The Narrow Path

Steve Gregg: Good afternoon and welcome to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and this is the beginning of a new broadcast week. We are on Monday through Friday and have been on Monday through Friday pretty much ever since 1997. It's about 29 years now. We did take a one-year hiatus back around the turn of the century, but we've been doing this for 29 years.

Anyway, we still have callers who call in and that's what keeps us going. If you have questions about the Bible and you want to bring them up for conversation on the program, we'll talk to you about that. If you call, you can call to disagree with the host also, we don't mind at all. You can call this number: 844-484-5737. That number again is 844-484-5737.

One announcement coming up this week. Tomorrow, actually, I'll be speaking tomorrow night in San Juan Capistrano in Southern California. I'll be talking on the subject of the four views of Revelation. Many of you know I wrote a book back in 1997 called Revelation: Four Views, A Parallel Commentary. It's been in print continuously by Thomas Nelson since that time. So it's been in print for about the same length of time as this show, 29 years.

Anyway, that book is still around. It's used as textbooks in Bible colleges a lot from what I understand. Yet, there are very many people in the churches who do not know about the four views of Revelation. Only one view is very commonly known, and yet there are three others that are very quite different and much more of long-standing than the popular view. The one that you know best is the one that's the newest. It just came up a couple of hundred years ago, whereas there are other views of Revelation that were much more common and accepted by the evangelical world for many centuries before and they still have reason to be considered.

In my opinion, some of them are better attested than the one that's most popular that you may have heard and that I heard all my life. Anyway, I'm going to talk about those four views tomorrow night in San Juan Capistrano at a church called Ranch Church. The talk is from 6:00 to 8:00. There'll be a short break in the middle. But at 6:00 tomorrow night, they are serving food to people who will register in advance. It doesn't cost anything, but you have to email them or contact them and let them know you plan to come.

At 5:30, they'll be serving a meal for those who have registered. So if you want to do that, just check out our website, thenarrowpath.com. Go to announcements, the tab that says announcements, and go down to tomorrow's date, which is February 10th. You'll see how you can register to let them know you're coming and then we'll see you tomorrow there in Southern California. I don't have anything more to announce, so we're going to go to the phones now and talk to Robert in Brunswick, New York. Robert, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Robert: Good evening. I must first profess with the fact that I'm vision impaired. That's why I can't go to the Bible and look for the answer for what I'm asking you about. I just want to know whether for a Christian marriage to be valid, must it be officiated by a pastor or a minister or priest?

Steve Gregg: For a marriage to be valid, does it have to be done by a priest or a minister? Well, there's nothing in the Bible that would say that. The Bible doesn't actually say anything about what constitutes a marriage except the assumption that everyone had was that it is a covenant relationship made between two parties.

In the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, we see this was usually an arrangement between the family of the bride and the family of the groom. In Jewish times, they probably had a rabbi who was overseeing it, but before Jewish times, like Abraham's time, for example, it was simply a matter of witnesses watching the man and the woman say, "You are my husband, you are my wife." That was their way of taking vows in the time of Abraham.

We don't have record of that in the Bible. We just know that from history, from records of ancient Mesopotamia and so forth. But there is no example of a wedding in the Bible. There's no prescription of how it has to be done. But it was not generally speaking something that was, for example, a state licensed thing as it is so often today.

I'm sure that the Roman Empire and other pagan empires had ways that they licensed the marriages that they conducted. But before there were any such secular powers to do it, God had instituted marriage. It was generally speaking an agreement between the families of the bride and the groom.

I'm sure that once religious institutions like Judaism and the church and so forth became established, it became customary for those within those institutions to conduct their vows before the congregations, before the community, before the families, and probably with a religious officiant. Like I said, a rabbi. Today, Jews would use a rabbi. Most Christians use a minister or a priest.

Now, does that mean that that is a biblical requirement? Well, apparently not, because there were marriages long before there were rabbis and before there were ministers from the time of Adam and Eve and on there were people who got married. So marriage is not primarily defined by a religious ceremony, though there's nothing wrong with a religious ceremony.

I think it's a very helpful thing. I think it's a very important thing, actually, for the vows to be taken before witnesses because those witnesses are there to keep you accountable to keep your vows. It's always tempting to break your promises when it's hard to keep them. If no one heard you make them except you and the person you promised to, then a dishonest person might just walk out on their vows.

The idea is that there are witnesses, there's family members, in the case of Christians, there's the body of Christ who's witnessed those vows and who's to hold you accountable to them. But as far as whether the person who officiates at the wedding is a minister or not, there's nothing in the Bible that requires that.

Robert: Thank you.

Steve Gregg: All right, thank you for your call. God bless you. Larry in Kent, Washington. Welcome to The Narrow Path.

Larry: Hey Steve, good talking to you again. Oddly enough, I've got another marriage question. Maybe it's the season coming up or something, but my question was in 1 Corinthians chapter 7: 36, 37, 38, where it says, if you are firmly established in your heart and you have your desire under control, you can keep your betrothed as a betrothed. But then he who marries a betrothed does well and he who refrains from marrying will do even better. But does this mean that I always thought betrothed meant being engaged to, but does this sound like something you can be engaged to for a while without marrying somebody?

Steve Gregg: Well, it's not the easiest thing in the world to know whether Paul is addressing the father of the bride or the groom of the bride when he says, "if a man will keep his virgin." I don't know what translation you're reading, but in the Greek it says, "if a man wants to keep his virgin, it's fine." He that keeps his virgin is fine, he who marries her is okay too.

The idea is it's rather unclear whether he's talking about the father who decides not to give away his bride. But I think in the context of the chapter, it's more likely he's talking about the betrothed, the groom. Because he has talked about the virtues and the advantages of remaining single, which would be a virtue that comes upon the bride and the groom by remaining single instead of getting married more than the father.

It's hard to know exactly what Paul's saying. Of course, earlier he says for the time because of the present crisis or because of the present, what is the word he uses in this translation? I think distress, verse 26. Let me just read verse 25 and 26. Now concerning virgins, I have no commandment from the Lord. So there's liberty about this.

He's just saying I'm going to give my judgment or my opinion about this as one who's whom the Lord has mercy on to make me trustworthy. He says, I suppose that this is good because of the present distress, that it is good for a man to remain as he is. Now there's some present distress he has in mind. Now whether that was a local situation or something that we don't know about, or whether he just means the whole distress of this present life.

It could be that because he goes on to say in verse 33, he who is married cares about the things of the world, how he may please his wife. But of course he says before that, he that is unmarried cares for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord. Paul is saying it's okay to get married, but he thinks that if people can handle it, single life, if they can stay pure, if they can overcome temptations and so forth and stay pure, it's a wonderful advantage to not have the responsibilities of a family so you can spend your whole time doing things that promote the things of God.

Now he's not disparaging marriage when he says, well, a man who gets married, he's got to care about the things of the world, how he may please his wife. By the things of the world, he doesn't mean bad things. He just means home and clothing for children and the kinds of things that become more of an obligation, more of a responsibility that ties a person down.

So Paul is kind of he's not requiring, but he's encouraging people who can to stay single. So in the context of the passage you mentioned, the man who has self-control and wants to keep his virgin, as Paul puts it, is very probably the guy who is engaged. He's writing to people about staying single, but of course many of his readers are already betrothed.

Now betrothal, I don't know about Corinth because that was a Greek city, but I know in the Jewish culture which Paul was from, betrothal was made with an oath. It was not just "Hey, will you marry me? Okay, good, let's tell people we're going to get married." It was like a marriage covenant. It's just they didn't move in together yet, but it was kind of a solemn promise and you didn't break it unless you had grounds for divorce.

So a man who'd made such a promise should keep it unless he can, I guess what Paul is saying is if he can keep his virgin, meaning if he can support her without actually getting married. Now that doesn't seem very fair to her if she wants to be married and have kids. So I think that Paul maybe talking about a brief period of time.

I don't know what he means by that, nobody knows what he means by that. And there may be a situation he's saying, "at the moment you might want to just stay single as long as you can because of this present situation." But who knows when the present situation is over, maybe he was thinking and then it'd be a better time to get married than now.

So just keeping her as a virgin and waiting to get married could be even what he has in mind. It's not clear. This is a great example of how we look at epistles because Paul and Peter and James and John wrote epistles to people whom they knew personally, whose circumstances they knew personally and whose living situations and culture they knew personally.

So they could make allusions to things that the readers would understand immediately. But we're reading it 2,000 years later, we're not familiar with all those circumstances they were in. And we're saying, how do we make sense of this? This is one thing we always have to remember when we're reading the epistles: we are reading somebody else's mail.

Just like listening to one side of a telephone conversation and not hearing the other side, you kind of have to deduce, if you can, what the context is of the statements made. And sometimes that's easy and sometimes it doesn't really matter the context because some things that Paul or Peter write are just universal theological truths that aren't circumstantially governed.

But when he gives advice, sometimes he does allude to things and people's names. They give people's names that we don't know and what they're doing. And we have to realize, okay, this is not really written directly to us. And the advantage we get is when we can apply what he said to some other group to a situation that's similar in our own case.

But once in a while, you've got situations like this where it's not entirely clear is Paul talking about a temporary, hold off on getting married for maybe a few months or years, or is he talking about go single for the rest of your life. They would understand the circumstances he's referring to and we don't. And we just have to live with that fact sometimes.

It's like later on in chapter 15 when he talks about those who are baptized for the dead. We don't really have any certainty what he's referring to, but he knew and so did his readers. They knew some people who were being baptized for the dead. We don't know anyone who does that except the Mormons. But I'm not sure that he's referring to the same practice that the Mormons practice. But the thing is that we just don't know, but they did. And this is one of those things that I have had to live with just being uncertain exactly what it meant. But the principle of the chapter is, of course, applicable and understandable, namely that if you have the grace to stay single and pure and just serve God with all your energy without the distraction of family, more power to you.

But if you don't, and he starts this right at the beginning of the chapter, it's great that a man would not touch a woman, but to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife and every woman her own husband. So he's kind of urging people who can do it to stay single and pure, but he also admits that not everyone has that gift, as he calls it. He says, to one is given one gift and to another a different gift, meaning the gift of being celibate or not. That's verse 7.

So throughout the thing, he's not trying to put down marriage or discourage marriage, but he is saying if you can handle celibacy and not be overwhelmed with temptations, that you're in a good spot to serve God without distraction. And that statement about the man keeping his virgin is in that context somehow. And while it's not entirely clear what keeping the virgin means, whether he meant, "okay, you were going to get married two months from now, but because of the present distress maybe you should wait a couple of years and just keep her as a virgin that long if you can control yourself." That could be what he means or he could be talking about something more long-term. It's just not entirely clear, but the principle, of course, is not too difficult to understand. That's, of course, the principle that's governing his whole instructions.

Larry: Okay. Well, thank you.

Steve Gregg: Okay, Larry. God bless you. Good talking to you. John from Phoenix, Arizona. Welcome to The Narrow Path.

John: Hey Steve, how you doing?

Steve Gregg: Good.

John: Hey, I emailed you over the weekend. Thanks for getting back to me. Although I'm still kind of a little foggy about the issue I emailed you about. It was about reading in the New Testament that Abraham was justified on several occasions. In today's Protestant teachings, we kind of assume that justification is a one-time shot and it kind of comes with the new birth. You wouldn't be justified on an ongoing basis or a lifelong journey. I agreed with what you said that it's kind of an ongoing thing as long as our faith stays alive. But can you kind of explain the difference between the view you explained versus what's kind of taught by the Calvinistic type teaching today?

Steve Gregg: Well, it is said of Abraham in Genesis 15:6 that when God told him his descendants would be as the stars of the heavens, it says Abram believed in the Lord and it was counted to him for righteousness. So that's the first time we read specifically in Genesis of Abram's faith or of justification.

Now, in Hebrews, of course, his faith and Romans, Romans 4 and Hebrews 11, Paul is also commended for his faith in trusting that God would allow Sarah to have a baby when they were too old to have babies. In Hebrews 11, it talks also, especially about when he offered Isaac, that that was a great demonstration of his faith.

Now, the term justification is applied in both those places. Because in Romans 4, when it talks about when he was too old to have children and yet he believed and hoped against hope and all of that, it says, "therefore it was counted to him for righteousness." What this is just saying is these are illustrations of the kind of faith Abraham had.

I think maybe some people are trying to say, okay, what do I have to do to get to heaven? Just tell me, I'll do it. Do I have to say this prayer? Do I have to get baptized? Do I have to confess something? What thing do I have to do to be saved? And there's not some one thing. It's a relationship with God. Abraham had that relationship with God, which was a trusting relationship, which was demonstrated in many parts of his life.

When God told him things about his descendants that seemed impossible to a man his age, he believed him. When God told him to offer up his son and all would be well, well, Abram believed him and obeyed. The point here is that these are just illustrations that punctuate the life of Abraham, but really were true of him at all times. These were times when his faith was made visible to people reading his story.

But the days in between those incidents, he had faith too. He was a man of faith and it's his faith that made him right in the sight of God. So it's not that I mean, I realize that there is a point in time when a person first puts faith in God, when they first learn of God or first surrender to God and put their faith in God. There's that point in time when they are first justified.

But it's not a punctiliar thing that happens one time, and then you have to kind of do it again once in a while to make sure you're renewing your membership or something. It's rather when you are justified, when you are converted, you become a follower of Jesus and that's for life. That's not, "well, I'll try this for a while, see how this works out, see if this is better than my other hobbies."

No, you don't get saved unless you come all the way in. You jump into the deep end and you're in it for life. A lot of people think they're going to just try it out. They'll believe in Jesus at this moment if that means I'll get saved. And then someone will tell them there are some people who tell you, "and if you just do that one time then you're saved forever, it doesn't matter what you do after that," this "once saved always saved" idea.

But of course, the Bible doesn't teach that. But the point is, when you get saved, you become a child of God. You become a disciple of Jesus. You become bought with a price, you're owned by God, you're His servant for life and you're His child for life and for eternity.

You live your life a life of faith in God and you live your life under the umbrella of being justified by God by your faith. It's not that the prodigal son comes home and he gets justified and then he goes back to the pigsty and then comes back and gets justified again every once in a while and goes back to the pigsty.

He comes home and stays home. He comes home to a right relationship with his father and he lives in that relationship with him and all is well with him and his father from then on. I think many people see Christianity or their Christian life as once in a while they'll check in with God and see if he's still interested in forgiving them for the way they've been living in between. People like that are not converted.

That's just not what conversion is. Conversion is a change. Conversion is a redirect of your whole life. And it's not just a tryout. You don't just test drive Jesus and decide if you want to buy him. Until you buy him, you don't drive him, you know, he's just not yours until you are his.

So Abraham's faith is mentioned many times and it's mentioned many times in connection with his justification. James also, of course, mentions that when he offered Isaac, he was just showed his faith was justified him. So Abraham is remembered primarily as a man of faith.

But not because he did one or two or three things that showed his faith. Those are the things that show what he was all the time. He was a man devoted to trusting God. And there are several incidents in his life where this comes to the fore particularly, and these are mentioned by different New Testament writers. But he's only justified because he is a man of faith, not because he had faith on that occasion and then God forgave him of his sins that time, but then didn't forgive him again until the next time he believed. Faith is a way of life. Trusting God is a relationship with God. And that's the only kind of life with God that the Bible knows about in the Old or the New Testament. The people who were saved were the people who had this kind of total life with God. They were devoted to God and trusted him, Old Testament and New Testament.

So it's not that he got justified on that occasion or that occasion or that occasion. Rather, he lived his life under the covering of God's approval and justification, which means God says you're okay with me. Why? Because he lived his life of faith. And these the incidents you talk about are simply moments where that was manifested in his experience.

John: That's really good. I appreciate you saying that. Thank you.

Steve Gregg: Okay, John. Good talking to you. Thanks for joining us.

John: Oh, sure. Thanks, Steve. Bye-bye.

Steve Gregg: All right, God bless you. All right, we have a break coming up here, but we have another half hour coming up too. We have some calls waiting and we have a couple of open lines. So if you want to get on for the second half hour, this is a good time to call in. The number is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737.

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Our website has like 1500 of my lectures verse by verse through the whole Bible as well as on hundreds of topics and they're free. All these lectures are free. They're audio. There's also links there to our YouTube page where there's also hundreds of the lectures in YouTube. And there's other stuff, a lot of stuff, and nothing is for sale at our website.

I really urge you to check it out. The website is thenarrowpath.com. That's thenarrowpath.com. Nothing there will cost you any money. Even my books, most of them, the audiobook is there for free to listen to them. But you can buy the books from Amazon but not from us because we don't sell anything. But you can hear the audiobooks for free of at least three of the five books at our website thenarrowpath.com. We are listener-supported and you can also see there if you wish how to donate and support us and help keep us on the air. I'll be back in 30 seconds. Don't go away. We have another half hour.

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Welcome back to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we're live for another half hour taking your calls. If you have questions about the Bible, objections to the Bible, you're not a Christian or you are a Christian and disagree with the host, want to talk about that, you're just confused about something in the Bible, feel free to give me a call. We'd be glad to talk to you whatever you bring up along those lines. The number to call, by the way, we have a couple of lines open. The number to call is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. Our next caller today is Tammy calling from Honolulu, Hawaii. Hi Tammy, welcome.

Tammy: Aloha, brother Steve. I just wanted to ask two questions for you. The Book of Enoch, what is your overall view of it and how should Christians kind of understand its place historically, spiritually, in relationship to scripture? Believe it or not, that was just one question. My second question is, do you believe there's any appropriate benefit for Christians to be reading the Book of Enoch for its historical or cultural context or should it just be avoided altogether? Thank you.

Steve Gregg: All right. Well, I certainly would not advise avoiding it altogether, although I don't say we're under obligation to read it either. I mean, that is to say, if avoiding it means we think it's poison or we think it's dangerous or it's heresy and we're just going to avoid reading that, I wouldn't say that. The early church read it. Sometimes they even quoted from it or alluded to it, even Jude in his epistle quotes a portion of it favorably.

So the early church liked the Book of Enoch. The Ethiopic Bible even includes the Book of Enoch, though I don't think it belongs in the canon of scripture, but it's obviously accepted in Christian circles in some Christian circles. So there's really nothing dangerous about it unless, of course, you read it thinking that it's inspired.

Here's the thing, the Book of Enoch is an apocalyptic book like many other books that were written when it was written about two centuries before Christ, which is a long time after Enoch disappeared from the earth. Enoch lived before the flood of Noah. The flood of Noah was like what 2700 years before Christ. Enoch lived and left this earth before that.

Here, 2500 years later, the Book of Enoch is circulating. It's not written by Enoch. In fact, it resembles very much a whole genre of literature that was produced in those early centuries between the Old and the New Testament times, religious in nature, written by Jewish people. And yet not inspired. They're not written by prophets, not written by inspired prophets or apostles like our Bible books are.

So it is an interesting book if you got a lot of time on your hands. I've got it and I've only read portions of it. I'd be curious to read the whole thing if I had all the time in the world. I have the Book of Mormon on my shelf. I'd be curious to read the whole thing too, not because I believe it, but because it's obviously influential in some circles.

I'd love to read everything I could. I'd like to read the Quran just so I'd know how to talk to Muslims about it. But there's a lot of religious books out there that are not inspired, but which a lot of people have taken seriously, which it doesn't hurt to be familiar with them as long as you keep it in the right perspective.

If you think of it as an inspired book, then you're going to let it do some of your interpreting of the actually inspired books. Because he talks about the flood, he talks about the so-called Nephilim before the flood, he talks about angels and watchers and things like that and relates them to some of the stories in the Bible.

Frankly, these are giving a human, uninspired interpretation of stories that are somewhat vague when they're told in the Bible. Of course, the Nephilim story comes from Genesis 6, but it doesn't say what Enoch says. It only says that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were beautiful to look upon and they took wives of them as many as they wished, and then they had children.

It says the Nephilim were in the world in those days too. So that's what we're told. But Enoch will say, "well, the sons of God are angels." Well, the Bible doesn't say that, but that's what Enoch says. And that they took women and their children were these Nephilim. Well, the Bible doesn't say that either. Genesis does not say that the Nephilim were the offspring of these marriages.

This is what Enoch tells us. I think Enoch might be the first book, I'm not sure, I think it may be the first book to have given it that interpretation. Now, people in Jesus' day were reading Enoch, Jews were. And the apostles were and they make allusions to it.

Now, to say that they made allusions to or even quoted from Enoch does not necessarily mean that they believed it was inspired. When you quote a book, it means that you like something that it's saying and you'd like to mention it sort of to illustrate or underscore something you do believe that you're saying. But it doesn't mean you mean it that you believe it's scripture.

For example, Paul on Mars Hill quoted some of the Greek poets because he was talking to Greek people and they liked their poets. So he quoted some Greek poets to confirm the kind of things he was saying. He wasn't saying these Greek poets are inspired. In 1 Corinthians, he quotes some Greek poets. In Titus chapter 1, verse 12, he quotes Epimenides, a Cretian poet.

Now, he's not saying these are inspired. He's just saying these guys said the same thing I'm saying. Preachers do that too, and rightly so. They can quote other literature that's not inspired but which is maybe well known, proverbial literature, quoting Poor Richard's Almanac or Aesop's Fables or some other non-inspired work because it happens to say the same thing and say it well.

So that's kind of what I think they did with Enoch. They quoted him favorably, but they never said he was inspired. They never said it was the Holy Spirit speaking through him. So that's how I would look at Enoch. It's not really written by Enoch, the real Enoch. It's one of the apocryphal books.

You might as well ask, should we read Second Maccabees or Second/Third Esdras. Well, these are books that you might find in the Septuagint. Some of them are found in the Catholic Apocrypha, though Enoch is not. Reading them can be edifying. In fact, Luther, you know, Luther didn't like the Apocrypha, or I shouldn't say he didn't like the Apocrypha, he didn't believe the Apocrypha belonged in the scriptures, but he did say they were edifying to read.

Probably many people would find the Book of Enoch that way too. There were some other written works in the early church, the Sibylline Oracles and the Shepherd of Hermas and so forth that were kind of apocalyptic books too, which are not inspired but which were so popular among the early church, some people wanted to put them in the Bible.

They didn't get into the Bible because they weren't written by apostles. I agree that they don't belong there. But to say that a book is not in the Bible doesn't mean it's something to avoid reading. I would not want to spend very much time reading those books until I'd really mastered the Bible itself, partly because you can go to heaven and be very well informed about Jesus without reading those apocryphal books, which is much less the case with the biblical books.

Reading the biblical books, you learn about Christ, important things about following him. Also, the better you know the Bible, the more discerning you can be in reading the apocryphal books and seeing what parts you would agree with, what parts you would not.

So Enoch, a lot of people talk about Enoch these days. Michael Heiser's books kind of popularized the interest in Enoch with many people today. I wouldn't say don't read it, but I would say if you do read it, don't imagine that Enoch wrote it or that it's inspired.

Tammy: Thank you so much, Steve. I really appreciate that. I have the whole ohana here sitting listening to that and so God bless you. We appreciate you and the short time that we can listen in and really take your information. I appreciate you. Mahalo.

Steve Gregg: Mahalo to you too, Tammy. Thanks for your call. God bless you and hello to your ohana. Bye-bye now. All right, Tom from Gainesville, Florida. Welcome to The Narrow Path, Tom.

Tom: Hello. I have two questions. Number one, could someone be a Christian if they lived in the year 200 BC?

Steve Gregg: Not a Christian as we call it, but they could certainly be a believer. They could certainly be saved. Yeah, the word Christian means someone who's following Jesus. The term was never used until after the resurrection of Christ and the believers, the disciples of Jesus who were in the city of Antioch in Syria, kind of adopted the name Christians for themselves, which stuck. It stuck and so eventually since then people have been called Christians, which means followers of Christ.

Tom: Okay. Also, three days ago I was on the University of Florida campus and there was a Christian preacher, Sister Cindy. It seemed like she talked about sex just to get an audience and then she just talked about Jesus. Any thoughts?

Steve Gregg: Well, I'm not sure. I don't know her. I think I may have heard of her unless there's another sister somebody that I'm thinking of.

Tom: I think you have because she was married to Brother Jed, who she claimed for the last 50 years, five hours a day for the last 50 years, she said she was on campus, he was on campus all across the country preaching about Jesus. Have you heard of him?

Steve Gregg: Do you know his last name?

Tom: Yeah, I would recognize it if you said it. It's a Jed Newton, maybe?

Steve Gregg: Okay, there was a fairly famous campus preacher whose name was Jed. I forget his last name. So okay, no, I don't know her and I'm not sure why she was talking about sex. So you're saying that she talked about sex to get attention and then preached the gospel? So what kind of was she talking in a wholesome way about sex? Was she speaking biblically about sex?

Tom: Yeah, she was. For some reason, her kind of motto was "Ho No Mo", which means to the women, don't be hoes anymore and just give sex before marriage. The women loved that message. The men didn't like it, but men thought I mean, the women at that talk three days ago, they were cheering her.

Steve Gregg: Was it okay, you're talking about Jed Smock and Cindy Smock, right?

Tom: That's right.

Steve Gregg: Yeah. Yeah, I'm not familiar with their ministry. I've only heard of them. I will say this, a lot of campus preachers, they're kind of outside the box. I don't know if you ever heard of Holy Hubert Lindsey. When I was young, he was on the campus at UC Berkeley and boy, was he in your face kind of a guy. He was a funny guy too. But he was pretty hard on his audiences, but they were hard on him too. He got beaten up and stabbed and all kinds of stuff, but he did it for decades. They called him Holy Hubert.

Anyway, sometimes these campus preachers, in order to, I guess, get the attention of people in that particular environment, say provocative things. But no, I mean, you're asking me if if this woman was right to do that. Lots of preachers will bring up contemporary concerns that people have from a biblical point of view and then before they're done, they'll have preached the gospel.

So I don't know how she does this, but I would say I don't have anything in principle against her doing that. I mean, certainly campuses need to hear about sexual purity. They need to hear about what the Bible says about sex because we live in an age where younger generations don't seem to have much of a clue about what the Bible says about it. So if she's teaching it faithfully, more power to her. Alan in Joliet, Georgia. Welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Alan: Good afternoon, sir. Had a question about hermeneutics for you. Would love to hear your thoughts. I've heard recently from some friends who are in the Torah-keeping Christianity movement talking about they call it New Testament Only-ism. I heard you speaking a while back, it was really good about how we use the New Testament to understand and interpret what various prophets meant when they said. I know 1 Peter speaks of this, but I want to hear you talk maybe a bit more fully about this.

Steve Gregg: Yeah, I don't know what New Testament Only-ism is. I haven't heard them speak. Now, if they mean we only read and only care about the New Testament and we don't need the Old Testament in our Bibles, I'd have to disagree with that. Since the Old what we call the Old Testament is the only Bible Jesus ever read or preached from and same thing with the apostles. They didn't have any Bible except the Old Testament and yet they were pretty good Christians who had a pretty effective ministry in the gospel.

So to say we don't need the Old Testament, I think, would be a mistake. Now, if they're simply saying we only obey the New Testament, we don't obey the law of the Old Testament, then I'd be I wouldn't have any complaints about that because, of course, the duties of followers of Christ differ from the duties laid out in the law of Moses. And if you follow the teachings of Christ, you will be doing all that you need to do to please God.

You don't have to add to that the animal sacrifices and circumcision and dietary restrictions that you find in the Old Testament law. If they're saying, well, we only follow the New Covenant, not the Old Covenant, I'd agree with that. I do too. But if they're saying we don't need to read the Old Testament, I'd say, well, then they're going to be very different than the early church. The early church had no other Bible than the Old Testament until the apostles, of course, wrote their books, which was pretty much near the end of the lifetime of the apostles.

So the church got along quite well without those writings, but they did have the preaching of the apostles. See, that's the thing. We only have their writings. The early church had their preaching in their churches. So they had the advantage of the New Testament without it being in writing.

Yeah, I'm thinking that term New Testament Only-ism was meant as a pejorative probably, and intentionally exaggerated put-down type of device. I've heard of the Red Letter Movement, which are people who say only the red letters, the words of Jesus in some Bibles are printed in red. Some people say they're Christians who only follow the red letters, which means they don't follow Paul and Peter and John, they follow only what Jesus said.

Which is not really following what Jesus said because Jesus said, "whoever receives him that I send receives me." And he sent the disciples out and he said, "as the Father sent me, so I'm sending you." So receiving what they said, you can't reject what they said without rejecting Christ also who sent them.

But it is good to put an emphasis on the teaching of Jesus since he is the king, he's the Lord, he's the one who we're seeking to please by obedience to him. And it's also right that the New Testament supersedes the Old Testament in terms of its position as giving us instructions for our lives. The teachings of Christ and the apostles are there's a great overlap between them and the law and the prophets, but it's not exactly the same because the rituals of the Old Testament have been fulfilled and we don't have to keep them.

Now, you were asking about my statement that we interpret the Old Testament by the new. What I'm saying is that the Old Testament prophets, they wrote, first of all, they wrote in poetry, which means they used hyperbole, they used metaphors, poets do not write literally in most cases. That's poetry is a different genre than regular writing. And it's written for aesthetic appeal with figures of speech and things like that that you expect in poetry that you don't find in other writing that much.

So to understand what they meant, we need what Jesus taught and the apostles. Now, it does say in Luke 24:45 that Jesus was with his disciples after his resurrection. It says he opened their understanding that they might understand the scriptures. Now, the rabbis, we assume, did not understand the scriptures properly or else Jesus wouldn't have to give his disciples special insight into them. They could just listen to the rabbis.

But Jesus said the rabbis were blind leaders of the blind. Paul said that when the Jews are reading the Old Testament without Christ, they have a veil over their mind, over their heart, they can't understand what it says until they turn to Christ. So obviously, if you don't let Jesus and the apostles' teachings explain what the Old Testament is saying, the Jewish rabbis themselves would not get it right. You need them. They are blind leaders of the blind.

Unfortunately, many people who are Christians and who teach about prophecy, they get most of their understanding from reading the Old Testament through the same eyes that the rabbis did and not the ways that the apostles and Jesus did. And so they miss it because basically the rabbis would take a lot of that literally, which Jesus and the apostles took in a spiritual sense and saw fulfillment in a different sense than the rabbis did and then modern Jews do.

The Christian has a choice to make when it comes to deciding on what the prophets were teaching. Do I understand them the way the blind guides, the rabbis who read the scriptures with a veil over their mind, do I take it the way they did? Or do I take it the way the apostles did whom Jesus opened their eyes so they might understand the scriptures? I'm going to go the second way. All right, brother, thanks for your call. Raymond, also calling from Honolulu. Second call from Honolulu today. Hi, Raymond. Welcome.

Raymond: Aloha, Steve. I just want to be clarified on what does the woman and the revelation signifies and who is the child that she gave birth to?

Steve Gregg: Yeah, you're talking about Revelation 12 where there's a woman groaning in childbirth and the dragon is waiting to consume and kill her child when he's born, but fails to do so. The child is caught up into heaven and to the throne.

The woman, I mean, first of all, there's a lot of different views of Revelation and a lot of people would see it differently than I do. But I think that it's not too hard to see what it's supposed to say. The woman is clothed in the sun with the moon under her feet and she has a garland of 12 stars on her head. The sun, the moon, and the 12 stars is a reference back to Genesis 39, which was a reference to Jacob and his family, Jacob and his 12 sons.

So it's talking about Israel. The woman is Israel, but I think more specifically because of what is said about her later in the chapter, it's the faithful remnant of Israel. God's promises to Israel were really to be fulfilled through the faithful remnant. Mary and Joseph, Zacharias and Elizabeth, Simeon in the temple, Anna in the temple. These were part of the faithful remnant of Israel at the time Jesus was born. There were faithful Jews before and after Jesus was born and it was this faithful remnant that went through great sufferings to bring the Messiah into the world.

This woman in labor, I think represents this faithful remnant of Israel in the years just before Jesus was born. The birth of the child is the birth of Jesus and when he's caught up to God and to the throne, of course that happened after Jesus rose from the dead, he ascended up and took his place at the right hand of God.

So he's not too hard to identify because it also says about the son that he's to rule the nations with a rod of iron. Psalm chapter 2 and verses 8 and 9 tell us that that's what the Messiah does. The Messiah is to rule the nations with a rod of iron. So this is the Messiah.

And the woman is the faithful remnant of Israel. Now, the Catholics think the woman is Mary, which is reasonable enough since she's Jesus's mother. But in Revelation, a woman is usually not a literal woman. For example, the bride who's mentioned later and the harlot who's mentioned later, they're not representing actual individual women. The harlot is that great city that rules over the kings of the earth, we're told in chapter 17, and the bride is the lamb's wife, which is the church.

So you've got two women, a harlot and a bride who are not really women at all, or woman is a symbol for them. And likewise here, the woman in labor, I think in Revelation 12 is a symbol for a larger entity which is the believing remnant of Israel. Mahalo to you too, Raymond. Thanks for your call. Steve in Tustin, California. Welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling. Are you there, Steve?

Steve (Tustin): My apologies. I'm so sorry. I am interested in hearing your thoughts on does God know the future as an actuality or a high degree of probability?

Steve Gregg: Well, let me just say because we only have a minute or two left and it's a big question. I personally believe that God knows the future absolutely. But this is not the only Christian view available. All Christians believe that God knows much of the future. For example, if God decrees that he's going to do something and he does it, well, he knew he was going to do it and he knew it pretty much absolutely. So he could know in advance what he's going to do.

But the Bible indicates that not everything that happens is his direct doing. There are things that happen he says, "hey, I had nothing to do with that, I didn't command that, I didn't even think of it, never came to my mind," he says. He blames people for some things that happen, but he even seems to know when those are going to happen, like when he told Peter, Peter would deny him three times before sunrise, before the rooster crows twice. And that's exactly what happened.

So it sounds like a very high degree of accuracy. It seems like he knew exactly how many times Peter would have this temptation to deny him, how many times he would fall to that temptation, he knew Peter would repent after that, he knew what time frame that was going to happen in. That's like knowing the future.

Now, there are people who are Christians who believe that God knows everything except things that are unknowable. To say he's omniscient, they would say, doesn't mean he knows what doesn't exist to be known anywhere, namely future contingencies like what someone's going to choose 10 years from now or 100 years from now, someone who's not even born.

However, God did know that Cyrus 200 years before his born was going to let the Jews go from Babylon and said so in Isaiah 44 and 45. A couple of hundred years before Josiah, God knew that Josiah was going to defile the altar at Bethel and predicted it by giving his name long before he was born.

So it seems like God does know exactly what's going to happen. Some people think like you said that he knows with a high degree of certainty. And there are Christians who love the Lord and believe the Bible, but they read some of the passages differently and see them differently than I do.

But I do believe God knows the future with exact certainty. If he didn't, it's not a problem to me. I mean, if the Bible taught otherwise, it's not going to offend me. But some might say, well, if he doesn't know the future, how can he know he's going to win? Well, that's easy enough. If you're a giant and all your opponents are ants, and you're determined to win, it doesn't matter what they choose to do, you're still going to win. So it's not like God's threatened by whether he knows what people are going to do or not. He can always respond in a way that will further his purposes if he wants to.

And some people think that's the way it is. I personally think that he knows the future and I don't have any problem with that. Other people have other views on that. I'm out of time, I'm sorry to say. You've been listening to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg. We are listener-supported. If you'd like to help us out, you could write to us at The Narrow Path, PO Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593. Or you can go to our website, thenarrowpath.com. Thanks for joining us.