens. Now, amillennialists have always believed this. So have premillennialists before dispensationalism. There was a premillennial view back in the early days of the church. We call it historic premillennialism. Lots of the church fathers held to that view, but they didn't include the pre-tribulation rapture. They believed that the rapture was part of the second coming of Christ. And this is also what the amillennialists believe. This is pretty much, to my mind, a fairly indisputable Christian view until Darby's time, who invented dispensationism. And he's the one who placed a seven-year interval between the rapture and the actual second coming of Christ. And that's what I used to teach because I was dispensationalist, but of course you can't read the scriptures without your dispensational glasses on and still believe that the Bible teaches that. Because I had 20 verses I used to prove the pre-trib rapture, but when I read them without my dispensational glasses on, I realized that, wait a minute, if I didn't already believe in the pre-trib rapture, none of these verses would teach it. None of these verses actually provide it as a taught doctrine in the Bible, you have to be told that it's there, and then you can read it into these passages, but that's not the way you're supposed to do biblical studies. You don't decide before you study the Bible what you're going to find there, and then shoehorn whatever you find there into what you've already decided it's supposed to teach. And yet that's what dispensationalism does, and that's why they believe in a preacher rapture. There's nothing in the Bible that says there will be a preacher rapture. But it doesn't, believing in a rapture is not strictly a dispensational thing. It's only the pre-tribulation rapture that is. All Christians, or almost all Christians, including all millennials, have believed historically there will be a resurrection and a rapture at the second coming of Christ. And if one wonders where that is found in, let's say, the amillennial understanding of Revelation 20, it's found in verse 9, where fire from heaven comes down and consumes... the wicked, and that's the second coming of Christ. In the amillennial scheme, that's the second coming of Christ, and that's when Jesus raptures and resurrects the church, too. In fact, that's the very thing you read about next in Revelation, about that, that the grave gives up its dead, and so forth. We know that the resurrection happens just before the rapture, according to Paul, and therefore, when you see the resurrection... there at the end of the thousand years, that's where you'd also find the rapture. Because, again, resurrection and rapture happen essentially at the same time. All right. I appreciate your call, brother. Let's talk to Brandon from Linwood, Washington. Hi, Brandon. Welcome.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thanks, Steve. My question is kind of on the extent of grace and getting your thoughts. Like, I've been doing a lot of world religious studies, and there's just a lot out there that teach mercy and compassion and kindness and justice. And, you know, I think of verses like, many will come saying, Lord, Lord, but they're not getting in. And things like, you know, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, and that just judgment will be on the deeds that were done in the flesh. And I just wonder if the grace of God and Christ's sacrifice extends to those who've never heard the gospel and maybe followed other things. And not to say that their works would get them there, you know, but Yeah, take it from there. You know, that's just kind of my thought. You know, can Taoists be saved even though they've never heard of Christ because they've practiced mercy and justice and Christ's sacrifice extends to them?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, one thing the Bible makes very clear is that nobody is ever saved apart from the merits of Christ. It is also clear in saying that people who reject Christ will not be saved. On the other hand, it doesn't say what will happen to people who've never heard of Christ. The Bible simply doesn't describe those people because it's not written to those people. The assumption, if someone's reading in the Bible, they've heard of Christ. So the Bible does not talk to people who don't know of Christ or tell much about them. A person who hears about Christ and rejects him has given up on the hope of salvation in Christ. unless they, of course, repent later and come back to him. But people have never heard of him. The Bible doesn't really describe them, except that they do need to hear about Christ. We know that they need to, and that's why the church has made it a priority in many centuries, the earliest and the latest, to reach out and try to reach the unlost. Now, some people think that because we are supposed to reach the unlost, that this implies that if we don't reach them, they can in no way go to heaven when they die. Now, the Bible doesn't say that. It doesn't actually talk about going to heaven much. It doesn't even talk about us going to heaven very much. There's occasional references. It's not the focus of Scripture. The focus of Scripture is the kingdom of God, and that God calls us to be part of his kingdom. That's now. We'll continue to be in his kingdom when we die, in heaven, of course, but... But the focus of the Bible is not, generally speaking, what happens after people die. The Old Testament says virtually nothing about it, although it covers 4,000 years of history. It's like there's almost nothing in it about what happens after people die. In the New Testament, there's a few more things said about that, but not very many. I mean, if you take all the verses of Scripture that teach things, I'd say you've got ten times as many passages talking about how we're supposed to live for Christ and in his kingdom now for every verse that there is that says anything about the next life. So the focus of the Bible is not on the next life. So it doesn't tell us, you know, if people don't hear the gospel, then in the next life such and such a thing will happen to them. We're not told that. It doesn't talk about that. What it does say is people need to hear the gospel because, of course, Christ's kingdom is to fill the whole earth. And Christ calls all men to be part of his kingdom. And if we don't preach the gospel, they won't hear about it and they won't become part of his kingdom. Now, what happens after they die is going to be God's decision. I think what we see in the Old Testament before Jesus came, there were people who went to heaven when they died, I think. or at least who were saved. They died saved. We call them the Old Testament saints. We know many of their names. Now, were there people besides them who died saved in the Old Testament? Yeah, I think probably so. I mean, I don't think that Isaiah was the only man of his generation, or that, you know, Joshua was the only one of his generation who was a saint. I think there were Jews who were faithful to God, and Gentiles too, actually. But they had never heard of Jesus. But But Jesus saved them anyway. You see, the point we have to understand is that no one can be saved without Jesus doing it. Only he is the Savior. There's no other Savior besides Christ. But we don't know that he can't save somebody who's never heard of him, especially if he sees in them a heart that is likely to receive him if they heard. Or, as some theologians say it, The people have responded positively to the light that God gave them. The light that God gave them in this life, if they lived in a country that was never evangelized, might not include hearing the gospel as we hear it. But that doesn't mean they don't have light. All people have some light. And the response to the light appears to be what determines if God is favorable or unfavorable toward them. Job, for example, Job had never heard the gospel. Job had no Bible, so he hadn't read any scripture. But God thought very highly of him. He said he was a just man, a righteous man, who sought to avoid evil. And we know that Job was seeking to worship God. And much of the God that he worshipped was not well known to him. He had a picture of God being a just and good God, but he didn't have a Bible, never heard of Jesus. But on the other hand, God thought well of him. And no doubt there would be others in that category. But nobody is saved by a different religion. Let's say, could a Buddhist be saved by being a good Buddhist, or a Hindu by being a good Hindu, or Muslim by being a good Muslim? No, because those are religions, and religions can't save anyone. Even the Christian religion can't save anyone. Christ saves, not religion. No one's going to get saved by religious activity, but people who are parts of various kinds of Churches, for example, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, different kinds of Protestant churches, though their theology is different from each other, they may have hearts for God that God recognizes as, you know, they're not his enemies. And we don't know that he doesn't see people elsewhere in the world who have never heard the gospel that way. We're not told. But it wouldn't matter to us. I mean, it matters to God, and he'll sort that out, fortunately. But for us... even if we did believe that God has a way of reaching or responding to people who look for him in other societies and who die without finding him, if we could say, well, God will see that they responded to the light they had in a way that pleases him, and Christ, who is the only Savior, will save them because of him, because he did die for everybody after all. And so if they didn't reject him and they sought God but didn't have much access, then why can't Christ save them? I mean, doesn't he want to? I mean, some people think that God doesn't want to save anybody, but he's kind of forced to if we get to them with the gospel first and they receive it. But God doesn't want anyone to be lost. What the Bible says is God doesn't want anyone to perish. He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. It's not that God is looking to damn whoever he can unless they squeak through this little narrow portal because they had the good luck of hearing the gospel at a time when they're vulnerable to it. Now, God doesn't want anyone to be lost, though some will be. But certainly, if there are people who are seeking him and would have loved him, but through no fault of their own, they never heard of him, but they responded rightly to the light he gave them, it's very difficult for me to know how Christ, who died for them, would not recognize them. You know, that's a different thing than hearing about Christ and rejecting him. So, I don't answer for God about what he's going to do about those cases. But if you ask, do I think it's possible there will be some people in heaven who never heard the gospel? Well, I know there are, because all the Old Testament saints are, and they never heard the gospel, not as we know it. So, yeah, there's people in heaven who've never heard the gospel. But that doesn't mean they don't need to hear it if they can. The more people who can hear it, the more can respond and become part of God's kingdom and play a role. in his kingdom mission here on earth and fulfill the role that he created them for. Also to be part of the body of Christ. Also to be delivered from their sin and their demons, which they can't without Christ. I mean, let's face it, going to heaven isn't the only advantage of knowing Jesus, although maybe some Christians have never thought about any other advantage. It is certainly not the advantage that God mentions or emphasizes most in Scripture. Rather, being freed from sin being delivered from darkness, being able to serve God and please God in this life. Those are the things that are emphasized throughout Scripture, in all the epistles, in all of Jesus' teaching. And so, you know, the part about whether they go to heaven when they die, that's the smaller part of the question, and the Bible says the least about it. But even if I thought they could, God has a plan for them in this life, and if we don't reach them, if they don't hear about Christ and their life is wasted, then that's a loss to Christ himself because he had something he hoped for them to do, and they didn't do it because they never heard about it. So it's on us. It's on us that people don't hear. But it's on God to decide what he does with those who don't, and he will do the right thing in every case because he never does wrong. Thank you, Brennan. Okay, let's see. Danny from Dallas, welcome. Welcome.
SPEAKER 07 :
Steve, appreciate your ministry. I've got a question for you. Maybe I heard it on your station or from you. The Bible records in Jesus over three years of ministry. The Bible records, what, 30, 40, 50 days of his stuff, of the stuff he did?
SPEAKER 02 :
About 39. About 39 days.
SPEAKER 07 :
About 39? Okay. Okay. Any ideas on about the others? I remember John wrote, you know, if everything was written and done, there's not enough books and libraries to hold it all. And I've kind of figured that as a guideline, but I was trying to remember what that number was. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Go ahead. Well, yeah, all of the Gospels admittedly give us a very abbreviated life of Christ. I mean, if I was going to write your biography, I'd do some research and try to find out where you were born, maybe who your parents were, how you were educated, what your goals were as a young man, what education you got, what you did at the beginning of your career. I'd want to cover a lot of things because that's what biographies usually concern themselves with. Two of the Gospels don't even mention the birth of Jesus, nor his childhood. And the two that do mention his birth tell us nothing about his childhood except the first few years. And one exception is that Luke tells one brief story about Jesus when he's 12. Then it skips over 18 years. And many of the Gospels just start when Jesus is 30 years old. So it's obvious they're not trying to give us a complete biography of Christ. Well, what are they trying to do then? Well, John, as you mentioned, near the end of his gospel, he says, there's lots of other things Jesus said and did besides those that are written in this book. He said, but these are written so that you might believe that Jesus is the Son of God. You might have life in believing. Now, the other gospels didn't tell us exactly why they wrote, but we might assume that they all wrote for a similar purpose. and that is to give a reader who is not otherwise aware of Christ an acquaintance with him sufficient for them to responsibly place their faith in the fact that he's the Son of God and that they can have life through him. And I believe that all the Gospels do that quite well. Apparently, they, I mean, Jesus, lots of times it says in Matthew, it's a summary statement, it's like, Jesus went through all the villages of Nazareth healing all their sick and casting out demons. Well, those are perhaps scores of miraculous healings that simply are not recorded in detail. They're just summarized. Healing everybody, you know. So, I mean, there's obviously a lot more miracle stories that could be told, but the Gospels choose to tell a select few. And they choose them for purposes of making some kind of a point of who he was, In many cases, like in John's gospel, John specifically selected miracles that would underscore what Jesus said about himself. So, in John 15, Jesus said, I'm the true vine. And in John 2, it records that Jesus turned water into wine, which is what vines do. He did it miraculously, though. In chapter 6, he says, I'm the bread of life, in the context of actually feeding people with multiplied loaves and fishes. In the case of Raising Lazarus from the dead in chapter 11 of John. This is to illustrate what Jesus said earlier, a few verses before he raises him, saying, I am the resurrection and the life. And, of course, he said, I'm the light of the world. In John 8, I believe it's in John 8, and then in John 9, he heals a blind man, gives him light, you know, as it were. So there's these different miracles here. John almost matches these miracles one for one with sayings that Jesus made about himself. And these miracles are symbolic. I mean, they're true miracles, but they symbolize him being, you know, the light of the world. He's the light of the world in a non-literal sense, but he literally heals a blind man to demonstrate that symbolically and so forth. Now, the other Gospels don't connect the miracles of Jesus one and one for one with things Jesus said necessarily. But no doubt they had the same intention. They didn't need to record thousands of miracles, even if you did them. No doubt many miracles were a lot like others. But they give us a sampling of various kinds of miracles, you know, walking on water, walking. stilling a storm, healing various kinds of sickness and blindness and leprosy, casting out demons in different situations. I think they don't intend to give us a catalog of everything Jesus did. They wrote a very selective, in each case, a very selective biographical treatment to provide only enough information as would be helpful to us in getting us to see and able to believe responsibly, as I said, that Jesus is who he is. And so... It is surprising to us that a man who lived such a short life, such a significant one, would have even of that short life only a few days recorded. But apparently all the authors thought that the things they recorded were sufficient to make their points.
SPEAKER 07 :
Man, I sure appreciate it. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right, Danny. God bless you. Good talking to you.
SPEAKER 07 :
Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye now.
SPEAKER 02 :
Let's see here. Oh, we've got a break coming up here, but we have another half hour or two. We've got a lot of calls waiting, and we'll get to all of them. In the next half hour, The Narrow Path is a listener-supported ministry. We pay lots of money to radio stations, and we're on a lot of radio stations across the country, and they're not cheap. But you notice we don't have any commercial breaks. Even this is not a commercial break. We have nothing to sell. You can't buy anything from us at our website. We sell nothing over the air. We don't sell anything at all. We are simply listener-supported. So if listeners keep supporting it, we'll stay on the air. Otherwise, we don't. I will say this, though. The money that is given to The Narrow Path all goes to paying for radio time. When I say all, I mean like maybe 0.5% of it might be used on office supplies or things like that. But we have no salaries, no overhead, nothing. And so the gifts that are given, they go to the radio so people can hear the program just like you're hearing it right now and hopefully can benefit from it. If you'd like to donate to us, you can. You can go to The Narrow Path, P.O. Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. Or you can do it at our website, thenarrowpath.com, where everything is free. That's thenarrowpath.com. I'll be back in 30 seconds. Don't go away.
SPEAKER 03 :
The Narrow Path is one feature of the teaching ministry of Steve Gregg. Steve's philosophy of teaching is to educate, not indoctrinate his listeners. He believes that Christians should learn to think for themselves about the Bible and not be dependent on him or any other teacher for their convictions. We hope to teach Christians how to think, not what to think about the Bible.
SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome back to the Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg, and we're live for another half hour taking your calls. We have one line open right now. If you'd like to call, the number is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. 844-484-5737. And if you're not familiar with the program, people call in because we talk about the Bible here. If you have questions about the Bible, maybe you have a different view of the Bible than I have. You're welcome to call and say so. I'd be glad to talk to you. It's an open forum about really biblical stuff. So feel free to call if you have questions. 844-484-5737. Our next caller is David from New Mexico. Hi, David. Welcome. Hi, Steve. How are you?
SPEAKER 08 :
Good. I had a couple questions. The first question, if you haven't heard about it, then I'll just move to the second question. But I was wondering, have you heard about a video that's on YouTube called Messiah 2030? Do you know anything about that, who it's from and what it's about?
SPEAKER 02 :
No, I have never heard of it. Never heard of it.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay, well, just give me a little rundown, because you may hear about it later on. Someone forwarded to me, and basically it's this idea that even though we can't know the day or the hour of Christ's return, supposedly they've done this biblical chronology that you can know the year. And so, of course, they're claiming that Jesus will return in 2030. So it's a very lengthy video, but if you ever want to check it out, It is on YouTube.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, I haven't the least interest. David, let me ask you just out of curiosity, how long have you been a Christian?
SPEAKER 08 :
Oh, I've been a Christian for a long time, and I'm not calling because I believe this video.
SPEAKER 02 :
The reason I ask is if you're a Christian long enough, you will have heard this very claim made about a dozen or more different dates over the years. I've been in the ministry for 55 years, and I literally have heard at least a dozen dates that were calculated by Bible experts and so forth and different years and so forth. And they've all been perfectly wrong. And there's not the slightest reason to believe that anyone in the future will get it right. You know, if they do, it's only by chance, not by their expertise. Because Jesus said, it's not for you to know the times or the seasons that the Father's put in his own power. So that people would make an effort to try to calculate the times or the seasons that the Father's put in his own power. When Jesus said, that's not for you to know. It just means they're in a rebellion. That's rebellion against him. He says, listen, don't worry about that. Don't think about that. That's not for you to know. But I'm going to spend a lot of time calculating that. I'm going to have a whole website about it. I know whole radio programs that almost every day, that's their focus. Oh, we're living near the end and so forth. And I think, why would you want to have a whole ministry in rebellion against what Jesus said? I don't understand that.
SPEAKER 08 :
Exactly. I hear what you're saying. Yeah, I understand what you're saying. The only other question I was going to ask you real quick was I hear a lot of people talk about the chronological Bible, and I realize that it puts things in chronological order, but I guess what I kind of wonder about is when we obviously look at our regular Bible from Genesis to Revelation, obviously it begins at the beginning of the world, the creation of the world, and it goes forward in somewhat of a chronology of a history. So How different is a chronological Bible in that regard to putting things in order, and do you believe those are helpful?
SPEAKER 02 :
Apparently they're helpful for some people, and I could see how they would be. I mean, if a person's not familiar with the Bible, they might get a little confused. You see, here's why our Bible doesn't read strictly chronologically, and that's because some books are parallel to other books. For example, the books of 1 Chronicles, for example, is parallel in its material to the books of 1 and 2 Samuel. So, you know, if you read through the Bible, you're going to read 1 and 2 Samuel. But later on, you're going to come to the same stories and same information, much of it, in 1 Chronicles. And likewise, when you read 1 and 2 Kings. you'll read that, and then eventually you'll come to 2 Chronicles, and it's going to be the same stories that are in 1 and 2 Kings. Now, when I say the same stories, I don't mean identical, but it's the same time period, and many of the same stories are there. Chronicles will have different details, but many of the same ones, too. It's like they're telling the same history, but including and excluding different parts. It's like reading the four Gospels. If you read the Gospel of Matthew... You do have a chronological story, a roughly chronological story of Jesus. But then when you read Mark, you're going to start at the beginning again and get the same story. Mark doesn't follow chronologically after Matthew. It parallels it, and so does Luke. So this is why, and then when you have the epistles of Paul, they're not arranged in our Bible in the order they were written. They're generally arranged in order of descending size. So the larger epistles of Paul are near the front, and then they dwindle down to Philemon, which is the smallest. But, I mean, the Psalms, for example, you're not going to run into the Psalms until you've finished all the history books of the Old Testament. But the Psalms, of course, belong to some of those historical periods you've already read about in the historical section. David was, you know, the story of David's in 1 Samuel and Chronicles. So you're going to be interlacing the Psalms. with those stories. So that's why chronological Bibles have moved things around to be you encounter them at the right time in the overall narrative. Now, I have never used a chronological Bible. Once you're familiar with the Bible, you know what time period you're reading about. And so you realize, oh, yeah, this is all sort of talked about over here. But for people who are maybe just getting acquainted with the Bible, it may be helpful. There were not chronological Bibles through most of church history, so Christians had to get to know their Bibles without that aid. But it can be an aid to some people, I suppose. So I wouldn't say not to do it. It might, however, be that if you're reading only a chronological Bible, you would not pick up, as you would just reading your Bible through, sometimes what the contents of a given book is. Because you're going to have the book of Jeremiah interlaced with with stories in Kings, you know, and Chronicles. And same thing with Isaiah. Whereas you might not, if you read through the whole book of Isaiah or the whole book of Jeremiah as a single book, as you're reading through the Bible, you may remember, oh, this was in Isaiah or this was in Jeremiah. And, you know, just by reading through the Bible, you remember, oh, it was in the Psalms I read this or, you know, in Amos or whatever, you know. But if it's all laced together as you're reading through it, you're not really getting a sense of when you've changed from one book to another and which book contains which. But it has its place. It has its place. And I would say that someone who's never read through the Bible might want to read through a chronological Bible in their first time. I'm not saying they should, but they might want to. But if they do, I wouldn't do it again. I would probably just start reading through the Bible ordinarily. Get acquainted with each book. Oh, gee.
SPEAKER 08 :
All right. Well, thanks. I appreciate your insight.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. God bless you, David. Good talking to you. Let's see. Esther from Long Beach, California. Welcome.
SPEAKER 05 :
God bless you, sir. Thank you. I hear a lot of the programs that come on. They're saying, Paul said this, Isaiah said this, but I think As nemesis and as Christian, we need to let that sinner out there know that God wrote the Bible. God told Paul what to say. And all those writers and all the 66 books in the Bible. And that's what I hear a lot on the radio. Paul said this. John said this. Isaiah said this. And another thing that I heard a lot of during the Christmas said that Mary was 13 years old. I don't believe that. Because Mary and Elizabeth lived many, many miles. And Mary went to visit Elizabeth. And if she had been 13 years old, I don't think they would have had the conversation or the closeness that they had. And our Bible tells us that Mary, after she left Elizabeth's home, she stayed there until John was born. And she went to her own home. And I never believed, I don't care what the traditions were back then those days, that Mary was only 13 years old. To me, that's a baby. And I wonder sometimes if that's why some men think they can molest a 13-year-old. No, I believe that Mary was a woman. The Bible says she was born of a woman. And when Isaac was carried up on the mountain by Abraham, he was 13 years old. And I do not believe that Mary was a 13-year-old.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. Well, you're certainly entitled to that belief. The fact is that you say to you, 13-year-old is a baby. Yeah, I think in our society, some people who are 35 are still infantile because people aren't made to grow up in modern society. Some of them do, and some just don't. And in our society, we have this category called adolescence. You've got children who are prior to adolescence called children, and then they reach an age which in old times they would have been called adults. But we call them adolescents, and they get about 10 years there of adolescence almost. And they're neither children or adults, and we don't treat them like either. We don't treat them exactly like children, and we don't treat them exactly like adults. That's our culture, though. And, of course – whatever our culture has done for decades and generations is going to seem natural to us. So to us, a 13-year-old girl seems like a child. In almost all cultures previous to ours, a 13-year-old girl was a woman. But she wouldn't be like our modern 13-year-olds because our modern 13-year-olds aren't raised to be women at 13. They're raised to be adolescents, and they get to live kind of an irresponsible, childlike life but they have a little more privileges than childhood. Adolescence is a very artificial category. But if you lived in a society where it was understood, when you reach puberty, you're now grown up. And that's why in the Jewish society, which is, of course, the society the Bible is written to, a boy at age 13 is bar mitzvahed. And the word bar mitzvah suggests he's now a son of the covenant. He's like a responsible adult. When he was up to 12 years old, he was under his parents' spiritual umbrella, as it were. But then when he's 13, he takes on adult responsibility, not only before God, but in many cases in business. I mean, they might take over the family business. I mean, there are children in places like India and places like that today who are not any older than that, and they run shops because, I mean, that's what they're raised to do. So culture is different in different places. And I do believe that it was commonplace in biblical times and in probably many parts of the world today for young women especially, who are 13, to actually get married. Now, you said you wonder if that belief is what causes men to think it's okay to molest children. I doubt if men who molest children are basing their actions on any biblical belief at all. I have a feeling they're just being jerks and evil. And people who do that aren't really following their interpretation of the Bible, generally speaking. They're just doing evil things they want to do. But a good man will not molest a little girl even if he does believe Mary was 13, even if he believed that in biblical times 13-year-olds usually were married or did get married shortly after that. Because that seems to be culturally the case. historically known, but it doesn't provide any excuse for anyone to molest a child or to molest anybody, even an adult. But I appreciate your thoughts there. That's certainly why we have an open line.
SPEAKER 05 :
Could I say this? Could I say this?
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, quickly. I have more people to take. Could I say this?
SPEAKER 05 :
Could I say this?
SPEAKER 02 :
Please do.
SPEAKER 05 :
When I go by, the Bible says he was born of a woman. And she went to her own home.
SPEAKER 02 :
I heard that. Yes, I heard you say that.
SPEAKER 05 :
She went to her own home. Uh-huh.
SPEAKER 02 :
No, her own home. You mean that she owned a home? No, she didn't own a home. She wasn't married yet. She would be living with her family until she was married. That was always the case in biblical times. Yeah, I think you're, again, it's natural enough to be kind of thinking of a 13-year-old in terms that we think of 13-year-olds, right? And you say, well, a 13-year-old wouldn't have her own home. Well, her father's home was her own home. That was her home. Her home was with her parents. She went to be with her relative, Elizabeth, for a while, and then she went back to her own home, which was her parents' home. And girls that age would live with their fathers. In fact, even older women would live with their fathers until their fathers died or until they got married. But most girls got married before their fathers died. But, yeah, I mean, and it does say she was a woman, exactly. But what I'm saying is in that culture, a girl who had reached puberty was now regarded as a woman, and a boy who had reached puberty was regarded as a man. We just prolong infantilism in children longer than they need to be. Other cultures didn't indulge in that so much, partly because they were poorer than we are. Parents can afford to raise their kids until they're in their 20s or 30s in many cases in America. In ancient times, families were dirt poor. And so you've got a kid who can carry adult responsibility, they start carrying it. They start helping to support the family and so forth. They're not kept infantile like we keep our children so many times. Anyway, thank you for your call. Good talking to you. I didn't hear what you just said. It sounded like you said you're not through, but that's for me to decide. And I think you are. But thank you. I appreciate you calling. Let's talk to Peter from Avon, Connecticut. Hi, Peter. Welcome. Hi, Steve. How are you?
SPEAKER 01 :
Good, thanks. Hey, I'm kind of in a tough situation. I wanted to call and talk to you about miracles and what advice you can give and maybe some direction. I was just diagnosed with ALS. I'm sorry.
SPEAKER 07 :
Oh, wow.
SPEAKER 01 :
Horrible, horrible. I know. Horrible disease. I know it is. And there's so many miracles in the Bible. They don't appear to me to be as numerous nowadays as they were in the Bible. I understand Jesus was trying to build this community, and, of course, he had to prove to people that he was God. But I don't know if he's still doing the amount of miracles, but I certainly need one because I really don't look forward to what lies ahead of me.
SPEAKER 02 :
I don't blame you. I mean, I know. I know what ALS is like. I had a friend who I lost my age with that. And, of course, I know of other cases. Well, I'll tell you, I certainly would wish a miracle for you. But to answer you very honestly, the Bible does not present miracles as the norm. In the Bible, there are seasons where God did a lot of miracles and seasons where there were centuries between miracles. For example, I mean, God did a lot of miracles. Probably the first time he did a lot of miracles was when he delivered Israel from Egypt and took them through the wilderness and brought them with Joshua into a promised land. There are a lot of miracles associated with that. But then after that, we don't read of miracles much until the time of Elijah. And Elisha. Now, Elijah and Elisha were like, what, 600 years after the Exodus, something like that, 600, 700 years later. There are a lot of miracles there, too. But there were centuries in between where we don't read of any miracles or many. And then after Elijah and Elisha, there's another 700 years or so before Jesus comes along. And before Jesus comes, John the Baptist comes. And the Bible specifically says John the Baptist didn't do any miracles at all. But Jesus, of course, did a lot. So did his apostles. So, we don't really see miracles as the norm in the Bible. And even in Jesus' ministry, we were just talking to an earlier caller, Jesus did a lot of miracles. But he lived 33 years, and he didn't do any of them until he was 30. So, all the miracles he did in his ministry were confined to the last 10% of his lifetime. And the first 90% was... not particularly miraculous except at birth. So, you know, we do read a lot about miracles in the Bible because those miracles are associated with significant events, and those are the significant events that the Bible wants to talk about because of their significance. Now, miracles still happen. I know that miracles still happen. The Bible doesn't ever say that the age of miracles has passed. But it also, you know, the age of miracles was not passed in the days of Jeremiah. But no miracles were being done. But, you know, there are seasons where God does miracles and seasons where he doesn't do so many. Now, I would not want to discourage you from trusting God for a miracle. I also wouldn't want to give you a falsehood and say there's a guarantee of miracles. The Bible does not guarantee miracles to us. So... I mean, if I were running things, I would certainly want to provide a miracle for everyone who's in such a terrible circumstance. But I will say this, when God doesn't provide miracles, I have to assume that he could, and the fact that he doesn't means he has something better in mind. I'm sure that Paul's thorn in the flesh was not as severe a condition as Lou Gehrig's disease, but it But it was a torment to him, apparently a constant torment. He begged God to take it away from him. And even though God worked miracles of healing and even raising the dead through Paul's ministry, he denied Paul a miracle in this case. He said, my grace is sufficient for you. My strength is made perfect in your weakness. Now, Paul still believed in miracles, but not in his case. He felt God had told him, no, I've got a better idea. I've got something better in mind. And, you know, when we're suffering... A horrible situation that only God can fix. We ask him to do it. We can't imagine that he'd have something better in mind or that there could even be such a thing as something better than for us to be healed. But even those who don't get, you know, debilitating sicknesses go through trials which seem like there can be no good in them. And yet God has promised he'll bring some good from it. Now, Obviously, some diseases greatly shorten people's lives or greatly diminish their quality of life before they die. And ALS, obviously, is one that typically does that. And I'd hate to have it myself. I hate that you have it. Of course, if hating something made it not exist, we wouldn't have any troubles at all in the world. But let me just say that If you can trust God when you're healthy, you can trust him when you have a disease as well, because he doesn't change. We trust God because he's faithful. We trust him because he's good, because he always does the very best thing that he can imagine for his plans, for each individual who's trusting him. And so the best we can do is trust him. It is not impossible for him to heal. I know of people who were healed of cancers that were said to be incurable. I've heard of people cured of all kinds of amazing things. But again, it's not the norm. If God wants it to happen, it can happen. And I would certainly pray for that. I'd certainly pray for your healing. But I'd also pray, if I were you, for God to bring you close to him so that you will do well In this test, whether you receive a healing or not, I don't say that with any callousness at all. My heart breaks for you. I just know. I'm a realist. I know that sometimes when it's our time to go, God takes us all different ways. And sometimes he takes us sick. But he never does anything wrong. And so miracles, yeah, miracles are something God can do and sometimes does do. But it's people who guarantee you that if you have enough faith, you'll have a miracle are probably going to disillusion you. It's better to just take the Bible for what it actually does say. Even Paul couldn't get a miraculous healing, even though he raised other dead people. You know, he couldn't help his friends from chronic illnesses they had, like Timothy and like Trophimus. So we live in a world that if we could work miracles, we'd do a lot more of them probably than God does. But we're not as wise as he is either. So many... I'm sure that we have thousands of people listening who are praying for you right now, and I hope many of them will remember to pray for you. But you did call to ask about a miracle, and I'm just saying ask God to give you the miracle of grace to glorify him in the midst of whatever his will may be for you and to heal you if it's his will. And then I would leave it at his door because it's only he can do anything about it. No man can. So I just leave it with God, and I would trust him to do what he sees as the right thing. I'm terribly sorry to hear about your circumstance, Peter.
SPEAKER 01 :
It's not pretty. No, it's not. And that's what I'm looking for, as I told you, direction. And you've given me some that I... Don't feel all that enthusiastic right now.
SPEAKER 02 :
I don't blame you. I don't blame you. Peter, let me recommend something. Have you been to our website before?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay. If you go to thenarrowpath.com under Topical Lectures, there's a series there called Making Sense Out of Suffering. It's only four lectures long, but I would suggest you listen to those lectures. It might be helpful.
SPEAKER 01 :
And what is it called again? I didn't quite catch that.
SPEAKER 02 :
Making Sense Out of Suffering.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay. Okay.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, at thenarrowpath.com, there's a tab that says Topical Lectures, and those series are listed in alphabetical order.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay. All right. So at this point, there's just not much for me to do except to try to keep my faith.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, don't just try. Just put your faith in Christ. Maintain your faith in Christ. And we all need to do that. And all of us, at some point, will come to the end of our lives. So it may not be. We may be younger or older than other people, but we'll all have the same test at the end, and that's whether we're hanging on to Christ and trusting in him when life has kind of dealt us our final day. Or God can heal. It's up to him.
SPEAKER 01 :
I'm sorry. I didn't hear that.
SPEAKER 02 :
I said, or God can heal you. It's up to him. We need to trust him to do it right there.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right. Well, brother.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, God bless you. Thank you, Steve, and I appreciate your prayers.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, and again, there are thousands of people listening. I'm sure many of them are praying for you right now. And probably a lot of the people listening to us are people who do believe that miracles are guaranteed. And I don't believe they're correct, but maybe according to their faith, be it unto you. Maybe God will honor it. All right?
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you, Steve. Appreciate it. Nice to talk to you.
SPEAKER 02 :
God bless you. Have a good weekend. Bye now. Well, we have our lines almost full still, and I'm looking at a clock that's going to say I'm off the air in about two minutes. I usually don't do this, but I'm going to see. I mean, sometimes I do. Someone's been waiting a long time. Connor from Bradford, Pennsylvania. Can you do anything with two minutes or one? Oh, I'm sorry. I had less. I had one. I apologize. The music's playing. I'll be cut off here in less than a minute, so my apologies. Feel free to call Monday, and I'll try to take all the calls then. God bless you. You've been listening to The Narrow Path. My name is Steve Gregg. I always try to squeeze in as many calls as we can, but sometimes I miscalculate how many we can get in. Anyway, we are a listener-supported ministry. As I said earlier, if you'd like to help us stay on the air, you can write to The Narrow Path, P.O. Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. Or you can go to our website. Everything at our website is free. The series I recommended to Peter just now, we have lectures, hundreds of them. If you go to thenarrowpath.com, look under the tab that says Topical Lectures and click on Making Sense of Suffering. The website, thenarrowpath.com. Have a good weekend.
What’s the story behind dispensationalism? How did it shape the modern state of Israel? And what lessons can we learn from the Book of Job and the struggles of anxiety? Steve Gregg answers listener calls and offers biblical insights in this episode of The Narrow Path, weaving together theological history, scriptural interpretation, and personal growth.
SPEAKER 1 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 03 :
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 to take your calls. If you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith, we welcome you to join us in this hour and give us a call and we can talk to you about those things. The number to call is 844- 484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. And any of you who happen to be in the Temecula area or Southern California area, there's a gathering at a man's house that he's a brother who He comes to some of our meetings, and I come to some of his. And he has me speaking at his house this Saturday morning in Temecula. And the address is posted at our website, thenarrowpath.com, under announcements. And if you're interested, that's 8 o'clock. This Saturday, he wants me to come and talk about the Jesus Revolution, the Jesus Movement, and so I will. I'd love to talk about that. I was there, and it's certainly something I'd love to remember. Anyway, that's happening this Saturday. If you're in the area and want to join us, go to thenarrowpath.com, look under Announcements, and you'll find for this Saturday – the announcement and the description of where that's going to be. All right, let's go to the phones and talk to Timothy from Ontario, California, who hasn't called us for quite a while. Hi, Timothy. Good to hear from you again.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, thanks, Steve, for taking my call. That meeting on Saturday morning, does that bring your own cereal? No, he cooks something there. He cooks up stuff.
SPEAKER 03 :
It's a pretty good group of men, at least when I visited there before. Yeah.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, I wish I could make it, but unfortunately I won't be able to. But my question is, often we hear a lot of talk about dispensationalism and its theology, but we never really talk about or hear about the founder of it. And I was wondering what information you could give me about the founder, John Nelson Darby.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, well, Darby was an Anglican. He was Irish in the early 1800s. He was a Bible student, scholar. He wrote a lot of theological works. He made his own translation of the Bible into English, in addition to the King James, which already was in use. You can still, many Bible books. websites where you can read different versions of Bobby. You can find the Darby version there. That's his. He did that. He is most famous for inventing the dispensational position. Now, there are people, dispensationalists usually, who say he didn't originate it. They say he was just combining things that other Christians had held throughout the centuries together. And that's in one sense true. There are a few things that Darby taught which became part of his system, which a very small minority of Christians at different times had held something like it. Darby, of course, is the one who came up with the idea that the nation of Israel, even after they reject Christ, still are God's chosen people. and that God still has some promises to fulfill that God made to Abraham, which he has not yet fulfilled to the nation of Israel, and that those will be fulfilled in the last days. Now, Darby did come up with that, and yet you'll find some of the Puritans a few centuries before him did believe that Israel would come back to their land at some point, but they didn't necessarily say that that's because there were unfulfilled promises that God owed them. In fact, I don't believe they believed that. I don't think anyone believed that before Darby. They just believed it was part of God's judgment on Israel that they were going to come back and the Antichrist. In fact, the Puritans said that the Antichrist, well, I would say some church fathers actually said the Antichrist will draw the Jews back into their land. They didn't see it as God fulfilling some promise, but something that was going to be very bad for Israel. But Darby is the one who said, no, Israel is going to be brought back by God to their land. And that's because God has made promises to Abraham that have not been fulfilled yet. And so he owes them some fulfillment of his promises. So that's the biggest innovation that Darby came up with. And, of course, dispensationalism is accepted by possibly the majority of evangelicals in America today. But this came up in 1830. He also came up with the pre-tribulation rapture. Now, again, dispensationalists will say, no, there were people who taught rapture before Darby. Well, there were a few. There were a few people who seemed to have thought that there would be a rapture maybe three and a half years before the second coming of Christ. These were definitely in the minority. It was not a majority view. Darby changed it a bit and said, no, there's going to be a rapture that's going to be before the tribulation, which he identified with the 70th week of Daniel and so forth. So he said it's going to be seven years before Christ comes back. So Darby changed. did pick up some ideas that had some analog in some minority groups that had existed before him. But he put it together into the system, which is now called dispensationalism, and especially the idea that Israel are still God's chosen people, even though they reject the Messiah. That's Darby. That's Darby all over. And that's, of course, what a great number of Protestant denominations as well as non-denominational churches teach today. In fact, it's probable that the majority of megachurches today hold that view either by default or very actively.
SPEAKER 04 :
Do you think dispensationalists or the view of dispensationalism had a direct effect in somehow causing Israel to become a nation?
SPEAKER 03 :
Absolutely. Even Israeli historians know that. I've seen more than one Israeli historian writing the history of modern Israel saying this would never have happened if it wasn't for the dispensational movement in American evangelicalism. We know that a man named William Blackstone wrote a dispensational book back in the late 1800s, called Jesus is Coming. And it was distributed to, I think, most pastors in the United States. It was hugely... It was like, if you've heard of Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth, which sold 40 million copies or something like that and changed the whole... emphasis of the evangelical church to the immediate second coming of Christ, Blackstone's Jesus is coming, he's like the Hal Lindsey of the late 19th century. And so he was a huge influence on American evangelicalism. And he also made what he called a memorial memorial. And each time there's a new president of the United States, he presented a memorial to the president, which I'm not sure why he called it a memorial, but I just call it a document, signed by some of America's most important, you know, entrepreneurs, bankers, politicians, religious leaders, very, very, very influential people. rich Americans, and not always rich, but just influential. And this document was actually requesting that the president of the United States would support the creation of an Israeli or Jewish state in the Middle East. And this was done for several presidents before Truman. Prior to Truman. Prior to Truman, yeah. And most of these presidents, they didn't mock it or anything like that, but they just didn't move on it. But Truman did. And what happened was, after World War II, because of the information of the Holocaust reaching the world, and everyone being aghast that the Jews had been so mistreated in Germany and so forth, there was a renewed interest in what was already called the Zionist movement. The Zionist movement... had begun in the 1890s in Europe. A guy named Theodor Herzl had started it. He was not a religious Jew. He's Jewish, but he was not observant. For example, his son was not circumcised, and he himself was not observant. But he started the movement, and it became somewhat popular among some Jewish people in Europe. But it never really took off until after World War II when tremendous sentiments of the world, especially the United States, were on the side of Israel because of what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust. And so, of course, Truman was influenced by that pressure. And so he, you know, through the influence of Blackstone and others, he decided that he was going to support the nation of Israel being founded. in the Middle East, and this was a decision made by the United Nations, and apparently it looked as if the United Nations didn't have enough votes to support it until Truman made some phone calls to various smaller nations that benefit from the United States and saying if you don't vote for this, then we're going to diminish or withdraw our support for your nations. So there got to be enough votes in the United Nations to agree to it. And so that's, you know, Truman was very strongly, perhaps not only, but very strongly influenced by American dispensationalism. Now, there's more to it than that. And I do have a lecture at a website called The Modern State of Israel that goes into that history in more detail. But, yeah, dispensationalism, even Israeli historians will strongly acknowledge, easily acknowledge that dispensationalism helped create the state of Israel.
SPEAKER 04 :
That's very interesting. Thank you for your information, Steve. I really appreciate it. All right, Timothy.
SPEAKER 03 :
Good talking to you.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay. Bye-bye.
SPEAKER 03 :
Bye now. All right. Benjamin in Greenville, Ohio. Welcome to The Narrow Path.
SPEAKER 02 :
Hello, brother. Hi. So I just finished reading the book of Job. I don't know if I'm doing what my dad used to call putting emphasis on the wrong syllable. Yeah. But as I read... Job's three friends came, and I feel like they were offering him correction through the reading, and then I get right to the end, and the Lord kind of rebukes the same friends. I feel like I'm missing something.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, the friends were hoping to bring correction. They were hoping to bring help to Job. In fact, they're sometimes called Job's comforters, though they didn't bring him any comfort at all. All they brought was really accusation. Now, at the end, as you say, God rebuked them because he says they did not speak rightly of the Lord as Job did. Now, not everything Job said was right either. Job said some things that were kind of immoderate and angry, and his friends were getting angry at him. Here's what was going on. Job had been a successful, rich guy, the greatest man of the Middle East at the time. And then all these trials came upon him. He lost his wealth. He lost his health. He lost his family. And so his friends came to visit him to try to comfort him in his grief. But they held a theology which Job himself also says he had held also previously. And that is that if you're a good man, you'll prosper. And God will give you good circumstances. But if you are bad, God will bring harsh circumstances on you. Now, this is a view that is probably held by default by many religious people, even though it's not scripturally true. But, I mean, it's kind of a common sense belief unless you have divine revelation putting a finer point on it. So they felt like, okay, God had been happy with Job when he was all rich, but now that all these disasters came, God must be angry at him. Therefore, even though Job did not have any obvious sins in his life, he must have had some secret sins, and they were calling upon him to admit it. They're calling him to repent. They're calling him to do things which a Christian might even call an unbeliever to do. The trouble is Job wasn't an unbeliever and he wasn't guilty of anything. God himself had told Satan that Job wasn't guilty of anything. He said that he had afflicted him without cause, it says in chapter 2 of Job. And of course, both in chapter 1 and 2 of Job, God says to Satan that Job was a man who was blameless and did righteousness and avoided evil. So God's recommendation of Job was very high, but You know, it was a mystery to everybody why a good man would suffer such disasters if their theology was correct. Now, the point is their theology was not correct. It might be generally correct or often correct. It is often the case that God brings blessing on righteous people and disaster on bad people. But we know also, as the psalmists often mention, God seems to prosper the wicked sometimes, while the righteous are often poor and downtrodden. So, in other words, their theology was true, except when it isn't true. Their theology was, they universalized a principle that might be true some of the time, but it's definitely not true all of the time. Now, unfortunately for them, it wasn't true in this case. Job was not being punished for anything wrong he had done. But their theology was inflexible. And Job was telling them, he said, I used to think that way, too, until this happened. He said, I guarantee you, I haven't done anything. I don't have any secret sins. I haven't done any criminal acts. I've been faithful to God. And they were angry that he kept saying that because their theology said, no, we can see with our own eyes that you've suffered disaster, which means disaster. our theology being true, that you must have done something to deserve it. And they would not let go of that theology. And Job wouldn't let go of his. I mean, he said, I used to think that way, but I know better now. And so this is where they spoke wrongly of God. They thought they were speaking rightly of God. But all they ended up doing is accusing an innocent man because their theology was wrong. I think of this sometimes when I think of certain theologies around today. People, for example, there's one school of theology in some churches that if you have enough faith, you'll never get sick. If you have enough faith, you'll never be poor. Now, if you do get sick and poor and you don't get over it, then the assumption is you don't have enough faith. It's your fault. So you end up accusing the victim. instead of having compassion, realizing, well, your theology may not always be right. At least at that point, theology may not. Sometimes there are some Calvinists, because of their doctrine of total depravity, they'll say, well, everyone who's not regenerated, everyone who's not a Christian, is a hater of God, and the thoughts and intentions of their hearts are only evil continually. Well, that's not true of everybody, and the Bible doesn't say it's true of everybody. So, you know, but their theology tells them that, and then you're going to see people who aren't Christians who aren't that way, and you're going to think badly of them that way, and that's what bad theology does to relationships. It makes you assume that your theology is correct, enough to condemn people who may, in fact, be innocent. You know, the Pharisees were that way, but when they saw Jesus' disciples picking grain on the Sabbath, technically. That was a violation of the Sabbath. They're not supposed to work. They were harvesting on the Sabbath. And Jesus rebuked the Pharisees, said, if you had known what this means, and he quoted Hosea 6.6, I will have mercy and not sacrifice. He said, you would not have condemned the guiltless. So the theology of the Pharisees condemned people who were not guilty of anything. Job's friends did the same thing. Now, they thought they were doing right. I imagine the Pharisees probably thought they were doing right, too. I imagine everyone who's got bad theology thinks they have good theology. But, you know, this was the issue. Job's friends didn't have good theology. What they said was true much of the time, but they weren't allowing that there are other kinds of circumstances. God isn't always, he's not like a slot machine or a vending machine where you put a you know, the money in and then you push the buttons and the product comes out, God has his plans. And he has different plans for different people. And sometimes good people suffer in God's plan because there's something good he hopes to bring from it. But their theology, now we can't blame them much because they didn't have a Bible. Not one book of the Bible had been written when Job lived. It's almost certain that Job was the earliest book of the Bible written. So, you know, we can't really blame these guys for not knowing any better. They're just kind of speculative theologians without any scripture, without any revelation from God. But when Christians do that with a Bible available, then we've got much more to be blamed for.
SPEAKER 02 :
Sure. All right. Great, brother. I appreciate the help out there.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, Benjamin. Good talking to you. Thanks for joining us. Cheryl from Lincoln, California. Welcome.
SPEAKER 01 :
Hi, Steve. Thank you. I have a question for you. I need some more clarification from you about I've heard you say on the radio program or topical lectures that anxiety is a sin. And I want to push back on that just a little bit, having dealt with anxiety since childhood. I'm now 67. Is it is it Actually, that's plain and clear, or is it more like the way I'm addressing it in my life now with God is I have this tendency, and I bring it to the Lord, and I work through it with Him. Like you were saying, you think of Jesus when we're told to think of something that is true, noble, right, and all those things. You think of Jesus because He's all those things. And so is it more about what we do with it that becomes a sin?
SPEAKER 03 :
Of course.
SPEAKER 01 :
Or is just having anxiety a sin?
SPEAKER 03 :
Anxiety is just a species of fear. And there's all kinds of fear. There's intimidation. There's anxiety. There's, you know, terror. There's all kinds of fears. And fear is a temptation, I believe. I believe fear is itself a good thing in some cases. For example, if you are thinking about crossing the street, but you can see that the traffic's going very fast and there's not a break in the traffic, and so you decide not to do it because you could probably get killed, then your fear of getting killed by cars is a good thing. It keeps you from doing stupid things. And, of course, animals have fear of the same kind. Basically, they're afraid of predators and things. They're afraid of a man shooting at them and things like that. So, I mean, fear is something that can motivate people to be wise, and to lack that kind of fear is to just be stupid. Now, on the other hand, fear, it's an emotional response. It's a visceral response to certain stimuli. You don't choose whether you have fear or not, but you have to choose what you will do with the fear. For example, if you see that somebody is drowning, out in the ocean, and there's sharks out there, and you know how to save people, but you're a little afraid of the sharks, now what do you do? Well, probably, if you're in most circumstances a Christian, would go out to save that person and take the risk, even though they have fear. And they should have fear. It's a dangerous situation. But having fear doesn't mean you're going to let fear dominate your choices. You need to follow your convictions and what's right and wrong, rather than your emotion. Fear simply tempts you.
As the episode continues, we delve into listener queries about the delineation of the Ten Commandments, the concept of full preterism, and the complexities involved in discerning the true Christian church in today's world. Bridging biblical history with present-day theological concerns, Steve offers practical advice on maintaining unwavering faith amid personal and doctrinal challenges. An insightful conversation that provokes thought and inspires spiritual reflection.
SPEAKER 01 :
Good afternoon and welcome to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we are live for an hour each weekday afternoon. I expect we'll have no trouble with the broadcast. I am in Southern California. You may have heard there's some big fires in this area. They are not very close to where I am, so I don't expect them to come to my neighborhood, but we have been alerted by the electric company that our electricity might be cut off at some point in the next few hours. And so I'm counting on that not happening during the radio program. We will do our best to have the whole program live. If we do happen to get cut off, if our electricity goes down, then there will be a recording of a previous show that will kick in. But I'm going to act as if this is going to work out just like any other day. There's good reason to believe it will. And so I'm going to say if you want to call in and have questions about the Bible or Christianity or you'd like to raise objections or challenges to either of those two feel free to give me a call the number to get me on the air is 844-484-5737 that number again is 844-484-5737 our first caller today is sally calling from nashville tennessee who used to call from i think salem oregon in the old days is that true sally That is correct.
SPEAKER 08 :
That's me.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, and now you're in Nashville. Hi.
SPEAKER 08 :
Yeah, hi. How are you doing? Hey, I have an origin of Satan question. I thought I'd heard most of the arguments about Satan being a fallen angel, which I don't really lean toward. But I'd heard a new one, and I wanted to get your thoughts. Someone said that there's three archangels, Michael, Gabriel, and apparently Lucifer. When I brought up the point about Lucifer being a Latin name in a Hebrew scripture and it really meant morning star, they told me about Job 38.7 that says, When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy, that Satan was at creation with Michael and Gabriel. I have not heard that one, so I wanted to get your thoughts.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, there's actually no reference to any archangels in the Bible except for Michael. Michael is referred to as the archangel. Yeah, in the book of Jude, in verse 9, Michael is referred to as an archangel. Gabriel is not. Lucifer is certainly not. Lucifer is not even said to be an angel of any kind. Gabriel, of course, is a messenger angel. He brought the messages to Joseph and Mary and to others in the Bible, even Daniel. Gabriel is a messenger angel, but he's never referred to as an archangel. Now, what that person said, I had been taught, too, all my life. I grew up thinking that there were three archangels, Michael, Gabriel, and Lucifer, and that all of them, each of them had a third of the other angels sort of assigned to them, and they led these ones. And then when Lucifer rebelled and fell away, his third of the angels went with him, and they became the demons, and this is how I was taught growing up. But, of course, then when you do grow up, you can read the Bible with your own eyeballs. And that's something I did. And there is no mention of any archangel in the Bible except Michael, and he's only called that one time. Now, Jesus is referred to as the captain of the Lord's hosts, which is archangel. Arche means chief. So the chief angel is what Michael is called. The person who appeared to Joshua, I think is in the fifth chapter of Joshua, outside Jericho, described himself as the chief of the hosts of the Lord. Now, the hosts would probably be the angels of the Lord. And so the chief of them... would probably be the same thing as the archangel, the leader of them. But we don't really have any other names given of any angels who are archangels. So that's not true. Now, in Job, it does say that when God laid the foundations of the earth, the sons of God sang for joy and also the morning stars. Now, the morning stars are obviously, they're equated with the sons of God. However, we don't know who is meant by the sons of God, it seems probable that it's referring to angels. But there's nothing that would suggest that it's referring to archangels. You know, angels could be represented by stars. And given the statement itself, it would suggest that somebody, before the earth was made, obviously not human, was rejoicing with God. So the theory that the morning stars are, singing for joy, that those refer to angels of some kind is not a bad idea. But the thing is, Jesus is also called the morning star. We know he's not an angel. So clearly, the expression morning star can be used more than one way. It may be, in fact, that Job is referring to the angels as morning stars. I have nothing, I'm not opposed to that idea at all. And Jesus, who is not an angel, is also called the morning star. And the king of Babylon is also called the morning star. Apparently it's a flexible term.
SPEAKER 08 :
Right. But one thing that made me kind of pause was him saying that the morning stars were the angels, at least one of them being Lucifer, because of that scripture in Ezekiel, or is it Isaiah where he's described as morning star?
SPEAKER 01 :
That's Isaiah chapter. That's what the word Lucifer means. And it only appears one time in the Bible, actually. And that is, of course, Isaiah 14. Excuse me, Isaiah. Yeah, 1412.
SPEAKER 08 :
Yeah, I think 14. And that's King of Babylon, right?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes, it's referring to the King of Babylon, as the passage says a few verses earlier.
SPEAKER 08 :
Right. So in my mind, if it's referring to the King of Babylon, it can't be Satan. So therefore, how could it be Satan? Because the same word is used.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, those... Those who believe it is Satan, they would say, sure, the passage says it's to the king of Babylon, but very secretly it's really addressing the spiritual power behind the king of Babylon, and that is Satan. So they're seeing something mysterious in it that the Bible doesn't reveal. So I would say, well, if the Bible doesn't reveal that this is talking about the spiritual power behind the king of Babylon, and it says it's written to the king of Babylon... Why don't I just go with what the Bible says? And if you want to make guesses about things the Bible doesn't say, you're welcome to do that. I think when we do theology, we're a lot safer to go with what the Bible actually says rather than guessing at things that the Bible doesn't mention.
SPEAKER 08 :
Right. All right. That helps. I appreciate that.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, Sally. Great talking to you.
SPEAKER 08 :
All right. You too.
SPEAKER 01 :
Bye-bye. All right. Our next caller is Randy from Redlands, California. Randy, welcome.
SPEAKER 05 :
Hey, thanks for taking my call. My question is about Exodus chapter 34, and I have two questions here. You know, it mentions that Moses, the Lord says to Moses, with these words, in accordance with these words, I've made a covenant with you in Israel, and then Moses writes the covenant on the Ten Commandments. So that's the old covenant, is that correct?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes, it is.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay. The Ten Commandments that are listed just before this Are not the Ten Commandments that are in Exodus 20 in Deuteronomy?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, there is no list. There's no list of the Ten Commandments in chapter 34. There are two places in the Bible that list the Ten Commandments. One of them is Exodus 20, which was uttered at Mount Sinai when the Israelites first got there. And the other one is mentioned a generation later. It's over in Deuteronomy chapter 5. Moses runs over the Ten Commandments again. Now, there's no listing of Ten Commandments in Exodus 34. There are some people who think that we should look for Ten Commandments in Exodus 34, verses 10 through 26, or 27, because in verse 28 it says, So he was there with the Lord forty days, meaning Moses was, and forty nights neither he ate bread nor drank water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments. So, on the tables of stone, Moses wrote the Ten Commandments. But we already know what the Ten Commandments were. They were listed for us in chapter 20. There's no list of them in this chapter. What we have in this chapter is a lot more than ten instructions written. I don't know where someone finds Ten Commandments here at all. In verses 10 through 27, I counted them once. It seems like there's at least 15 or more commandments in that section. But those things that are commanded in these verses are not themselves the Ten Commandments. It says, basically it's saying that Moses wrote these things, and he did because we read them in Exodus, but he probably wrote them on papyri or parchment. not on stone. And then it says, and on the stones he wrote the Ten Commandments. So Moses wrote, as I understand it, the entire Pentateuch, or the entire Torah. And the Torah included 613 commandments. But the Ten Commandments were uniquely written on stone. The others were all written on whatever writing materials Moses had, which in those days would either be parchment made from goatskin or papyri, which is sort of a paper-like substance that was manufactured in Egypt. So it's not saying that you will find the Ten Commandments listed in this chapter, because they aren't. And the material that some people, strangely, want to see as, oh, here's a different set of Ten Commandments in this chapter, I'm not sure how they're counting them, I think they almost have to just kind of be artificial in where they put the numbers, because there's a lot more than ten instructions in this particular passage.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, and it's the same thing. There was more than ten there, but verse 27 says, write these words for accordance with these words. Which he did. Which he just was speaking about the words before. Yeah, well, yeah.
SPEAKER 01 :
Right, the words he's given just before, he tells them to write them down, and he did. And that's why we have them in the Bible. He wrote the whole five books of Moses. So they are there. They are there because he did write them down. And then it says, and he wrote the words of the covenant on the tablets, which are the Ten Commandments. So these words that aren't the Ten Commandments, he wrote on whatever writing materials he had. The Ten Commandments, by contrast, were written on tables of stone, it says. So that's all it's saying. It's not giving us a list of the Ten Commandments. It's simply referring back to them. which were already listed 14 chapters earlier and didn't need to be listed here, too.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay, very good. So Hebrews 8.13 says he's made a new covenant and the person is obsolete. He's talking about the Ten Commandments as a contract.
SPEAKER 01 :
Right. Well, he's talking about the entire Torah. Now, see, everything that's written in Exodus and Leviticus were written at Mount Sinai. Israel, when they came out of Egypt, they camped at Mount Sinai for a year. During that time, Moses made several, at least two, important long treks up the mountain where he met with God, and God gave him the Ten Commandments on the first time on stone, and then they got broken, so he had to take up tables of stone again and write them on there again. But God also dictated to Moses a whole bunch of other instructions. about animal sacrifices, about priesthood, about clean and unclean animals, about sacred days. None of those were really in the Ten Commandments, with the exception that one sacred day is, and that's Sabbath. But there were lots of sacred days, and they're not in the Ten Commandments. So the Ten Commandments were the first laws, and most people see them as sort of a summary of the basic moral code that belongs to the larger law. But the larger law had a lot more laws and rules that are not in the Ten Commandments. Like I said, about over 600 more rules than the Ten Commandments. So, you know, Moses wrote all of them, and this is affirming that. Now, they were part of the covenant that God made there, not Sinai, and that's the covenant that Israel lived under for 1,400 years until Jesus came, and then Jesus made the New Covenant. And as you quoted from Hebrews 8, it tells us in Hebrews 8.13, where there's a New Covenant... it has rendered the first one old or obsolete. And so the old covenant is now obsolete because there's a new covenant.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, thank you very much.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right, Randy. Good talking to you. Thanks for your time. Bye now. Kim from Las Vegas, Nevada. Welcome.
SPEAKER 09 :
Hi, Steve. First, thank you for your ministry. It's helped me tremendously. My question is, I've just recently been looking into, like, full preterism. Just was curious about it. And I find all these Israel only. And it just, wow, I mean, these people seem very well learned and quote, incite all these things. I don't have enough knowledge. But I don't. I don't go for it. Anyway, I don't know if you have it in your topical lectures, but I would love if you would speak on it, if you could address it.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, actually I wrote a book against full preterism. And while you can actually purchase the book from Amazon, you can also listen to the audiobook for free at our website. So if you've been to our website before or if you have our app, it's better if you have our app because when you listen from our app, the app, remembers where you leave off and brings you back to the place you left off when you come back the next time. I'm not sure if listening to it on the website has that feature. But anyway, the book is called Why Not Full Preterism? And it's a 300-page book. And, again, if you're really interested in looking into the subject, I give the arguments that full preterism largely leans on. And then I debunk them. And I teach what I think Christians have always understood the Bible to say until the full preterist movement started back in the 1970s. Now, the Israel-only movement, as I understand it, is a sub-branch of full preterism. And there's a lot of hostility between some full preterists and the Israel-onlys because full preterism has broken up into several different branches. And most of these branches really despise each other. You can tell by the way they speak about each other. They really don't like their competitors. See, if you come along and you're the first person to say, hey, everything was fulfilled in 70 A.D. There's nothing left to be fulfilled, which is what the first full preterist said. you kind of have the corner on the market of novelty there, because the whole church has always believed there's a second coming of Christ, and you're the first person to come along and start a movement saying there isn't going to be one. So everybody who's interested in silly novelties will run to your camp. But then if your camp breaks up into several different denominations or branches... And now there's a bunch of people saying the one thing that is your novel, your novel claim to fame. They're all saying that it was all fulfilled in 70, but you've got people adding other bizarre stuff like only Israelites can be saved and so forth. So there's a lot of resentment, it appears to me when I read the literature, between most full preterists and the Israel-only full preterists. And I don't say much about Israel-only in my book because I am rather trying to address the issues that underlie full preterism itself and undermine the whole concept. The concept being Those who don't know, the full preterists believe that everything that was ever predicted, including the second coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the rapture, the final judgment, the new heavens and the new earth, those have already happened. They all happened in 70 A.D. So it's kind of a ridiculous view, but they don't sound ridiculous. Like you said, they sound like they really know the Bible well. I debated Don Preston about 12 years ago. He's the leading debater among the full preterists. We had a two-day debate in Denver. And he is not stupid. He's not stupid. He can quote scriptures. He can talk real fast. He can make points from scripture that you've never heard before. But so can Jehovah's Witnesses and so can Mormons and so can people. Just because someone can do that doesn't mean that they understand it correctly or that they're not a cult leader. So I wouldn't be impressed by people who think they see the scriptures better than anybody else ever did in the past 2,000 years. Generally speaking, that's an extremely unhumble claim. And I'll tell you, if I thought I saw something differently than all Christians had before me for 2,000 years, I'd either be fairly quiet about it or extremely humble about it. You know, I mean, if I brought it up, I'd say, well, you know, this is just my opinion and so forth, but it's the way I'm kind of looking at it. And I have done that with some things. I mean, there are not many things that I would ever say, you know, no one has ever said before. But when I see something differently than most Christians do, and once in a while that's the case, I just, you know, I will not be dogmatic about it because I fear, why would I be right and everybody else wrong? But the full preterists don't have any of that humility. They think it's quite natural that they would be right and everyone else would be wrong. And that's exactly what their claim is. Their claim is that the whole church has been wrong for 2,000 years until they came along. They're very arrogant. Yeah, I have no use for that kind of arrogance in a Bible teacher.
SPEAKER 09 :
Okay, I appreciate that. I'm going to check out that book. It's called Why Not Full Credit.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes, like I said, the regular copy you can buy as a book from Amazon if you want, but I'd recommend, I mean, some people would rather read than listen, but you can at least listen to it for free at our website. If you go to thenarrowpath.com, and there's a tab that says Books, and that'll take you to a picture.
SPEAKER 09 :
Okay, I know how to get there.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, do it.
SPEAKER 09 :
I appreciate that, Steve. I just found that shocking, some of the way they come across. And so this, no, you guys are totally wrong, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, I'm like, what? So I wanted your take on it.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right.
SPEAKER 09 :
Well, thanks for your call, Kim. Thank you.
SPEAKER 01 :
God bless. You too. Well, Kim was in Las Vegas, and so is Joseph, who's our next caller from Las Vegas. Hi, Joseph. Welcome.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hi, good afternoon, Steve. I listen on KKVV radio here in North Las Vegas, Nevada. Anyway, I want to ask you, I'm very concerned about the people in Southern California, primarily Los Angeles area. And I want you to explain, if you will, please, via Scripture, if you can quote maybe a few Scripture passages, do you think they're being judged by the Heavenly Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit of Jesus? Or do you think it is the devil that's creating... the winds and everything that is happening, the fires, the downed power lines in the Los Angeles area. The reason I wonder about this, they call the winds the Diablo winds.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, well, what people call the winds doesn't tell us anything about the will of God. Now, you gave two possibilities. One, is these fires are a judgment from God, and the other is that they're, you know, an attack from the devil. I'm sure for those who are losing homes and things like that, it would seem very much like an attack from the devil. But there is always a third option, and that is it is the laws of physics. Fires get started. If there's dry brush around, they generally spread to the dry brush. If there's strong winds, the fires spread faster. If you've had incompetent governance in an area for years so that they've reduced the police, I mean, the fire department size. They haven't maintained the woods. They cut away dead brush and so forth because they had too many homeless people to put into hotels. Well, you know, there's, or illegal aliens or whatever. You know, when government mismanagement can lead to problems, and the problems are caused by nature, but could have been mitigated by human activity. I don't see how God or the devil really has to be brought into the picture of this as the cause of the storm or the fires. The Santana winds are strong, you know, seasonally. It's not uncommon for Southern California to have several days, at least a year, of these Santana winds that blow really hard and fast. And obviously that makes it very difficult when you're trying to put fires out. And then when you've got a reduced fire department, Resources have been mismanaged by the governing people in Southern California, leading to water shortages and things like that, mismanagement of the forests. I think, you know, I'm not going to put that on God or on the devil. Now, I will say this. Despite the fact that nature throws all kinds of disasters at people, I mean, if you were in some parts of the world, world, you might have volcanoes to contend with or tornadoes or hurricanes. Here in California, we often have earthquakes. They're not always devastating, but when they are, I'm sure people say, well, is that God or is that the devil? I don't really think we have to have God intervening specially to bring disasters. I do believe this as a Christian. that I can trust myself and my things and all my concerns to God, and that God can protect from even natural disasters, certainly. And I'm not saying the devil never has anything to do with it, because in the case of Job, you know, God gave the devil permission to test Job, and a strong wind came and blew down Job's house on his kids and stuff. So, you know, I'm not saying the devil never has anything to do with bad disasters. And I'm not saying that God never sends them. I'm just saying we don't have any information in the Bible that would tell us that every time something like this happens, we can pin it on the devil or on God. But I do believe that living in a disaster area As a Christian, I can say I'm trusting my well-being and my things to God. If he takes them from me, he's got every right to do so because everything I own belongs to him, including my own life. I've been bought with a price. I'm not my own. If he wants to take my life, that's perfectly his priority. He's going to do it sometime. If this is the day, then this is the day. Same thing with my loved ones. Same thing with all my possessions. They're all going to burn someday. If this is the day, then maybe I wasn't planning on it being the day, but it's not altogether surprising. I expect everything I own to burn someday, and I expect to die someday and all my loved ones to die someday. It might sound a little clinical to say it that way, but, I mean, you might as well live in the real world. Now, I will say this. I do believe that if God doesn't want me to die or doesn't want my things to be destroyed, that he can protect me. And there have been cases of disasters that totally wiped out whole neighborhoods, and one house is standing untouched and unharmed. Now, I'm not going to say it was always the Christians who had that house. It might be a non-Christian. But it's obvious that just because there's a disaster, it doesn't prevent God necessarily from protecting what he wants to protect. And Job is another case of this, because the devil complained to God before God gave the devil permission to hurt Job's things. The devil complains, says, I can't touch him or anything that he has, because you put a hedge around him. But take down the hedge and let me come in and hurt him, and you'll see, he'll curse you to your face. So God, the devil can't touch anything you have unless God lets him. And if God lets him, he's got a reason for it. And that's the way a Christian looks at the world. Non-Christians, of course, can say that's silly, that's superstitious. Yeah, but at least then you're just left to fate. And that's fine if you want it to be that way. We have reasons to believe what we do. But I'm out of time for this segment. We have another half hour coming up. You're listening to The Narrow Path. Our website is thenarrowpath.com. We have another half hour coming up, so don't go away. My name is Steve Gray. I'll be back in 30 seconds. Don't go away.
SPEAKER 06 :
Small is the gate and narrow is the path that leads to life. Welcome to The Narrow Path with Steve Gregg. Steve has nothing to sell you but everything to give you. When today's radio show is over, we invite you to study, learn, and enjoy by visiting thenarrowpath.com where you'll find free topical audio teachings, blog articles, verse-by-verse teachings, and archives of all The Narrow Path radio shows. We thank you for supporting the listener-supported Narrow Path with Steve Gregg. Remember thenarrowpath.com.
SPEAKER 01 :
Welcome back to the Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg, and we're live for another half hour, taking your calls. If you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith, or you disagree with the host and want to say why, feel free to give me a call. The number to call is 844-825-8000. That's 844-484-5737. Once again, that's 844-484-5737. Our next caller today is Danielle from San Juan Capistrano, California. Hi, Danielle.
SPEAKER 02 :
Hi, Steve. Thanks so much for taking my call. My question is, well, let me give you a little background. I've been doing a Bible study with some friends. in the book of Revelation and, um, learning about the early church. And I'm trying to take a deep dive into what the early church believed, what they held on to. Um, um, and I really, you know, I, I'm, I take all of my information from the new Testament. Um, but I'm hearing a lot of talk online on social media that the Catholic and the Orthodox church is the true church. And since I'm already struggling with, um, Reformed theology, especially on election, predestination, and eternal conscious torment. I'm wondering, what do I do now? Because I don't know where to go, what to do, because I want to walk in the way of Christ, but I don't know what the church is. Where should I be worshiping? And so I was wondering if you could speak on this. Because I'm kind of in limbo, and I would love to get out of this place.
SPEAKER 01 :
Sure. Well, you know, there's a woman who asked that same question to Jesus. Where should we go to worship? And he said, well, she knew of two options. One was Jerusalem, and one was the Mount Gerizim where the Samaritans had their temple. And there was conflict. Some said they were the true church or the true temple, and the others said they were. And so we've got the same kind of situation today. And she said, well, which one is right? Where shall we worship? And Jesus said, well, the time is coming where people won't be worshiping in either of those places. Those who worship God acceptably are those who worship in spirit and in truth. Now, in spirit and truth is not a particular location. In fact, that's the point. You're not going to worship in a given location necessarily. If you're worshiping God in the way he's pleased, you'll be worshiping him in spirit and truth. Now, was he saying that people won't go to meeting places anymore? No, he himself went to synagogues. after that to worship on Sabbath, and so did the apostles and others. And the churches, you know, the apostles set up churches that people gathered. So gathering with Christians is just fine, and even gathering with Jews was just fine before they were Christians. But that's not really, that's not part of what's required. I think sometimes we feel like God is going to be displeased if we choose the wrong day of the week or the wrong place to meet with others. I think we can meet with God, with God's people anywhere where two or three are gathered in his name. And it can happen not once a week. It can happen every day or four days a week or 10 days out of the month or something. You know, I mean, there's nothing in the Bible that says how often or where you need to meet. In the early church, they met in homes primarily. Sometimes they met in one of the porticos of the temple. Sometimes they met in the school of Tyrannus, which Paul apparently rented or secured for Christian meetings, a public access facility. In other words, it really didn't matter where they met. We know at least one case they met out by Riverside. And so it doesn't matter. Now, what you're really asking is what denomination or what group is the approved group, because you've apparently had some connection with Reformed groups, which would be maybe Presbyterian or other Reformed groups, possibly Reformed Baptists or whatever, and now you're having a problem with their Reformed theology. And you're looking at the Catholic and the Eastern Church, which both claim they're the original church. Now, the problem with anyone saying they're the original church is that the original church died 2,000 years ago. The church is people. The church is not an organization. The church is not an institution. The church is people. And, of course, generations of people overlap each other through the ages. So there's people who are part of the church now. at all times and all places where there are Christians. But certainly there wasn't always the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church was never really Roman Catholic until there were people referring to the Roman bishop as the pope. And that really wasn't happening much until about probably the 5th century or later. The Eastern Church was joined at the hip with the Roman Catholic Church until the 11th century, and then they broke off and had their own But they say it was the Roman Catholic Church that broke off from them. The point is both groups claim that they are the true church and the original church. No, the original church was in Jerusalem. Then there were churches in many other places, too, in Antioch and eventually, you know, Philippi and Thessalonica and Galatians and so forth. There were churches lots of places, but they were not Roman Catholic, and they weren't Eastern Orthodox. They were just congregations of Christians. They didn't have names like that, and they didn't have a centralized authority, except that they all agreed that the apostles were, you know, the apostles that Jesus appointed. So if they had disputes, they had to send messengers back to Jerusalem where the apostles were. But the apostles are dead now. Fortunately, their writings are still alive, so we can still follow the apostles today. because we can follow what they said. It's in writing for us. Unfortunately, none of the organizations that have called themselves churches, whether it's Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic or Protestant for that matter, none of them that I know of have simply continued the biblical practices and doctrines that the apostles taught, that Jesus taught. Each group has their own traditions they've added. which I'm not going to say traditions are bad, but if they insist upon those traditions, then, of course, then you begin to confuse man's traditions with God's word, and we shouldn't do that. I believe the Catholic Church has some traditions that are quite contrary to Scripture, and I think the Eastern Orthodox has some, too. Perhaps the Catholic Church has more. I'm not sure. But they're both very similar in that respect. They have a lot of tradition. They've got an institutionalized structure. And then, of course, Protestant denominations have the same problem. They have their traditions, and they have their institutionalized structure. So what you can either do is start a 4,500th denomination of your own, or just fellowship with people in any of them. Because in every denomination, there are true Christians. In every denomination, there are also some traditions and things like that that aren't really Christians. were never part of what Jesus taught or the apostles. But as long as they don't make you believe those traditions, you'll find in those churches there are people who really love the Lord, really people who are followers of Christ. I can fellowship with an Eastern Orthodox person or a Roman Catholic person. I won't be joining their churches, but I have no trouble fellowshipping with them if they love the Lord. Same thing is true with Protestant churches, including Reformed churches. I have different views than Reformed churches. But I have no problem fellowshipping with somebody who holds Reformed views as long as they don't make the mistake of thinking that their views are the gospel or something like that, which some seem to. You know, you just find, I would just say find people who love the Lord, who are following Jesus, who are seeking to follow the word of God. Don't worry too much about, you know, harmless traditions that some of them may hold. We live in a hard time for finding a church. I have people write to me all the time saying, do you know of any good churches in the area where I live? I've been looking for a long time for one. Sounds like you're at the beginning of that process, too. I don't. I don't know of good churches in most places. But I assume there are churches that are good enough. That is good enough. I mean, not that they can't be improved. And perhaps that's one of the main things. Are they willing to be improved? You know, I believe that any church you attend, including the church that I have in my home, it's got defects in it. It's got problems. I mean, there's going to be things that aren't perfect. But the real question is, are they perfectable? Are they correctable? Are they teachable? And this is the problem that some churches have is they don't want to be taught. If they have things they're doing unscriptural and you say, hey, by the way, this isn't a scriptural thing, they don't want that. They'll kick you out before they'll change. And that's the kind of church you don't want. You don't want to be in a church that doesn't love the truth but just loves its own historical viewpoints and traditions because that church is not following Christ. Now, some people in it might be. Remember, the real church is people. The institution and the people are not the same thing. It's just that people sometimes are part of an institution, but their being part of Christ is a different matter. You can be part of an institution and also a follower of Christ, but not if you're going to put the views of that institution ahead of the views of Jesus, obviously, because a person who's a real Christian wants to follow Jesus. It looks like you're kind of in that place. You've been with apparently Reformed people, and now you see some things differently. You know, I don't know if they're driving you out because you don't believe as they do, or if you're just saying, wow, these people are so different than me, I don't want to fellowship with them. I think we should fellowship with people different from us until they won't let us. But on the other hand, if I went to a church and all they ever talked about were things that were their traditional beliefs that I don't agree with, I would definitely get a little tired of that. I'd go looking for a church that wants to talk about Jesus. There must be a few around. I'm not sure. You know, there were a lot of them around when I was a kid. When I was young, even a young man, I could go into any town, and I could go into a Baptist church or a Methodist church, probably a Presbyterian church or, you know, something like that, Pentecostal church, and I could find people, churches that wanted to talk about Jesus and wanted to talk about the Bible. That's less and less popular in churches these days, and so I'm not really sure that they'll be easy to find. But there's got to be. There's got to be some churches where you live. where people, you know, the pastor really wants to talk about Jesus, wants to follow Jesus, wants to teach people to be disciples. And I'm saying there will be a lot fewer of those churches now than you would have found 50 years ago, but you've got to find one, even if they just meet in a home, you know. But I wouldn't choose them based on their denomination. I'd choose them on the basis of their single-mindedness as followers of Christ. That would be them. the only issue I'd be looking for. Because they don't have to agree with me on anything else.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, that makes sense, because I was looking at the Fellowship of Believers in Acts 2, and it's just meeting together, breaking bread, sharing what they had. I just want to follow Christ, learn to love, learn to be merciful. Very simple, and I just didn't know if, because I believe that we're saved, Christ saves us, you know, that it's not the church that saves us, but I started hearing different voices. I got confused. So you simplified and confirmed what I've been thinking. So thank you very much.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, sure. And you live in Southern California, and so do we. If you want to email me, we might be able to direct you more. You know, I can make some suggestions.
SPEAKER 02 :
That would be wonderful. I would love that. Is that your website?
SPEAKER 01 :
At the website, yeah. Go to my emails there.
SPEAKER 02 :
Perfect. Steve, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, and God bless you.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, Danielle, God bless you. All right, we're going to talk next to Cheryl from Wheatland, California. A lot more women today than usual. We usually have mostly men. Hi, Cheryl, welcome.
SPEAKER 07 :
Thank you, Steve. Thank you for taking my call. I was reading through Matthew, and I became puzzled by a couple of things. One was, why does Peter get so much credit for recognizing that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, when earlier on, when Peter had walked on the water and then got into the boat, it seemed like all the disciples seemed to come to agreement when they said, truly, this is the Son of God.
SPEAKER 01 :
And even more than that, Before Peter ever met Jesus, his brother Andrew came to him and said, we have found the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. So, I mean, before Peter ever laid eyes on Jesus, he was told by his brother that Jesus was the Messiah. So why was this a great revelation two years later when he, at Caesarea Philippi, Peter said that? Right. Good question. I think, well, you know, when Peter did say you are the Messiah, the son of the living God, remember, Jesus said, blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father in heaven has. Now, he's saying you didn't learn this from man. Now, the truth is, he did first hear it from a man, his own brother, Andrew, told him that. But that didn't that wasn't the revelation that Peter got that he needed. And many of us need to ask ourselves, do we know Jesus is those things by anything other than hearsay? You know, somebody has told us that and we decide to believe it? Or do we know that because the Father has revealed it to us and we know it and no one could dissuade us from that conviction? I think that this was the kind of steadfast conviction that Jesus is commending because just a few days earlier, Jesus had had the multitudes following him. He had fed the 5,000 like maybe a week earlier, if that. And there were these huge crowds following him. And then Jesus said some offensive things to the crowds, and they all left. At least most of them left. And so much so that Jesus turned to the 12 and said, Are you going away too? Like almost the only ones left. And Peter said, To whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life. And it was like the next week or a few days later that Jesus went with them to Bethlehem. to Caesarea Philippi, and Peter made the statement that Jesus was so pleased to hear. I think what it is, is that Peter and the disciples were following Jesus on the assumption that they believed he was the Messiah. But then John the Baptist had thought he was the Messiah too, and when John was put in prison and Jesus didn't seem to be moving forward in the routing of the Romans to get John out of prison... John began to have his doubts, said, are you the one who's coming or not? Now, you see, at this point, John the Baptist and even probably the disciples were shaky about this because they started out convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, but he didn't seem to be acting like the Messiah. They thought the Messiah was supposed to rouse the troops of Jews to drive the Romans out. That's what the Messiah was supposed to do, they thought. And Jesus wasn't doing that at all. Now, when Jesus had thousands following him, I'm sure the disciples thought, oh, man, it's any day now. He's going to mobilize these people. But then everybody leaves him, you know. It's like he says some things about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and everyone's offended and leaves him. And now, you know, after there were thousands in his movement, and Peter and the disciples, of course, all kind of his cabinet people, You know, I mean, they probably thought they were really riding the crest of a big wave here. And suddenly, boom, the tide went out and there's only them. Now, that would be discouraging for them. And it may well be that although the disciples didn't voice it, Jesus knew very well. Some of them were wondering. Some of them were having the same kind of doubts that John the Baptist had expressed. But when he said, who do you say I am? You're the Messiah. You're the son of the living God. It's like, OK, I know that you are saying that not because someone told you that two years ago when we first met. But you're saying that because my father has shown you that, because you wouldn't, you know, the fact that none of these things have shaken your faith, you're still strongly convicted about that. So, good for you, you know. I think that's what he was saying.
SPEAKER 07 :
Also, I was also noticing how the disciples were able to be sent out by Jesus to raise people from the dead and heal and drive out evil spirits, but it seems surprising to me that they would become so amazed about Peter walking on the water when they were able to do those miracles.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, well, I'd say no matter how many miracles I'd seen, the first time I saw a man walk on water, if I'd never heard of anyone doing it before, I'd think that's pretty amazing. You have to realize that human beings, in order to believe in miracles, Probably they need to discipline themselves to not forget what they've seen. How many times have any of us prayed for something and then it happened? And when it happened, we thought, oh, I'll never doubt God again. You know, I'll never doubt God again. But then how many days does it take until you're in another crisis and you pray and you're not really sure if God's listening? I mean, the Israelites walked through the Red Sea on their way out of Egypt. Three days later, they thought they were going to die in the wilderness. It doesn't take long to forget the things that make an impression on us. when they haven't been around for the last few days you know so i think that you know yeah the disciples had seen miracles but that you know when you're living in the now and there's a new crisis and the crisis isn't immediately resolved suddenly we go back to our old doubting ways unless we discipline ourselves to hold on to the faith and not forget what we've seen and that's what like the writer of hebrews urges us to keep doing don't forget Thanks for your call. I need to try to get more in before we're done here. Not much time left. Bob from Bellevue, Washington. Welcome to The Narrow Path.
SPEAKER 04 :
Hey, good afternoon, Steve. My question has to do with Genesis 6. And it seems as particularly the Nephilim, the giants that are mentioned in verse 3, with regard to verse 2, the sons of God. If the sons of God were fallen angels, my first question to you is, were they men who had corrupted themselves so much that they were open to full demon possession, thus allowing them to cohabitate with human women? If not that, then Were they just fallen angels who somehow came out of their realm and were able to cohabitate with women? The second question regards the Nephilim. It seems to be just inserted there. I don't know. I don't want to say out of place, but it's just right there in verse 4. And there's nothing said about them that are evil or anything like that. or that they were an offspring of the sons of God. You're right. Yeah, so I guess my question is, why is it there?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I think the Nephilim were in the land in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God went into the daughters of men and children born to them. Obviously, the Nephilim were there before those marriages and afterwards. So it's not saying that these Nephilim were produced by these marriages, but that they were there at the same time. Now, the Nephilim are apparently giant races of people. And why it's mentioned here, I'm not sure, with the possible exception that Moses, when he wrote this, was dealing with Jews in the wilderness, because that's where Moses was apparently when he wrote this, and they had been afraid to go into the promised land because they'd seen Nephilim there. And God had said that he could give them the land, but when the spies went into the land and came back and said, we saw Nephilim there, we can't conquer them. And Joshua and Caleb said, no, but God promised he'll give it to us. And the people didn't believe it because they were afraid of the Nephilim. It may be that Moses, writing to these very people, when he's writing Genesis, because he's writing ancient history at the time he wrote Genesis, he mentions certain things. And maybe he's saying, you know, in those days there were Nephilim there too, but what do you think happened to them? You know, these are the people who were wiped out in the floods, including Nephilim. God doesn't have any problem dealing with the Nephilim. You know, that might be why he mentioned it. I don't know. Some people say that the Nephilim were evil, and they say the sons of God were fallen angels. The Bible does not say that the sons of God were fallen angels, nor is there any particular reason to associate them with that. This idea became popular as a result of an apocryphal book called Enoch in the 2nd century B.C., long after Genesis was written. The idea that these are angels that fell is not mentioned in the Bible. And I don't believe they are, for the very reason you mentioned. How is it that angels could procreate with humans? Do they have human DNA? How did they get that? God didn't give angels human DNA, so how did they get it to procreate with humans? I think sons of God are simply humans. Human children of God. Like I'm a child of God and you're a child of God if you're a Christian. To as many as received him. To them he gave the power to become the sons of God, it says in John chapter 1. And people in the Old Testament are called sons of God too. Israel, when they're loyal to God, are called that. So I think that sons of God as often, no doubt more often in the Bible, refers to humans who are godly. Although there's a couple places in Job where it probably refers to angels. But the term sons of God can be used more than one way, obviously. So I don't think these are fallen angels, and I don't think the Nephilim are from them. And why the Nephilim are mentioned, I can't be sure. You're right, it does seem to be an offhand mention of it. But it may be, as I said, there may have been a purpose that Moses had, as he's writing this for the Israelites to read, that the Nephilim that they saw in the land that were such a terror to them, even though God said he'd give them the land and give them the victory, They apparently didn't think God could take care of giants. Well, this story points out that among the people that God easily took care of in the flood, they included giants. I mean, God can take care of the situation. And that might be why he mentions it. I'm only guessing because I haven't spoken with Moses about it to get it from him. But that would be a guess that I would be willing to strongly consider.
SPEAKER 04 :
How about the verses in Peter where Peter says that, Jesus proclaimed. 1 Peter 2.
SPEAKER 01 :
1 Peter 3.
SPEAKER 04 :
And the days of Noah, these spirits were thrown into the spirit prison. He went down and proclaimed his victory over death. But he references these were the ones who were in the days of Noah.
SPEAKER 01 :
The disobedience in the days of Noah. I think that's 1 Peter 3.20. I think he's talking about human spirits. I think he's talking about human beings that were disobedient while the ark was being prepared, it says, and Christ preached to them. They are now, because they've died since, they are spirits in prison. But when they were still alive, those spirits in prison were preached to in the days of Noah through the Spirit of Christ. And that's what Peter says there. He says, through the Spirit, Christ preached to these people who are now spirits in prison. But he did it in the days of Noah while the ark was being prepared. They weren't dead then. They're dead now. They're spirits in prison now, but they were alive then. And they were preached to, but they were disobedient, it says. And I think it's referring to the preaching to that generation by Noah himself. That's at least how I understand that passage.
SPEAKER 04 :
All right, sir. Thank you very much. Have a good 2025.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right. You too. It's good to hear from you, brother. Well, my apologies to all those who are waiting online to get on. We seem to have run out of time. But we haven't run out of days yet as far as we know. We're on every day. So if you didn't get on today, again, I apologize if you've been waiting online for, as some of them have, for about a half hour. I'm sorry for that. Those who call earliest definitely get on earliest. So keep that in mind because we're on Monday through Friday. And every one of those days of the week, we have the lines open. If you want to call early enough, you'll definitely get on. If you call late, you sometimes will. But unfortunately, today is not one of those times. I wish it were. So with only about a minute left, I'm going to have to not take any more calls. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I'll take a call and say, oh, we don't have a minute. Is that good enough for you? And it's not. So I'm just not going to take that chance. Music's playing. Time to go. Let me just remind you, The Narrow Path has been on the air for 28 years daily. And we don't have any commercials because we don't sell anything and we don't let anyone else sell anything during our hour. So we are listener supported, but we pay lots of money to radio stations. Lots of radio stations carry the show and they charge for it like they do everyone else. So we have to pay them. And if that money comes in the mail, we keep paying them and we stay on the air. If you'd like to help us stay on the air, you can write to The Narrow Path, P.O. Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. That's P.O. Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. Or you can do that from our website, where, again, everything is free. The website is thenarrowpath.com. thanks for joining us let's talk again tomorrow God bless
Join Steve Gregg on The Narrow Path as he dives into a deep theological discussion about the distinction between the Gospel of the Kingdom and the Gospel of Grace. Tackling various theological interpretations, Steve addresses these fundamental concepts, including how interpretations role in Christian faith and understanding today. Engage as he answers listener questions with clarity, delving into scriptural insights and historical contexts, establishing a foundation of truth sought after by seeking Christians.
SPEAKER 1 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 01 :
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, including today. And during the live program, we invite you to call in with questions you might have about the Bible or the Christian faith that we can discuss together. Maybe objections. To the Christian faith, or at least some point that this host has previously made, and you object and see it differently. We always welcome argumentation from alternate viewpoints. That's the only way to be honest and to seek the truth. And so we welcome you to do that. What I'm looking at right now is an empty switchboard, which is, again, this has happened maybe once in the last decade. Month or so, but it hardly ever happens. Been doing this for 28 years. This is our 28th year this year doing this show. Anyway, it's a good time for you to get through because of that. Some of the lines are lighting up, but we've still got lines open for you at this number, 844-484-5737. That's 844-484. 5737. And so we'll be getting to your calls in just a moment. We, again, have some lines open for you at 844-484-5737. Our first caller today is going to be Shannon from Arkansas. Hi, Shannon. Welcome.
SPEAKER 08 :
Hey, how you doing?
SPEAKER 01 :
Good. Good to hear from you.
SPEAKER 08 :
Good to see you. And I'll get right to it. Mark 4, 11, that Jesus said, the mystery of the kingdom of God revealed to the twelve about the kingdom. Could you explain that verse? I had a Mid-Acts guy tell me that's about a prophecy. That's about the prophecy in the Old Testament, which they would say that's a different gospel, you know, than Paul preached.
SPEAKER 01 :
Right.
SPEAKER 08 :
Can you go over that, please?
SPEAKER 01 :
Sure. I'll be glad to talk to you about it. The mid-Acts dispensationalists that you mentioned, they believe there's a different gospel that is to be preached today than the gospel that Jesus and the early apostles preached. They acknowledge that Jesus preached a gospel of the kingdom. They believe that the early apostles, Peter, James, and John, and those guys, they also preached the gospel of the kingdom. But that, in the middle of Acts, when Paul became an apostle and began to preach, he had an entirely different gospel, and it was the gospel of grace. So they'd make a distinction between the gospel of the kingdom, which they say Jesus and the early apostles taught, and on the other hand, the gospel of grace, which they say Paul taught. Now, they believe that for this present dispensation, the gospel of grace is the appropriate gospel. So we should be preaching the gospel as Paul did, not as Jesus did or the early apostles did. On this view, of course, nothing in the Gospels, at least in terms of instructions, are applicable to us in this dispensation. So the Sermon on the Mount, the teachings of Christ in general, are not directly relevant to us, and they're not for us. They were for the Jews who Jesus thought would welcome the kingdom. That's what they say. But the Jews did not, and therefore those teachings of Jesus were postponed until the kingdom comes at the second coming of Christ. Apparently the apostles in the early chapters of Acts are thought to have made the same mistake that Jesus made, that the gospel he preached was only going to be true if the Jews were receptive to it. I don't know of anything in the Bible, actually, that says that the truthfulness of the gospel has anything to do with any number of people accepting it, Jews or Gentiles. So this is an assumption they make, but it's an assumption based on, well, nothing in the Bible, at least. the idea of the gospel that Paul preached being different, they would say that this does not involve the kingdom. It's the gospel of salvation. It's the gospel of grace, and that we shouldn't preach the gospel that Jesus preached over the early disciples, because if we do, we're in the wrong dispensation. I would love to see some evidence that this claim has merit. I mean, I wouldn't love to see it because I don't like the idea necessarily, but I'm not, you know, if I could see the biblical evidence for it, I'd certainly be open to that. But it simply doesn't have any biblical evidence. By the way, I'll answer your question directly in a moment from Mark chapter 4, but I will say that for those who are inclined to think that Paul and Jesus spoke different gospels from each other, I would recommend a document that I have posted online that compares Jesus' teaching with Paul's on 15 of the major things that they taught about, side by side in two columns, and show that they taught exactly the same things on every subject that they discussed. Now, that online document can be found at Matthew713.com. That's Matthew713.com. And there's a choice of categories to look at, but one of them I think is called Charts. Charts is on there somewhere. If you click on Charts, there's a lot of different charts I've made and posted. I think the first one is the one I'm talking about. I think it says Jesus versus Paul or Paul versus Jesus or something like that. So you can find it at Matthew713.com. And you click on the thing that would take you to the charts. And I believe it's the first one. You can easily tell by the title of whatever is listed as the first one. Now, on the verse Mark 4, 11, this was an answer Jesus gave to the twelve when they had heard his parable of the sower. And they and the audience didn't understand it. And so it seemed to the disciples that Jesus was not speaking very clearly there. and was more or less too obscure to be understood by his audience, which doesn't seem like something a public speaker would want to be the case. And the reason it was obscure is because he spoke in parables. And, you know, these parables would begin with the words, you know, the kingdom of God is like this. But then what it's like would be something that was not obviously meaningful to the kingdom of God. You know, sower sowing seeds, a woman making dough, putting leaven in the dough. You know, the planting of a mustard seed that grows into a tree. I mean, what do these things have to do with the kingdom of God? Well, the disciples thought Jesus could be somewhat more lucid if he avoided being so obscure with his parables. And they said to him, why do you speak to these people in parables? And he said to them, to you it has been given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God. But to those who are outside, all things come in parables. Now, what he's saying is that he's not going to entrust the message with any clarity to people that he doesn't trust. He's preaching to multitudes. Now, the Jewish multitudes throughout history have shown themselves to be very shallow in their interest in the things of God. They had a few revivals in their history, but most of the time they wandered off into idolatry and whatever. whatever Jewish practices they conducted faithfully. They did it without zeal. They sacrificed inferior animals. God said that their love for him was like the dew on the grass that lasts about just as long when the sun comes up, it's gone. There are many complaints the prophets made, and Jesus made some of them too, about the Jews. He didn't trust them with the secrets. Now, he was bringing a kingdom... that was an invasion force into a world that was already occupied by the kingdom of Satan. And Jesus made that clear in what he was saying about it in Matthew 12, when he answered the Pharisees saying, you know, he's casting out demons by Beelzebub, the prince of demons. Jesus made it very clear, no, I've come, I've invaded Satan's kingdom, and he can't stop me because I've bound the strong man. I'm spoiling his house. So Jesus bringing his kingdom was invading an already occupied planet that by an opposing kingdom. Now, therefore, his ministry was doing something that was going to oppose and overthrow Satan. And he didn't want Satan and his loyalists to understand it. You know, Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 2 that the rulers of this world did not understand the secret wisdom of God in a mystery. Here, Jesus used the word mystery in this verse 2 that you're talking about. Paul said it's something revealed to the apostles by the Spirit, but he said, The enemies were not allowed in on it. He says, or else they might not crucify him. See, the secret plan was for Jesus to overthrow Satan by being crucified. But if Satan understood that, well, then Satan might not do it. So Jesus was basically keeping his cards close to his chest and not just explaining these mysteries to the crowds. He said, to them it is not given to know. The mystery of the kingdom of God. But to you it is given. Now, who's you? Well, it says specifically the twelve. The twelve had come to him and asked him about why he was using the parable. Well, you guys. I trust you guys. You guys have left everything to follow me. You guys have been vetted. You guys are trustworthy. And therefore, I'm letting you in on my secrets. In fact, later on, when they were in the upper room before Jesus was arrested, in John 15, Jesus said, I don't call you anymore servants, but friends, because a master doesn't let his servants know everything he's doing, but I've let you know everything that the Father has revealed to me. So he's willing to tell his friends secrets because he trusts them. He doesn't tell his secrets to people he doesn't trust. Now, by speaking parables... and saying the kingdom of God is like this, he makes it very clear that he has information about the kingdom of God, but it's not very clear to the average here what that information is. So people could just go home and say, well, I didn't get anything out of that guy. I don't know why everyone talks about him being so profound. Or others could say, he's talking about the kingdom. I want to know about the kingdom. I've been waiting for the kingdom. I want to understand this. And disciples would come to him and ask him, tell us the meaning of this parable. And it says in Mark chapter 4, just a few verses later, in verse 34, it says, but without a parable, he did not speak to them, meaning the multitudes. And when they were alone, he explained everything to his disciples. So he did want his disciples to understand the mysteries that he wasn't telling everybody. Remember in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, don't cast your pearls before a swine or give what is holy to dogs. They'll just abuse them and turn on you. Jesus was practicing his own policy. He wasn't sure who in the crowd was or was not comparable to a dog who would trample upon him or a pig. But he knew there were some people in the crowd who were potential disciples. So he threw the bait out there to the crowd and said the kingdom of God is like this. And there were people in Israel, the faithful remnant, who were faithfully looking for the kingdom of God, craving it. and could not be put off. They said, I want the kingdom of God. I need to find out more about this. The rest of the crowds would just go home confused and not think any more about it, perhaps. And so he's saying, to you disciples, and he means by that not just you 12, but anyone who's a disciple, because it says in verse 34, he explained all things to his disciples, and there were many of those besides the 12. But the disciples all had one thing in common. They had left everything to follow him. And therefore, they could be more trusted than the faceless masses. So this is what he's saying. It's not given to the crowds to know the secrets or the mysteries of the kingdom. It is given to you. Now, Paul also, of course, later became an apostle. And he said that he was preaching the mystery. The mystery was that Jews and Gentiles be joined together in one entity. And that is what the kingdom of God is. It's the kingdom of God is made up of all those who embrace Christ as their king and follow him. And that's not just Jews. The Jews thought they were the kingdom of God alone. And Paul said, no, this is more mysterious than they knew. This includes Gentiles, too. You'll see that, for example, in Ephesians 3, verses 1 through 7. But Paul frequently talks about the mystery. And so does Jesus. It's a mystery to people who don't have any right to know it, basically. But the disciples of Jesus are the ones who do have the right to know it. That's what he's saying. And that's why he spoke that way to them.
SPEAKER 08 :
Yeah, thank you so much.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, Shannon, great talking to you, man.
SPEAKER 08 :
Yes, sir.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right, bye now. Let's see, Zachary from Maui, Hawaii. Welcome to The Narrow Path. Good to hear from you.
SPEAKER 07 :
Okay, Shannon, good talking to you, man.
SPEAKER 01 :
Hey, you got to turn your radio off. Turn your radio off. We're hearing what we heard a minute ago. Yeah. Okay. Hi, Zachary. Are you there? Hey, Zach.
SPEAKER 05 :
Hey. Hey. Yeah. Can you hear me?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes. I have been... Can you hear me? Yes. But you haven't heard me until now. Yes.
SPEAKER 05 :
Go ahead. Okay. Hey. So this is my dilemma. So I... I made a pact with God. I know that's not something necessary, but God and I have always had this understanding with each other, as far as I know, that if I behave a certain way, if I stay away from certain things, that good things will happen. And it always worked that way throughout my life. And I recently did something that I said I would never do again, and if I do do it again, my tenants would be going to hell. And I did what I said I wasn't going to do, and now that I repent for what I did, usually when I repent when I do something, I... I feel a presence. I feel a warmth come over me. I can feel the Holy Spirit's presence within me. Right now, when I repent and pray, I don't feel any type of warmth or any type of... Okay, okay.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, let me just say there's a number of things that you've said that I would like to respond to. One of them is that feeling warm is not one of the ways of knowing whether you have repented and whether God forgives you or not. I'm not saying that people never do have such a warm feeling when they know they're forgiven, but feelings have nothing to do with it. The faithfulness of God to forgive, as he said he would, is what determines whether that's happened or not. Whether you feel it or not, you can trust that God is telling the truth. But you also have kind of a sub... Christian concept of what it means to have a relationship with God. You feel like you can bargain with God. You say you and God have an understanding that if you avoid certain things, things will go well for you. I'm not sure that that's God that you're dealing with, because God doesn't really negotiate that way, as far as I know. And frankly, God doesn't promise that things will go well for us. As a matter of fact, Jesus said, in the world you will have tribulation. And Paul said the same thing. In fact, the Bible says it throughout. If you follow God, there's going to be possible persecution. Some people are broke because they follow God. Paul was. Paul said that he was homeless and naked, meaning he didn't have much clothes. He's hungry. And this is all because he was obeying God. And, you know, not everyone experiences the same trials, but certainly there's not anything in the Bible that suggests if you do the right thing, things will go well for you. What is said in the Bible is that if you do things that God is pleased for you to do, well, eventually, in eternity, it will certainly go good for you. But in this life, God doesn't make promises in this life other than that he'll take care of you as long as you need to live. In other words, he'll provide all your needs. But, of course, when it's his time for you to die, then your needs do not include anything. You know, you're going to die. It's your time. But providing your needs isn't often what people understand it to mean. It certainly doesn't mean making you wealthy. It doesn't even mean preventing you from being sick or from being rejected by society or other things like that. All those things happen to people who are pleasing to God, as well as good things. God has a plan that he works for your life, and it includes some trials and probably some blessings, too. But this life is not all there is. And Paul said, our outward man is perishing. He's talking about all the suffering he's going through as a Christian. He said, though our outward man is perishing, our inward man is being renewed day by day. And he says, while we look not at the things that are seen, but at the things that are not seen. For the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal. That's over in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, I think it's like verses 17 and 18. So, he's not, you know, you don't make a deal with God that if I obey you, I'll expect you to give me good things and do good things in my life and have good things happen to me. Now, obeying God is what we're all obligated to. It's not like, hey, God, I'll do you a favor if you do me a favor. Now, when you obey God, you're doing God no favor. You owe that to him, you know. It's like if I lend you $100,000, And you come to me and say, you know, if I pay you back that $100, I expect you to do such and such for me. Or rather, if you do certain things for me, I'll give you back the $100 I borrowed. No, no, you owe me the $100. You need to pay that back in any case. And we owe God our lives. We've been bought with a price. We're not our own, the Bible says. Jesus died for us to purchase us. And our surrender to him and our trust in him and our living under his lordship is what he requires. And those who actually do those things are not in a position to ask for special bonuses. It's failing to do that that puts you below the waterline, puts you underwater. If you do everything God said, you know what Jesus said? Jesus said this over in Luke 17.10. He said, so you also, when you have done all things that you've been commanded to do, say, We are unprofitable servants. We've done only what was our duty to do. In other words, if I do everything God wants me to do, then my position is I don't have any special claim to privilege or congratulations. I'm a servant. Servants are supposed to obey their masters. So I've done nothing more than that. So your idea of working things out with God where you'll do certain good things that he wants you to do. By the way, doing good things aren't that good if he doesn't want you to do them. So the only thing that's really a good thing you can do is whatever God wants. Jesus said, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he that does the will of my Father in heaven. So doing what God wants is the Christian's duty. Now, A lot of listeners are going to want me to tell you this, and I will, that you can't earn your way to heaven anyway. You can't earn favor from God. That's what grace means. Grace means that God gives good things to those that he chooses to give them to, not based on how they earn them, but on his good pleasure. And he gives grace to the humble. He gives grace to the repentant. And the Bible says that. So when you turn to Christ, which is, of course... The first thing everyone needs to do, because he's the Lord of all, God has given him authority over heaven and earth and everything in it. So, you know, you are under his authority whether you live like it or not. But when you repent of not doing so, when you surrender to his lordship and willingly live as he wants you to, you are accepted. And you're accepted because you have surrendered and because you do believe in him. That's what believing is. Some people think you just have to believe Jesus existed, and that's how you're saved. The Bible knows nothing of that kind of faith. The only faith the Bible knows that saves anyone is one that changes their direction and their life, a faith that says, I trust in Christ, and that means I'm going to follow his way. Why? Well, because I trust him. He wouldn't tell me wrong. If I trust him, he wouldn't give me an inferior way to live. If I really believe in Christ, it means I'm going to live the way he said to live, or else I'm saying I don't believe him. I believe I think I have a better idea than he had. That's not being a Christian. Now, it's when you recognize what the Bible says about Jesus. He's the king. He's the Lord. He has bought us with a price. I believe that, and therefore I live as though that is true. That means I'm obedient to him as a servant to a master. I'm not trying to gain brownie points with him in any way. I'm just living my role. It's like a child obeys his father in a good parenting situation, not because he's hoping that that way his father will still accept him as his child, but he obeys his father because that's what children are supposed to do with their father. He doesn't do it, he shouldn't have to do it because of fear of punishment or a carrot on a stick of some reward. He should do it because that's what children are supposed to do. That's what the role is of being a child in a household. Submit to your parents. So, you know, I think people who think of God as someone who's out there making some kind of a transaction with people who will do enough good deeds, that's not even taught in the Bible. The Bible does teach that when you turn your life around to be a follower of Jesus, that dominates everything about you. And, of course, as a result, you will do what pleases him. You'll do what he asks. but you won't be expecting special treatment that you wouldn't have had otherwise. You don't expect bonuses for obedience, because obedience is simply what comes with the territory. It's part of the definition of submitting to someone who's a Lord. And if you don't think of him as your Lord, then you don't think of him at all, because there is no Jesus in the universe who isn't the Lord. So some people say, well, I believe that Jesus is my Savior. Well, fine, but the only Jesus I know of that's a Savior is also a Lord. If you believe he's Savior but not Lord, you don't believe in the Jesus in the Bible. The only Jesus in the Bible and in the universe that can save is the one who's the Lord. And if you believe he's your Lord, that'll show in the way you behave. But you won't be doing it hoping to get special treatment from him and bonuses. That's just something employers do with their employees. You don't have an employment system. arrangement with your father in heaven and with Christ. So that's the whole area where I think your whole approach to God is wrong. The fact that you don't feel anything, the fact that you don't feel forgiven or whatever, it doesn't matter how you feel because, again, we're talking about trusting. We're talking about faith. If you have faith in Christ and he says, listen, I'll forgive you. You know, the In 1 John 1.9, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So if you trust in Christ, then there is a promise that he forgives your sins. What if you don't feel like it? Well, is God's faithfulness dependent on your feelings or does it depend on who he is? Well, the answer to that is that's a rhetorical question. Of course, it's based on who he is. He's faithful because that's what he is, faithful. And therefore, you don't have to worry whether you feel it or not. You take it by faith. I would anyway, and I recommend you do too. I need to take a break here. Appreciate your call. You're listening to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. We have another half hour coming up. But at this point, we'd just like to make sure our listeners know we are a listener-supported ministry. And you can write to us at thenarrowpath.com. 1730 Temecula, California, 92593. Or you can do so from our website where all the resources are free for download at thenarrowpath.com. I'll be back in 30 seconds. Don't go away. We're only half done.
SPEAKER 02 :
Everyone is welcome to call the narrow path and discuss areas of disagreement with the host, but if you do so, please state your disagreement succinctly at the beginning of your call and be prepared to present your scriptural arguments when asked by the host. Don't be disappointed if you don't have the last word or if your call is cut shorter than you prefer. Our desire is to get as many callers on the air during the short program, so please be considerate to others.
SPEAKER 01 :
Welcome back to the Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg, and we're live for another half hour. Right now our phones are, all the lines are full, and there may not be a chance to take more calls than those that are waiting, so I'm not going to give out the number at this point. But for those of you who are waiting online, let me instruct everybody, as our former caller needed to be instructed, when you get on Don't leave your phone somewhere and just listen to the radio hoping you'll notice when I call your name. The problem is the radio broadcast is delayed by maybe as much as half a minute. So when I actually in real time call your name, you'll hear it if you're on the phone because your phone and I are connected in real time. But if you're away from the phone listening to the radio, you won't hear me call your name until half a minute or so has gone by, in which time we've used up over $50 of airtime because you weren't there. And so we'd love to have you on, but please stay near your phone if you're online waiting to talk. All right, we're going to talk next to, looks like it's going to be Anna from Petersburg, New Hampshire. Welcome.
SPEAKER 04 :
Hi. Hi. You heard me, okay. How are you today?
SPEAKER 01 :
I'm fine. How are you?
SPEAKER 04 :
I'm good, thank you. Happy New Year. Thank you. My question is, and I'm so humbled because you have such a wealth of knowledge, but people have touched on this before, and I wanted to be sure, but let me just come out with it. Okay, so God created Adam and Eve, right? And the... It says, and I got all the days that were of creation, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and some day rested, right? But in those days, it says he created man and women, and he said be fruitful and multiply. But then when you get into the second chapter is when he starts forming Adam, and then he puts, takes Adam out he takes Adam and puts him in the garden right and now Adam names all these animals and everything and he names all the plants and everything and he gets bored and then God makes him a woman for a helper someone to love right but where are you your voice disappeared hello well you seem to have gotten cut off I didn't cut you off
SPEAKER 01 :
Anyway, I will answer your question because I think I understand what you're getting at. And that is that in Genesis chapter 1, we have the creation of everything, including man and woman, recorded in a chronological sequence of six days. And then on the seventh day, God rested. That seventh day is mentioned in chapter 2 of Genesis, verses 1 through 3. Although the chapter divisions are not in the original. Those were added centuries later. So, The story of the seven days of creation really goes from Genesis 1-1 through Genesis 2-3. But at the next verse, Genesis 2-4, you begin to have a story of creation again. It kind of sounds different in some ways. It starts at a different place. In fact, it starts with the creation of man. Well, it not quite starts because it mentions there was ground, there was no rain, a mist rose up from the earth and watered the ground, which I presume means rain. for the plant's sake, which must have been there. But what mentions that God made man from the dust of the earth, and then later he brings the animals to him, and Adam names the animals. He puts them in the Garden of Eden, as you said. He makes a wife for him and gives them instructions. Now, because you read chapter 1 first and chapter 2 second, it seems like maybe you've got two events, the creation events of chapter 1, which then were followed by the creation events of chapter 2. But this is not how any Bible scholar would understand it. And frankly, we need to be careful not to do that because there are times when the same story is repeated in the Bible from a different angle or giving different details of the story. For example, if you read of the birth narrative of Jesus in Matthew chapters 1 and 2, And then you read of the birth narrative of Jesus when you get to Luke in chapter 1 and 2. You say, wait a minute, was Jesus born on earth twice? I read about this two books ago. Back in Matthew, we had the birth. Now it looks like he's getting born all over again. No, you understand that Matthew and Luke are both telling about the same story, but they're giving different details about it. And that's true of also the first two chapters of Genesis. The first chapter is told as a broad overview of without laying much emphasis on any one thing. It's six days, and at the end of the sixth day, everything has been created. Among the things that are said to have been created are man and woman, who, like the animals before them, are given instructions to be fruitful and multiply, though they're also given instruction to have dominion over everything else. Now, then the story ends. But in the first chapter, the creation of man and woman aren't given that much... focus, not as much as humans deserve in terms of the creation of everything else, in terms of trees and rocks and distant planets, man's creation is much more significant. So there's a second account of the creation of man and woman, which Of course, it doubles back and retells the story of the sixth day, or at least part of it, where man and women were created. See, in Genesis 1, it kind of just says, he made man his own image, male and female he made them. Well, in Genesis chapter 2, it's going to go back, take that more slowly, and say, okay, he made man, then this happened, then this happened, then this happened, and then he made the woman. Now, you wouldn't know that from reading chapter 1, It just says he made man, he made male and female. Well, that's true. That's not disputed, even in chapter 2. It also says that God made male and female, but it gives lots more information of things that happened, for example, between the creation of man and woman. And then what happened, it gives God's instructions about the trees. So what we have in chapter 2 is a second account which focuses in greater detail on one point in the first account. It's like, you know, I don't know if anyone reads magazines anymore, but back in the day when these news magazines like Time and Newsweek were around, they'd have a story that ran several pages long about some event going on in the world, some war or something. But then they'd have what they called a sidebar, a little block on one of the pages, kind of in the midst of the story, that went into more detail on some issue that was covered over very quickly in the general story. They covered over it quickly in the general story because they didn't want to interrupt the story with all this extra information. They wanted to get through the story. But then they thought, well, some people may not know much about this point. So they'd have what they called a sidebar on the page where they had a lot more information on one point. And that's, I think, the way we're supposed to look at Genesis 2. That's like a sidebar. Genesis 1 kind of gave the sweep of the creation of everything from zero to the end in six days. But then... Realizing that the creation of man and woman has only been passed over in a few sentences in the first account, just like the other things in the other days were, the writer gives us a second look at that. And it's more of a microscopic view or a magnifying glass view of the creation of man and woman, giving many more details. So the second account is not contradictory or it's not an additional creation. The man who is called Adam in the second account and the woman who is called Eve in the second account are the same male and female that were mentioned without naming them in Genesis 1, 26 and 27. So that's something that you're not the first person to have misunderstood that, but that is a misunderstanding some people have. All right, let's talk to Thomas from Phoenix, Arizona. Hi, Thomas.
SPEAKER 06 :
Hey, Steve. How are you?
SPEAKER 01 :
Good, thanks.
SPEAKER 06 :
Hey, thanks for taking my call. Okay, so I guess I'm just looking for some biblical direction and reassurance on something. I've asked a lot of questions, and not just in your show. You know, I've heard a lot. I've heard a lot of Bible shows throughout my life, and I'm getting to the point where I'm kind of asking, what is the You know, like, there's so many answers that even you or a bunch of these other people basically say, like, well, we don't really know, you know, a lot of things. I mean, obviously there's some clear-cut things in Scripture, but, like, I hope you see what I'm trying to ask here. At what point should we just stop trying to figure out every little nuance of Scripture, or is that just something I need to push past?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, let me say this. There's no point of Scripture that I would not be interested in understanding correctly. But there are many points of Scripture that I realize I don't have sufficient data provided to know exactly what something means. Now, my commitment in reading the Bible is to find out what God wants me to know. I don't read it just out of general curiosity, or just to say I read the Bible through so many times, I read it because I consider it to be God's word, his revelation to me about the things he wants me to know. But when I find things that are obscure enough, that there just isn't enough information to make the decision up, I have to assume, okay, this must be something that God didn't really care that much for me to know, because he would have made it less obscure. Now, many things in the Bible are, you know, very obvious, that Yahweh is the one true God who created all things, that he made us, that he has an interest in our behavior and in a relationship with us, that he called a people at one point through Abraham to make himself known to them through prophets and through the law. And he told them he's going to send a Messiah. And when the Messiah would come, he'd be the true king, not only of Israel, but of the whole world. And then, of course, we see Jesus coming as the Messiah. And we have Jesus teaching about how to live. And then we have, after he left, he authorized the apostles to continue teaching the church how to live. And so we find that kind of teaching in what the apostles wrote, what we call the epistles, the rest of the New Testament, in other words. So, I mean, there's a storyline. There's a narrative here which has the main features. No one can read the Bible trusting it and miss it. But, of course, there are hundreds of things that are passed over without much description. Yes, like I was saying to that previous caller earlier, We don't have a sidebar on everything, but the story, the grand narrative of human history mentions certain things in passing that simply aren't part of the main story, at least not enough to give a whole sidebar and explain it all. So we're reading ancient history here. We're reading the history of ancient Mesopotamian and Semitic and Middle Eastern people and their customs and traditions. We read about the kings and the nations and the wars that were going on around Israel. Some of them involved Israel, some of them not so much. But, I mean, we're reading ancient stuff that we don't naturally understand or know. And fortunately, some of the information that we don't know much about, and the Bible doesn't say much about, can be discovered and has been discovered through archaeology and other studies. But the point is, If God didn't make it clear in his word, I think it's his way of saying, move along, nothing to see here, you know, nothing to worry about here. Now, if you say, but I'm very curious, well, you can read books about archaeology and other things and find out some of those things. Can't find them all out. But I think our problem is we have perhaps lost the instinct. of recognizing the difference between the essential things and the peripheral things. We just like to know everything. I do. I'd like to know everything. But I'm also realistic, and I realize that, you know, not everything is equally important. And the things that are essential, I think God has made clear. The things that are not as essential are not as clear. Now, among those things that are not essential, there's two categories. There's those things that there just isn't enough information given to us, to know exactly what they are. And they're apparently not important at all. But also among the non-essential things, there are some things that there's a lot of information about, but people misunderstand or misinterpret parts. So you've got different theories. You've heard on this program people talk about dispensationalism and in contrast to, say, amillennialism. Or you've heard people talk about Calvinism in contrast to Arminianism or whatever. These are subjects where there's a lot of information in Scripture But people, somebody is misinterpreting some information. You know, on one side of the aisle, someone's getting it wrong. They can't both be right on both sides because they have, in many cases, conflicting ideas. But this being the case, we can argue that this is not crystal clear. If it's not made crystal clear, it's not one of the essential things. God's not trying to hide himself from people who are seeking to follow him. He's trying to reveal himself to those who are seeking to follow him. You know, if something is obscure enough that people who've studied the Bible a great deal cannot really decide which side of the aisle, you know, the Bible really supports more, then it must be that the Bible doesn't make that the central issue. And so, for example, dispensationalism. That has a lot to do with end times prophecy and stuff like that. I'm not a dispensationalist, so I disagree with dispensational views. But I hardly think it matters much. I mean, there are some aspects that do. But the end times stuff doesn't. I mean, what do I care? What do I care if the dispensations are right or wrong about end times? I'm not living with a focus on the end times. I'm living with a focus on Jesus. And that's the point. The essential thing is, who is Jesus? Who is he to me? And what does he want me to do? I believe the Bible gives all. more than adequate information for that. And in the course of reading the story, of course, we recognize we're reading ancient Middle Eastern literature. It had to be written by somebody in some culture, in some language. But we just happen to live in a different culture, a different time, and speak different languages than they did. So it is possible to become a scholar and to learn those languages or to learn a great deal about their culture, and it will fill out a lot of interesting stuff. That would not otherwise be clear to us. But we have to assume it's mostly clear to the people who lived in that culture and spoke that language. And we have to access things that they knew just from living at that time. We don't. So we have to learn those things by special scholarship or not at all. And some of those things, the not at all is just fine because to get all tangled up in controversial things that aren't essential can simply be a distraction. And it is for many people. Now, I've spent lots of years teaching the Bible, and I'm very interested in almost all the controversies, and I've studied both sides of almost all of them, too, because I'm interested. I'd like to know. But having done so, I've come to the conclusion that many of the things that people have controversy over, I think I know what the Bible does say on it, but it doesn't matter much. I mean, I'm not emotional about it. I don't care if someone agrees with me or not. And many other things I've looked into, okay, we just don't have any information on that. Even from archaeology or anything else, we just don't have currently any information on that. So I don't have to know that. So we just kind of have to read the Bible for what it is and recognize it's a set of ancient documents written in a culture that we have very little familiarity with unless we study it specially. written in languages that are now dead languages, which we'll never know unless we study them as an academic pursuit. And, you know, so I think we have to take an attitude that I trust God to make clear to me the things that he wants to be clear to me. The other things I'm still interested in, but at a much lower level of interest. And I'll still study them because if I can learn more about them, I'm I want to, but I'm not going to worry about them too much. So, I mean, when you hear all kinds of different subjects and you hear me saying, yeah, it doesn't really matter, it doesn't really matter, I don't care if you agree with me or not on this subject, those are subjects that can become distractions from the main subject. And when I say I don't care if you believe it or not, I would like it if everyone saw everything just the way I do. I think it would be a better world, a better church, if everyone just saw things just like I do. And the people who disagree with me think the same about their views. But the truth is, in most cases, if someone puts too heavy an emphasis on one disputed subject, they're going to be distracted from the main subject. And it's more of the attitude you have to have toward the Bible, I think. Thank you, Steve.
SPEAKER 06 :
That was awesome.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you. Okay, Thomas. Hey, good talking to you, brother. Thanks for your call. All right, our next caller is Scott from Detroit, Michigan. Scott, thanks for waiting so long. Welcome.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yes, hi. Can you hear me?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes, sir.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yes, hi, Steve. I appreciate you and your ministry and your understanding of the Word of God. I've listened to you for some time, and I had a time when someone was calling in about the millennium, or the millennial period, and I just want to ask you some questions on those. I think I actually attend a church and part of the denomination that does is non-millennial, if you will, but I just can't stomach it personally myself, and it's not, again, a huge issue, but it's just something that I wonder why people come to a different conclusion than what I would assume or would say is fairly clearly stated in Revelation 20 that it is a period that happens after Christ comes back and isn't something that's going on right now.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay. Well, there's a lot of people who agree with you about that. For those who didn't understand, he's saying he attends an amillennial church, but he doesn't believe in amillennialism. Now, I do, and so I understand why Revelation 20 can be seen the way that amillennialists see it, because I see it that way myself. I can also see why someone might have trouble with it. I think the one thing you said I'd like to respond to is you said it looks like it's pretty clear in Revelation 20. Well, I don't think anything in the Bible is pretty clear, unless you really compare the visions in Revelation with other material throughout the Bible, because nothing in Revelation is given in very literal terms. Jesus is not described as a human being or as God. He's described as a lamb with seven eyes and seven horns. That's not literal, but he's called that about 27 times in the book of Revelation. The enemy of God is seen to be a dragon with seven heads and ten horns, which is obviously supposed to be Satan, but Satan is not a reptile with seven heads and ten horns. That's a symbol of him. Likewise, the evil rulers of the world are described as a beast with seven heads and ten horns with the mouth of a lion and feet of a bear, you know, and other characteristics. And, you know, no one believes that that's a real animal. No one believes that. So we realize that the whole book is written in symbolism. So we have to be careful about saying, I think it's clear. Now, I'll tell you, you said it seems clear that the thousand years in chapter 20 comes after the second coming of Christ. Let me just tell you why it's not all that clear to me that that's the case. One is, Revelation 20 is a standalone vision. It doesn't necessarily have to have any chronological relationship to chapter 19. There are many times that a vision in Revelation will come to its proper end, and then a new vision will come that covers the same territory. For example, in Revelation 11, when the seventh trumpet sounds, it sounds like it's the judgment of the world on the last day. The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he'll reign forever, and it's the time of the judgment. So that's chapter 11. But in chapter 12, it goes back to the birth of Christ again and tells the story another way from another angle. So this is, you know, so chapter 19 could bring us to the end of the world at the second coming of Christ, and chapter 20 could start it at the beginning again. I mean, we can't say until we know what chapter 20 is saying whether that's so or not. But it's not, it wouldn't be a strange thing. We have to be, we have to ask that question. Is that what's happening? Now, the other thing is you probably assume that the second coming of Christ is described in chapter 19, which is why the assumption would be that he's on earth in chapter 20. But many people see Jesus riding on a white horse, smiting the nations with the rod or the sword from his mouth. is not a reference to his second coming, but is a description of the gospel progressing, the word of God coming out of his mouth like a sword, conquering the nations through the missionary efforts of the church. Now, it doesn't seem like that to you or me, probably, but it can be seen that way. I mean, there certainly are similar images here. making that kind of a point in Scripture. So, in other words, it may be that what you naturally see as the second coming of Christ in Revelation 19 isn't even about that. Now, when you get to chapter 20, it's interesting that Jesus is not mentioned as being on earth. Now, if he came back and set up the millennial kingdom on earth, you'd expect him to be there. But there's not one reference in Revelation 20 to Jesus being on earth, nor even does it mention the saints on earth, although I think there are no doubt are saints on earth during the period of time. But it describes saints in heaven, seated on thrones in heaven, reigning with Christ. He sees their souls, not their bodies. So the resurrection has not happened yet, or else he wouldn't see their souls. He'd see them in resurrected bodies. So, I mean, there's some things. Now, I was taught, as you are, that we've got the second coming of Christ in Revelation 19, then we've got the millennium comes after that in chapter 20. But the more you study the book of Revelation, the more you realize that what is intuitive to you upon a first or second reading, because of the symbolic nature of the book, because of the non-chronological nature of the book and so forth, there's simply no reason to insist, and maybe not even a very good reason to suggest, that Revelation is describing things that happened after chapter 19. It is certainly a position that can be taken, but it's not at all something that's obvious when you take all the factors into consideration. Brother, I need to take another call, but I appreciate yours. Oh, no, I'm running out of time. I may not have much time for another call. You've been waiting a long time. Craig from Washington. If you've got a real quick one, I'll take it. Otherwise, we're probably not going to get through it. Go ahead.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, it's not very quick, but anyway, I've been doing some research on the millennial reign, and some people, some Christian people are looking into it and thinking that he came physically and the reign is over. And why do you think that he didn't come in a physical form and that you think he's like this?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I think he hasn't come in a physical form yet because he still is going to. Now, people who say that the millennial reign is over and that Jesus already came are probably what we call full preterists. They believe everything predicted in the Bible was fulfilled no later than A.D. 70 when Jerusalem was destroyed. I don't agree with them. I think that's really an irresponsible way to look at the Scripture, but there's a lot of people out there, especially online, who are full preterists, and that's the view they take. They don't believe there's a future second coming. They think Jesus came back in 70 AD, though they wouldn't say physically. They would say he came back spiritually in 70 AD, and they would say the millennium then was the period between Jesus' death and his coming in 70 AD. Now, I don't consider that this has good arguments in its favor at all, but that is the view that some take. Now, as far as you believe Jesus will come back physically, so do I, But he hasn't yet. That's why we can't see him anywhere right now. He hasn't come back yet. When he comes back, every eye will see him. But the book of Revelation does not necessarily describe Jesus as coming back before the millennium. That's what I was saying to the previous caller. I have lectures on this. I don't have much time right now to go over it deeply. But if you go to thenarrowpath.com, look under topical lectures and find the series that's called When Shall These Things Be? I have very thorough lectures on the millennium and other topics like this at thenarrowpath.com. We are listener supported. You can donate there, too, if you wish. But you don't need to. Just take the stuff.
Join Steve Gregg as he navigates an array of thought-provoking questions from listeners about biblical teachings and their implications on modern faith. The discussions open with a deep dive into whether the Bible foresees exceptions to the general rule of death, referencing the resurrection accounts and the appointed time for judgment. The episode unfolds with nuanced conversations on spiritual power, delving into what Paul meant by the 'power of his resurrection' and its relevance to believers today. Listeners are also treated to historical insights into the practices of crucifixion, particularly the role of cultural norms and gender in the administration of such punishments. A significant portion of the broadcast is dedicated to the prophetic context of Isaiah’s depiction of the virgin birth, drawing links between Old Testament narratives and New Testament fulfillments. The episode ponders the feasibility of local versus global interpretations of the Genesis flood, seasoned with scientific and archaeological perspectives, and concludes with a guide on how Christians can ensure their relationship with Christ is genuine and acknowledged.
SPEAKER 1 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 02 :
Good afternoon and welcome to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we are live, as we usually are, Monday through Friday for an hour in the afternoon with an open phone line for you to call if you want to call in with any questions that you have about the Bible or the Christian faith. that you would like to discuss with us on the air. Maybe you have objections or disagreements with something that this host stands for or has said in the past. You're always welcome to call and say that this is so and why. The number to call is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. Our first caller today is Mark calling from Eagan, Minnesota. Mark, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.
SPEAKER 03 :
Thank you, sir. This stems from the belief that near-death experiences aren't possible because of Hebrews 9.27, but there are verses in opposition to that, namely Luke 8.52-55, Jesus raises a dead 12-year-old girl. John 11.43, he raises Lazarus. Luke 7.12, He raises a widow's only son who had died. 1 Kings 17, Elijah raises another widow's dead son. In Matthew 27, right after Jesus died, the graves, people were resurrected from their graves. And then especially the last one here, Matthew 10, 8, Jesus tells his 12 disciples to heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, and raise the dead. But Hebrews 9.27 says, and as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment. How do we explain Hebrews 9.27 in regards to people only dying one time?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, well, first of all, there's also other exceptions because we have Enoch and Elijah who did not die. even once. And then, as you say, there are a few people throughout history who've died, and then they were raised supernaturally from the dead, and then we assume that they died again, since they don't appear to be walking around on earth today. So there are people who've died more than once, and there are people who have not died even once. Now, we also have, of course, the statement that Paul makes in 1 Corinthians 15, I show you a mystery. We will not all die. Well, he says we shall not all sleep, but he means we won't all die, but we'll be changed. And also in 1 Thessalonians 4, verses 16 and 17, he says when Jesus comes back, the dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive and remain will apparently not die, like he said in 1 Corinthians 15, we won't die, but we'll be caught up to meet the Lord in the air. So there's a whole generation of Christians that won't die. So why does the writer of Hebrews in Hebrews 9, 27 say it is appointed unto man once to die? Well, we have to ask ourselves, what is he affirming and what is he not trying to affirm? Is he trying to say there are no exceptions to this? Let's face it. I think that even though you and I have recognized cases in the Bible, and even if you believe as I do that the last generation of Christians will not die, then it's clear that it is not the case that every last person, in fact, dies. But I don't think anyone would say we're speaking... wrongly when we say it's appointed unto men to die. That seems to be a general rule. 99.999% of men who've lived have died, and probably a very large percentage of those living now will die, probably all of us, unless Jesus comes back sooner. So it is, in fact, a rule. God has appointed unto men once to die and then to the judgment. Now, are there any exceptions? Well, apparently there are. I mean, Jesus himself died once, but he didn't go to judgment. And other people have died more than once. And some didn't die at all, a couple of them. And some more won't die at all at the end. So, in other words, the writer of Hebrews is not trying to teach a doctrinal statement about how many times people can die. I don't think he would have thought himself... in need to make that point. I think everybody knows that it's appointed man what's to die. I think that he's, of course, allowing for whatever exceptions God may make. It is a general rule, and that's what he's stating. The purpose for stating it in the passage is not to tell us how many times people die, because I think all his audience pretty much knew that already. Any human being who's been around much knows that. But to make the point, and the point he is making is that Jesus died only once. He doesn't have to die again. Unlike the high priests who have to offer their sacrifices year after year after year, just a couple of verses after the one you're quoting in Hebrews, over in chapter 10, it makes it clear that unlike the high priests whose sacrifices didn't accomplish anything permanent, and they had to repeat them so frequently, Jesus only had to die once. He died once and for all. He offered himself once and for all. So, the point he's making is he doesn't have to die again. People really, it's appointed on men only to die once. Not all men. I mean, you find some exceptions, of course. But, and we could even say, you know, that stage four cancer is inoperable, is a, you know, a death sentence. You know, people are going to die from it. But some people don't die from it. I mean... I mean, God can heal them, or there might even be some medical technologies that make some exceptions. But there are things that are so generally true that, I mean, you could state it with, you know, if it's stated as a doctrinal statement, okay, everybody, the Word of God is making this declaration. Only one time will anyone ever die, period. And then they'll go to judgment. That's not what the writer of Hebrews is doing. He's arguing that Christ's death was good once and for all. He doesn't have to die again. He was a man. He came as a man. It says that in Hebrews chapter 2. He was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death. And in Hebrews 9 it says, and he did die. He died and he doesn't have to do it again. Because really, people really only have to die once. Generally speaking. And that's the point he's making. He's not trying to insist that everyone must die. If he was, then he's disagreeing with Paul. He's disagreeing with many angels. cases. Well, not many cases, but some. Many at the end time when Jesus comes back, and then a few in the Old Testament, Enoch and Elijah. And he's not saying there can't be any cases that a man would die more than once, but there aren't many of those that we know of. There's like Elijah raised one, Elisha raised one. I think that makes up the whole Old Testament group that raised from the dead. Then there's a few, some who raised when Jesus came out of the grave, and we know three that he raised during his three years ministry, and he told the disciples to raise them too, so they must have raised a few. So let's just say there's a dozen people or so, maybe a couple dozen, out of billions and billions of people who are exceptions to that general rule. That doesn't make the general rule not true. It just means there are exceptions to that rule, but not very many. So that is how I understand that. I don't think he's trying to make a an absolute statement of doctrine that cannot be ever deviated from. He's just saying this is the way things are, generally speaking. Are they not? People die. After that, they're dead, and then they go to the judgment later on. So that is the general truth, and I think that's what the writer of Hebrews is trying to say. I think he knew. I think he knew about Elijah. I think he knew about Enoch, and I think he knew about the people that Jesus had raised from the dead. If he didn't, he wasn't a very informed biblical writer because he obviously was a companion of the apostles. It would be surprising if he didn't know of the exceptions. Okay. Thank you. All right. Thanks for your call, Mark. Okay. Let's talk to – we're going to talk next to Van from Dallas, Texas. Hi, Van. Welcome. Hello, Steve.
SPEAKER 08 :
I have a question here. Hi. Hi. The phrase, the power of his resurrection, what does that really mean, the power? Could you elaborate on this, please?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, you're referring to Philippians 3, I believe, where Paul said, you know, all the things that were gained to me, I counted them as dung, that I might know him in the power of his resurrection, the fellowship of his sufferings. Right, so the power of his resurrection, of course, could refer to the fact that Paul's looking forward to being resurrected, and others experiencing the power of resurrection that Christ initiated by his own resurrection, and he was the first fruit, so the rest of us will rise too. And it's only a few verses later that Paul says, I have not yet attained, I have not yet attained to the resurrection of the dead. So in that case, he's just talking about the physical resurrection, which he anticipates, that he wants to follow Christ and have a part in that resurrection. And you can see a few verses where he does mention that, you know, I want to have part in that resurrection of the righteous. It's also possible that, since Paul believed this too, that the resurrection of Christ has also brought the power of resurrection to us in a spiritual sense, that we've been born again, we've passed from death unto life, and that can only be done by having Christ. So Paul had experience of that. And he expects to experience a physical resurrection, too. So I don't know. He might have both in mind. He might have one or the other. He doesn't clarify. He doesn't say enough to choose between those two. But I think that even the spiritual power of resurrection, that is our being regenerated, our passing from death to life, our being dead in trespasses and sins from which he made us alive, he says in Ephesians 2 and Colossians 2. Those things in John 5, 24, where he says, whoever believes in him has passed from death unto life. I think that's the power of regeneration, the power of our conversion, which is a spiritual kind of resurrection. And it is made possible by Christ's resurrection. So it is the power of his resurrection that brings this miracle about in our lives. But there's also, of course, the future resurrection, of which that's simply the continuing harvest of which Christ was the first fruits. It's his resurrection, and we'll be following in his train in the same experience of resurrection. So we can go either way on that.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 02 :
Just curious. Yeah.
SPEAKER 08 :
With power, I was thinking more like spiritual warfare or something like that, or...
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, Paul doesn't really associate our experience of resurrection with our warfare, though it doesn't mean that he wouldn't see any connection to it. We don't have any cross-reference where he says, you know, we can defeat the demons or we can successfully resist Satan because of the power of Christ's resurrection. But that doesn't mean it isn't the case. It just means that we don't know if he had that in mind since he never mentioned that particular connection before or elsewhere.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, some pastors, teachers use that phrase a lot, and just wanted clarity where they were coming from. Okay. If we were talking about spiritual warfare, I don't think the word power would be the right word. I think it would be authority because Christ cast out demons because he had the authority to do it. He had the authority to heal. He gave his disciples authority over serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy. Authority has to do with his unique position of being over all things, and he has delegated his authority to us. Now, power would be, I think, something more like what you'd want in a wrestling match physically. you know, you have a certain amount of strength and your opponent has a certain amount of strength and if you're going to win, it'll either because you have better strength or better skills. But I think when it comes to spiritual warfare, what's more important is the authority of Christ. That's what it means to do something in the name of Christ. It means in his authority. Just like somebody might do something in your name if you authorize them to do it. It doesn't give them technically power or energy, but it gives them the right to act on your behalf and to have their decisions honored and, you know, considered official. Yes. Very interesting. Well, thank you, sir. All right, Ben. Good talking to you, brother. Thanks for your call. Okay. We're going to talk next to Barbara from Roseville, Michigan. Hi, Barbara. Welcome.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, hi, Steve. Now, in biblical times, they would hang men on the cross and crucify them. Did they ever hang women on the cross? And if they didn't, what did they do to punish the women?
SPEAKER 02 :
I do believe women were crucified. The historians, like Josephus, say that the Romans actually crucified thousands of people. And I don't think that the Romans would have spared a woman if she did something wrong. that would get a man hanged on the cross. That is, if a woman was found to be part of a terrorist cell trying to overthrow the Roman authority or something like that, along with the men, I think they'd all be hanged. I don't know of any cases where women were hanged on the cross. I mean, the Jews, of course, if a woman did something worthy of death, the Jews would stone them to death. They didn't have the power of crucifixion. But the Romans, the people that a Jew would stone, the Romans, if they had the same complaint against them, would crucify them. So I don't think that there'd be any deference given to women if they did things that the Romans thought were worthy of death. But I don't know of any cases. But I do know that it was the commonplace method of executing a criminal by the Romans if that criminal was not a citizen of of Rome. Now, all over the Roman Empire, there were people who had the privilege of Roman citizenship. Paul was one of them, for example, though Peter was not. And for that reason, Peter was crucified and Paul was beheaded because the Roman citizens, by virtue of being Roman citizens, they were exempt from crucifixion. Crucifixion is like the most awful way, the most hideous, heinous, painful way to die that probably people could have thought of in those days it was absolutely horrible terrifying in fact whereas being beheaded no one's eager to get beheaded but it's quick and painless so if a Roman citizen like Paul had done something worthy of death and at the end of his life the Romans decided he had by being a Christian he'd get beheaded Peter on the other hand was killed under the same emperor Nero but Peter was crucified because he was not a Roman citizen So I think anyone who did something that the Romans thought was worthy of death, they'd be crucified unless they were a Roman citizen. If they were a Roman citizen, they'd probably be beheaded as Paul was. They'd have to hang up their naked? Well, they might have to hang up their naked, true. I mean, they weren't a Christian society, the Romans. They were pagans, and they didn't have the... modesty conventions that usually come along with the conversion of a society to Christianity. For example, the Assyrians and the Babylonians, who were not much different than the Romans, they would strip women naked to lead them out into captivity. They'd put a hook in their nose and drag them off. Well, they'd let them walk, I hope. Dragging them by the nose wouldn't last long. But, you know, they'd put a hook in their nose and they'd lead them off naked. It was part of the humiliation that they intended for their conquered peoples. So the Romans wouldn't be any more squeamish about a woman's, you know, being naked or not than Assyrians or Babylonians were. That's paganism. We live in a society... that has been influenced by Christianity for many centuries, so that there's the assumption that women should be treated with some deference. Because that's what Christianity would suggest. We give honor to women as the weaker vessel, the Bible says. And so, I mean, there's just a certain civility that comes to a nation when it adopts Christian ideas. And along with civility comes a... a care to exempt the weaker parties, women and children and so forth, from the kinds of pains and severe punishments that often men have. Though, I mean, even in our country, women will have capital punishment if they deserve it, don't receive it. But there just aren't many women who commit crimes that are, compared to men, there aren't many women who commit capital crimes. Anyway, I don't think the Romans would have spared them. At all. Okay, let's talk to Daryl from Maine. Hi, Daryl. Welcome.
SPEAKER 08 :
Hi, how are you doing, man?
SPEAKER 02 :
Good.
SPEAKER 08 :
I have a joke for you.
SPEAKER 02 :
A joke?
SPEAKER 08 :
Yeah. It's a really, really good one, okay?
SPEAKER 1 :
This dog is man's best friend.
SPEAKER 08 :
What's that little dog? The opposite?
SPEAKER 02 :
I'm sorry. You know, every time you call, and I don't blame you for this. I know you have Parkinson's, but I have a hard time understanding you.
SPEAKER 07 :
I didn't hear what you said. If a dog is man's best friend, what's that make God the opposite?
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, I see. Okay. Well, I guess that's a joke. Okay. If a dog is man's best friend, is God the opposite? Because God is spelled differently, backward from dog. Yeah, that's not really a question you have, but Thank you for, you know, a moment of comic relief here. I appreciate you. I hope you're doing well. All right, let's talk to Tim from La Mesa, California. Tim, welcome.
SPEAKER 08 :
Yes, Steve. I had a question about Isaiah 7. When the sign is given about, behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and he will, you know, know the good news, know how to refuse evil and choose the good, etc. Now, to us, of course, Christians, the whole thing about a virgin bearing a son is applied to Christ. But in the day of Isaiah there, was the sign... Did the sign have anything to do with a virgin conceiving? Or was it, you know, since the word in Hebrew can mean young woman or virgin, was it just that a young woman...
SPEAKER 02 :
supposedly the king's wife because you know it's a royal royalty i think here was that the sign that uh that he will know things or refuse the good and evil before a certain age and all that yeah that passage has caused a lot of confusion obviously christians and matthew and his gospel in chapter one quotes verse 14 where it says behold the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and and shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us. So we recognize that as having a fulfillment when Jesus was born of a virgin. However, most scholars, including conservative ones, and I don't know that I call myself a scholar, but I also hold this view, but it'd be this standard view of almost all conservative scholars, is that this prophecy, first and foremost, is not referring to Jesus alone. but is referring to a child that would be born in Isaiah chapter 8. Now, why? Why would we say that? Well, for one thing, the child born in chapter 8 is also called Emmanuel. In chapter 8, verse 8, he is called O Emmanuel, which is the same name that this child in chapter 7 would be. More than that, the occasion of the prophecy was that the kings of Syria and Israel were gathered with their armies to destroy Judah and conquer Judah so they could take it over. And King Ahaz was concerned about that, and Isaiah was sent to assure Ahaz that these kings would not defeat Judah, and told Ahaz, ask God for a sign, and he'll show you. He'll give you a sign to prove it, so you don't have to worry. Ahaz refused to ask for a sign. He thought it was irreverent. So Isaiah said, well, God will give you a sign then. He'll pick one for you. The virgin shall conceive and bring forth a son. Now, that's not all of it. It says, And by both her kings, it means the king of Israel and the king of Syria, which were threatening Judah. And so these kings of Syria and Israel would be defeated before this child would... have reached an age of accountability where they know to refuse the evil and choose the good. Now, the next chapter, chapter 8, God tells Isaiah to go into the home of this woman and have a baby by her. Now, most Christians assume this woman was his wife. which is possible, or maybe she wasn't yet his wife. Maybe she was a virgin at the time that the prophecy was made, and then he married her, and then, of course, as a married couple, they had a child. We're not told exactly how that relationship was, but we are told that he was supposed to have a child by this woman, and the child's actual name was Meher Shalel Hashbaz, but it says about this child, chapter 8, verse 4, Before the child shall have knowledge to cry, My father and my mother, the riches of Damascus, that's Syria, and the spoils of Samaria, that's Israel, will be taken away before the king of Assyria. And then this child is spoken to, and in verse 8 he's called Emmanuel. So notice the comparison here. Ahaz, the king, is told that a child is going to be born before that child reaches any advanced age, before he knows good from evil. that the two kings of Syria and Israel will be gone and will no longer be a threat to Ahaz. And this child will be called Immanuel. Now, the next chapter, as soon as he's finished giving the prophecy in chapter 7, Isaiah is told to actually make this happen. He goes and has a child by a woman. They call it Immanuel, although that's not his name. Of course, Immanuel is not Jesus' name either. It's a title more than a name. And they do refer to the child as Immanuel. And it is said of him, the kings of Syria and Israel will be gone before this child knows to say mommy or daddy. In other words, both children are said to be a signal. that the kings of Syria and Israel will be defeated before the child has reached more than a few years old. Now, it's interesting because from this point in time when Isaiah's child was born, Syria did fall to Assyria, and Samaria, the capital of Israel, fell to Assyria also within a few years. And so this child... Initially, his prophecy is about Isaiah's child. And, by the way, it is said to be a sign to King Ahaz, so it had to be something that happened in his lifetime. What Matthew tells us is that that child obviously was a type and a shadow of Christ, because Christ was born of a virgin, and he is God with us. Not everything in the prophecy in Isaiah 7 applies to Jesus, for example. Syria and Israel would not be destroyed before he reached the age of accountability. That was true of Isaiah's child, not of Jesus. But that's the way it is with typology in the Bible. You know, something is true of someone in the Old Testament, and some aspects of it are true also of the Messiah. Now, I could end that here, but I want to say more about the word virgin here. But I have to take a break, so I'll come back after the break and talk about the significance of the word virgin in this place. You're listening to The Narrow Path. We have another half hour coming up, so don't go away. We are listener supported. You can go to our website, thenarrowpath.com to find out more. I'll be back in 30 seconds. Don't go away.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you very much.
SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome back to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg, and we are live for another half hour, taking your calls. If you'd like to be on the program, you can call this number, 844-484-5737. Now, before the break, there was a call, a question, about Isaiah chapter 7. the famous passage about the virgin shall conceive and bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel. And I was talking about how almost all scholars, including conservative ones, believe that the first application of that prophecy was to Isaiah's own son, who was born as recorded in the very next chapter. the same things are said about Isaiah's son as are said about this child that is prophesied. However, Matthew, recognizing that the name Emmanuel means God with us and realizing how that obviously is more true in the case of Jesus than of anyone else who's ever been with us, he saw that this is also, that Isaiah's child is like a type or a shadow of Christ and that the ultimate fulfillment of it is in Christ. And that he was, in fact, born of a virgin because the Bible says that when Mary was told she'd have a child, she said, I'm a virgin. I've never known a man. How can this happen? And the angel told her, well, that's not a problem. God's going to miraculously make it happen. So, you know, the fact that she was an actual virgin... is another connector there that Matthew sees. This has relevance to Christ. Now, you asked, what about the virgin? What does that mean? I mean, obviously, the Hebrew word Alma, which is used there, can mean a virgin, but it also can just mean a young woman. In fact, Hebrew scholars mostly say that Alma... the Hebrew word for virgin in this passage, in Isaiah 7.14, just means a young woman. That's not really talking about a woman who's literally a virgin. That's not what the word means in Hebrew. And that this is referring to Isaiah's child being born of a young woman, the woman through whom he fathered the child. And so they say that's that. Now, one thing that's interesting and more in support of the literal virgin meaning is that when the Jews translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek about in the 3rd century B.C., long before Jesus was around, long before there were Christians making claims about the virgin birth of Christ, the Jews themselves translated this passage back as they did the rest of the Old Testament, into Greek. And when they chose to translate this verse in the place of the word Alma, they used the Greek word Parthenos. And Parthenos apparently means a literal virgin. At least in almost every case where it occurs, it's actually talking about a woman who's never had sexual relations. So it's kind of interesting because although the Hebrew word Alma may not be that specific, It could just mean a young woman. Yet, the Jews recognized the prophecy almost three centuries before Christ. They recognized the prophecy as having to do with a Parthenos, a literal virgin. Now, how is this fulfilled in Isaiah's child, if it is talking about a literal virgin? We know that Mary was a literal virgin, so there's no problem with that. But what about Isaiah's child? We know that Isaiah's wife was not a virgin. He was told to go into her, meaning a Hebraism means go have sex with her and conceive a child. So he did. She wasn't a virgin. So what do we make of that? Well, it is possible that at the time the prophecy was made, that woman was a virgin. She was not yet married to Isaiah. It's a prophecy about a woman, a virgin. who would yet have a child it doesn't say she would necessarily still be a virgin at the time that happened so he may have married this virgin woman and then you know impregnated her in the normal fashion so that at the time that you know after they were married she wasn't a virgin but she was a virgin at the time the prophecy was made that's one possibility um Of course, that doesn't make it a miracle. And some people say, see, it has to be a miracle because it says this is going to be a sign to Ahaz. And how is it a sign that a young woman has a baby? That happens all the time. How is that a sign? Well, the sign is not said to be that the child will be born, but that when the child is born, that's going to signal a very short period before the kings of Syria and Israel will be defeated by the Assyrians. In other words, any child that was born after that, it happened to be that Isaiah's child fit the bill, but any child born just after that would be three or four years old or less when this process was fulfilled. In other words, the sign is not that there was a miracle done. The sign was that it was a signal of the shortness of the time when this child was born, whether it's conceived supernaturally or not, once this child was born, there'd be only a few years, very few years before any child that was born could know good from evil or say mommy or daddy, it says, then this would be done. So this is more of a time marker than a miracle. And by the way, there's no need that this has to be a miraculous thing that he's talking about here. just because it was a sign, because Isaiah had two sons, and neither of them were born supernaturally. And yet, he says in Isaiah 8.18, Here I am, and the children whom the Lord has given me, we are for signs and wonders in Israel. So Isaiah had Meher Shalel Hashbaz in chapter 8. Before that, he had another child named Shir Jashub. He had two sons, and he said, my sons and I are a sign to Israel. Now, he's not saying that any of them were born supernaturally or that any miracle had occurred in connection to their lives. A sign doesn't have to be a miraculous sign. It's an indicator of something, and the birth of this son was an indicator of the nearness. of the coming of the disasters on the enemies of Judah. So the birth of any child, in any way, could serve as a sign that way. But there's another possibility. I said it's possible that the word virgin applies because the woman in question was, in fact, a virgin at the time of Isaiah giving the prophecy, though she didn't remain one that long after that. But there's also the fact that in the book of Isaiah, elsewhere, the nation of Israel, or Jerusalem at least, is referred to as the virgin. Now what's interesting is that the the prophecy doesn't say a virgin will conceive and bring forth a son. The prophecy in Isaiah 7.14 says the virgin will conceive and bring forth a son. And that's kind of interesting. It's as if the virgin is like a technical term as opposed to any old virgin. Now, what's interesting, although the word virgin is different in this passage, but in Isaiah chapter 37, When Hezekiah is sending a response to Sennacherib, who has sent a threatening letter, in Isaiah 37.22, Hezekiah's response says this, The daughter of Zion has despised you and laughed you to scorn. The daughter of Jerusalem has shaken her head behind your back. Now, the daughter of Zion or the daughter of Jerusalem is a poetic way that the prophets often speak of the population of Jerusalem. The people of Jerusalem are the daughter of Zion or the daughter of Jerusalem. Now, that daughter of Zion is called the virgin, not a virgin, the virgin. The letter of Hezekiah says the virgin, the daughter of Zion, has despised you. Now, if the Jews thought of the population of Jerusalem as being, you know, something they could call the virgin, then when Isaiah said the virgin will conceive and bring forth a son, I'm thinking perhaps it's talking about Jerusalem. Perhaps it's the people of Jerusalem that are going to bring forth a child. And if Isaiah's wife was, in fact, a woman of Jerusalem, which is possible since Isaiah was a man of Jerusalem, that would seemingly explain it. That the thing is that it was a Jewish girl that Isaiah married. And she bore a son. So I'm thinking that could be what the virgin is. The virgin could be a reference to Jerusalem itself. And that would explain it too. And that could explain why the translators of the Septuagint rendered it Parthenos, even though it was only Alma in the Hebrew. Anyway, those are some thoughts on that. The bottom line is that I believe... The passage has its first application to Isaiah's own son mentioned in the next chapter, and then it has its ultimate application to Christ, who is, of course, the child of a literal virgin. And we don't need the translation of that word to be considered in order to know that, because Mary herself mentioned that she had never been with a man, which means she was a virgin in the sense that we use that word today. Okay, let's talk to Jeff from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Hi, Jeff. Welcome.
SPEAKER 07 :
Hi, Steve. Thank you for taking my call. My question is about the flood narrative in Genesis, and I'm wondering if you, in your studies of Hebrew and Genesis, do you feel there are biblical interpretations of the flood that would support a local or regionalized flood? In particular, I've heard some arguments that the Hebrew terms for a planet's earth and land, I believe it's Eretz, are quite ambiguous. And just what are your thoughts? Is there a biblical argument that supports a regionalized flood?
SPEAKER 02 :
There are arguments for it. There are arguments for a regional flood as opposed to a global flood. I still favor the global flood theory, but you're right. The word Eretz, which is translated the earth, whenever it says, you know, all the earth will be covered with water and everything that dwells on the earth shall perish. And so for the word earth, we use that term usually for the planet Earth. Now, of course, we might use it less frequently to speak of dirt. If you pick up dirt, you're holding a handful of earth. But that's not as common. When we use the word earth, we're almost always talking about the planet Earth. Not necessarily so in the Bible. In fact, there's hardly ever. I think there are some cases, but they're very rare in the Bible. When earth or Eretz in the Bible means the planet earth, because the same word means ground or land. In fact, the land of Israel is often called the Eretz, the land, the same word. Now, of course, the flood didn't cover the land of Israel. Noah and his family didn't live in the land of Israel. They lived in Mesopotamia. But the region, the land there, you know, it could be that the word earth speaks of a limited region. range of land. All the land in the region that was flooded was covered and all the things died there. I mean, there are people who have argued that the word Eretz is perhaps ambiguous enough that it doesn't have to refer to all the planet Earth. And that's one of the arguments they make. And then they have other arguments too, but that's the main one I think that would be drawn from scriptural language. However, there are things about the flood that make me think it's not regional, though if it was, that's fine with me. I have no preference. You know, I have an opinion about many things about which I have no preference. So I have opinions about the age of the earth, about the global flood, things like that, but I don't have any interest in whether it's correct or not. I just I just try to follow what I see as likely from Scripture. And if I turn out to be wrong, there's nothing lost from it. But I do believe that the Bible indicates that the flood covered all the highest mountains to a depth of 22.5 feet above the highest mountains. Now, I'm not sure how you contain a local flood when all the mountains, which would be the natural perimeters, The mountain range would be the one thing that would contain the flood in a certain valley. If the water's above the mountains by, you know, as much as a two-story building above, then I would say probably it wasn't confined to that area. Another thought is that we know that when the rain stopped, when there was no more water being added to the flood, it took a whole year. for the waters to drain off to the point where Noah and his family could get out of the ark and live on the ground again. It took many, many months before they could even see the tops of mountains. Now, in a local flood, You know, no matter how much water there is, within a few days or weeks, it'll drain off once you stop adding more, once it stops raining, you know. Whatever is on the ground will simply drain off. You know, the most abundant waters in a region will run off in, you know, I would say less than a few weeks. The reason that the flood didn't go down for about a year... in any considerable way, would have to be because it had to evaporate. It wasn't running off anywhere. There's no place to run off to. That's what I think. And then there's, of course, the whole issue of if God wanted to preserve two of every kind of animal and Noah's family, and he gave them 120 years advance notice to build a boat, why? Why build a boat? Why not just leave the valley? Why didn't God just say, hey, Noah, this valley is doomed. There's a mountain range over there. On the other side of it, there won't be any flood. You've got 120 years to get over there. No one would take 120 years to go over the next mountain range. So he could more easily have relocated than built a boat that big. So it strikes me as if the Bible is describing something that wasn't just locally contained. And if it turns out that it was, I've got no problem with it. But if it wasn't, I mean, if you take seriously some of the descriptions of things, I would have to say I don't think it works out for it to be a local flood.
SPEAKER 07 :
Excellent. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay. Thanks, Jeff. Okay. Our next caller is Lito from Spokane, Washington. Lito, welcome.
SPEAKER 06 :
Sure. Thank you for taking my call. My question is in reference to when Jesus tells those that I never knew you, what is it, in your opinion, that we need to do to make sure that Jesus knows us?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, yeah, that's at the end of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 7. And I think he gives the answer there before he gives that little anecdote. Here's what he said, of course, that you're referring to. Verse 22, Matthew 7, 22 and 23. He said, Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and done many wonders in your name? And I will then say to them, I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness. So here's people calling him Lord. And they're saying they cast out demons in his name and prophesied in his name and did wonders in his name. So it seems like they were Christians. They certainly thought they were. And yet he says, when they stand before him, he's going to say, I never knew you. Which is kind of scary, really. We think, well, if these people had that kind of credentials and weren't the real deal, maybe I'm not. Do I have better credentials than those? Have I cast out demons and done mighty works in God's name? If not, then they seem more like convincing Christians than I am. And he didn't know them. So maybe we're all in trouble. But it's not so, because the verse that leads to that bit there, that interchange, is verse 21. And Jesus said, Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father in heaven. This is very similar to what he said in, I think it was Luke 6.46, if I'm not mistaken, or maybe Luke 6.40. He said, Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and you don't do what I say? In other words, the people to whom he said, I never knew you, they didn't do the will of the Father. They didn't do what he said. Now, they did stuff. They did stuff that was impressive, but it wasn't what he told them to do. You know, Moses, the second time he struck the rock and got water to come out of it, God had told him not to do it. God told him to do it the first time, 40 years earlier, and he got a miracle. He struck the rock and water came out. The second time, God told him to speak to the rock, and water would come out. That was 40 years later. But Moses was angry, and he didn't obey God. And he struck the rock again, and it worked again. But then God reproved him and said, I told you not to do that. Now you're not going to be able to go in the promised land because you didn't obey me. You didn't sanctify me before the people. Now, here's the thing. A man can work a miracle in the name of God at times, and yet be doing it in disobedience to God. Or it may be that God simply had nothing to do with his doing it or didn't command him to do it. But doing the will of the Father means that I am now reoriented from the position I was born into. I was born interested in my will. I was born looking out for my interests, trying to make sure that everything around me worked for my good, for my comfort. for my gratification. That's how babies are born, and that's how people remain when they grow up from being babies if they don't change. Now, change means convert. The word convert means change. The change is this. When you become a true disciple of Jesus, you now say, not my will, but God's will be done. I'm no longer living for my agenda. I'm no longer seeking my dreams. I'm no longer doing anything because I want to specifically. I'm doing it because I believe this is what God would have me do. I'm seeking God's will has displaced my will in that part of me that determines who I'm going to serve and who I'm going to please. Now, it doesn't mean that once you've made that decision that you never do anything wrong. The Bible makes it very clear. Paul said, I desire to do good, but I sometimes do things that aren't good. That's true. He said in Galatians, you know, the flesh lusts against the spirit, the spirit against the flesh, and these two are contrary to one another. So you don't do what you want to do. Well, when you're sinning as a Christian, you're doing what you don't want to do, he said. And you don't want to do it because you want to do the right thing. You have decided and reoriented your life toward doing what's pleasing to God. When you succumb to the flesh, when you're tricked, when you're deceived, when you're weak and you stumble, well, then you end up doing what you don't want to do. But the fact that you didn't want to do it indicates that you have been reoriented. Because before you're a Christian and you do something that pleases you or your flesh, you don't have any objection to it. It's not a problem. It's quite agreeable with your general orientation. But conversion changes your orientation. You are converted when you say, I will no longer seek my own will. I will seek God's will from now on. And then you begin to live that way. You'll have failures. You won't be consistent all the time. But your commitment never changes. At least it doesn't have to. No matter how many times you stumble, you don't have to ever change your commitment to be, I'm going to follow God. If I stumble, I'm going to get back up again. I'm going to repent and move forward in the right direction again. That's what being a follower of Christ is. That's how the disciples who followed Jesus were. They did wrong things too, but they kept following him. And so doing the will of my Father refers to following Jesus. I mean, that's clearly what he called people to do. And when he said, why do you call me Lord, Lord, and you don't do the things I say, it's obviously saying, well, I don't recognize you as my followers if you're not doing what I say. But again, I want to make it clear. Doing what he says is, no one does that perfectly. Paul didn't. Peter certainly didn't. I don't. And you don't probably. So if no one does it perfectly, then how do we know if we're really saved? Well, you'll know if you're saved by the fact that, just ask yourself, what is the purpose of my life? What am I determined to do with myself? And if the answer is to please God, to do what he wants, to make whatever sacrifice is necessary to fulfill his purposes for my life, if that's where you can honestly say, you can say that to yourself, then you're certainly, he's never going to say, I never knew you, because he does know you. And you know him. So that's the thing. When Jesus said there are people who think they know him, but they'll find out that he didn't know them, he makes it clear that there are also people that he won't say that to. They are the ones who do the will of his Father, which I think speaks of an orientation toward, well, let's just say an orientation away from a commitment to doing our own will. Now, why would I say that? Because Jesus said in Matthew 18, 24, excuse me, 16, 24, he said, if anyone come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. So that's the basic thing. You're not a Christian yet if you haven't denied yourself. And what does that mean? It means I'm going to deny myself the right to dictate the pattern and goals of my life. I used to do that. I'm going to change from that. I'm going to deny myself that position and place the will of God in its place and follow Jesus. So anyone who does that has no reason to doubt that when Christ sees them, he'll say, well done, good, faithful servant. But people who have never done that and who are using religion as something just for their own good, whatever good they think it may be, they haven't really changed. They haven't denied themselves. And they're not doing the will of the Father. They're doing their own will still. So Jesus actually, in the passage, gives enough information for us to know how to answer that. All right. Thank you for your call. Linda from Auburn, Washington, you're our last caller. We only have a few minutes. Go ahead.
SPEAKER 05 :
Hi, I wanted to say two things related to the flood issue and two more things related to... There may not be time, so do the most important things first because we don't have much time. Okay, so the first one is that there's evidence for it not being a worldwide flood, and that is that Australian Aboriginal people have had continuous culture for 50,000 years, and there's also evidence of them making it to South America. And the second is evidence in clay tablet writings that there can be a thousand feet of stope over Uganda and Kenya region, and they may have very rich soil, so it at least looks like it went that far, but maybe not the whole planet.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, the Bible says that everybody in the world descended from Noah's family, so... When we say, well, the Australian aboriginals, their history goes back 50,000 years. Yeah, where are the records of that? Were they keeping accurate records that long? How do we know that? You see, cultural anthropology that looks at the traditions and the mythologies and so forth of ancient peoples, the Chinese, let's say, there's a lot of people say, well, their history goes back tens of thousands of years, aboriginals. The Chinese, I think, are more likely to have kept records than the Aborigines. I mean, what do the Aborigines do, writing on dirt? I don't think we can prove that. I think it's a claim.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, there's a – yeah. Well, I mean, people could look into it, how they've kept the records. That's what I heard, and that was from, like, a listener of God.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, I'll tell you this. I'll tell you this. There's no society – that has kept records for 50,000 years that anyone has ever discovered. So, you know, if they say, well, we have oral traditions of our kings or our chiefs going back thousands and thousands and thousands of years, well, okay, that's what was passed on orally. The longer something is passed on orally, the more likely it is it's, you know, changed.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, they have found new archaeology that's covered with water around, like, Egypt area, India, I believe. Right. Japan off the coast of Japan.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right.
SPEAKER 05 :
And it has to do with the thawing of the poles and stuff.
SPEAKER 02 :
But to me, yeah, I think the evidence is strong that it was a global flood. But that's fine. If you want to say that, that's fine. All right. Thanks for your call. You've been listening to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg. We are out of time for today's program, so thanks for joining us. Let's talk again tomorrow. And, by the way, we are a listener-supported ministry.
