The Word of God is the source of all spiritual truth. Everything we need to know for salvation, sanctification, and the hope of glory is given us in the Scripture. Welcome to Grace to You with the Bible teaching of John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson. From time to time, John MacArthur would set aside an evening service to answer questions from his congregation at Grace Community Church.
And today, you'll get to listen in on one of those Q and A sessions.
So stay here as John answers questions that perhaps you've had as you've studied God's Word. Here's the first question from a member of the congregation, and then you'll hear John's answer.
Now, the idea is not stump the pastor, okay? I mean, I know you can ask me things that I can't answer, but what we want to do is to deal with things that are of importance, and we'll do our best to give you an answer out of the Word of God. You know, in the Book of Acts, it says Paul reasoned with them out of the Scripture. It means he dialogued with them, and one of the great teaching ways is question and answer. In fact, throughout the early Years of the church, there was a developing question and answer mode in teaching, that became sort of refined into what we know as catechism, which is a series of teachings based upon the question and answer process.
So we just encourage you to feel free to ask a question, and we'll do our best to speak right to the point. Keep your questions short. Don't give us a big, long, drawn out thing, or we'll never get everybody's questions answered. The scripture I'd like to have explained it's First Peter three twenty one, the part where it says and according and corresponding to that baptism now saves you, not the removal of dirt from flesh, but the appeal to God for a good conscience. Right.
What that verse is saying is that. Peter's just talked about. First, we're talking about First Peter three eighteen. Christ has once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, and so forth. And it talks about there Christ's provision of salvation.
And then it says that when his body was on the cross, dead, his spirit. Was alive, not the Holy Spirit there in verse eighteen, but His Spirit, and He went and preached to the spirits in prison. And I believe these were demon beings. And the word "preach" is not to preach the gospel, eungalizo, but kairuso to proclaim a triumph. I believe that when that when He was dying on the cross, this is a marvelous truth.
When He was dying on the cross. It looked to hell and the demons like perhaps they had won the victory, and so at the very moment when his body was dead, during that period of time his spirit was alive. It says in verse eighteen, and he went right down into the prison where the spirits are kept. And you want to know what spirits they were? Verse twenty says they were the ones disobedient during the time of Noah.
And you remember in those days, the time of Noah, God sent the flood because the sons of God commingled with the daughters of men, so they were spirit beings who cohabitated with women, creating a sort of a rosemary baby race of people. And God destroyed them all in the flood.
So these are demon spirits. That's all you really need to know. He can. He went into the place, proclaimed a triumph over the demon spirits, even in the midst of his death. And then it talks about the ark, in which people were saved by water.
The ark then becomes a symbol, and in verse twenty-one, the like figure under which even baptism doth also now save us. But it is not the putting away of the filth of the flesh. In other words, he is saying that as that ark was saved in water, so are we saved in water. But it is not external water. You see that it's not the water that washes the flesh, the physical body, not that at all.
But is it is that purification of the conscience. It is the purification of the conscience that he's really referring to. In other words, it's symbolic. As the ship was saved by the water, it floated on the water. The water was its salvation.
So we are saved by a certain kind of being in water, but it is not the water of the physical baptism. What water is it? Titus three five tells us. Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us. Here it comes by the washing of regeneration.
Okay, it's that washing of the heart.
Now you go back with Peter and you go back with Paul to a Jewish concept that really starts in the New Testament with Nicodemus, doesn't it? Jesus says you must be born of what? Water, John three. Spirit.
Now, what water was that?
Well, what would Nicodemus understand? Nicodemus was a Jew. He was the teacher in Israel. He was an erudite scholar of the Old Testament, and he would know that back in Ezekiel's prophecy in chapter thirty-six, Ezekiel said someday God is going to come in a unique way, and He is going to wash you with clean water. Take out the stony heart of flesh and give you a heart of flesh, and put His Spirit within you.
So Nicodemus knew that someday the Messiah would come and He would do a washing work in the heart and plant the Spirit. That's the water and the Spirit of John three, and so water, which always in the Old Testament outward cleansing symbolized inward cleansing. Always does the same in the new, so that the ark then becomes a figure of being saved through a water, and that water is not an external baptism. This verse in Peter argues against baptismal regeneration, but rather a washing of the heart through the working of God and forgiveness through Christ.
Okay.
Okay.
Thank you. Good question. Yes. My question is: Did God establish salvation on the basis? Of faith because of Adam and Eve's lack of faith?
Did God establish salvation on the basis of faith because of Adam and Eve's lack of faith? No, I don't think so.
Now you're into a very difficult area of theology, which is known as lapsarianism, right? Sublapsarianism, supralapsarianism, or infralapsarianism. Doesn't that bless your heart? And what it basically means is, you're really asking the question, did God establish salvation because of what Adam and Eve did, or did God establish salvation before Adam and Eve did anything? And what did God establish first, and what is the sequence, and what is the order?
And the answer to all of that is, I don't know. But some people are sublapsarian, some people are infalapsarian, some people are superlapsarian, and then there are Labrador Retrievers. And I really don't. I'm really not able to tell you what God did first, so I tend to say that God didn't do anything as a reaction to what men did. I believe that the reason God has given us salvation by faith, just simply, is because it most exalts Him, because it eliminates anything that we might do, right?
Hi, my name is Alan Gordon, and I just moved here from Florida. And before I moved, a lot of people said that if I came to this church, that they believe in election, and I don't understand it completely. And I'd like to get it cleared up because so far, what I do understand, it seems right.
Okay, welcome. We're glad to have you from Florida. God bless you. Thanks for coming. Election.
Well, this is easy. Let's see. In other words, what people always ask, and I'll frame the question for you: Are we chosen to be saved, or do we choose ourselves to be saved? Right? Right.
Did I come to Jesus Christ because I was irresistible, drawn by God, and had nothing to do with it, or did I come to Christ because my heart said I want to come to Christ? And the answer is yes. Isn't that simple?
Now, let me see if I can explain it to you simply.
Okay? The Bible teaches election; it uses that word many times. It says we are elected according to the foreknowledge of God. It says we were chosen in Him before the foundation of the world. It says our names are written in the Lamb's Book of Life from before the foundation of the world.
It says you have not chosen me, but I have chosen you and ordained you. In the book of Acts, it says that God said, "I have much people in that city, people who weren't even saved yet, but He had His name on them to be saved." You cannot deny election. Ephesians one, chosen in Him before the foundation of the world. We know we are elect.
So when you come to a passage on election, you preach it with all your heart. You just preach it. It's there. You can't argue with it. We're elect, chosen by God.
Nobody ever came to Jesus Christ except the Father did what? Draw Him.
So we are saved because of God's predetermined love, and that's it. I mean, we are elect of God, and what a marvelous thing that is! And that's so important in the doctrine of security, because if He elects us, He's going to hold us, right? All right.
So we teach that, and we preach that. And when you come across a passage on election, you just preach it fully and completely, because that's what the Bible teaches. But the Bible also teaches human volition. Jesus said, "You will not come to me that you might have life." Jesus said, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often I would have gathered thee as a hen gathereth her brood, and you would not." In other words, Jesus on the one hand said, "You can't come to me unless the Father draws you," and on the other hand, "If you don't come, you are to be blamed." Now, in our minds, those seem like opposites, don't they? Paradoxes, unresolved.
And they really are. Over here, if you're saved, it's by God's election. And over here, if you're damned, it's your own choice.
Now, let me tell you something. That shouldn't be a problem for you, because of this. God's mind is greater than our mind, right? If I can understand everything, I'd be God. And if I was God, the world would really be in bad shape.
But man loves to think he's God. He wants everything to fit into his mind.
So what he does is take those kinds of things and try to find the truth in the middle that accommodates both. And in the end, he destroys both. And so you come up with this thing where, well, you see, God looks down the road and he says, "Uh huh, I see the way they're going. I know what's going to happen, boy. They're going to go over there, and so I just won't elect them because I can see that." And so God becomes the victim of the things that men do.
That isn't what the Bible teaches. If you deny election, you've denied something in the Bible. If you deny the choice of man, where it says, "Whosoever will, let him come, take the water of life freely," Revelation 22. You can't deny either one. You leave them there, and if you try to harmonize them in the middle, you've destroyed both of them.
See, just leave them there. You say, "But I don't understand them." That's good. You know what? That proves you're not God, and that makes us all very comfortable. And I'll tell you another thing.
It's there is John Murray, the theologian in Westminster Seminary, says there is an apparent paradox in every biblical doctrine, every major biblical doctrine. For example, I'll ask you a simple question: Who wrote Romans? Who wrote Romans? Paul, God, Holy Spirit. Who did Paul write a verse, and then God write a verse, then Paul write a verse, and God write a verse?
You say, was it all the Holy Spirit? Is every word in Romans from the mind of the Holy Spirit? Yes. Is every word in Romans from the mind of the Apostle Paul and his heart and his vocabulary? Yes.
Who wrote it?
Well, it's all God and it's all the it's all Paul.
Well, how can it be all God and all Paul?
Well, it can't be in our human thinking. That's paradoxical, but it is. Let me ask you this: Was Jesus God or man? Yes. Half God, half man.
What's half a man? What's half a God? A nothing. He was one hundred percent God, one hundred percent man. You can't be that.
That's right. It's paradoxical. But if you try to make it in the middle and mix it and and take away a little of his deity and a little of his humanity to come up with a hybrid, what have you just done? You've destroyed the person of Jesus Christ.
So you leave it alone. And you say to yourself, "I can't know that the secret things belong to the Lord." Deuteronomy twenty nine, twenty nine. I will not play God and assume that everything has to fit into my computer to be true. I'll ask you another question: Who lives your Christian life? Who does?
Do you? Are you out there saying, "I'm going to live my Christian life if it kills me"? You say, "No, it's Christ in me. I don't do anything. I just flop, and He does it all." No, no, no.
I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless, I live. Yet not I, but Christ lives in. It's the same paradox. See, whenever you try to reduce the truth of God down to the human brain, you're going to have some stuff left over. You understand that?
And consequently, you've got to be able to allow for what we call divine tension. Just leave it there. Bible teaches election. Bible teaches human choice. Let it teach both.
God understands how it all goes together. We don't. That's a matter of faith, isn't it? Don't come up with something in the middle; you destroy both.
So, people who want to say, "Oh, we can't believe in election because it messes us up on this end," are really doing what they have no right to do. They're saying we've got to reduce God to our own thinking processes and assume He's going to do only the things that we can fully understand, and that's not so.
Okay, good. Yeah, John, concerning last week's teaching on the illumination of the Spirit of the Scriptures. How is it that how do we understand that so many spirit-filled and studious men come up with so many different doctrines about? Yeah, that's a good question. Why is it that good men disagree?
Right? If if it's the Spirit of God who's our teacher, okay. Let me tell you, and this is hard to you know to clarify in a simple way. But look at this: we're all going to be wrong somewhere because we lack perfection. True.
I know I have errors in my theology. I just don't know where they are. If I knew where they were, I'd change them. I'm working real hard, and I believe everything I say. I really do, and I preach it that way.
Don't you get the idea that I really believe what I say?
Now I know that I'm imperfect, and so I, to start with, no one person is the repository of all divine truth. And I say that to say this: that all of us are made to some extent. Incapacitated because of our humanness, and so there will be times, for example, when we're working on a passage, when we're interpreting a passage, that it'll go into our permanent file, and we've done less than adequate scholarship on that passage, and so that part of what we've done may not be truly representative of what that text teaches.
So you're dealing one with the human element. Secondly, the reason there's disagreement is because of background and presuppositions. In other words, men are raised in a certain environment with certain definitions and parameters in life, and certain presuppositions. The hardest thing in Bible study is to divorce yourself from all your presuppositions and take every text purely on its own merit. We tend to go into the text with all of our preconceived ideas, and then fit this thing into the system that's already been developed.
Rather than to keep the system open enough to take what that thing says. Thirdly, I think there's a very important reason why good men don't agree, and that's because many good men don't really dig deep enough, and they're too superficial. And if they really were faithful. To dig with great diligence, they'd find themselves coming together much more than they do, and that's important. The fourth reason that good men don't agree is because some texts are obscure and difficult to interpret, and since you can't really be utterly, absolutely dogmatic about them, there is room for latitude at that point.
But the thing that is so wonderful in all of this is that those who are those who represent the word of God and who believe the word of God and who teach the word of God as the word of God and love the Lord Jesus Christ will have differences, but they will inevitably be peripheral differences. The core of the main line of God's revealed truth will be there. See, and the differences will come. Through their background, through their scholarship, adequate or inadequate, through their presuppositions, through their diligence or lack of it, through the fact that this text doesn't have enough information for us to really know, but I think that good men basically agree right down the line. I stand in a historic context.
I'm basically teaching you what has been the main line doctrine of the church since Jesus Christ, and I haven't deviated from that. Oh, there may be some passages where I'll go off a little bit here and there from somebody else's teaching, but the heart and soul of the message of the Word of God is intact. And the other reasons that I gave you will explain why those variations appear. Really, what we need to do is work harder and get rid of our preset presuppositions. That really helps.
Yes, I've never really understood the passage. In Luke five thirty six to thirty nine about the new wine and the old bottles, so I like some explanation.
Okay, Luke five thirty six. He spoke also a parable to them. No man puts a piece of new garment on an old. If so, then both the new makes a tear, and the piece that was torn out of the new agreeth not with the old. No man puts new wine into old wineskins; else the new wine will burst the wineskins, be spilled, the wineskins perish.
New wine must be put in new wineskins, and both are preserved, and so forth.
Okay.
What it's saying is, you ladies know about this. You get an old piece of garment, you put a new patch in it, and it'll rip the old up, won't it? Can't put a new patch in an old garment. You put you get an old wine skin that's had wine in it for a long time. In those days, in that culture, we don't do things like that anymore.
But what would happen is once it was emptied, it would sit and it would dry and crack. If you then poured liquid into it, what would happen?
Well, it would leak. You have to have a new, supple, soft wine skin to handle that. And I think this is so important because now I also did a tape on that. Tom and Matthew nine, by the way, because there's parallels there. But what Jesus is saying is so vital.
He says, "When He came into the world, He is saying, 'Look, I am not here as an addendum to Judaism. I am not here to put some new wine in old wine skins. I am here with a new covenant.'" And I think he's he's representing his ministry not as something that in any way on in the earth can fit into Phariseeic Judaism as it existed in the land of Israel. That's really what he's saying. There's no way that that I can accommodate the system that is.
And he was really calling men to come out totally from that self-righteous, legalistic, works-centered system that was Judaism. He wasn't accommodating himself to that in any way, shape, or form. What he brought was something new, and it had to come in a new package, didn't it? It couldn't be contained by that old self-righteous works system. That's the essence of what he's saying, I think, in that parable.
Yes, I have a question that's been racking my mind for a while, and that is: Did the prayer of Moses on behalf of the people in Exodus 32 change the mind of an omniscient, sovereign, immutable God? No, no, it didn't change his mind. What you have to understand in the Scripture is that God relates to us in human terms.
Okay.
In other words, when it says it repented, God that He made man did God really repent? No, but we understand that that that means that on the surface it appears as though God was sorry about something that He had done. He felt sorry that it even made man. What that means is that God is not ipso facto saying, "I am sorry I made man," like He did something wrong. But He's relating to us in a human emotion that helps us identify with what God was feeling when He saw people turning their back on Him.
Okay, now when Moses prays to God on Israel's behalf, or to spare the people, you know, if there's just a few righteous, Abraham did the same thing. You remember in Sodom and Gomorrah, the same kind of thing. If you can just find a few, will you spare them, and so forth and so on? God is not changing His mind. God is not altering His behavior.
God is not changing the plan. But from the human viewpoint, prayer appears to have that effect on God, and so God talks to us in those human terms, so that we can perceive that that that that can be understood that way. For example, the Bible says the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the earth. Does God have eyes? No.
But if it said God uses his glips to fricus, we don't know. We don't know what that is. But if it says he uses his eyes to see, we perceive then that he is able to take in information. Or it says the arm of the Lord is not short and he can't heal; he doesn't have arm. Says his ear is not deaf that he does not hear.
In fact, it even says that he covers us with his feathers, and it doesn't mean that God is a chicken or a duck or whatever. But God reduces Himself, and this is very important. It's what's called an anthropomorphism. That comes from two Greek words: anthropos, man, morphē, body. Terms of the body of a man.
God reveals Himself to us in terms that are understood in human life, so that we can perceive what is what is happening from the only vantage point that we could ever perceive it, and that's on human terms.
So it is not to say that God changes His mind or alters His position or alters His view. It is to say that it appears that way from the human viewpoint. When, for example, in any time you pray, right? Let's say a sequence is going on and you pray and the Lord heals somebody. Did God change His mind?
Would God have healed the person anyway? That's a very difficult question because the will of God ultimately was to heal the person.
So whether you prayed or not, what would God have done? Healed the person, except for the fact that your praying was part of the process for God to heal the person.
So that was in the plan too. Very difficult.
Now you're trying to unscrew the unscrewable.
So, so when God told Moses that I will destroy these people, even if Moses had not prayed, God would not have destroyed the people. No, because you know you can't say if he hadn't prayed because he did pray. In other words, God. God is talking to Moses in human terms to draw him to pray for the people. That's part of the plan.
God knew what He would do in the end. But again, God is reducing Himself to a conversation perceivable to the human mind. It's the only way we can understand God.
Okay, and it leaves some. Dan, I grant you, it leaves some tough areas out there. But someday we'll know as we're known, right?
Okay.
You're listening to Grace to You, the Bible teaching ministry of John MacArthur. Thanks for being with us. We broke from our regular schedule to air a special time of Bible questions and answers, recorded at the church John led in Southern California for 56 years. And you know, friend, one of the benefits of a Q and A session like today's is that it shows just how comprehensive. And thoroughly sufficient scripture is, yes.
The Bible raises a lot of questions, but it also answers them. More important, it has the power to transform you and me. Here's what John had to say about that in our studio some years ago. I enjoy the Q and A sessions, and I feel comfortable doing it because of the fact that all the answers are in the one book.
So I might not be able to answer philosophical questions because I would have to be widely read to understand philosophy. But when it comes to biblical questions, having spent my life in in the Bible, I know essentially what God's word says about most people's questions. The point of writing the MacArthur Study Bible notes was to put the answers in the Bible, so that people don't need to ask the questions. Right? They ask them anyway, though.
Well, they always want to go beyond what you give an answer in the notes in the MacArthur Study Bible, and that's fine as far as it goes. But that leads to other questions, and that's that's great. I love that as well. But a good place to start with all your questions, and if you're if you're reading the Bible, you Will have questions. A great place to start getting answers is with the copy of the MacArthur Study Bible.
There are twenty-five thousand footnotes on every single page, explaining what you're reading in the scripture, giving you background, culture, geography, language. That all is part of getting to the meaning of the text, explaining hard to understand passages and all those kinds of things. Yes, friend, the MacArthur Study Bible is an all-in-one spiritual library that can help you understand God's word like never before. A reminder too about the newly upgraded MacArthur Study Bible app. It lets you take your all-in-one library with you everywhere.
This redesigned app now gives you John's study notes free of charge, plus a host of other helpful features. To order the MacArthur Study Bible. And to download the MacArthur Study Bible app, get in touch today. Call eight hundred fifty-five Grace, or visit our website gty.org. Again, the MacArthur Study Bible is available in several English and non-English translations, in covers from hardcover to premium goatskin, and prices are reasonable.
Shipping is free. To see all of the choices, shop online at gty.org, or call us at eight hundred fifty-five. Grace, and again, don't forget to download the MacArthur Study Bible app if you haven't done it already. Keep in mind, John's study notes are now included free, no add-ons to pay for, and the app now includes four English translations, including the Legacy Standard Bible. That's a tremendous tool that will transform your daily time in God's Word.
To download the free MacArthur Study Bible app, look for the "Get Our Apps" section on our homepage at gty dot org. Again, that's gty dot org.
Now, for the entire Grace to You staff, I am Phil Johnson. Thanks for joining us today. Watch Grace to You Television this weekend on WVCY in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and check your local listings for times near you. Then be here Monday when John helps you test your faith to see if it's the real deal. Don't miss the next thirty minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
