The Narrow Path

Steve Gregg: Good afternoon and welcome to the Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg. We’re live once again as we are every weekday for an hour taking your calls. If you are curious about something in the Bible, confused, perplexed, upset at something you encounter in Christianity or the Bible, feel free to give me a call. I’d be glad to talk to you. The number to call is 844-484-5737. Now our lines are full right now, so don’t frustrate yourself trying to call at this moment because call in a few minutes and there’s a good chance you’ll find a line has opened up. 844-484-5737.

Since the lines are full, there's no reason for me to delay going to our callers immediately. John in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, welcome.

Guest (Male): Hello, Steve. How are you? In 1 Corinthians chapter 1, in particular verse 30, it says, “But of him are you in Christ Jesus, who of God was made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.” So, “But of him are you in Christ Jesus.” I know this talk about, like in Ephesians, being in Christ is how God chooses people, how he elects people in Christ.

This seems to say the reason that we find ourselves in Christ is because God put us there. It goes along with the rest of the chapter where he’s talking about how the gospel is the power of God unto those who are called, the called ones. To other people, the Jews and the Greeks, it's a stumbling block and foolishness, but to us who are called, it is salvation. I'm wondering how you view the fact that being in Christ is the result of God, not the result of an individual's choice.

Steve Gregg: To my mind, it’s rather simple. The church is “you,” and “you” is plural. So, the church in Corinth, he’s saying that they are in Christ. That is God’s doing. It is God who has created in himself one new man from the Jew and the Gentile believing in Christ. He has formed Christ as a new entity and he has put the entire church, or all the people in the church collectively, into that body.

That body is a collective entity and this is God’s doing. We didn’t do it. We didn’t create the body of Christ. We didn’t create opportunities for ourselves to get in it. This is something that God has done for us. This is gracious of him that we are in Christ and with all the benefits of being in Christ, we can’t really credit anyone but God for that.

Now, if someone takes him to be saying that each of you individually has been selected to be in Christ regardless of what you had done, which is of course what Calvinism teaches, that you were picked out by God as an individual to join this collective and you had nothing to do with it, in fact, you could do nothing about it because you were totally depraved and couldn’t even make a decision to believe or repent, and therefore it’s all God’s doing.

Well, that’s a theological position someone may wish to take, but it certainly isn’t taught here, not explicitly. Now, if that doctrine were true and we knew it to be true, let’s say, from the general teaching of scripture, or even one unambiguous statement of scripture for that matter, if we knew that doctrine to be true, we could say, “Oh, here we see it in this one too. This one will work that way.”

Well, it can work that way if that doctrine’s true. But if the doctrine is not true, this scripture doesn’t create that doctrine. My understanding is we are in Christ collectively and it is God who has created this in Christ situation. It’s God who created the body of Christ. All of us benefit from that and we can thank God for that because it never occurred to us to create the body of Christ. That was God’s creation. That was God’s grace to humanity to put this there as an option for believers who would repent and turn to Christ and follow him.

It’s the Holy Spirit who places us in the body of Christ individually too, when we believe. So, there’s nothing in this that takes away from the fact that everyone has to make an individual decision and that those who don’t make those decisions will not be included in the statement. He’s writing to people who are believers. He’s writing to people who are the church. He’s saying the church, you plural, the church, you are in Christ Jesus. That’s great, and that’s because of God.

What I mean by that is that you could have become a follower of Jesus and God never have created the body of Christ. So, you’d be like, let’s just say, the followers of Moses or of Joshua or of Isaiah. He had disciples too, or of John the Baptist. We are disciples of Jesus. We could be the disciples of Jesus and there never have been the phenomenon of being in Christ. We’d just be people following him around. But God has done something unique in that those who follow Christ are now incorporated into him, which is a divinely, unilaterally decided arrangement. Men didn’t think this up. This was a mystery that hadn’t been revealed before to the sons of men, but was revealed to the apostles and prophets through the Spirit, Paul said. So, I believe that. I believe that all that can be said about us, the body of Christ being in Christ, is true because God made it so.

Guest (Male): It seems like you’re saying the one thing that separates an individual from eternal life is not the blood of Christ, not the death, not the favor of God, but the individual’s choice deciding, “Hey, I want to be a Christian.”

Steve Gregg: Well, you’ve just created a false dichotomy. To say that my being in Christ is the result of my making a choice to be a Christian does not necessitate the dichotomy of “it was not the blood of Jesus, it was not the grace of God, it was not what God did for me.” No, I’m not taking away from that at all.

When you have a friendship with someone or a marriage or something like that, you can say, “I married her because I loved her, because I wanted to spend my life with her, because I vowed my life to her.” And that’s why I’m married to her. Well, that’s true. That is true. But it doesn’t eliminate the fact that she also loved you and married you and made the commitment.

So, there’s a relationship here that goes both ways. To speak in one place about what you did and in another place about what God did is not a contradiction. By saying that I’m a Christian for having chosen to be a follower of Christ and would not be a Christian if I had not made that choice, does not in any sense diminish anything that could be said about the blood of Jesus or the grace of God. Both are true. It’s a false dichotomy to say, “Well, you’re not saying it’s this but that.” No, I didn’t say it’s not anything in particular but that. I said both are there. But Paul doesn’t talk about both in every place, but he talks about each of these aspects in various places.

Guest (Male): Wouldn’t you say the blood is there for everyone?

Steve Gregg: It is, yeah.

Guest (Male): So that’s not the factor that changes a person from lost to being saved.

Steve Gregg: Well, sure. To everyone who is in Christ, it is the blood of Christ that is the factor that causes them to be saved. But it’s not the factor that—I mean, Jesus dying did not in itself determine that I or you would be a believer and that our neighbors would not. Jesus died for the sins of the whole world, which means the whole world is in the position to be saved if they wish.

If Jesus died for the whole world, how can it be that some of the world is not saved? Well, because there’s another factor too. There’s what God did, and now there’s what we have to do. Now Calvinists hate this doctrine. They call it synergism. They say, “Well, then we’re working together with God. This is all God’s work.” Where are they getting that? This “all God’s work” part is their own imagination.

Even Paul, talking about the building of the church, said about himself and Apollos, “We are laborers together with God.” I planted, Apollos watered, and God gave the increase. Is this somehow taking glory away from God to say that he has partnered with his people to do things? That he responds to our obedience and to our choice and our faith? How does that take anything away from God? I don’t see that it does. But Calvinists think it does.

Guest (Male): So some people are smarter than others or more humble or more—

Steve Gregg: Are they not? Are there not people smarter than others? Let me ask you, are there people smarter than others? Okay, then I’m not going to deny that.

Guest (Male): I believe you’re smarter than I am. But is that the reason why you’re in Christ?

Steve Gregg: No, the reason I’m in Christ is because I surrendered to Christ.

Guest (Male): That’s what I just asked you.

Steve Gregg: No you didn’t. You asked if I was smarter than you.

Guest (Male): The reason why you’re in Christ is because you surrendered to Christ.

Steve Gregg: Right, which has nothing to do with my intelligence. It has to do with my will.

Guest (Male): So that’s the reason why you’re in there. That’s what I’m saying to you. Some people have not decided to do that.

Steve Gregg: Right.

Guest (Male): Is it because they’re wiser or less wise or less intelligent or less humble?

Steve Gregg: Well, let’s put it this way. Some decisions are wiser than others, okay? If a person makes a wise decision, we could say that’s a wise decision. If someone makes a foolish decision, that’s a foolish decision. That doesn’t tell us much about the sum total of their virtues or vices.

A person who’s incredibly intelligent might make a foolish decision for reasons that have nothing to do with intelligence. I think Adam was made as intelligent as a man could be, but he made a very foolish decision when he was faced with the option of staying loyal to God or going with his wife. He preferred to go with his wife. That strikes me as a very foolish decision. It doesn’t have anything to do with his intellect. It has to do with his will.

Guest (Male): You don’t see you saying, “I decided to become a Christian, I decided to accept Christ,” you don’t see that as something of a boast?

Steve Gregg: No, I actually think the opposite. I’m saved by faith, okay? And if I was saved by works, that would be a boast, says Paul. Romans chapter 4 makes that very clear. Paul says if a man is saved by his works, then he has a reason to boast. But if he is saved by faith, he has no reason to boast.

So I believe I’m saved by faith. If you say, “Well, didn’t that mean you made a decision?” Of course. Everything you believe is a decision you make. If someone tells you something and you choose to believe it, that’s a choice you make. If you choose to call them a liar, that’s a choice you make too. Believing is not a work. It’s simply a decision to believe or not. And yeah, it’s a better thing to choose to believe than not, but choosing to believe is not a work. It’s the opposite of work, and Paul said it’s the opposite of having occasion to boast.

Let me read this to you if I could. Okay, so Paul says in Romans 3:27, “Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what principle? Of works? No, by the law of faith, the principle of faith.” So if I’m saved by works, I can boast. But if I’m saved by faith, he says, boasting is excluded. And then in chapter 4, verse 1, it says, “What then shall we say about Abraham our father, what has he found? If Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast of, but not before God,” he says.

“But what does the Scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.” And he says, “Now to him who works, wages are not counted as grace. But to him who does not work, but believes on him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness.” So Paul says the person who’s not doing the works, but they’re believing. So Paul makes it very clear that faith or believing, as he thinks of it, is not a work. It’s the opposite. You’re either earning something by your works or you believe.

Guest (Male): Yeah, it’s not a work. Because faith comes from God. Faith doesn’t come from a dead sinner. Faith comes from God.

Steve Gregg: How do you know? Where do you get that? Where did you get that doctrine?

Guest (Male): It’s because of him that we believe.

Steve Gregg: Well, it’s because of him that we breathe, you know, but the fact is, once we breathe, once we are human, we are human and given choices. We make choices. And the choice to believe or the choice not to believe lie among the choices that people have.

I can choose to marry or not to marry. I can choose to work as a Taco Bell employee or I can choose not to. I make choices all the time. I can choose to skip breakfast or have breakfast. Making choices is what we do every single day, hundreds of times. So what you’re saying is, “Yeah, but there’s one choice we can’t make, and that is to believe in God.” I’m saying, okay, where are you getting that exception? We know that men and women make choices all the time, but you’re introducing from nowhere, it would seem, one choice that we’re not able to make.

Guest (Male): 1 Corinthians chapter 2, the next chapter over, “But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God. They are foolishness to him, neither can he,” that’s ability, that’s not choice, “neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

Steve Gregg: Right, he can’t know them. He cannot know them. You can’t know things unless they’re spiritually discerned. That doesn’t mean you can’t repent. You don’t have to know very many spiritual things to repent. The prodigal son in the far country repented. He didn’t have a lot of spiritual insights about things. He knew one thing: he knew he was better off when he was with his father than when he wasn’t.

Sounds like a fairly selfish choice on his part, which is quite consistent for an unbelieving man. But having realized that, he made the reasonable choice to say, “I’m going to go back. I’m going to repent. I’m going to turn back to my father.” Now this man was not a highly intellectual person, at least he’s not represented that way. He’s not a spiritual man, as far as we know. He doesn’t know spiritual things. But he knows what it means to be sorry. He knows what it means to ask for mercy. That’s not a—that doesn’t involve a high degree of spiritual revelation.

So I mean, we have different views about this because you’re a Calvinist and I’m not. If you’re interested in a full discussion about this, which we can’t do on the air since I have full lines and very little time, I would recommend you go to my website. I’m not sure you’re interested in a full discussion. I’m not sure if you just want to make your point or want to hear my points.

But the truth is, if you’re really interested, you’ll hear both sides at my lectures because I present the entire biblical case for Calvinism from the mouths of the Calvinists themselves in my lectures. Then I give the alternate view where I exegete the scriptures in context. Now, if you’d like to hear both sides, you just go to thenarrowpath.com. This is all free. Nothing is for sale there. Go to thenarrowpath.com. There’s a box there that says, you click on it, it says, “Topical Lectures.”

And under that box, there’s a page that has a lot of choices. Yeah, we do make choices. You can choose the series called “God’s Sovereignty and Man’s Salvation.” Okay? God’s Sovereignty and Man’s Salvation. Click on it, you’ll see my entire lecture series, the verses you’re concerned about, I go into in great depth. Every verse you’ve ever heard or used to promote Calvinism, I go into it in great depth. I quote your champions. I point out what the problem is with their abuse of the passage, what the context says, and what they’re introducing that isn’t there.

Now if you’re interested in that kind of a study of the subject, I recommend that. If you’re not interested in that kind of study, then really I don’t have much I can do for you because that’s the only kind of study I believe in. I believe in responsible study and exegetical study, not picking out proof texts without context and then deciding to fit them into a paradigm that I’ve decided I want to believe. I know that phenomenon. It’s just not—I have no taste for that kind of study. But thank you for your call. You can call again if you have questions after you listen to those lectures because you’ll probably have some things to respond to. Linda in Fresno, California, welcome to the Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Guest (Female): Hello. I have a question about Ephesians 6:10-18, put on the whole armor. This is everything but the back. My understanding through the years was that the back is not covered because God got your back. Can you explain this to me?

Steve Gregg: Well, that’s a preaching point. It’s not something Paul is saying specifically. Yeah, it’s true, the armor assumes that you are facing your enemy, not running from your enemy. And so the armor covers your front. Well, technically, your breastplate. The breastplate, I’m sure, had some protection for the back too, since it covered both front and back. But I’ve never seen one of these breastplates up close. I assume the front part was more heavily armored than the back part.

Preachers like to say that you’ve got no protection on your back from the armor because, and then they’ve got different opinions. One would say, like you said, God’s got your back. Okay. Another reason they give is that you’re not supposed to turn and run away. If you turn and run away, you’re not protected. Okay, that could be true too. Those are both preaching points. They’re not points that Paul raises. They’re not exegetical points, and I’m not sure Paul had them in mind.

But as far as I’m concerned, God does have your back if you’re going forward doing what he tells you to do in faith. Yeah, I think he’s got your back. That doesn’t mean you won’t die. It does mean, though, you won’t suffer spiritual disaster if you—and this is, of course, a spiritual warfare, the armor is not described as anything that keeps you physically safe.

The Apostle Paul certainly practiced his own preaching and wore the spiritual armor, but he got beheaded anyway, and so did the apostles. They got killed and so forth. Jesus said he that seeks to save his life will lose it. He means his physical life. But he who loses his life for my sake shall find it. So the armor of God is not there to keep you from dying physically. That’s not our concern. It’s God’s concern whether we live or die physically. It’s our concern whether while we are alive, we remain faithful.

And the armor is there for us to be in the thick of the battle in which the devil and his principalities and powers are doing all they can to turn us back from being faithful. So Paul’s essentially saying spiritually you can win this thing. It doesn’t mean you won’t die, of course. It says about the saints in Revelation 12:11, it says they overcame Satan by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony and did not love their lives to the death.

So defeating Satan required them being faithful in warfare and being willing to die. So the victory in the warfare is not that you physically survive. Everyone’s going to die. The victory in the warfare is that you remain spiritual faithful. Now the idea here in the armor is that we’re confronting the devil and he’s going to be trying to bring fiery darts and other things like that to destroy our faith and our righteousness and our salvation and things like that. Those are—and we have those armor pieces, which we can be sure will keep us safe from those kinds of attacks, so long as we’re engaged, so long as we’re really doing the battle. And one could argue if you turn and run away, you might get shot in the back because you don’t have protection on your back. That may be true. I don’t know that that’s one of the points Paul is thinking of or if he was expounding on this if he would have brought that point up. He might have. But it certainly is not in the forefront at all of what he’s saying.

Guest (Female): Okay, thank you.

Steve Gregg: All right, Linda. Thanks for your call. Bo in Seattle, Washington, welcome to the Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Guest (Male): Hi. Long-time listener. I have a question. I've been studying especially chapter 21 in Exodus and I've come across that example of the ox goring. It seems like an un-watched ox that gores somebody, the owner should be penalized with death, life for life. Assuming the victim dies, yeah. And then but there's an exception where if it’s a slave then you just have to basically pay the price of the owner. And the owner of the ox just has to pay a fine. And the problem with that is that at the beginning of the chapter, chapter 21 verse 1, it says that God is giving these rules to Moses for Moses to give to the people. So my question is, did God really say that or maybe it was maybe Moses’ interpretation of that?

Steve Gregg: No, I believe God gave that law. I believe God gave that law.

Guest (Male): Oh, so then if he did, what’s changed in the New Testament where we kind of don’t see that?

Steve Gregg: Well, in the New Testament, we are not running a government with a law enforcement system, okay? The church is a spiritual entity. It’s defined by the spiritual experience and behavior of its members. Its membership is defined spiritually. We operate in the spiritual realm. We don’t wrestle against flesh and blood like the armies of nations do.

We’re not involved in a national enterprise. We’re in a spiritual enterprise, which is international, actually invades all the nations. We come into all the nations and without becoming a separate nation, we are there to be leaven among them and light among them and to increase the sum total of love and obedience to God by our presence there. So in other words, the church is not a political nation. It doesn’t have a police department. It doesn’t have a city hall. Church doesn’t have that. Nations do. Nations do.

Okay, so in other words, if someone commits a crime in the church, we don’t put them to death. That’s what’s changed. In Israel, they were a nation. They did have law courts. They did have police. They did have criminal justice systems. And that’s what these laws are about. These laws are about what penalties should be imposed upon people who are guilty of certain crimes. We don’t do that in the church.

Guest (Male): Right, but the point was that it seems that God, he didn’t value a life of a slave just because it was a slave.

Steve Gregg: Yeah. Well, I will say this. I thought that might be your point, but you didn’t ask that or raise that as your concern. Yeah, it is true. In those days, a slave’s life wasn’t as worth as much as a free man’s, although he was to be treated as a human being. If a man actually just unilaterally killed his slave, the man would be put to death. We’re talking here about a case of involuntary manslaughter through an animal that wasn’t kept confined.

Presumably, the owner didn’t want the animal to get out and gore anybody. I mean, this was something that happened that he didn’t control. He could have controlled it, he should have, but yeah, you’re right, if that circumstance leads to a free man being gored, it’s just a death penalty to the owner of the ox. Otherwise, not so much. Hey, I need to take a break here. We will be back in 30 seconds. Our website’s thenarrowpath.com. Don’t go away.

Welcome back to the Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we are live for another half hour and our lines are full, so I won’t bother giving out the phone number right now because we only have a half hour to take the calls that are waiting at this time. If we do have lines open up and plenty of time, I’ll give the phone number out again and we can take additional calls. Right now we’re looking at a full switchboard, so I’m going to go to talk to Eden in St. Paul, Minnesota. Eden, welcome to the Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Guest (Male): Hi Steve. I met you this past fall up in Isanti. You came through. But I've always wanted to call in and ask you if you could answer a simple definition for me. Is there a difference between self-will and free will?

Steve Gregg: Yes. I mean, the terms mean something different. I mean, technically, if you make a decision by yourself, that’s you’re using yourself your will. But the word “self-will” usually has a different meaning. The phrase itself means being willful, which also has a specific meaning of just insisting on doing your own thing, doing what you want to do, following your own wishes and your own will as opposed to God’s will.

Now having free will, of course, doesn’t have those negative connotations. Having free will simply means you have the power to choose one way or another. Now that can go badly if you make bad choices because free will will not prevent you from making bad choices. That’s the point of being free. If it’s free, you can go either way. It’s not pre-determined by God that you will make this decision or that. You’re freely making one.

But it’s only negative in the case where you make a choice to do the wrong thing. Of course, the assumption is that people who are godly are in general determined to choose to do the right thing. So free will is not a problem in that case, in fact, it’s a very good thing. It’s much better for a person to choose to do what is good in the face of alternatives than to do the right thing only because they had no other choice. Let’s just say they were programmed like a robot to do something or like an animal, they don’t have free will.

True, free will can lead to bad behavior if people use their free will to make bad choices. It can also lead to good behavior and good behavior that is freely chosen when there were alternatives that were bad and one chooses the good, that is far more—well, that’s the only thing that really is good. I mean, if an animal is supposed to migrate and God has put instincts into it to migrate and it does so, that’s not particularly good. I mean, it’s not bad, it’s just not good or bad, it’s amoral. They don’t have any choice in the matter, it’s just the way they’re programmed.

The only way something can actually be good or bad is that you’ve chosen one thing over another thing. And if the choice you made is to reject a bad choice and to do the good thing, then that’s what goodness really comes to in choices. So free will isn’t negative. It can go badly or wonderfully. It’s neutral until you make a choice. Self-will is a term that usually refers to being selfish, choosing to do what you want as a priority. Your priority is to do what I myself will to do. It’s my will, not God’s will. So that’s different. That’s always a negative. So that’s where the difference would be. All right? Thank you for your call. Let's talk to Michael in Inglewood, California. Hi, Michael, welcome.

Guest (Male): Hello, Steve. Before the break you were just talking about slaves, and well not slaves but I had a question about the 1807 Slave Bible and I guess just what are your thoughts on it and as far as can it be assimilated to the synagogue of Satan, maybe the writers or the Bishop that condoned it?

Steve Gregg: Well, first of all, I am not familiar with the Slave Bible. I wasn't around in 1807 and I’m not sure that it’s readily available in print now. I mean, if it’s still in print, it’s not really visible. I mean, you’d have to go looking for it. You’d have to know it was there and go looking for it probably. I didn’t know it was there. What is different about the Slave Bible than others?

Guest (Male): It was redacted. They redacted a lot of things, like there is no Jew or Greek, freedom, basically to keep slaves from knowing about freedom or thinking that it’s good.

Steve Gregg: Okay, I—yeah, I didn’t know about that choice. I know there’s been other Bibles that have redacted things that they didn’t like, like Thomas Jefferson’s Bible. He left out, you know, the miracles that Jesus did and so forth because he didn’t believe in miracles. But yeah, the Jefferson Bible and if that’s true of the Slave Bible, then these are corrupted Bibles. They’re Bibles where a man or men decided they don’t like what God said. So they’re going to say what they want to say and leave out what God wants to say. That would definitely be a corrupt thing to do. I wouldn’t wish to be in their shoes.

Guest (Male): But there could be no correlation to like the synagogue of Satan as far as Pharisees or Jews I mean.

Steve Gregg: Well, I’m not sure what correlation—I wouldn’t say there’s a correlation. There might be some things they have in common. You know, if somebody is neglecting the word of God to follow their traditions, well, the Pharisees did that too, though not in the same way. The Pharisees didn’t omit references to slavery or equality and things like that from their Bible, but they had their own traditions, some of which they followed more carefully than they followed the Bible.

Yeah, I mean, if somebody is presenting the Bible but deliberately leaving out the parts they don’t like or adding parts that aren’t really there because they wish they were there, that’d be I guess that’d be similar to what the Pharisees did, though that can be in a thousand different ways it can be done and the Pharisees did it a very specific way. Other people have done it in other ways.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses, of course, in their Bible have, you know, changed the parts that plainly speak of Jesus as God because they don’t believe Jesus is God. So there are people who don’t want the Bible to say what it does say and they’ll come up with their own redactions or translations that make the Bible say what they want it to say. Of course, once you’ve done that, you don’t have a Bible in your hands anymore. You’ve got some man’s opinions instead.

Guest (Male): And you're sure you weren't born when it was written?

Steve Gregg: Well, I’m not—I’m pretty sure. I don’t remember the day I was born or the year. I mean, it’s on a birth certificate, but if that’s true, then I wasn’t here in 1807. Close to it, though. All right. Thanks, Michael. Let's talk to Mark in Seattle, Washington. Mark, welcome.

Guest (Male): Hey Steve. My question is about the age that people lived to specifically, I think in Genesis, it’s been a while since I've read it, but it seems like there’s people that they say lived several hundred years. 900, 800. I was wondering if you could just elaborate on that for me.

Steve Gregg: Okay. I mean, there’s no explanation given in Scripture, but we can have some thoughts about it. In Genesis chapter 5, there’s a record of 10 generations linking the time of Adam to the time of Noah. And there’s one family line in particular that is followed, that’s the family line of Seth. And that goes up to Noah himself. Noah is in that family line.

Now, there were many other family lines. They aren’t recorded there. You know, Adam and Eve had many sons and daughters and it only follows the lineage of one of them, Seth. So all these other sons and daughters had their own separate lineages that are not recorded. But the thing about the lineage given in Genesis 5 is that it gives the age of each man at the time of the birth of his first son. And then it gives the number of years he lived after the birth of his first son, usually saying that he also had other sons and daughters but not naming them. And then it gives the full age of the man at the time he died.

Now, most of those lived to be in the 900s. Enoch is an exception, the seventh generation from Adam. Enoch lived only 369 years, but he didn’t die, at least apparently he didn’t die, the Lord took him and so that’s why his life was shorter than the others. All the others that lived out natural lifetimes lived to be well into their 900s. Now, we’re not told why they lived that long and we’re not told that that family was unique in living that long.

I mean, for all we know, the other family lines that were not that one recorded probably had similar lifespans. It probably reflects generic normal human longevity in that period of time. Now, that period of time happened to be before Noah, until Noah, until the flood. Now, some things happened in the flood, a number of unique things happened in the flood, and then after that, in chapter 11, we have a genealogy from Noah to Abraham.

And that’s another 10 generations given. And likewise, the age of the men in each generation is given and their ages are considerably shorter right from the get-go. I mean, right after the flood, the generations tend to be down around 600, 500, and so forth. And after 10 generations, Abraham himself lived only to be 175. So we can see a rapid decline in longevity of people after the flood.

Now, we don’t know if the flood itself changed the conditions that impacted longevity or if something else is to be blamed for it. Some people think that the sudden diminution of length of life after the flood as opposed to before it suggests some kind of a environmental change that impacted how long people would live. One common view, but not universally held, is that before the flood there may have been sort of a water vapor above the level of the atmosphere, kind of shielding the earth.

Some people call it the greenhouse effect, that it would distribute the sun’s heat evenly around the earth through this vapor barrier and would shield the earth from a number of the harshest, most damaging rays of the sun and other cosmic radiation that currently is a factor in our aging. We don’t know if it’s the only factor in our aging, but it certainly is a factor. And with that diminishing of those rays through that vapor barrier, that would perhaps allow people and animals to live a lot longer before the flood.

But that at the time of the flood, when it says the windows of heaven were opened and rained and so forth, some feel that this is the time that that vapor barrier was broken and no longer exists. And as a result of that, people began to be more radically affected by forces from beyond our atmosphere, which even to this day contribute to aging.

This may or may not be relevant. It may not be true. Some people say that before the time of the flood, the soil was much more rich. And of course, after being flooded and what with the floodwaters going down after a year of covering the earth, that would have leeched out many of the nutrients, the trace minerals and important things in the soil, so that the plants that grew from it after the flood were much less life-sustaining, much less vigorous or whatever. And so that nutrition may have had something to do with it too.

Of course, it’s hard to imagine any change in nutrition that would let people live to be 900 years, but it may have been a combination of factors. Or it may simply be coincidental that the change happened at that time. I don’t think so, but I mean, let’s face it, from the time of Adam and Eve to the time of Abraham, average lifespans went down from about 900 down to under 200 years. And that might have been a something that would have happened in any case. Man becoming mortal, it may be that mortality simply increased its effects over time until people were living like in the days of Moses, although Moses lived to be 120. He said in Psalm 90 that the days that God has allowed to a man is three score years and ten, which is 70 years. So we don’t have any—we don’t have any certainty about what is affecting the longevity of people in the Bible. But those are some of the—you asked if I had thoughts about it. Yeah, I have thoughts. I just don’t have any firm answers.

Guest (Male): Gotcha. Yeah, I was mainly just curious, just as someone new to reading the Bible and reading through that part, being like, okay, what the heck is this actually? Is it literal or is it a figure of speech? But it sounds like you believe it's literal.

Steve Gregg: Well, I think it is. And one thing that’s interesting is a lot of the pagan ancient societies record some of their kings and stuff living to be many hundreds of years old too. And someone might say, “Well, that just means that the Bible is copying the conventions of the pagans in attributing artificially long lives to important people.” But it could go the other way.

It could be the other way, that people in other societies, people around the world, lived much longer in those days. After all, the persons that are given these long lives in Genesis 5 are not kings. They’re not even necessarily special. They just are links in a generational chain that goes 10 generations from one man to the next. We’re not told that they were special people. So it’s possible that people did live that long.

You know, it’s possible that God made man, although he made man mortal, with the possibility of being immortal by eating the tree of life. But that even after being banished from the tree of life and natural mortality kicking in, it may be that the simply the average person was made to live about a thousand years whether he lived forever or not, you know. His natural mortality would run out in a thousand years or something, and they did.

I really don’t know. I will say this, I don’t place any stock in this particular argument, but you’ll hear it and I don’t want anyone calling me to tell me this is the answer as if I’ve never heard it. You know, it says a day to the Lord is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day in 2 Peter chapter 3. Some people say, “Well, notice even when people lived in their 900s, they didn’t live to be a thousand.”

And God told Adam and Eve, “The day you eat of it, you will surely die.” But if a day is like a thousand years, then that death could take place anytime in that thousand years. It would still be that day. And therefore, since all of these people died in their 900s or earlier, no one did live to be a thousand years old and therefore that proves that they died the same day if a day is a thousand years. I personally believe this is a total misunderstanding of what Peter’s saying in 2 Peter. I don’t think he’s arguing that a day is literally a thousand years to God. I think he’s saying that what is a short time for us or a long time to us is not the same length to God. God is, you know, to us a thousand years is a long time, to God it’s like a day. He’s not saying there’s some kind of one-to-one correspondence between a millennium and a day when you move into God’s way of thinking about things. Anyway, those are some of the thoughts that have emerged on that subject. Chris in Glen Falls, New York, welcome to the Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Guest (Male): Hey Steve, how’s it going? Good. I had a question about the Council of Jerusalem where they’re trying to figure out if the Gentiles should eat like the Jews in Acts 15:7-11. And I was wondering what the correlation was chronologically with Galatians 2:11-14, if there was any that you knew of.

Steve Gregg: Yeah. There’s a controversy among Bible scholars as to whether Galatians was written before or after this Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. There’s two theories about the date of writing of Galatians. I won’t get into the weeds about it, but there’s what’s called the North Galatia theory and the South Galatia theory. Paul evangelized Southern Galatia in his first missionary journey.

And it seems that he would have written Galatians after that first missionary journey. Now, we don’t have any record of him evangelizing North Galatia, but it’s possible that he did in one of his later journeys. Now, it’s clear that the Galatians Epistle was written to people in either Southern or Northern Galatia because he calls them Galatians.

The Northern Galatians were ethnic Galatians, but in Paul’s day, the whole region north and south were called Galatia by the Romans. So it’s unknown, I mean just from the use of the word Galatia, whether he means the ethnic Galatians in the north or the whole region including the south, which was a political designation of their boundaries.

Now, having said that, if Paul’s writing to South Galatia, that’s the people he evangelized in his first missionary journey. And he writes them in Galatians saying, “I’m so surprised that you have so soon turned away.” So he would have written it shortly after he evangelized them. If he’s writing to North Galatia as some people think, then he’s writing to a people that he evangelized at some later time that we don’t have record of, and therefore that would make the letter later.

Now to my mind, you know, all arguments on both sides aside, to my mind, it’s obvious that Paul wrote Galatians before the Jerusalem Council. And therefore the chronology is Paul makes his first missionary journey, evangelizes Galatia, comes back to Antioch, his starting point, and people from Jerusalem, Judaizers, come down and start arguing with him. We read about this in the 15th chapter, at the beginning of chapter 15 of Acts.

And Paul and Barnabas have just returned from their first missionary journey and now they’re finding out that these Judaizers have been going up into Galatia and corrupting his converts by preaching that they have to become Jews, have to get circumcised and keep the law. Paul’s angry about this, so he and Barnabas go up to Jerusalem and then the Jerusalem Council occurs, and the apostles in Jerusalem agree with Paul and against the Judaizers. That’s what we read about.

Now here’s the thing, if Paul wrote Galatians after the Jerusalem Council, it could have been much shorter. He didn’t have to write six chapters of arguments arguing why or that Gentiles don’t have to be circumcised, Gentiles don’t have to become proselytes. This was decided at the Jerusalem Council by all the apostles.

If the Jerusalem Council had already occurred before Paul wrote Galatians, he could just write to the Galatians, “Hey, this was already decided by Peter and all the rest of us. You don’t have to be circumcised.” End of letter. No more needed. Because it was official doctrine of Christianity decided by all the apostles at the council. If that had happened before Paul wrote Galatians, he wouldn’t have to write these many chapters of arguments to make the point, which was already established at the council.

So it’s clear that Paul’s writing his arguments is trying to persuade them of something that had not been officially decided by the church yet, which means he wrote it before the Jerusalem Council. And that’s what I would have to say about that particular chronology. Rama in Michigan, Rama, welcome to the Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Guest (Female): Hi, Steve. Today's question is from Matthew 26:11, "the poor you will always be with you" when Jesus said that. There's a nationwide discussion about the homeless freezing to death on the streets. It happened just recently last couple of weeks ago in Michigan. So of course the people are the church and there's an outrage about why won't the churches open their doors and let the homeless sleep in the church. So I was just wanting to know your view, if you think the pastors are using that scripture to justify why they're not opening the doors to their church. And there's a well-known pastor in Houston about a decade ago there was a hurricane and I won't call any names, but he didn't open the church and there was outcry. So that's the only thing I can think of for pastors who don't—when you Google, there's about 400 cases in the country. But there's a lot of legal liabilities I get it, Good Samaritan laws if something happens to the homeless in the building. So I just wanted to get your view as to why you think pastors aren't opening the doors if you think they may be using that scripture, "well Jesus said the poor is going to be with you so we can't—"

Steve Gregg: I doubt if they’re justifying it that way. I’ve heard a few Christians use that scripture to say, “Well, Jesus said you’ll have the poor with you always so let’s not even bother to do anything for them.” But I don’t think most Christians do that because Jesus, in one of the parallels in the Gospel, said you’ll have the poor with you always and you can give to them whenever you want to. In other words, he’s not saying don’t give to the poor because you’ll never be rid of poverty. It may be true that you’ll never be rid of poverty, but that’s not the point. He’s making the point that there will be other opportunities to help the poor because they’ll always be around to help. And so he’s not saying don’t try to end poverty. That’s a very different meaning, and I don’t think most pastors would think of it that way.

See, in the early church they didn’t have buildings, so this didn’t come up. And now that there are buildings, there are corporations. These are developments in the church that I’m not particularly fond of. But this is how things stand right now. Buildings are owned by corporations. When they’re churches, they’re usually 501(c)(3) corporations and, you know, and then they are stewarded by a board of directors, that’s what corporations do. And they have insurance and they have all these business problems.

Now, you can invite a homeless person into your house if you want to, or if you own a building, you can let them come in there if you want to. If you’re stewarding a building that’s not yours, let’s just say you’re on a board of directors and your duty is to make sure the building is looked after, then, you know, that’s another issue because you might say, “Well, I’d love to bring these people in, but we have to have security here. We have to have—this makes the insurance go up.” It’s not just a matter of these people are cold, let’s put a roof over their head. That’s a wonderful thing. I think we’d love to do that for every homeless person.

But, you know, as far as what you do with a building owned by a corporation, I don’t know. There must be—there probably are policies or there’d be liabilities, there’d be stuff like that. I would say if they had sufficient security to watch the homeless in the buildings, that might be a very good thing to do. Without doing so, you’ll just turn the building into a drug den and a place where vandals, you know, break things and destroy things so that when the church comes to meet there, you’ll be stepping over people’s feces and their trash and their needles and stuff.

And you know, I can see how someone should say, “Well, shame on you if you’re not willing to accommodate that.” But I can also say not so much shame. I don’t think many people want to let homeless people in to do that to their living room. I think the stewardship of a building is the choice of those who are given stewardship over it. I can’t judge another man’s servant who’s managing another someone else’s property. I’m responsible for my hospitality and I would make some distinctions in who I would have come live in my living room. Anyway, it’s an unsolved problem at this point and I don’t have time to solve it because we’re out of time. Our website’s thenarrowpath.com. Thanks for joining us.