Matt Slick Live

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 CARM.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.

Hi, this is Charlie Spine, and you're listening to Matt Slick live, and I'm so pleased to be sitting here. If you want to call in with your questions about the Bible, theology, apologetics, religions, or other topics having to do with Scriptures, you're welcome to call in toll-free at 877-207-2276. You can also listen to us and watch us on Rumble and YouTube and Facebook.

Those links are on the CARM.org homepage, and in those streams, you can participate in the live chat. We've developed a wonderful following in the chat, a wonderful Christian family in there that likes to banter back and forth and compare notes on the Scriptures we go to and look at during the show, and it's become a wonderful enterprise to become involved in. So, if you would like, call in. There's a call-in waiting right now. Dave? Dave? And Candace, you're on the air. Hello, Dave?

Charlie, I've posted all my commentaries, and I haven't been able to find a consistent answer on this, from MacArthur to Ryrie to everybody else, but I knew you would have the answer. Well, I hope I can. Okay, the answer is, it's Matthew, I gave Trina the wrong question, it's Matthew 11 or 12. Matthew 11, 12.

Okay. And it's about taking the Kingdom violent. From the days of John the Baptist to now, the Kingdom of Heaven has been subject to violence, and violent people have been raiding it. Well, depending on how closely you look at it, in the modern sense, you would read it that men take it with force. These men are forceful in their acquiring or attaching themselves to the Kingdom of Heaven. When it says violent men, these are men who are forceful men, who take hold of it by force. They cling tenaciously to the Kingdom of God. It's not the sense of violence in that they do harm, but in the face of harm, you have these men who are violent in that they are extremely passionate in grasping to the gospel.

They're grasping to hold it into the Kingdom of God. So don't let the modern English meaning of the word violent throw you a curve on that. There's a lot of things that when the translators translated into English, it was rather difficult sometimes to convey the meaning of what it meant to the people it was written to and what it meant to the writer in the message he was trying to get across to them. In their day and age, this would have been easily understood, and it wouldn't have confused them at all. This is a good exercise in looking at something, and I'm glad you did, because on the face of it, it does seem to be curious.

But it's not curious at all when you take into account, yes, it took men great prowess to go ahead and do something that was not only life-changing, but life-threatening in the day and age to latch onto the Christian faith. Some of the Greek words do mean forcefully advancing. I'm glad you looked into the Greek. Sometimes it's a good exercise to go into the Greek language, because in my Greek class in church, the Greek professor had a joke. He said, the Greeks have a word for that.

The language is so precise that when we look at a word used in the New Testament, it's a treasure chest full of meaning that we miss in the English. I'm glad you looked at the Greek, because that's a very worthwhile thing to do, and I'm glad you did that. Thank you, Chuck. Oh, you're so welcome. I'm glad you called in.

Call in again, I hope. Okay, all right, bye-bye. Yeah, that's a good question, people. Paul had advice for Christians like us, he had a great deal of advice, and one thing he advised Christians to do is to prove everything and hold fast to that which is good. We're to test all things. We're to make ourselves a person who's not ashamed to handle the Word of God rightly, and then present it to the world. Probably one of the most fitting biblical examples of that in the New Testament were the Christian believers in Berea. Paul had come from another town, another region, Thessalonica. He spoke about the Thessalonica, how they had readily accepted the Gospel as he preached it, but he said when he got to Berea, you people, you're of even a more noble-minded attitude in that you take the Scriptures daily and test to see what I'm saying is true.

And so that's what we should do, just like the previous caller did. We should open up our Bibles, no matter where you hear it from, no matter who the source and how much you respect that source. I mean, Paul the apostle, I mean, we can't get a source better than that. And he was pleased, and he commended those people for opening their Scriptures and even checking the apostle Paul out to see what he was saying was accurate.

So this is a very worthy task, and a task that every time I've undertaken it, the Lord has had a blessing waiting for me, sometimes more than one blessing as I studied His Word. So I hope you do that. Now, we are transitioning a lot of our content over to Rumble, and so I would advise some of you people that if you want to keep up with us, because of some of the constraints on other media platforms and some of the ways they treat people they're not necessarily fond of, or they're not necessarily fond of the message in the world they sent, they seem to make it difficult sometimes. So we found Rumble to be absent those kinds of restrictions. In fact, I saw an interview with the man who founded it, and he seems to be quite committed to allowing expressions from everyone on his format there. And so you might find yourself in the Wild West, or you might find yourself amongst them, like-minded Christians.

But you certainly wouldn't expect yourself to be censored or limited over there on Rumble. So that's a note you might want to take. Now, today is Tuesday, February 21, 2023, and we're open to your toll-free call at 877-207-2276. And if we have time, you can email your question, and hopefully I can't say that I'm going to get to it before Matt gets back. You can email a question to info, that's info at karm.org.

And if we can, we'll try to answer you from there. Now, we have another caller today, and it has to do with, we'll let her explain. Hi Ann, you're on the air. Hi. This is Charlie Spine. Hi. Hi there.

Hi Charlie. I understand that Lent is not in the Bible, so I'm questioning where it comes from, and I grew up in a church that, you know, Lent was every year, but I still don't know where it came from, and is it something good to practice? Well, I'm glad you asked, because we have a wonderful article on Karm about that, and interestingly enough, it's called, What is Lent?

And one of our writers in Valuable Resources is Luke Wayne, and he wrote about this. It's a period of 40 days of fasting, leading up to Easter, and it's celebrated by Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans, and some of Protestant traditions. The motivation, as Luke writes, and precise practices surrounding Lenten seasons, have been a little varied, and not exactly the same amongst those groups, but the idea is to give up something and focus on the approaching Easter, Resurrection Day. This is kind of a tradition that's developed over time. Many Evangelicals have rejected Lent, because it seems to have overcome some people, as far as the seriousness of it goes, to be attached to proper worship of God.

Well, that's different. That's more like a works-righteousness kind of thing, and you need to be careful in keeping such a tradition. If your tradition and then your conscience, and you're the only one that knows that you're doing it for the reasons of to contemplate and prepare yourself to fully worship the Lord's resurrection, then in good conscience, you're probably fine. If you see it as a means of gaining grace with the Lord, or merit with the Lord, like some of these other situations are in the other families of faith that I mentioned, like the Catholics and the Orthodox, then you're off the mark, because there's nothing we can do to merit God's favor.

His favor is bestowed on us gracefully, a free gift. So don't practice or do practice Lent, but keep in mind that it's between you and the Lord. I, particularly being raised as a Catholic, did practice Lent. I didn't know why.

I had no concept of what I was doing, just that I always thought it was the right thing to do. We're coming up on a break, but I hope that helps. It helps. Thank you very much.

If not, okay. Thank you. Bye-bye. Take care.

You too. It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick.

I think we're back. This is Charlie Spline, sitting in for Matt Slick on Matt Slick Live, while Matt Slick enjoys a trip to the Holy Land with a group of other Christians. I hope he's enjoying himself. I hope they're safe over there. I'm waiting for him to send back some pictures and reports to us here. Apparently, he's been too busy and enjoying himself to send much of anything, but that's okay. I'm sure he's going to bring back a good report. He's been there before, and some of the pictures he brought back were just stunning to see the history that you can experience in that area, and walk amongst the remains of things that are spoken of in the Bible.

It must be a great experience. Anyway, today we have open lines to call in and ask your question. You can call and participate at toll-free at 877-207-2276. In the last call, I mentioned an article by Luke Wayne. When I'm not sitting in for Matt, usually I'm in the background posting into the chat streams on the various social media streams. I post in links to articles that are related to the topic of the caller's question. I do that because the articles are a lot more valuable to go through than Matt or I could go through with you, and try to keep up pace with a live radio broadcast. When I post links to the articles on the topics, such as Luke Wayne's What Is Lent article, you can take your time. You can open your Bible, you can compare what the believers of different flavors of you went as, and then with your Scriptures open in front of you, you can come down on a particular point of view that should be, and hopefully will be, an accurate and faithful view according to Scripture. So those links are easily followed, and if you don't have the benefit of me posting a link in chat when I'm busy doing this, you can go to the CARM search box on the CARM homepage, C-A-R-M dot org, and you put in a term or a phrase in that search box, and you'll be surprised.

More times than not, there'll be several articles in a list of articles on that topic, sometimes explaining the pros, sometimes explaining the cons, and usually explaining both. Matt's pretty balanced in his approach to most things. So I invite you to use the CARM search box when you have time, because I don't have the time live on the air. Okay, we have another call coming in, let me grab that, with Paul from Virginia. Hi Paul, you're on the air.

Paul? Oh, hi. Hello. Hi Charlie. Hi there.

Question? I'm not sure of the exact place in Scripture, but if Paul was talking, I'm thinking it's in Romans, about someone that harmed him. It was a coffersmith. Do you recall what that Scripture reference was? Well, let's see. The one I'm recalling is, I thought it was in Thessalonians.

Maybe I'm wrong. Well, there was Alexander the Coppersmith, and there was Hymenaeus and Philetus, who had been causing mischief in the body of Christ. And Paul had some very strong words for them. He said that they had been overturning the faith of some, and that their false teachings ate like a cancer in the body of Christ. Theologically speaking, he wanted that cancer excised, and he expressed exactly that feeling. In fact, he said, may they be rewarded according to their works, and he said that in the most sarcastic way in Scripture. Yes, so they had done him harm, and he wasn't shy about mentioning it, because they were doing open and very material damage to the body of Christ, and in fact even overturning the faith of some.

So this is dreadful. I thought it might be referenced that he was jailed. I think he was in prison at the time, when he was trying to warn about that coppersmith, and that may God judge that coppersmith according to his bad deeds. That may be true. I'm really not exactly precise on the circumstances of where he was when he wrote this down. He may well have been in jail, and someone had brought him the news of this kind of thing going on. That may be the case. I'm not exactly sure. You know what?

I'm not sure. I never really followed it up enough to find out if he's mentioned as having repented of the errors, or repented of his errors. That would be an interesting thing to study, though, and something I need to put on my list. When we find error in the body of Christ, it's our duty to first go to the person who might be responsible for spreading that error, go to them as a brother, and sometimes you can win him back from that error, and put him back on track with Scripture. Sometimes you can't, and you have to go with another witness or two, according to the New Testament formula for trying to mend things or correct each other. If that doesn't work, then you might go to your pastor or the elders, if you find someone in any kind of error, really. If that doesn't work as a last resort, you invite them to leave the congregation.

That's one of the most extreme kinds of methods of dealing with error. Apparently Paul called it something that eats away like a canker. He says that our terminology today would be like a tumor, like a cancer in the body of Christ. That must have been extremely serious, and he attached it with that their teaching was actually overturning the faith of some young converts, or prospective converts to the Christian faith.

I'm glad you asked the question, because it's a serious issue, and we see a lot of it around us now in some of the modern, what would you call it, the feel-good churches? Yes, indeed. The seeker-friendly stuff. Well, we're coming up on a break, so hopefully that answers your question. Well, thank you. Thank you, Charlie. Thanks for coming for Matt.

All right, thank you. Hi, this is Charlie Spine. We're back with Matt Slick live. I'm sitting in for Matt while he's down. We do appreciate the Christian community who supports us, and if you want to support Matt Slick live, you can simply go to the CARM homepage, and you'll see a button that says donate. Matt might like to minimize his appeals, and sometimes all he asks for is just a recurring gift of $5 a month, which seems pretty reasonable, and if you're happy to support us in that way, then we're happy if you choose to do so and spread the good news of the gospel.

We have several schools of apologetics that you can go to to learn about the Christian faith and how to better defend it, and you can see those three CARM online schools, School of Theology, School of Apologetics, and the School of Critical Thinking, by going online and hitting the link for the CARM.org slash schools, and that will bring you there. We have a question on the phone, so let me get to that, and here we go. It's Courtney from Ohio. Hi, Courtney.

What can I help you with? Hi, there. My question is about, have you ever heard of, I'm not sure if I'm saying her last name correctly, but it's Jan Markel or Markel or something like that? Uh-huh. Yes, I have. You have?

Yes. Okay, so I've heard she's very conservative. I mean, I've heard her say a few things and say they were fine. I was fine with what she said. I was just wondering, why is it okay for her to teach?

I mean, I know she's not behind a pulpit or anything, but she does do conferences, and I know she has a radio show. Is that okay with using? Yes. And if yes, why? Yes.

Okay. You said the key thing in your question. She's not behind the pulpit in the church. That position is reserved for the elders in the church, the teaching pastors in the church, and it's not a slam on the female of humans, but it's a position of authority that was set up, according to Paul. It has its basis in the creation order of Adam being the head, and not to make him more important, but to make him more judge-worthy, because he knew better than to act the way he did in the Garden of Eden. In fact, if you recall, it was Eve who first ate of the fruit, and then gave it to her husband, yet the Bible says sin entered the world through one man.

So this is a concept called federal headship, and that federal headship carries through into the order maintained within the church. Now, I think she has understanding of the times. She's written several books. Women are very valuable in teaching ministries. In fact, the Billy Graham Crusade, every one of his crusades gave away a book about understanding the Bible by Henrietta Mears, and she was a marvelous person. Yes, fully devoted to the Word of God, and her book was very helpful to many Christians early in their faith to understand the basics of the Bible, and so her work was hugely helpful, but she never got behind the pulpit.

That's the thing. So when you conduct yourself, as Paul calls it, in the household of God, according to the order presented in Scripture, then you are being faithful to the directions of Scripture, and normally blessings follow. But yes, I don't think she's ever tried to usurp the position of a teaching elder in a congregation, as far as I know.

If she has, then I've not heard of it. Okay, I have another question that piggybacks off of that. Sure. Is that okay?

Sure, you bet. Okay, so I am not a fan of Joyce Meyer, okay, but I know she has a lot of crazy teachings, but has she... I mean, she just does conferences and stuff, right? Or has she actually got behind the pulpit? Oh yeah. I mean, I get that I know how she says it way wrong, but I don't know if she's ever done that.

Yeah. Has she? Does she go to churches? She is indeed behind a pulpit, and she is indeed a preaching error of the worst kind.

If you go to the CARM website and put in Joyce Meyer, there's several articles. One of them has not only the ghastly quotes that she's put in print, but they've got just as ghastly audio recordings of her saying the very same, well, they're blasphemies, you know? Unless you believe that Jesus went to hell and was born again, he was the first man ever born again, and stuff like that.

Wait a minute, Jesus didn't need to be born again, he was the sinless Son of God. I mean, this stuff is whacked, and where she gets it from is awful. She's been confronted by people in the Christian arena, she's been confronted by very knowledgeable Christians who have said, please don't teach this to her, please correct, please retract what you've said, because it's giving a black eye to the faith, not only to the faith, but it's making us look just ridiculous and nutty in the face of the people of the non-Christian world, the secular world. They say, you know, we don't want any part of that kind of wackiness when they hear that stuff.

Even they know that it's off the mark, but if you lay those pages on a column, you will hear the audio, and it's unmistakable, and it's fully documented, and we're not telling tales out of school. She is probably one of the most popular folk features. Someone told me, she grows and grows and grows and grows, and I said, yeah, my mom had a tumor that grew and grew and grew. It doesn't make it a good, because it grows. What makes it good is how faithful it is to the word of God. So, I'm glad you asked about her, because you need to warn people about her false doctrine and lead them to resources like Karm has that points out just exactly why these errors are so ghastly. Oh, that is...

Okay, great. Well, and that's one of the things, like, I like to listen to Jan Markell, but I was like, I don't want to listen to somebody that's not supposed to be... I mean, like I said, I never knew that Joyce Meyer was behind the pulpit. I knew she had conferences and stuff like that, but I know so did Jan Markell. I know she's had conferences and stuff too, so that's where my main thing was. I was like, is that being behind a pulpit if you have a conference? And I never knew Joyce Meyer went to churches.

That was where my, you know, I was wondering about that too. I know she takes this crazy stuff. Yes, she does. And when they host her at churches and put her up there in front of everybody teaching them this stuff, she's completely out of line and completely outside the bounds of Scripture. So, I'm glad you called upon her.

Yeah, I have heard some of the crazy stuff. Yeah. Well, good. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Courtney. It makes me feel better about listening to Jan. So, thank you.

Yeah, so far as I know, Jan is very down the middle of the road. Unless I hear otherwise, then you let me know, okay, if you hear otherwise. Okay? Okay. Okay. Thank you. Okay. All right. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Okay. Well, that was a good question, because there is, as the Lord said, there's going to be a lot of false teaching as his return gets nearer and nearer. There will be false prophets, false teachers. He even says false Christs. In fact, the Scripture says many false Christs have already gone out among you. And so, we're to be on the lookout for these false Christs. What they'll do is they'll try to counterfeit the real Jesus. And of course, the counterfeit is an attempt to look as authentic as possible. So, this is how they might spew Christian language and so forth, as they're out there with their error.

But normally, they'll redefine some of the Christian terms that you and I are used to, and they don't have the same meaning behind them. So, here we go into another break, and hopefully you can call in, and we'll continue. Thank you so much for listening to Matt Slick Live at 877-207-2276. It's Matt Slick Live! Taking your calls at 877-207-2276.

Here's Matt Slick. Hi. Okay, I think I'm back now. I was a little premature in trying to get back.

This is Charlie Spine sitting in for Matt Slick Live. And we're happy to have you call in. In fact, someone has called in just now, Terry from Florida, with a question. Hi, Terry. Oh, hi. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Go ahead. Oh, okay. I'm glad.

I can hear myself coming back to me, but I'll be honest, that's the least of our worries. I'm a bit of a tech head. I'm sort of a tech guy.

The song will play now. But you guys are having some kind of tech issues, maybe? I'm not sure what I'm looking at on the screen.

It seems to be an older gentleman speaking on his phone with the green screen. It's really fuzzed out. But I mean, there's a delay that I can only describe as apocalyptic, the level of delay that we're dealing with audio-wise. And I'm just wondering if you guys want some help in there to get this up to a running level.

Well, it's a work in progress. We're trying to stream through several different venues. Matt has the technical hookup at his place in another state that I'm in. Where's Matt? Where's Matt? How come Matt's living here?

Yeah, he's on a trip to Israel with a bunch of other Christians, and he'll be there this week and next week, and then he'll hopefully, Lord willing, return to the saddle. And yeah, I'm the older gentleman. I think you're doing a fine job. It's not your fault, but it almost feels like, dare I say, it almost feels like the Lord himself is sort of saying, hey, isn't happy with what's happening, because it's just a mess. Well, we're going to try to fine-tune it, but thanks for letting us know. We'll continue to work on it. You want me to call? I can do it. I can do it for free.

I can call in and help. I mean, it might be latency problems. The green screen issue is a lighting problem. It's a straightforward lighting problem.

That's why you're getting that bleed coming through at the top. Okay, okay. I can fix that. Yeah, we can get this dealt with. Hey, hey, this guy's... I'll find a way to get back at him for it. But yeah, what was your question?

Oh, it looks like he dropped off the air, or dropped off his phone. But his question was about finding a church, what to look for. You know, Matt has several sister articles on that topic. One of them on CARM is, what things should we look for in a church?

You put that into the search bar on CARM, and you'll come back with an awesome article on things to look for. There's also, like I said, a sister article called, what is the Christian church supposed to be? And if you find a church, and it's not acting like the church is supposed to act, well then perhaps you can help them act more appropriately. Or you can find another church to attend.

So yeah, there's another article too, but let me give you this one. This is one that I found to be very helpful, and it's from the Master's Seminary. It's a church finder, and it's a reliable resource as far as I've been experienced with it, and I've been experienced with it now for several years. So if you go to the Master's Seminary church finder on the web, I wish I could post the link in for you now, but I think that's enough to find it in a search engine. You'll find that these are churches that are pastored by graduates from the Master's Seminary more often than not. And they'll be very conservative and somewhat Reformed, obviously, and they should be ones that pass all the tests of what you should look for in a church. You can check out their statements of faith, of course. Karma is a statement of faith that is very precise in that we engage in talking to people that are somewhat picky, which is good.

If you're a Berean and you're picky in that sense, we commend that. But in that we deal with issues that are central and critically important to the Christian faith, we want our statement of faith to be just as transparent and open as we can be, and then we won't surprise you with an answer having to do with Christianity and the Christian faith. And if you find our answer to be inconsistent with our statement of faith, we're going to rely upon you good people to remind us of it, and we will fine-tune either our statement of faith or our position or both. We've found that as we approach the Word of God, we try to avoid baptizing our doctrine and our ways of thinking into the scripture. Rather, we have the scripture enlighten us and wash our minds clean to where they can think clearly. And if we have to adjust our position to make it fit with scripture, we hope we're not too proud and too stubborn to do so, because some of us get set in our ways with certain doctrines that we've followed for probably good or bad reasons. But if we find that we've followed a teaching or an idea that runs up and butts heads with the scripture, then we have to be willing and humble to submit to the scripture and give up that position and adjust accordingly. That's what Christians do, rather than stick with your favorite way of interpreting something.

We had one person that we dealt with who said, we were talking about Jesus speaking of his resurrection, and that he said, destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. And he was speaking of the temple of his body. And he said, well, that's your interpretation.

And I said, wait a minute, that's kind of a tricky way of looking at things. I said, I didn't give that interpretation. The apostle John gave that interpretation. That's what he wrote at the time. I think his interpretation would be accurate.

I don't want mine to stand or fall. I'm not even going to take a position outside of his position of what it meant. So when you run into people like that, they've got to be willing to go outside of simply blowing off a scripture by saying, that's your interpretation, because many times the scripture gives its own interpretation of what's being said. And in that case, the apostle John himself gives us the precise meaning of what he was talking about.

He was talking about the resurrection of his body. So, there's no callers on the line right now. If you do want to call, I think there's time to take another call. And it would be to our toll-free number, which I just covered up my page that had it on my screen. I almost gave up my whole number. No, our number here to call in with a question is toll-free, 877-207-KARM. And KARM is short for 877-207-2276. So, you can call in, and we'd love to engage with your question. I always look forward to the calls, because, to put it bluntly, the next call we get to the show may be the most important call we've ever gotten.

It may be your call. So we look forward to that. Let's see, there is also a Spanish version of KARM for the Spanish-speaking people who are more comfortable with Espanol. And that's found at MIAPIC.

That's M-I-A-P-I-C dot org. And Carlos, who's on the trip with Matt right now, is enjoying the Holy Land. He administers that website, and he's a superbly accomplished translator and teacher of the Bible and defending the faith. There's also, for those who would enjoy a Portuguese version of KARM, we have one with our help in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I believe he lives in Sao Paulo.

Dave Brito. And he's got an extremely wonderful website. Defend the Faith. I think it means to defend the faith in Portuguese.

I'm not multilingual, so I'm barely monolingual. But Defend the Faith with Dave Brito is a marvelous resource for Portuguese-speaking people. Of course, for all of us English-speaking people, thanks to the Truth Network, you can access over 600 podcasts that they have archived in their website. If you go onto the Netflix thumbnail, I think of the different broadcasters they have over their service. And you go to Matt Slick and look at his programming, and there will be a link to the archived shows of Matt.

600. That's amazing. So, anyway, we don't have any calls, and so what I can do as we go out of this session today is thank you for listening, and thank you for your support of KARM.org. Tonight, I'm going to go and see the mom and the child who I was speaking of yesterday, who is just a miracle child that we've been praying for. I'm going to go to the Bible study she attends on Tuesday nights in my town. They're several miles away.

Very close. And I'm going to ask her if she will perhaps call in tomorrow and share the story of Little Graceland and God's marvelous hand at work in her little life as we approach her upcoming birthday. And so, hopefully, I can get her to join us, and I think you'll be delighted to hear about this wonderful, wonderful story of faith and the mercy of God. And let's see. If there's something else I'm skipping, I hope you'll forgive me, but Lord willing, you can listen again tomorrow at this time. Now, remember, because of some of the censorship we've experienced in some venues, we're going to be bringing our content to rumble, which is the most open and useful format. So I appreciate your participation today. I hope you can come back tomorrow. Bear with us on the technical difficulties.

We're doing our best to continue to smooth those out. And unfortunately, I'm not hardwired for technology.