The Narrow Path

Steve Gregg: 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 some lines open right now if you'd like to join us. If you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith, this is a very good opportunity to get on the switchboard and get in ahead of others who will be calling later in the hour. If you'd like to call in with a question or maybe a difference of opinion from the host, the number to call is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737.

I want to make another announcement. I'm not making this every day, but it's coming up in a few weeks. I'm going to be speaking in San Juan Capistrano on Tuesday night, February 10th, at the church Ranch Church. Ranch Church in San Juan Capistrano, California. They've asked me to come that evening and speak on the four views of Revelation. So, if you're in Orange County or anywhere near there or want to join us, you can go to our website and you'll see where that is, where the church is, what time that is, and so forth. Again, that's going to be February 10th, which is a Tuesday night. If you don't know where our website is, it's thenarrowpath.com. Check it out there. If you go to thenarrowpath.com and you click on the tab that says Announcements, that's where you'll find this kind of information.

Also, just getting ahead of the game a little bit here, in March, early in March, I think it's March 6th, I'll be debating in Wisconsin, in Onalaska, Wisconsin. I think I'm pronouncing that city name correctly. It's spelled like Onalaska. It's a pretty big church I'll be speaking at and I'll be debating with Joel Richardson. Now, Joel Richardson approached me about this, which I was happy about. I enjoy debates. I just don't go looking for them. I'm not that familiar with Joel Richardson. I've seen his name on things. I haven't really listened to him much. I haven't read his books. He's kind of famous in some circles. But we're going to be debating on the Davidic Kingdom, the throne of David.

Now, this is essentially a debate between premillennial and amillennial views. Premillennialism teaches that when Jesus comes back, he will sit on the throne of David in Jerusalem for the millennium. Amillennialism teaches, as the New Testament does, that Jesus ascended into heaven and is now sitting on the throne of David in fulfillment of the promises that were made to David. This is what Peter said, Paul said it. There are plenty of scriptures that say it. We'll be debating that point, and that's going to be March 6th in Wisconsin. Next month on the 10th in San Juan Capistrano, California, and then the following month, March 6th, I'll be speaking in Wisconsin. Okay, we're going to go to the phones now and talk to Julia calling from Surrey, British Columbia. Hi Julia, welcome.

Julia: Hi Steve. I have a question and I want to ask this question with reverence because who am I to judge Jesus? I do struggle with the situation where the fig tree was not in season and yet Jesus cursed it. How do you explain that?

Steve Gregg: Well, frankly, I don't know that anyone needs an excuse to remove a tree if it's not bearing fruit. Now, I realize that some people think Jesus got mad at the tree when he said, "No one shall ever eat fruit from you again." Now, if Jesus was angry at the tree, that does raise questions about, I suppose, his sanity because he should know that trees don't have any choices in these matters.

But it was more of a prophetic action. I believe the fig tree represented Israel, which throughout the Old Testament is represented as a fruitless piece of farming plant. Usually, it is referred to as a vineyard or a vine that doesn't produce any good grapes, although Israel is also likened to other things, olive trees, fig trees, and things like that. The idea is that using these agricultural metaphors, the Bible often speaks of Israel that God expected from them, like a farmer expects from his plants, fruit.

God never got the fruit he wanted from them. Now, in Isaiah chapter five and verse seven, it says the fruit he wanted from them was justice and righteousness. So God was looking for Israel to be just and to be righteous. That's why he gave them just and righteous laws to keep and so forth. And yet they gave him every advantage but they didn't produce. Now, when Jesus comes, he's coming at the end of a very long period of time that God has been trying to get fruit out of Israel, that is justice and righteousness, which has been metaphorically referred to as the fruit from a vine or from a fig tree or olive trees.

Jesus told a parable back in Luke 13 about a fig tree. In that parable, it says that Jesus told a parable about a man who had a vineyard with a fig tree in it. The owner said to his gardener, "Let's just take this fig tree out. It's not bearing any fruit. We've been waiting for two, three years, nothing's come of it. Let's just remove it." Now, by the way, this is not being angry. This is just using your land well to remove a fig tree that's not producing figs so you can plant something that will produce fruit. That's not an action that requires some kind of moral justification. It's not morally wrong.

But in the parable, the gardener, who I think represented Jesus speaking to God, said, "Let's give it one more season. Let me dig around it, let me fertilize it some, see if I can get some fruit out of it. And if not, we'll tear it down." Now, what's interesting about that parable, it doesn't conclude. It doesn't say whether the fruit came or not. It doesn't say whether the fig tree was spared or not, because all we're told at that point is that they had one more season. They had less than a year to turn around. And if they didn't get turned around, they'd be removed.

Now, this was probably several months later. Jesus is walking into Jerusalem and there's a fig tree on the hillside and it doesn't have any fruit. Jesus hopes it will. He looks and it doesn't have any. And because it doesn't, he says, "No one will ever eat fruit from you again." To my mind, this is a prophetic action which is the conclusion of that parable. The parable left it hanging. Is the tree going to produce fruit or not? Let's give it one more season. Well, at the end of the season, when it was about time, it was a little early, but there were a lot of leaves on the tree, which means winter was over. Lots of times when there are leaves on a tree, there could be fruit too, although it does say in Mark it was not yet the season for figs.

But it wasn't the season for leaves either. This tree appeared to be ahead of the season, so it had leaves and therefore might also have fruit. Jesus went and found there was no fruit and so he denounced it and it withered up and died. Now, I believe that was symbolic. I think he's pronouncing that God has given Israel the last chance they're going to have to bear fruit, because within days they were going to crucify him. Now, they had opportunity before that for years, actually millennia to bear fruit for God. But the previous few years Jesus had been there cultivating and trying to get fruit out of them and they had rejected him. So he said, "Okay, end of story here. I left that story open when I told it back in Luke, but it's over now. This is the way the story ends. This tree is not going to produce fruit anymore. It's dead."

We don't see any anger on Jesus's part. We don't see any indication that he did something that requires some kind of moral vindication. We can remove trees from our yard anytime we want if we want to plant something else there. Trees don't have any intrinsic rights, nor do they have any intrinsic blame. If they don't do well, it's not their fault. But it's also not the gardener's fault if they say, "This tree isn't producing anything, so I'm going to get rid of it." So, I mean, you're not making a judgment of Jesus unless you're thinking Jesus was just peeved, Jesus was just impatient. Here he'd like to have some figs and this is like in a vacuum, he's walking without any context to this up to Jerusalem, he wants some figs, there's none on the tree, so he gets angry at the tree and curses it. Well, that would be a little childish.

Julia: I guess my only issue is with the fact that it was not the right season to have fruit.

Steve Gregg: Well, like I said, it says there's no, it's not the season for fruit yet, but many of the trees got fruit early. Many times the indication that they had was this foliage. Now, so I mean, he just did this as a symbolic gesture. You know, in Jeremiah, Jeremiah took a pot, he bought a pot from a potter and he went to a public place and he tossed it on the ground and broke it to pieces and said, "This is how Jerusalem is going to be shattered." Now, it wasn't very nice to the pot. It didn't do anything wrong. I mean, how could Jeremiah be so cruel? Well, that's not cruel to break a pot. A pot doesn't suffer and trees don't either. If they die, they're not animate, not conscious. So, it's a symbolic action. Jeremiah was not actually angry at the pot and neither was God. God was angry at Jerusalem, but he was not angry at the pot. But breaking the pot was a symbolic action demonstrating what God was going to do to Jerusalem. This is the same thing that Jesus did here with the tree.

Julia: Thank you.

Steve Gregg: Okay, God bless. Let's talk to Gil from Long Island, New York next. Hi Gil, welcome to the Narrow Path.

Gil: Hi Greg. You remember me, of course.

Steve Gregg: Yeah, you've called lots of times.

Gil: Yeah, this is my fifth time calling your program, I think. In Psalm 4 verse 8, it says, "I will lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety." And in Hebrews 10:25, it says, "Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the day approaching." I was wondering if you could expound on those verses because I am pretty much happy with the church that I'm going to. Someone picks me up on Sunday to take me to church. I'm living in a nursing home for a couple of years now, so I have the pleasure of going to church on Sunday. I used to go to mine in Queens. I worked in the phone ministry. So I was wondering if you can expound on those verses.

Steve Gregg: Well, do you find something that they have in common? I mean, they are two verses I can talk about them, but are you joining them in some way or contrasting them in some way?

Gil: Not really. One is more of comfort when going to sleep at night and the other one has to do with fellowship in church and all of that with God's people.

Steve Gregg: Yeah, they don't have anything in particular to do with each other. Okay, yeah, when David said that he'll lie down in peace because God keeps him safe, that's his conclusion. Now, you know, it's a short Psalm and at the beginning he says, "Hear me when I call, O God of my righteousness. For you have relieved me when I was in distress. Have mercy on me and hear my prayer." So he obviously is not in a good situation. He's in distress, he said. And he says, "God, you've heard me when I was in distress before. I'm calling on you again. Have mercy on me and hear my prayer."

And then, of course, like many of the Psalms begin with the writer, who in this case is David—not all of the Psalms were written by David, but the writer begins with this very kind of complaint and calling out to God saying, "Lord, you know, everybody's against me. The people who want to kill me are more than the hairs of my head. Why are the righteous forsaken? Why are the guilty sinners prospering?" A lot of the Psalms begin with a complaint or a cry for help and a description of a very bad situation that the Psalmist is in.

But these are prayers, of course. And of course, many people are driven to prayer when their situations are bad, especially when they have no way of remedying them and they have to fall back on God alone. And that's what David does. But also while I don't know how many Psalms this is, I'm going to say out of 150 Psalms, probably half of them, if not more, begin with this kind of complaint of some kind. But of those that do, I think I've found in my study of the Psalms, maybe two, if that, or three Psalms that begin that way and don't end up happy. In other words, they're kind of sad all the way through.

But almost all of them begin with a crisis and end in peace. In other words, we could say David prayed through. That's what some old preachers used to talk about, praying through. That's not a biblical concept, but the idea is you're in trouble, you get on your face, you pray until you get victory, you pray until the crisis is over in your heart. You pray because you are in crisis, but you redirect, in prayer, you redirect your concern, your focus, your trust in God. And by the end, you can get up on your feet and say amen and you're feeling great because you say, "Well, you know, God's in charge here. God's going to take care of it."

And that's what this Psalm is no different than most of them in that respect. He starts out with problems. He cries out to God to hear his prayer. And then at the end of it, he says in verse seven, "You have put gladness in my heart, more than in the season that their grain and their wine increased. I will both lie down in peace and sleep, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety." Now he's saying, "You know, I'm not going to be afraid anymore. I was. I had a lot of enemies. When you got enemies, you're always afraid. Can I rest? Can I go to sleep? Will they find me in the night and kill me? Who knows?" Well, I've talked to God about it now. It's in his hands. I can just rest now. I can go to bed and rest knowing that I've put this in God's hands. He keeps me safe and I'll be able to sleep like a baby. And that's what he's saying. And it's really typical of many of the Psalms, obviously.

Now you talked about Hebrews 10 verse 25, "not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as we see the day approach." You said you're in a home of some kind. So I guess that has some impact or maybe your recent circumstances have had an impact on your ability or inability to go to church. This clearly is telling people don't stop going to church. Of course, we have to remember, in those days, if you lived in town, there was only one church in town. All the Christians in town were in the same church. So you wanted to be integrated, cooperative, a participant in the body of Christ because the body of Christ works as a body. It works as a team, and your contribution is an important part.

And of course, its value to you is great. It can comfort you. People can exhort you, as he says in the previous verse, exhort one another. So there's plenty of reasons to not separate from the people of God. Now that was the way it was then because if you weren't going to a particular church, you weren't going to any church. There was in fact only one place to gather with the Christians in that town, and that was the one church in that town. Now, we live in a time where there's a hundred churches in almost every town, maybe far more than that in big cities.

Sometimes people just go to the same church every Sunday and that's fine. I've got nothing against it if it's the right situation for you to go to church. That is, you're being fed, or at least you're able to minister to others there. There's avenue for your service. Your gifts are being used. There's edification taking place all around. That's what church should be like. And if the church you go to is that way, well good. You don't ever have to go to a different church at all. That would take care of all the bases.

But lots of people find that the church they attend isn't really the best option, that there's other churches in their town they like too, but they have relationships in the church they go to, they've been going there for years, and they don't want to break off with the friendships and so forth. So they might visit around other churches. And some people haven't found a church in their town that they find to be worth going to at all. Now you might say, "Well, that's awfully proud of them." Well, it doesn't have to be pride. It's true. If people are proud, if they think they're too good to go to church with lesser people, then that's pride.

But that's not necessarily the reason they don't go. There are people who are very eager for, for example, their children to be raised in a good church environment and the churches they go to are simply not what you could describe that way. These are not churches where Christians are edifying one another. These are churches where people sit in theater seating and they're entertained by professional entertainers on the stage. That's not exactly church. That might be some kind of an edifying thing for Christians to do, but that's hardly what the New Testament would recognize as church.

And so sometimes they find church alternatives, like in home churches or something like that. And that's okay too. But if you stop going to an institutional church, somebody at that church is going to say, "Well, doesn't the Bible say don't forsake the assembling of yourselves together?" Which means to them, it means you've got to go to their church on Sunday. Well, I'm for going to church on Sunday. I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from doing that unless, frankly, the churches they've tried simply are not they're not really churches in the New Testament sense at all. And they find true fellowship with other Christians more readily in less formal settings.

Now, I don't think less formal settings are always better than formal settings, but they can be. And I would think that people might want to have a little of both. But the point is that forsaking the assembling of yourselves together in the days when Hebrews was written, well, there's just one church in town and all the Christians assembled there and you don't want to stop going there else you're out of touch with the Christian community. In our day and age, you could go to several churches or go to no institutional church and go to some very informal fellowship things that are actually closer in description to what the Bible would refer to as church than the modern churches are. And so no one can say that this verse requires you to go to an institutional church, although if you've got a good one, more power to you.

But it does say you shouldn't forsake Christian gathering. And of course, if you are a godly Christian, you crave Christian gathering even if it's only a few Christians here and there that share your heart, that share your passion, more than going to a church with a thousand people in it where it's not easy to tell whether anyone shares your passion there. They might, but who can ever discover it? You don't know these people. So there's different fellowship options, different fellowship venues. And many people assume that the only way to follow what is being said in Hebrews chapter 10 and verse 25 is to join an institutional church. The truth is, much as I tolerate good churches that are institutional, what we call institutional church does not resemble the early church in many important features.

And there's certainly nothing in the Bible that speaks of an institutional church as we have today, a 501(c)(3) with professional staff, a building, all kinds of programs. I mean, these are not bad things. I don't think they're bad. They don't have to be bad. But they certainly aren't what the Bible calls church. Those are what we call church today. The early church had a much more robust idea of what it meant to be the body of Christ fellowshipping together. Anyway, I hope that's helpful and I hope you get plenty of fellowship and encouragement, brother. Okay, Greg from Loveland, Colorado, welcome to the Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Greg: Yeah, hi Steve. I enjoy your show. I might be losing you, I'm driving through the mountains. But my question has to do with baptism. Do you need to be physically dunked in the water by another person in order to be baptized according to the scriptures?

Steve Gregg: Well, it's interesting you said it that way because some people would say, "Do you have to be baptized to be saved?" Which then I'd have to pursue what do we mean by saved, because the Bible uses that term various ways. But you said, "Do we have to do it that way in order to be baptized in the manner that the scriptures say?" And that's a very good question because whether a person needs to be baptized to be saved or not, an observant Christian will probably want to be baptized in the way the Bible teaches, in the way that Jesus and the apostles believed in it and practiced it.

The answer is, yeah, you do. I mean, baptism the way they did it in the Bible meant they dunked people in water. The word *baptizo* or *baptismos*, but *baptizo*, is to mean to be immersed or *baptisma*. That's another form of the word, I think that's the noun if I'm not mistaken, and *baptismos* the verb. I probably have it backward. In any case, they just have a different ending on the core, and our English word baptism comes from that. And the word in the Greek actually means to dip or to immerse. So it was done by dunking people under water.

Now, I don't know that the underwater dunking part is absolutely as essential as some other aspects of it. I think if a person has been sprinkled or had water poured over them, there are different denominations who practice these things differently. I'm not going to say that's not legitimate as long as they were responsible adults who saw themselves as committing themselves as in marriage to be loyal to Christ for the rest of their lives. And this is what they're announcing through the act, I think that's baptism.

Now, you said do you have to be dunked or do it the way the Bible talks about. Well, yeah, the Bible does, as far as we know, nobody was baptized in biblical times except by dunking. But by the end of the first century, many Christians of the first or second generation were open to other forms of baptism though they still practiced dunking or immersing. That is in the book the *Didache*, which is a very early church document saying how to do things like baptism. It says in the *Didache* that baptism should be in running water if possible, but if it's not running water, then it could be still water. And it says if there's no cold water, you can do it in warm water. And it says if there's not enough water, then just pour water over the head and say, "I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit."

What we see here is a very flexible idea of what actually has to be done in the process of being baptized. They preferred cold, running water. But if they didn't have that, you could do it in water that's not running or you could do it in water that's not cold. And it said if you don't have enough water at all, just pour it over the head. Now very clearly, when they say pour it over the head if there's not enough water, for what? Well, clearly for immersion. Obviously it's saying the normal way of baptism is immersion, but if there's not enough water for that, you can do it by pouring. So, yeah, the biblical form of baptism is immersion. But the early church was not all that legalistic about how it was conducted as long as it was conducted. I need to take a break. You're listening to the Narrow Path. We have another half hour coming so don't go away. Our website is thenarrowpath.com. Check it out, it's full of resources. You can donate there if you wish at thenarrowpath.com. I'll be back in 30 seconds. Don't go away.

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Steve Gregg: Welcome back to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we're live for another half hour taking your calls. You can call in if you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith you'd like to talk about. Or if you see it differently than the host and you've heard something here you think is wrong and you want to correct it or balanced comment, we'd love for you to join us. The number to call is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. Our next caller is Tyler from Dallas, Texas. Tyler, welcome to the Narrow Path.

Tyler: Hey Steve, how are you? Can you hear me alright? I just wanted to get your interpretation on Hebrews 6:4-6 and looking at it, is it more of someone who has fallen away, would they just be really unlikely to come back? Or is it that they've fallen away and it's impossible because God won't let them back after that?

Steve Gregg: Well, it's not the second. It may be the first option, that it's really hard for people who've fallen away to come back more than it was to come the first time. I mean, Peter says something like that in 2 Peter chapter 2 at the end where he talks about those who've been like a dog who returns to his vomit and like a washed pig that returns to its wallowing in the mire. He's describing people who, as he puts it, have once known the way of righteousness but they've known it and they turn from the holy commandment delivered to them. It's worse for them after they've done that than it was at the beginning, meaning before they were converted. That's 2 Peter 2:20. It says specifically, "For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in those things and overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning."

Now he obviously doesn't mean the latter end is worse than when they were being obedient. That goes without saying. What he means is it's worse than before they were Christian. Now why would it be worse? Well, because someone who's never been converted is very much reachable. A person who was a Christian and then they've decided they don't want to be a Christian anymore and you try to reach out to them, to them it's a been-there-done-that, got-the-T-shirt kind of a thing. They feel like they've tried Christ and he's been found wanting, so they're not interested.

So C.S. Lewis said that the difference between an unconverted person and a person who has fallen away is like the difference between a virgin and a divorcee. And as you can imagine, when they're thinking about marriage, a virgin can be very idealistic about it, and then the divorcee is someone who's tried it and didn't like it, or I mean we're talking about if she divorced her husband herself rather than him divorcing her. So, you know, it's kind of like that with people with Jesus. Not everyone who's never been converted is attracted to Christ. But those who've abandoned Christ are seemingly more hardened. By abandoning him, they've hardened their hearts more, so it's harder.

Now that might be what Hebrews 6:4-6 is saying, or it could be saying something else, which I'd like to suggest. Let me read it for those who don't know the passage. It comes up a lot because a lot of people are puzzled by this. The writer of Hebrews says in Hebrews 6:4, "It is impossible for those who were once enlightened and have tasted the heavenly gift and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and have fallen away..."

Okay, so they've had all these experiences and they have fallen away. He says it's impossible to renew them again to repentance since they crucify again for themselves the Son of God and put him to open shame. Now, there's in the Greek it reads a little different in that last line. It doesn't say "since they crucify Christ." It just says in the Greek it just says "crucifying again for themselves the Son of God." Now, what in other words it says, "It's impossible to renew them again to repentance crucifying," meaning while they are crucifying again for themselves the Son of God.

Many people say, you know, they're going to have to turn back. They're going to have to stop crucifying Christ again if they're going to be repentant. And that would go without saying. If leaving Christ behind and publicly renouncing your former Christian life is an insult to God, it's like crucifying Christ again. It's treating it as if he hadn't been crucified for you the first time and as if he needs to do that again for you, which he can't do, of course. But that's kind of what you're doing subjectively, crucifying him again. And as long as that is happening, your heart is antagonistic toward God. And as long as someone's got that going on, they can't be converted again. They can't come back.

Now if they stop doing that, if they give up their antagonism, if they decide otherwise, then they can come back. Now this passage is not the only passage on the subject, or else we wouldn't have any real way of knowing which position is true. Now both positions can be true because they're not contradicting each other. One suggests that after someone has deliberately fallen away after knowing God, they've hardened themselves and it's essentially all but impossible for them to come back. Now I realize it says it's impossible, but the Bible sometimes says things are impossible, but then it says but without, with God nothing is impossible. So humanly impossible, but not ultimately and absolutely impossible, because God can do anything.

But the book of James ends with this statement, that if any of you brethren should wander from the truth and one converts him, let him know that he that converts the sinner from the error of his way shall save his soul from death and hide a multitude of sins. That's how, actually, those are the last words in the book of James. If one of you brethren, which I take to mean Christians, wander away from the truth, okay, that sounds like they've fallen away, but someone goes after them and converts them and brings them back, okay, that is a possibility apparently. Then by doing that you have saved their soul from death. Apparently death was what they would be experiencing if they didn't get converted back.

So James seems to think that's possible. The prodigal son story seems to indicate the possibility of someone who's fallen away and alienated from their father coming back. So I don't think it's correct to say, and really by the way, Jesus said whoever denies Jesus before men will be denied by God, but Peter denied Jesus before men and he did come back. So it's really hard to know if we ever encounter somebody who is so hard that they can't come back, although many people may appear to be. But the writer may be saying it can get to that point where you're just so hardened, you're just not going to come back, no one's going to bring you back. Or it could be saying these people, as long as they continue crucifying Christ afresh, and the Greek allows for that. In fact, I think some, I don't have one in front of me, but I think some of the English translations translate it like that, "while they crucify him afresh." So I don't remember which ones do. I think I've encountered that. But I've certainly encountered that interpretation. So that's what I'm saying. I don't think it's saying that there's certain sins that if you, you know, if you commit them or if you turn back from God and do those things, that God will just never have you, never have you back. God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. And I believe that if those who've fallen away from Christ are perishing and they need to come back to repentance, to say it's impossible for them to come to repentance and mean that in the absolute sense, it must be something in them that makes it impossible. It certainly isn't God, because God wants all men to repent and wants none to perish. Alright, let's talk next to Fred in Alameda, California. Fred, welcome.

Fred: I'm turning my attention to Psalm 114, and if you look at verse five, it says, at least the translation I have, "What ailed thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest? Thou Jordan, that thou wast driven back?" So that's my question, is this is not a metaphor for people, is it? Or is it talking about an actual river and a mountain?

Steve Gregg: Yeah, it's talking about the Red Sea and the Jordan River. Yeah, he's reminding Israel that God caused the sea to withdraw at God's command and the Jordan also stopped or turned back so that it didn't flow down to the place where the Israelites were crossing. It's referring to the fact that when they came out of Egypt, God opened the Red Sea and they walked through on dry land briefly until the sea came back down on the Egyptians. And then, of course, they crossed the river Jordan 40 years later to enter into the promised land. So essentially it's one of the many Psalms and many passages about that reminisce about the Exodus and how God established Israel from a community of slaves to be the nation that they became. And it's just poetically talking about that like the sea was afraid, you know, something was scaring it. "What ailed you, O sea, that you fled? O Jordan, what ailed you that you turned back?" It's just a rhetorical question that's meant for poetic purposes.

Fred: Okay, Fred. Thank you for your call.

Steve Gregg: Okay, Tina from Surrey, British Columbia, welcome to the Narrow Path.

Tina: Hi Steve. Thank you for your service. I just wanted to know, did the devil sin before Adam came or after? And I'll take the answer off the air. Thank you.

Steve Gregg: Okay, well, we don't have anything like that recorded in scripture. It's obvious that if the devil is a righteous angel and became a wicked serpent, that this happened before Adam and Eve sinned. But did it happen before they were created? We have no way of knowing. We do know that God had made every creature of the field and the serpent among them was the most conniving, cunning. And we do, it says that about the serpent, he was the most cunning of all the beasts of the field which the Lord had made. Now we do have in Genesis 1 that all the beasts of the field were made before Adam was made. Now, of course, but the problem here is that the serpent in the Garden of Eden is not only referring to the animal, the serpent, although it is spoken of as if it's one of the animals that God made.

But of course, the New Testament would tell us that that animal was possessed by or used by or was an agent of Satan. And that of course, Revelation 12:9 is one of the places you'd find that where it says that the dragon, the serpent, it says Satan was that old serpent. So it's interesting that the Genesis account doesn't mention Satan by name anywhere. In fact, the Old Testament hardly mentions Satan by name at all, just a few times. But the New Testament identifies that serpent with Satan. But obviously Satan is not a literal reptile. After all, the passage in Revelation that compares him to the serpent also calls him a dragon. Dragons and serpents are not the same animal, although they both be scaly reptile type things. But they're not the same animal. So neither is literal. Satan is a spirit. Satan is not a scaly reptile.

But he either took on the form of a serpent or else inhabited one. We know that demons can inhabit pigs, because Jesus cast a bunch of demons into a bunch of pigs and they became demon-possessed. So it's not impossible that Satan could have inhabited this creature. But the point is, was the fall of Satan earlier than the creation of man? There's not very much in the Bible to give us information about the fall of Satan. And whatever is used by teachers don't say anything about the chronology of it. So we don't know. We can certainly say that the devil was as evil as he ever would be before Adam and Eve sinned, because Adam and Eve sinned as a result of Satan's evil tempting. So, yeah, there are some people who believe that Satan never was a good angel, never fell. There's nothing in the Bible that actually ever says that he was an angel.

I know the verses, I mean I know the verses that people use to pretend that it says he's an angel, but a person only has to look at those verses carefully and see that it doesn't say anything about Satan being an angel. But it is traditionally understood that Satan was an angel and then that he fell and became evil. That's possible, although Jesus spoke differently of Satan in John 8:44. He said Satan sinned from the beginning. In other words, he doesn't say that Satan was good and then started sinning, he sinned from the beginning. So that sounds like it's saying, you know, he was he was a tempter from the beginning. Maybe not the beginning of his existence. Maybe he was good before and became evil and then at the beginning of human history he was sinning. That's okay, that could be. We're just not given any specific information. People who think we are are the kinds of people who read stuff into the Bible and don't realize they're doing that. There's no passage that speaks of Satan actually being an angel who fell, but there certainly are passages of him sinning from the beginning and being a tempter. And he was in that role certainly before Adam and Eve sinned. That's about the most we can say with certainty, at least if we're using scripture as our guide. I appreciate your call. Let's talk to Anthony from Atlanta, Georgia. Hi Anthony, welcome.

Anthony: Hello, I'm actually listening to your radio station right now and I just had two quick questions. What are some tangible ways that I can hear from the Holy Spirit? And what are some ways that I can memorize scripture?

Steve Gregg: Well, people are always asking that kind of question. It's not something that there's not something that you could generalize that would apply to every person in this. For example, how can you memorize scripture? Well, some people are better and some not so good at memorizing anything. Their memories are not great. On the other hand, most people if they work at it can memorize some important things that they want to memorize, although lots of times they'll have to review it like on a daily basis or else they'll lose some of it because the memory, different people's memories simply have different capacities.

I myself have done relatively little scripture memorization, but I actually remember scripture. Even scripture I never memorized. And that's partly just from immersion in it. I grew up in a church where they read the scripture from the pulpit. I never memorized the scriptures they read but I remember them because they kind of stuck, you know. You hear them and the wording kind of sticks in your mind if you hear it several times. It's kind of hard to get out of your mind, especially when you're young. And then of course when I was in my teens I read the Bible all the time. Now I did a little bit of Bible memorization. I memorized a few books of the Bible, short ones. I memorized 1 John and 2 John and 3 John and 1 Peter and James, which are short books.

But I did that on purpose. I mean, in other words, that was deliberately, I wanted to memorize those books. How did I do that? I would just read, I had to be alone a lot to work on it and be concentrating. Fortunately I didn't own a television in those days, which is very, having a TV or for that matter any kind of a screen to distract you is probably going to work against you memorizing scripture. But if you can be alone and undistracted, what I did to memorize, let's say to memorize 1 John, I would read out loud to myself verse one. I'd read it several times. Then I'd close my eyes and try to repeat it. If I came to a spot that I couldn't remember, I'd look at it again, read it out loud again, and keep doing that and then closing my eyes until I could say it. And once I'd done that, I'd do the same thing with verse two.

Once I had verse two under my belt, I'd close my eyes and quote verses one and two. Then I'd do the same thing with verse three. And once I had that down, I'd close my eyes and quote all three of them until I knew them all. But you know, and I did this. I actually memorized a chapter a day for a while because I didn't have an awful lot to do besides. And so I memorized 1 John in five days. I memorized James in five days. I memorized 1 Peter in five days. So in 15 days I'd memorized 15 chapters. But I had to recite them to myself out loud every day or else I would lose detail. And I had to do that for years. Literally every single day I'd have to go for a walk and it take 45 minutes to recite it at a reasonable speed to listen and think about it.

And of course it was very useful to me. That meant 45 minutes every day in addition to whatever other Bible reading I was doing, I was reciting and thinking about the verses I'd memorized in those books. So they became very familiar. I literally did that every day for probably at least 10 years. So I've probably recited those to myself thousands of times. But I found that 45 minutes a day is a long time to review, so I couldn't keep adding more books and more books because I'd have to then be taking walks for three hours and reciting them and I still wouldn't have the whole Bible. So I just kind of gave up on that. I still could remember them for years and years.

But I just read the Bible through over and over again. And if you immerse yourself in something, it's going to stick in your mind. You won't remember everything. I don't remember everything. You might think I quote a lot of Bible verses. I'll let you know in a little secret. Sometimes I'm not quoting at all. I'm actually paraphrasing. I'm just kind of remembering the major phrases in a verse and stringing them together with what I know the Bible itself strings them together, but I don't remember which words they used to string them. In other words, I'm not, I haven't sat down and memorized a lot of the Bible. But I remember most of it because I've read it through 40 or 50 times.

And you know, when you immerse yourself in something, it's going to stick in your mind. Now as far as how does the Holy Spirit speak to you, that too is a very personal thing. Not everyone has the same experience. I would say, although the Holy Spirit has spoken to me other ways too, the majority of the ways the Holy Spirit has spoken to me when I'm reading my Bible or meditating on the Bible. It's been hundreds and hundreds of times in the last 70 years or 60 years that I was meditating on scripture and something I felt like the Holy Spirit spoke something to me through it. Either something that was a corrective to me, maybe as a new insight into a passage I'd never heard, something like that.

But I will say this, whenever I've needed guidance, knowing the scriptures has been one of the most valuable things. Because people say you can't be guided by the letter, you have to be guided by the spirit. These people don't understand what the Bible is. The Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit speaks to people if they have the spirit through the word of God. It's not the only way he does. But it's certainly the most reliable way. I mean, there are other things. I've had dreams a few times and sometimes I'm not sure, but other times I know for a fact that God was speaking to me through these dreams. But that doesn't happen very often. Maybe four, five times in my whole life.

I've had impressions that I thought were the Holy Spirit speaking to me and sometimes they were, other times I'm not so sure. But you know, the thing I say is that if you are submitted to God, the Bible promises that you'll be led by the Holy Spirit. It doesn't mean that you'll always know that you're being led. If you ask God to guide you, if you acknowledge the Lord in all your ways he will direct your paths, the Bible says. And Paul said, "As many as are led by the spirit of God, the same are the children of God." So I mean, if you're a child of God, the Holy Spirit's leading you. You're not always aware of it. There may be times when you'll just sense the conviction of God in your soul from the Holy Spirit. Other times, and this has been more common for me, although I've had other things too, but the most common is that something God said in the Bible will come to mind and it's 100% applicable to the decisions I have to make.

Not every decision can be made that way, but most of them. So, you know, I can't tell you how God's going to do it with you. I do know people who say, "You know, I was walking down the street and the Holy Spirit told me to walk into this door on the left and go up the stairs and there were three doors and he told me to knock on the door on the right-hand side and introduce myself and it turned out that there was someone there about ready to kill themselves and they said, 'I prayed that if God didn't want me to kill myself that he'd send someone to stop me,' and that was you." Now those kind of stories are wonderful and I've heard a lot of them. And frankly, I'm inclined to believe them. I believe that that happens. But most of the time when God speaks to me it's not quite like that. I mean, he's not telling me turn left here, walk 100 yards and turn right, knock on this door. I'd love it. I would definitely love it if God spoke to me that way, but that's not generally the way it happens.

For me. It does for some people. So I can't tell you how the Holy Spirit will speak to you. I do have a book, *Empire of the Risen Son*, book two has some chapters about being led by the Holy Spirit. And they're very practical. And I think they may be of use to you. The audiobooks, both book one and book two, are at our website. You can listen to for free. You don't have to buy the book. The books can be purchased at Amazon but you can have the audiobooks for free at our website thenarrowpath.com. There's a tab that says Books. If you go there you'll see all of my books, but the books I'm referring to are both called *Empire of the Risen Son*. It's a treatise on the Kingdom of God. And book two is the one I'm referring to that has some chapters on being led by the spirit. I'd suggest listening to that or reading the book might be helpful because it is a bigger subject than than I've been able to cover in this short answer I've just given. Thank you. Margaret in Minneapolis, I don't know we don't have much time, but if I can help you, I'll try. Be quick.

Margaret: Yes, my question is, did Christ die for all or only for the chosen and the elect?

Steve Gregg: Alright, yeah. That's a Calvinist question that Calvinists believe that Jesus only died for the elect. And they believe that when he died, he secured the salvation of everyone he died for. And since not all people get saved, only the elect do, they say he obviously only died for the elect because if he died and secured the salvation of everybody, then everybody would be saved and not everyone is. So they would say Christ's death secured the salvation of everyone who's elect, and he didn't really die for anyone else.

Now those who are not Calvinists generally say Jesus died for everybody. His death did not secure the salvation of everyone, but he did secure the salvation of all who are in Christ. And everyone has the right to be in Christ if they will. God didn't choose some to be in Christ and some not. We decide that. We exercise our will to surrender to Christ, to be loyal to him, to obey him, to be faithful unto death. This is what it means to be in him. We come to be in him and in him we are saved. So the death of Christ, what it did according to this view, did not secure the actual salvation of everyone for whom he died, but rather secured the potential salvation of everyone on the planet and secures it for those who believe, for those who surrender, for those who become followers of Christ. So, you know, if someone is kind of caught between those two theological opinions and can't quite make it out, all I can say is believe in Jesus, repent of your sins, be faithful unto death, and you can be quite sure that Jesus died for you. I'm out of time, but thank you for calling. You've been listening to the Narrow Path. We are listener-supported. You can go to our website thenarrowpath.com if you'd like to see how to help us. Everything there is free though. Have a good evening.