Matt Slick Live (Guest Host Luke Wayne)

The following program is recorded content created by the Truth Network. It's Matt Slick live. Matt is the founder and president of the Christian Apologetics Research Ministry found online at KARM.org. When you have questions about Bible doctrines, turn to Matt Slick live.

Francis, taking your calls and responding to your questions at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick. Good afternoon, everybody. This is Luke Wayne filling in for Matt Slick this week. That means today, Friday, January 14th, will be the last day that you guys will have to put up with me, and Matt will be back with you guys on Monday, Lord willing.

But it is exciting to have this opportunity to be here and answer you guys' questions here on Matt Slick Live. This show is an extension of the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry. You can find us online at KARM.org, that's C-A-R-M dot O-R-G, where you can find answers to thousands of questions in the form of articles there. But we want to answer your questions live on the air here, so if you have any questions about biblical doctrine, Christian theology or apologetics, cults, false religions, ethics, if you have those kinds of questions, then this is the show for you. And we'd love to hear from you at 877-207-2276.

The phone lines are open, so please give us a call. I also want to let you guys know that we are planning a conference in the Salt Lake City area in April coming up, and we want some feedback from you guys, not only related to this conference, but in planning future conferences as well. And so if you guys could help us out by going to KARM.org slash surveys, that's C-A-R-M dot O-R-G slash surveys, and click on the Salt Lake City, Utah 2022 KARM Conference link and take the survey there. We'd love to get some feedback from you that will help us not only preparing for this conference, but in planning future conferences that might be helpful to you guys, so please come on and click on that and fill that out. While you're there on the website, go to the homepage and sign up for our newsletter so you can keep up on when events are happening, when new articles are coming out, and things are going on with KARM.

So we'd love to have you guys join us there. Now that said, KARM is the Christian apologetics and research ministry, and on this show and generally in life, even this week while I've been filling in, we often get the question of, what is apologetics? Apologetics is a branch of Christian theology concerned with offering a defense of the Christian faith or a reasoned response to objections and challenges to the Christian faith, both for the purpose of discipleship, of strengthening the faith of the believer, as well as evangelistically to reach the loss, to be able to answer objections, to remove stumbling blocks or clarify points in the Gospel so that people can hear and understand what we believe and why we believe it. And a common question along with that is, what is the biggest apologetics issue facing the Christian Church today?

And there are a number of directions you can go in answering that question. I think it's difficult to find the criteria to say what one thing is absolutely the biggest, but I think back on a few decades ago when the late Francis Schaeffer was asked what issue he believed would be facing the Church in the generation to come that they needed to be preparing for, and his answer was statism. Normally at apologetics conferences, that's not the subject you hear about, and yet I think history has shown that he was onto something, that in an increasingly secular society, people look to government to fill the role of God. Government is good when it fulfills the specific role that God has given to punish evil, to protect good, to uphold rights, to serve justice. But when we begin to look to government to do more than that, to solve all of life's problems in every facet of our life, to silence our opponents, to dish out not merely civil justice for outward crimes, but cosmic justice, we're asking government to do something it cannot do when we are making gods of the state.

So Schaeffer was onto something. And yet, I think there are even more foundational, fundamental things to look at. Ten years ago I was asked a similar question. Early on as an apologist, I was asked what I thought would be the biggest issue facing Christian apologists that they weren't really talking about. And my impulse back then was the answer, identity. Identity. You see, I think in an increasingly secular society, when you remove God and His design for who we are to define us, we're left groping in the dark to answer the most fundamental question, who am I? And I saw ten years ago, I don't want to put myself out there as someone who's good at predicting things, I'm normally terrible, but by God's grace I recognized this, that we were going in a direction where that was going to be an increasing, we were approaching an existential crisis, where people would begin to search inside of themselves to invent an identity, because a secular worldview simply couldn't give them one. On an atheistic, naturalistic, materialistic worldview, you're just a bunch of chemical reactions. You're an event, you're not a person, you're not even an object, you're an event more like a tornado or a rainstorm, a bunch of matter swirling in a certain pattern for a little while and then dispersing. Where do you find who you are, your personal identity in that?

You can't. And so we grope at it, and what's it led to? It's led to confusion in matters of gender and sexuality, it's led to the increasingly polarized fiction of racialism, where we take this entirely man-made construct that divides humans into races based on arbitrary physical characteristics. Now, ethnicity is real, culture is real, but race, where if you happen to be below this level of darkness or above this level of whiteness or whatever, that we lump you all together into one thing and call it a race, is a man-made fiction.

There's no even secular biological backing behind this. And then we define our whole lives by it, why we don't know who we are. There's a whole book in the Bible about this issue, the book of Ecclesiastes, where the wisest fallen man who ever lived, King Solomon, wrestled through many of these dilemmas. He sought meaning in pleasure or in work or in learning, in education and all of these things, and where did he find himself at the end of each of these journeys? When you isolated any of these parts of life and tried to find meaning in it, what was the end, what was the result? Meaninglessness. Meaninglessness, it's all meaningless, until finally the climax of the book brings you to an Ecclesiastes 12. In the end it says, All has been heard.

Here is the end of the matter. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole of man. For God will bring into judgment everything, even every hidden thing, whether it be good or evil. We cannot understand who we are, why we live, what our purpose is, who we're to be, without reference to our designer, our maker, our creator and our judge, our moral lawgiver. Without the true and living God, and without the context of eternity, we can't know who we are. And we live in a culture who needs that answer, and so they need the proclamation of the gospel. They need a biblical worldview. And it's up to us as Christians to bring that to them, and that's part of what apologetics is all about. So what do you guys think?

What do you think are some of the major apologetics issues facing the world today? Call in. Let me know. 877-207-2276.

Or any other questions about biblical theology, about the Christian life that you might have, we'd love to hear from you guys. Speaking of which, let's go to the phones right now. We're going to talk to Winfield in North Carolina. You're on the air. How's it going? Hey, how are you?

Doing good, doing good. What's your question? I have a question. I called in actually a week ago to Matt, but I'm still kind of struggling with Galatians 5-4, where it says you've been severed from Christ, you are seeking to be justified by the law, you have fallen from grace. I guess really my question is, can you fall from grace? It says you can fall from grace. And from a Calvinistic standpoint, the answer is no.

And I go to a Calvinistic church, but I'm still kind of like struggling with that. Okay, give me just a second while I'm pulling that chapter up here. Okay, so... And so you're keying in on the phrase in there, fallen from grace, and saying, does fallen from grace here mean that you can lose your salvation? Is that what you're asking? Correct.

Okay. And I understand that, because taken by itself, the phrase certainly sounds like it could mean that. But in the context here, as we walk through what we just read, and in the greater context of Galatians, I do not believe, and especially when you look at the rest of the Testament, it's clear that that's not what it's saying, that the New Testament does not teach that God's grace is something that he gives us conditionally, and then we have to live up to the standard to keep it, that ultimately our works are what keep us in God's grace. And in fact, Galatians is all about this problem, the people coming in saying that the Gospel is Jesus and a ritual, Jesus and a work, Jesus and laws, Jesus and our effort. And so in this case, when he uses this phrase of fallen from grace, it's not because these people have committed these sins and therefore lost their salvation, what the people he's accusing are doing is teaching a Gospel that says, Jesus isn't enough, put your trust afterward in circumcision and the keeping of the law.

And he tries to show the error of that. He says, Now, does that mean any circumcised person cannot be saved by Christ? I mean, he says, if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you. So can a Jew be saved? Yes, of course.

Can a circumcised person be saved? Yes. So he's using very strong language here to make a point, and we're going to get to that point as soon as we get back from that break. Stay with me, Windfield.

As we walk through this, I want to help you see the context because this is really important. So hold on and we'll be right back after this. This is Matt Slick.

Not Matt Slick. This is Luke Wayne filling in for Matt Slick this week, and we'll be jumping right back to the phone lines in just a minute. If you want to get on, you can call at 877-207-2276. We'd love to hear from you all with your questions. We'll be jumping back on with Windfield from North Carolina.

We were just talking about Galatians 5-4 and whether when Paul uses the phrase fallen from grace, he's talking about us losing our salvation. So let's jump back in with Windfield and talk about this a little bit more. All right, you still with me, Windfield?

Yep, I'm here. Excellent, excellent. Okay, so as we've seen here, Paul's focus, we were looking at verse 2 where he says, And he doesn't mean literally every circumcised person, but he's referencing back to the false teaching that's been addressed throughout this book where a group of false teachers were saying that if you add to Christ the requirement of circumcision, you are in fact negating the message of grace. The finished work of Jesus Christ. If it is Jesus and, then it isn't actually the good news at all. As he opens where he talks about preaching another gospel, which is no gospel.

It is no good news at all. There's no grace in it. And so that's the message he's dealing with. If you receive circumcision as a means toward your salvation, Christ is of no benefit to you because you're not actually putting your full trust in his sacrifice. And so he goes on in verse 3, So then, he says, you have been severed from Christ, so you're circumcising your flesh, you're also circumcising your gospel. You're cutting away, as you cut away the foreskin of your body, you're cutting away the grace from your gospel.

He's using a metaphor here. You who are seeking to be justified by law, you have fallen from grace. What he does not mean, you were once saved and you have fallen from salvation. But that you have departed from the teaching of grace, that you've departed from the gospel.

Your message isn't good news anymore. What you're putting your trust in is no longer the grace of God. You haven't ascended to a higher, more complete teaching, like these false teachers are saying. Oh, that Jesus part, that gets you started.

But now, let me take you to Moses and show you everything else you have to do. No, you're not ascending to a higher level of knowledge, to a higher gospel. You're descending, you're falling, your gospel's collapsing.

You've fallen from grace to legalism. And that message will not save you. And if that's what you're putting your trust in, then you weren't saved at all.

Right, and I 100% agree with all of that. I guess the part that I'm struggling with, like if you go down to verse 7, you were running well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? So to me, and I don't know, you were running well, which means that you were doing good. And then someone came and has now moved you from that. So someone said you were doing good, and now all of a sudden someone came and said, oh, wait a second, you need to get circumcised. And now I may be thinking, maybe I need to go get circumcised. And that's the way I'm looking at it.

Maybe I'm looking at it wrong, but you know. And I'm sure you're familiar with the parable of the soils. The parable of the sower, where Jesus talks about, okay, and so in among the descriptions when Jesus is interpreting that, and he talks about the seed that falls on the rocky soil, he says in a similar way, this is reading in the version in Mark chapter 4 verse 16, in a similar way, these are the ones on whom the seed was sown on rocky places, who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy, and they have no firm root in themselves, but are only temporary. Then when affliction or persecution arises because of the word, immediately they fall away. And others are the ones whom the seed was sown among, the thorns. These are the ones who have heard the word, but the worries of the world, the deceitfulness of riches, the desires of others, and he goes on, so there are these people who, the seed falls, and they spring up, even with joy. There's this outward sign of responding to the gospel, and yet behind that there is in fact no root. So there's a sense in which someone can receive the gospel and be responding outwardly in a right way, joyfully excited about the gospel, and then later demonstrate that in fact, under it all, they were never rooted in the gospel.

And so when we look at the rest of the New Testament, we have to treat it as regarding this idea of a false faith that Jesus talked about in his own parables does exist. There are people who receive the gospel, even excitedly, enthusiastically, and seem to spring up quickly, when in fact they're not rooted in the gospel. And those people who never bear fruit are not people who were ever saved. In Jesus' own explanation of it, the good soil, they are the ones who hear the word and accept it. The ones who genuinely actually accept it are the ones who bear fruit and are good soil. And so when we look at the categories that Jesus gives us, and we read Paul's letters that way, we can understand the kind of people he's talking about who responded early on to the gospel, but are now showing signs of not being rooted in the gospel.

And Paul is challenging on them. He is genuinely, pastorally concerned for these people. I don't want you to be rocky soil. I want you to be the good soil.

I want you to not just outwardly look right for a while. I want you to be right with God through Jesus Christ. But that means being rooted in the gospel of grace, not just doing right things, but having the right faith underneath that. And that's Paul's deep, grievous concern that pours out in very emotional terms throughout the book of Galatians. It's a powerful book when we read it in the whole context in that way. Does that make sense?

Yep, yep, yep, yep. I think what I have to do is just go to John, stick at John, where it says that Jesus can't lose any, and maybe just stick there. Maybe that's the place I go. Again, we read scripture in light of scripture, and so I would understand that Paul doesn't disagree with Jesus.

When we see what Jesus says about such things, I would start there and read Paul in that light. All right, Winfield, as you wrestle through these things, feel free to call back again, and we'd love to talk more. All right, you have a wonderful day. Thank you for calling. All right, that was Winfield in North Carolina, and we will be back to take more calls after this break.

You call in and get in line at 877-207-2276. We'll be back after this short break. It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick. Welcome back to the show. This is Luke Wayne filling in again for Matt Slick for one more day. Matt will be Lord willing back with us on Monday. And you guys can get on the show and talk.

Call in at 877-207-2276. All right, now we are going back to the phones. We're going to talk to Anthony in Richmond.

Anthony, you're on the air. Can you hear me? I can.

Yes, I can. But at the beginning of the show, you said something that wasn't really related to Christianity, but I thought was definitely wrong, and I think we should be committed to truth, even when it's... You said that race is a social construct and that there really isn't any such biological, scientific basis for race. Is that what your belief is? There's no biblical nor scientific basis for the modern conception of dividing all ethnicities, cultures, and people into a tiny number of four or five races by arbitrary physical characteristics.

Yes, that would be correct. Well, I do want to say that... I think that's not true. First, let me say I do believe all people have inherent dignity and should be treated equally, but there's no... It's not immoral or incorrect to say that there are racial subgroups and that it has a firm scientific genetic basis, and there are firm scientific evidences that demonstrate that, and in many, many different areas of biology, demonstrate the reality of different races. Not that that makes anyone lesser or more than another race, it's just to say that there really are different races, and this can be demonstrated scientifically.

And I don't think Christians should... I know that there's an allergy to that type of... Because we all, you know, I constantly hear the refrain, you know, there's only one race, it's the human race, but also there are different races, and there's nothing wrong with believing that, especially since it is firmly rooted in factual biological science. Well, the thing is, again, biblically, the distinctions between peoples... There are nations, tribes, and tongues, language groups, certainly, but when it comes to race, to say all people, because they have certain darkness to their skin, or a certain shape to their eyes, or things like that should all be lumped together as one type of people.

There's absolutely no biblical basis for that. And on top of that, if you look at statements by the American Anthropological Association, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, the Linguistic Society of America, all sorts of different disciplines of human study will all make statements like, quote, race is widely viewed by scholars in numerous disciplines as a social construct rather than a biological fact. Racial identities, ideologies, and practices are expressed locally and very widely, with models of race differing throughout history and across the globe. But there's no actual, natural basis for it, so different cultures invent their own concepts of race and divide people accordingly. And so this is what all the secular scientific groups say about the concept, even just from a biological standpoint, that a Tanzanian and an Irishman are genetically more similar to each other than a Tanzanian and an African Pygmy. So if you're going to genetically divide people into race, then a black Tanzanian and a pale Irishman would be the same race as opposed to a Pygmy. But nobody divides it that way, and nor should they, because race is a cultural fiction. And in the reality, all men are made in the image of God, all men are fallen in Adam, and all men stand equally before God in need of the Gospel.

And I know you agreed with all of those things. And that's the biblical view of man. Really, the only two groups that the New Testament would lead me to regard, there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free. What I'm to look at is there is the old man and the new man.

There are those who are redeemed in Christ, who are my brothers in him, and there are those in need of the Gospel, outside of Christ, who are in Adam, who are in the old man, to whom I bestow my compassion and my proclamation of the Gospel, because they too are made in the image of God and deserve that dignity. But the idea that I should divide people based on arbitrarily selected physical characteristics that change divisions over time, even within my own lifetime. In the earlier decades, when I first learned about the cultural concept of race, people from the Near East, or even as Far East as India, were not in the same race as people in the Far East, though the Asian race was considered the people of the Far East.

Now, Asian encompasses anyone from the continent of Asia. Why? Because we can move the boundaries around, because they don't actually correspond to anything in nature, anything that genuinely exists. It is a fictional concept, and therefore there's absolutely no grounds for judging any person or treating any person differently based on a fiction like this. Can I respond? We should view people with... Sure, absolutely. Well, first of all, yes, I do absolutely agree. All human beings are made in the image of God as a special creation. They did not evolve from any lower form. They were created especially. But, that being said, when you talk about these academic groups, you have to realize there's this concept of what's called wokeness in academia, where they're also trying to destroy the concept of biological male and female, so those people really can't be trusted at all.

They're trying to destroy the thing between man and woman. Many of the statements that I'm referencing here predate modern wokeness. The stand that there's absolutely no biological basis for the concept of race is many, many decades old and has been the persistent view of the hard biological and cultural sciences. Only recently have people been standing up to challenge it, because the idea that race isn't real goes against wokeness. Wokeness wants race to be real, because then you cannot understand unaccountable for something that someone else in their race did.

Okay, well, just a couple of evidences, and then I'll leave. There are companies that will test your DNA and tell you what your racial subgroup is, and there are medical variations between racial subgroups. Some racial subgroups are much more likely to contract or experience certain types of ailments and illnesses than other racial subgroups.

It's rooted in genetics. There are genetic differences between the races, and even though the differences are very minor, that's a distortion that comes from the fact that the genome is very large and it has countless sub-base pairs. If you look at the difference between races, it's only a very small percentage of the genome, but the differences do exist, and they create the various racial subgroups. Again, that doesn't mean that one racial group is better or worse than the other in any way. It just means that there are racial subgroups, and it is rooted in science.

I kind of wanted to dispute what you said earlier. I don't think it's immoral or wrong for Christians to accept the notion of biological basis in actual different races existing. I didn't actually say that it was immoral to believe in the concept of race. Well, I do again hold that when you talk about biological differences, you begin to conflate the concept of ethnicity with race, which are actually two distinct things. What I did say was that when people abandon God and try to find their identity in other things, and therefore begin to derive an entire identity out of race by saying, well, because I have these superficial, physical similarities to these people and not those people, and therefore my loyalties are here and I have to be this kind of person and behave in this way and do these things, and those people have to be that way. When we start to wrap up identity in race, we run into two serious problems. That was the statement that I made.

My primary focus was on the issue of identity, and it happens that in what you refer to as woke culture, we define things within race and then try to derive our identities from that. That's where we run into very serious problems. Do you understand what I'm saying? Yeah. Oh, did we lose you?

Are you still with us? Okay, well I hope that was helpful in further explaining that to you, and we will get on to our next caller after this. You guys can call.

There is an open line. Call in at 877-207-2276. It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick. Welcome back to the show.

This is Luke Wayne filling in for Matt Slick for one last day before, Lord willing, he'll be back with us on Monday. And so we do have an open line. We'd love to hear from you guys.

Call in at 877-207-2276. But let's get right back to the phones. We're going to be talking to Mark in Connecticut. Mark, you are on the air. Hey, hey. Hello, Luke.

Greetings, Karm family. How's it going, Mark? Good, good. You're doing a great job filling in. Thank you. I appreciate that.

So what's your question? My question is about Adam and Eve. Did they go to heaven or hell? What is the scriptural basis about? Also about the flaming sword keeping them from coming back into the garden. So were they saved or not? What does the Bible say? Okay. I'm sorry, what was that? I can hang up and listen. Okay.

Well, thank you very much, Mark. And I wish I could give you a more definite answer, but the simple fact is, to my knowledge, the Scriptures never plainly answer the question as to whether Adam or Eve repented and turned to God in faith or not. And so my hope is certainly that they did ultimately believe, but I do not know. Adam is used in the New Testament in contrast to Christ. If you are in Adam, you are still in your sin and going towards destruction. If you are in Christ, then you are redeemed. So perhaps through that you could extrapolate that he is still unregenerate, is unsafe, but I think that's reading more into it than what is plainly said.

The fact of the matter is, I do not know, and I don't know that any of us can know, this side of eternity, whether Adam and Eve believed, because to my knowledge, the Scriptures don't tell us that. So I wish I could be more helpful. I hope that answers your question. I'm going to Michelle in Texas now. Michelle, you are on the air. Hi, Luke.

Yes. Hello, Michelle. How are you doing? I'm doing great.

How about you? You're doing a really good job. I've enjoyed listening to you. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, I'm struggling with 1 Corinthians 14, verse 2, and it says, And I was delivered out of a false church about a year ago, and there was a lot of, you know, Scriptures that were twisted, and I'm really struggling with that. So I'm going to hang up so I can listen and take notes. Okay.

Thank you, Michelle. All right, so Michelle was asking about 1 Corinthians 14, and the statement that the one who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men, but to God, for no one understands. And I think that's an important thing to recognize, that throughout the rest of this chapter, he's going to be rebuking people who are speaking in tongues, or it's the normal Greek way of referring to languages.

So you could translate this, and some translations have rendered it, speaking in languages. Speaking in tongues or speaking in languages. And so someone who speaks in a language, supernaturally, from the Spirit, obviously this is talking about a gift to the Spirit. Someone who supernaturally speaks in a language does not speak to men, but to God. Does this mean that the gift of tongues is a supernatural gift of speaking a non-human, unknown language that only God understands? And I don't think so. Now there are multiple views on this.

I'm going to explain to you where I land. There are solid Christians who would disagree with me on this interpretation of this passage, but I'm going to speak where I land on this passage. And that would be that the gift of tongues is a supernatural gift that we see exhibited in places like Acts chapter 2, where people speak in other languages, real spoken languages, that they themselves have never learned. But by the power of the Spirit, they speak these languages. And later in this chapter, Paul will go on to say that the one who speaks in the gift of tongues is a sign to the unbeliever, whereas the gift of prophecy is a sign to the believer.

And there would seem to be a parallel between the way in which those are signs. And so in the same way that the gift of prophecy is a positive, edifying, exhorting sign to the believer, as we see in verse 3, it would seem that the gift of tongues is intended to be exercised in that positive way toward unbelievers, that it is an evangelistic gift, as we see it used in Acts 2. And Paul says in this chapter, I more than any of you wish I spoke in tongues.

Why? Because he's the apostle to the Gentiles, traveling around as a missionary. That gift would be extraordinarily, or he does speak in tongues. He says, I'm grateful that I speak in tongues more than any of you.

Why? Because it is of more use to his mission. Whereas this chapter in 14 is talking about its abuse in the Church, in the midst of Christian worship, when people of the same language are gathered together to be edified, to receive the Word of God, and instead someone gets up and edifies only themselves by putting on a show, preaching in another tongue that nobody understands, speaking this language, which only makes them look good.

Hey, look how spiritual I am, and does nothing for the Church. And so he says, the one who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men, but to God, for no one understands him. Later on, in verse 9, he says, so unless you utter by the tongue speech that is clear, how will it be known what is spoken, you will be speaking to the air. So he also refers to this in the language of speaking to the air.

You're talking to the wind. You're not talking to the Church. You're standing in here, you're standing up like you're talking to the Church, but you're not talking to any of them. And so he uses all these different languages, all these different terminologies, all these different metaphors, to help us understand how useless and in fact counter-productive exercising the gift of languages is when used within the local Church gathering. And therefore, if no one's interpreting, if no one's explaining what's being said, then don't get up and exercise that gift. You're abusing it.

You're not using it the way it was intended. So anyway, I don't want to take up the whole rest of the show just preaching a sermon on 1 Corinthians 14, but hopefully those highlights would at least show you why I think the way I think on this, and I hope that is helpful to you as you continue your study on that. But again, that's my view. There are solid Christian brothers who would disagree with me and interpret this another way.

I would not define orthodoxy by where someone lands on the gift of languages. So hopefully that was helpful to you. Let's go on to Laura in Utah. Laura, you are on the air. How's it going?

Good. Hey, I keep getting questions. I have my own view on it, so I figured go out on the radio with your answer and maybe that will suffice, the people that have been asking me. So they want to know if all of Israel is saved, like it says in Romans 11, I believe it's 14.

No, 11 and 26. And also they are twisting it to be like the Jews. So we've got Israel being saved and then all the Jews being saved, and I will let you go to town with that. Okay. So just to clarify, what you're wanting to know when it says in Romans 11, all Israel will be saved, who and to what extent that's talking about? Yeah.

Is that all Israel? I have my thing. I want your word.

You're knowledgeable to go out, not mine. Okay. Okay.

And remind me, which verse in chapter 11 is that? Just finding that real quick. 26. 11, 26.

26. There we go. I do not want you, brethren, to be uninformed of this mystery so that you will not be wise in your own estimation that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved, just as it is written.

So the Israel that is partially hardened is also the Israel that will be saved. So when we put it in context, again, let's walk back a little, beginning at verse 17. But if some of the branches were broken off, and you being a wild branch, now, branches of what? The olive tree of God's covenant people. Some of the branches were broken off so that you, the Gentiles, can be grafted in and become a partaker in that rich root. Do not be arrogant towards the branches, but if you are arrogant, remember that it is not you who supports the root, but the root who supports you. You will say, then, branches were broken off that I might be grafted in. Well, quite right, they were broken off for their unbelief, but you stand by your face.

Do not be conceited but seared. And it goes on discussing this idea of the breaking off and the grafting of the olive tree. And so it would seem that when we get to there was a partial hardening of Israel for the Gentiles to come in, and that that relates to the idea that branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in. That the partial hardening of Israel is the literal ethnic people of Israel, and that there was a partial hardening of Israel so that the Gentiles could be brought in. And then it talks about that God's ultimate intention is to provoke Israel to jealousy through that to bring them back in. So I do think that this is pointing to an idea that there will be, before the end, a widespread evangelistic success among the people of ethnic Israel and a great salvation among them. And this was a common belief among the Puritans, Spurgeon, many throughout, so I'm not standing alone here in the Reformed tradition and viewing it this way, that there will be, before the end, a great harvest among the people of ethnic Israel. That doesn't mean all Israel of every generation will be saved regardless of their faith in Christ.

That's been made clear throughout this. Those who are cut off are because of unbelief. Those who are saved are because of belief. But I believe a day will come where there will be a regeneration of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ among the people of Israel before the end. That's all the time we have today. Thank you guys for tuning in, and we will see you Monday. Another program powered by the Truth Network.