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 with an open phone line for you to call if you wish to participate by bringing up on the air the questions you have about the Bible or the Christian faith and that we can talk about those. If you disagree with the host because you've heard me say something on another occasion, or perhaps in this program, maybe I'll say something you won't agree with, you're always welcome to call in to discuss that disagreement as well.

The number to call is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. There are lines open right now if you want to call now. We can get you on before very long. I should announce that tomorrow, being the first Wednesday of the month, is the Wednesday that each month we have a Zoom meeting in the evening, 7:00 PM Pacific Time. So, West Coast time, 7:00 PM each first Wednesday of the month, a Zoom meeting where we do a Q&A very much like what we do here on the program, with a slight difference.

You may not think I do, but when I'm answering questions on the air here, I actually am in a hurry. You probably think I'm not because I talk so long, but the truth is I try to give a brief answer and get as many calls as possible, and that's because we only have an hour together here. The Zoom meeting is a little longer. It's more of a face-to-face fellowship, I should say. It's not confrontational, and you can participate if you'd like. If you want to know how to be a part of the Zoom meeting that's tomorrow night at 7:00 Pacific Time, the login for the Zoom meeting is given at our website, thenarrowpath.com.

There's a tab there that says announcements. It tells where I'm speaking and what's going on, and the Zoom login is there. You can join us if you'd like. Speaking of announcements, at the end of this month, I'm going to be speaking a couple of times in a little farther north than where I live here in California. I've got at least one scheduled meeting in Oakhurst and one in Clovis, California, and we're actually open to the possibility of setting up other meetings in that area around the same time.

So, if you want to look at our schedule online at the announcements link and say, well, we could have a meeting before or after those or whatever. I think there are a couple of other meetings that are kind of tentative that aren't nailed down yet. So, I'll be speaking a few times, let's put it that way, up in that area at the end of this month. Then two weeks later, I'll be in Sacramento, and I've got a few places to speak there too.

As I said, if you would like to set something up in Sacramento, it's going to be around the second week of September. You get in touch with us and we can usually find a way to fit it into the schedule. We can meet in a home, in a church, in whatever, wherever people can meet. So, around Clovis, Fresno, Oakhurst in the end of this month, then early in September in Sacramento.

I'll be speaking in quite a few places in Michigan in October, and then in November, I'm going to be in Phoenix again. I think the Michigan area is filled up for all the spaces for that week I'll be there, and then I don't have the exact dates for you in Phoenix, but if you want to set something up in Phoenix, this is a good time to get in touch with us. We'll try to do that. Now, as those meetings get closer, of course, I'll put a finer point on what's been set up, but just a heads up there. All right, and we're going to go to the phones now and speak to Carrie from Fort Worth, Texas. Pardon my voice. I've got issues with my voice, not just today but recently. It's not quite as severe as Robert Kennedy Jr.'s voice, but it's kind of like that, only it's a different condition. Anyway, we can still do the show because my microphone volume, if I speak low, can be turned up. Carrie in Fort Worth, Texas, welcome. Thanks for calling.

Carrie: Steve, you sound fine, but a couple of questions for you today. First of all, what does it mean to be orthodox, and do you consider yourself orthodox? The other question would be, I know you don't go with the Calvinist view on total depravity, but do you have your own definition of total depravity? Those are my two questions.

Steve Gregg: Well, thanks for the call. Do I consider myself to be orthodox? Well, of course, that word has more than one meaning. For one thing, of course, there's the Orthodox, the Eastern Orthodox, which can be Greek or Russian Orthodox or some Orthodox Eastern branch of the church that's not part of the Western church. There's even the Oriental Orthodox, which is further east than that. So there's groups that are called Orthodox Christians.

Before these groups branched off from the Roman Catholic—well, I shouldn't say that because the Oriental Orthodox never was part of the Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox claim that it was the Catholics that broke off of them. In any case, back when in the Western church almost everybody was a Roman Catholic, there were councils that decided what views were going to be held to be orthodox. Now, orthodox simply means true, the correct views for Christians to hold.

So, for example, the deity of Christ was held to be true at the Nicaean Council. After that point, if you did not believe that Jesus is God in the flesh, you were not considered to be orthodox in your theology. This has nothing to do with being Greek Orthodox or Eastern Orthodox or anything like that. This simply has to do with being correct. It's the opposite of being heterodox. Now, heterodox means heretical, okay? So you begin to have these categories emerging, especially at the time of these ecumenical councils.

Now, the word heresy was used before those councils. I mean, Irenaeus, 150 years before those councils began, he had a writing called Against Heresies. Now, heresies are considered to be divisive, false teachings that have entered the church and that cause a challenge to mainstream or orthodox Christian teaching. But when we say orthodox in this sense, we mean not heretical.

And so, for example, the Roman Catholics would not call themselves the Orthodox Church because that name belongs to the Eastern Orthodox, but they would say that their theology is orthodox in the sense that they would say it's not heretical. And so would virtually all Protestants say the same about themselves. They say our views are not heretical; therefore, they are orthodox, which simply means acceptable and true and so forth. It's not really referring to the category that is described as the Orthodox Church in the East or whatever.

In that sense, do I consider myself orthodox? Well, sure. I mean, I can't think of anything I believe that hasn't been a mainstream view in one or another of the respectable denominations. I mean, I'm not Calvinist, and I'm also not dispensationalist. Now, a lot of churches are Calvinist and dispensationalist, which I'm neither. Some of them are Calvinist but not dispensationalist, some are dispensationalist but not Calvinist, and all of these people would have some disagreement with my theology.

But they could not deny that mainstream Christian denominations have been Calvinist and have been non-Calvinist, have been dispensational and have been non-dispensational. And so what I'm saying is I don't have a set of beliefs that belong to any one recognized denomination, but every belief I have, and I mean by that every controversial belief I might hold, is held to be true by some established, major, non-cultic denominations. So that's what I'd say about that.

Now, you said I don't believe in Calvinism, which is true, and the doctrine of total depravity. When I was younger as a Baptist, I would have said I believed in total depravity, but I didn't understand what it meant. I thought it just meant that everybody's a sinner, and of course I do believe everybody's a sinner. So if that's what someone's asking about when they say total depravity, then I do believe in that. But that's not what the word means in Calvinist circles.

The Calvinists are not just asking one to acknowledge that everybody in the world has sinned. They want to have—there's something much more specific that total depravity means, and that is that everything a person does is tainted by sin until they're regenerated. And that if you're not born again or regenerated, everything you do is sin. And you can't even want true righteousness. You can't want to be in fellowship with God. You can't desire those things because you are dead and corrupt and your passions and your desires are all sinful.

Therefore, you can't have such a good thing as a desire to find God or to believe in God or to repent of your sins. You can't even want those things. Now, that's what total depravity teaches. I don't teach that. I don't believe that. I believe that people are sinners and I believe because we're sinners we need salvation, and I don't believe there's anyone on the planet of whom that cannot be said.

But I don't believe that the special aspects of that doctrine, which are introduced pretty much in only among Calvinists, I don't believe those are true. In other words, I don't believe an unregenerate person is incapable of repenting. I believe it's the unregenerate who are commanded to repent in the Bible. I mean, Christians are too, but I mean all people are called to repent. The Bible says God's not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

And so God's will is for everybody to repent. If some people are not able to repent because they're totally depraved, well, the Bible doesn't let us know that. The only way that we have a hint that there are some people who can't repent are they're in that condition not because they were unfortunate enough to not be elect, but because they have hardened their hearts through their lives and given—Paul says they're past feeling. They used to have feeling, but they're past that point now. They're like sociopaths or reprobate minds, their hearts are hardened. Now, they weren't born with hard hearts, their choices in life caused them to make choices that hardened their hearts. And there's people in that condition, and it does appear that such people may not be able to repent, at least it wouldn't be easy for them to. So my views are pretty unexceptional. The Calvinist idea of total depravity is really exceptional. I mean, sure, Calvin taught it 500 years ago, and Augustine taught it about almost a thousand years before that, but it's not original Christianity. It's not what the Bible teaches; it's not what the Church Fathers taught in the first four centuries.

It's something that came up new in the fifth century and has been widely adopted. It's a little bit like dispensationalism. Dispensationalism wasn't taught in the early church or in the Bible; it simply arose in the 19th century and captured the imagination of many, many people. And so I don't have to go with those new doctrines. And actually Calvinism is therefore a new doctrine compared to the Bible itself, and so I don't hold that doctrine. No. But I do believe all people are sinners. That's a little different than what total depravity is claiming.

Carrie: Thanks again, Steve. Take care of your voice.

Steve Gregg: All right, God bless. Our next caller is Randall from Tacoma, Washington. Hi, Randall, welcome.

Randall: Hello, Steve. Thanks for taking my call. Do we know how old Solomon was when he became king after his father David?

Steve Gregg: I don't know if it's stated. I understand that he was 20 or thereabouts because he reigned for about 40 years. Yeah, he reigned about 40 years and died at 60, I believe.

Randall: That's what I had heard, but I'd never seen any evidence to back that up. I do know in verse seven of First Kings chapter three he says, "Yet I am but a little child." And this is when, of course, God appeared to him in a dream in First Kings 3:5 and said, "Whatever you want, it's yours."

Steve Gregg: Well, in saying he's a little child, he was not arguing that he was chronologically a child. He's basically saying I've been given a man's job here to rule this nation and I have the experience no much more than a child. It's sort of like what Jeremiah had said. Jeremiah was called to be a prophet and in Jeremiah chapter one he says, "I'm a child, I can't do that." Well, he wasn't literally a pre-pubescent child. He was probably in his late teens.

But the idea is that a child would be a euphemism for someone who doesn't know much or someone who's not very experienced in life. Remember Jesus said, "I thank you, O Father, that you've hidden these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them to babes." He's talking about his disciples as babes. Well, they weren't babes; they were adults. But same idea: these are not intellectual people; these are not highly educated, highly qualified people for the task of studying theology and stuff like that. But just the idea of being a babe or a child means I don't have much experience or knowledge. I need more than I have.

Randall: Okay, yeah, I was just curious. I had heard that he was about 20, but I couldn't really see where it was.

Steve Gregg: I can't remember—basically, it is from reading the Old Testament, and I don't remember where all the proof texts are for these things. My impression is that Saul, David, and Solomon all reigned for 40 years and all died around age 60, which I mean, I'm not sure that's stated in every case. But it is stated of some of them. I'd just have to go looking for the verses that talk about that. Feel free to look it up, and if you can't find it, let me know, and then I'll know more. I mean, I'll know because you told me. You can inform me. All right, Randall, thanks for your call. Paul in Colorado, welcome to the Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Paul: Hi, Steve. I just had a question about the history of the amillennial stance and a friend of mine's Catholic. I was kind of talking with him a little bit about that today. He mentioned the Council of Nicaea was that like 325?

Steve Gregg: Yeah, 325 was the Council of Nicaea.

Paul: And he's a staunch Catholic, and he was saying that the whole Reformation with Luther basically was he was involved with demonic activity. And that the Council of Nicaea would qualify that. Are you aware of any specific doctrine in that scenario? That's my first question.

Steve Gregg: Well, I don't first of all, I don't think that the Council of Nicaea dealt with the question of amillennialism, which is what you brought up at the beginning.

Paul: No, I misspoke. I was wanting to refer to the not amillennialism, but the Reformation with Luther.

Steve Gregg: Well, the Reformation came 1200 years later. So obviously at the Council of Nicaea, they didn't talk about Luther or the Reformation. However, Luther and the Reformers agreed with the Council of Nicaea. I mean, I don't know that anything was discussed at the Council of Nicaea which the Reformers would refute or dispute.

Paul: Okay, and as far as Luther was concerned, you consider that a legitimate Reformation, the whole Protestant movement basically is based off of that, correct?

Steve Gregg: It is, but to say do I believe that it's a legitimate Reformation, I guess it depends on what you call a Reformation. It's the first of its kind in the Western church, and it's not what Luther hoped to do. Luther did not try to start Protestantism. Luther was a Catholic monk. All the Christians he knew were Catholics. All Western Christians were essentially Catholics unless they belonged to like a Hussite group or some branch-off group, which there weren't many people in those groups.

Almost all Christians in the Western Europe were Roman Catholic and Luther was not an exception. And when he began to see certain things differently because he was teaching the book of Romans at the university, a Catholic university, reading the book of Romans, he began to see some things differently than they taught. And so he started to raise these—he wrote about them, he debated people about them, but he wasn't trying to start a new denomination. The idea of denominations back then was unheard of.

There was only one church and Luther was part of it. So what he hoped to do was to steer that one church in the direction of a more biblical theology. And if the Catholic Church had followed that steering, we could call that a Reformation, that is a reforming of the Catholic Church. But Luther, I think, would like to have reformed the Catholic Church, but he was kicked out of it so that the Catholic Church didn't reform and he started a separate movement, which we call Protestantism.

So, it is interesting we call it the Reformation also when in fact maybe Europe, I guess they'd say Europe was reformed from being Catholic, some parts of it became Protestant. But the Catholic Church, which is what Luther hoped to reform, never was reformed. So anyway, yeah, if you say is it a legitimate Reformation, well, the Bible doesn't ever talk about Reformations, so I guess what makes one legitimate? If you're saying do I believe that Luther had legitimate cause to believe the things he believed differently than the Catholic Church, I would say certainly in most cases he did.

I mean, he held some doctrines that later Protestants may not hold because he pretty much—there's a lot to reform in your own thinking if you've been raised all your life and all the Christians you know have held certain views. Let's just say you're raised in a dispensational church. It's the only thing you've heard, and then suddenly you begin to read something in the Bible that doesn't seem to support a pre-trib rapture or something like that. And you don't know anyone who doesn't believe it, you don't know anyone who's not dispensational.

And so, you know, it's a slow learning process to learn on your own against your training, against the environment you're in. And Luther didn't change everything that could have been changed. He held on to infant baptism, for example, which was the Catholic practice, and many of the Reformed churches, like Presbyterian and so forth, continued the Catholic practice of infant baptism, although they claimed they were going back to the Bible, and the Bible has nothing to say about infant baptism. So that was something—a blind spot, I suppose.

But insofar as he disagreed with the Catholics on a number of important things, I would tend to think, yeah, I think he saw it better than they did. He's not infallible. Not everything he taught can be trusted, but looking case by case at the issues that got him in trouble with the Catholic Church and got him kicked out, I would say he was on the right path in those cases, if that's really what you're asking me about.

Paul: Are you there, Steve?

Steve Gregg: Yes, go ahead.

Paul: One more quick question. It was about a fellow by the name of Kenneth Johnson, PhD. He wrote a book called Paul's Ancient Hebrew Thessalonian Epistles, proof of the subtitle Pre-trib Rapture Interlineal Included. And he goes through, and it was interesting because I've been listening to you for probably over eight years now. And it seems like I remember you saying that there was taught by—well, he's got some quotes here in his book from ancient church fathers on their belief in a future 1,000-year reign of Jesus Christ on earth. I was taught by John, this is Papias, 90 to 110 AD, "I was taught by John himself that after the resurrection of the dead, Jesus would personally reign for 1,000 years." There will be a literal 1,000-year reign of Christ. Another one by Justin Martyr.

Steve Gregg: Yeah, those men were premillennial. There's no question about that. And I've always said so. Whenever people ask me what the historical views of the church, I say what anybody, actually anyone who knows about church history knows. The first 300 years, most of the Church Fathers appeared to have been premillennial. They didn't believe in a pre-trib rapture. They didn't believe in the kind of millennium dispensationalism teaches where there's a Jewish temple and Jewish sacrifices and Jewish priests.

The early premillennials didn't believe in that kind of nonsense. But they did believe there would be a millennium, and that's what you're reading there. Papias was one of them, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, quite a few of them believed in that. I've always said that, but they weren't dispensationalists. Dispensationalists added their own things that weren't in the early church position. Hey, I had to break in because we've got to take a break here. Our website is thenarrowpath.com. We have another half hour. Don't go away. I'll be back in 30 seconds.

Welcome back to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg, and we are live for another half hour taking your calls. Our switchboard is mostly full, but there's one line open if you want to call in with your questions or disagreements. The number is 844-484-5737. And now that line is lighting up too. All right, so we're going to go to the phone lines and continue talking with those who have been waiting here. The next caller is Yugoslavia from Miami, Florida. Hi, Yugoslavia, good to hear from you again.

Yugoslavia: Hello, Steve. Thank you, God bless. Question: do you hold conferences in Florida or close to the state of Florida? I couldn't find it online.

Steve Gregg: Right. Well, I haven't done any recently. I used to go every year and teach for Youth With A Mission for a week-long in Jacksonville every year. And I've been to many other parts of Florida, but I don't regularly go. But then I have to say that I go wherever I'm invited. So if you have a church or a home meeting or somebody that wants me to come to Florida, I'm very rarely have said no.

And if I do say no, it's only because I've traveled too much recently or there's a conflict or something. But yeah, I'm always glad to come and speak to groups, large or small. And so, yeah, I used to go every year, probably for about five or six years, I went every year to Jacksonville and spoke. My wife just told me that there have been recent inquiries from people in northern Florida asking if I would come. So we don't have anything set up yet, but do watch our announcements page because that's where we'll post them and I'll of course, whenever we do have something set up, I'll announce it on the air for the benefit of those who are there.

Yugoslavia: Great, great. Thank you, thank you so much. God bless you.

Steve Gregg: All right, God bless you. Thanks for your call. We're going to talk to Jeff from Enumclaw, Washington, next. Hi, Jeff, welcome.

Jeff: Hi, I have a question about a Dr. Michael Heiser. He deals, speaks a lot about the intertestamental and the Book of Enoch. And I'm just wondering, do you know much about him?

Steve Gregg: Well, I know he's gone on to be with the Lord in the last few years. I've read one of his books and maybe half of another one, and I've heard him speak a few times on YouTube, but no, I haven't really been a follower of his theology. He's been very influential in the later years of his life. I'd say probably the last decade of his life or so, I heard a lot about him. That's why I watched him and read his books. He may have been influential before that time, but I didn't know of him.

My thoughts about him are, as far as I know, he's a good guy. He's a very capable Old Testament scholar. And that doesn't mean that he's right about everything. And he became quite well known for his views about the Divine Council, which he took to be a group of what we might call angels or archangels or something like that, but he said they're referred to as gods in the Bible. But he made it very clear it doesn't mean that they are God like God is God, more like they're small 'g' gods.

I mean, there are things that are called gods but that have a small 'g' that aren't the real God. And so he believed that there's a council I think of 70 these gods that God would consult and he gave them authority over, I guess, the nations of the earth, of which there were 70 of those too. And some of them, maybe most of them, defected and became, you know, caused the idolatry of the nations and things like that. Now, I don't think the Bible teaches that with clarity.

And the man was very knowledgeable in the Old Testament Hebrew and things like that and in ancient Near Eastern literature. So I wouldn't ever set my knowledge of such matters on his level, nor certainly above it, but I will say my knowledge of the Bible doesn't require for me to understand everything that the Near Eastern pagans believed about these things, or even to know all the details of the Hebrew Old Testament. We have reasonably good English translations which access its basic ideas to us without much difficulty.

And there are some of the passages that he thought were very definitive are simply passages I see differently. I don't see them the way he did. So I don't really put my stamp of approval on his teaching. And by that I mean as a whole. Nor does he need my stamp of approval. I don't think anyone needs me to approve their teaching. He could know more than I do about it, and he could be right, but my own study of Scripture would not cause me to give a blanket endorsement of his theology.

But there are very many young theologians especially who have really kind of been, they're his followers kind of, and his theology does appear a lot these days. Now, do I think his theology's dangerous? I don't think so. I don't know of anything he teaches that would be said to be dangerous. It's just a question of whether he's interpreting the Scripture in the way that I think it's best understood. And so he and I would have a disagreement about that.

Now, maybe now that he's gone to be with the Lord, maybe he agrees with me, I don't know, or maybe I'll agree with him when I go. Until then, we pretty much have to study the Scriptures and as responsibly as we can reach our conclusions, but at the same time realize there are many things deep and dark that we don't understand in the very realm that he's talking about. His book is called his first book, I think, or the main one is called The Unseen Realm. Well, the unseen realm is a subject that the Bible tells us only a smattering of information about. And some of the things that it talks about the unseen realm can be taken more than one way. And so he took them a certain way. He did a very good job of synthesizing a lot of things that are said about the unseen realm and putting them into a, what should we say, a paradigm, into a systematized picture which, of course, whenever someone can present a systematized picture of a lot of Scriptures, it's impressive and persuasive to many people.

However, before I ever knew of Michael Heiser, I had—I was familiar with all of those Scriptures too, and I myself had in my own understanding put them in a systematic way that isn't necessarily exactly like his. I don't disagree with everything he said, but I don't agree with everything either.

Jeff: Do you think studying or reading Book of Enoch and because she's mentioned in the New Testament, he kind of says that you've got to know like what the peers of the time were hearing and I have a friend at church, he said stay away from that. And he said stay away from this book, this book because they're all intertestamental.

Steve Gregg: Well, they are. They are intertestamental books, and therefore they're not inspired. And the biggest objection to taking them very seriously is that they are not inspired, they are not written by the authors whose names they bear. They are what we call pseudepigraphal literature, which means written under an assumed name. And therefore, the authors actually claim to be somebody very famous who they really were not.

The writer of the Book of Enoch was not Enoch, and no one knows who he was, but he lived a long, long time, over a millennium later than Enoch was on earth. So it's written by, you know, anonymous writer who said he was Enoch. And we could say, well, isn't that a forgery then? Well, maybe not quite the same thing as a forgery because it was very common in the intertestamental period for people to write books anonymously and attach the claim that they were somebody famous from before, but I think the Jews recognized that this was being done.

That is to say that they were not really—not trying to convince people they really were that person, but really writing a book from the standpoint of what that person would say or think. And so the Book of Enoch isn't written by Enoch, and yet it claims to be Enoch. And you know, given the fact that we have some very good solid prophetic and apostolic books in our Bible, I wouldn't want to water them down by adding a book by somebody who claimed to be someone he wasn't, and you know, it's more like it's a fictional book.

So, no, I don't believe it belongs in the Bible. I don't—if you read it knowing that, then I don't think it's dangerous to read it. I mean, early Christians read it and Jude we know quotes it, and there's a good chance that both Jude and Second Peter allude to it in their reference to the angels who fell and things like that. So some people think even Jesus alluded to it. I'm not so sure he did, but when Jesus said that the angels don't marry and are not given in marriage, there is in fact that datum of information also is in the Book of Enoch. I don't know that Jesus was dependent on Enoch for that and he didn't quote Enoch.

But some people think Jesus was alluding to Enoch too. I don't know. But I will say that the fact that someone in the Bible actually cites or or quotes something doesn't mean they are saying that that person that they're quoting is really, you know, an inspired writer. For example, in Titus chapter one verse 12, Paul quotes Epimenides, a poet of Crete, as if the guy's got something valuable to say. He says, "One of them," meaning one of the Cretans, "a prophet of their own said, 'Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.'" End quote.

Then Paul says, "This testimony is true." Now, it's a true testimony, but it's not inspired testimony. He's not saying the Greek poets are inspired. You know, it's entirely possible to recognize a true statement from literature and to mention that you agree with that statement without in any sense claiming that you think it's inspired Scripture. And I think Jude quoting Enoch is the same thing.

Jeff: Aren't there some books of the Bible that come across as not being the original author?

Steve Gregg: How do you mean?

Jeff: Well, are every books of the Bible written by like Isaiah or other people that their books are in the book?

Steve Gregg: Because it seems like there's some... Well, I believe that every book that has the author's name in it is written by that man. And if that isn't the case, they don't belong in the Bible. That's the point. I mean, I could write a book and claim to be Elijah the Prophet, and I'd be lying. And just because Elijah's a great prophet of God, no one should put my book in the Bible because I claim to be Elijah.

It would be a forgery. It would be a lie. Now, if Isaiah didn't write Isaiah—and of course Isaiah identifies himself as the author—then his book shouldn't be in the Bible if he didn't write it. Same thing with Jeremiah, Ezekiel, any of the prophets, any book that claims to be written by somebody, it either is written by that person or shouldn't be in the Bible. Now, there's a lot of books, like I said, the intertestamental books that are claiming to be written by somebody important, but they aren't. They weren't written by those people.

No one believes they were, and no one then believed they were, I don't think. So in other words, they aren't—they're not Bible books. They're just books. And lots of people read them. The Jews liked the Book of Enoch. The early Christians liked the Book of Enoch. I know a lot of Christians who like, you know, the Chronicles of Narnia, but that doesn't mean—even though they're widely read—that anyone believes they're true stories.

And yet it might be possible for a preacher, making a point for which a good illustration can be found in the Chronicles of Narnia, he might tell that anecdote from the story to make his point. But he would know that neither he nor anyone listening to him believes that's a true story. You see, if a preacher gives an illustration and he mentions where it's from, we presume that he knows whether the people in his congregation would take that as a true story or not. And that's what Jude does with Enoch, that's what Paul does with some of these Greek poets that he cites, he quotes others too. Anyway, I appreciate your call very much, and we need to try to get some more in before we're out of time here. Our next caller is Sam from Tucker, Georgia. Sam, welcome to the Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Sam: Yes, I spoke to you Monday and I didn't get a chance to respond to what you answered to me. I don't know if I got cut off or...

Steve Gregg: Remind me.

Sam: Oh, it was about why you didn't mention Mary possibly telling Jesus about sex.

Steve Gregg: Oh, yeah. I didn't cut you off. I just answered your question and moved on. Yeah, I told you what I thought.

Sam: Right. Okay, that wasn't a problem. I just wanted to follow up because you had said that you didn't think a 10 to 12-year-old child in that society would have even known about sex. But that was like an agrarian society and children would have grown up seeing how animals reproduced. And so I would think they would know just as much about sex as you said children do today.

Steve Gregg: Well, I think maybe if they lived on a farm, you know. Но even then, maybe not. I mean, children who see dogs and cattle and horses and sheep mating, they might put it together that maybe people do that too. Children who are very young probably wouldn't have a particular—wouldn't draw too much attention to that because they may not be putting biological facts together from observing nature. They might, or their parents might even tell them.

However, this would be true of children who are raised on farms where animals were reproducing. Jesus was raised in a carpenter shop, and yeah, it was an agrarian society, but he lived in a, you know, his dad ran a business, he didn't raise animals. So whether Jesus, working in the carpenter shop, ever looked out the window and saw dogs reproducing, I have no idea.

But I, you know, even if he did, I mean, as a child, I don't know if he would have made the connection. I'm not sure how many children do. I don't have anything at stake in this. I mean, if you find a child who's four years old and figured out that people reproduce by having sex because he saw some animals doing it, fine. Fine. I will say that when I was young, I didn't put it together like that. I didn't know those things.

And, you know, a lot of the kids at school knew those things. I know because eventually some of them told me about them. Но I didn't put that together. So I have to assume a lot of kids don't. A lot of kids aren't thinking about those things perhaps. But maybe you're right. I mean, if that's why you called to say, well, maybe he did put it together, I'm not going to say you're wrong. I just don't know that it'd be obvious that it was right. Richard from Phoenix, Arizona, welcome. We only have a couple of minutes.

Richard: Hi, Steve. I got a quick question. The prophecy that the Lord gave in Jerusalem about the "not one stone will be left upon another"—it sounds like that would probably be hyperbole, but you know, I thought I heard somebody say something the other day about there actually being true, you know, apparent evidence that that was actually literally true, that when Jerusalem was burned down by the Romans, that every—they went out of their way to knock every block over. Do you know if there exists any such evidence?

Steve Gregg: Well, I don't know that Josephus gives us that detail, but we do know this, that in 135 AD, which is 65 years after the destruction of Jerusalem, some buildings in Jerusalem were still, you know, rubble but they were there. And there were probably some stones standing on others. I don't know if that was true of the temple. But there was another rebellion against Rome led by Bar Kokhba, and the Romans came and crushed it, and the Roman general actually required his soldiers to plow Jerusalem like a field and pull all the rocks down and flatten it and so forth.

So I would say at least by 135 AD, not one stone would be left standing on another. But it's possible that—and no reason to doubt—that that kind of treatment was given to the temple earlier in 70 AD. We know the temple was destroyed. Whether there was one stone left standing on another or not, I don't know. But I agree with you that Jesus' words could very easily be hyperbole.

Now, some people have asked about the Wailing Wall, which is still standing. And they say, "I thought the stones were supposed to be all cast down." But you may be aware, the Wailing Wall was not a wall of the temple. The Wailing Wall is a retaining wall that the Temple Mount—in order to have it, you know, site prepared for the temple to be built, they had to build up parts of it and they had a retaining wall holding up some of the earth. And that wall, although the temple was destroyed, that retaining wall is still there, which is the what they call the Wailing Wall.

Anyway, I appreciate your call. You've been listening to the Narrow Path. We are listener supported. You can write to us at The Narrow Path, PO Box 1730, Temecula, California, 92593, or go to our website, thenarrowpath.com. Thanks for joining us. Let's talk again tomorrow.