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 taking your calls. If you have questions about Christianity, about the Bible, anything related to that, Christian theology, ethics, apologetics, or Christian history, we'll be glad to talk to you about those things. If you've listened before or you listen today and hear something that you don't agree with that is said by the host, feel free to call in and tell us why. We'd be glad to talk to you about that.

The number to call is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. Many of you know I'm teaching an itinerary in Washington state at the moment. We've got about half of that behind us and a little bit before us. I won't be in Washington state tomorrow; I will be on Vancouver Island at the Mill Bay Community Hall tomorrow.

We have actually two lecture sessions, and one of them is from 3:00 to 5:30, I believe. The other is from 7:00 to 9:00 PM. The first session, they've asked me to speak on challenges to biblical living in secular culture. The second one, they want me to talk on the true church versus the institutional religion. I'll be talking about those things tomorrow afternoon and evening on Vancouver Island at the Mill Bay Community Hall in Mill Bay, British Columbia.

That's the one time this week I'm not in Washington state. The following night, Saturday, I'll be in Mercer Island speaking again at the place I often speak when I'm here. If you want to go there, you have to call and let the people know. I'll be in North Bend, Washington on Sunday morning and evening at a church there, North Bend Community Church.

Then we've got Spokane on Monday, Kamiah, Idaho on Tuesday, and then on Thursday, I'll be in Boise, Idaho. If you're in any of those places and would like to come to any of these gatherings, you just have to go to our website, thenarrowpath.com, and there's a tab that says announcements. Just click on that tab and it'll take you to a page that will show you all these meetings and others. Anytime I'm speaking someplace, it is listed at that tab, announcements. Enough announcements for today. We will go to the phone lines and occupy the rest of the hour with our callers. Our first caller today is Jim in Hayward, California. Jim, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Guest (Male): Hi Steve, good talking to you again. I'm hospitalized as I frequently am and I didn't have access to a phone, so I couldn't call you a couple of weeks ago. I know your birthday went by.

My question is if a person is a non-believer, and the reason for my question is I'm concerned about a young man that I've shared with who is just an adamant non-believer, is there any chance that the Lord will reveal himself to that person so that they can come to salvation?

Steve Gregg: That would be the thing you'd want to be praying for, I think, is that God will work on that person to soften their heart. That may be a rough road. Sometimes God softens people by putting them through some hardships and so forth. You don't wish any harm on them, but you do wish for their good. If they are hard-hearted, obviously the only thing that would do them good is to have their heart softened.

God knows how to do that kind of thing. To pray for that would be a reasonable prayer. Also, of course, God can reveal himself to them. In fact, pretty much he's going to need both. He's going to need to have his heart softened if he's adamantly adversarial toward God right now. His heart is hard. He'll need his heart softened and he'll also need to have a revelation of God.

A lot of people don't place any emphasis on getting a revelation of God. Lots of people born and raised in church become believers kind of by default and move into their adult life, maybe to the day of their death, and never really know God. They know about him. They don't disbelieve, but it really can't be said that they've had a real encounter with God to know him. Jesus said this is eternal life, that they may know you, the one true God and Jesus Christ whom you've sent.

To know God is eternal life. It's not just holding propositions that are correct about God in your mind. This is a relationship with God and you don't have relationships unless you have some kind of contact with somebody. We do need a revelation from God. Remember, when Jesus asked the disciples who do you say I am? Peter said you're the Christ, you're the Son of the living God. Jesus said blessed are you, Peter, because flesh and blood, meaning human beings, have not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven has.

Jesus was delighted to see that Peter had had the revelation of God that caused him to have confidence in Christ. What's interesting, he said that flesh and blood did not reveal it to you. And yet, what had Peter said? He said that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of the living God. Peter had heard that report about Jesus from his brother Andrew right at the beginning before he even met Jesus.

Andrew, his brother, had come to him and told him that they'd found the Messiah. Peter came and apparently became a believer in what his brother said, and Jesus knew that. But Jesus said it wasn't what your brother said; it's not any human being that revealed this to you. A human being may tell you about it, but you have to have it revealed to you by the Father.

As you said, can God reveal himself to this man? Of course God can. These are the things you should be praying will happen. This is something that people need to bear in mind. A lot of times children raised in the church turn against Christianity, or even people who have never been in the church, they have some kind of irrational resistance to Christianity.

Apologists who argue for Christianity can sometimes put before their mind all the reasons why someone should believe and that any real intelligent, rational person would believe if they knew these things. But a person can hear all that and still just not be moved, not believe. God has to do a work. It's not just hearing the truth or even hearing it defended. God has to reveal himself to somebody. At that point, the person is really going to be converted.

Yeah, Jim, you're talking to a guy who's adamantly against Christianity. Is there hope for him? Of course there is. Many people who serve God faithfully today were once adamantly against God, or at least against Christ. The Apostle Paul being one of those. He wasn't against God, but he was against Jesus. But Jesus revealed himself to him.

When I talk about God revealing himself to an unbeliever, I don't mean exactly the way that Saul of Tarsus got a revelation. He got a vision from heaven and was blinded. It was a miraculous revelation. For most of us, it's a revelation inside our hearts, but it's still rather unmistakable. That's what we need to be praying for your friend and frankly, anyone we hope to be saved, that God will not just soften their heart, which has to be done before they can repent, but also when the heart is soft enough to be receptive, that God will reveal himself to them. Jim, I appreciate your call. I know you're in the hospital. I hope you're getting better.

Let's talk to Robert in Nampa, Idaho. Robert, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Guest (Male): Hi Steve, good to talk with you. I get to see you next week when you're in Boise on Thursday, a week from today. That's on my birthday, so that'll be great. Anyway, a little question here on altar calls.

In '78 I was in Costa Mesa, Calvary Chapel, got saved on a Monday night back in the days when Greg Laurie was doing Monday nights there. I'm not sure if you were there in '78, but I visited. I had moved away from Southern California by that time, but I did come down and visit my folks and I did go hear Greg Laurie sometimes at Calvary on Monday nights.

My question is on altar calls. Back then I thought they did some great altar calls as far as being informative, as far as exactly what it was all about. It wasn't wishy-washy like a lot of altar calls are today. Do you believe that good, effective, informative altar calls can be an effective tool for the Lord to save people if they're done right?

Steve Gregg: Yes, of course I do. We don't have any example in the Bible of anyone giving altar calls, but there's nothing that would prevent an altar call from being effective in bringing people to Christ, assuming of course the message has been made plain. That is, assuming the people know what it is they're coming forward for.

Like you said, sometimes that information is clearly given before the altar call is made. Other times it's frankly not. I've seen altar calls where someone just said accept Jesus in your heart so that you won't end up in the tribulation if Jesus comes and takes the church today or something.

There's no understanding of what it means to have Christ within you, nor is that the best motivation because lots of people who have no real interest in Christ might come forward and do the thing because they have an interest in themselves. Of course, whatever we do that's strictly for ourselves doesn't really result in conversion. A person who comes to Christ has to deny themselves.

Guest (Male): I've seen good ones and bad ones throughout all my years since I got saved. I always thought as far as in the Gospels and in the book of Acts, everybody had a unique story as far as coming to the Lord. In a way, I always look at that as that was their altar call, that in some way when Jesus says to the disciples, come forward, follow me, that was their altar call.

Steve Gregg: Yeah. On the day of Pentecost when Peter gave his sermon, he gave no altar call, but the people came up anyway. They said, "What must we do to be saved?" If he had called them forward, they could have still gotten saved.

Guest (Male): So in a sense, it might not be exactly the same, but I always look at that as in a way that was their altar call to receive and make a decision and follow. Even though it's not like what we consider altar calls today in a church, I always thought if it was done right and even a follow-up, like a lot of the Calvarys used to do follow-ups after the altar call, get people a Bible and try to give them instruction, that that would be a good step for people that are just starting out.

Steve Gregg: I was raised in a church that gave altar calls after every service. If someone wanted to receive Christ, they'd be given some counsel in the pastor's office after the service and probably given a Bible if they didn't have one. Calvary Chapel did that too. It's kind of a standard American evangelical practice.

There's nothing really wrong with it with the exception that if you say come forward, that's nice, but does a person know what is involved in coming forward? Do they know that they're surrendering their whole life for the rest of their life to be slaves of Jesus and to be not their own, but bought with a price?

Guest (Male): I think Chuck Smith and Greg Laurie used to talk about counting the cost to follow and to repent. I used to hear that quite a bit, so I thought they're trying to stay on top of it as far as not taking this for granted.

Steve Gregg: I grew up listening to Billy Graham and he was definitely my hero and of course he was the master in my generation, the master of altar calls. When I was 15, I became one of the counselors at the Billy Graham Crusade in Anaheim, California. When people went forward, I went forward because I was trained by the Billy Graham Association how to deal with the people who came forward.

You do everything you could to make sure they understood what it meant to be committed to Christ. But you know what you find is like I went to an evangelistic meeting once and I was in the audience, but the preacher gave an altar call, but he didn't really explain what it was about. There was a dramatic presentation about heaven and hell. It was supposed to make people very much afraid to go to hell and want to go to heaven.

At the end, the whole sermon was about do you want to go to heaven? Accept Jesus. You don't want to end up in hell. Accept Jesus. There was really no content that indicated what accept Jesus means. Of course, the implication was because evangelicals often think this way, it means say a prayer, say a prayer asking Jesus to come into your heart.

I was raised with that idea all my life until I actually studied the Bible and couldn't find any evidence that anyone in the Bible ever asked Jesus into their heart or came forward at an altar call.

Guest (Male): Unless it's like "call upon the name of the Lord to be saved" is probably what they would think of.

Steve Gregg: Right, but sometimes when they say call upon the name of the Lord, they're using the word Lord just as one of the nicknames of Jesus, just call upon Jesus. Most people don't even know what a Lord is. Even when the Philippian jailer said what must I do to be saved and Paul and Silas said believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you'll be saved.

I knew that scripture all my life, but it never really sunk in what it meant to call him Lord. Remember Jesus said why do you call me Lord, Lord and you don't do what I say? He was not impressed with people who called him Lord, Lord and didn't do what he said.

It's possible that if our altar calls are too vague and just an attempt to report afterwards we had 80 people come forward, well that's kind of good for fundraising, that's good to promote your ministry, but if you had 80 people come forward in a meeting, it was an exceptionally revival time or else the people came forward, many of them not really fully knowing what they're doing.

At the one I mentioned where the guy kept talking about heaven and hell, at the end some people came forward and then he said, "Now we're going to have some counselors talk to you about what it is you've committed yourself to."

I remember thinking none of these people as far as we know have committed themselves to anything. They just don't want to go to hell. They made no commitment. They're just kind of coming on Black Friday to Best Buy to get there before everybody else gets there. It's kind of a "come and get it" kind of a gospel. A "come and get it" gospel is not what Jesus or the Apostles preached. I'm in no sense opposed to altar calls assuming that the gospel and its cost and what it really involves has been made clear to people.

If they don't know that, they will come forward and you'll say a little prayer with them sometimes, you lead them in prayer so they're not even generating the prayer, and then you send them home with the assurance of salvation when they might have never done business with God in any way. I just want to get that clarification with you. I'll be glad to see you next Thursday. Robert, look forward to seeing you too. God bless.

Peter from Everett, Washington is next. Hi Peter.

Guest (Male): Hey. I need the scriptural verification of a knuckleheaded thing I did. You're the guy that came to mind because I looked at the congregations I belong to and they don't know apologetics from a depression.

At one time I was exasperated and disillusioned and I prayed to God, I'm exasperated, disillusioned, get off my flipping boat, I'm taking over. We'll see how this works. Amen.

That was not smart. I had predictable results and upon realizing how bankrupt I was, I said, Father, please help me. Something happened but now 40-odd years later there's no scriptural reference saying you can get to the Kingdom of God through the Father.

Steve Gregg: Well sure you can. I mean it's through Jesus, but if you call out to the Father...

Guest (Male): I didn't ask for him. I asked for the Father. That's been a stark... I assume that maybe because I asked the Father to leave my flipping boat, that Jesus still walked with me, but that was not my understanding at the time.

Steve Gregg: Well, I don't really make the stark distinction between the work of the Father and the work of Jesus that some people do. Jesus and the Father are two persons in the Godhead in my opinion, but Jesus is the Father's right hand. He's God's working through Jesus.

If you call out to God in sincerity, it's Jesus who saves you. It's Jesus who died for you and rose again and God knows that. It's on the behalf of, you know, if you're sincerely surrendering to God, then Jesus is not uninvolved in that situation.

Remember Jesus told a parable, this was not an actual case but apparently is a realistic case, the publican and the Pharisee in the temple praying and the publican just said, "God be merciful to me, a sinner." Now in his Jewish mind because these were Jewish men in the temple, God means who we call the Father. He's calling out on God the Father.

Jesus said that man went home justified. Now he's not justified apart from the blood of Jesus. In fact, Jesus hadn't even shed any blood yet when he told this story. Of course it wasn an actual story but there must have been people of that type who made that kind of appeal to God.

God would save them because Jesus was in fact going to die for them. Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and David and Moses and the prophets were all saved, not without Christ, but probably without knowing the name of Jesus. I don't know if anyone in the Old Testament knew the name of Jesus.

Some of them might not have fully understood the atonement. Yeah, there were some scriptures that mentioned Jesus being an atoning sacrifice, but it's not as if everyone in Israel had a Bible and knew everything in it. People who cried out to God in sincerity would be saved, but they'd be saved by Christ.

If you called out on God in sincerity and surrendered to God and repented of your sins to God, well then you would have gotten saved, but it would be through Christ that you were saved. I think that's true of people in the Old Testament. Like I said, they didn't know the name of Jesus. They didn't know the gospel as we do.

But if they were sincerely seeking God, God knows. God's more eager to save people than people are eager to get saved. And so, you know, if people kind of don't know all the details, don't know all the facts, but they're coming to God in humility, God gives grace to the humble and resists the proud.

So I mean it depends on what the nature of your surrender was or your nature of calling out on him. But I don't think you have to worry. Some might I guess, but I wouldn't. I wouldn't worry about whether you had called out to the Father or to Jesus. The salvation we receive is the salvation of the Father and of Jesus.

They're not at cross purposes with each other. So I'm going to say, assuming you've lived your life as a Christian since then following Christ, then I don't see any necessary defect in the way that you turned to Christ and called out for mercy or to God.

Ryan in Greenville, South Carolina, welcome.

Guest (Male): Hey Steve. I just wanted to ask you a question. I hear so many people praising Augustine the church father and to my knowledge he brought in a lot of the headache of Calvinism. I was just curious if you could give me a more succinct list of your criticisms of Augustine.

Steve Gregg: Well, of course Augustine is the most influential theologian who ever lived. He is the father of the Roman Catholic Church and he's the father of the Reformation too. Now, of course when we talk with the Roman Catholic and the Reformation, we're talking about Western Christianity.

He had no significant influence on Eastern Christianity. They developed their understanding independently of Augustine. They weren't followers of his. But he was a Latin father, meaning he was part of the Latin church or the Western church.

He basically taught that all the bishops should submit to the bishop of Rome, which is essentially Roman Catholic foundation there. But he's also the founder of the doctrines we call Calvinism today. No church father before Augustine in the fifth century taught what we call Calvinistic five points.

Calvin never pretended that they did. He basically said he was expounding on Augustine's views. Now, I believe therefore that Augustine laid the foundation for some doctrinal issues that are to my mind not pure and good. Now you have to understand if you buy the set of the church fathers, which is like 36 volumes or something like that, there's probably five volumes of Augustine's writings.

A very great amount of it is what all Christians would agree with. He was a saintly man. He was a monk and he lived a very saintly life. But like any Christian, he was fallible and in some ways the products of his time.

In some ways he was an innovator because he integrated like the Calvinistic doctrines that had never been in the church before except in the Manichean cult. Those doctrines which we call Calvinism were known to the earlier church fathers before Augustine, but they recognized them as part of Manicheanism, a heresy. Only Augustine, who had been a Manichean and became a Christian, introduced them and made them acceptable in the church.

So you know he, I believe he corrupted the church in some ways, but certainly not on purpose. I think he was a sincere believer, but a fallible one. I need to take a break. You're listening to The Narrow Path, our website's thenarrowpath.com. I will be right back.

Welcome back to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we're live for another half hour taking your calls. Right now we have a couple of lines open if you want to try to get through. You have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith. The number to call is 844-484-5737.

Michael in Inglewood, California, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Guest (Male): Hi Steve. I'm calling because it seems like the more I study theology, the more perturbed I get from its history. I heard you say yesterday we study through an American evangelical lens. The thing is, it kind of seems like that's even worse than the Black Liberation theological lens.

I heard on Matthew 7:13, a lady called and said she thanked you for opening her eyes to other lenses besides that American evangelical lens. But my question is, is it not better to learn the Bible through no lens at all?

Steve Gregg: Well, if we were not human beings, that would be wonderful. I mean, like if we had no prejudices, if we had no assumptions, if we had no upbringing in religious ideas, then when we got saved, we'd be a blank slate.

I suppose if we were on a desert island not influenced by preachers and books and Christian radio and things like that and just had a Bible, I would say it'd probably be a reasonably good way to learn the Bible. But none of us are in that condition.

Everybody who becomes a Christian, at least in a country where Christianity has long been known, has some ideas about Christianity already. Then of course everyone who is led to the Lord by another person is led to the Lord by somebody who has their own theological outlook.

Guest (Male): I brought up American evangelical theology because of the founders. They were slave owners and also KKK were prominent members in the early 20th century.

Steve Gregg: Well, I don't think that American evangelicalism in any sense was derived from theologians who were part of the KKK. I think more we'd say the KKK was some fringe group of extreme racist people who happened to be attached to the evangelical churches in some way.

Unfortunately, there's all kinds of bad people who have very bad attitudes or bad theology who nonetheless are not unchurched. They go to church and that is bad. To say that the founders of American evangelicalism were slave owners is not quite true.

Charles Finney, for example, was very much an abolitionist and he was one of the most influential revivalists in early American evangelicalism. He was staunchly against slavery and didn't have slaves. Wesley also, John Wesley, who was also influential that way, also was very much against slavery.

As were many other early founders of evangelicalism in America, but of course those were... Wesley was English but he did a lot of ministry over here too. D.L. Moody would be a strong influence in the formation of American evangelicalism. I'm pretty sure he didn't have any slaves.

To say that the theology was formed by slave owners is first of all not very accurate. But more than that, almost every viewpoint, Christian or non-Christian, that has come down to us from two centuries ago or earlier was held by people who had slaves or at least many of whom did.

Slavery wasn't an American institution. There were Americans who had slaves, though the vast majority of Americans didn't have slaves. There were especially slaves in the South but most Southern people didn't own slaves. It was a nasty thing where it existed.

Slavery was practiced in every society in the whole world; Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, Hindu, if there were atheists, they weren't back then, but if there were atheists, they would have had slaves too. The teachings of Jesus had not yet fully informed everybody's social and political thinking and still haven't.

Slavery was one of those things that was very hard to get rid of. Even we read that George Washington had slaves and Thomas Jefferson had slaves and so forth. Now, they're not founders of American Christianity, but they're founders of American government.

I believe they both objected to slavery. You might say that's easy to do where you're still keeping your slaves. It's not that easy because slavery was deeply entrenched. In some cases, slaves had been so robbed of independent spirit that when they were let go, they really felt like they didn't know what to do.

In the Bible, people say why did the Bible not condemn slavery? Why didn't Paul abolish slavery? Why didn't he tell slave owners let your slaves go? Why did he simply say if you have slaves, treat them fairly, treat them like brothers, do not abuse them and so forth? Why didn't he just say let them go?

Well, one reason is while that might have been the right response for in certain cases, a lot of people were slaves in the Roman Empire because they sold themselves into slavery. Because they simply had not been able to support themselves. They got into debt over their head. They couldn't support their families.

Selling themselves into slavery was the only way out of being homeless. And many of them would, if they had nice masters who took care of them and fed them well and treated them well, it was frankly a better gig for some than just sleeping in the gutter and being a beggar.

Of course not everyone enjoyed being slaves or everyone would prefer it. But the point is, if slavery was simply made illegal and everyone had to let their slaves go, then many of the slaves, not all of them, and we're not talking about African slaves here, we're talking about European slaves with European masters.

This is not racial slavery in biblical times. It was not a racial issue. It was an economic issue. People who could not support themselves were permitted to and were allowed to sell themselves as slaves so that they'd have security for life. All they had to do is serve their master.

That might not be any harder than serving themselves if they had a plantation of their own to run. It's same kind of work. But when you don't own the thing and someone else does and they've given you security for life, frankly there's a certain kind of person who'd rather have that security.

In fact, we see a trend in our own society now of generations that want the government to take care of them and don't want to have personal responsibility for their own upkeep. The more the government offers to pay for your healthcare or to have a safety net if you lose your job and to do just about everything for you, the more people are saying, "Yeah, sign me up."

But you can't really have the government do that without the government taking from you things they wouldn't otherwise have to take. They have to take your money first of all to pay for these things. They also have to regulate the terms by which you're going to get those things, which if you agree to them, then you're losing some of your freedom.

I'm not saying it can't be done or shouldn't be done. I'm saying that there's a continuum just in life. At one end is total freedom. At the other end is total bondage, but there's security because the person who has you in bondage is responsible to take care of you and they will presumably.

All of us either give up freedom in order to go on the security side or we give up security, that is we give up government-provided or human-provided security to have more freedom. As a Christian and frankly as an American too, I love freedom and I don't want the government providing any security. I don't want any help from the government. I don't want anyone else guaranteeing my security.

As a Christian I trust God and I'll take my responsibility for myself all myself and for my family. Not everyone's eager to do that. So there's different kinds of people. Not everyone loves freedom as much as they love security.

Slavery, if your master was not abusive and many times the masters of slaves were frankly kindly people, Christian people who treated them well. In I'm sure in many cases they did release their slaves if that's what the slave... it'd be better for them. A Christian is always concerned about bettering the life of somebody else.

If they had a slave who was clearly be more desirable for them to be free, I'm sure many Christians gave their freedom to their slaves. But on the other hand, some slaves might fear to be let go because they couldn't make it financially on their own. That's why they sold themselves into slavery. Now that they're older, there's no promise they could make it on their own.

So you might say well there were slave owners in the founding of this country. There were slave owners even among some evangelical people, I'm not sure who they were, but most evangelicals were against slavery long time before it was abolished politically.

So I don't, yeah I wouldn't say that. American evangelicalism, I'm not coming against it. I'm saying that like any other brand of Christianity, and you know there's many denominations and brands of Christianity, it has its own strengths and weaknesses.

I was raised American evangelical all my life and I consider myself to be an American evangelical. I have not rejected evangelicalism, but I have felt that when we look at American evangelicalism we might need to do the same thing Paul said: judge all things and hold fast to what is good.

There's no movement within or outside the church that is perfect. If we look critically at the Christianity that we were raised with or that we inherited from a previous generation and it's strictly speaking an American brand of Christianity because frankly if you go back a few hundred years even evangelicals didn't hold the same positions modern evangelicals do.

We need to get back to scripture and say, "Okay, I was taught this is how Christianity is lived, this is how we present the gospel, this is how we conduct church." And it was from the paradigm of my upbringing, which was evangelicalism of an American brand.

Since that time, for many years, I've been weighing that paradigm against what I find in scripture. That means that sometimes I'm in a position to critique some aspects of the form of Christianity that I was raised with. It's not an absolute rejection of it. If you change it, that's really so that you won't have to reject it. If it's going wrong, you either have to reject it or reform it, or just go wrong with it.

To my mind, I don't want to reject it and I don't want to go wrong with it. I just assume do what I can to modify it in the ways that the Bible requires so that I have a more historic, biblical kind of Christianity. That's what I'm after. Those are my thoughts. I'm not critical of the founders of American evangelicalism, but I will say that it has taken on the character of secular American culture to a very large extent, including in the way we present our messages to the unbelievers.

Let's talk to Craig in Seattle, Washington. Craig, welcome.

Guest (Male): Yes, to follow up on the earlier caller, what are the five points of Calvinism?

Steve Gregg: The five points of Calvinism are those which are usually summarized by the acrostic tulip, T-U-L-I-P. Each letter stands for one of them. Now I'm not sure Calvin spoke French, not English, so he didn't put this acrostic together.

We're talking about English words. I don't know that he ever came up with the tulip acrostic, but English-speaking Calvinists who follow his teaching have been able to summarize the distinctives of his teaching in this.

T-U-L-I-P are five different doctrines which are not the core of Christianity. They are the aspects of Christian doctrine where Calvin differed from other Christians who aren't Calvinistic. Of course, the five points of Calvinism were introduced, at least four of them were introduced by Augustine. No Christian father before Augustine ever taught them. It's a distinctive theological position in contrast to more ancient Christian teachings.

The way we talk about the five points of Calvinism, the first one is total depravity. The second one is unconditional election. The third is called limited atonement. There's then irresistible grace and perseverance of the saints. That's T-U-L-I-P, tulip.

If you accept one of these, you pretty much have to accept the others unless you're not rational because they are like chains in a logical progression. Once you have the first one, it requires pretty much the next one and the next one and the next one. It's a very logical system, I should say a very self-consistent system internally.

This makes it very attractive and many of the people who are attracted to Calvinism today are young intellectuals. I don't know that it always was so, but there is a movement among young intellectual Christians to be reformed or Calvinistic in their thinking.

Total depravity, when I was a Baptist growing up, I thought I was maybe a three-point Calvinist. I didn't realize what those points really meant. It was when I studied them and talked to Calvinists and read them that I realized oh wait a minute, I wasn't an any-point Calvinist. I would have said I believed in total depravity.

But to me, I thought that just meant everybody's a sinner in others, universal sinfulness. That's not what the doctrine of total depravity is. The doctrine of total depravity is that before you are regenerated, before you're born again, you have absolutely no choice in the matter of whether you're going to follow God or not. You can't.

You cannot believe, you cannot repent because you're dead in trespasses and sins and dead people can't do anything. So you're absolutely helpless. Calvinists will tell you that if you picture salvation as going out and saving a drowning man throwing him a life preserver, they say that's inaccurate.

What you need is a scuba diver to go get his dead body off the ocean floor because he's dead, he can't reach out for life preservers. That's what they say. Now of course the Bible doesn't say that, but the Bible does use the term dead in trespasses.

To suggest that it means what they say is 100% arbitrary. There's not a reason in the world why we should assume that that statement means a person can't repent or believe. After all, literally dead people can't do anything. They can't get up in the morning, they can't go to a job, they can't brush their teeth, they can't eat because they're dead.

And yet we're talking about spiritually dead people or we're not talking about physically dead people. Physically dead people can't think, they can't talk, they can't repent, they can't believe they're dead. But living people can do all of those things. Being spiritually dead simply means you are alienated from God like the prodigal son when he was away from his father.

His father said my son was dead, but now he's alive. Dead simply refers to alienation. It doesn't refer to literal deadness or inability to repent. The prodigal son when he was still far from his father repented even though Jesus said the man was dead to his father.

So to say we were dead is not arguing that we can't repent, but Calvinism teaches that. It's an absolute total depravity. Therefore, to be chosen by God requires that he choose people unconditionally for the simple reason that people who are totally dead can't meet any conditions.

If you're totally depraved, you have to be if you're going to be chosen at all, it has to be without your choice. God has to do all the choosing and he's got no basis to choose you as opposed to someone else since you can't do any better than anyone else can.

That means Calvinism feels that they give God all the glory for salvation. And perhaps in a sense they do, but you can't really have that doctrine without giving God all the blame for people who don't come because God chooses whoever he wants to randomly without reference to anything in them, Calvinism teaches.

Therefore, the person he chooses is no different internally than the person he doesn't choose. Therefore, God makes what we'd have to call an arbitrary choice between two people equally, pretty much the same spiritually, and he decides I'll save that one not that one.

And the one he doesn't save can't get saved because he's dead. God could raise him just like he raises the elect one, but he just doesn't want to. So in Calvinism, it's true God does all everything involved in saving, but he also is the only one who has any choice about people going to hell and it's his choice that causes some to go to hell because he could have saved them if he wanted to. He just didn't want to.

Limited atonement is the view that Jesus died only for the sins of the elect. God has some people that he's chosen to save, no one else. There's no sense in Jesus dying for the ones that God doesn't want to save, so he only died for the elect ones.

Irresistible grace teaches that if God has elected you and Jesus has died for you, then you cannot help but come to God. You're drawn to God as with a tractor beam. You just can't resist. Everyone who is elect will inevitably be saved by this doctrine.

And once you're saved, of course, just as you had no real choice in getting saved, you have no real choice in whether you backslide or not. You can't. Once you're elect, God has determined you will be saved, you're drawn and held irresistibly, which speaks of the perseverance of the saints.

And that means that if you once are saved, you will never be capable of rejecting Christ again, never be capable of falling away. So those are the doctrines of Calvinism. When I learned them from Calvinists, not from my own assumptions about what those words meant, I realized that I didn't believe three of them. I didn't believe any of them.

You have to believe the first one before any of the others make sense. If you do accept the first one, you can't make sense without accepting all five of them. It's like a self-consistent logical system.

If you believe at the outset that a person who is not saved is incapable of repenting, can never repent unless God makes them repent, well then of course you're going to be Calvinist on all five points. But I don't... if you don't think that's true, if you think no, God has made people capable of repenting and believing if they would only respond to his drawing, but people can reject his drawing.

So that's the difference. I believe that when you take a non-Calvinist view, you never have to be embarrassed by anything in scripture. If you take a Calvinist view, there will be many scriptures that will embarrass you and not only scriptures, but just common sense too.

Because in Calvinism, God determines whether you're going to be good or bad, whether you're going to believe or not, and yet the ones who aren't, though God determined inevitably that they would not be saved, he blames them and punishes them for eternity.

How does Calvin square that? In his book *The Eternal Predestination of God*, he repeatedly said it's a mystery, it's a mystery, it's a mystery. But it isn't. There's no mystery in it. The Bible says I will honor those who honor me and those who despise me, I will lightly esteem. God gives grace to the humble and he resists the proud.

So the Bible is very clear on these things. That's why it took 400 years of theology for someone to come up with these doctrines, which Augustine did. Many Protestants feel very beholden to those doctrines because we're so proud of being part of the Reformation and the Reformers taught these things.

But we don't have to follow Calvin or any Reformer blindly any more than we are of Paul or of Cephas or of Apollos. We're not of Calvin; we are of Christ and so we need to get our doctrines from him and not from somewhere else. I hope that clarifies things.

Ron from Maine, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Guest (Male): Yes, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my call. My question is in Ezekiel towards the end of the book, I think it's around 46 or something. He's led to the temple. So my question is about the temple. As far as I could tell, it seemed to me after thinking about it, I didn't get it at first, but after thinking about it for a while, I thought that the temple they're describing is the one built but not by human hands in God's city. Would that be kind of...

Steve Gregg: Well, that's one opinion. There's much controversy about Ezekiel's temple. There's eight chapters in a row describing this temple, chapter 40 through 47. This is one of the great controversial passages. What is it describing? It's clearly describing a temple, but which temple? I believe it's describing the second temple.

Now, the second temple didn't fit this description, which is why some people reject that suggestion and some people say it's a third temple. Now, in Ezekiel's day there was no reason to talk about a third temple since there was no temple.

The first temple had been destroyed and the next temple that was built after Ezekiel's time was the second temple. There's no mention of a third temple in the Bible at all. Just the second temple is the last one we read about.

And so I believe the description is of a second temple. Zerubbabel built a second temple, but not to these specifications. But there's a reason because in Ezekiel 43:10 and 11, God tells Ezekiel to show the plans of the temple to the children of Israel, and if they are ashamed of all their sins, then this is to be delivered to them as the blueprint for their temple.

In other words, if they all repented, if they were ashamed, if they were zealous for God, then when Cyrus let them go from Babylon, they'd go back and this is the temple they would build. What actually happened, though, they didn't all... they weren't all zealous for God.

They didn't all want to go back and worship God at the temple. They wanted to stay in Babylon most of them. So when Zerubbabel went back to Israel to build the temple, he had a smaller workforce, a smaller budget. He had 50,000 people. That's a very small portion of the Jews that were in Babylon.

Most of them stayed in Babylon. So it seems to me they did not meet the requirements to have this temple. Instead, they got a temple that was greatly diminished from that. And that's what I believe is being described. Not the third temple, but in my opinion it is the second temple. Thank you for your call.

Let's see who's been there the longest. Kevin from River Rouge, Michigan, welcome Kevin. Only a few minutes here.

Guest (Male): Yeah. I'm sorry, I'm going to have to cut it short, I had a couple of questions. I first want to say... regarding the sovereignty of God being instrumental in our lives versus the devil arranging circumstances like he did with Jonah finding the ship to Tarshish. I just was wondering where do you draw the line in your own personal life, I mean my life or anyone.

Steve Gregg: Let me just jump in here. Sounds like you're moving in another direction from where you started and we only really have about one minute or two. Let me start with this idea.

Where do I draw the line between the sovereignty of God and what is done by the devil? Well, I don't draw a line anywhere. God is sovereign even over the devil. God is sovereign. Now, sovereign means the one who does whatever he wants to and has the authority and the right to do so and is not subject to challenges or disagreement from others. He doesn't have to answer to anybody.

God is that way. Now some people think sovereignty means he does everything, he controls everything. A sovereign king doesn't necessarily do that. He can, or he can give people freedom. That's his own sovereign choice. In God's case, he allows things to happen including the devil to operate and sinners to operate. He will punish them. They're not operating without responsibility to him, but he lets us go the wrong way, he lets the devil go the wrong way.

And therefore, although God can stop the devil from doing anything to us, he doesn't choose to do so all that often. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn't. But the point is the sovereignty of God means God has the choice. He's the one who can do what he want. If he wants to let the devil test us, that's what he'll do. If he doesn't, then the devil won't have a chance to test us.

I'm out of time. Our website is thenarrowpath.com. Thanks for joining us.