Key Life Network

Steve Brown: What part of me goes to heaven? The answer to that and other questions on Key Life.

Guest (Male): Key Life exists to communicate that the deepest message of Jesus and the Bible is the radical grace of God to sinners and sufferers. Life's hard for everyone, so grace is for all of us. But there's a lot of confusion about how grace applies to real life. So here's seminary professor and author Steve Brown and Pete Alwinson from Forge Truth to answer your questions.

Steve Brown: Thank you, Matthew. Hi, Pete.

Guest (Male): How you doing, Steve?

Steve Brown: I'm doing really good.

Guest (Male): Good. You're looking good. I mean, you know, you don't look like you're going to heaven soon.

Steve Brown: No, the good news is you're going to heaven, and the bad news is you're going on Thursday. Listen, check out forge truth.com. That is an absolutely amazing website and the podcast will blow you away. So check it out, especially if you're a guy.

And you can listen in if you're of the other gender. And you know you are. I mean, there's some people confused with that. But if you want to know what men are thinking and to try and understand them because they're confusing, that website will help. Pete comes in on Fridays, as you know, and we spend the whole time answering questions and we'd love your questions.

1-800-KEY-LIFE. You can call anytime you want to and follow the instructions. And that's 1-800-539-5433. Or you can send your question to Key Life Network, Post Office Box 5000, Maitland, Florida 32794. Or in Canada it's Key Life Canada, Post Office Box 2060, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 6J8. Or you can email your question to steve@keylife.org.

And all of those places are places where you could send money. And if you have it, do it. I mean, we'll we'll spread it around in a way that brings glory to God. If you don't have it, don't do it. We understand that.

But say a prayer for that. Actually, if you can help us financially, please do. I promise we'll be faithful to your gift. Pete, lead us in prayer and we'll get to these questions.

Guest (Male): All right. Let's pray together. Our Father, we do come to you today right now, just for a moment at the end of this week. So grateful that we that we are yours and that we can say we know who we are, why we're here, and what we're here to do.

And Lord, to enjoy you and glorify you. And so we we give you praise. Thanks for this week. Thank you for all that you have done that we didn't even know you did, but thank you for the good things that we see. The answers to prayer, the opportunity to do good work for the good of other people, to be able to pay our bills. Lord, we need you for everything.

And some of those of our our listeners, Lord, just need healing, they need encouragement, they need they need you in a special way. And so we commit them to you right now. And we ask that you'd be with our leaders for this weekend. Lord, we want to worship. We need to meet with you and your people in a special way. And we ask that you would be with our priests and pastors and teachers. Be with our missionaries.

Many speaking in this country right now during this season. And Lord, we we do pray that you would be with all of our leaders, that they would lead us into your presence and you would be glorified. We commit now this time of Q&A to you as we pray in Jesus name. Amen.

Steve Brown: Amen. Let's go to our phone lines.

Guest (Male): What goes to heaven? Your soul, your spirit, your body?

Steve Brown: All of that. All of it. But that requires a little bit of exposition.

Guest (Male): That's right.

Steve Brown: Okay, the ball's in your court.

Guest (Male): Well, you know, good good solid Christian theologians differ on this. But you know, Paul is pretty clear in Corinthians to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. So if if we died right now, right, we would be in the presence of the Lord. The the body would go into the ground and the soul or the immaterial part of us goes to be with him. Soul or the spirit goes to be with him until, 1st Thessalonians 4 tells us, the second coming of Christ in which we get the resurrection body.

Now, that is a classical way of understanding it.

Steve Brown: Your way of understanding it is is kind of weird. Go ahead and say it.

Guest (Male): Well, it's not weird. It it has a lot of it it makes sense. It didn't wasn't this C.S. Lewis's particular view?

Steve Brown: Yeah, I got a lot of that from there. But when you read scripture, you you begin to see apparent contradictions in this area. Where at the sound of the last trumpet, the dead in Christ shall rise, Paul said. And yet Jesus said to the thief, "Today you will be with me in paradise."

Guest (Male): Right.

Steve Brown: And those two comments seem to contradict. And they're reconciled by what you just said, which is the orthodox answers to those particular questions. I just think there may be another option.

That we're living in a time continuum now, and God is outside of time. And once we die, we join God in that place where time is irrelevant. So God is using time language to describe a non-time reality, and that that's why it appears to be contradictory. Both are true.

Guest (Male): Yeah, so God is outside of time, and so all of history is the eternal present for him. And so when we go,

Steve Brown: We're with him, and time is irrelevant.

Guest (Male): And and and so we have our new bodies at that point. That I understand that from a the Bible is written phenomenologically.

Steve Brown: Exactly.

Guest (Male): It's written how we experience time and and the phenomena around us.

Steve Brown: And it's written in very get the fodder down low kind of. Calvin said it was God's baby talk.

Guest (Male): That's right. That's right. So, go ahead.

Steve Brown: So, go ahead.

Guest (Male): So, yeah, Steve, you know, and and either way, we're not lost. And I think because of the resurrection of Christ, when we die, we go to be with him, our our mind, our body, our soul. By the way, when Paul says your body, soul and spirit will be saved until the day of redemption, he says, "all of you." He's meaning all of you.

Steve Brown: That's exactly what he means.

Guest (Male): That's what he means. We get some people to split that up and say, "That's what he means." Yeah. And I I think that we're material and we're immaterial.

Steve Brown: Yeah. That's enough.

Guest (Male): And in the new heaven and new earth, which is when the new heaven comes to us, we we will have our bodies. We are not going to ever be just disembodied spirits.

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Guest (Male): It it's a complicated thing, but but the New Testament is clear that when we die, we're with him.

Steve Brown: That's true.

Guest (Male): And we're not lost.

Steve Brown: That ought to be enough.

Guest (Male): Yeah.

Steve Brown: Okay. This is an email. I get the impression that not all Bible promises can be applied to us right now, that some only apply to the person or the situation at the time. If this is so, how can I know the difference?

Guest (Male): Well, that's that's a very good question. Really is. And it's a hermeneutical question. How do we interpret?

Steve Brown: What's that word?

Guest (Male): Hermeneutics. What's that? The science and art of biblical interpretation.

Steve Brown: Sounds like a disease.

Guest (Male): I know it does. I I I got hermeneutics, man. My back is broken out. You know, but it it really if you if you look at these promises, that's that's a really good question. So when we look at the promises God made to Abraham, he made the promises of of the seed to him and his descendants, and he reinforces those promises all the way down to each successive generation. So you can't miss that those promises weren't intended for other people.

At other times, we see we see promises or warnings like to Ezekiel.

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Guest (Male): That are not to be applied all the way across. Ezekiel, if you don't tell the guys you don't tell my people the truth, their blood will be on your shoulders. That was for him.

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Guest (Male): That was a promise warning. And it's not it's not for us and some try to take that and apply it to all of us.

Steve Brown: I know. That's and and it gets kind of gray here and there. Let me tell you, I think the promises as opposed to principles.

Guest (Male): Mhm.

Steve Brown: The promises of God should not and this is hermeneutical principle too. It should be a part of the whole counsel of God and not just one verse.

Guest (Male): There you go.

Steve Brown: So if you get a promise that's made to to Abraham, it might be the reference to the nature of God.

Guest (Male): That's right.

Steve Brown: And then you find it in the New Testament, other places in the Old Testament, and you can say, "I claim it."

Guest (Male): That's right.

Steve Brown: That's a promise. But you let the Bible decide that and your common sense.

Guest (Male): That's so good. Scripture interpret scripture is the very best interpretive principle.

Steve Brown: Yeah, it really is.

Guest (Male): So keep reading the whole thing and and say, "Lord, is this apply to me?" And he he will give you understanding in that by his spirit. He will help you understand that.

Steve Brown: Don't thank us. We just gave you Hermeneutics 101.

Guest (Male): And talk to your pastor because that's one of the things that we we do study in seminary is is this whole the application of some of these promises.

Steve Brown: Yeah, good stuff. This is an email. How do I honor the Lord, and you do a lot of this, in my work or my career?

Guest (Male): Hmm. What do you think? That's a that's a good question.

Steve Brown: Well, you're dealing with that all the time. I mean, that's part of what you do.

Guest (Male): With guys, yeah, we're we we are talking, you know, when we talk about a man's purpose, we're leaders, worker-providers, warrior ambassadors. I I think that this question shows that all of life is spiritual ministry.

Steve Brown: Yeah, we dichotomize, don't we?

Guest (Male): We do, and we don't need to do that. So there's a there's a ministry called C12 that helps businessmen slant their businesses and their companies toward doing good and doing ministry and thinking biblically about every aspect of what they do. And I think that's what we we need to.

Steve Brown: When we do all things for Christ.

Guest (Male): That's right.

Steve Brown: That's enough. I mean, it has to do with excellency, integrity, and honesty, and a bunch of other things.

Guest (Male): That's right. Do your work heartily unto the Lord, rather than just to men. It's the Lord Christ you serve. So if we think of our work that way, that changes everything.

Steve Brown: It really does.

Guest (Male): Diligence and all that, yeah.

Steve Brown: And your ministry is to men, my ministry is Key Life.

Guest (Male): Yeah.

Steve Brown: Nobody else's ministry is in computers.

Guest (Male): That's right. And somebody else's ministry is in teaching in school.

Steve Brown: Right.

Guest (Male): Medicine.

Steve Brown: That's where we're Yeah, that's where we're called.

Guest (Male): You can even be a Christian lawyer, can't you?

Steve Brown: Well, that's taking it a bit far. It's a joke. Don't send us letters. Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.