The Narrow Path

Steve Gregg: Good afternoon and welcome to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we're live as we are every weekday taking your calls, hearing your questions that you raise about the Bible or the Christian faith, or the disagreements you may have with the host. We'll listen to those and respond. Feel glad to hear from you in any case.

At the moment our lines are full. Don't call right now, you'll just be frustrated; you won't get through. But we've got an hour ahead of us and there's going to be many, many times during this hour when lines are opening up and you could get through. You just have to call at the right moment.

So, the number is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. Boy, it was a little embarrassing yesterday. I struggled with a very simple and familiar word that nobody struggles with. I had to make about four passes at it before I got it right, which is strange. It's a four-syllable word. I was making it five initially.

It was crazy because I knew I was wrong, but I couldn't figure out what was right. It's almost like I felt like maybe I'm having a slight stroke. I don't think I was. But I kind of know how maybe what Rush Limbaugh said when he always said he was broadcasting with half his brain tied back behind his back. I was definitely not firing on all four cylinders.

But, or four—I don't always drive a four-cylinder car, sometimes I do. Anyway, many of you probably noticed that and probably wondered how come he can't say that word? It's very simple. I wondered the same thing as I was doing it. It's a very strange thing. Anyway, it's not a problem, just an embarrassment. And so, we're going to go to the phone lines and see how many mistakes I make today. We're going to talk first of all to Fred in Alameda, California. Hi, Fred. Welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Fred: Hi. Do you have any idea—there's some people who believe that the whole purpose of God giving the Ten Commandments and the law is to show that man's a sinner because it was inevitable that we were going to violate that, and is just God trying to humiliate us? But I mean, that may be true, but don't you think the primary purpose is just saying to live right? Because why would a loving God ask us not to do something if we were incapable of not doing it?

Steve Gregg: I'm with you on that. Yeah, I mean, in Isaiah chapter 5, God talks about how when he established Israel, which happened at Mount Sinai, it was like planting a vineyard. And he gave them every advantage to succeed. He put a wine press in it, he gathered out the stones, he built a hedge around it to protect it from beasts. And he says, "I looked for it to produce good grapes."

Now, he later defines the grapes as justice. He wanted them to be a just and righteous nation, he said. But they didn't produce that fruit; they produced something else. And he said, "What else could I have done that I have not done to guarantee that I could get good grapes from these people?" In other words, God says, "I don't know of anything I could have done to get a different outcome. I gave them every advantage."

Now, this would hardly be true if, in fact, he had given them a system of laws which nobody could keep and which they inevitably had to fail in. That's not—you're right, some people say that's what he did. The Bible doesn't say that. It is true that people do fall short of keeping most of the commandments, and especially if we see them in their spiritual light.

Of course, to look at a woman to lust is adultery and if to be angry without a cause is like murder. But the Ten Commandments didn't define it that way. Jesus made it very clear that that's what it was like, but that's not how it was described in the Old Testament. So, I don't really think it's impossible for a person to go his whole life without sleeping with his neighbor's wife.

Or without—that he can't go his whole life without murdering his neighbor, or stealing. Now, obviously, people do those things all the time, and the spiritual aspects of those we probably cannot go a lifetime without committing. But that's not how the Ten Commandments were defined. God gave them a basic code of decency.

The way Paul put it is that love does no harm to his neighbor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. That's what Paul said in Romans 13:10. And he lists commandments. He doesn't list all the Ten Commandments, but he says in verse 9, Romans 13:9, "For the commandments: You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not bear false witness, You shall not covet, and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying: Love your neighbor as yourself."

Love does no harm to his neighbor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. When God commands you to do something, he doesn't sit back secretly gloating that you can't do it. I mean, that's not very loving on his part. So, yeah, I don't believe those people who say, well, God just gave the Ten Commandments to show us how sinful we are.

The truth is they don't always serve that purpose. When the rich young ruler came running to Jesus and said, "What must I do to be saved?" Jesus said, "Well, keep the commandments." He said, "Which ones?" And Jesus listed a bunch of the Ten Commandments, plus additionally, he listed, "Love your neighbor as yourself." But the point is he listed the commandments.

And if that's supposed to make the guy feel guilty, it didn't work. The guy said, "Yeah, I've done those. Yeah, that—I've been doing that all my life," he said. And there's a good chance that he was. I mean, a decent person will not be killing his neighbor, sleeping with his neighbor's wife, stealing from his neighbor, lying in court against him, dishonoring his parents. Those are pretty bad things to do, and many people do them.

But it's not like those are impossible rules to keep. At least the Bible doesn't say it is. The Bible does say it's impossible to be justified by keeping the law, but that's because law-keeping doesn't justify. But the truth is the Bible doesn't say that no one can keep the law. As a matter of fact, God said in Deuteronomy, or Moses said to the Israelites, "This word that I've given you here, it's not too hard for you. You don't have to go up to heaven to get it or cross the sea to get it. It's right here. It's right here."

God made it accessible to you, easy. All you have to do is do it. And but let's face it, people—people are not very fully committed to obeying God because of their own sinful, selfish nature. And that being so, they would—we, we all have fallen into temptations in the past. But to say we—that was inevitable is to go far beyond Scripture. If it was inevitable, how could God hold it against you? If you couldn't do otherwise, how could you be responsible? So, I think we have to say we could all do better than we do. Now, whether we'd get through a whole 70 years without breaking any of those commandments, that'd be quite a—that'd be difficult, probably, because we have temptations and we have our selfish moments and our weak moments. We're not at our best all the time and probably—probably everybody, given enough time and enough testing, would succumb to temptation once in a while. But that's not the purpose of the commandments. You're right, it's the purpose of the commandments, according to God in Isaiah 5, was so that Israel would be a just and righteous society. In other words, he wanted them to live up to them. And he actually made it reasonably easy. He could have said, in addition to all this, I want you to crawl to Mecca on your knees at least once in your life. Well, that'd be pretty hard. But he gave rather easy things for good people to do. Now, of course, Calvinism teaches there are no good people, although the Bible certainly disagrees with that. The Bible refers to many people as good people. But relatively, nobody's perfectly good. Only God is perfectly good; Jesus made that clear. But there are people who are certainly called good people in the Bible. And that being so, a person who is a good person isn't generally going to kill people or certainly not commit adultery or steal those things. So, in my opinion, God could have picked some really hard things if he wanted to really show us how weak we are and how guilty we are. But frankly, the things he gave are pretty basic decency. And you the only way you violate them is by violating your own basic decency, which of course many people do. All people do at some points in their life. But did they have to? I don't find that stated in Scripture.

Steve Gregg: All right, thank you for the call, Fred. Jason in Salem, Oregon, welcome.

Jason: Hey, thanks, Steve. It's good to talk to you again. My question today is about—I have a couple about Matthew 24. I agree with you about it all happening or not all of it, but the lead up to the destruction of the temple and all that. My confusion, I guess, is if Jesus coming in the clouds represents the judgment, then why does it say that that happened after the tribulation? You know what I mean?

Steve Gregg: Well, the tribulation would be the tribulation during the war. Yeah, during the war. And at the end of that time, the temple fell. Yeah.

Jason: So it just means like after the war, he's coming in the clouds like at the very end to destroy the temple?

Steve Gregg: Well, yeah, I mean, his—if, if the coming of Christ in the clouds refers to the judgment on the temple, this occurred after the Romans broke through the walls and started slaughtering people wholesale and burned the temple down and, you know, it was a horrible, horrible time. A great judgment. That would—that would be, if that's what it's referring to, that's what it's referring to.

And then, of course, that would be after the prolonged war and siege of Jerusalem. And one who reads Josephus about that, who was there and who wrote a history of it, would see, "Well, yeah, when Jesus said it's a tribulation such as never been since the world began nor ever shall be," it's hardly a hyperbole. Although that kind of phrase is used as hyperbole throughout Scripture many times, and it probably was a bit of a hyperbole. There might have been some times worse, but it would certainly be ranking up there among the very worst times, the tribulation of that time. And then, of course, after that, it ended with the destruction. And so, that's why I think he says after the tribulation of those days.

Now, let me say another alternative. What I just described, I think, is very reasonable and very—we could say very likely. And many people hold that view. There is an alternative view that is not impossible and it's quite different. And that is that the tribulation of those days, when he says immediately after the tribulation of those days—the tribulation of those days might not be confined to the Jewish war and the fall of Jerusalem.

The Jews came under that horrible tribulation at that time, but they continue to live under tribulation ever since. They've been in exile, they've suffered Holocausts and pogroms and all kinds of, you know, all kinds of afflictions and so forth. These are the very things that Deuteronomy 28 said would happen to them if they violated his covenant.

I mean, God goes into this in great detail in Deuteronomy 28:15 through the end of the chapter, which is quite long. He itemizes the horrible things that they would experience once they're banished from the land and living among the Gentiles and they're terrified and they're afflicted and so forth. That, unfortunately, very sadly, that has happened ever since the Jews' temple was destroyed and they were, you know, driven out of their land, they've lived among the Gentiles, it has gone badly for them.

And so it's possible that the tribulation of those days is not referring to simply the little time slot of the Jewish war. It may be that the tribulation of those days, which began at that time, has continued even till the present day. In which case, when he says immediately after the tribulation of those days these, you know, the sign of the Son of Man in heaven and so forth will be seen, that would make it possible for the sign of the Son of Man to be a reference to the actual second coming of Christ at the end of the world.

And that the tribulation of those days extends from, say, 66 AD until whenever the end of the world. Now, for people who have a real hard time accepting the apocalyptic imagery that is used there as being symbolic—now, apocalyptic imagery always is symbolic and Jesus used it. But some people are just—it just goes against their grain because we're Westerners, we're not Middle Eastern Jews, we're not familiar with that kind of talk.

We take everything literally. We're more Greek in our thinking, we're very analytical, and therefore, you know, we sometimes just have this instinctive resistance to the idea that the coming of the Son of Man could be referring to an earthly war, an earthly destruction in AD 70. So, for those who don't believe that that is about AD 70, they could—they could just apply those verses to the future second coming, but then they'd have to say, as I suggested a possibility, the tribulation began back then and continues for thousands of years.

Now, of course, after that point, Jesus says, "This generation will not pass till all these things are fulfilled." And but that would mean that of course it would begin in that generation, but it continues for a very long time. And that would not be out of line because Paul—Jesus is talking about the very same thing in Luke chapter 21, where he said that, you know, the armies are going to come and surround Jerusalem and it's going to be—he talks about its being destroyed, its desolation comes.

And it says in Luke 21, verse—let me get the verse number here—verse 24, it says, "They will fall by the edge of the sword," this happened in 70 AD. "They will be led away captive into all nations," that happened in 70 AD. "And Jerusalem will be trampled by the Gentiles," yes, "until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled." In other words, in 70 AD all these things happened, namely Jerusalem was destroyed, people were slaughtered, Jews were taken into captivity, and Jerusalem was trampled by the Gentiles.

Now, the fact that that condition of the trampling of the Jerusalem by the Gentiles might continue for thousands of years does not rule out the idea that, you know, all these things in a sense were fulfilled. There's a lot of prophecies that were fulfilled in Christ that really were inaugurated in his lifetime but that continue in the church. So, so it has, you know, there's more than one way to understand this in a legitimate way. So, it's hard to know exactly. I personally lean toward the apocalyptic language of it being a reference to 70 AD when the Son of Man comes and so forth, because that's the language the prophets always use to talk about those kinds of things, although most Americans don't talk that way.

Jason: So when you were teaching dispensationalism, how did you get around the whole "this generation" thing?

Steve Gregg: Well, I think as a dispensationalist, I was just following the talking points of dispensationalism, that "this generation" referred to the generation that would see Israel become a nation in the last days, which we quite mistakenly interpreted to be the meaning of Jesus' statement of the fig tree putting forth new buds and leaves and so forth.

Now, of course, Jesus in the statement of the fig tree makes, as near as we can tell, no allusion to Israel becoming a nation in the end times. There's certainly nothing that would inspire the reading of that meaning into his statement. But we took it that way just because it made it a little easier to say "this generation shall not pass" meaning that one. But it was always hard to know why Jesus said "this generation" rather than "that generation" if he's talking about a different generation, and especially when the term "this generation" is used I think five other times in Matthew, always referring to his own generation. So, to make this an exception would be strange. But I, I mean, frankly, I followed my teachers just because I didn't know there was another way of looking at it, you know? I gradually learned different things, first of all, by my studying the passages and realizing how much we were reading into them that wasn't there. And then, of course, eventually I was exposed to other views and weighed those. And eventually, it was very clear that a different view had far more biblical support than the one I had been taught.

Jason: All right, well, that's super helpful as usual. Thank you so much, Steve. I'll let you go.

Steve Gregg: All right, Jason, thanks for calling. Junior in Bowie, Maryland. Hi, Junior. Welcome.

Junior: Hey, Steve. Thanks for taking my call and thank you for your ministry. So, I have a question, but for me to well phrase this question, I'll give one sentence comment and then I'll follow up with two questions. So, on my way home, I was listening to—and sorry for the noise in the background, that's my son—I was listening to the Instruction of Amenemope. You've probably heard it. It may be considered one of the pseudepigraphal books or not. I was listening to that, practically the whole book. And I've noticed some phraseology and some parallelism with the Book of Proverbs, more specifically. Except for maybe I'll say one verse where it says something like, "Don't be friends with the poor." And I'm like, wait, Jesus was friends with poor, but that's not the main point. But I noticed a lot of parallelism and a lot of phraseology that's very similar to the Book of Proverbs. So, my two questions are: one, what is its relationship with the Book of Proverbs? And second might be related to the first question, is what came first? Was it the Book of Proverbs and then this book or vice versa?

Steve Gregg: Okay, let me first of all say I'm not familiar with the book the way you pronounce it. Can you spell it for me?

Junior: It's A-M-E-N-E-M-O-P-E.

Steve Gregg: AMENE—M-O-P-E. Okay, I have to say I've never encountered this book. Now, is it an old—what country does it come from?

Junior: I believe Egyptian.

Steve Gregg: Yeah, it's an Egyptian book, yeah. Because it sounds very much like one of the Pharaohs' names. It's one of the Pharaohs' names was like Amenhotep or something like that. So, so yeah, it looks very Egyptian. So, what era is it from? I'm not familiar with it.

Junior: Good question. I don't know.

Steve Gregg: Apparently, my wife here has done a quick look up. 13th to 10th century BC. So that's going to be, yeah, probably older than Proverbs. 1300 BC.

Junior: Oh, wow. So yeah, the reason why what caught my attention to this book is because this morning on my way to work, I was listening to Dr. Michael Heiser and he mentioned how—well, he said that Solomon may have read this book and took some of its philosophies into its in the Book of Proverbs.

Steve Gregg: It's not impossible. It's not impossible. I mean, Solomon was well-read and his wife was the princess of Egypt. He probably had some Egyptian books in his library. So, I mean, it could be. I've never read the book. I wasn't even aware of it. There's a lot of ancient Near Eastern literature that is in the form of proverbs. Are you saying that's what it is? It's like a group of proverbs.

Junior: Yeah, it really sounds like word—almost word for word as the Book of Proverbs, literally almost.

Steve Gregg: All right. Well, not the whole book, just some proverbs in there, you mean?

Junior: Yeah, I would say like 80%, 70%.

Steve Gregg: Is that right? Well, I'll have to take a look at it. Yeah, I'm sure that Solomon gathered proverbs from other places that he liked as well as—I mean, he was a—he was a collector of proverbs and he and of course, he came up with some of his own. But yeah, there'd be no problem with that if he happened to have Egyptian proverbs that happened to be true and agreeable. Yeah.

I mean, later on, in the intertestamental period, hundreds of years after Solomon, there's a book called The Wisdom of Sirach, which is also called Ecclesiasticus in the Jewish—well, in what's found in the Catholic Bible, actually, in the Apocrypha. Not Ecclesiastes, that's in our Bible, that's Solomon's. But a book called Ecclesiasticus, it's different. And it's Wisdom of Sirach. Now, that has a lot of proverbs—it's mostly a proverbs kind of a book, too.

I mean, there's—and yet it's at least, like, 600 years after Solomon's time. So, you know, in those ancient Near Eastern lands, there were a lot of what we call wise guys. I mean, wise men who collected wise sayings. You know, we're familiar with Aesop's Fables from a different era in a different country, but are similar, you know, I mean, kind of, in early American history, we have, you know, Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack, which has the same kind of stuff in it.

Human beings, thoughtful ones at least, have always liked to distill truths into pithy, brief proverbial forms. Those who did so were sometimes called the wise. You remember when it describes Solomon in, you know, 1 Kings chapter 4, it says he was wiser than—and it gives the names of some people we don't know who they are, you know, this guy and that guy and this other guy. He was a lot wiser than them, you know? I mean, it's like there was a famous—a lot of famous wise men, Solomon being the wisest of them.

But yeah, I mean, I don't have knowledge of this particular book, but I have no doubt that if it was written about 300 years before Solomon's time and he had a great deal of commerce with Egypt, including marrying the Pharaoh's daughter, there's no reason to suggest that he would be, you know, incapable of having read it.

Junior: If I may then, given that you don't know the book—that book, but you know the Book of Proverbs. I assume that the Book of Proverbs was more—it's a bad assumption, but I assumed that the Book of Proverbs was more of an inspired—yes, inspired. I assume that's the case for the Book of Proverbs where it's inspired by the Spirit of God or God himself or some sort. Or was this just like a collection of bad practices and good lessons Solomon has taken as he grew old and he wrote this book down?

Steve Gregg: Okay, I'm going to move along and I'll answer that point after we come back from our break. As you know, we have a hard break here. All right, Junior, thanks for joining us, man. God bless. All right, you're listening to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. We're not done. We have another half hour immediately after this half hour. At this point, we let our listeners know that the reason you don't hear any commercials and don't hear any products for sale is because we don't have any. We're listener-supported. If you'd like to help us pay the bills of running a radio show, which, by the way, the bills are paying for radio time, you can go to our website, thenarrowpath.com, and donate if you want to. thenarrowpath.com. I'll be back in 30 seconds. Don't go away.

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Hi, welcome back to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we're still taking your calls, another half hour. If you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith, the number to call is 844-484-5737. And unlike a half hour ago when I gave the number, our lines are not all full. They're mostly full. You can get through now if you call 844-484-5737.

Our previous caller was Junior from Maryland who called and was asking about a book I was unfamiliar with, an Egyptian—an ancient Egyptian book of wise sayings. And he was saying it's very similar to Proverbs. In fact, some of the sayings in it are almost identical to those in Proverbs. And he wondered whether Solomon might have been influenced by it. I thought that's entirely possible.

As I was talking, my wife on the side here looked this up and she said the book is thought to come from the period of from 1300 BC to 1075 BC. Now, that'd be either just before Solomon's time, the later date, or three centuries before Solomon's time, the earlier date. So, clearly, it is believed to predate Solomon. And therefore, if there was any influence between the two books, this book would have been the one that influenced Solomon rather than vice-versa.

Now, she also found—my wife is a great researcher on the spot here—that the oldest manuscripts of this Egyptian book are actually from later than Solomon's time. They're assumed to be older than Solomon's time, but we don't have any manuscripts that are as old as Solomon's time, which means we can't really be sure they were around before Solomon's time. They might have, we don't have any manuscript proof of that.

If they in fact originated later than Solomon's time, then maybe the influence went the other way. Maybe Solomon's proverbs influenced it. But the real, I think, problem that Junior was asking about is wasn't Proverbs inspired by God? And if so, how could it be influenced at all by some other book that Solomon may have been influenced by?

Well, you know, it's like saying if the Gospels are inspired, how could Matthew have borrowed anything from the Gospel of Mark? Now, I don't know that he did, but that's what most scholars believe that he did. Most scholars believe that Mark was first and that both Matthew and Luke gathered material from it. Now, Luke himself actually tells us at the beginning of his book that he had access to previous written accounts of the life of Jesus and gave a strong indication that he no doubt collected some of his information from them.

After all, he said he wasn't there. He said the best witnesses he had were the eyewitnesses. So, I mean, if you're—if you're picking up information from other places and collecting it into a document, does that mean you're not inspired? Well, I guess that depends on what "inspired" means. If we think that inspired writers all fit into a certain description, like let's just say, you know, David's ready to write a Psalm, suddenly he falls into a trance.

Suddenly, he's not writing from his own experience as they appear to be. He's not writing anything except what the Holy Spirit's dictating, you know, syllable by syllable through him. If that's what inspiration means, I guess we'd have to call that automatic writing. And there, that phenomenon is well-known in the occult. There are books in the occult that are claimed to be written that way. The Bible never really claims that that happens.

The prophets receive words from God. They receive burdens and visions and dreams from God, but they write them, as near as we can tell, themselves. I mean, the information is inspired information, but as they write it, they're using their own style of writing. Certainly, the style of Isaiah is very different than the style of Jeremiah, which is very different than the style of Ezekiel.

And these are all inspired guys. They're all seeing visions and receiving prophecies from God, but they're all writing as human beings who have received these insights and they use—they have their favorite vocabulary, they have their favorite figures of speech they use, and so forth that are different than others. Likewise with the Gospels. The Gospel writers have their apparently favorite themes that they press, which other Gospel writers don't.

So, you know, this being so, and by the way, you get into the New Testament, you've got Paul's writings. There's very Pauline vocabulary and very Pauline expressions and Pauline themes that Paul's writing about which Peter and James and Jude and John aren't—don't write about. Very true of the Johannine literature, that John writes—John's writing is so distinctive of him that whether you're reading the Gospel of John or the first or second or third epistle of John, you know you're reading the same guy because of his typical Johannine style.

So, what I'm saying is the fact that somebody has gotten information, either from God or from any source, and writes it down in his own language does not tell us whether inspiration was at play or not. I mean, think of Luke. Most—most Christians will say Luke was inspired. He doesn't mention it. He just mentions that he had a great number of sources and that his knowledge of his subject was thorough and that he could give a very reliable account.

Now, he mentions his sources were—were reliable, which means he had sources. I mean, he collected information and put it into a book. Does that mean he wasn't inspired? Well, it probably does mean that he wasn't in a trance in a state of automatic writing. But then, we have no reason to believe that any of the writers of Scripture were in that state when they wrote.

So, Solomon—to say that Solomon was inspired. We don't really see him as a prophet, and prophets are inspired one way. Other kinds of ministries are probably inspired other ways. But Solomon, we would accept his work as from God because God gave him wisdom. And God promised to give him wisdom. And therefore, when he had wisdom and wrote it down, this was because of the gift of God.

You know, I trust God to give me wisdom when I teach and when I'm studying and so forth and when I'm answering questions. I trust God to give me wisdom. But I don't see it as if I'm, you know, a prophet—you know, a mere mouthpiece streaming, you know, God's exact words. Inspiration really is, you know, it—it's different in different cases.

But for Solomon to have put together a book based on the wisdom that he had from God, that would mean he also had the wisdom to sort among good and bad proverbs. Wisdom is wisdom. And some proverbs are not very good wisdom, but Solomon's are. So I guess I don't have a problem even if Solomon hadn't originated any of his proverbs. Now, we know he did. But we don't know that he originated all of them.

And if he had gotten them for ten different sources, I could still see that God, who gave him wisdom, and that's the only inspiration that's claimed for him is that God gave him wisdom, that he through that wisdom given to him was able to collect reliable and helpful wisdom proverbs. By the way, Paul talked about his founding of the Corinthian church as being he in—this is 1 Corinthians 3:10—he said, "I, according to the grace of God and the wisdom given to me, have laid the foundation" of the church.

So Paul indicated that the wisdom he had in his ministry founding churches was according to the grace of God. He didn't say he was inspired in doing it. He might have been, but he certainly gave the credit to God who gave him the wisdom to do it. And so, yeah, you know, if I found—if I found ten books more ancient than Proverbs and found among them all the Proverbs of Solomon, I'd say, "Okay, so that's where he got those."

But the fact that he gave them to us was a result of God having given him the wisdom not necessarily to write proverbs, although he may have written most of them. So, I don't know, I don't have this idea of inspiration that some people have, which is kind of magical, you know? Suddenly Solomon, who's ruling the nation, all of a sudden he picks up a quill and an ink bottle and a parchment and boom, he's in a trance and you know, he's suddenly his mind is on blank and and God's just channeling proverbs through him. I don't—I have never believed that and I don't believe that the Bible gives us any reason to think that way about it. So, it may be the problem may be in how we have been led to believe about what inspiration looks like. John in Englewood, Florida. Welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

John: Yes, thanks, Steve. I was having a conversation with a person and out of the clear blue he came up and asked me—told me he's a homosexual and asked me if that was a sin. I would have probably told him that that's clearly defined in the Old Testament, you know, that that is definitely an abomination in God's eyes. But then if he came back and said, "Well, you know what? I've been thinking about selling my daughter into slavery if I can get a good enough price, as it says in Exodus 21:7, or I have an employee who works on the Sabbath all the time. Should I have him put to death?"

Steve Gregg: Yeah, I've heard this—I've heard this line before. I know you didn't make it up. You're apparently one of those guys who thinks that I haven't heard such things. Now, this list of things has been on the internet for decades. I wrote a complete response to every one of those things years ago and could do it now, too. No, what this list is supposed to do—and this is what I think you're trying to do, though I could be wrong—is to say, "Well, if you Christians say we shouldn't practice homosexuality because the Bible says so, well, then we shouldn't offer animal sacrifice or we shouldn't—you know, we should offer animal sacrifice or whatever."

The idea is to try to show that there's a lot of laws in the Bible that would seem ridiculous for us to try to practice today and which Christians don't do. So why do we observe the law against homosexuality? That's the argument I understand very well. Yeah. First of all, the argument does not understand the Bible much at all.

And I guess people can't be blamed for that if they've never studied it. If you go through the Bible just skimming through, you'll find a whole bunch of things that we don't do anymore. You know, we don't have the clean and unclean foods, we don't have a woman going 40 days after having a baby boy going to the temple and going through rituals of cleanness. We don't when people are lepers we don't—and then they get cured, we don't have them wring the neck off a bird and pour out its blood.

Yeah, we don't do those things anymore. Those are part of the Old Covenant. Now, the difference between the Old and the New Covenant, and Christians follow the New Covenant, is that the Old Covenant had a whole bunch of rituals that had nothing to do with basic righteousness or morality. They were rituals that had symbolic value that anticipated spiritual truths that are revealed in the New Testament.

That's why we don't offer animal sacrifices because they foreshadowed Christ's sacrifice. We don't have the clean and unclean animal difference because they symbolized a difference between people who were spiritually clean and unclean. These were spiritual lessons which were needed, the Bible says, for the time present as sort of a schoolmaster to the Jews until the spiritual realities would come, which came in Christ.

So, yeah, Christians don't follow those. Now, someone says, "Well, then why do you follow the forbidding of homosexuality?" Well, because that's not a ritual. That's a moral. That's a moral law just like don't commit adultery. If you sleep with your neighbor's wife, that's morally wrong. If you sleep with an animal and have sex with them, that's morally wrong. Those are in the same list of moral codes.

So, you know, there are laws in the Old Testament that describe moral behavior and there's another whole bunch of laws that talk about rituals that are not related to moral behavior. When you come to the New Testament, morals have not changed. It's still wrong to practice bestiality or incest or homosexuality or adultery or prostitution. These things were wrong in the Old Testament, they're still wrong. Why? Because morality doesn't change.

Now, rituals can change, especially if their purpose has been served. The purpose of the rituals was to look forward to the coming of Christ and to foreshadow spiritual things related to him. Well, he came. He has come. Paul says that those rituals in Colossians 2:16 and 17, he said those rituals were a shadow for the time present, but the substance or the body is of Christ.

The shadow is temporary. The body is permanent. And Christ is the body that was casting that shadow. Now the light has come, when the light is directly overhead, the shadow disappears. So, this is—again, if you don't understand the Bible, you can say all kinds of silly things about it and think you've made other people look silly when in fact all you've done is shown that you don't know what you're talking about.

Now, I don't know if you are doing this—I think you are—or maybe someone sent you that internet list. I've gotten it many, many times over the decades and it's old stuff, easy to answer, but you know, I don't know if you saw it and you're troubled by it and you're wanting me to help you out with it or if you're just one of those people I've had several call me over the years who just want to make that list and say, "Well, you know, how much should I sell my daughter for?"

Well, how about you don't sell your daughter at all. That's a good idea. That's an Old Testament thing when slavery was around. We don't have slavery now, so you don't sell your daughter at all. Thanks for your call, though. Greg in Sonoma, California. Welcome. Thanks for calling.

Greg: Blessings, Steve and Dana. Genesis chapter 1, verse 26: "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image and in our likeness.'" What does that mean, "image and likeness"? And then the second part is the "us" and the "our" referring to the triune God?

Steve Gregg: All right, yeah, as far as the plural pronouns, there's different theories about that. Certainly there are Christians who believe that this is talk about the Trinity, God speaking to the other members of the Trinity, "Let us make man in our image" instead of the singular that you'd expect God to use. It could be a reference to the Trinity. The Jewish religion doesn't recognize the Trinity, so when Jews read this, and it is their Bible initially, they don't read the Trinity into it because they don't believe in the Trinity.

But Christian theology does, and therefore we can read that back into it and say, oh, there's a hint of it right there. And we could be right. There's other possibilities. Some think that for example, some rabbis think that God is talking to the animal world. Now, I don't accept this at all, but "Let us make man in our image"—that is, man is part animal-like and part God-like. That is, man has a biological body like the animals do, and God has a spiritual aspect, and men have both, so in a sense we're made in the image of God and the animals.

Some probably would say this is assuming evolution to take place, that God directing animal evolution, he's saying "Let's bring a man forth." I don't accept that explanation, but some do. Some have suggested that the "we" is simply a literary device, what we call the editorial we or the royal we. There's different ways of speaking where sometimes an individual refers to himself in the plural for whatever literary purpose. Some think that's what's going on.

I don't myself know for sure, but it's not only found there. I mean, there's other places, too. If someone says it's the Trinity, I'm not going to debate that. I think it could be a reference to the Trinity. Now, what does it mean to make God in our likeness and our image? Well, I don't believe this has anything to do with man's physical image for the simple reason that it says he made man and woman in the image of God, and man and woman aren't identical. So which one? Which one does God look like, you know?

I think that the image of God, which is here, I believe, intended to be in stark contrast to the all the animals and the plants that he made earlier. He's made a lot of living things, but he hasn't made any of them that are much like him. And the ways that man is different than God—though both he and God are alive and the animals too are alive, but they're not like God—I think the way that man is different than the animals in this respect is that we have inner nature, we might call it our soul or our spirit or both or neither, which is made with capacities similar to God's.

For example, the ability to have a relationship in a spiritual realm with God because we're spiritual beings and animals are not. The ability to make choices, we have like God, we have volition. We can choose things, that is, we can make free choices. And this is particularly essential in that verse because God said "Let's make man in our image and let's give him dominion over the other things."

Well, dominion means you're ruling. Well, ruling means you're making decisions. That's what rulers—that's how rulers differ from others; they make more decisions than others do about things that others don't make decisions about. So, yeah, he had to make humans capable of ruling or making decisions, which is something that no animal can do. And so some would wrap up the whole human psyche, you know, our emotional life, our volitional capabilities, our rational powers.

I mean, let's face it, humans create things, animals do not. God is a creator, humans are creators, animals are not creators. Men create songs, stories, art, all kinds of things which animals do not do. But God does; God's a creator, too. So there's a lot of these things, they have more to do with the functions that man has that are that resemble God's but don't resemble any other animals'. That that would be the realm in which I believe God made us in his image.

It's not a visible image, but it's rather a likeness in nature and in capacities. Not—certainly we don't have all of God's capacities, but we were made to be more like children rather than pets to God. That's why in Luke chapter 3, Adam is referred to as the son of God. None of the animals are called sons or daughters of God, but humans are. Because a human being can have animals, but they're not like his children. His children are more of his own nature, and that's what God did with making man, made something much more of his nature. And it's that nature that I think is made in the image of God. If I'm wrong, then some other answer is true. Okay, let's talk to Ron in Indianapolis, Indiana. Hi, Ron.

Ron: Hello, Steve. Thanks for taking my call. Steve, I've tried to get in before because I have so many things that I want to ask. So, I'll start with this. Steve, of late, it appears that there has been conversation that comes up about Calvinism, which I believe is something about that God is responsible for everything. And my arms are a little bit too short, so I'm going to ask this: is it—is the future already planned out by God, or otherwise how does he know there's going to be a new heaven and a new earth?

Steve Gregg: Well, yeah, I mean, many future things are planned out by God. Not necessarily every detail, but certainly that there's going to be a new heaven and a new earth, that's in God's plan. Back when Adam and Eve were created, Jesus coming and dying for our sins was already in God's plan. In the days of Isaiah and before, it was in God's plan that Israel would go into captivity in Babylon and would return again and be restored as a nation, which happened.

These things were predicted long before they occurred. But they actually were not the fine points of people's decision-making. I believe that people don't have absolute free will—for example, I cannot choose to return to the way I was when I was 25 years old physically. I might choose to if I did have that power, but I don't. We don't have absolute choice, we're not sovereign like God is. But we have some free will. We have enough free choice capacity to be responsible for our choices.

Now, Calvinism doesn't teach that God is responsible for everything. I mean, they kind of do, but without using that language. They, in many cases, they would say it's not God's responsibility that we sin. He did foreordain that we would sin, and because he did, we had no other option, but they would still say we're the ones responsible. Now, to me, that's philosophically like saying two plus two can equal five. You know, that somebody can have everything they do predetermined by an omnipotent force that won't allow them to do anything else, and yet they're responsible for having done it. That's to my mind, that's almost like ignoring the definition of responsibility.

So, Calvinism does teach that, but they wouldn't say—most of them, I don't think, would say that God's responsible for everything, because they would say God is the author—God is the—he ordains, but he's not the author of sin. Which is to my mind just double-talk. You know, of course, if he ordained it, if it happened because he chose for it to happen, he's the author of it. You can use different language if you want to, but Calvinism just—the bottom line is in Calvinism, yes, God has determined everything.

Outside of Calvinism, in other words, in the Bible, God has determined many things. These are the outlines of history, these are the broad contours of what he's going to make sure happens in the course of the earth's history. Because he's got a purpose and he's got an objective and a destiny that he's going to bring about. But he doesn't have to micro-manage everything to make it happen. He can steer history without determining what every individual's going to choose.

For example, it might be entirely unrelated to the course of history that you would marry a certain person. I mean, if you have significant children who change the course of history, then it wouldn't be insignificant, but I mean, let's just say you get married and don't have any children. It's significant to you and to your wife and to the people that are around you are affected, but it might not change the course of history. So God doesn't have to be involved in every choice you make. But if you were going to make a choice that was going to thwart some purpose that was non-negotiable in his mind, of course he could stop you from doing that. And he would, because he's going to have his purposes fulfilled one way or the other.

Steve Gregg: Steve from Portland, Maine, welcome.

Steve: Yes, hi. I know this is probably a little dated. In a part of the Old Testament, it mentions about a person going and cutting down a tree and decorating it with silver and lace and whatnot. Is that Jeremiah chapter 10? Yes, and is it referring to a Christmas tree? And what is that all about?

Steve Gregg: No, it's not referring to Christmas trees; they didn't do that back in biblical times. No, it's referring to idols. God's great complaint in all the prophets, including Jeremiah where that occurs—that's Jeremiah chapter 10, verses 1 through 5. That's making idols. Let me read it to you and you'll see what it's talking about. He says, "Do not learn the ways of the Gentiles. Do not be dismayed. The customs of the peoples are futile. For one cuts a tree from the forest, the work of the hands of the workman with an axe." That is, he's carving it, he's shaping it with an axe. "They decorate it with silver and gold." Yeah, they had wooden idols fashioned into animal and human forms and then they gold-plated it or silver-plated it to make it look pretty. "They fasten it with nails and hammers so that it will not topple. They are upright like a palm tree, but they cannot speak. They must be carried; they cannot go by themselves. Do not be afraid of them, for they cannot do evil nor can they do good." This is not talking about a Christmas decoration; this is talking about an idol, which is, of course, the main theme of the prophets is how God despises and mocks the idolatry of the people. So that's what that's about. There's nothing there about a Christmas tree. Thank you for your call.

We're out of time, sadly. You've been listening to The Narrow Path. My name is Steve Gregg. I mentioned earlier we're listener-supported. If you want to write to us, the address is: The Narrow Path, PO Box 1730, Temecula, California 92593. You can also donate from our website, but everything there is free. The website is thenarrowpath.com. Have a good weekend, and let's talk again Monday. God bless.