Thru the Bible - Questions & Answers

Guest (Male): The Prophet Malachi spoke of the great and dreadful day of the Lord, but before that day would come, God would send Elijah. Was this speaking of John the Baptist, or is Elijah still to come? Will stay with us to find out.

You're listening to the Question and Answer program, a ministry of the Thru the Bible Radio Network with our Bible teacher, Dr. J. Vernon McGee. For over 30 years, Dr. McGee answered questions from his listeners concerning biblical and theological issues. His answers have been preserved for the teaching of future generations as they study the Word of God.

Our first question comes to us from a listener in Riverside, California. He's concerned with the issue of baptism, so he writes, "Would you please explain what Paul is saying in Ephesians chapter 4, verse 5, where he says, 'one Lord, one faith, one baptism'?"

Dr. J. Vernon McGee: Yes, I'll be very happy to do that. The one Lord means that there's one God and Father of us all. There's one faith, and that's the faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And there's one baptism, and that's the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

And that's the one that Paul speaks about in 1 Corinthians 12:13. By one spirit are we all baptized into one body. That is the real baptism. Now there is ritual baptism, and that is by water. And of course, as you know, the church has differed a great deal on the mode of water baptism. But the real baptism, and that's the one baptism, that is the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Now this party asks also concerning Acts 19:4 and 5, which is in the same connection. Verse 4 and 5, "Then said Paul, John verily baptized with the baptism of repentance, saying unto the people that they should believe on him which should come after him, that is, on Christ Jesus. When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus."

The situation was this when Paul came over to the city of Ephesus. He noted in his contact with the church there that the people did not seem to grasp the spiritual truths he was giving. And Paul, having a real spiritual discernment, saw that they did not have the Holy Spirit, that they were not baptized with the Holy Spirit, but that they were not indwelt by the Spirit or filled by the Spirit at all.

So he asked them, he said, "Now I'd like to hear about how you got converted." Well, the way they got converted was that they weren't converted. What really had happened was Apollos had been there, a very eloquent preacher in the early church. And Apollos had only known the baptism of John.

He had never heard about Jesus dying on the cross for the sins of the world. And as far as he went, he was right, but you see, you don't stop with John. You must move on. Now they had been baptized. They had told Paul, "We've been baptized under John," but John's was a baptism of repentance. That is, they were identified with repentance looking under someone who was to come.

But they were in the attitude of waiting and watching. Now Paul preached the one that had already come, died on the cross, and was raised from the dead. Now they were baptized and identified, if you please, under the Lord Jesus Christ. And they're baptized under him now. And when they were, by the way, the Holy Spirit, you notice, came upon them. That is a very, of course, remarkable thing.

Guest (Male): We turn now to a question from a listener in Virginia Beach, Virginia, who says, "Doesn't the Bible teach that anyone who believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God is saved?"

Dr. J. Vernon McGee: No, I do not think that the Bible teaches that, by the way. The Bible teaches that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, but he died upon the cross and rose again from the dead bodily. And that faith in what he did for us is what saves us.

Now you've given me 1 John 4:15 and 1 John 5:1, and I want to turn and read those. 1 John 4:15 reads, "Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God." And God in him. Now the other scripture that you've given me is, "Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone that loveth him that begat loveth him also that is begotten of him."

Now here is the danger of lifting out a verse of scripture and taking it just as its face value without considering the fact that it came out of an epistle, a very wonderful epistle that teaches that faith in Jesus Christ means that you trust what he did for us. Now John says in this first epistle in the second chapter, verse 2, "And he is the propitiation." That is, he is the mercy seat.

He died and shed his blood. You remember the blood was put on the top of the ark there. It's a highly ornamented thing with the cherubim looking down upon it, and the blood was sprinkled there of the sacrifice. And that made it a mercy seat, and God accepted on that basis because that pointed to Christ. Now Christ is our mercy seat.

And he shed his blood. And because of that, God is propitious, or God is inclined toward us today, and God will save us if we trust him. So when you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, you have to believe that he came to this world, died on the cross for your sin and my sin, and that we trust him as our Savior because he's the propitiation for our sins, and for not ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.

And then notice right before the verse that you gave us in the fourth chapter, verse 10 says, "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and he sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." You see, he's the one that paid the penalty that now God can be propitious to us. He can extend mercy to us today.

And that's what it means to believe, according to the Gospel of John, Jesus is the Son of God. You see, you have to put it all together. And it's a dangerous practice just to lift verses out here and there and to attempt to make them mean what you want to mean. Now this party gives other verses here, but may I say that the same rule applies to them.

Maybe I ought to turn to one of them especially. Let me turn to John's Gospel, for instance, and it's the 20th chapter. I didn't intend to do this, but I think probably I ought to do this. John 20:30, 31. It says, "Many other signs truly did Jesus, which are not written in this book, but these are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through his name."

And the Gospel of John goes right on then telling you about the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ after his death. So that here you'd have to take again the whole context. And that applies to these other scriptures also. The gospel, as Paul put it, is that Christ died for our sins according to the scripture, that he was buried and rose again the third day according to the scriptures. Now that's the gospel. Nothing more is the gospel, nothing less in the gospel, and that is the gospel, by the way.

Guest (Male): Now this party goes on with this, and I guess it leads to his second question. "There are many verses in the Bible, for example, Acts 16:31 and John 3:16, which indicate that salvation is the result of belief. James wrote, James 2:19, that demons also believe. They believe in one God, and I'm sure that they know and understand perhaps better than we do who Jesus is and what he came to do on this earth. What separates this type of believer from a true Christian? I fear that there are many people who believe they are Christians simply because they believe in God."

Dr. J. Vernon McGee: Now I thoroughly agree with you on that. There are many people today that are actually members of the church, and they think the only difference between them and an unbeliever is that the unbeliever's an atheist and they believe in God. And that, of course, is not true at all.

And it is true now that the demons, they believe. And as you say, they probably understand it better than we do. They certainly do. I'm of the opinion that they have more knowledge about this, and they actually have more faith. But what kind of faith is it that they have, and what is Christian faith? Christian faith is to believe, as we've just gone through this other question, that the Lord Jesus Christ not only died on the cross, rose again, not only that that is a fact, but that he did that for us.

And as John says, that God demonstrated his love, that while we were sinners, Christ died for us, and that he is the propitiation for our sins because God loved us. Therefore, it's essential that you trust Christ as your personal Savior from sin. And the demons believe in the fact, but they do not believe in the purpose of his death, nor do they believe in the result of his death, that his death would save sinners.

And that makes the difference. I thoroughly agree with you that today we have many people in our churches that do not really know that they have trusted Christ as their Savior and that they trust him, and him alone, for their salvation. And they trust him because he died for them. That's the way he exhibited his love for us. He died for us, paid the penalty of our sins, and rose bodily. And until you and I believe, or trust him, I can say this very candidly, we're just not saved. That's all.

Guest (Male): From a listener in Bremerton, Washington, she writes, "Where did all the various races and nationalities come from? Are we not all descendants of Adam?"

Dr. J. Vernon McGee: That's true. But a great deal happened after Adam. To begin with, Adam got all of us out of the Garden of Eden and got us into this weary world filled with sin and crises that we're in right now. And he started all of that. A great deal has taken place since Adam and Eve.

And to begin with, there came the flood, a flood that was made upon a generation that had turned to violence and gross immorality and had turned away from God. And God could not recover the human family unless he stepped in with a judgment that removed that entire generation from the world and keep the one man that was still walking with God.

And that was Noah. Now after Noah, there were three sons, and those three sons and their families came out of the ark. And I suppose those three boys were probably as different as any three could be. And I don't think I'm speculating when I say that probably one of them was a blonde, one was a brunette, and one was even a face with some color in it. And I don't know what that color might have been.

I do know this, that you have to go to the Tower of Babel, and God scattered mankind on the earth with the different languages. And as a result, the peoples in one family moved one direction. You find them going over to China, and you find them moving down into Africa. Now I believe that the environment that they were in and their lifestyle over a period of centuries is what brought about the color that is in the human family: the yellow, the red, and the brown, and the black, and the white.

The white races seem to have moved north. They got up in a cold climate, and they didn't get much of the sun. Those who went to Africa got plenty of the sun, and the pigmentation I think began at that particular time. Actually, we recognize with Kipling that the kernels lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under the skin.

And under the skin, we all belong really to the same family. But the different races, the different nationalities, the different colorations, the different types of individuals all came about during the centuries. And when I say that, I think all of this took place in a period of six, seven thousand years.

And there's no reason to think that it could have been otherwise. I see today a great change taking place right here in California. We're told here in Pasadena, we have probably more races and different kinds of immigrants than any other place. And you can begin to see here in the children a change begins to take place, friends. And that is the thing, I think, that's even happening today. So that's the thing that's responsible for all the races that are upon the earth. The Bible doesn't go into a great deal of detail about that because that, of course, is not the primary message of the Bible, but there's enough there to let us know that this is the way that God wanted it.

Guest (Male): From a listener in Orinda, California comes this question, "Could you please explain why Luke traces the genealogy of Jesus through Mary? What significance does this have?"

Dr. J. Vernon McGee: Well, there are two genealogies that are given of the Lord Jesus Christ. One is in Matthew, that is Joseph's genealogy. And from Joseph's genealogy, from that line, he got the royal title to the throne of David. And from Mary, he got the bloodline.

And that's the reason that Luke is very careful to give you the bloodline. Dr. Luke is presenting the Lord Jesus as the perfect man. Dr. Luke evidently was a Greek, and I'm not sure whether he was Jewish or not. If he was Jewish, he was absolutely embedded and engrossed in Greek thought. He thinks like a Greek thought in that day. And he was a doctor.

And he presents the man Christ Jesus. He shows how human he is and that it was Mary who gave birth to him. And he just gives you a lesson in obstetrics. He does that before she came together with a man, she was found with child. And that's the statement of scripture, friends. You either take it or leave it.

And that's the way God gives it to you. And the important thing is not that you believe in the virgin birth first of all. If you're an unbeliever, it's whether you trust Christ as your Savior. And I found that's the way I had to become, and I believe that's the way that you must come to him.

Now the genealogy in Luke goes back to Nathan, one of the sons of David. And through that line of David, why, he gets the blood title to the throne of David. You see, that was something that was very important, that he have the blood title and he have the royal title to the throne of David.

And the very interesting thing is that he's probably the only one in existence that has been from that day down to the present that could fulfill that. And that makes it extremely interesting also because up to the present, none of the prophecies of the Old Testament concerning his birth could be fulfilled since Jesus was born.

Guest (Male): We turn our attention now to this question from a listener in San Jose, California. "According to Matthew chapter 10, Judas was given the authority to cast out demons. Some say that this proves he was saved, but I don't think he was saved because he committed suicide. Could you please provide your comments on this issue?"

Dr. J. Vernon McGee: Well, first of all, let me say that he committed suicide because he was lost. He's not lost because he committed suicide. That's not the criterion. He was already a lost man, and that is because not only of his betrayal of the Lord Jesus, but you see, he could have accepted the Lord Jesus.

When he came out to the garden, and he told his man the way you'll know him, I'll kiss him. And he went up and kissed him. Even at that point, the Lord Jesus said to him, "Wherefore friend art thou come?" In other words, even at that late moment, it wasn't too late for him to turn to Christ, even after he had betrayed the Lord Jesus.

So that he's lost not because he committed suicide. He's lost because of the fact that he rejected the Lord Jesus Christ as his Savior. That's the basis on which this man was lost. And now the question of suicide is an altogether different question, totally unrelated to Judas, because we know he was a lost man. I mean, that's made very clear to us that he rejected the Lord Jesus right up to the very last moment.

But there are suicides today of people that I'm convinced are saved people. And the reason I say that is they are born-again people. I've known several in my day that were as best that one human being can judge another human being, they were genuine. They had accepted the Lord Jesus as Savior. They trusted him.

And there was no question about that. They trusted him. They rested in him. They absolutely gave every evidence they were a child of God. Now some great crisis or catastrophe came in their lives, something that probably shook them mentally, spiritually, and really physically. And then they committed suicide.

I know a man, a fine Christian man, very active. He was paralyzed, and he managed to get poison tablets and he took those. And you can see the man's thinking. He felt like he was, in fact, he told me, "I'm worthless now. I'm just a drag. I'm not even a good witness for Christ anymore. I can't do anything for him."

You can see the thinking of the man. I believe that man's a saved man. You see, it's too bad that they do it. It's too bad that it happens, and all that sort of thing. But you see, you've got to come and look at this question from another viewpoint: Is this man here a born-again man? And the answer is yes, he's a born-again man.

All right, if he's a born-again man, he's a child of God. He'll never perish, the Lord Jesus said. He's saved for time and for eternity. Now he does this awful thing. Is he lost? No. If he'd shot somebody else and been forgiven of that, a murderer can be saved, and so a suicide. If he's saved before the act, he's certainly saved afterward. And that doesn't excuse it or make it right, but it does set in order these great theological truths that need to be put in order. And that is the only thing we're trying to do there.

Guest (Male): Our final question today comes to us from a listener in Warwick, Rhode Island. She writes, "Malachi 4:5 says, 'Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.' How could Elijah refer to John the Baptist when the coming of Elijah is in relation to the Great Tribulation?"

Dr. J. Vernon McGee: Well, may I say to you that when it says before that great day of the Lord will come, why Elijah the prophet shall appear. And if some people think it's John the Baptist when he came, why they just happen to miss it because John the Baptist was not Elijah.

The Lord Jesus said if they had received him as the king at that time, why Elijah would have been John the Baptist or John the Baptist would have been Elijah. And I don't see how that could be. And since it didn't happen, I don't have to explain it. That's not the way it took place. Elijah was Elijah, and John the Baptist is John the Baptist. And Elijah is to appear, and that's just somebody's guess.

And so you are basing your question on what the scripture says at one place and what human beings like you and I are, and you can be sure of one thing: we make mistakes. And believe it or not, I make quite a few of them I found out. And therefore, it's a guess to say that it's John the Baptist.

I very frankly say to you, I think that if we're permitted to guess, I would guess John the Baptist. But I don't know that. And no one else knows that. And I would not have you to base your interpretation of scripture on the fact that what we have here is John the Baptist when we don't know whether that's going to be true or not. I think that Elijah's going to appear, and there's going to be another witness. And the other witness is John the Baptist. But I do not think that John the Baptist was Elijah, and I don't think that we can interpret scripture like that.

Guest (Male): With that answer, we come to the close of today's question and answer program. We hope that these insights have inspired you to dig into the Word of God a little bit deeper yourself. If you still have a question, we may have the answer for you in the numerous resources that we make available by Dr. McGee. Simply ask for a resource catalog when you call or write.

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Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain, he washed it white as snow.

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