Bible Questions and Answers, Part 54

When you die, you will immediately go into the presence of the Lord. Absent from the body, present with the Lord, right? Second Corinthians 5. Well, Philippians, far better to depart and be with Christ.

It's instantaneous...it's instantaneous. Welcome, friend, to a special Tuesday edition of Grace to You with John MacArthur. On this Independence Day, we're taking a break from our study of the rapture in the day of the Lord, and instead you're going to hear John field some helpful Bible questions from his people at his home church, and maybe these are questions you've wrestled with as you've studied God's Word. Questions like, how can you know if God is calling you into full-time vocational ministry, and will you recognize your friends and your loved ones in heaven? As we begin, you're going to hear a member of Grace Community Church ask his question, and then John will respond. So, let's start the Q&A. Hi, John. My name is Phil, and I've been with you for 31 years, and I enjoy your ministry. And I just have one quick question that has been on my mind for quite some time.

Both my wife and I live in Burbank. We have a lot of people from the Watchtower Society come to our door, and I have such a great compassion for these people that I actually invite them in so we can talk and I can get a chance to share the gospel. And my question was, out of, of course, John's second epistle in verse 10, if anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house, and do not give him the greedy, and then John goes on and on. How would you respond to that?

Well, we have to respond...a good question, Phil...we have to respond to that in its context, okay? In the period of the New Testament and after and before, there were itinerant teachers. Basically people traveled around and taught and preached. They were dependent upon the care and the reception of people in the towns and villages where they went to receive them into their homes, to give them lodging, to give them food.

That's the context here. What John is saying is when an itinerant teacher comes to your town who is not faithful to the gospel, do not provide for him a home, a place of reception, that's the context here. It does not mean that you should not have a conversation with somebody with the objective of communicating the gospel to them.

In fact, Jude tells us that we need to snatch people like brands from the burning without getting our own garments burned, or we need to reach down for people who are corrupted without staining our own garments. So, you remember perhaps the best illustration of this, of course, on the positive side would be Jesus sending out the 70 in the New Testament and saying, wherever you go, where people receive you into their home, you know, give peace to that home, where they spurn you, you know, shake the dust off your feet and go somewhere else. That's a picture of the itinerant preacher moving around the countryside, going from village to village, that's how they plied their trade.

That still goes on to some degree in parts of the world today. But it would be the idea of a welcoming reception. If in the Jewish kind of social world, having a meal with someone was tantamount to acceptance of that someone, then that is exactly the way they viewed that because that's why the leaders of Israel condemned Jesus, they said, He eats with sinners.

And the Pharisees, you remember, wouldn't eat with anybody but a Pharisee. So the idea of opening your home, receiving somebody in, having a meal, giving them hospitality, caring for them, meeting their needs, which is aiding and abetting their enterprise is exactly what it's talking about there. I don't think that it is specifically referring to the fact that we should not have a conversation with these people geared to communicating the truth to them.

I think we should. Now having said that, you have to be very, very careful that if you're going to engage yourself with a Jehovah's Witness, or with a Mormon, or any other person that comes along denying the truth, that you take the position of the offensive. It's very easy for them to twist and manipulate a new believer who can get tossed to and fro and cared about by every wind of doctrine. So someone as mature as yourself, I would say they have no idea what they just stepped in to. And that's a good thing, so keep it up, Phil. Okay...okay. Hi, Dr. MacArthur. Hi. My name's Amy. Hi, Amy. I want to thank you so much for your ministry. You've impacted so many people, including myself and my family. My question is, what is the relationship...how does the Bible define the relationship between Christ and the Holy Spirit, especially during His ministry on earth?

Good question. The best way to understand that is this, that when Christ emptied Himself, as it says in Philippians 2, and took upon Him the form of a servant, He yielded up His own personal will. He said over and over, as we have noted many times, I only do what the Father shows me to do, I only do what the Father tells me to do, I only do what the Father does, I only do it when He says to do it. And it comes to the crux in the Garden when He says, not My will but Yours be done, which means He has completely submitted to the Father's will. So He goes through life, not that His will is in disagreement with it, but He yields up His own prerogatives to do the will of the Father.

The self-emptying, however, is more than that. It is more than just a willingness to do the Father's will in the Father's time. It is a yielding up of prerogatives within His own power. For example, He said, if I wanted to, I could call a legion of angels, right?

But I won't. He yielded to the Father's will and He yielded to the Spirit's power. This comes into clear focus if you understand from the very beginning that He was conceived in the womb of Mary by the Holy Spirit. He was at His baptism being baptized by John, the recipient of the Holy Spirit in a symbolic way when the Spirit came like a dove and settled upon Him. This was a demonstration of now that He's going to launch into His ministry, it's going to be empowered by the Holy Spirit.

So that's the way to understand that. Now Jesus said in that last night in that upper room with the disciples, He said, when the Holy Spirit comes, He will speak of Me. So the ministry of the Holy Spirit now is to point us to Christ. In His humiliation, Christ pointed to the Holy Spirit as the source of His power. In His exaltation and His saving work, the Holy Spirit comes to point us to Christ.

Okay? Good question, Amy. Hi, Pastor John.

My name is Chris. I know that you've spent a large portion of your ministry and even your life to training men for the ministry. So I have a two-part question for you. First of all, what would you say to a young man who was aspiring to be in full-time ministry who strongly desired it but wasn't quite sure that he was called by God?

And secondly, what are some major pitfalls that that same young man should be looking out for? Sure, I think I know who that young man is. That's wonderful, Chris. Look, you're in the same place everybody's in. I never had an epiphany, an angel never showed up, I never heard a voice out of heaven. When I looked at my own life and said, what do I want to do? There were no supernatural events.

There were no supernatural events. All I could look at was a desire and I think that fits perfectly the New Testament pattern. 1 Timothy 3, if a man desires the office of an overseer or pastor, he desires a noble work. The assumption there is that this is the normal way that God indicates the calling through desire...through desire.

And as that desire flourishes and strengthens, it becomes a singular desire. All I can tell you is, there were times in my life when I thought I would be a preacher. Then there were times in my life when I hoped I would be a preacher. Then there were times in the progression of that when I knew I would be a preacher. Then there were times when I knew I couldn't be anything other than a preacher or a pastor. And I think it's that desire that grows and develops.

And what grew it in me was not so much the nature of ministry itself, but my undying passion for the book. When I went to college, I'm not going to give you a whole lot of useless information about my past, but my whole life I got notes that I had to take home about how bad I did in school and Johnny could do better notes, you know? My mother was always saying to me, we know you can do better, we know you can do better. And I was always trying to convince her, no, no, this is it, I'm maxed out.

I'm giving it my best shot, that's all I can do. No, you can do better, you can do better. And the teachers would say, Johnny can do better. The point is, I was no scholar, I was no academic. That was true all the way through high school. And in college, I didn't let my books get in the way of my education either.

I went through college from one event to another event, student life, athletics, every sport, I played every sport in my college days and I was involved in all kinds of activities. And as I got toward the end of my college years, I think it was my junior or senior year, the Word of God took on a whole new depth for me. And what it came down to was this need to know what the Bible meant. That's what drives me, by the way.

It's not you that drive me, it's this that drives me. I really became a preacher of the Word of God because I didn't want to do anything in my whole life but that because I wanted to know it and I wanted to share its glorious truth with others. And so, it just kept developing in my heart. And I remember when I went to seminary, remember now, I had convinced my mom that I had maxed out with, you know, C's and B's and I went to seminary and I remember the first time I showed her my first semester report card, she just...I knew you hadn't been telling me the truth all these years. I just...I went through seminary and I did so well and I graduated with honors and all of that and there was one driving reason. I was doing what I really loved and the passion was there. So the other components of that, the desire, the growing explosive desire in your heart that eliminates anything else, the next thing that comes along was confirmation from the people, you know, who were saying, you want to teach? Let's hear you teach. And that's fine as far as it goes, but if you say, I'm called to teach and you teach and everybody says, oh, no you're not. Maybe you ought to think about that. But where there's affirmation of your giftedness and where there's confirmation by the leadership of the church that your character and your giftedness fits this, so you have laying on the hands like in the case of Timothy. But all the way along, sure, there's a certain sense of is this really what I ought to do?

Why? Because there's this nagging unworthiness, there's this reality that how am I going to survive? How am I going to be faithful? And you know, you just take it a day at a time. And I will tell you that it is the greatest joy, continues to be the greatest joy of my life, but it continues also to be more important than it's ever been in the past.

It's a growing joy that I have. So there is a certain sense in which a desire...it's a desire, a flourishing, developing desire, eventually you can't do anything but that because that begins to completely capture your heart. Then you have to look at your giftedness response, affirmation from spiritual leaders around you, set aside your fallenness because the only kind of people the Lord can use are broken vessels because that's all there are, okay? And when it comes to that, and I tell young guys this all the time, all ministry, all ministry comes back to this book, all of it. All of it is informed by this book. So when you want to get trained, get the tools to understand this book. And then when you've gotten that foundation, you can go take whatever field you want, whether you want to teach or whether you want to be in a university, whether you want to teach in a seminary, pastor of church or be a missionary.

But in the end of the day, all ministry is a dissemination of divine truth, right? And that's what you want to make sure you grasp. If you're young enough, you still have a little bit of doubt about whether this is what you ought to do, and I can honestly say that I had no idea when I went to seminary what I was going to do, I just was driven to dig into the Word of God and I loved it.

I don't think I even knew till I finally got to my third year where it would go. But I think you can start there and if the Lord continues to make that desire flourish, that you're going to find you're in the right spot. My guess is if that's already a passion for you, that's the work of the Lord in your heart. Okay? Good. Mark Nielsen Hi, Pastor MacArthur, my name is Mark Nielsen, how are you? Pastor MacArthur Good, thank you, Mark. My question is, in Romans 11 26, Paul says all Israel will be saved. Who does he mean exactly, as far as we can tell from the Scriptures, as who all Israel is? Pastor Mark Nielsen It's pretty clear if you put that together with the whole picture eschatologically, all Israel will be national Israel in the future...in the future. All Israel will be saved at some point. Right now, individual Jews here, there, but as a people, they have not come back to their Messiah.

In the future, God will sovereignly save the nation. That will be essentially the Jews collectively as a people will believe in Messiah, Zechariah says, they will look on Him whom they've pierced, mourn for Him as an only son, a fountain of cleansing will be opened and they'll be washed from their sins and they'll receive the Kingdom God promised to them in the Old Testament. That is after, according to Isaiah, two-thirds of the rebels...two-thirds of Israel, rebellious, purged in judgment during the time of the Tribulation. So in the period time of the Tribulation, there's going to be a salvation of national Israel.

It encompasses 12,000 from every tribe. They don't know their tribes now, God does know them. It constitutes 144,000 Jews, then they become evangelists to the world. The revival seems to start to take effect, salvation of Israel in the city of Jerusalem, Revelation 11 at the end of the chapter where the population of Jerusalem begins for the first time after the two witnesses to glorify God.

So that's talking about a future generation of Jews at the end of the age that the Lord will redeem as a constituted people and give to them the Kingdom which was promised in the Old Testament. In Leviticus 11, God gave to Aaron and Moses the commandment about cleanliness, unclean animals and hygiene and such. And there was food that was forbidden, kind of go along with the food and fellowship thing. A lot of that food that was talked about then is part of our cuisine now. How do we address that?

JOHN. Sure, it's good, very good question. The critical thing for God dealing with Israel was this, they were to be the repository, the national repository of divine truth, okay? They were the sole monotheists in a polytheistic, animistic world, okay? They were the true worshipers of the true God. They were an island in a sea of polytheism, animism, whatever kind of false religion, multiple gods. How was God going to protect them and insulate them?

The food and fellowship thing comes into play. They couldn't dress like the other nations. They couldn't eat like the other nations. All of that had no real purpose other than isolation, just a way to separate them. This was part of their cleanliness so that they just couldn't go over to anybody's place and interact with them and therefore be influenced. God was designing a peculiar people. So God was protecting the people to protect their future so that the Messiah would come from Abraham through the line of David, that that would still be in existence.

That was part of the insulation and the protection. Once the Messiah came, all that part of the Law goes away. And that happens immediately in the book of Acts. Peter has a vision. Remember that in Acts 10? He sees a sheet and in the sheet are all kinds of animals, clean and unclean. And the Lord says to him, rise, Peter, kill and eat.

All that's gone, no more. And his response is, wait a minute, I've never eaten anything unclean. And the voice comes back and says, don't dare call unclean what God has cleansed. That whole part of the Old Testament Law, that ceremonial part is gone. That's why in Colossians Paul says, don't let anybody hold you to a new moon, a festival, or any kind of food. And he goes on to talk about it a lot, that we're no longer under Old Testament dietary laws. So they're gone.

So you can feel free to eat anything. Okay? Good.

Yes? ERICA Hello, Pastor John. My name is Erica, but I have two questions that are related on behalf of Kathy Kim. So I'll read those to you. She says, how are you?

Okay. The questions are, when we die, do we wake up in God's presence and will we know each other in heaven? JOHN When you die, you will immediately go into the presence of the Lord. Absent from the body, present with the Lord, right?

2 Corinthians 5, or Philippians, far better to depart and be with Christ. It's instantaneous. It's instantaneous. There's no delay.

There's no waiting. It's not waking up because you never really go to sleep. It's absent from the body, present with the Lord. As soon as your spirit leaves here, your spirit never goes to sleep, your spirit never dies. Your body may go to sleep, your spirit will enter into the presence of the Lord, immediately. And then at the Rapture of the church, you will receive a glorified body and there are no wheelchairs in heaven, none of them.

Okay? But there's no soul sleep, waiting place, no limbo. You go from the presence here to the presence of the Lord. You'll see Him, the Lord Jesus face-to-face. When you get to heaven, you will know as you are known, you will have instant knowledge of the Lord, instant knowledge of everybody else that is there. I wrote a book on heaven. You can go to the bookstore afterwards and get a copy of that book, it has a whole section on that. Okay?

Would you do that, Erica, for her? How are we going to know each other? Should we just read the book? Well, you could probably gain a lot by reading the book, or I can just give you the answer and you can forget the book.

That's either one. Because you're going to have perfect knowledge. You're not going to need to...we won't have...I'll put it another way.

Not only will there not be wheelchairs, there will not be name tags. You will know because you will have perfected knowledge. Okay? And I think you rock. She thinks you rock. Thank you.

I think you roll. Together we're a perfect combination. This is Grace To You with John MacArthur.

Thanks for being with us. We've broken from our regular programming to air a practical Q&A with John answering Bible questions from members of his congregation. John, when we air a Q&A session like the one we did today, of course, we're able only to cover a few of the questions that people ask. But even if we could air Q&A programs 24-7, that still wouldn't provide all the answers that people need. And the fact is, your desire is that people should be able to find the Bible answers they need for themselves.

Yeah, I think that is the assumption that God had in mind when he gave us his word, that the answers were there. I don't mind answering questions. Obviously, I've done it my whole life, and will continue to do it to help people.

And you're good at it, too. You're who I come to with questions, because I'll get a good answer. Well, yeah, I've been in the Bible long enough to have been able to frame up many answers, but I think that's a valid point to make, that the reason you study the Bible, the reason you read the Bible, the reason you listen to sound preaching and read good theology is so you can access biblical answers on your own. I would suggest, however, there would be a tool, maybe more than any other single tool, that would be of great help to you, and that is the MacArthur Study Bible.

We endeavor to answer, with regard to each passage, the very most important and urgent questions raised by that given text. So there are a couple of ways that you can access the Study Bible. First of all, you can go to simply the Study Bible. That's an app, and it will give you the entire text of God's Word in three translations, New American Standard, the ESV, and the classic King James text. With the app, you can quickly link to Grace To You sermons and articles. So you literally will find a door open to all the wealth of resources that we have just by going through the app and picking something that you're interested in. And then for a nominal one-time fee, you can add the study notes from the MacArthur Study Bible.

So you have them on your app, and you also have access to everything else. Secondly, and maybe more conventional, would be to get a copy of the MacArthur Study Bible. Hardbound or leather editions, we have lots of them. And of course, as always, great prices from Grace To You and free shipping in the U.S. That's right, friend. The tools you'll find in this resource, the cross references, the maps, the charts, and especially the 25,000 study notes, all of it is there to really bring Scripture to life and to help you understand God's Word better than ever. To order your copy of the MacArthur Study Bible or to download the app, contact us today. You can call us at 800-55-GRACE weekdays from 730 to 4 o'clock Pacific Time, or visit our website anytime at GTY.org. As John said, the Study Bible is available in the English Standard, New King James, and New American Standard versions, as well as several non-English translations.

And with free shipping and reasonable prices, we're sure to have an option that will meet your needs. Again, to order the MacArthur Study Bible, call 800-55-GRACE or shop online at GTY.org. And if you'd like to keep the MacArthur Study Bible available wherever you go, let me recommend our Study Bible app. It also includes multiple translations of Scripture. It gives you immediate access to the resources of our website, blog articles, devotionals, and much more. And for a reasonable price, you can add the study notes from the MacArthur Study Bible. The Study Bible app is just one of thousands of resources available free of charge at our website, GTY.org. That's GTY.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson encouraging you to be here tomorrow when John returns to his series, The Rapture and the Day of the Lord, with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.