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, and we're live so that we can take your calls. Now there's a few stations that are not live. If you're listening at any time other than two in the afternoon Pacific Time, that'd be like five in the afternoon Eastern Time, any time other than that, then you're listening to a rebroadcast and not to the live broadcast. But virtually everywhere that we are on the air, which is all over the country, we are on live so that you can be on and you can call in with your questions about the Bible or about Christianity and we'll talk about them together.

It also allows you to call in and interact with subjects maybe the host has spoken on that you don't agree with. I've listened to Christian radio all my life, and I still do. Sometimes it's frustrating because I'll hear somebody on the radio say something that I don't agree with, but I know that I won't be able to respond because it's not a live broadcast and they're not taking phone calls. Even if I write to their ministry, it's probable that my complaint will not go on the air so that the people who heard what I think is wrong will never hear what I have to say by way of correction. So, that's one good thing about a live broadcast. One of the problems, though, is you're certainly welcome to call and disagree, but we usually do have a lot of people waiting behind you, which means we can't have a full-blown debate over the whole program. We have to keep things a little brief, but I do want if you see something differently, I want you to have a chance to say so and why. Anyway, the number to call is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. Our first caller is Dana from Mount Lake Terrace, Washington. Hi, Dana, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Dana: I am leading a Bible study here at this assisted living place where I live, and we're studying the Lord's Sermon on the Mount. I've come to these verses in chapter five where he says, "I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart." Then he says, verse 29, "If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish than for your whole body to be cast into hell." Then it says about the right hand also, "It is more profitable for you that one of your members perish." I'm thinking I'm going to have to lead this Bible study tomorrow on these topics, and I don't know how to talk to them about this. Maybe you can help me.

Steve Gregg: Well, a lot of people assume that the statement about looking at a woman to lust, which is of course about mental adultery, many people assume that this is referring to the same thing as when he talks about if your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. Now, the truth is your hand doesn't cause you to stumble and your eye doesn't either. These can certainly be instrumental, but if a person is looking at someone with lust or with envy or with anger or any other wrong deed, that's in their heart. That's not their eye doing that. You could pluck out both eyes and the same evil would be in your heart just the same. It's not the seeing of something that makes it a sin; it's the desire to see it. It's the heart that has an evil desire.

When the business about if you look at a woman to lust, many translations render that differently. One of the worst translations you'll find in some Bibles is "whoever looks at a woman lustfully." Well, that's not at all what he says because what does lustful mean? Does it mean if you look at something and you have desire for it? The word lust is simply the ordinary word in the Greek language for desire. It can be used of good desires or bad desires. But he says if you look at a woman and you look with desire, well, how could you guard against that? Because that's what temptation is. Temptation is when you see something or think about something and it arouses a desire. Then you haven't sinned when the desire is there; you sin when you cave into that desire. The temptation is the desire, but temptation is not sin. Sin is when you give into temptation.

In other words, you may strongly... like if you were fasting, for example. Well, then when you're fasting, you shouldn't eat, but you might have a strong desire to eat. Well, it's not a sin to desire to eat, even if you're not supposed to eat because you're fasting. It's not a sin. But once that desire is there, the question is are you going to compromise because of that desire? Are you going to follow your desire or your convictions? That's so. It's not when a man looks at a woman and happens to find her desirable or attractive that he's sinning.

What Jesus said, and this is how it reads in the Greek, the better translations say it this way: whoever looks at a woman to lust after her. In other words, his heart desires to look at her to lust after her. That's his intention. That's what's in his heart. Now, a man who has nothing of that in his heart may walk down the street and see a very provocatively dressed woman who's very attractive, and there's chemicals and things that are in the human body that can cause that man to find her desirable, which becomes a temptation. If he looks away and just keeps going, then he has not sinned even if that desire has arisen.

When Eve saw the fruit that was not permitted for her to eat, it says she saw that it was desirable to make one wise. It was pleasant to the eye. It was good for food. Now, these are all desires. It appealed to her desires on several levels. But she didn't sin until she reached out and took the fruit, which she was not allowed to do, and bit it. Now, having all those desires is temptation. But Jesus was tempted in all points like we are, yet without sin. So being tempted doesn't mean you're sinning. Being tempted means you're in danger of sinning and you have to realize, oh-oh, this is a battle. This is a battle for my mind.

But your hand or your eye does not make you sin. It may be that what you see or what you touch or what you desire to grasp may be... it would be sinful for you to do it, but it's your heart. It's evil in your heart. It's your fleshly carnal nature that desires that. That's what makes you sin. So Jesus is not saying, here's how you can stop sinning: cut off your eyes, pluck out your eyes, cut off your hand and you'll be a perfect person. No, your heart will be no changed, not changed at all.

I have known of people who did pluck out their eye or cut off their hand or try to do so because they took this too seriously. Jesus is using hyperbole here. He certainly knew as well as we all do that if you pluck out your eye, and let's just say you've been having trouble looking at the wrong things, plucking out your eye isn't going to stop you looking. You've got another eye. So if you pluck out the other eye, then what? You'll be blind and then what? Your mind will picture these things without eyes. It's what's in your heart, not what's coming through the lens on the front of your face.

If you sin with your hand, your hand didn't make you do that; your mind told it to do that. It obeys you. It's your heart. So Jesus is not saying... obviously these things aren't really what cause you to sin. And he means that no more literally than in the next chapter when he said, when you give alms, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Well, your hands don't know what's going on anyway. So it's a figure of speech. It's a hyperbole. The point is be secretive about it. Now, in this case, it means if there's something very dear to you, as dear to you as your hand or your eye, but that thing in your life causes you to sin.

Let's just say you don't have the strength to avoid the temptations that come with that thing. Get rid of it. Now, he doesn't mean literally your hand or your eye. I can hardly imagine a situation where the hand or the eye would be in this position. The reason they are mentioned is because the right hand would leave a man unable to work. It's one of the last things he would wish to get rid of. He'd get rid of almost anything before that. Likewise his eye. The point is no matter how precious it is... now, what's it likely to be? More likely in real life, it's probably going to be perhaps a relationship you have with somebody. You cherish it. You would be loath to be rid of it. You don't want to separate yourself from it. But it's just dragging you down. It's stumbling you. You're falling into sin because of this relationship. Or maybe some possession that you have. Maybe it's an addiction of some kind. Something you crave. It might be your money.

The point is that these things don't in themselves make you sin, but they may indeed as long as you hang onto them cause you to sin, and letting go of them is what is what you need to do. So I don't think the eye or the hand, although he uses those and in by the way, in the parallel in Mark nine, he also adds the foot. If your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. I've never known anybody whose foot even that they would have mistaken it for causing them to sin, unless of course it means they walk to the wrong places, the wrong part of town where they get into trouble or something.

But the point is not literal. Don't cut pieces off your body. It's not going to change your heart. You could cut off all the pieces of your body. In fact, you could be a quadriplegic and blind and dumb and you could still be sinning in your heart. You'd still be as much a sinner because it's your nature, not your body parts. So I would say what he's talking about here about lusting in the heart, he's saying if you look at a woman in order to lust after her, it means your heart has that as its intention. Well, then your heart's giving you trouble. Now, when it gets to talk about plucking out an eye or cutting off a hand, no one will be spared from their lusts by plucking out an eye or cutting off a hand because the mind can still, if it wants to, think about those things.

But what he is saying is if you indulge your flesh to the point where you do live in sexual fantasies by looking at other women and so forth, then that's your heart sinning. That's not your eye sinning. That's your heart is sinning. But whatever is in your life, and it may be a relationship, it may be something, some favorite possession you possess, but if it's causing you to stumble, he says you'd be a whole lot better getting rid of that and going into eternal life than holding onto that and missing out on eternal life. So that would be what I think he's saying there.

Dana: Thank you very much. You've really helped me. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Steve Gregg: All right, Dana, thank you. God bless you. Okay, Tom in Seattle, Washington is next. Welcome to The Narrow Path, Tom.

Tom: Yes, good afternoon. A speculation time here. I don't expect you to have a complete answer for this, but I've always been curious about one thing or a lot of things, but I'm reading the Gospel of John right now. And by the way, one of the best Gospels in the Bible. And Jesus refers to himself often as being in the Father and the Father's in him, etc. And in the Gospel of John, there's a story where they're about to go into Jerusalem for the feast and the brothers and sisters or brothers at least approach him and said, "Listen, why don't you go," and so many words I'm paraphrasing this, "go in there and reveal yourself for who you are. Why if you do all these amazing miracles, you know, show yourself to the world?" Here's my question. And I've often pondered this and I don't have an answer. Where do you think the point was in time where Jesus had an epiphany where he literally knew he was the Son of God? Because his family who were raised with him saw him every day and knew him, played with him, chided him, did childish games, grew up with him. There must have been a moment in his life where all of a sudden he knew something that he didn't quite know before and all of a sudden the alarm went off. I don't know if anybody has an answer for that, but it's often fascinated me that the Son of God, you know...

Steve Gregg: Yeah, well we can set a maximum age for that at age 12. Now whether he knew it before age 12, I don't know. But at age 12, he spoke to his parents when he'd been in the temple and they hadn't known where to find him. Then they found him in the temple. And he said, "Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" Now what's interesting is you and I have no problem understanding what he means by my Father's house. He's God's son. The temple is God's house. It's a very understandable statement, not even very obscure in my opinion. But it says his parents didn't understand what he meant.

Because his mother had just said, "Your father and I have been looking for you everywhere," referring to Joseph as his father. And that's natural enough. Joseph was not his biological father but had been the only father in his home since he was born and had raised him as a father. Now there were other children too, but Jesus was the oldest of the family and... so in other words, it's very natural when someone has a stepfather who raises them from infancy or whatever, that they just call him Dad. I mean, it's commonplace. And the mother would refer to him as your Dad because that's the relationship they've had all their lives. Joseph was not his real father, but Mary said, "Your father and I have been looking for you," meaning Joseph and I, because that's the way they had always talked until that point.

But Jesus said, "Yeah, well I've been in my Father's house all this time," meaning the temple. Which means that whatever they may have said all his life in just acting and speaking as if Joseph was his dad, Jesus realized he had another father and that the temple was his Father's house and therefore he was the Son of God. Now if he had come to understand that earlier, we don't know, but it certainly was no later than that point because he mentions it at that point.

Now as far as his brothers, when did they come to think of him that way? Well, we're told in the very passage you mentioned, you raised the matter of John chapter five. It says there for even his brothers did not believe in him. Now I guess that would be seven five. I got the number wrong. 7:5. He says even his brothers did not believe in him. So we've got his belief... he's doing miracles and all this stuff, but they don't believe in him. Why not? Well, they were raised in the same house with him. He was just a normal kid, although probably better than average kid, but he was not working miracles until he was 30, so they had never seen that. If you grow up with someone in your home for the better part of 30 years and they've never done anything miraculous, and then you start hearing rumors, oh, he's doing miracles, they kind of mocked him about those rumors, but they just didn't believe it was true.

So when did they change their minds? We know that in the book of Acts in chapter one, these brothers of Jesus along with Mary were in the upper room waiting for the Holy Spirit to come, so they were believers by this time. But we know that First Corinthians 15 tells us that Jesus appeared to his oldest brother James after he had appeared to the apostles and some others. He appeared to his brother James who had been an unbeliever. We have to assume that this had an impact on James because James became a solid leader in the Christian church after that point. And we don't read of him appearing to the other brothers and maybe he didn't, but James being the oldest brother and becoming persuaded probably not only by seeing him but also by the other evidence of the empty tomb and things like that, the other brothers apparently came around too. So I would say after the resurrection his brothers came to believe in him and not before. Jesus came to have gotten the epiphany or whatever that he was the Son of God either by age... well, certainly by age 12 if not earlier, and that's really the only information we have that would be relevant to answering that question.

Tom: If I may, can't we assume at some point that either God revealed himself to Jesus apart from anyone knowing it at some point when he was young, and there was a connection that was divine that occurred that triggered his realization that maybe he had questions that no one could answer, and God said it's time and God revealed himself to his son in some way either through an angel or through divine intervention, but there was some moment when the bells went off, the lights went on and he knew who he was?

Steve Gregg: I'm sure that's true. Yeah, I'm sure that is the case. I'm sure that Jesus at some point didn't know and then he did later. I mean, if people say, "Well, he was omniscient; he was God from the time he was born, so he knew even from the time he was born." No, the Bible doesn't indicate that Jesus was born omniscient. In fact, it says in the last verse of Luke chapter two that the boy Jesus after age 12 went home with his parents and he increased in wisdom and in height and in favor with God and man. So he increased in wisdom. He got intellectually smarter as he grew up, just like everybody else does. So he wasn't born knowing everything. He was born like a baby who had to learn to speak. Wouldn't that have been something if he came out of his mother and he's already speaking fluent Hebrew and Greek and Aramaic and he could tell everyone what they're thinking? Yeah, I don't think there'd be much way to keep him, let's just say, obscure in the neighborhood if he was doing that. But he was very obscure. He remained obscure until he was 30 years old, then he manifested himself. So, you know, we could say he didn't know until he was 30, except for the fact that when he was 12 his comment clearly indicates that he saw God as his father and the temple as his Father's house in a way that would be unique.

Tina from Surrey, British Columbia, welcome.

Tina: Hi. I just want to know, if a person is doing all the right things, they're caring, loving, gentle, but they don't have the Lord in their life whether they know about Jesus and God or not and they don't do hardly any evil, will they be considered as going to heaven by God like me and the rest of us Christians are? I'll take the answer off the air. Thanks.

Steve Gregg: All right, thanks for your call. Well, if they don't believe in Christ, they won't be regarded as a Christian, but whether God will view them as one of his friends or not is very hard to know. Remember the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25 verse 31 through 46. He says that there's going to be a judgment day and everyone's going to stand before God. They'll be judged for their works, as every judgment passage in the Bible says people will be judged for their works. Jesus said there will be some people that are regarded as sheep and some who are regarded as goats, and the sheep will go into everlasting life, the goats into everlasting punishment, he says in verse 46.

Now, there's someone else in there too in the story, and that's his brethren. He says to the sheep, "When you did these things to my brethren, you did them to me." And to the goats he says, "When you didn't do these things for my brethren, you didn't do them for me." In other words, there's three categories of people there: there's the brethren and there's people who are reacting to the brethren one way or another, either in a godly way or an ungodly way, either in a selfless way or a selfish way.

Now, Jesus doesn't explain that much, but if we ask, well, who are his brethren? I've known some people, dispensationalists, who say it's the Jews. But Jesus answers the question for us if you look at Mark chapter three or frankly I think the same statement's in the other two, Matthew and Luke. Jesus said, "Who are my mother and who are my brothers?" He looked around the crowd and said, those who do the will of my Father in heaven, they are my mother and my brothers. So his disciples, in other words, were his true family, his true brothers. So later when he says the way you treat my brothers, I take it as if you're treating me that way.

So, you know, I don't know. We could say, well, the sheep and the brethren are the same people. Well, that's a possibility, but the way the parable's worded, it encourages us to think there's a third category in there. The Christians are definitely his brethren. That's what being a Christian does; it makes you a child of God. What about the people who are nice people but aren't Christians? Well, I really can't say. But it does look to me like God recognizes a difference between those who treat Christians and probably even for that matter who treat other people kindly and those who don't.

But I'm not going to answer for how God's going to judge each person. First of all, I don't know what's in anyone's heart. Even a person you described who does right things, all the right things, well, I still don't know what's in their heart. I mean, there are people who act nicely because it's their natural temperament. They may do good deeds for people, but they may do them for reasons we don't know. Maybe they're just trying to look good. Maybe they want people to like them. Maybe there may be reasons they do it that have nothing to do with their moral character. It's just everybody does what they do to get the best deal in life they think they can, and this is the way that they do it. This is their way. Which means they're not doing it for God at all; they're doing it for themselves or who knows.

Now, I'm not... now, see, Calvinists would say because of their doctrine of total depravity that everyone who's not a Christian is quite wicked and they can't do anything righteous. Even the righteous things they appear to do, they're doing for wrong reasons and therefore they're sinning still. I've thankfully never been a Calvinist and the more I read the Bible the less likely it is I'll ever be one. And I don't believe that. I don't believe that every good thing that a person does if they're not a Christian is seen by God as a bad thing. But on the other hand, I can't say that every good thing they do is seen by God as a good thing if their heart's not right.

Jesus talked about the Jewish worshippers of his time. He said, "These God said these people draw near to me with their mouth, but in their heart they're far from me." So we know that there's not always the same thing. Jesus said the Pharisees were like white-washed tombs who on the outside were like all cleaned up and they did everything right. They lived a squeaky-clean life. But he said inside they were like full of dead men's bones and all putrefaction and everything that defiles. So Jesus definitely made it clear that there is a category of people who do things right on the outside, but in their hearts they are very, very far from God and not pleasing to God at all.

And I acknowledge that that is the case. Though his statements do not tell us whether there might be also people who do things on the right on the outside because their heart is right with God, because they are seeking God even if they don't fully know him. I believe there's probably a category like that too. So I don't judge like God will because I don't have his capacity. Paul said in First Corinthians four, judge nothing before the time when the Lord comes and then the secrets of men's hearts will be revealed, he said. Which means of course God then can judge rightly because he knows everything, but we don't. That's, by the way, First Corinthians 4:5.

So I'm not going to make those judgments about people. I will say this: I don't care who they are, they need Jesus. But I don't think we only need Jesus to go to heaven. I think he does... if we have Jesus, we will go to heaven when we die. But I think Jesus is for a lot more than just getting people to heaven. He's to transform your life, which people will never have that unless they know him. So, people might do good deeds and God might judge them in a sympathetic way on the last day, but they if they don't know Christ, they are not building his kingdom, they're not living for his glory, they're not manifesting and using his gifts in the service of the brethren and for humanity, they're not doing everything for the glory of God. They're missing out. They're missing out and it's a significant missing out. I need to take a break here. We have another half hour coming. Don't go away. Our website is thenarrowpath.com. Check it out. I'm going to take a 30-second break and come back for another half hour or so. Stay tuned.

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Welcome back to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we continue on for another half hour, as we do every day, an hour together and with open phone line for you to call if you have questions about the Bible, you want to call in we'll talk about them. Right now you can't because the lines are full. But I'll bet you within a few minutes one of these lines will open up, maybe several, in which case you might get through. If you want to try that, the number to call will be 844-484-5737. Our next caller today is Tony from Indiana. Tony, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Tony: Yeah, hi Steve. My question's kind of a general question in terms of here we are 2026 years later, our Lord was walking the earth, a lot of the words were written down and kept by faithful believers through number of churches and the apostles and disciples. The question I have is this: the Lord was speaking to directly to those people at that time and he was speaking to his apostles and disciples, which he chose and they chose him at that time. So how much of that in terms of the dialogue that's actually in what we consider our Holy Scriptures is given to us, meaning you and I right now in the future? I get it that we can pray and speak to God and hopefully through the Holy Spirit he speaks to us, but how much of that is just him speaking to his disciples and apostles and we use it as good knowledge and glean from it?

Steve Gregg: I understand what you're saying and let me jump in here if I can. It is true that when you read the Bible, you read that the authors were writing to people of their own generation, writing to audiences that they identify, the Corinthian church, Thessalonian church, Theophilus is who Luke wrote to, a particular man. They're writing to somebody and we're reading their mail. And because we're reading their mail and it was written for them primarily not us, there's things that are alluded to which the original readers knew and understood but we may not because it has something to do with something in their culture or in their church or in their life that we were not privy to and they did know.

So we have to say virtually everything in the New Testament, especially the Epistles, were written to originally to certain individuals or churches. But that doesn't mean it's not relevant to us. And likewise the Gospels. We know that Luke wrote his Gospel and the book of Acts to a man named Theophilus, but the other three Gospels seem to be written to the believers at large in the first century. So how do they apply to us? Well, to my mind they apply when they apply. For example, when Paul says there's someone in your church who's living incestuously with his father's wife, you need to put him out of the church. I might say, well, I go to a pretty small church, I'm pretty sure no one in our church is living incestuously with his father's wife. So that doesn't apply directly to me. However, if it does, if there are people in my church living in fornication, suddenly what Paul gave as instructions to Corinth becomes relevant to us too because we're in exactly the same position and God's judgment of the matter would not be different today than it was when Paul wrote it.

Now as far as Jesus' conversations with people, I assume you're talking about the New Testament because we don't... Christians are not obligated to follow the Old Testament in quite in the way that Jews were. But we are supposed to follow the teachings of Jesus. Now unlike the Epistles, the Gospels do contain conversational information. Jesus answered people's questions; he gives discourses in public addressed to multitudes and some not in public, some in private dwellings with his disciples. Now, there is an issue here sometimes knowing whether something that he said in private is of general application or specific application to the people he spoke to.

Because Jesus did of course select the apostles. The Bible says he selected them for very special purpose: that they could be with him, that he could give them power to cast out demons and heal the sick, and that he could send them out. That's what it says he chose the 12 from a much larger group of people. He had a lot larger number of people following him. And it says that these people were all following him and he went on the mount to pray and to receive guidance, I imagine, came down and chose 12 of those people from the larger group because he wanted to use them for something special, which he did. And they are in general the people who wrote the New Testament for us, although there's some exception. Some of them didn't write and a few of the people who wrote might not have been among the 12. But the point is there was a special role that the 12 had and some of the conversations recorded between Jesus and them are private between him and them and may very well refer to them only or only by some extension to people in parallel circumstances.

Nobody's exactly parallel to the apostles, but church leaders might of course be governed by some of the same instructions. Like when Jesus said the rulers of the Gentiles, they exercise authority over them. But I say to you, don't do that. He said whoever's chief among you let him be the servant of all. Now he said that to the disciples privately and said, okay, who among you apostles whoever's chief will be the servant of all. Now does that apply to all Christian leaders? I would think it would. I mean, if the apostles were clearly the most authoritative leaders the church ever had and even if they were not to exercise dominion over people and even if they proved their worth by being slaves of all as Jesus said, well then how much more would people lesser men like like you or me or pastors or whatever? How much more that would be true of us?

So in other words, sometimes Jesus said something to the apostles privately it would have direct application to them, but just like the letters to the churches sometimes it has direct and immediate application to the original reader but in principle it tells us something very valuable about what how God feels about these circumstances and so we should seek to conform to them. Now when Jesus spoke to the public or to the vast body of his disciples, which would be analogous to Christians in general, things like the servant sermon on the mount for example, we could say well those instructions are for us too, although they are often couched in illustrations and such that would apply to them more than to us.

For example, in the sermon on the mount in Matthew 5, he said if you bring your gift to the altar. Now he's talking about bringing an animal to sacrifice at the temple, at the altar. Which is their form of worship in the Jewish society when the temple was standing. That was the how the Jews worshiped and his disciples were Jews. He said when you bring your gift to the altar if you there remember that your brother has something against you leave your gift there, go make peace with your brother, then come back and offer your gift. Now, you know, how does that apply to me? I don't go to the temple. I don't have lambs that I offer on an altar anywhere. Yeah, but I mean he's telling us something about God's priorities. He's saying you want to worship God, well, good, you should worship God, but if you are neglecting a rift between yourself and some other brother, you know God wants you to fix that, God wants you to do what you can to reconcile. And if you haven't done that, don't bother bringing your worship to God until you've at least done what you can about that because you're being a hypocrite if you do. Go fix it first, then come back.

Now that because even though I don't offer animals on an altar, I do worship God. I do attend worship services and so forth and worship God there. But, you know, I'd say well he didn't say that to me because he wrote he was saying those things to Jews, Jewish followers of his who had a temple to worship at. Yeah, well I don't have a temple like that to worship at, but I still worship. And he's telling us something about God's priorities about worship and relationships and so forth. So it takes to my mind it's not rocket science at all but it but it is not infantile approaches.

I've heard so many atheists and people who are critics of Christianity they'll quote some kind of hyperbole or some kind of a statement from Jesus and say isn't that ridiculous? And they've given no thought to it whatsoever as if they're smarter than Jesus was. I mean, he's the he's had more impact on the fate of the world than anyone else who ever lived in all of history. And they think, you know, they who have given two seconds thought to the matter, you know they're smarter than he is. Yeah, I think I think stupid people do that, but wise people say, well, you know, I this I'm not sure exactly how this applies or how he meant this and how it would apply to me, but he is important enough and his wisdom is deep enough that it makes sense for me to think about it before I decide how to how to react to it. And that's what people should do. That's why the Bible talks about meditating on the word of God day and night.

People who just kind of don't, they don't think about God during the day, they're doing their business, they're doing their stuff, they're entertaining themselves, they're glued to the screen on their phone, they're not given any thought to God. And then then they take a few minutes out to read the Bible, but they've never given any thought. No wonder they don't understand it. It's crazy. If you know the Bible is the word of God and if you don't meditate on it day and night... well, by the way, if you don't love it you won't. You can't make yourself meditate on something unless you love it. But if you do love something, you can't make yourself not meditate on it. I mean, just think of when you first fell in love. Whatever you were doing at your job or school or whatever, playing sports, the person you loved was kind on in in your mind. You're looking forward to seeing them. You're thinking of the last conversation you had and so forth. I mean, when you love something, you think about it as much as you can because it's pleasant to do so.

Now, if you love it says in Psalm one that you know the blessed man is one who delights in the law of the Lord and in that law he meditates day and night. Now, in other to know how the Bible applies to you or to anyone today is not a mystery, but it's not laying right on the surface since the Bible was written to people in a different culture, referring to different you know practices that they might have parallels in our time. You have to think about it. You have to think, well, how does this apply to me? How what principle is here? And when you do that, you'll find that virtually everything in the Bible has something to say to you, but you have to give it the respect of thinking about it as if it contains something of value for you to learn.

Now, I'm I say that knowing what I'm speaking of. from the time I was a essentially a child, I I thought about the Bible. When I was in school and and I was doing other things, I wasn't in Bible school, I was in secular school. But I was, you know, whatever happened, I thought of it in terms of what's the Bible say about that? Or at least if I knew something in the Bible that applied to it, that would be the first thing that comes to my mind to see how's that apply to what I'm learning here. Every Christian I think should do that. Not everyone has the capacity to do it equally, but everyone should do it to the best of their ability.

And then they won't have to ask, I wonder if this applies to me. There will still be times when maybe a promise that Jesus made to the apostles you won't be sure if it's a promise that applies only to them or to everybody. And that's even the disciples in the upper room actually said, "Lord, do you say this to us or to everybody? Only is it only us or for everybody?" And there are things, for example, when he said, "He that believes in me shall do greater works than I do." Is he saying that about every Christian's going to go out do miracles like Jesus? Or is he talking he's talking privately to the apostles is he talking about basically their ministry? When he says where two or more are gathered in the midst of you or more than that, he says you know what you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, what you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven. Well, he's talking to the apostles. Is this a promise that applies to them exclusively, principally, or does it or does it apply to everybody? These are questions that need a lot of thought and a lot of consideration and can possibly be answered with such. But but you can't just say on top of you know just on the surface everything he said to them applies to all of us. And when people think that that is the case, I believe they're not very good thinkers about the Bible. So I'm not sure if that answers your question fully, but it's as much as I have time for right now with the full line. I appreciate your call, Tony. Peyton in Seattle, Washington, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Peyton: Hi, Steve. Love the show and thanks for taking my call. Would you discuss the doctrine of original sin and I'm going to cross-reference Psalm 51:5? "In sin did my mother conceive me." Was that meant to be literal or was David speaking so David was speaking out of hyperbole in that verse?

Steve Gregg: Well, no, it's not literal. Well, I think he was. I mean, let's face it, it's Psalms, it's poetry. And one thing that you can say about poetry is poets do not speak the way people do when they're writing, let's just say, didactically or theologically. Now, there's good theology in his poetry, just like there can be good theology in any good Christian poem written by a knowledgeable Christian. But he but in poetry, there is an awful lot that is not literal.

I mean, let me just take before we take that Psalm, take Psalm 14, for example, which is often quoted with reference to the same subject of original sin or or of total depravity. But in Psalm 14, it begins, "The fool has said in his heart there's no God. They're corrupt; they've all done abominable works. There's none who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven upon the children of men to see if there's any who understands who seeks God. They've all turned aside; they have altogether become corrupt. There is none who does good, no not one." Well, it's kind of strange to say that about everybody because the Bible talks about certain people who do do good. Some of them are not Christian people like Cornelius, for example, in Acts 10. But but then he goes on and says in verse four, "Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge who eat up my people as they eat bread and do not call on the Lord?" Now, what was there a cannibalistic group, you know, is eating people like they eat bread? No, this is this is hyperbole. This is the whole Psalm is hyperbole as is case with very much poetry.

Now Psalm 51 is also poetry and it's written in agony of soul when David was suddenly convicted of his sin with Bathsheba, and it's like cut him to the heart and he wrote this Psalm. And, you know, he's I mean one thing he says that isn't entirely literal. He says in verse four, "Against you, you only have I sinned." Now that's not true. He had sinned against Bathsheba; he'd sinned against Uriah; he'd sinned against the whole country. He'd sinned against God. Nathan the prophet said he'd given the enemies of God occasion to blaspheme. There's, you know, he'd sinned against a lot of people. But in his agony of repentance before God, he said his feeling was as if, you know, God's you know having sinned against God is the greatest offense. It's it's like eclipsing all other concerns at this point. It's not true that it was only against God, but he's speaking emotionally; he's speaking hyperbole; he's writing poetry; he's he's not stating things as if they are exactly true.

Now in verse five, he says, "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin my mother conceived me." Now it's very possible that he meant by that I've been a sinner from the beginning and, you know, it's almost like I was sinning from the day I popped out of my mother's womb. Now, if that's true, it's probably not quite I mean that's probably not exactly true. He probably didn't commit any sins until he was at least out of the womb. He said he was conceived in sin. That's nine months before he came out of the womb. I don't think a zygote that's three or four cells large is committing any sin. So this is hyperbole too.

But there's also another possibility. He could be quite literal in another sense. Some people feel that David was an illegitimate child of Jesse, born from a different mother than the other brothers, which is why the other brothers didn't like him. Jesse didn't you know care for him as much as he cared for the other brothers. So it's only a theory, but it's possible that like Jephthah the judge who was only a few generations before David, Jephthah had been the son of his father with a prostitute and the other brothers hated Jephthah and rejected him. Well, David seems to experience that kind of rejection from his brothers and he says, "Yeah, my I was conceived in sin." This could certainly mean, although I don't say it must, but it could certainly mean that Jesse had an illegitimate child with you know a prostitute and David was that child and he was conceived in sin and in sin my mother conceived me.

So that could be more or less literal but it doesn't have anything to say about the subject of original sin, especially that. I mean, if he's simply saying my mother was sinning and my dad too when I was conceived, well, that doesn't tell us anything about his guilt or his nature. But Augustine felt, and this is like 400 years after Christ, Augustine felt like this is saying there was some mysterious iniquitous thing that transfers to the zygote from human copulation because humans are sinners, they pass that down. And Augustine's view was not just that people have inherited a sinfulness that leads them to do bad things. More than that, Augustine thought they've inherited the guilt of Adam's sin. Now there's a difference. Some people haven't thought enough even to realize that.

Original sin doctrine, which Augustine created was had two parts. The part is when everyone's born, they're born with a propensity towards sin. Well, I'm I'm not going to fight against that. I mean, I don't know if that's stated anywhere in scripture but let's just say it doesn't seem to go against any experience I know of. So I'm not going to fight against that. But the other part of the doctrine that Augustine had was the child is conceived also with the guilt of Adam's sin upon him, which means, I mean to many Calvinists who are Augustinians, not not all would say the same thing, but some say a child in the womb is guilty of Adam's sin and if they're aborted, they go to hell. Or even a baby dies, goes to hell. That's a that's a Calvinist position. It's not the only one. Some Calvinists have a different nuance on it. But some who are the most consistent with Augustine would say, yeah, the babies go into hell if it dies in the womb or elsewhere because it's already guilty.

Now to my mind it's one thing to say a child may have in its nature from from the get-go a selfishness that leads it to do sinful things. It's a very different thing than saying the child is born guilty of somebody else's sin who lived six thousand years ago when the child has done nothing wrong. It you know the first would be like saying, you know, the rabid dog that bit a child and killed her or the rattlesnake that bit somebody and killed it. Well, that's its nature. It's a nasty thing. It's its nature to do that. But they're not guilty of it. The snake didn't know better. It's made to do that. It doesn't it doesn't have any guilt for the murder. It's just bad nature. And we could say people can be born with bad nature without saying they are born already guilty of a sin that was committed millennia before the child was conceived.

I do not accept and I don't think anything in the Bible would give any reason to accept the idea that a child is born guilty, though there may be much to suggest a child is born inclined to do the wrong thing and inevitably does a great number of wrong things and therefore all have sinned. So that would be a brief take on that. By the way, I have a a lecture at our website called Total Depravity and Original Sin, or it might be simply called Original Sin and Depravity. But it's at our website thenarrowpath.com. It's quite a deep dive into all the scriptures and what the church fathers said before Augustine, for example, because they didn't agree with him, and so forth. So I mean if you go to thenarrowpath.com under topical lectures, there is I think it's maybe a two-part lecture series on original sin and depravity. And, you know, people may not agree with me, but they will not be able to say I left anything out of consideration.

Linda in Wallingford, Connecticut, welcome.

Linda: Hi. Yes, we're doing a Bible study on Job, and I was wondering is there any speculation on the time all those conversations took place and were in these three guys? Are they leaving Job and coming back because they need to eat?

Steve Gregg: Well, no, we're not given any information about how long transpired. We do know that when they first came to him after his trials had come upon him, they sat silently for a week before any of them spoke. Now once they began speaking, all those conversations could conceivably have taken place on a single day. I mean, you could read it out loud in a single day. So those those conversations could have... although it's also possible that they spent several days in conversation and these and the recorded comments are a summary of the kinds of things they said to each other. We don't have that specific information.

In all likelihood the whole thing didn't transpire for longer than a week or two, but we don't know. It could have happened much more briefly than that. So we don't know how long Job remained in his agony. And even after even after the conversations were over, we don't know how long it was before Job was finally healed and everything went right with him. Because he did, of course, at the end he had twice as much wealth and twice as much of everything except children as he had before the whole trials came upon him. And yet some of that would probably take some time to accumulate. It's not like, okay, he he said his comments of self-deprecation and repentance to God in the beginning of chapter 42 and then boom, he turned around he had all his camels and sheep and all that stuff back twice as much as before. That that would have taken time to accumulate. So the whole story from actual beginning to end could have lasted could have taken a year or more. But the conversations themselves could have occurred in a single day for all we know. They might not have; they could have been stretched out over a few days. Our curiosity wants to know, but of course it doesn't it would do us no good to know. I mean there's no particular meaning that we could derive if that were so that would be different if it was a different length of time. Thank you for your call.

Michael from New Hampshire. We only have a few minutes. Go ahead. Michael, are you there? Michael's not there. Steve from Phoenix, Arizona, welcome to The Narrow Path. Only have a couple minutes.

Steve: Quick question about biblical significance of when the day starts: sunset or sunrise, or is that just relevant to the Jewish and Mosaic covenant/tradition?

Steve Gregg: Well, in the Old Testament, the day began really at sundown of the previous day. So if today is Friday, as soon as the sun goes down, and it may be down where you are but some of our listeners it's already down, it's already tomorrow for them. When the sun goes down, it's already the next day. And I think that's based on Genesis one where it said evening and morning were the first day and evening and morning were the second day. But whether it's based on that or not, I think it is, it's still the way the Jews did think about things. Now, are we obligated to think of it that way? I don't think so. I'm not really sure why it would matter. I mean, if we had to keep Sabbath, it would matter. Because if we were under obligation to keep Sabbath, then today, Friday, when the sun goes down, it's Sabbath and it's Sabbath until sundown Saturday. So just Jewish tradition.

Right. And then it stops being Sabbath at sundown Saturday. So but I don't observe Sabbath in a Jewish manner at all, so it you know nothing of practical importance hangs on whether whether we'd start the day at midnight, start the day at 6:00 the night before, you know, whatever. I mean, the Jews do it one way; they've done it forever that way. They're entitled to do it that way, but no one else is required to do that.

Steve: Thank you, just wanted to get your point of view on that. Appreciate it.

Steve Gregg: Okay, Steve, great to hear from you. Thanks. Bye-now. All right, you've been listening to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. Hopefully you've been listening all week. This is our last day of the week, but we have Monday through Friday next week if the Lord tarries. Not only this past week, but we've been doing this for 29 years now. This is our at least our 29th year on the air daily. So we've been doing this a long time. We buy the time on radio stations, currently we're on more radio stations than ever before and therefore spending a lot more money than ever before. We have no other expenses. This ministry has zero expenses essentially except to pay the radio stations. If you'd like to help us do that, we have no sponsors, we don't sell anything. You can write to us at The Narrow Path, PO Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593, or go to our website thenarrowpath.com. Have a good weekend.