The Narrow Path

Steve Gregg: Good afternoon and welcome to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we're live for an hour each weekday afternoon and during that hour we take your calls if you have questions that you'd like to raise for conversation on the air about the Bible or the Christian faith or maybe you're questioning or wanting to challenge something that this host has said to a previous caller or to yourself on a previous call. Feel free to give me a call. We'll take those calls as well. The number is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737.

Tomorrow night is the first Wednesday of the month of April. And on the first Wednesday of every month, we have a Zoom meeting which you are invited to participate in if you wish. Only a total of 100 people can be part of it, but usually we have under 100, sometimes very close to 100, but if you're interested, you can probably get on. That's tomorrow night, Wednesday night, 7:00 PM Pacific time. And that's about two hours.

It's a Q&A time. You can join us if you want to. You'll find the log-in information for that Zoom call at our website, thenarrowpath.com, under announcements. So you go to thenarrowpath.com, there's a tab there that says announcements, find tomorrow's date, which is Wednesday, April 1st, and then the log-on code to join us for that Zoom meeting tomorrow night is there. You can get in. That's at 7:00 Pacific time tomorrow night. All right, we're going to go to the phones right now and talk to Tyler calling from Dallas, Texas. Tyler, welcome to the Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Tyler: Hey Steve, can you hear me all right? I just wanted to get your perspective and opinion on Once Saved Always Saved. I argue with my friends about it a lot because I don't really think I believe in it. But the scripture and things that I use to argue it, they use the same scripture to say that Once Saved Always Saved is true, but it seems like they're reading their perspective into it. For example, when Jesus says, "He who don't remain in me will be cast away, withered and burned," and they say, "Well, that person was never in the vine to begin with." I'm confused because he says remain, and I can't remain in something I was never in.

Steve Gregg: Exactly. You see, the reason they're arguing like that is simply because they want to believe what it is they want to believe, and the scriptures don't support their belief. So what they do—now there's two things you can do when scriptures don't support your belief. You can change your belief and agree with scripture, or you can twist scripture to try to preserve the belief that you prefer to believe. And that's pretty much what they have to do.

There's a very good example you just gave. Jesus said in John 15 that he's the vine, we are the branches. Whoever remains in him will bear much fruit. But he says if anyone does not remain in him—and it's obvious that he's talking about staying. Remaining means to stay. So he's talking about people who are in fact branches in him, in the vine. But if they don't remain in him, they'll be cast forth as a branch and withered and burned.

This is pretty plain stuff. Only if you had already decided beforehand that you cannot lose your salvation would you have any difficulty understanding what Jesus said here or in many other places, or what Paul said or Peter or James or John, all of these or Hebrews. The writers of the New Testament, they all indicated there was a danger that a person may fall away from Christ if they allow themselves to do so and that they would not be in Christ anymore. And if you're not in Christ, you don't have salvation because salvation is in Christ.

Jesus said you have to remain in me. Now if somebody is determined to believe a doctrine no matter how hostile the witness of scripture is against their doctrine and they're not committed to scripture, they're just committed to what they want to believe—which is, by the way, many religious people. That's definitely where they're at. They don't honor the scripture. They honor their belief and exploit scripture as much as they can to support the belief they want.

And there are no scriptures that say you cannot lose your salvation. There are scriptures that warn against that loss as if it's a very real loss and there's some places that even predict it. Paul said in the last days many will depart from the faith. Well, again, you don't depart from something you've never been at. You can only depart from a place that you are and then you can leave that place. But you can't depart from the faith if you're not in the faith.

And there's many, many scriptures. Frankly, it's just in virtually all the major authors of scripture have given these warnings. So your friend, he wants to believe Once Saved Always Saved. Now I always wonder why does somebody want to believe that? And of course they'd say, "Well, obviously, I'd like to believe I'm going to go to heaven no matter what I do." Okay, but does the Bible say people are going to go to heaven no matter what they do?

Paul in 1 Corinthians 6 said that fornicators and idolaters and drunkards and adulterers and blasphemers will not inherit the kingdom of God. Okay, so the Bible does not say you're going to go to heaven no matter what you do. And he's warning Christians here, the Christians in Corinth, and also in Galatians 5 verses 19 through 21. Paul makes a similar list, a longer list of sinful things. He said, "I told you before, whoever does these things will not inherit the kingdom of God."

So anyone who thinks it doesn't matter what you do apparently hasn't paid any attention to what Paul said or what Jesus said. Jesus said on the day of judgment he's going to separate between the sheep and the goats. The sheep are going to go into eternal life, the goats into eternal punishment, and the basis of being designated as a sheep or a goat is about what you did or didn't do. I was naked and you clothed me. I was hungry and you fed me. When you did it to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me. Enter into the joy of your Lord. Then I was naked and you didn't clothe me. I was hungry and you didn't feed me. Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

That's Matthew 25. It's just a commonplace throughout the scripture in Paul and Peter and John and James and Jesus that what you do does matter. Now I can understand why someone might think, "But I'd like to think it doesn't. I'd like to think that I can live in sin and still go to heaven because when I was a little kid I said a sinner's prayer that someone told me to say and I repeated the words after them and they said that I'm saved for all time now." Well, they may have said that, but when you stand before God, God is not beholden to those people.

He's not obligated to honor what they told you. He honors his own words. People say all kinds of things. The Bible says if they don't speak according to this word, it's because there's no light in them. You can't trust somebody just because they happen to pastor the church you were raised in. They have to agree with Christ and the apostles and if they don't, they are inadvertently deceiving you, or maybe on purpose, but probably inadvertently.

And God has no obligation to say, "Oh, they told you that and so you thought that was true and so you lived a life that's worthy of hell, but because they told you you'd be saved if you did that, I'm supposed to honor that." Sorry, they don't tell me what I have to do. I tell them. And when pastors lie, whether they know they're doing it or not, to people and tell them it doesn't really matter how they live their lives, they're not saying anything that any of the apostles would agree with. In fact, they're contradicting all the apostles and Christ.

But I can understand if somebody doesn't love God, which means they're not saved—if they don't love God, but they want to go to heaven instead of hell, I can see how they'd be attracted to a doctrine that says, "You don't have to love God, you don't have to obey God, you don't have to be a Christian in the biblical sense, you don't have to be a disciple. You get to go to heaven anyway just because when you were a little kid you decided you wanted to be a Christian, but you've never lived for God since, and you can live for the devil until the day you die and still go to heaven." That's a gravy train, but it's not a gravy train that's described anywhere in scripture.

So if they're going to believe that, I guess the question I'd want to ask someone like that is, "Do you want to believe what the scripture says or do you want to believe what you want to believe?" And the answer to that will determine whether it's worthwhile having any further conversations with them. Because if they just say, "Well, I want to believe what I want to believe," well then, okay, what's the point of arguing? They're going to believe what they want to believe. There are people like that.

If they say, "No, I want to believe what the scripture says," then you can sit down and say, "Now listen, if you want to believe what the scripture says, we're going to look at the scriptures, no fair twisting, no fair pretending it says something different than what it says. That's not how you examine the scriptures. That's not how you conform your beliefs to the scriptures, not by looking at the scriptures and seeing if you can take a shoehorn and force a square peg into a round hole because you want it to fit. That's not the way people who are honest in the sight of God do theology."

And by the way, you may pretend that you're honest, all the people who agree with your doctrine might think you're honest because they're doing the same thing. But God is not fooled. God is not mocked. Do not be deceived. God is not mocked and he will not be fooled. So the best thing you can do is be honest, even if that means you have to obey what the scriptures tell you and conform your views to what the scripture says instead of what your pastor said or some book that you read. So that's what you're facing there with that person. I would ask them, "Are you interested in believing what the scriptures say or what you want them to say?" And the answer to that will tell you whether it's any sense talking to them about it anymore.

Tyler: Right. A lot of times they just tell me, they'll say other verses where I can't be snatched out of my hand or my father's hand. He's talking about someone else snatching you out of the hand. You can't be snatched. You can't snatch yourself out of a hand you're already in.

Steve Gregg: Exactly. He's saying that there are thieves and robbers that want to steal God's sheep, but God secures his sheep, and no one can snatch them out of his hand. He's stronger than anyone who might want to take you away from him. But he also describes in that very passage, he says who his sheep are. "My sheep hear my voice and they follow me." Okay, so if you're hearing his voice and following him, you're his sheep.

Now if you're following him today, but let's say six months from now you decide you don't want to follow him anymore, are you still a sheep? Well, no, you don't fit the description. The sheep are those who are following him. If you're following him, he protects you spiritually. If you're not following him, you're not his sheep. And it doesn't matter if you were one of his sheep before. The Bible talks about sheep that go astray and they do.

And certainly talks about Christians who go astray. And James said, "Brethren, if any of you errs from the truth or goes astray and one converts him, let him know that he who converts a sinner from the error of his way shall save his soul from death and shall hide a multitude of sins." Those are the closing verses of James. But you've got that kind of talk all through the Bible that you can wander away.

You shouldn't and you don't have to. You never have to worry that you're going to wander away as if it's inevitable or somebody can make you do it. That's what he's saying. No one can pluck you out of God's hands. But sheep do wander off if they're stupid. And let's face it, some people are just that stupid. I've known people who did. Shame on them. That's no shame on God. He'll keep his sheep. But you have to be one of the sheep. And being a sheep, he said, is that you're listening to Christ and following him. You stop doing that, you stop fitting the definition of one of his sheep and you stop having the protections of the shepherd. All right. Tyler, I appreciate your call. I hope that helps. We're going to talk next to Josef from Knoxville, Tennessee. Josef, welcome to the Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Josef: Thank you, Steve. I had a question for more of a hiccup, I'm a Protestant hiccup and question more towards the non-Protestant view on the Holy Spirit and the church. I wrote down my question. Most Protestants believe that the canonizing of scripture and the very early protection against heresy is a work of the Holy Spirit in the corporate church. And the non-Protestant view is also the same. But their problem with the Protestants is saying that a worldview is all relative and doesn't really have any basis for grounds in holding certain beliefs. And the example was looking at early history like with the canonizing of scripture and how we put a lot of confidence on the objective canon and we emphasize that the Holy Spirit used the church and the tradition to make it up because that happened obviously after the apostles. And even doctrines like the Trinity and Arianism, all these things. So if everything is relative in our doctrinal interpretations and we only nitpick certain historical church events and even a couple councils that we claim to be objective, how is the church consistently being a pillar and buttress of the truth?

Steve Gregg: Well, first of all, I don't know who says everything is relative. That'd probably not be the word you're thinking of. Most Christians believe in absolute truth rather than relative truth. The question you're asking is the canon of scripture. Roman Catholics will say, "How can you Protestants say you only follow scripture and not Catholic tradition when in fact the very selection of the books that belong to the scripture was made by Catholic tradition?" That is, the Catholics decided which books belong in scripture and now you Protestants want to reject the Catholic traditions but you want to accept the scripture. How can you do that?

Well, they're mistaken. There was no—when we say we're against Roman Catholic traditions, we only mean the unscriptural ones. And of course the Bible warns against—like the Pharisees. Christ rebuked them because they accepted the traditions of men at the expense of following the word of God. You find Jesus giving this rebuke to them in Mark 7 and also in Matthew 15 which is parallel. He said, "How can you believe who you're following the traditions of men? You're drawing near to God with your mouth but your heart's far from him and you're not following God's word, you're following human traditions."

Well, the Pharisees were not the last group to do that. Many religious Christians have done that. They follow the traditions of any group they want: the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox group, the Lutherans, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Pentecostals. You name it, people can follow whatever traditions they want, but if they're following any traditions contrary to the word of God, then they are in error.

Now the Catholic Church says, "Well, God is preserving truth through one institution, the Catholic Church, and therefore when the Catholic Church officially comes up with traditional ideas that aren't even found in the Bible and sometimes even contradict the Bible, well, they're still inspired because God's Holy Spirit is guiding the church corporately through its cardinals and its bishops and its popes and so forth."

Well, the Protestant says, "Well, we do believe the Holy Spirit guides the true church, but not necessarily through political leadership that's been elected by man and are mere humans and they come up with these traditions and tell us we're supposed to follow them." The Protestant would say, "No, we're supposed to follow what the Bible says." Now, of course, the Catholic says, "Well, whose interpretation of the Bible are you supposed to follow?" I'd say, "Well, the true one."

And it doesn't mean that when I read the Bible, I instantly know the true interpretation, especially when there's other groups that have different interpretations of the same passage. Fortunately, passages that are unclear where honest and intelligent Christians can have different opinions are not the important things. The things that are clear are the things that Christians have to agree about. There's probably hundreds of smaller points in the Bible that Christians can disagree about and it's not really problematic to disagree with them.

It's when people feel like you have to get everything right and we don't know who has everything right, so we're just going to say this group over here, whatever they say, it's all right. That's simply putting trust in men or a human organization and not in Christ or the Holy Spirit himself. As far as the choice of books that went into the New Testament, to say that those were selected by the Roman Catholic Church is anachronistic. The Roman Catholic Church didn't exist as a Roman Catholic Church where the Bishop of Rome is sort of the head of all the bishops in Western Europe or in Africa. That didn't exist when the canon of scripture came together.

What was called the Catholic Church before the Roman Catholic was simply the universal church. And bishops from all over the world, who were not necessarily subject to Rome or any one bishopric, got together and hammered out the arguments and figured out which books had apostolic origins. And they didn't do so lightly because after many councils, some of the books that are now in our New Testament were still held at arm's length by some. Some accepted all of them, some accepted some of them. Over time, the objections to some of the ones that were disputed were overcome.

And the objections to others that were disputed came to be dominant so that they were rejected by the church. But the point is, by the time we had the present canon of scripture established, there still had not arisen a pope yet. The idea of the Roman bishop being in charge of all the other bishops simply was not an established view of the church at those days. So it wasn't the Roman Catholic Church.

I don't care who decided that these books are genuine. If Paul wrote his epistles, they have his authority. And by the way, all of Paul's epistles were accepted as genuine before he died. In the first century, the church didn't have to decide whether Paul's epistles were authentic or not. The church knew long before that when Paul died, his epistles were recognized as his by everybody. Peter's first epistle was that way too.

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were all accepted immediately after the time of their writing. What there were some books, other books, not those ones, whose authorship was not known for certain. Hebrews, for example. Some questioned whether the Apostle John had written Revelation or whether John had written Second and Third John, or whether Peter wrote Second Peter. Okay, so the authorship of a few of these books was open to question.

But we have to realize that the books that we depend most upon, the Gospels, which have the teachings and life of Jesus, the writings of Paul, who wrote more books than anyone else in the New Testament, these were never questioned. We didn't have to wait for some Catholic council to tell us to accept them. The whole church accepted them from the moment they came from the pens of the authors.

The canon of scripture being decided finally in like 397 AD at the Council of Carthage, that only involved a few of the books, a few of the lesser books, generally speaking, which even if we didn't have them in our Bible, we'd still have the whole teaching of Christ and the apostles. But there was some question and it took a while to decide whether these were apostolic or not. I believe they are. I believe that the acceptance of them made sense.

But even without any council making a decision about this, we have enough in the undisputed writings of the apostles to know which traditions of the Catholic Church go against them and which do not. The Apostle Paul, for example, said a bishop must be a married man. Well, the Catholic Church's traditions say no, he has to be celibate. Okay, so you've got Paul insisting that a bishop must be married, and the Catholic tradition insisting that he can't be married. Are you going to flip a coin or are you going to go with the apostles?

It's not questionable. It's not like the Catholic Church has somehow a different interpretation of some obscure passage. When Paul said a bishop must be the husband of one wife, it's kind of unobscure. And by the way, the Catholic Church didn't always insist that bishops are celibate, but that was a tradition that developed among them. So what they're saying is we don't care what Paul said, our traditions overrule Paul. And that's the kind of thing that Protestants find to be a little bit disgusting, to feel that our leaders of our organization somehow have an authority that supersedes the apostles and can even contradict them.

At least I, as a Protestant, find that repugnant. And it's so unnecessary. It's so unnecessary for a church to look at something the Bible says and say, "Well, we're going to say the opposite here and we're just going to go with that." Why? What's the problem? I sometimes when I've seen movies based on Bible stories—and I've seen too many of those and I don't like most of them—the thing I notice is how often they change the story from the way it is in the Bible because they think it's better this way, the way they made the movie. And I think, "It's not, it's not better. Why can't they just follow the story as it is in the Bible?"

And I think that way about church traditions. Why can't they just go with what the Bible says instead of having to make it all complicated and come up with things that confuse people and even contradict what the Bible says? To me, a Christian is somebody who follows Christ as completely as they know how. And following Christ as completely as you know how means you accept his teachings as he gave them and the teachings of the apostles that he appointed. Because Jesus said if you receive the one I send, meaning an apostle, you've received me.

So you receive his apostles, you're receiving him. It's really pretty easy. Now you don't need—Jesus, by the way, didn't say anything about apostolic succession or that a second or third or fourth or tenth or millionth generation after him, there'd still be apostles who had the same authority that Peter and James and John and Paul had. I don't believe that. I just don't believe anyone has lived since the first century who has the authority to speak for Christ as the apostles that Jesus handpicked had.

And as long as they're saying the very same things Jesus and the apostles said, I'm not going to fight them. But if they're saying something opposite, then I will because traditions of men—I don't care what men, I don't care how big a church they run. The Mormons have a pretty big church and they got their traditions. Why should we follow the Catholic traditions instead of the Mormon traditions? They got men saying things there that's unscriptural too. Traditions of men simply do not hold a candle to the authority of scripture, in my opinion.

So that's how Protestants are. Now Protestants, you asked if Protestants think that the Holy Spirit guided the selection of books for the canon of scripture. I think most Protestants do, though we don't have to believe that. With or without special guidance, we would know that when Paul wrote a letter, he's writing as an apostle of Christ. When Matthew wrote a book about Jesus, Matthew was a disciple of Christ. John was an apostle of Christ. What these people wrote are authoritative. You don't need somebody to make a list of the total number of books. It doesn't hurt to have one. I'm just saying that even before such a list existed, it was never impossible to know how to follow Jesus in the apostolic manner because there were books that were never disputed that made those things clear. All right. I need to take a break. You're listening to the Narrow Path. Our website is thenarrowpath.com, and we have another half hour coming so don't go away. I'm going to be gone for 30 seconds and we'll have another half hour. Stay tuned.

Steve Gregg: 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 or the Christian faith, we'd love to talk to you about them. Got a lot of calls waiting to get in in this half hour. We've got one line open if you want to try to get through. The number is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. Our next caller is Michael from Inglewood, California. Michael, welcome to the Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Michael: Hello Steve, good to speak to you again. Last Friday there was a lady that called and I tried to get in to answer in case she's listening. She asked where can you find church fathers' writings and it's the Christian Classics Ethereal Library or ccel.org in case she's listening. But my question, you were just talking about interpretation and you mentioned Second Peter. In Second Peter 1:20 it says, "Knowing this first that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation." My question is considering maybe Daniel or Zechariah, but mainly John and Nero and the number 666, was that not kind of private interpretation?

Steve Gregg: Well, Peter didn't say that we're not supposed to interpret the scripture for ourselves. He said no prophecy of scripture came from anybody's private—he's not telling us how to or not to interpret the scripture. He's speaking about the origin of the scripture. What he says is, "Knowing this first that no prophecy of scripture is of," meaning arises from, "any private interpretation."

That is, the prophet was not giving his own private interpretation of things. He says, but by contrast, "for the prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit." He's not talking about how we treat scripture, he's talking about where it came from. It didn't come from anybody's personal opinions or private interpretations of the times they lived in. They were moved by the Holy Spirit. It didn't come by the will of man.

So Peter has actually nothing to say about the question of personally interpreting scripture. How in the world would you understand it if you don't? Interpretation refers to the process of taking something that is in symbols, that is letters and combinations of letters on a page, or maybe syllables spoken. If you can transform those symbols into thoughts, you've interpreted it.

Now if somebody's standing next to me speaking Chinese, I can't interpret those sounds. It's not like they're nonsensical; someone who knows Chinese would understand them. They could interpret them properly. But to turn those syllables into meaningful ideas or truths would be impossible for me because I don't know how to interpret them.

But if somebody speaks English and let's say it's very plain English, I can interpret those sounds. In fact, every time right now when I'm speaking, you are hearing the syllables coming out of my mouth and they are forming thoughts and ideas which hopefully you'll be able to interpret and understand. Every time we have a conversation, we're interpreting something.

Now the Jehovah's Witnesses—I've had them say, "We don't interpret the scripture, we just take it literally." Well, that's not not interpreting it. You're interpreting it literally. You can interpret something literally, you can interpret it figuratively, you can interpret it intelligently, you can interpret it unintelligently. You can interpret it devoid of its context or you can interpret it aided by its context.

When you're turning any book you read, not just the Bible—any time you read a printed page or hear spoken words, your mind is interpreting sounds, syllables, images, and so forth into thoughts. And the way you interpret something differs. You interpret poetry differently than you would interpret a children's fable differently than you would a technical manual for an electronic device. There's just different ways to transform what is communicated to us into thoughts.

And so when people say, "Well, you can't interpret scripture for yourself," well why not? I mean who's going to do it for me? Is there someone out there that's—their interpretation is infallible? If so, I've never met them. On occasion I've heard of people that are supposedly infallible, but then when I hear what they say, it's obvious they're not infallible; they say things that aren't true.

So I am responsible, it's a stewardship I have. If I have the Bible and I read the Bible, it contains truths that God is trying to communicate. I have to read it in such a way as to interpret it into truths. Now this helps if somebody has translated it into my language because the Bible's written in Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek. I don't read those languages. So I need a good translator. And now we've got English words on the page. I still have to interpret those, just like you have to interpret anything.

Anything that isn't a thought in itself but is a communication of a thought. You've got to use some form of interpretation to make those sounds into thoughts. And so yeah, we do interpret the Bible for ourselves. That's a good thing too, because if we leave it to other people to do, then we're stuck with their prejudices and their failures to understand things correctly. At least if I misinterpret something and I hold to it and follow it, I will be following my own mistake and not somebody else's.

I'm not afraid to make mistakes. I don't want to make mistakes, I'd like to know the truth about everything. But I'm going to pursue the truth as responsibly and honestly as I can. I'm not sure about anyone else. There are no doubt other people who do pursue the truth as honestly as they can, but I can't speak for them. I don't know if they are or not. And if they're making mistakes, I'd rather go by my own mistakes than theirs because I can be as honest and responsible as I intend to be. I can't make anyone else be that.

So of course you have to interpret it for yourself. Now on the other hand, if you interpret something in scripture one way and everybody else sees it a different way, then you might want to be humble enough to say, "Well, maybe I'm not seeing something here, maybe my interpretation needs to be cross-examined." And this has happened to me scores of times, if not hundreds of times in my lifetime, that something I was taught, I was reading the Bible a verse a certain way, and then it turned out that I looked at it differently and said, "Wait a minute, that's not the most responsible way to see it."

So I'd have to correct myself. But I can only do that if I'm thinking for myself and if I'm willing to do the kind of thinking that's involved in interpreting words into ideas. And so yeah, Peter's not saying don't interpret it for yourself. He's not even talking about us interpreting scripture, he's talking about the origin of the prophecy. No prophecy of scripture came from anyone's private opinions. The scripture did not come by the will of man, but the Holy Spirit moved people, holy men of God.

So that's what he's saying. I realize that Catholics and Protestants often make this mistake. Catholics will quote this verse to say, "You Protestants are not supposed to be interpreting the scripture for yourself, you have to let the Pope do it or you have to let the College of Bishops do it because Peter said it's not of any private interpretation." And then many Protestants say the same thing, only they say that their leadership is supposed to be interpreting it for you. It's amazing once you break away from papal authority and you're a Protestant, doesn't mean that you're not going to be following some tradition of man.

There's plenty of traditions of men out there outside of the Catholic Church and many Protestant churches have them. And anyone who doesn't want you to criticize their viewpoint or cross-examine it, and they're a leader, can say, "Oh, the Bible says don't think for yourself, the scripture is not for private interpretation." It does not say that. It's saying something entirely different than that. And so don't let anyone control you with that kind of an argument. It's not true. All right, let's talk to Mike from Phoenix, Arizona. Mike, welcome.

Mike: Hey Steve, how are you? Good, brother. Hey listen, I have a couple questions for you. Number one, I think there's things I differ, I want you to clarify on this. You know, we understand that when Christ and the apostles were there and then the apostles were left to develop the church, that the church was moved by the Holy Spirit. So we can see an evolution in the book of Acts, the church evolving. That by the time John dies, you know, they had already established bishops like Polycarp, Ignatius, Clement, and others in the church. These guys were established by Paul, Peter, and others. And so the church was in full swing when Ignatius writes his letter. The church was established. So if the church was established and there was a structure in the church already when Paul was alive, when John was alive, when Peter was alive, even in the Book of Revelation it says to the church or to the angel of the church of Smyrna, to the angel, obviously he's talking to the bishop of that church. One question I have is why do you have such a big—why is your ecclesiastical doctrine so way off? Like I mean, when we see the Holy Spirit already develop—Steve, you have a problem with church governance. You don't like the bishop call where there's an actual bishop of a church and then there's elders and overseers of it. You think it should be just full eldership. You always have problems with a pastor who's called to be a pastor or shepherd or bishop in the church to oversee the church. You think it should be ruled by a bunch of people rather than one. When Ignatius who was walking with John and Paul and all the other apostles and the church was already established, it was established by a bishop who would oversee the church. You seem to want to unravel that. Even the other day you even spoke about church membership and instead of being assumptive, you were very assumptive to think that having church membership was about having power over people rather than thinking that it was protection. Listen, church membership is very important because it protects the congregation from wolves. Who are the people asking for money? Who are the people that are serving among you? You're not going to put someone to take care of kids ministry just because they say they're a Christian from Antioch Church right down the block. So what? Who are you? Where do you come from? Do you have a letter? Church membership protects the congregation from wolves, but you seem to think that there's a problem with that.

Steve Gregg: Well, you seem to think that I have more problems than I do. You keep telling me how many things I have a problem with. I have a problem with this, I have a problem with that. I would say rather than my having a problem with things—because they aren't affecting me; I'm not adversely affected by the things you mentioned, so I don't have a personal problem with them. I'm a Bible teacher, okay? I don't teach against things I have problems with, I teach against things that the Bible would speak against and I affirm the things I find in the Bible.

Now yeah, there's lots of people read the Bible and they think they see something else, more power to them. I don't say they can't. Like I sometimes say, I'm the world's greatest authority on my own opinion and that's what I give here when people ask me questions; I'll give my opinion. My opinion is based on having spent over 60 years reading and studying the Bible, over 55 years teaching it verse by verse cover to cover. I've changed my views on things often because I read the Bible and because the views I was taught in my denomination I was raised in did not conform to the Bible sufficiently for me to continue teaching them.

So I've been in the process of learning for decades and decades. And that doesn't mean that I know everything. It just means I don't have a naive opinion about things. I mean, I may not be right about everything, but I'm certainly not naive about very many theological things because I've studied them out and I've debated them and so forth and I've done so without an axe to grind. I just want to believe what the Bible says and I want to teach what the Bible says because the Bible says teachers will have a stricter judgment.

So I don't really have the problems you're talking about. You say I have a problem with bishops. I don't have a problem with bishops; I'm not in a church that has one. If someone asks me whether the Bible teaches that a church should be headed by a bishop, I'll have to say of course not; we don't have anything in the Bible that says anything remotely like that. And many of the things that people assume as norms in the church are things that Jesus actually spoke against.

He told the disciples—and this was the apostles he was talking to—he says, "The rulers of the Gentiles exercise authority over them, but it shall not be so among you. But whoever will be chief among you must be the slave of everybody else." Okay, well that doesn't sound like organizational leaders, political leaders of an organization. That talks about people who are serving others. Now I have, of course, you brought up so many things that I can't bring them all up now because I have other people waiting and we only have 15 minutes or less left of the program.

But I do have lectures on this that cover almost everything you brought up at our website, thenarrowpath.com, and my lectures are free, everything at our website is free, so you don't have to—they're not hard to get. You can listen to them online. There's a series under the topical lectures at thenarrowpath.com called "Some Assembly Required." And it's about the church. It's about church leadership, it's about church organization, it's about that kind of thing. And it uses scripture.

Now you mentioned Ignatius and church fathers. You said these people walked with Paul and John. Actually, I don't think Ignatius did walk with Paul. He may have known John. Some people think that he had crossed paths with John. But by the time Ignatius was martyred, he was probably an old man and John had been long gone and we don't know if he spent much time with John or not. He probably never saw Paul. Most of the apostles were dead before Ignatius was born. Ignatius was probably born around 70 AD, actually, and very few of the apostles would still be left.

Anyway, how long does it take when an apostle leaves the church for it to devolve into something different than what the apostles approved of? Well, let's take the book of Galatians. Paul wrote the book of Galatians probably within weeks or months of his having been to the Galatian churches. He had evangelized that region, he'd planted those churches, he'd set up leaders in them. And then he has to write back to them and say they've departed from the gospel. They're moving into Judaizing. Some of them are thinking they need to get circumcised.

Now the Apostle Paul had been among them weeks earlier and they're already, he said, departing from the gospel. He said they've fallen from grace, they've become estranged from Christ, he told them. How about the Corinthian church? Paul spent 18 months with the Corinthian church after he founded them. And then he leaves and shortly after that he has to write back First Corinthians. They've got people saying, "I'm of Paul, I'm of Apollos, I'm of Cephas." They've got people disrupting the service, they're getting drunk at communion, a guy is living sinfully with his father's wife.

I mean, how—it doesn't take very long once the apostles are gone for churches to deviate from apostolic patterns. Now I'm not saying people like Ignatius and the church fathers that they fell into really nasty stuff like Corinth did, let's say. But it's the most natural thing in the world for a group of people to start depending on one man to be their leader. And that happens in almost every group.

In fact, even before John died, that had happened in a church. We don't know what church it was, but in the book of Third John he's writing to his friend saying, "Look out for Diotrephes. He loves to have the preeminence. He's kind of bullying the church." Well, certainly that's during the lifetime of John. And anyone who was following what Jesus said about leadership would never be doing that and yet this already is creeping into the church in John's lifetime.

So if we say, "Well, these early church fathers, they were very early, in some small ways their lives somewhat overlapped the lives of the apostles," well maybe, we don't know to what degree they had contact with the apostles. They were essentially a generation later or two generations later. But that doesn't mean that when the apostles were gone these guys, they did things exactly the way the apostles did.

Church does change. Now you mentioned the church evolved during the book of Acts. Well, it didn't really evolve, it grew. It grew and the main change that it grew into was a movement that included Gentiles who were uncircumcised. And yeah, that was something they hadn't thought through until there were a lot of Gentiles coming in. And so they had the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 and they decided that the Gentiles don't have to be circumcised or keep the Jewish law. But they weren't sure about that until they had that council.

That's not really the church evolving so much as growing into an understanding of what the church is. But you see, here's how I would—you talk about a church evolving or sometimes people talk about how the church matured. After the apostle was gone, it matured and that's why we have all this organization. Well, I would say something is maturing if it's becoming more consistent with what Christ said, more consistent with what the apostles said, not less so.

If it's deviating from Christ the apostles said, it's not maturing, it's drifting. It's drifting. And so I do see the church maturing in the book of Acts. I don't see it drifting. But we do see a little bit of evidence of drift in John's epistles, which were probably the latest books written in the New Testament, where false teachers are there denying that Christ came in the flesh, there's Diotrephes who's just the big boss man in the church.

This kind of stuff became very commonplace in the church throughout history after that, but it was not growth or development, it was getting off target. It's drifting. At least that's my interpretation of it. And if you interpret it differently, you can. Nobody is obligated to believe the way I do, but we are all obligated to believe the way Jesus and the apostles taught. That's all I stand for. You don't have to agree with what I think about it, but you do need to follow Christ and the apostles. If that leads you to believe something different from what I believe, fine, because you have no obligation to believe what I say.

But on the other hand, I gotta feeling if you go by only what Christ and the apostles said, a lot of your views that you're representing right now will probably come over a little more the direction I'm at because I've made that journey also myself. Leaf from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, welcome.

Leaf: Hey, how are you doing, Steve? This is kind of in reference to the debate you had not too long ago against Joel in Wisconsin, I believe, Joel Richardson. I'm not understanding the mechanism that is drawing a Zionist ethic into the New Covenant or into the New Testament into our modern life. I always thought it had to do with how dispensationalists view the dispensations and the fact that the third temple would be rebuilt in some narrative or whatever. But here you have, and I've seen you've debated Dr. Brown as well who doesn't say that he's a dispensationalist. So I am confused about how you can not be a dispensationalist and yet still draw that ethic. I'm sure there's a way to do it; I just don't get it. So maybe you could elaborate on that.

Steve Gregg: So you're saying Zionism seems to be something that's tied to dispensationalism, Zionism and dispensationalism seem to be tied together, joined at the hip. And yet you've got people like Joel Richardson or Michael Brown who say they're not dispensational but they've got the dispensational ideas about Zionism. Well, the truth is I believe you'll find that people like that usually used to be dispensationalists and they've gravitated away from a pre-trib rapture. I think that most—the two guys that you mentioned, I think would both say that they don't believe in a pre-tribulation rapture.

And because they don't, they would say they are not dispensationalists, because dispensationalists do believe in a pre-trib rapture. So they would say they're not dispensational and they would say they're historic premillennial. Now we need to understand: premillennialism is the view that Jesus will establish the millennium when he comes back. There are dispensational premillennialists and there's historic premillennialists.

Dispensational premillennialists believe Jesus will come back, set up the temple, restore Jewish sacrifices, have a Jewish-centered millennial kingdom. And that's basically dispensational premillennialism. Historic premillennialism was held by many church fathers. They were premillennial but they weren't dispensational and they didn't believe in a pre-trib rapture, they didn't believe in a rebuilt temple in the millennium, they didn't believe that the Jewish order was going to be restored with Jewish sacrifices in the millennium. They didn't even believe that the millennium was a fulfillment of promises made to Israel at all.

They believed that Jesus was the fulfillment of the promises God made to Israel. But they did believe that there was a millennium because that's how they read Revelation 20. Now you may know that through most of history, premillennialism of any kind was pretty much shunned by the church. After some of the church fathers had held it, it kind of ceased to be taught in the church and then it wasn't part of Christianity until the 1800s when Darby and the dispensationalists brought it back in the new form, the dispensational form.

Now these gentlemen you mentioned, I think they have dispensationalism in their background. And they have realized the Bible nowhere speaks of a pre-trib rapture and I think that's the main thing that they saw dispensationalism as. And when they gave up the pre-trib rapture they say, "I'm not dispensational."

But what they don't seem to acknowledge is the most defining aspect of dispensationalism is giving Israel a prominent place in the end times and assuming that the promises God has made to Israel have not yet been fulfilled, even though Jesus came and the New Testament represents him as the fulfillment of the promises God made to Israel, and the church always saw it that way until the 1800s.

But these guys have decided no, I think they've retained that dispensational idea without realizing that's a dispensational idea. If they say they are historic premillennial but they still believe there's unfulfilled promises to Israel, then they don't believe what the historic premillennialists believed in the first three centuries. They're still dispensational, really essentially, they're just dispensational without a pre-trib rapture.

And so that's why they're Zionist. Basically, I mean there's two reasons to be Zionist. One would be if you're not religious at all but you just think that it's a good idea for Jews to be in their old land, you could be a Zionist, a secular Zionist. That's actually how Zionism started; Theodor Herzl, a secular Jew, started the movement in Europe in the 1800s. It was not a religious movement at all. You could be a secular Zionist just because you think politically it's a good idea for the Jews to have their land.

Or you could be a Christian Zionist which is almost certainly going to be based on dispensationalism because dispensationalism is the only theological system that imagines that Christ failed to fulfill the promises to Israel and has to fulfill them instead at his second coming, and that there's a lot of unfulfilled promises that need to be fulfilled to Israel. That's dispensationalism. These men are not dispensational in that they don't believe in the pre-trib rapture. But they are dispensational in their view of Israel.

Hey, I'm out of time. Sorry to say. You've been listening to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. We are listener-supported. Our website is thenarrowpath.com. Thanks for joining us.