The Narrow Path

Steve Gregg: Good afternoon and welcome to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we're live Monday through Friday at this same time on these same stations and on the internet stream and at our app. Five days a week, we have a much larger reach than we used to, but we've been doing the program daily on the radio, of course originally on much fewer stations than now, for 29 years. We're getting close to 30 years of daily broadcasting of this program live. It's not always live. Sometimes I can't be at the microphone, but it's almost always live.

And it is today, and the reason that it's live is so that people like you can call in and we can have dialogue in real time on the air. The idea is if you have questions you want to raise and discuss about the Bible or the Christian faith, or you have problems with the Bible or the Christian faith, or you just disagree with the host about something related to what you've heard the host say, you're welcome to call and we can dialogue on that.

Looks like our lines are full at the moment, but you can call later in the program. They do open up throughout the hour. The number to call is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. And let's see, let's just go to the phones right now and talk to Michael in Denver, Colorado. Hi Michael, welcome to the Narrow Path.

Michael: Hi Steve, thank you so much for taking my call. It's so nice to speak with you again. I recently read something I wanted to get your insight on. An interesting story online just came up, a decade-old study. It's claiming to have found evidence of the earthquake described in the Bible at the time of the crucifixion. It's reigniting interest after resurfacing online.

A team of geologists actually examined the sediment layers near the Dead Sea, about 25 miles from where many scholars believe the crucifixion took place. Their analysis revealed signs of at least two significant earthquakes affecting that region around the time of the crucifixion. As you know, the Gospel of Matthew says the earth shook moments after Jesus cried out before dying on the cross. I was just interested in getting your interpretation on if you think the Gospel of Matthew was actually describing a literal earthquake occurring when Jesus died.

Steve Gregg: Well, a literal earthquake, I mean, if we say one that seismology can prove by showing that the earth shifted or the seismic plates shifted at that time, I would generally assume yes, that would be what is meant by the earthquake there. Obviously, any movement of the earth, even if it was from some other cause, there could be a supernatural cause. God could shake things up if he wanted to and it wouldn't be quite the same thing as a naturally occurring earthquake.

But I would just say it probably was an earthquake which, if scientists had been around at the time, they could have measured it and seen where the epicenter was and things like that. But I don't have any attachment to that view. I mean, if someone were to say we don't have any knowledge of that from science, I'd say maybe not. Maybe it didn't happen in the natural way. It does seem like the timing of it was significant and it was apparently some kind of a sign.

Likewise, a few weeks later, when the apostles in Acts chapter 4 prayed and had a big prayer meeting, the Bible says the place they were praying was shaken as a result. Now, we're not told what the cause of that shaking was. I'm sure that it was considered to be providential, something that God did as sort of a sign to them, but whether he did that by causing an ordinary earthquake at that moment or not, we would simply be speculating to say.

I would think it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for scientists to pinpoint the actual day of an earthquake 2,000 years ago. I mean, I would think they could look and say, "Somewhere around this general time period, there were some earthquakes here." I don't know how exact the equipment is they're using. My guess would be, and I could be corrected since I don't claim to know, that maybe they just say the Bible says there was an earthquake at that time and there were some earthquakes in that general area around that time. If they could pinpoint the date and say it was the day of Passover in the year 30 AD, that would be very interesting and significant.

Michael: Yeah, definitely. I remember reading in this specific article that there is a major fault line in that area of the Dead Sea where Jesus was said to be crucified. But also, I remember the Bible describes when Jesus dies that the storm clouds appear in the sky and it becomes very ominous. I just didn't know if there was kind of a direct correlation to that being a literal event or not, but that seems like a pretty good interpretation of it, Steve.

Steve Gregg: Well, it could be. I don't have any way of confirming or disconfirming that. The sky became dark for about three hours in the afternoon when Jesus died or when he was on the cross, anyway. People have tried to explain that in natural terms, too. A lot of people have thought it was an eclipse, though it was not, because the time of the month that Passover falls, the phase of the moon is such that it would be frankly impossible to have an ordinary natural eclipse.

That doesn't mean that God couldn't darken the sky supernaturally. Probably, what's interesting is that there's reason to believe the sky was, in fact, dark at that time, by whatever means, because an early defender of Christianity in the very early centuries was citing a skeptic of Christianity who said that this darkening at that time was an eclipse. Some non-believer was confirming there was a darkening of the sky.

I think it was Julius Africanus, but I might be way wrong on who it was. I remember there was a quote, I just don't remember who made it, very early in church history. It was said such and such a person says this was due to an eclipse, but I think the Christian author said that seems unreasonable. It is unreasonable because the moon and the sun have to be in a certain relationship to have an eclipse, and at that particular time of the month, the phase of the moon makes it impossible for that to be the case.

I've never tried to assign natural causes. It's a little bit like the Star of Bethlehem. Many people have tried to show from astronomical calculations that the Star of Bethlehem was some known natural phenomenon that took place at the time Jesus was born and can be explained in terms of movement of planets and so forth. Maybe so, but I don't think the Bible is asking us to believe that.

I think the Bible is asking us to believe that these things happened, but not necessarily to believe they were natural results of anything. They seem to be supernatural signs in their very intention, which means they could have happened through God manipulating natural things like seismic plates or planets in their orbits, but it could also have just been done totally supernaturally. I'm not invested in either view.

If someone could prove scientifically there was darkness for three hours and an earthquake at the time Jesus was crucified, I'd say, "Okay, yeah, the Bible mentioned that, so it's obviously true." But if they say we cannot prove that in any way, and I would suspect that in most cases they cannot, I'd say we don't need them to prove it; we have the testimony of scripture. If they discover some other way to confirm it, more power to them if that helps their faith. It's not going to help mine because my faith is already there. I already believe the Bible.

Michael: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Steve Gregg: Okay, Michael, thanks for your call. Terence in Warren, Michigan, welcome to the Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Terence: Praise the Lord, brother Steve. How are you? Appreciate you and your ministry and your wife. I had a quick couple of questions. I love reading about the kings of Judah and I was looking on your website, verse-by-verse, and I don't see Chronicles listed. Is there a reason?

Steve Gregg: You are right. That's the only book in the Bible that we do not have verse-by-verse teachings on. Actually, I would say it's not the only one because of Psalms. We have most of the Psalms on there, but we don't have every verse of every one of the Psalms and that's a defect. But we have a lot of Psalm lectures. We don't have any lectures devoted to 1 and 2 Chronicles with the exception of an overview of them.

We have that in the section at our website called Book Overviews, where we have an overview of each book of the Bible. There is a book overview of Chronicles, and I do go through it and give an overview. For those who don't know, the books of Chronicles cover the same historical period as do the books of Samuel and Kings.

I gave these lectures when I was running a school. We were teaching through the whole Bible in nine months, and so the students had just been through Samuel and Kings when we came to Chronicles. To go over that material again, which is probably 80% identical stuff, I just thought, "Why take another couple of weeks going through these stories we just went through?"

When I was teaching Samuel and Kings, I also supplemented them with things that were in Chronicles, so I kind of accessed Chronicles to fill out the story. That's why we didn't have separate lectures on Chronicles. But we do have a book overview, and I focus there on the differences, the things that are different between the Chronicles accounts and the Samuel and Kings accounts.

Terence: Okay, my question was about King Asa. I know he had the foot disease, and one commentary said that he sought physicians using enchantments and different things and he trusted the physicians rather than God. Do you have any historical information or any information that he repented at the end of his life? I'll take my answer off the air. Thank you, God bless.

Steve Gregg: Alright, thank you. It's hard to know whether he repented since it's not recorded, or even whether he really needed to in the sense of whether his trusting the physicians about the problem with his feet was something that disqualified him for heaven. It brought a judgment upon him, or disfavor. God was displeased that he trusted the physicians rather than himself. But Christians do that kind of thing all the time. That doesn't make it okay; it just means that it may not have anything to do with whether we're saved or not.

People who are godly, when they realize that something they've done has displeased God, they repent. They do it not because they're afraid to go to hell; they do it because they love God and they're sorry they did something offensive to him. Asa was a good king. He seemed to love God, and the one thing we know about him is that he kind of dropped the ball there when he got sick in his feet and looked to the physicians. Which, by the way, is a very natural thing for people to do, although it's probable the physicians were occultists.

They didn't have modern science or modern medicine at all. So it's possible that going to a physician in those days was maybe not too different than Saul going to a witch at Endor. It's just not the right thing to do. But when a man does one thing like that that's recorded against him, but his whole life and career are God-ward, I would suggest that if his general orientation was God-ward and this was one defect in him, in all likelihood he did repent.

If you live your whole life for God and then you realize near the end of your life that something you did is not pleasing to God, unless you've just decided, "I guess I'm just going to backslide and be apostate," you would repent. I assume he did. I assume he died on good terms with God even though he did have that error.

It's a little bit like Josiah. King Josiah is like one of the greatest kings Israel ever had. He's eulogized as a great one. Hezekiah and Josiah and maybe Jehoshaphat were among the very best kings that Judah ever had. And yet each of them made some mistakes. For example, Hezekiah made a mistake of rather proudly showing off all the wealth of Jerusalem to emissaries from Babylon. Isaiah said because you did that, the Babylonians are going to come back and take it all. That was a mistake on Hezekiah's part.

Josiah sent his armies out to fight against Pharaoh Necho in a battle, and a prophet said to him, "Don't go. Don't do that." And he did anyway. Now, why Josiah would do that anyway, we don't know. But he got killed in battle and it was a sad thing. Even the best good guys in the Bible have at least one thing wrong recorded against them. David, of course, was one of the great kings, and yet he had a horrible crime in his sin with Bathsheba, but he did repent.

The fact that we have a record of his sin does not imply therefore he's in hell today. Everybody sins, and I think what the Bible tries to do is show us that even the best of people, and some of these kings are the real spiritual heroes of their generation, even the best of them have their feet of clay and do some things wrong. I don't think that the record of that is trying to tell us they lost all and went to hell. I don't think that's the implication.

Alright, well we're going to talk to Carrie from Fort Worth, Texas next. Carrie, welcome to the Narrow Path.

Carrie: Hey Steve, just a quick question. In John 14, when Jesus speaks of the mansions, is this a reference to something in heaven now, or is this a reference to the New Jerusalem after his second coming?

Steve Gregg: Yeah, well, I've actually spoken about this quite a lot. You could find it on matthew713.com or even my verse-by-verse teachings through John, but I'll just say quickly that in my opinion, let me first read the passage for people who don't know what you're talking about. In the King James and the New King James it says this: in the upper room, Jesus said in John 14:2, "In my Father's house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself, that where I am, there you may be also."

Now, almost everybody you'll ever read or hear or even who write hymns about heaven and things like that, they almost always assume that when Jesus said "in my Father's house," he's referring to heaven. And when he said "in my Father's house are many mansions," they picture there being a lot of mansions, big houses, fancy houses, up in the sky, up in heaven somewhere for us. Now, the truth is it's his Father's house and the word mansions is the ordinary word in the Greek for dwelling places.

It's actually *mone*, which is the noun form of the verb *meno*. *Meno* is the Greek word to dwell or to abide, to stay. The noun form of that is *mone*, which means a place of staying. When you put it in the context of a house, "in a house there are many staying places," many modern translations translate it "rooms." Because he's talking about a house, he's saying in my Father's house are many staying places, meaning rooms. Houses have lots of rooms in them.

So, he's not talking about a bunch of estates on acreage up in heaven somewhere. He's talking about rooms in a house. Now, when we think of the Father's house as heaven, we're simply doing so because the Bible does talk about God being in heaven. "Our Father which art in heaven." But the Bible also teaches God is everywhere else. David said if he ascends to heaven, God is there; if he descends into Sheol, God is there. If he takes the wings of the dawn and flies to the uttermost parts of the sea, God's there, too.

In other words, God is everywhere. The fact that God is everywhere, including heaven, doesn't tell us necessarily what is meant by the phrase "God's house." But the rest of the Bible does tell us what is meant by God's house. In the Old Testament, the expression God's house, well, Jacob said that Bethel was God's house. He set up a rock where he slept one night and had a dream, poured oil on it, and said, "This is the house of God," and he called it Bethel, which means God's house.

But in Moses' time, they built the tabernacle. And the tabernacle was called the house of the Lord, the house of God. A house is where someone dwells. God's house is where he dwells. But in particular, it's where he dwells among men. Bethel, which means house of God, is on earth. The tabernacle was a building on earth which was deemed to be God's habitation. Eventually, Solomon's temple replaced it, and so the house of the Lord in the Old Testament always is referring to either the tabernacle or the temple because that's where God is housed among men.

It doesn't mean he's not in heaven; he's everywhere. But where he houses himself among men is the tabernacle or the temple. Now, Jesus even used the expression "my Father's house" one time previous to this. In the same book, in John chapter 2, when he cleansed the temple, Jesus said, "Do not make my Father's house a house of merchandise." He means the temple. "My Father's house" is the same phrase he uses here, but 12 chapters earlier he uses that phrase and he means the temple.

Now, there's no place in the Bible where heaven is spoken of as God's house. But the tabernacle often is. The temple often is, and Jesus used it that way. But also, Christ's people collectively are. Peter says in 1 Peter 2:5 that we are like living stones, individual Christians are built up into a spiritual house.

Paul used the same imagery a number of times, very notably in Ephesians chapter 2. He says that we, in verse 20 through 22, have been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. He's talking about us. We're a spiritual temple. We're the church. The body of Christ is where God dwells now on earth.

He doesn't dwell in temples made with hands; he dwells in his people. And it says in verse 22, in whom you also are being built together for a habitation, meaning a house, of God in the spirit. So Paul says we're being built up as the house of God. In 1 Timothy 3:15, Paul says to Timothy, if I'm delayed, you need to know how to behave in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.

Now, church to Paul is not a church building; the people of God are the church and the church collectively is the house of God. That is to say, the tabernacle and the temple in the Old Testament were God's house on earth. He doesn't dwell in those kinds of houses anymore; he dwells in his people who collectively are like a temple. That's the whole idea of the temple and house of God in the New Testament.

Now, Jesus is speaking at a time of transition. At the time he's speaking, he's in the upper room and he's going to die the next day. He's making the new covenant in that same room that same evening. He refers to his Father's house before this evening as the temple. "Do not make my Father's house a house of merchandise." But now he's made a new covenant just a couple chapters earlier.

He says, "Now in my Father's house," and he's now speaking of a different kind of a house. He's talking about the church on earth as his house. Now, how do I know that? Well, because he says, "In my Father's house are many *mones*, dwelling places." And this word *mone*, though it's an easily translated Greek word, it's only used twice in the New Testament. The other time is a little later in this same chapter in verse 23.

Jesus answered and said to him, "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word," we're talking about a Christian here, "and my Father will love him, and we will come and make our home with him." The word home there is *mone*. "We'll make our dwelling place with him." Now, he starts this chapter saying my Father's house has many dwelling places. 21 verses later he says, "And if you love me and keep my commandments, God will love you, and we will come and make our *mone*, our dwelling place with you."

In other words, *you* will be our dwelling place. You can be one of the rooms in this house. The house is collectively the church, the body of Christ. The individual Christian is like a dwelling place in the house. Now, notice whose house it is. It's not your house, so it's not your mansions, it's not your *mones*. It's God's *mones*. His house has many rooms, and he lives in his house. All the rooms are his dwelling place.

So, when Jesus said "in my Father's house are many dwelling places," he doesn't mention heaven and he uses an expression common in scripture but never used in scripture of heaven. Rather, it's where God dwells among men. He clarifies it a few verses later where he says, "If you love me, we'll come to you." Not, "You'll go to heaven and be in my house." Not that you'll go to heaven and be in one of those mansions.

But rather, you'll *be* one of those mansions. My Father and I will come and dwell in you as one of our mansions. This has really been turned upside down by many people who read it casually and don't think much about these themes in the Bible or the meaning of the Greek words.

When Jesus said "in my Father's house are many rooms," he means in my Father's house is now going to be you people collectively, the church. You guys are individual rooms. God will dwell in you each as well as in you collectively. And he says, "I go to prepare a place for you." Later he's going to point out he's going away so he can send the Holy Spirit. He says that just a few verses later also. He says, "I have to go away, and then I'll ask the Holy Spirit to come and he'll come to you. Father will send him and he'll dwell in you."

In other words, Christ's going away is not to prepare buildings for us to live in in the sky. He's going away so he can send the Holy Spirit to live in us and transform us into his new dwelling place, his new house. That's what's being discussed there. It's not really talking about going to heaven at all. Jesus did go away to heaven, but he went there so he could send the Holy Spirit. That's what he said: "If I don't go, the Holy Spirit won't come."

Anyway, I need to take a break here. I hope that helps, Carrie. You're listening to the Narrow Path. We have another half hour coming. Don't go away. Our website is thenarrowpath.com. You'll find topical audio teachings, blog articles, verse-by-verse teachings, and the archives of all the radio shows. Study, learn and enjoy. We thank you for supporting the listener-supported Narrow Path with Steve Gregg. I'll be back in 30 seconds, so stay with us.

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'd like to call in with a question about the Bible or to disagree about anything with the host, the number to call is 844-484-5737. One more time, it's 844-484-5737. Our next caller is Fred in Alameda, California. Welcome, Fred. Thanks for calling.

Fred: Hi, yes. I have a couple of questions. It seems to me there's a couple verses towards the beginning of the book of Job where, after the final catastrophe happens and Job's health goes down, Job's wife says, "Does thou still retain thine integrity? Curse God and die," if you remember that. And then Job responds by saying, "What, shall we not accept evil from God as well as good?"

My father once said God is cruel, look at the earthquakes. I feel like he's a lot like Job's wife in that statement. But there was a minister on the radio that was saying it's not that Job's wife was mean, it's just that she didn't know what to do or say in that situation. So I have two questions: how come Job's wife is not mentioned after that, unless I'm wrong? And then the second question is what do you think of my father's statement, "God is cruel and look at the earthquakes"? I'll take my answer off the air.

Steve Gregg: Alright, well, thank you for your call, Fred. First of all, Job's wife, it's hard to read the nuance of what she's saying. Remember Satan bet that Job would curse God if God would allow Satan to bring these disasters on Job. The result would be, said Satan, that Job would curse God. This was the test. God didn't believe that Job would; the devil thought he would and so this is why the test was put and God won the wager. Job did not curse God.

But it's clear that when the devil was losing this wager and the second wave of disasters came on Job, the devil actually spoke through Job's wife. "Why don't you just curse God and die?" Now, to say that Satan spoke through her does not tell us that she was an evil person, because Peter was not an evil person when he told Jesus, "It shall not be so that you be crucified, Lord," and Jesus had to say, "Get behind me, Satan."

There are times when people who care about you and people you trust just aren't on the same page as God. They don't know what page he's on, and they don't know what's right or what's going on. And neither Job nor his wife knew what was going on. They didn't know why these things were happening. Although they loved God, they were Middle Eastern people without any Bibles. No part of the Bible had been written in the days of Job.

Even Genesis had not been written yet. Moses wrote Genesis, and Moses lived a long time after Job. Job hadn't been written at this time; the story of Job originates with the writing of Job. Really, Job lived at a time where there was no scripture at all to reveal much about God. He intuitively knew there was a God, he intuitively knew he should be righteous in God's sight, and he was just a man who did good.

No doubt he and his wife were not free from some of the superstitions of their own age. In fact, we know that because we know from what his friends said and even what Job said in later chapters, that there was a general feeling that if you are good, only good things will happen to you. And if bad things happen to you, there's no explanation except that you are bad. That's what his friends thought, though they knew him to have been good, and even Job said he thought that way himself before all this happened.

People who don't have the Bible to guide them sometimes speculate. One thing they speculated that was wrong is that if you're righteous, no bad thing should happen to you. Another thing they apparently thought, and Job's wife's comment seems to imply this, is that if you curse God, you'll be struck by lightning or you'll die. God just won't tolerate it; if you curse God, you'll die.

Here he was suffering, he'd lost everything, so had she, by the way. She'd lost her children, she'd lost all the wealth they had; she was suffering, too, although she didn't have the sickness he had. She might have just been saying, "Okay, Job, you've suffered enough. Why don't you just let yourself go? Just curse God and let him kill you and you'll be free from your suffering." It's sort of like euthanasia, like putting someone down because they've suffered enough and there doesn't seem to be any cure. Let's shorten your suffering.

She may have thought if you just curse God, it's like pulling the plug on your life support and you'll die. She might have just been thinking, "I hate to see you suffer like this. Why don't you just do yourself a favor and end it?" It was bad counsel, very bad counsel, but her intentions might not have been bad. She might have been sympathetic that he's suffering so much and thought, "Okay, you don't need to suffer anymore, just end it."

It's hard to say about that. But the question of is God mean because of earthquakes, well, I don't think there were any earthquakes in Job, but I think what your father was saying is that because bad things happen, earthquakes sometimes kill people. Not all of them do. I'm not sure what the value of earthquakes are, but I think earthquakes actually do have some kind of function. They're not just a result of the natural movement of tectonic plates. I think they actually provide some function that I read about years ago, but I'm not a scientist, so I don't know.

Not all earthquakes are really damaging. There are a lot of earthquakes that are relatively minor. I've lived in California a good portion of my life, and I've been through many earthquakes, and none of them did me any harm or were scary to me, although they have done harm sometimes to other people.

Earthquakes can be devastating, but so can bad storms. So can driving your car on ice and slipping over a cliff. So can dying of cancer. You can die of a lot of things. If barbarians attack your country and start hacking people up, cutting their arms and legs off with scimitars, as has happened to many societies in ancient times and modern, that's bad stuff.

Does that mean that God is mean? Well, I suppose you've got a choice of things to believe, and that would be one of them. "If God is good, he wouldn't let me suffer like this. If God is good, he would have changed the course of nature so this natural disaster would not have affected me adversely. If God was good, he wouldn't let bad people do bad things that hurt me."

People who think like that really are facing a bit of a two-pronged choice here. One is: "I deserve to get what I want, and if God doesn't give me what I want, he's bad." Or choose to think like: "Maybe what I want isn't really what governs the universe. Maybe I'm not the center of the universe. Maybe my suffering, my loved ones' suffering, maybe whole civilizations' suffering is not even what the whole universe is about."

Maybe there's a bigger plan. Maybe there's something going on here and we're all eventual casualties of life; we all die. Something's going to take us out. If an earthquake takes out my mom and my dad or my wife and my kids, that's a terrible thing to go through, but something else would have gotten them and me. Something's going to take us all out. We're all casualties of history.

Now, the question is, of course, why does God allow this particular thing to take this particular person out at this particular time as opposed to maybe a few years later? Some other particular thing takes the same people out at a different time. Is there a good time to go? Which time is better for us? When do we want our loved ones to die and in what way? Well, we don't get that choice. To suppose that because God doesn't give us that choice there's something wrong with him, well, it means that we have not been cured of the malady that we're all really born with: thinking we're the most important thing in the world and that even God ought to accommodate us.

We grow up trying to get all people to accommodate us. We learn to manipulate people. Even babies and children learn to manipulate their parents and their siblings. We learn that early on. That's really our whole focus of life: ourselves. And if we don't outgrow it or get converted, we grow up being old people who still think the same thing. It's all about me.

And if you don't repent and grow up, then as an older person, you'll still be trying to make sure everything that happens around you serves your interests, including the way you manipulate people and things and even God. This is what we need to be cured of. To say, "Because something happened that was hard on me, I suffered a loss I didn't want to suffer on this occasion, I got hurt, I got sick, I died, therefore God's bad."

Well, I guess that's one conclusion you could draw; it'd be the wrong one because God isn't bad. But the person who would draw that conclusion is simply advertising that they have never woken up to the fact that it's not all about them. God does not have an obligation to consult you about when disasters will come and when they will be withheld.

He doesn't have to consult you about when you or your loved ones will die. It's going to happen sometime. I'm happy to let God be the one who makes the choice about that; he knows best. There are two positions we can take. One is that people are bad, and one of the things God does to cure them of their badness is to put them through various kinds of suffering, which is kind of like surgery to get a cancer out of us of total self-centeredness.

People who suffer and respond well to their sufferings often are made better by it. I know I have been by suffering I've been through, and the Bible makes it very clear. Job was. The Bible even says Jesus was made perfect through his suffering. Paul said our light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us a far more eternal and weighty weight of glory. It's working for us.

The Psalmist said, "It's good for me that I was afflicted that I might learn to keep your statutes." We don't want to suffer. It says in Hebrews no chastisement seems joyous at the time, but grievous, but afterward, it works the peaceable fruit of righteousness in those who are improved by it. So suffering can be the scalpel by which the cancer we're all born with is eventually removed or at least mitigated.

It may be that while we would say, "I have a certain list of things I would like to happen and a very long list of things I would like to have not happen, and I'm submitting this list to God, and if he grants me the things I want and spares me the things I don't want, then I'll conclude he's a good God." By doing that, you're showing you're not a good person. You're still self-centered. That's the very thing you need to be cured of, and it's the very thing that sufferings, rightly responded to, will cure you of.

When someone says God's mean because of this, it's always, "I wish he wouldn't do this, and he did anyway, so he's mean." You have to see the subtext: God stands at my bar of judgment; I'm the judge, he's on trial, and if he can give me a very good reason for what he did, then I'll acquit him. We're not in that position. God does not stand at our bar of judgment. He is not on trial.

We are not his judges. This is the very change that takes place when you are converted. Before you're converted, you do imagine that everything should conspire to your happiness and your good. You do assume that the universe owes it to you to make you happy and to keep you from suffering. When you get converted, you repent and you think differently.

That fundamental change in your thinking is you no longer think the whole universe is about me. You suddenly open your eyes, you come out of your haze, and you say, "Wait a minute, why should anything be about me? What am I? I'm a speck of dust on a planet that itself is a speck of dust. And I think that somehow the universe and God is supposed to be taking orders from me? How stupid could I be?"

When you're converted, you come around to think, "God is important, I'm not very important. Maybe I should, instead of thinking I have to get God to do what I want, maybe it makes a lot more sense in the whole scheme of things that I should do what he wants. Maybe I should put him in the center instead of me." And when someone does that, they become a Christian.

When they've done that, it means they don't, when there's some conflict between what God wants and what I want, we don't say God should do what I want. No, we say I should do what he wants. And that's what Jesus did, right? Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane said, "Father, if it's your will, take this cup from me." He didn't want to be crucified, that hurts. He said, "I'm a good person, I shouldn't have to go through that, please take it from me if you can."

But he said, "Not my will, but yours be done." Why? Because that is the basic orientation of one who's been converted. If you're not converted, your whole life is lived under the basic premise not anyone else's will, but mine be done. When you're converted, you say not mine, but let God's be done because that makes sense. He's the good one, he's better than I am, he's wiser than I am, he's certainly a lot more important than I am.

In the grand scheme of things, I'm not very important at all. I'm a particle. So when you come around to think, "God is good, whether I like what he does or not," we've suddenly come to our senses. Nebuchadnezzar was a great king, and in chapter 4 of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar was surveying the great accomplishments he'd made. He said, "I've done this with my great power and I'm wonderful, I did all these great things."

God said, "Oh yeah? Well, we'll see about that." And Nebuchadnezzar was struck mad, and he was mad for seven years. He wasn't even indoors; day and night, he's out on the hillside eating grass like a cow. It says at the end of that time he came to his senses and he glorified God. Now, before he came to his senses, he glorified himself, which is what anyone glorifying themselves is doing; they haven't come to their senses yet.

When a person comes to sanity, they say God is great, not me. God is glorious, not me. God is good, not me. God's will ought to be done, not mine. That's simply the difference between a Christian and a non-Christian.

Some people don't say that. Some people say a Christian is someone who believes in Jesus and has gotten forgiven. Well, they do, of course, but if you think that's all there is to being a Christian, you haven't read the Bible much. Jesus said, "If anyone comes after me, let him deny himself, let him take up his cross, let him follow me." This means you're not going after your own agendas anymore; you're going after his. If someone hasn't done that, he said they have not yet come after him.

The church may tell them they have, they may have said a sinner's prayer, walked down an aisle, even been baptized, they might even pay their tithes and go to church, but if they have not denied themselves, if they're still the center of their own life, they're not converted yet. They have not come to Christ on the terms that Jesus said, and therefore not on the terms that God requires.

The man who says God's evil because he allows earthquakes, a person who puts God first would say, "These earthquakes are hard on us people, and we lose things. They are all things that we would lose some other way if we didn't lose them that way, because everything we have we'll lose. We're not going to take anything with us when we die."

We're still judging God in terms of what we think he ought to do. When a person has been converted, they say, "Yeah, earthquakes are terrible things and people get hurt. How can I be of assistance to those who are hurt? How can I be an agent of God helping these people? How can I do the will of God and be a witness to him so that he gets glorified in this situation?"

Katrina, many years ago, people who lived in New Orleans noticed how many churches sent busloads of people down. Every time there's a hurricane in the South, busloads of people come from churches and volunteer weeks of their time to rebuild and reroof. Instead of the Christian saying, "God must be bad to let this happen," they just say, "We don't know why God let this happen, but we know people suffer and we know that God wants us to help." That's a very different approach. It's putting God's will first and not making us the judge of God, which is a very stupid thing for anyone to think they can do.

Alright, let's talk to Sarah from the Bay Area, California. Sarah, welcome to the Narrow Path.

Sarah: Hi, Steve. Thanks for taking my call. My question comes from Exodus chapter 22, verse 18. It says, "You shall not allow a sorceress to live." My question is: is a sorceress the same as a woman who practices witchcraft, and does the Bible give us specific activities that witches and sorcery people do, like the exact activities that they're doing?

Steve Gregg: Well, there are lists of things that witches do which are forbidden. If you look, for example, at Deuteronomy chapter 18, it does list things. Witches are in the picture, but all kinds of occultic things like fortune tellers and things like that are all of the same kind. It says in Deuteronomy 18:9 and following, "When you come into the land which the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or daughter pass through the fire, one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. For all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations the Lord your God drives them out before you."

He lists a whole bunch of occult things and says these are the things the Canaanites do and these are really disgusting; God hates those things. The reason he does is because they're demonic. God is against Satan and the demonic realm and their activities and their agendas, and God wants his people to turn their back on demonic practices and any trust in demonic powers and to trust in him instead and to follow him.

Witchcraft was one of those things in the law of Moses that was a capital crime. Not the only one. There are 30-something different crimes under the law that were capital crimes, and they were not to be tolerated because if they were tolerated, it would corrupt the nation who was supposed to be loyal to God and to be living according to his ways among the nations of the world. Israel was the only nation that knew God and therefore was to live very differently than the other nations as a witness to those nations.

If they would begin to absorb and practice those wicked things, it would destroy their mission, and so that's why it was not to be tolerated.

Alright, let's talk to Mary in Chaska, Minnesota. Hi, Mary, welcome to the Narrow Path.

Mary: Hi. Thank you. I heard you talking a few days ago about different interpretations or understandings of hell, and you said some may believe that hell is forever and maybe it's not; maybe it's just for a time period and then that torment ends. I was wondering about Mark 9, verses 43 and 48. In both of those, it refers to hell; in 48, it says, "Hell, where the worms that eat them do not die and the fire is not quenched." And then in 43, it says, "Hell, where the fire never goes out." I'm going to hang up and let you answer that. Thank you.

Steve Gregg: Okay, thank you very much, and I only have a few minutes to answer, so I can only give a partial answer. I do have two lectures at our website; they're free. There's two lectures called "Three Views of Hell," and I go into more detail about all the verses relevant, including these ones. I also have written a book which can be gotten from Amazon called *Why Hell?*, and I also go into a close critical examination of all the different views of hell and all the different verses that they use.

But in answer to your question, what did Jesus mean when he says better for you to cut off a hand or cut off a foot or pluck out an eye than to go into the fires of Gehenna, which is what the Greek text says, where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. The worm not die and the fire not quenched is a quotation, and he quotes it three times in the passage, but the quotation comes from Isaiah chapter 66. In fact, it's essentially the last verse in Isaiah.

Isaiah 66:24 says, "They shall go forth and look upon the corpses of the men who have transgressed against me, for their worm does not die and their fire is not quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh." Now, who shall go out and look on them? It's talking about the righteous in verses 22 and 23. They worship God all the time, and they go out and look upon the corpses of the ones who have been rebellious.

Jesus is using that image. Now, it's not talking about living people; it says corpses. Isaiah 66:24 says they will go out and look at the corpses. These are dead bodies that are in a burn pile. These are people who have been, it's the war-dead. In my opinion, it's referring to those who were killed in the Jewish war and the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. I think there's a very good case to be made for that, but I would need much more time to make that case here.

In any case, it's not describing people who are alive and being tormented; it's talking about corpses that are smoldering and the maggots are eating them and the fires keep burning. The word hell, unfortunately, is inserted in the English versions of Mark where it says the fires of hell. The word there is Gehenna.

Gehenna is not necessarily a reference to hell, although the English translations have traditionally translated it that way. Gehenna is a word that, if you translate it exactly, it means the Valley of Hinnom, which was an actual valley where dead bodies were sometimes stacked and even burned at the time of war.

Jeremiah was talking about the coming of the Babylonians to wipe out Jerusalem; he says that the Valley of Hinnom is going to be renamed the Valley of Slaughter because of the number of bodies that'll be put there. The Valley of Hinnom's right outside Jerusalem, and it was a place where the war-dead in great massacres were stacked and disposed of. That happened when Jerusalem was destroyed by Babylon, and it happened again when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70. I think that's what Jesus may be talking about.

The idea of a fire not quenching, read the book of Jeremiah and you'll find that the destruction of Jerusalem is always referred to as God's wrath burning like a fire that is not quenched, but it's talking about the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon in those passages.

I'm out of time. Our website is thenarrowpath.com. You can learn more about these things by going there. thenarrowpath.com.