Welcome to the Narrow Path Radio Program. And now, please enjoy this special collection of calls to Steve Gregg and the Narrow Path. And our first caller today is Bruce from Beaverton, Oregon. Bruce, welcome to the Narrow Path. Good to hear from you again.
Hi Steve, good to hear you. Yeah. Questions about Jacob and Esau. First, what does Jacob's name change to Israel with the, you know, the angel? And what does Israel mean?
I'm getting different stories. Israel apparently means a prince with God. I've heard different preachers give other meanings, but it seems like the meaning you'll get mainly from the lexicons is a prince with God, or one who rules with God. The pastor I was raised under actually said that it means governed by God or ruled by God, which would be nice, but it's not necessarily supported in the lexicon. So I think you're going to get most authorities giving the meaning of Israel as a prince with God. Prince of God. So is a subservient or a servant of God of some sort, right?
Well, I mean, I think, of course, all things are subservient to God, but I think that the word that he's a prince would suggest kind of the the other way, that he's ruling along with God. Okay, good. And nothing in there about struggle or submitting, I guess.
Okay, I got that. On Esau, you know, if you go to Hebrews 11, the Hall of Faith, and I mean, you get Jacob's name in there. Somewhere I think I've heard that there's something about how Esau is somewhat of a lost character. Well, in chapter 12 of Hebrews, it does say that he was a, what's it say, a carnal man or something like that. It says that we should not be fornicators or profane persons. I think the word profane is what's used in the older versions. That we should not be fornicators or profane persons like Esau, who for one bowl of pottage sold his birthright.
That's what it says. So he was not a man who had interest in holy things, and therefore the sacred birthright that came with being descended from Abraham was not of interest to him. That's good, that's good. And what do you think of the reconciliation that... Between himself and Jacob? Yeah, it changed to Israel, and then the next day they meet, and... Well, I have no reason to doubt that it was sincere, if that's what you're wondering. I think the two brothers were in fact reconciled 20 years after the offense.
It would appear to be so. Yeah, Jacob said he was going to follow Esau to Mount Seir, but we don't have any record of him doing so. He might have done so off the record, but the next we read of Jacob after he said that he's going to follow Esau to Mount Seir, the next thing we read he's near Shechem, camped out with his family. So I don't know if he ever went to Mount Seir.
If he just said, I'll meet you there, and then just kind of hightailed it the other direction, or if he actually did go there. Do we see Esau... I mean, Seir, that's on the east side of the Jordan, isn't it near Petra, that area? Yes, Petra was actually part of Edom.
Uh-huh. So we characterize him as Arab? Well, Arab, you know, insofar as we use the word Arab for a, you know, a generic kind of Middle Eastern non-Jewish tribal people, then yeah, the Edomites would, I guess, in those days they wouldn't call them Arabs. I think in those days you'd probably have to be from Arabia to be called an Arab, but in modern usage the word Arab is a much broader term that refers to a whole bunch of different races of non-Jewish people in the Middle East. But yeah, I mean, if there were Edomites today in the land of Edom, I'm sure we'd call them Arabs, you know.
Yeah, I'm trying to track, you know... But there are no Edomites, there's no Edomites today. Yeah, there's no Edomites today, so they would not be identified. All right, thanks a lot.
Okay, Bruce, thanks for your call. By the way, the last known Edomite was Herod the Great, and he died in the infancy of Jesus. It was after the Babylonian exile, when the Jews were taken into Babylon in 586 BC. Three years later the Edomites were also conquered by Babylon and taken away, but they never were restored. The Jews were restored back to their land by Cyrus in 539 BC, but the Edomites never were. And so the remnants of the Edomites, the ones that survived, just kind of moved down and lived in the southern part of Judah, and they were called the Idumeans, and Herod the Great was one of the last known Idumeans in history.
So they've been gone for a couple thousand years. By the way, that's what is being referred to in Malachi chapter 1, where God is saying to Israel, I have loved you, and they say, well, how have you loved us? He said, well, we're not Jacob and Esau brothers, yet Esau I hated and Jacob I loved. What he's referring to is the fact that God had shown favoritism toward Jacob by restoring them from captivity, but he did not show a similar favoritism toward the Edomites. So he says, Jacob, I've loved Esau, I've hated and I laid his mountain's waste. In other words, Esau's mountains. We're talking about the Edomites, not the man. This is not a statement about the men, Jacob and Esau, but about the nations of Jacob and Esau, Israel and Edom, respectively.
But that's because Edom was not restored after the Babylonian exile, and Israel was. I appreciate your call. Let's talk to Evangelina calling from Sacramento, California. Evangelina, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.
Hi, Steve, thank you. I have a kind of, it's definitely, I guess, Christian-related, because I have three young children, and my husband and I have been battling with the idea of either homeschooling them or keeping them in a public school system, and, you know, because of the curriculum and kind of things that they want to teach them that contradict our beliefs, and, you know, you could choose to answer or not, but I believe on one of the shows you had mentioned that your son was homeschooled and that he kind of, as an adult, kind of regretted that fact. Like, he felt like he was maybe too sheltered as an adult and wasn't exposed to maybe some things of the world, and it kind of hindered him as an adult. Do you regret homeschooling, or do you think that that was and maybe is a good option for Christians these days with our young children? I do not regret homeschooling, but I do think that had my wife at the time been more open to it, we would have done some things a little differently. I have five children, and four of them were homeschooled and never saw the inside of a classroom.
Well, I take that back. My youngest, because their mother left them and me, I had to finish raising them, and my youngest actually got put into a Christian school for his last two years, actually for most of his high school years. So he's the only one of the four younger children that ever went into school. We homeschooled all of, well, see, I have children from two marriages. My first daughter went to Christian school, and then when I started having these other children by this other marriage, they were all homeschooled.
But then their mother left them, and so they didn't do that well after she left, I'm sorry to say. But my older son did once say to me that he thought they would have spiritually benefited from being allowed to go to public school at some point. Now, he didn't say that he shouldn't have been homeschooled in the early days. He wasn't against it. But he said that by the time he was in high school, he felt like it might have been good for him to go to public high school so that he'd be exposed to worldly culture and so forth, so that he'd actually, he said he'd have something to resist so that he might have more spiritual strength. Now, it might sound like a strange suggestion, but I actually believed that.
I actually made that case with my wife at the time who was not open to it. She wanted to homeschool them through college. But I felt that all my children were strong Christians by the time they reached high school age. And they remained strong Christians in the early years of their high school age, too. But they never really did face the world until they left the home, really.
And that's not a very ideal situation to me. If I had it to do over again, and if I had a cooperative wife who wanted to do the same thing, I would still homeschool the children up through junior high school. But of course, that's when they reach the age that, in traditional society, they're adults.
The Jews, of course, Bar Mitzvah, a young boy, and consider him a grown man when he's 13, that's about the time, traditionally, children have been considered to be passing into adult life. And I don't think you need to hover over them quite so much when they're young adults. And I think they do need to face the world. And I think it's good for them to do so while they're still under your care, while they're still in your home, where you can actually have some degree of monitoring of their progress or regress as they go to public school. But I would say this when your children are, I assume, fairly strong. I wouldn't send a weak Christian child to public high school. But my children were actually seemingly strong Christians when they went to high school. But they didn't go to public high school. They were homeschooled even then. And I think when they're young adults, it's a good idea for them to actually get their feet wet in secular society, but while still living at home, so that their parents can still monitor and have some input into their lives. If they don't really have any immersion in secular society until they leave their parents home, then, of course, their parents don't have any influence over them at all and can't as easily counteract the influence of the world. I do think homeschooling in the younger years is the best possible thing if parents are able to do it. And I think more parents are able to do it than think they are.
It's not rocket science, actually. If you can read and write and balance your checkbook, you can teach elementary school kids virtually anything that the schools can teach them. And one thing you won't teach them, if you're a Christian, is you won't teach them that they are gender neutral, that they're born without gender, and that they can choose what gender they're going to be, and that marriage is anything that people want it to be.
Any two people who want to have sex can get married, male with male, or female with female, or whatever. I mean, these are views where the schools are pretty much compelling children to be subjected to the new secular mindset. Now, of course, if your children are strong Christians, I was. When I was in elementary school, I never went to Christian school or homeschooled, and I argued with my second grade teacher over a biblical man. For a biblical matter, I gave a talk against evolution in junior high school to my class.
I did that kind of stuff. I was a pretty strong Christian throughout my childhood. But what I'm going to say is that if your children are strong Christians, they may survive elementary school as long as the school allows them to. You see, we still had freedom of speech and freedom of thought when I was a child in school.
Now, more and more, the left are being totalitarian in their indoctrination. Call me paranoid, but I would foresee a time when the schools do not give the parents the right to teach their children something so counter-revolutionary, as that marriage is between a man and a woman, or that a child is born with a certain gender. Those things are new revolutionary teachings in the schools today, and at the moment, parents are tolerated in teaching their children the opposite. But unless the country turns around, which it's hard to know whether it will or not, I do believe that eventually children will be taken out of the homes of parents who seem to be injuring them by teaching them old-fashioned values.
That would be considered child abuse. And this has happened in many countries. You can't homeschool your kids in Germany, for example. There's lots of places in the modern world where you can't homeschool your children because they don't want you to pass along your old-fashioned values. There's a new world, and the schools are there to indoctrinate the children in it. So I strongly advise homeschooling young children if you can, and I think most people could.
They might have to live more modestly because, of course, it generally means you have to live on one income in the family. Sure. Well, I really appreciate your answer. It's funny that you brought up the gender situation because actually in the city that I'm in, there was a school that was reading a book to kindergartners, which I have a kid in kindergarten, talking about how it's okay. It was about a little girl and how she was different than everybody, and it basically was all about how she liked the opposite sex and that it was okay. You mean that she liked the same sex or she wanted to be the opposite sex?
She wanted to be the opposite sex and that she was attracted to the same sex. And this was in kindergarten. This was a kindergarten book geared to small kids to kind of place and wet their feet about the fact that it's okay, this is an acceptable thing. Of course, that's the way things are going. There's no surprise there.
I mean, anyone who's awake sees that that's the trend, and anyone who's raising small children will want to do what they can to protect them from that kind of evil. Absolutely. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to say that and appreciate your ministry and God bless. Thank you, Evangeline. Good talking to you today.
All right. Our next caller is Catherine from Fort Worth, Texas. Catherine, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.
Hi, thank you for taking my call. So I'm an author of Christian Romance, and I recently self-published Shall Not Perish, John of Tribulation at Smashwords.com. It's based on end-time events, and I wanted to be as factual as I could with not knowing all the details, like who is the Antichrist, where is he coming from?
But the big key is the rapture. So we have many well-meaning Christians who believe pre-Trib, mid-Trib, post-Trib, no-Trib. I chose the pre-Trib. I understand. Are you pre-Trib? Not anymore. I was.
I used to be pre-Trib. But you do believe in the rapture? Yes, I believe the rapture comes on the last day. Jesus said he would raise his people up on the last day, and so that's what I believe.
So my question would be, what are the ramifications? Because, you know, I believe one way, you believe the others, and others believe the others. We can't all be right. So whichever one is right, we'll find out eventually. What are the ramifications, though, of being wrong?
I mean, I didn't want to write a book and have it false. I don't want to give false hope, but obviously I believed enough clues to say pre-Trib. I don't think being wrong about the timing of the rapture is going to be a deal breaker for anyone with God, unless it is. And by that, what I mean is I've occasionally met people, not very often, but they've said, well, if there's not a pre-Trib rapture, I don't even want to be a Christian. In other words, they're saying, I won't be faithful to Christ if I have to go through the tribulation. Well, what they're saying is they don't have any commitment to Christ, not the commitment that Christians have. A Christian is committed to Christ. And Jesus said, if you seek to save your life, you'll lose it.
If you lose your life for my sake, you'll find it. That's the only kind of commitment that Jesus recognizes from His people. So there are people who would say things like that, like they're so wedded to the pre-Trib rapture that they would not, and they even say they would not, be a Christian if there is no pre-Trib rapture. Now, I don't meet people like that very often, but I've met a few.
I've also met a few. I mean, I used to get calls from a fellow down here in Southern California who said that if they brought the mark of the beast to his door, he'd take it, because otherwise he wouldn't be able to buy or sell. He said, how could he be expected not to take it, because then he wouldn't be able to buy or sell? He wasn't really understanding what Christianity is. Christianity is not saving your life. Christianity is obeying Christ, even if it costs you your life. And so there are people whose attitudes toward suffering for Christ are not what they should be.
And for them, it may make a difference if they are expecting a pre-Trib rapture and there isn't one. Okay. Well, I appreciate that. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you for your call. God bless you. Let's talk to Tim from Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Tim, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling. Hi.
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for taking my call. Sure.
Okay. My question today is, I've been learning a lot about conversion. And, you know, I went to a Pentecostal Bible school, prayed people through sinners' prayers, receiving Jesus, but have come kind of to the conclusion that Jesus isn't knocking on the door of our heart so much as ruling from a place, you know, far above the world and the highest place of authority. And he's not coming like a beggarly encyclopedia salesman or something. And therefore, our response needs to be different. Recently, we've had someone come to Toronto, Torben Sondergaard.
I don't know him. He started a ministry called The Last Reformation. They do so-called kick-starts and start people in evangelism. And they're more getting people to do something like the four-part, you know, Peter package, repent, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, that's repent toward God, and then be baptized as like a third step, and finally receiving the Holy Spirit. I see some people kind of applying it also like a formula.
And my question is, like a formula? And my understanding is people should show some kind of fruit or some kind of sign that they've repented before being baptized. And there's interesting, you know, communication also going on about that verse, baptism now saves you, right?
So I'm just wondering if you can, you know, give us your reading of Scripture around those topics. Well, yeah, the words repent and believe and be baptized and even receive the Holy Spirit all have fallen on hard times in terms of, you know, immediate clarity in their usage. Lots of people say they believe in Jesus, but they don't mean it the way the Bible uses the term. Some people might say they were repentant, but they don't mean it the way the Bible says. I mean, truly, if a person repents and believes, then they do become converted. And that changes their whole life.
That changes the whole direction of life, changes their whole patterns of life and their whole experience of life. I mean, those are the things that the Bible says you have to do to be saved. But for many people, they are simply words and not realities. Many people say they believe, and that was even true in biblical times. That's why James had to write James chapter 2 and say, you know, yeah, you say you believe, but let's see it from the way you live.
Faith without works is dead. He said even the devils believe and tremble, but clearly their works don't show that they're true believers. Believing in Christ means you actually believe Him when He says things like that you have to forsake all and follow Him. You believe the gospel.
The gospel is that Jesus is the Lord. And if you believe that He's the Lord, well, then that's going to show in the way you act. Obviously, if I believe that I have a Lord, you will be able to tell it because I'll be obeying Him instead of something else. If I don't believe I have a Lord, you can tell because I'll just be doing my own thing. So I mean, believing and repenting, repenting means turning around or changing your mind, which results in you turning around in your life.
These are all, these are important words that are bandied about in religious circles without, I think, too many people understanding what they really mean. And so there's a large number of religious folks in churches who would say, yeah, I believe, or I've repented, or I've even been baptized, but who really don't have a very clear idea of what that means and what their experience is, not what the Bible's describing. Certainly, if a person has been converted, what will be clear is that they now live for Jesus Christ instead of for themselves. I mean, that's what a Christian is. A Christian follows Jesus.
He's the Lord. They take up their cross. They deny themselves.
They follow Him. Jesus said, if anyone will come after me, he's got to do those things. Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Me. And a lot of people call themselves Christians who haven't done any of those things.
They have not denied themselves. They've said, as soon as they come they've said, as soon as there's prayer, hoping to affirm themselves and get themselves a good deal with God after death instead of really denying themselves. And taking up a cross? You don't find very many people in North America taking up a cross in any serious way that the Bible would suggest. Being willing to die?
Being willing to give up everything? Jesus said, unless you forsake all that you have, you can't be My disciple. So there's some very serious ramifications of conversion in the Bible. And an awful lot of people would call themselves converted, but they haven't had any of those experiences of surrender and true repentance and hating sin and loving righteousness and following Jesus. And if somebody isn't doing that, then whatever it is they did that they're calling their conversion isn't the thing that the Bible is describing as conversion. Because conversion changes you. That's why it's called converted. Convert means to change. So that's what I'm thinking.
Okay. And with regard to baptism, I mean, is that something you'd hold back on? I mean, I hear people using baptism and evangelism almost as part of their first approach. Well, John the Baptist said to the Pharisees, you know, bring forth fruits of repentance before he'd baptize them. On the other hand, he knew they were hypocrites and he had reason to be suspicious of their commitment. It would appear that most people who came to be baptized by John were not people that he personally knew or that he held out and waited to see signs of repentance in their life.
How could he even watch all their lives? All of Judea was coming out to be baptized. It would appear that he routinely baptized people simply on their request of it, on good faith that they were repenting as they claimed to be doing. But when the Pharisees came, he didn't trust their sincerity.
He knew what kind of people they were. So he said, I need to see some evidence before I'll baptize people like you. In the early church, they baptized them the same day they were converted. At least they did in Acts 2 and Acts 8, and seemingly every case when people were converted, they baptized them right away. On the other hand, they preached a gospel to them that would not generally be responded to favorably unless people were being converted because they didn't preach, get out of hell, you know, gospel.
You'll never find any mention of hell or heaven in the preaching of the apostles in the book of Acts. They preached the authority of Jesus Christ, the lordship of Jesus Christ, and the need for people to turn and be followers of Christ. That's what they were basically teaching. And when people respond to that message, they took their word for it that they were sincere and they baptized them. If there's any question that people aren't really sincere or don't know what they're doing, I would hold off and not baptize them until I believe that they really did. But I'd have to have reason to have my doubts.
You know, I need to take a break here. We have some of our stations leaving our network now, but we are going on for another half hour, so stay tuned if you can. You can hear the whole program on our website, thenarrowpath.com. You can also donate from there. We are listener supported. We pay for the radio time.
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Study, learn, and enjoy. We thank you for supporting the listener-supported Narrow Path with Steve Gregg. Welcome back to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. This is our second half hour of the program. Those of you who listen to stations that pick up the program at this point and don't carry the first half hour, we'd just like you to know that the entire program, which is an hour every day, this is the second half, you can hear it from our website thenarrowpath.com. Every day the program is streamed from the website, so you can hear it live, and also every day the program is archived at the website, so you can hear it later if you can't listen live.
And these archives go back many years, so you can listen to our programs going back a long time if you visit thenarrowpath.com. All right, our next caller in line is Mary from Sacramento, California. Mary, welcome to the Narrow Path. Thanks for calling. Hi Steve, how are you doing today?
I'm fine, thanks. I listen to you quite a bit, and I also listen to John MacArthur quite a lot. I suffer from anxiety, and I take medicine prescribed by a doctor.
I try to turn my anxieties into prayers with thanksgiving, the way the Bible says to do, the way I understand it. John MacArthur says, if you have anxiety, you are sinning, because the Bible says, do not be anxious. Do you agree with him? Well, you know, there's a number of things I don't agree with John MacArthur about.
I do probably agree with him on the issues of emotional and mental health more than on many other issues, but I wouldn't put it the way he's putting it. We are told to be anxious for nothing. We're told to not fear. We're told to not be angry. And yet, what does that mean? Does that mean that the moment you feel a fear that you're sinning, or the moment you feel angry, or the moment you feel anxious that you're sinning?
I don't think so. I think that when you feel anxious, you're being tempted to be anxious. When you feel fear, you're being tempted to be fearful. When you feel angry, I think you're being tempted to be angry. That is to say, these are states of mind and emotion that we are to reject, but which, you know, the temptation to them is the emotion itself.
And by the way, a lot of those emotions are good emotions in some situations. Fear, for example, is a really great thing to feel if you're thinking about crossing crossing the freeway on foot. You should realize, hey, that's pretty dangerous. It should make you very cautious.
It might even make you decide not to do it. You know, in other words, fear can keep you from doing stupid things because you're afraid of the consequences, and you should be. Animals feel that fear too. Animals are afraid of predators and so forth, and that's not a sin. It's not a sin to feel fear. But what is a sin when it comes to fear? It's a sin to allow your fear to dictate your choices and to, in other words, become a fearful person who's dominated by your fear so that you don't do what you should do because it's a scary thing to do.
You don't have courage to do what you should. The same thing about being angry. I believe that we're supposed to be angry about things. God is angry about things, and I believe that godly people get angry.
In fact, when the Spirit of God came on King Saul, it says he became angry because it was a righteous indignation against something horrible that was taking place that had to be redressed. I think there's a godly anger. But you don't want to be an angry person. You don't want to be a person who's dominated by anger.
You don't want to be a person who gets angry easily. And when it comes to anxiety, there are certain things that you should feel care about. You should be anxious for the souls of people whose souls are in danger, for example.
But that doesn't mean that you're an anxious person in the sense that you're always worried about stuff. It means that you feel anxiety or you feel fear or you feel anger. You feel these emotions because they come upon you. And at times, those are the very emotions that you should feel because they will motivate you to do something that needs to be done.
Other times, they can become oppressive. That is to say, if you let these emotions dominate you instead of letting them motivate you to do what's right, then they become oppressive and sinful. Now, if you feel anxiety, you said you try to turn your anxieties into prayers. That's doing the right thing.
That's doing exactly the right thing. If you're feeling anxious, instead of sitting around and worrying, you turn that into an occasion to let your request be known to God. As Paul says, be anxious for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God. So instead of being anxious, you turn your anxiety over to God through prayer. That's what Paul says doing, and you're doing the right thing.
Now, do you still feel anxious at such times? Possibly, but you can't be held responsible for a feeling. You can only be held responsible for a choice. You don't have power over feelings.
You have power over your choices. So if a feeling of anxiety comes upon you, a feeling is not a sin, but a choice to wallow in worry, to not trust God, to be fearful and crippled by fear, paralyzed by fear and anxiety, instead of turning it over to God and doing your duty as a Christian. Well, of course, those responses would be bad, but when you do go to God in prayer about it, then you're doing the very thing you're supposed to. So if MacArthur says it's a sin to have anxiety, I don't know if he's thought that through as much as he should.
It's true. The Bible says, don't be anxious, but it also says, but in everything by prayer and supplication, make your request known to God. In other words, instead of letting anxiety dominate you and dictate your course, let prayer and trust in God dictate your course. Lots of times, people who are doing the will of God and trusting God feel a great deal of fear in it, because it's a scary thing, but they do the right thing anyway. A soldier going into battle, if it's a hot battle, may very well feel very much fear of the bullets flying around him.
But if he gets out of the foxhole and charges against the enemy, he's overcoming that fear. He may feel it all the time, but what you feel is not your responsibility. What you do is your responsibility, and I think you're doing the right thing. If you feel anxious while you're doing it, that's not your fault. How can you be expected to change your emotions?
If somebody says that it's a sin for you to have certain emotions, then I think that they're kind of putting a burden on you that's not very realistic. Our next caller is Trenton from Boise, Idaho. Hi, Trenton.
Welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling. Thank you. I have a question for you. I've heard you say a couple of times that although the word Trinity isn't found in the Bible, you believe that it's a concept that is taught there. I was wondering if you could lay out that argument. I've never been able to see it.
Okay. Well, the Trinity doctrine, I'm not here to defend necessarily the conventional or formulaic presentation of it that came out of the creeds, although I'm also not disagreeing with them. I'm just saying that there are man-made ways of explaining things that the Bible does not explain for us. And the creeds have come up ways with describing the Trinity, for example, as three persons, one in substance, and so forth. This may be a good way to talk about it, but the Bible doesn't use terminology like that. As you know, if it did, we wouldn't have people wondering, is the Trinity taught in the Bible?
What we do know is that the Bible teaches very strongly that there's only one true God. It teaches that in both the Old Testament and in the New Testament, there's only one true God. And yet, it also teaches that God's word, which is obviously an aspect of Him, just like your words and your thoughts are part of you, God's word has, in a sense, an identity of its own.
It's part of Him, and yet it proceeds out from Him. As it says in 1 John 1.1, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And this is God's communication, this is God's expression of Himself, and this is something that is, of course, part of His being, but it's also, the Bible treats it as if the Word of God has a life of its own, or of His own. And so we read that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and that's, of course, Jesus. Now that would suggest that God the Father, as Jesus called Him, and Jesus are, you know, the same God, but two different manifestations, because Jesus talked about His Father and Himself as two witnesses. He said, you know, I bear witness of Myself, but I have a second witness. My Father bears witness of Me. So Jesus distinguished Himself from His Father, but He also identified Himself with His Father.
He says, if you've seen Me, you've seen the Father. He said, I am in the Father and the Father is in Me, which is very confusing, but nonetheless, He clearly identified Himself with the Father, but also distinguished Himself, which would mean that Jesus and the Father are in one respect identified, and in another respect distinguished. Again, the Trinity would suggest the way they are identified is they are one in substance, and they are two in person. But whether substance and person are the best terms for that, we don't know, because the Bible doesn't use those terms. Then, of course, we've got the Holy Spirit. God also has a Spirit. He is a Spirit, but His Holy Spirit is given to us and was given to the prophets and given, of course, was manifest in Christ, too. And this Spirit that was in Christ is now given to His people. Now this Holy Spirit is also called God, and so we have a Father who's called God, a Son who's called God, who is the Word, who is the Word of God made flesh, and we have a Spirit who is called God, and these three are treated as if they're not in every respect the same. For example, Jesus said, if I go away, I will ask the Father, and He will send you another periclatus, a comforter, the Holy Spirit.
So here's Jesus. He's going to talk to the Father, and the Father is going to send another, not Jesus, but another comforter, the Holy Spirit. So we've got distinction between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and yet all of them are called God, and yet the Bible could not be more emphatic in its claim that there's only one God. Now this sounds like a big mishmash of, you know, imperceptible, you know, bad mathematics or something like that, that how could God be three and one at the same time.
Well, it is, it'd be nonsensical if we were saying He is three in one sense and one in the same sense, because He can't be three and one in the same sense, but He could be one in one sense and three in a different sense. For example, my wife and I, according to Scripture, are one flesh, so in one sense we're one, but if you saw this, you'd see there's two individuals here, so in one sense we are two people, in another sense we are one. I don't know exactly how to explain that oneness because it's somewhat mystical, but we read also that Jesus and the Father are one. It's not necessarily explained how that is so, but Jesus was distinguished from His Father and made a very clear distinction. He said, I didn't come to glorify myself, I came to glorify my Father who sent me.
I came down from my Father, and so forth. So Jesus and the Father are in one sense two, and in a different sense they are one, just like my wife and I in one sense are two, and in another sense we're one. And then of course the Holy Spirit's in that mix too, and He's apparently a third. So I accept simply because I can't think of any way not to accept it while accepting everything the Bible actually says. I accept that God is in one sense three, and in another sense one, and that's the essence of the idea of Trinity.
All right, well I appreciate the explanation. It seems like Occam's Razor would say that the one that's like you mentioned between you and your wife would seem to be easier to explain the one that's between three individual numbers, but I do appreciate your explanation. Well Occam's Razor simply says that the easiest or most obvious explanation is the most likely one to be true, and I don't know that it's more likely that my wife and I would be one flesh biblically, or that Jesus and the Father be one flesh biblically. I mean both of them seem about equally likely since they're both declared to be true, and it's difficult to know exactly in what sense they are true, but I've never felt like I had to fully understand that. I just consider that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, and so if God has made Himself known in His Son, then we can know Him through His Son. That's what I would think, and so I'm a pretty simple man. I guess Occam's Razor works real well for me because I'm a very simple man.
I like the simplest explanation, and if the Bible says there's only one God multiple times, then in other places identifies three different beings that are all said to be God, then the simplest explanation is in some sense God is one, and in another sense He's three. That makes sense to me. Thank you very much. All right, thank you so much for your call. God bless you. All right, our next caller is Arnold calling from Pittsburgh, California.
Arnold, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling. Hi, Steve. Thanks for taking my call. I don't know if you can hear me well. I was just driving through the hills.
Yeah, it's a little noisy, but go ahead. So my question is, do you know of any of the best way I could say the systems for prayer? That is, there was a missionary that came to my church, and he was saying that the way he prays on Mondays, he prays for missionaries. On Tuesdays, he prays, I don't know, for family and Wednesdays. That's, I guess, one type of system of prayer. So I read a book from Dave Carson. He says that he has, I guess, he lists it. I mean, he has, like, he mentioned, like, files almost, where he goes through each file, gets it out of a page, and reads from it, his prayer, his prayers that he has, or whatever. Do you have, do you know of any systems like that, or do you have any?
I don't. I don't have any systems like that, but I think they're both good suggestions. I've known people who have certain days of the week that they pray for specific category of needs, simply because, eventually, if you're a praying person and people are giving you their requests, you're going to have a huge, a huge catalog of people you're praying for. And a lot of times you won't have time to give real attention to each of those requests every single day. Ideally, of course, it'd be great if you could just get up a couple hours earlier and pray for everyone every day, but that's not something that everyone would find practical. And I don't see anything, I don't see anything wrong with, you know, dividing it up like that.
I'm going to put you on hold because the noise of your car is a little loud in the background there, but you're still on the line here. You know, I never have recommended methods of prayer, and if somebody tells me that they pray a certain way and it's been a good way for them and I think about it and it sounds like it's not unbiblical, you know, I think that's a good thing. Maybe I'll try that too. The way I pray isn't really a method. I guess it's a method, it's a very simple one, and that I generally will take what we call the Lord's Prayer, where Jesus taught his disciples to pray, and there's a certain number of short petitions there, but each petition, in my opinion, introduces a whole category of things to pray about. Even the statement, you know, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, would include all kinds of petitions for the salvation of people that I'm praying for or for circumstances to change in, you know, countries where Christians are persecuted or things like that. I mean, all kinds of things, the work of missionaries, for revival in the church, I mean, those kinds of things would all fall under that one category and then move on, you know, give us this to our daily bread. And in other words, when I come to each petition, then I pause to think about what in that category I want to specifically ask for, and I spend as much time as I can or need to, as long as things are coming to my mind.
Now, I really think I should do something I don't do, and that is what looks like D.A. Carson said he does, and you mentioned, and that he makes a list of everything. I should keep a complete prayer list of everything that people ask me to pray for, and I have to admit I don't, and it would be, I think, a wise thing to do. It's just, I guess I'm not always somewhere where I can write things down easily when people ask me to pray for something, and I pray at the moment, but I don't always remember to pray much afterwards. I try, but everyone's prayer life is somewhat different, and each person finds a little different way that seems to, you know, allow them to bring the petitions to God that they want to bring. And I would say that any method of prayer that isn't specifically an unscriptural one, in other words, there are forms of prayer that are occultic and Eastern and things like that, which are not biblical prayer at all, but in any way that you would, you know, use to remember your prayer list or to break up the prayer list into certain days or whatever, I would say if it gets you praying, it's a good thing, because I think the biggest problem with most Christians is the neglect of prayer altogether, or almost altogether. Lots of Christians probably don't remember to pray except when some crisis comes up or when they're bowing their heads to eat a meal, or sometimes they have, you know, bedtime prayers or, you know, times that they will say a short prayer, but a lot of Christians just don't pray as much as they actually feel they should, and partly that's due to a very busy life, and I think if you've got some kind of method, some kind of a program that you have that basically disciplines you to pray regularly for the things that people have asked you to pray for that you don't need to be prayed for, I'd say more power to you.
I think it's a good thing. Yeah, because unfortunately, I'm a Christian for 10 years now, this next month, and I barely, honestly barely, just started taking everything seriously, actually praying, reading every day, so if that's one thing too with me, I wasn't praying regularly, so I want to look for something like that. Do you actually have a teaching on the Word of Prayer?
I was looking for something, but I couldn't see anything on prayer. I do have a message called Improving Our Praying, and I'm trying to remember if it's at my website or at another website. There's more than one website that has a lot of my lectures, Adam, and my website doesn't have all of them. Besides my website, which is thenarrowpath.com, as you probably know, there's another website, which is called Theos, that's T-H-E-O-S, dot org slash media. Theos.org slash media has a lot more, I think it has a lot more of my lectures than I have at my website, and there's another website called Digital Ministries, which is the narrow path, digitalministries.us, that's digitalministries.us, and they've got some of the lectures there that I don't have at my website.
I know that somewhere, and I don't know if it's at my website or one of these others, there is a lecture I gave called Improving Our Praying, and I think you can find it at digitalministries.us at least. Okay, I'll do that, okay, thank you very much brother Steve, God bless you. Okay brother, thanks for your call, good talking to you, bye now. All right, our next caller is Sue from Everett, Washington. I think it may have been Sue that I accidentally hung up on, is that correct Sue? Yes.
I'm sorry, thanks for coming back. That's okay, yeah. So I've been contemplating holy lately, and I just was wondering, it's kind of like all mashed together, what does holy mean? Can we be holy in this life? What is it that we have to do to make ourselves holy, or is it the Holy Spirit that makes us holy? Can you just kind of address holy and holiness?
Yeah, I think I can. Holy, the word holy means set apart for God. Now you don't make yourself holy, God makes you holy. He sets you apart for himself, but you also set yourself apart in agreement with what he has done. That is to say, when you become a believer, God puts you in a different category from what you were before you were a believer.
You now belong to him. You're now like a priest who's been set aside for one thing, and one thing only, and that's to please God. That's what holiness means, is I've been set aside to please God. Now, you see, in the Old Testament, all the priests were holy, but a lot of them were scoundrels. You know, a lot of the priests, in fact Caiaphas was a scoundrel, but he's a holy priest. How could he be a holy priest and a scoundrel? Because he was set apart for God.
He just didn't live like it. Being a priest meant that God set that man apart to be holy to him, and that's what he was, but he didn't live like it. Holiness is not the way you live. Holiness is the status that God gives the people that he has accepted for himself.
Okay, now you're mine. It's like the tabernacle was a holy building. The spoons and the lamps and the snuffers in the tabernacle, they were holy things, but they didn't behave any particular way.
They didn't behave at all. They're not even live things, but they were holy because they were set aside for one thing, for God. You couldn't take the spoons home from the tabernacle and use them to eat your cereal in the morning at home. There were spoons that could be used for that, but not in the temple.
The temple spoons were just for the worship of God. So you can see holy just means something that's been set apart for God alone. Now, when you're a Christian, you have been set apart for God alone, so you are holy.
Now, you're supposed to take stock of that fact and live according to that truth. So we are told, for example, in 1 Peter 1, he says in verse 15, As he who has called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, because it is written, Be holy, for I am holy. So God calls us to be holy in our conduct, which means that our conduct is being called upon to conform to the reality. The reality is, I'm a saint. The word saint means a holy one.
Someone's set aside. Unfortunately, I don't always act like that, but I should, and I'm exhorted to, in all my conduct, behave myself as someone who does not belong to himself, but who belongs to God and has been set aside for God. If my life resembles, in most respects, the lives of people who aren't Christians in my values, in my pursuits, in the way I spend most of my time and my money and so forth, then I'm not really being very different. I'm not really acting like I'm a different kind of a person set aside for God. Of course, many things that Christians do will be very much like what non-Christians do, because it involves taking care of a family and earning a living and things like that. But as far as values and priorities and choices and things like that, that's going to look very different for a person who recognizes, I've been set aside, set apart for God.
I'm not the same as others in the world. And that's what being holy means. So God calls you holy. He designates you as set aside for Him, as soon as you become a follower of Christ.
Then it's my responsibility, day by day, in all my choices and all my values and all my, you know, enterprises, to make sure that I'm doing what a person set aside for God ought to do, as opposed to somebody who's not set aside for God. A person who's not set aside for God can do what they want. You know, the priests in the Old Testament, if you were a son of Aaron, you had to be a priest because the son, the family of Aaron was set aside. They were holy unto the Lord. But what if you wanted to not be a priest and want to be a plumber or a carpenter or an accountant or a lawyer?
Well, tough. You couldn't be because you were a priest. You were set aside for one thing. Now, Christians can be plumbers and can be carpenters and can be carpenters and can be all those things, because we're not set aside to a vocation that really involves us going to a tabernacle and offering animal sacrifice like the priest had to do. But we do offer spiritual sacrifices, including our whole bodies. We're to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.
And Paul said that in Romans, of course, 12.1, but in Romans 6.13, he said that we are to present our members of our body as instruments of righteousness, not as instruments of iniquity. So this is what it means to offer ourselves to God that our choices, our bodies, everything, our children, our resources, they're all yielded to God because we belong to God. We're not our own.
We've been bought with a price. We're holy unto the Lord. We're a temple, like the temple is holy to the Lord. So holiness is to be reflected in our conduct, but it is not a definition of conduct.
It's a definition of a distinctive status that is given to those who are in Christ. Wow. Okay. Okay. That's very, very helpful. I appreciate that a lot. Thank you.
Yes. Thank you for calling. You've been listening to the Narrow Path radio broadcast.
My name is Steve Gregg. As we were saying earlier, we are listener supported. The address to write to if you'd like to help us out is The Narrow Path, P.O. Box 1730, Temecula, California 92593. You can also donate from the website, though everything there is free at thenarrowpath.com. Thanks for joining us. Let's talk again tomorrow. God bless you.
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