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're taking your calls. If you have questions about the Bible or about the Christian faith, we'd be glad to have you call in and we'll talk to you on the air about those things. If you disagree with the host, you can call in about that, and I'll be glad to talk to you about that as well.

Right now our lines are full, so wait at least a few minutes before trying to call in. At various times during the hour there will be lines opening up, including all the lines that are currently full will be opening up individually at different points. So just call randomly and there's a good chance you can get in. The number is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737.

I don't think I have any announcements I have to make this week, although I would remind you that next month, I think it's on the 10th if I'm not mistaken, I'm going to be speaking in San Juan Capistrano at a church called Ranch Church. They've asked me to come speak on a Tuesday night, that's February 10th. San Juan Capistrano, I'll be speaking about the four views of Revelation.

I'm not going to announce everything because I don't like to give so many minutes to announcements when there's so many people waiting. Let's talk to Darwin in Detroit, Michigan, first of all today. Darwin, welcome. Thanks for calling.

Guest (Male): How you doing, Steve? I met you in Hamtramck, Michigan, with my nephew William. I don't know if you remember me.

Steve Gregg: Yeah. Boy, that's the town I can hardly pronounce. Yeah.

Guest (Male): Okay, I have something in Deuteronomy 23, verse 1 and 2. Can I read it to you?

Steve Gregg: Of course.

Guest (Male): He that is wounded in the stones or has his private members cut off shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord. And verse 2, a bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord, even to his tenth generation shall he not enter the congregation of the Lord. Does verse 1 speak of like a transvestite cannot enter? Or verse 2, a child of God cannot enter the sanctuary or the church ceremony? Speak on that.

Steve Gregg: The first one is talking about somebody who's been castrated or otherwise their sexual organs have been destroyed. The modern New King James says, "He who is emasculated by crushing or mutilation shall not enter the congregation of the Lord." And then the other one is about a person of illegitimate birth cannot do so. Now, people get upset about these kind of laws sometimes simply because they don't understand what this is about.

There's also laws that say that a dwarf can't enter in or a person who's club-footed or a person who's blind or whatever. Obviously, these people have nothing to say about whether they're in that condition or not. Why should God blame them? Well, He doesn't blame them at all. You don't have to enter the congregation of the Lord to go to heaven when you die.

The whole purpose of the tabernacle worship is not to meet conditions for being on right terms with God, because even a leper could not enter in, but a leper can very much be on good terms with God. This is not whether God likes you, loves you, will save you, will forgive you, or sees you as a good person or not. This is simply maintaining the symbolic, ritualistic purpose of the tabernacle.

The tabernacle was not a place where you go to get saved. It's a place where the Israelites would act out ritualistic practices which symbolized spiritual truths. It was very important. God told Moses, "When you make the tabernacle, make sure you don't deviate in any way in the structure and the design of it from the pattern I showed you on the mount."

The writer of Hebrews tells us in Hebrews 8 and 9 that the reason that God was so adamant about that was because the tabernacle was portraying spiritual realities or heavenly realities. Like some other things on earth, for example, marriage. Marriage was created by God to be an earthly model of a spiritual truth about Christ and His church.

This is why Christians have no authority to modify what marriage is, because you're not allowed to change the things that God instituted to illustrate spiritual truths. They're lessons for us. Likewise, the tabernacle was a lesson. Lots of people in the world never went to the tabernacle. That doesn't mean none of them were in heaven. This is not related to how you go to heaven. This is a system that portrayed in symbolic rituals spiritual realities.

You can buy whole books on the tabernacle and what it represented and what its details represent. In fact, I have ten lectures online about the tabernacle. I gave them a very long time ago, like back in the '80s, and I haven't heard them since then. I'm not sure if I'd stand by everything I said in them, but everything you read about the tabernacle, book-length treatment and so forth, have a measure of speculation in them.

There are certain spiritual truths that are quite obvious and that any book or teaching on it would bring out. This is how we have to see the tabernacle. The tabernacle was not where you go to get saved. Yes, they did offer animal sacrifices there, but you didn't even offer animal sacrifices to be saved. Everyone was saved by faith in the Old Testament, the Bible says, just like they are now.

But people who are saved by faith, because they are saved, they want to live in obedience to what God wants them to do. During the time of the Mosaic law, worship at the tabernacle, later the temple which replaced it, was what people did to be obedient. If you weren't near the tabernacle, if you lived in another country, if you were like Job, a foreigner who lived elsewhere and didn't go to the tabernacle, you could still be on good terms with God.

He didn't expect it of you, but what He did expect is that the Israelites would carry out these rituals faithfully, so that the things that the rituals represented spiritually might not be misrepresented. We're not told what all of these rituals are about. A person who's emasculated presumably refers to or corresponds with somebody who's spiritually fruitless.

An actual castrated person may not be spiritually fruitless. In fact, Isaiah chapter 56 has a whole section there. It talks about in God's sight a eunuch, which is someone who's been emasculated, a eunuch who keeps God's laws and is faithful to Him will be counted as a son or daughter of God just like anyone else. It's clear that the ones who were not permitted to go to the tabernacle were not excluded because God didn't like them or because God thought worse of them.

It was because their participation would fail to represent the spiritual truth that these physical conditions correspond in symbolism to spiritual conditions. A person with a clubfoot who can't walk right, you've got to walk right before God to be saved. A person who's a dwarf would be probably somebody who didn't grow in a normal way, someone whose growth was stunted.

There's nothing wrong with being a dwarf, God has nothing against them, but in the symbolism of that ritual, spiritual growth would be one of the things that God's looking for. Spiritual sight and being able to hear God could be symbolized by physical sight and hearing and things like that. A somebody who is an illegitimate child, the book of Hebrews tells us that if a Christian is not receiving chastening from the Lord, they are not legitimate sons.

A person who's not a legitimate child of his father, his earthly father, can be a child of God. For example, one of the judges, Jephthah, was the son of his father and a prostitute, an illegitimate son. But God raised him up to lead and rescue and rule Israel as a judge. David, too, some people have suggested may have been an illegitimate son of Jesse.

We don't know that to be true, but some things David said in Psalm 27:10, some things that we read about in his story about the way his brothers treated him and even his father, have led some people to think, and certainly Psalm 51:5, have led some people to think that David may not have been a legitimate son. Yet His name meant beloved of the Lord and he was a man after God's heart.

It's clear that if David under the law was an illegitimate son, he would not be permitted to go into the tabernacle. David did go into the tabernacle, so some might say that proves he wasn't an illegitimate son, but the truth is, David did a lot of things the law didn't permit. God gave him some special grace.

For example, he ate showbread which only priests were allowed to eat. He had some insights, as the Psalms point out, of what God really wants is not so much these rituals. He said, "Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, but You opened my ear to You." David knew some stuff about what God really cares about and that these rituals were not the most important thing.

David, apparently with God's approval, sometimes kind of fudged on them a bit. So whether he was a legitimate son of Jesse or not, we don't know. The truth is that if he is or is not an illegitimate son, it would make no difference because he was a man after God's heart. These laws about who cannot go into the tabernacle are simply the categories that are listed of people with these kinds of defects or irregularities, that they represent a counterpart in the spiritual realm.

Their not being able to go into the tabernacle is not a matter of God rejecting them. They might be as saved as anybody else, they might be closer to God than other people, but they can't go to the tabernacle because the symbolic ritual of the tabernacle, its message would be lost if its conditions were not met. That's how I understand these various groups of people that are not allowed to enter the tabernacle.

Guest (Male): I appreciate it, Steve. That's a good answer for me.

Steve Gregg: Okay, Darwin. I appreciate it. Good talking to you. God bless. Ryan from Lynnwood, Washington, is next. Ryan, good to hear from you again.

Guest (Male): Hi, Steve. I don't want to take up too much of your time, but I emailed you earlier, and I know how sometimes they can slip through the cracks, but have you in your researching the different ministries around the world, have you been able to find a reliable anti-human trafficking organization? I just feel overwhelmed when I look into those things.

Steve Gregg: I have not. I've heard of some, and there have been some that I initially had some confidence in, but then I heard some rumors against them. I'm pretty careful about who I give donations to or what ministries I support, but I don't spend a lot of my time at it. If I can't get information reasonably easily, I don't put them on my list.

I would love to support ministries that save people from human trafficking, but I'd also like to save people from a lot of other things and support ministries that do that. I think that everyone who's going to donate to a ministry probably should do their own vetting of ministries, and I have not done that thoroughly. I can't tell you who to trust.

I would hate to tell you, "Oh, this one I trust," when I haven't vetted them and it may be that they end up doing scandalous things. I'm going to just have to say no, I don't have a list of those that I can say, "Yeah, I can trust these ones." That doesn't mean there aren't many. It just means I haven't done the research.

Guest (Male): Yeah. Okay, well I'll just stick with the ones that I give to then because I feel pretty confident about them. Well, thank you. God bless you.

Steve Gregg: Okay, Ryan. God bless you too. Thanks for asking. It's an important question. Joe in Los Angeles, California. Hey, welcome.

Guest (Male): Hello there, Steve. Thank you for taking my call. My question, first on Dispensationalism. You hear folks like Tucker Carlson and a lot of the folks on the internet right now, I think they don't understand Dispensationalism completely. Candace Owens supposedly, well I actually heard her say she left Christianity for Catholicism because of Dispensationalism.

So who knows there, but my question to you is, if you were to be invited onto the Tucker Carlson show, would you be willing to accept and explain what it's all about and stuff?

Steve Gregg: I don't know if I've ever turned down an invitation to be interviewed or to debate something. Of course, if I were invited, I'd be glad to. I doubt that I'll be invited to, but if someone wants to suggest that they invite me, I would not say no.

I will say this about Candace. She started out as a Protestant, but she's married to a Catholic. I remember listening to her years ago. She was still a Protestant, but she was kind of considering Catholicism. To say she left Christianity to become Catholic, I'd say she left Protestantism to join her husband in the Catholic Church.

She's perhaps a convinced Catholic now. I don't know that all Catholics have left Christianity, although I realize that not all Catholics and not all Protestants are themselves Christians. You can be part of a church without being a real Christian. I don't know that she's left Christianity now.

I would not, however, if I want to get information about Dispensationalism or eschatology or biblical theology at all, go to Candace or Tucker or Mike Huckabee for that matter. Mike Huckabee is a Dispensationalist, I think, but these are people who their expertise has always been in other areas, and they also happen to have religious views.

When I'm wrestling with what Dispensationalism teaches, I'm not going to go to just to one of the critics of Dispensationalism. I'm a critic of Dispensationalism, as you know. I don't believe in it. But I wouldn't go to somebody who's merely a critic of it and who, frankly, it's not their specialty. Theological inquiry is not their strong suit.

I just hear them, I take them with a grain of salt. I realize that some of the things they say are probably true, some things not true. But when I'm trying to understand a theological concept, I'm going to go to the theologians who teach it to find out what they say and why.

Guest (Male): Right. Yeah, and I think they're kind of mistaken in the way they try to explain Dispensationalism, but they're very much against it, you know.

Steve Gregg: They probably are. It certainly would be, if Candace said she left the Protestant churches because of Dispensationalism, a strange choice to make since Protestant churches have generally not been Dispensationalist until fairly recent times and most of them probably still are not.

I think most American evangelical churches are Dispensational or lean that way, but Protestant churches throughout history have not been, and many of them are not now. It'd be a shame to say, "I'm going to leave the whole movement because some of them have this crazy view."

People do things for poorly thought-out reasons. She may have been more influenced by the fact that she wanted to join her husband in his faith, but I don't know her.

Guest (Male): Yeah, well, again, thank you for your answer. I'm actually going to see if I can get on one of those where you can comment on their videos and tell Tuck to reach out to you. So if you don't mind, I can do that.

Steve Gregg: Sure. I'd be glad to hear from him.

Guest (Male): Thank you so much, Steve. Thank you for your time.

Steve Gregg: Okay, Joe. Thanks for your call. Bye-bye. James from Long Island, New York, is next. James, welcome to the Narrow Path.

Guest (Male): Yes, hi Steve. Paul went to Antioch and he spoke about the unknown God. He also said God doesn't need a place to dwell. Then why did they build the ark? And why do they sacrifice animals? If He's spirit, why do you have to sacrifice any animals? I can't understand. If You're spirit, do you need this? And the ark, what would that be?

Steve Gregg: The ark, you say? You're talking about the Ark of the Covenant?

Guest (Male): Yes. They built that so specifically and the details were unbelievable. So if He's spirit, why did He need a place to dwell in?

Steve Gregg: He doesn't. He doesn't need anything from us. He did it for them, not for Him. He said that He would have them put the mercy seat on top of the ark so that He might meet with them, that He might commune with them there. That's more for their benefit than for His.

If He's a spirit, what's He need a house for? He doesn't. But people need visual aids. Your question is really very closely related to the first one on today's program that was asking about tabernacle rituals. I don't know if you were listening then, but as I mentioned to the earlier caller, the tabernacle and its rituals, which includes the animal sacrifices, the Ark of the Covenant, and the mercy seat, were symbolic.

God didn't need symbols, but people often do. People can't understand spiritual things, and therefore sometimes an object lesson will help. A picture maybe worth a thousand words. You can believe that when you start reading the description of the tabernacle in Exodus, it seems like they take about a thousand words to explain things you could probably get in a single photograph.

The picture, the object lesson, makes things accessible to people who do not understand spiritual things. Even Nicodemus, who was a godly Jew, had trouble understanding spiritual things when Jesus said you have to be born of the Spirit. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 2 that the natural man cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God; they're foolishness to him because they have to be spiritually discerned.

In the absence of spirituality, which the Israelites were not in the Old Testament characterized as a spiritual people in general, God still wanted to get lessons across to them. One of the ones in having the tabernacle at all was that God wanted to dwell among them, that is to make Himself accessible to them.

He's everywhere; He doesn't have to be anywhere in particular. He's everywhere in the universe, so He doesn't need them to make a house for Him. That's what Stephen said in Acts 7: "The Most High does not dwell in temples or houses made with hands." Paul said, "In Him we live and we move and we have our being." He's everywhere around us and everywhere in the universe.

So your question about why were these things needed? They weren't needed by God. He got along just fine without them for gazillions of years before He created the world and even after He created the world for a very long time. But people needed it. People needed to get a grasp of some spiritual things.

One of the spiritual things, and probably the primary one, had to do with what Christ would accomplish through His death: that the shedding of His blood would be seen and function as an atonement for the sins of mankind. Before sending Jesus to accomplish that, God gave Israel these object lessons, and frankly not even only Israel because almost all religions offered sacrifices. They just had corrupted and perverted the practice because they worshipped the wrong gods.

The understanding was there is a satisfaction to be made to the gods, or to God in the case of Israel. That satisfaction has to do with the sacrifice of a life. In pagan religions, they actually sacrificed human lives. The Mesoamericans offered virgins to volcanoes and things like that, and virtually every pagan religion did have human sacrifice.

The Bible doesn't. The Bible never sponsors or approves of, in fact, it strongly condemns all human sacrifice. But the idea of a life being given was represented by a substitute for a human life: an animal. An animal actually makes a decent substitute because the animal has no guilt.

If it's going to die in the place of the guilty, it at least has none of its own, so there's a symbolic ritual of laying hands on the animal which represented transferring the guilt from the guilty person to the animal who had no guilt. Then the animal dies. As I understand it, this is getting across the idea of a substitutionary sacrifice, that the animal takes the place of the sinner.

Jesus would do the same, which is why one of the first things said about Jesus chronologically in public was when John the Baptist said, "There's the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world," suggesting that Jesus also would do what the lambs did when they were sacrificed. He'd take the sins of the world upon Himself and He would be sacrificed.

Every society in history is familiar with the idea of animal sacrifices and, in some cases, human sacrifices if you're in the pagan world. That idea of offering sacrifices didn't just spring from nothing. It must have sprung from the days of Adam and Eve or at least the next generation with Cain and Abel.

Abel, who Jesus said was a prophet, actually offered the kind of sacrifice God instructed to give and set an example for all people who would do what God wants in this matter. After the flood, people became spread around the world; they were pagans, they corrupted their religious ideas, they maintained this idea of sacrifices, but they lost the meaning of it. They worshipped demons instead of God.

In order to maintain the value of the object lesson but to prevent Israel from worshipping pagan gods or demons, He gave them very strict instructions about how and where they should do this. For 1,400 years they did, until Jesus came, and then His death fulfilled it. All the learning period, the school period of learning this lesson was over, and Jesus fulfilled it, and then the temple was destroyed.

God has never authorized animal sacrifices or any kind of blood sacrifices since then because the blood of Jesus is adequate. That's the role I think sacrifice has played and the temple and all of that stuff. Anyway, I hope that's clear. It may not be. These are some concepts people have problems with.

You're listening to the Narrow Path. We're not done; we're halfway through. We have another half hour coming. Half hours go very fast on this program for me at least. We are listener supported. You can write to us at The Narrow Path, PO Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. Or at our website, you can donate or just take stuff free. I'll be right back. Don't go away.

Welcome back to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we're live for another half hour taking your calls. It looks like our lines are full again, but if you want to try a little later, the number is 844-484-5737. We take your calls if you either have questions you want to ask about the Bible or Christianity, or if you have a different view of any subject that you've heard the host talk about and want to balance comment.

Our next caller is Jacob in Lacey, Washington. Jacob, welcome to the Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Guest (Male): Hi Steve. My question has to do with the Tanakh and the word Mashiach, which I believe means Messiah. I don't know in the Hebrew Bible or in the Tanakh—the Torah, the Nevi'im, and the Ketuvim—if the word Mashiach is ever used foretelling the coming of Jesus, if Jesus really existed.

Steve Gregg: Not commonly. No, the word Mashiach, which is the Hebrew for Messiah, is not a frequently used word in the Tanakh or in the Old Testament scriptures. It is not entirely absent. For example, probably the most obvious place, although Jewish people might dispute this, but I believe that it's nonetheless the case that in Daniel chapter 9, in the seventy weeks of Daniel, it talks about from this point in time to such and such a point in time will be when the Messiah comes, Mashiach.

There are some people who want Mashiach to simply mean an anointed one; they would like it to refer to maybe one of the high priests, Onias, or someone like that because they're trying to change the meaning of the prophecy. They're welcome to try to do that, but I think in all honesty we can say this is reference to the Messiah, the Christ, what came to be called the Messiah.

Later, after the Tanakh was complete, based on its writings and especially those of the prophets and Psalms, but even some of the earlier prophets which we call the historical books, Jewish rabbis began to speak of a particular figure called the Messiah whom I believe was recognized to be the one called Mashiach in Daniel 9. I think it's Daniel 9:24 through 27; I think there's a couple times Mashiach is used.

Also in Psalm 2, verse 1, it talks about how the nations rage against Yahweh and His Mashiach, His anointed one. In many of our English Bibles, it reads in Psalm 2:1, "Why do the heathen rage against the Lord and His anointed?" But the anointed there is the word Mashiach. In the New Testament, that verse is quoted by the apostles.

When they pray in Acts chapter 4, they quote that verse and they rendered it, of course, against the Lord and against His Christ, meaning Jesus. I don't know how often the word Mashiach in the Old Testament would refer to what we call the Messiah, although Messiah is the Anglicized form of the word Mashiach. But the word Mashiach can be used generically for someone who's anointed in some other capacity.

I know at least two cases, one in the Psalms and one in Daniel, where the Mashiach is a reference to Christ Himself. I believe that after the Old Testament, the Tanakh, was completed, the rabbinic writings began to speak frequently of the Messiah in the same sense that we speak of the term Messiah; it's just that they didn't recognize Jesus as being him when he came, and we do. Thanks for your call.

Let's talk to Jonathan in Atlanta, Georgia. Jonathan, welcome.

Guest (Male): Steve, thanks for taking my call. I appreciate it. Just one quick question. A couple weeks ago I spoke to a deacon at a local Catholic church—I'm not a Catholic, but I like to engage with believers—and I spoke to a priest at another Catholic church and they both told me on the same day not to preach the gospel to Jews.

They said they're both under the Old Covenant. Again, this was two separate assemblies. I refuted that very quickly by scripture and they got very upset with me. I'd just like to hear your thoughts on that.

Steve Gregg: I didn't know this to be the Catholic view, though maybe it is. I have Catholic neighbors and I asked them about that; they said they never heard of that. I can't speak for them or why they said don't preach to Jews. I do know this: that ever since Vatican II, the Catholic Church has taken a much more generous approach to non-Catholics.

Prior to Vatican II, it was the Catholic official belief that anybody who's not a Catholic is going to hell. In Vatican II, they took a gentler, kinder view of others who are not among them, referring to Protestants, for example, as separated brethren instead of as heretics or anathema. We who are Protestants are called separated brethren in their view now.

The view that Vatican II took was that it may well be that a non-Catholic is damned in many cases, but only if they know that they should be a Catholic and refuse. They would say if a Protestant, and I think they'd probably say this about a Jew also, if they do not believe that the Catholic Church is the true church and therefore do not become part of it, they are not lost for that reason.

They may not be in the church as they should be, but they're not lost by not being in it as previously to Vatican II they would have said. On the other hand, if a Jew or a Protestant does believe that the Catholic Church is the true church and is still refusing to become part of it, they would consider that to be damning. That's the new gentler attitude the Catholic Church took.

In some ways, it's actually more generous than that which some evangelicals take, who just believe that if you don't become an evangelical you're lost no matter how ignorant you are about things like that. It's no doubt the case that the church is very sensitive about the things that Jews have suffered at the hands of Europeans who identified as Christians.

There's a very strong feeling among many Jews that Christians are anti-Semitic. Certainly, there are people who called themselves Christians who have been anti-Semitic. There's no question about that. Unfortunately, what many Jews don't realize is you don't become a Christian by calling yourself one. You don't become a Christian by going to church.

Becoming a Christian means you've become a follower of Jesus, and Jesus was not anti-Semitic, and therefore no one who really follows Jesus would be anti-anything as far as races go. We don't have any hostility toward any race because Jesus didn't. The Catholic Church, with this awareness that Christians, including Catholics, have been extremely hard on Jews sometimes in the past and there's a great distrust and resentment between them, maybe they're saying, "These Jews don't know any better. God can save them because they don't know they're supposed to be Catholic, so let's not stir up trouble with them."

Perhaps a little bit like some Protestants might be toward homosexuals who are married. They think they don't know that it's wrong, so maybe God will just forgive them and let's just not muddy the waters by bringing that up. I don't know if that's the Catholic attitude toward it. I'm sure that there's no Roman Catholics that want me to be their spokesman, so I'm not pretending to be.

I will say, even among Dispensationalists there have been people who take what's called the dual covenant theory, who believe that Gentiles need to be saved through Christ, but that Jews who are not believers in Christ can be saved through keeping the Old Covenant. This is a false doctrine. It's a very dangerous one. Certainly, Paul never heard of it or the apostles, or else they wouldn't have preached to the Jews like they did.

The entire preaching of the church for the first several years before any Gentiles were included in it was to the Jews. The apostles preached for years in Jerusalem and their entire audience were the Jews, and the whole church was made up of Jews who became converted by their preaching. It certainly would have been news to them to be told we don't want to preach the gospel to Jews.

If they hadn't preached to the Jews, there'd be no church at all because they certainly didn't preach to Gentiles until many years after Pentecost. It's a very strange position for anyone to take, though like I say, there have been some whacked-out Protestants who've taught something making kind of the same claim. You don't have to preach to the Jews; they just have to be faithful to their religion.

Jesus apparently had not heard that; He didn't get that memo because He preached to the Jews, and those who rejected Him, He had rather negative, pessimistic predictions about how it's going to turn out for them with God because they rejected Him. The apostles took the same view Jesus did.

The church apparently is not taking the same view that Jesus is if they're saying we shouldn't preach to Jews. There's lots of people who say we shouldn't, only because they don't think that Jesus is all that important. I don't think the Catholics would say they don't think Jesus is all that important. I'm not sure how they justify that. I think perhaps they're just not thinking very clearly about it.

Guest (Male): Good answer. Thank you, sir.

Steve Gregg: Okay, Jonathan. Thanks for your call. Michael in Effingham, New Hampshire. Hi, Michael. Welcome.

Guest (Male): Hey Steve. Love your ministry. I want to thank you and your staff. Since I've been listening to you, I'm trying to get a hold of church history from the beginning, and your lectures are awesome.

Steve Gregg: Well, thank you. We have a 30-lecture series on church history at our website for free.

Guest (Male): Brief background for my question. I grew up in the faith, I started reading scriptures at an early age, like VBS and young people's Bible study. I went to Christian schools in the late '70s and early '80s in the Midwest. Back then memorization of scripture was required, and I was fairly competent.

I find now as I get older, it's just so difficult to even recall scriptures that I had memorized. I try writing them out, I speak them aloud and repeat, and I ask the Spirit to bless my meditation and my study. But aside from taking what is it, there's a drug on the market, Prevagen, for your memory. Do you have any suggestions what works for you?

Steve Gregg: I've seen it advertised, I think. I don't know if that would help. I'll tell you what worked for me is being young. Being young helped a lot. I'm 72 now. As you get older, you tend to lose short-term memory more than long-term memory, which is good because I spent my entire young decades immersed in the Bible.

I didn't spend much time memorizing the Bible. I memorized a little bit, but I read it so much that there literally has been the major seasons in the middle of my life where if you started quoting a verse, I could finish the quote from memory almost. Maybe not if it's in the middle of 1 Chronicles 3 or something, but essentially almost everything in the Bible I was quite familiar with.

Without having memorized it, I could finish the sentence only because I've heard it so many times. I differentiate between remembering on the one hand and memorizing. Memorizing is deliberately setting something to memory, disciplining yourself to do that, whereas remembering it is just something you're not forgetting. You remember because you've heard it so many times.

That was it; I just read the Bible so many times and heard it so many times. I never stopped. I was in a vocation where I taught through the Bible every year verse by verse in a school for 16 years. It got reinforced in it all the time. I was mentioning on the radio last week that early in my ministry, about 19, I memorized a few short books of the Bible.

These I memorized; I actually disciplined myself to memorize them verbatim. They were the shorter books near the end of the New Testament. Having memorized them, I found that it wasn't hard to memorize them, but it was sure easy to forget them. I actually had to quote them out loud to myself every single day in order not to forget them.

I would go on a walk every day and quote them out loud to myself, which was very edifying to actually go through these books. It was 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, 1 Peter, and James. Going through those books every single day was a great edifying experience—talk about meditating day and night on the Word of God.

If you memorize it, and if you're like me, you'll probably have to review it a lot. But that's not a problem; reviewing it is very edifying. My problem was it takes 15 minutes to recite 1 John or 1 Peter or James; they're all about the same length. Then I had a couple shorter books like 2nd and 3rd John.

I had about an hour of recitation I had to do every day, and that was just for those books. If I was doing nothing else, studying nothing else, it just got to the point where I realized I couldn't keep memorizing more books of the Bible and have time to recite them every day. I got lazier about it.

Whenever I, if a scripture comes to my mind and I share it on the air or in a Bible study, usually it's not from one of those books. Even if it is from one of those books, I'm still kind of paraphrasing it nowadays because I don't trust myself to quote it exactly. I'm not really anal about being exact quoting.

I believe that I not only know the verses, I know their context, I know the flow of thought, I know what they're saying, and in most cases I trust myself to quote the words I remember verbatim and fill in the other parts from what I know the verse to be talking about. People should look it up and make sure I'm not getting it wrong, but I'm pretty accurate. I'm not perfect.

To remember scripture, I don't know you at all, but I know lots of people who say they can't remember scripture very well, but they can remember all kinds of amazing things that I could never memorize. Sports statistics, the kind of engine that certain cars had in certain years, details about all kinds of stuff that I couldn't remember those to save my life because I've never paid attention to them.

People's minds have an amazing capacity to remember the things that they immerse themselves in. I just thank God because if I were starting to learn the Bible now with my diminished capacity, I'd have all the same problems anybody else has. But I started to learn it when I was young.

A lot of people are not in a calling like mine where you get to teach the Bible every day and read it every day, so I can see how people who learned scripture as a young person don't get to reinforce it every day of their life, and it could be harder for them. But I do believe in what Psalm 1 says.

It says that the man who is blessed is the one who his delight is in the law of the Lord and in His law he meditates day and night. Those two things are related. If you delight in it, you'll think about it all the time. Anything you're delighted in... if you delight in sports, you'll be thinking about them all the time. If you delight in cars, you'll be thinking about them all the time.

If you're delighted in the law of the Lord, you'll think about it all the time. If you're thinking about it all the time, you can't get very far from its contents.

Guest (Male): Right. Well, I also appreciate your verse-by-verse because you explain... I used to listen to Dr. Sproul because he could explain the tougher learning of scripture. I believe he's a Calvinist. He died a little while ago.

Steve Gregg: He was. He was quite a Calvinist. I listened to him. I think he's awesome.

Guest (Male): I read my first book was *The Holiness of God*, and that really was a wake-up.

Steve Gregg: That one kind of put him on the map; that kind of made him famous back in the '80s. I need to move along, Michael. We don't have much time and have a lot of callers, but I appreciate your call.

Guest (Male): All right, thank you so much for your ministry and take care and God bless.

Steve Gregg: Thank Michael. Good talking to you. Karen in Auburn, Washington. Karen, welcome.

Guest (Female): Hi Steve. I have a question on Psalm 51:17 if you could define exactly what a broken and contrite heart is.

Steve Gregg: The Hebrew word contrite means crushed, like you crush something with a mortar and pestle into powder. "The sacrifices of God are a broken and contrite spirit"; God doesn't despise that. What it means is that you just feel powerless. You've come to the end of yourself completely. It's as if you've been evaporated; you've been crushed into powder.

That would be in terms of not that you're a true basket case or that you're either morally or intellectually incompetent. What it means is your self-confidence is destroyed, which is good. We live, ever since probably the '60s or '70s, in a time where the church has been encouraged to bolster people's self-image, self-esteem, self-confidence, self-love.

Those are simply not biblical values. To love yourself is what you naturally do. We're never told to love yourself; we're told to love your neighbor the way you love yourself. Job, after he had gone through his trials, was crushed. He said to God in Job 42, "I've heard of You with the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You and I deplore myself. I abhor myself. I repent in dust and ashes."

When you come to a place where you say, "There's nothing good in me. I'm a total loser, I've got nothing to be self-confident about," that doesn't mean you can't be confident. You be confident in God. Once you've learned not to be confident in yourself, you now have a broken spirit. You now are poor in spirit, as Jesus referred to it.

That's a species of being humble. You're humble about yourself, but you're confident and trusting in God. You know you have to trust in God because you've got nothing you can contribute to His kingdom except what He does through you. When you come to that point, that's where David was. He had a crushed spirit.

In that Psalm, of course, he came to terms with the fact that he had broken God's law. He had committed adultery with his neighbor's wife and he had had his neighbor killed unjustly. He was a murderer and adulterer, and he'd always thought of himself as a good guy. He's the same David who as a shepherd boy had meditated on God's law day and night and was a man after God's heart.

Every man can fall, and he did. When a man is generally speaking a good guy and then he falls so terribly, it's a wake-up call. It says you're not a good guy. God may use you to do good things and you may be aiming at being good, but you can't be good without help. To come to that total loss of self-confidence and that total sense of dependency on God is what it means to be crushed.

Devastated. It's when you come to the end of yourself that God really has you where He wants you.

Guest (Female): Yep, that's good stuff, Steve. Thanks.

Steve Gregg: Okay, Karen. Thanks for your call. Good talking to you. Edwin from Killeen, Texas. We don't have very much time, I'm afraid, but go ahead.

Guest (Male): Yes, hi Steve. My question is about Matthew 7:21-23. I'm kind of new to this; I gave my life to the Lord less than a year ago. There was the verse that I'm confused about: people saying that they prophesied in His name and did all these things, cast out demons and whatnot, and the Lord responded with, "Depart from Me for I never knew you."

At first glance, it kind of looked like it was referring to people that walked away from Christ and then came back. Why would He say "Depart from Me for I never knew you" instead of "Depart from Me for I don't know you any longer"?

Steve Gregg: He's not talking about people who backslid or fallen away. He's talking about people who never had the right evidence of being real Christians anyway and were making a mistake about their own status. He says in verse 21 of Matthew 7, "Not everyone who says to Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven."

He doesn't describe people who once did but now aren't. He's talking about people who are saying, "Lord, Lord," that is they think of themselves as His people, as Christians, but they're not doing His will. That's not what they do. Now what does it mean to do the will of the Father? It means that you are now on a different path than before.

You were following your own desires and maybe including God in there once in a while or not at all, but now you're following His path. Doing God's will is the definition of what you live for. He says there are people who do other things short of that: prophesying, casting out demons, He mentions impressive things, working mighty works in His name.

He says some of them are not in that place where they'll enter the kingdom of heaven because their life is not characterized by doing God's will. They're doing all these things, but that doesn't mean they're doing God's will. Doing God's will means you're submitted to Him. You've denied yourself, taken up your cross, and you're following Him. Jesus said that elsewhere and that's what I think He's referring to.

I wish I could go longer; I can't. You're listening to the Narrow Path. Our website is thenarrowpath.com. Thanks for joining us.