The Narrow Path 10/5

Music playing... Good afternoon, and welcome to the Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg, and we are live for an hour each weekday afternoon, taking your phone calls. If you have questions about the Bible or about Christianity, about the Christian faith, you're welcome to join us on the program if you want to talk about those things.

Maybe you have a different view from the host, either within the Christian community where there are differences of opinion, or maybe you're not part of the Christian faith and you have differences of opinion on that basis. Feel free to give me a call. We'll be glad to talk if you want to. The number to call is 844-484-5737.

That's 844-484-5737. Tonight, I am speaking in the Houston area in Jersey Village north of Houston. Are we filled up for tonight or not?

Maybe not. Okay, it's an RSVP thing because it's in a home. If you're interested in coming tonight, I believe it's at 7 o'clock, and it's just going to be a Q&A. It's going to be about the Kingdom of God followed by a Q&A.

Okay, see, it shows how much I know about what I'm doing. But see, I'm speaking in a different place almost every night on this trip. I'm traveling, and we were in Arizona speaking a couple times, and we've already had a couple times in Texas. There's a few more times in Texas. Tonight, we'll be in, as I say, the Houston area. Tomorrow, we'll also be in the Houston area, but south in Chocolate Bayou, and that's going to be tomorrow night at a church. The pastor there, Steve Vaughn, is a friend of mine, and we were mutual admirers, I think.

And I'll be speaking at his church. I think that's—do we know? Is that Q&A? Anyway, something. Probably both.

Probably. A lot of these places have asked me to speak on the Kingdom of God. Obviously, I speak on many other things, and while this is not a book tour, I think I've been asked to speak on the subject because I do have a new book on the subject of the Kingdom of God that's—well, I just found out yesterday it came out already on Kindle. It's not going to be out in a hard copy on Amazon or anywhere else until October 15th, which is obviously only about 10 days from now. But if you just can't wait to get the book and you've got a Kindle app, which who doesn't, you can then get it on Kindle right now and read it. The book is called Empire of the Risen Son, and of course, the word son is spelled S-O-N. Empire of the Risen Son.

It's about the Kingdom of God. It's the first of two books. It was going to be one book, just got too big, so I made it into two books. And the first book, as I said, will be released in hard copy about 10 days from now. The other one is probably at least a month behind. I'm not sure. In any case, both books are complete.

They're both at the publishers, and I'm just waiting to see them come out. But for that reason, a lot of the places I'm going have suggested specifically me speaking on that topic. So that's tonight. Also tomorrow night, which is in Chocolate Bayou, and then the next night, I'll be in the Dallas area. So tonight and following two nights, I'll be in Texas.

After that, we're heading further east, and I'll be in Arkansas and other places further east, eventually in the Indianapolis area. So we're away from home for a few weeks. However, we have military people stay in our home, so don't try to break in while we're gone. It's well defended. I'm kind of joking, but that's not untrue. So I just want you to know, you know, when you say we're away from home for X number of weeks, you're just kind of saying the house is unprotected, but it is not.

It is not unprotected. Anyway, we have angels also gathered around the house watching it for us. We ask for them, and they always come at our request, anyway. Well, we have our lines filled, as I've been blithering on. We've seen the lines fill up, and so I'm going to go ahead and talk to the callers here.

Again, if you want to call in later in the program, there will be opportunity. The lines do open up, and if you'll call a few minutes from now, the number is 844-484-5737. I just realized I didn't give any specifics about where I'm speaking. All these places, they are at our website. You can go to thenarrowpath.com. And look under the tab that says Announcements.

And if you scroll down to the proper date, you'll see the specific information, all you need to know to join us. All right, let's talk to some of these callers here. Paul from Peachtree, Georgia, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Hi, Steve. I wanted to ask you about the Jewish expectation of the New Covenant, since they reject Jesus as the Messiah, and how you see their view of Jeremiah 31 and the way that they don't see that it's fulfilled in Hebrews 8. Can you talk about that a bit?

Yeah. Well, I have to just start out by saying I've never really talked to or inquired of an Orthodox Jew, a modern Jew, concerning what they think the New Covenant will look like. I can only speculate, since they don't believe Jesus established the New Covenant, that they believe it will happen when Israel is gathered.

Because in the context of Jeremiah 31, there is discussion of God gathering Israel from all lands and so forth. And that's really what Orthodox Jews are anticipating. They believe the Messiah will come and he'll gather the diaspora from all the different nations and bring them back to Israel. That's associated with the coming of the Messiah in their mind. And then I suppose when it says I'm going to make a New Covenant, I'm going to write my laws on their inward parts and my ways on their heart, and they'll all know me and so forth, I suppose what they just would imagine that. I imagine they would say that means there will be a general turning to God. Israel's hearts will be right with God. They will turn to God. They'll be embracing his covenant in a way they have not previously.

And they would be justified in thinking this. I mean, if Jesus in fact had not fulfilled it, and if it was unfulfilled, this would be a very justifiable way of looking at it, because for a Jew to have God's law in their heart is something that, for example, David spoke about in Psalm 40. Now, the book of Hebrews tells us that this statement of David is really to be attributed to Jesus. But David did say in Psalm 40 verses 6 through 8 that God's law was in his heart. And so to have God's law in your heart would perhaps be seen to them as simply a way of saying, you know, they love his law. They're not rebelling against his law.

It's not being imposed upon them against their will. It's right in the basic core of their passion is to keep God's law. And we know that was true of David. It's also true of Jesus, because Hebrews applies that to him. And the idea of God's law being in the heart, if I were an Orthodox Jew, which I'm not, and I don't really know if they follow this way, but I would think almost certainly they would think that God writing his law in their hearts is simply an image for them thereafter having God's law in their heart, sort of figure of their hearts being changed and their keeping of the law being pretty much the way it was supposed to be. They're not looking for, as Hebrews does, an abandoning of the Torah law.

They don't believe, for example, that the sacrificial system has been done away. They believe the temple will be rebuilt. There will be priests.

There will be animal sacrifices. So they would, of course, however they understand the new covenant, they would see it as including the behaviors of the old covenant, but adding to the outward behavior perhaps a changed heart toward the law. Now, if an Orthodox Jew is listening and I got it wrong, feel free to call in, because I'm not the only one allowed to speak on this program.

You can tell me if I was wrong. Just my knowledge of Judaism, which is certainly not comprehensive, modern Judaism, would make me think that that's probably how they would speak of it and how they could, in a sense, reasonably speak of it. If Jesus is not the Messiah, if Jesus didn't fulfill these things, then it seems to me only the most logical way to see it. But I think there's a better way to see it since I do believe that Jesus is the Messiah and that he did fulfill that. But if you really want an authoritative answer, you're going to talk to somebody who either is an Orthodox Jew or has at least studied their views on many things that I have not studied their views on.

They are Talmudic, and I haven't studied the Talmud that much, but certainly I know there's a lot of Jewish people who have listened on this program, either intentionally or unintentionally, and feel free to give me a call if I got that wrong because I am not beyond making mistakes about what other people believe. The number to call, if you're interested, is 844-484-5737. All right, our next caller is Frank from North Texas.

Frank, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling. Good afternoon, Steve. How are you? Well, I'm well.

Thank you. Listen, first of all, I should be seeing you Wednesday night in Richardson, Texas. Great.

It looks like it's falling in place. My wife and I should be able to make it. I'm looking forward to it. I listen to you a lot on the radio. I haven't had a chance to see you in person.

I'm looking forward to that. Let me get to my question. Last few Wednesdays, we've been in church. We've been studying cults and different beliefs, Buddhism, Islam, and it goes on and on.

We've touched on about 10 or 15 of them. It struck me as funny as we were reading all this, the information about it, how little hope and joy and peace these people have with this. The big thing, though, was a scripture came to me. It was the last verse in Judges when it says that Israel was without a king and the people did what they thought was right in their own eyes. Am I taking this too far or does it not seem like these people who start these things, like Joseph Smith, these people who start these different things, does not seem like they want things the way they want it, not the way it says it in the Bible?

They don't have a king. Obviously, I would have to take, when it comes to people's motivations, I'd have to take their word for them unless they explain some motivation they had that was obviously different than what they were speaking about or what they were doing. I don't know their motivations but I'm sure there are people who are like that. There are people who want to reject the Bible and want to reject God and want to reject Jesus and would rather substitute Him with something else. I'm pretty sure Joseph Smith would fit in that category because he was, to my mind, a charlatan. But I wouldn't say that Mormons in general all fall into that category. I think that there are Mormons who probably think that Joseph Smith told the truth. They probably think that he's got it right and by following him they believe that they're doing exactly what the Bible wants and they're not following their own will. They're following maybe Joseph Smith's will but they believe it's God's will. Joseph Smith himself, of course, knew better because he had to perpetrate a great hoax in order to start the religion. But there's a difference between being the deceiver and the deceived. Of course, it's not desirable to be either.

But I believe the deceived, especially if in some sense they have been deceived in a context of not having much light of themselves, there's somewhat less culpability on their part than on the part of the deceiver. So yeah, there are people who just want to do what they want to do and they're not submitted to the king, Jesus, so that would explain why they have to fill that void. If they're not going to do what God wants, they've got to do what someone else wants.

And who is the greatest competitor to God in that respect but yourself doing what you want? Okay, Steve, I'll let you go and I'll be looking forward to a Wednesday night. God bless you, brother. Thanks for your call. God bless you. Stephen from Wilmington, Ohio, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling. Hey, Steve, good to talk to you.

Yeah, good to hear from you. I was wondering, why do so many Christians think that the book of Revelation is mainly about the end times instead of 70 AD, do you think? Well, there's a number of reasons and I can speak somewhat knowledgeably about this because I used to think that myself and I know why I thought it and so I can tell you the answer.

I'm pretty sure from my conversations with others who believe that way that we all kind of had the same reasons. One is that we're very unfamiliar with the kind of literature that the book of Revelation is. We're accustomed to reading literature as if it's written in literal terms and most Christians are not familiar with what we call apocalyptic literature. The Jews and the Christians of the first century, the ones to whom that was written, were entirely familiar with a lot of books written that sounded, if we would read them, they sound a lot like Revelation, but they knew that they were part of a kind of literature that was making a point symbolically. And when you read the Gospels, you're reading history. When you read the book of Acts, you're reading history. You're supposed to take it pretty literally. When Paul wrote his letters, mostly he's talking in literal terms to people, so you kind of expect, well, you should take the Bible literally.

And you should if you're reading the parts of the Bible that are written in order to be taken literally, but there were parts of the Bible which the original audience would have known very well are not literal, just like we know that Daniel is not being literal when he describes the Babylonian Empire as a lion with wings coming out of the sea. That's a symbol for Babylon. Or the media Persian Empire is a bear with three horns in its mouth or something like that. When Daniel uses that kind of imagery, there's no question it's symbolic, and Daniel's the same kind of book as Revelation. It's got apocalyptic visions in it. And I don't know why it is that all Christians know that Daniel's visions are symbolic, but not all Christians recognize that the visions in Revelation are symbolic in the same way.

In fact, many of them are the same symbols that Daniel used. So, I mean, we're not familiar with a great amount of biblical books or any other kind of books that use that kind of imagery. So we tend to read things literally unless we have very good evidence not to. And many times we haven't been told, as Christians we haven't been taught well about the prevalence of apocalyptic literature in the first century so that the Christians would immediately recognize it when it was written to them. Another thing is that because we take it literally, we have to say, well, those things haven't happened yet, obviously.

These are like science fiction movie stuff. I mean, it could happen in the future because who can say what can't happen in the future? Maybe anything could happen in the future, but we certainly would say that hasn't happened yet. I mean, there certainly has never been a time when a third of the ocean turned to blood and a third of this fish in the sea perished and a hundred-pound hailstones pelted the earth.

I mean, those things have never happened. And therefore they'd say, well, if the Bible is true, it must be talking about something that hasn't happened yet. And again, this is a problem with not realizing the nature of the book. They're assuming these are literal descriptions of phenomena and that if they are, certainly you'd never find a time when they all happened. And so they must be future.

I think that's the main thing. And then, of course, the other reason is because all the teachers that they have listened to, or at least the ones that have influenced them most, are the ones who assume that Revelation is about the future. And as you know, there's different views. There are teachers like myself who believe that most of Revelation is about the past and there are other views too. But the most popular teachers of the largest churches who write the best-selling books and have most of the radio programs on the Christian stations, they assume that it's about the end of time. And in many cases, they identify some of the visions in Revelation as coinciding with things we see happening in the world now, which again tends to confirm that John was writing about things that were very much in the distant future from his point of view. And though they're still future, from our point of view, they may not be so far distant.

This is, I think, the main thing. We're unfamiliar with apocalyptic literature and therefore we assume that these things have to happen literally and we know they haven't happened literally in the past. And since we trust the Bible to be true, we figure they must have to happen in the future. And then, of course, all the teachers, some people have heard, and I've heard teachers of various views, but not everyone has, many people have only heard the view.

That's about the end time. So they just take it as a default view. And many of them don't realize that that view wasn't held by Christians throughout history.

It's a rather relatively modern view that they're holding. Yeah. Thank you, Steve. Okay, Stephen, I appreciate your call, brother. Can't wait to read your book, man. All right.

Well, you can get on Kindle today or you can wait a couple of weeks and get the hard copy. God bless you. All right. Thank you, Steve. Bye-bye.

Bye now. Okay, Jeff from Dallas, Oregon. I mean, no, Dallas, Texas. I knew it was Dallas, Texas, but I used to live in Oregon just down the street from a town called Dallas.

So it was kind of a reflex. Jeff from Dallas, Texas, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling me.

Hello. Just kind of a curiosity question. Since Moses set up the tent of meeting outside of camp and the cloud came down and he would meet with him there, why would he also go up on Mount Sinai to meet if he could just meet in the tent of meetings before the tabernacle? Well, that's a good question that the Bible doesn't answer. My assumption would be, and this may not be the correct one, but my assumption is that in the initial contact with Israel and the giving of the law that God wanted to make an impression of his separateness from them and of the fact that only Moses would be allowed to really go into the presence of God because he was an unusual man, but the majority of Israel would not be allowed to. And then the fact that he later was able to meet with Moses in a tent, which was, by the way, still removed, it was still outside the camp, but it was at least not up on the mountain, would suggest that God had come down to dwell among them as he promised to do. Remember on Mount Sinai, God was about to wipe out Israel when they made the golden calf and Moses interceded for them.

He says, if you don't go with us and among us, you know, we're not going to go. And so perhaps in order to let Israel know that he had forgiven them at the behest of Moses' intercession and that he was now among them, perhaps that I'm guessing here, but that may be one reason why he allowed Moses to set up a tent of meeting actually, at ground level, still outside the camp, but not so far away from the people that he had promised to travel with. Up on the mountain, if he had never camped, if he never appeared in the tent at ground level down from the mountain, then God could be perhaps seen by Israel a little bit like the way the Greeks saw the gods on Mount Olympus. And, you know, they're up there inaccessible. No one's really ever seen them, but, you know, they're supposed to believe that they're there. But God supernaturally appeared to them on the ground because, especially when they began to travel, we know that there was a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire at night, a cloud in daytime, fire at night, that actually led them. If you can picture, you know, like people following the path of a tornado or something like that, and yet it would stop and then it would hover over and into the Holy of Holies.

So, I mean, there was there's a clear supernaturalness about this. They couldn't see God's face or anything like that, but they could see that he was present in this way. And that made him more real and more personal, I suppose, to them than if he had just been an unseen deity hidden in the dark clouds at the top of an inaccessible mountain. So I think that the original meeting between Moses and Mount Sinai probably had to do with emphasizing that God is lofty.

God is far above. And with the people who had not yet come into the covenant with him, he would not be among them. But the covenant was made on the mountain.

And then because of the covenant, God promised that he would be among them. And that's kind of the way I would just assume this change took place and perhaps the reason for it. Right. Yeah, it's a tough one.

Yeah, that's interesting. I appreciate it. OK, Jeff, good talking to you. Thanks for your call.

Steve from Bellevue, Washington. Welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling. Well, thank you for taking my call. Steve, my question has to do with Matthew 6, 14 and 15. Ask the Lord's prayer for your audience. God says, if we forgive others, then he will forgive us. If we don't forgive others, he won't forgive us. My question is, I know a lot of people have trouble forgiving themselves. Would that be the same as not forgiving somebody? Well, the Bible never even never even implies the existence of such a phenomenon as forgiving yourself.

We know we do use that term in modern times and we even know kind of what it means that, you know, I'm kicking myself for doing something. I did something that kind of ruined my life and are complicated things. And, you know, I'd give anything if I could turn the clock back and go through that patch of my life again and not do that. And, you know, to forgive yourself is to pretty much put it behind you and and move on. We call it forgiving yourself.

And there's a sense in which it is. I mean, you have to release something as a past issue, no longer relevant or something you can change. But this time it's you're the one who did rather than someone else that you have to forgive. But the Bible, you know, I think the Bible teaches that God, when we repent, forgives us and his opinion of us is all that matters. You know, I think that people who say you have to also forgive yourself are addressing a problem that the Bible hopes that Christians will not be struggling with.

And that is, it's all about me. You know, you know, I think the early Christians to whom the New Testament is written had come to Christ by denying themselves, taking up their cross and realizing that they're not the focal point of anything. They don't have to please themselves. They don't forgive themselves. They need to be approved by God, not by themselves. You know, if I'm looking for my own approval of myself and something stupid I did or evil I did that I've, you know, I've repented of, I'm still, you know, it hurt my reputation, it hurt my self-image, it hurt, you know, things.

I'm still obsessing with myself, you see. And the Bible doesn't want to encourage us to obsess on ourselves. The idea is if you're a Christian, you've already made the transition in your thinking that my opinion of me isn't what matters. It's not men's or my opinion.

It's God's opinion. And if He forgives me, that's good enough. And though it's true, at that very moment we are in a sense forgiving ourselves. That is to say, we're not going to be holding it against ourselves perennially. I don't know that we need to absolutely forget what we did. Sometimes we need to remember it to be humble because it's good that we don't forget everything we've done wrong lest we begin to think we're better than we are because God does make us better. And once we get better, we might think we're pretty good until we remember what we did, you know, back then.

I don't say we should be remembering all the time what we did in the past, but I don't think it's necessary that we absolutely forget it. The main thing is that remember that it's not our opinion of ourself that matters. It's God's opinion of us. And so to talk about forgiving ourselves would make it sound like, yeah, we need to get our own approval and so we need to forgive ourselves. And of course in a humanistic world, that's true.

In the Christian world, it's not. I need to take a break for 30 seconds. I'll be right back. Welcome back to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we are live for another half hour, taking your calls as we do each day at this time. If you would like to join us, we actually have a couple lines open, which is not often the case. If you have questions about the Bible or a disagreement with the host that you'd like to bring up for conversation, the number to call is 844-484-5737.

That's 844-484-5737. And I'll just say again that it is upon us that tonight I'm speaking in the Houston area at Jersey Village and tomorrow I'm speaking in the Houston area at Chocolate Bayou. And then the next night I'm speaking in Dallas. So I know we have listeners, we're on radio stations in these areas, so if you live in one of those areas and want to join us, you can go to our website, NarrowPath.com, and you'll get details about where and when these meetings are. Some of them are in private homes. In Chocolate Bayou it's going to be in a church, and the address will be found there at the website. But the homes, we're asking people to RSVP. That way the hosts can give out their address to a finite number of people rather than posting on the website.

And also they can keep track of how many people are coming so they know if there's too many or not. So anyway, oh, I'm sorry, in Chocolate Bayou is? Oh, okay, in Dallas. Yeah, in Dallas it's actually in a hotel conference room, so I forgot that it was going to be in a home, but it's in a hotel, but you still have to RSVP.

Anyway, all that information, confusing as it is to me, that can be crystal clear to you if you go to our website, TheNarrowPath.com, and look up under Announcements the dates in question, which is tonight, tomorrow, and the next night, all of which are going to be in Texas. All right, let's talk next to Richard from Phoenix, Arizona. Richard, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Hey, Steve, it's Richard from Years Gone By. How you doing? Oh, good. Good to hear from you. Yeah, good to hear from you too. I listen to you all the time.

So anyway, good to talk to you again, and I've got a question for you, a pretty simple one. So we have in Galatians, at the end of Galatians 5, all these vices to stay away from that people that do it will not inherit the kingdom of God. And then we come to the pharmakeia part, which is basically drug use, magic potions used in cultic worship and stuff to, you know, induce worshippers to fall into incantations and stuff like that. So my question for you is, I would take it that in ancient Israel, this is also forbidden, and where would I find in the Old Testament a specific reference to a prohibition against using drugs in mystery religions, cultic religions and things of that nature? Well, I don't think the law mentions drugs specifically, but it does, of course, mention the occult, both in Deuteronomy and in Leviticus.

In Deuteronomy chapter 18, for example, verse 10, it says, There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, which was a form of child sacrifice to Molech. It says, Oh, I have one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. It says all those who do these things are an abomination to the Lord. And so he basically lists almost every kind of occult thing that they were familiar with. Now, when Paul uses the word pharmakeia in Galatians chapter 5 as one of the works of the flesh, and he says those who do these things will not inherit the kingdom of God, the word pharmakeia obviously has etymological connections to our word pharmacy. Our word pharmacy comes from it, and therefore it's understood to have something to do with drugs. Now, I don't know, I mean, not all commentators will say the same thing, but it seems like the drugs in question are hallucinogenic drugs, or consciousness-altering drugs, which were used not recreationally so much as in occult ways that you were just describing. Not that using them recreationally would have been any more acceptable, but I don't know that people were using them recreationally. I think they were largely used for occult rituals. And so, in a sense, the forbidding in the Old Testament of all occult involvement would include the forbidding of the use of drugs in occult practices. Now, again, I don't know how common it would have been in Old Testament times or new for people to, well, I guess they'd smoke opium and things like that, you know, but I don't know how much of it was really known as part of the occult in the Old Testament. But I think the main concern, probably in both passages, in the Old and the New, is the occultness rather than the drug itself. But consciousness-altering drugs are nonetheless contrary to what the Bible indicates we should be doing because, again, because the Bible doesn't mention opium or cannabis or anything like that or hashish, which seems strange because some of those things certainly were available in those days, I think they must not have been used that much by the Jews because the law, of course, and the prophets were written to the Jews about their issues. But alcohol was frequently mentioned. And I know that Hosea, for example, said in Hosea 4.11, he said, harlotry, wine, and new wine enslave the heart.

Now wine and new wine, the Bible does not forbid the drinking of wine per se, but obviously many people drink wine excessively and are kind of getting, trying to get a buzz or worse, trying to get really drunk. And that is something that we're warned, that takes away the heart. Now the heart, of course, in the Bible is your inner spiritual man, and it says in Proverbs, guard your heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life. That's Proverbs 4. That might be verse 23, if I'm not mistaken.

It could be verse 18. Proverbs 4. But guard your heart with all diligence. Out of it are the issues of life. And Jesus said the same thing in Matthew 15 when he said, out of the heart comes out all these sins that people commit.

They come from the heart. So, you need to guard your heart against allowing it to be corrupted. And when it says that wine and new wine, and of course it means by that the overuse of it or the abuse of it so that you're consciousness altering use of it, that takes away or it enslaves the heart.

It clearly is saying it's spiritually dangerous. And just anecdotally, my generation, the baby boomers, of course, used a lot of drugs, experimented in drugs a lot more than our parents' generation probably did. And we even had some new drugs that didn't exist in our parents' day, like LSD and so forth. I didn't use them, but I certainly, almost everyone I knew of my generation who wasn't a Christian used them. And when these people became Christians, they often said that these things seemed to open them up. They thought at the time to enlightenment and things like that, but now that they had become Christians they recognized it was not enlightenment, it was deception and it was demonic.

And so, again, anecdotally, I would say that consciousness altering substances certainly enslave your heart or at least make your heart vulnerable to demonic interference, deception, and possibly even possession. So, those are just some thoughts about it. I don't know of anything in the Old Testament that specifically mentions pharmaceutical-type drugs, or even, of course, they didn't have pharmaceutical drugs, but they had natural things like opium in those days.

But I don't think the Jews used it much. Yeah, getting back, I just want to touch on one thing you mentioned about the pharmakeia. Have you ever read D.A. Carson's little book titled Exegetical Fallacies? Yes, many years ago I did read that book and I liked it a lot. Yeah, I've got that book. I've read that a couple of times.

It's a good book. He points out that to take words from the Greek New Testament and to read back to them anachronistic meanings is completely and wholly wrong. He uses pharmakeia as an example of where somebody would say, oh, well, we get our English word pharmacy from it, and we do. But he says that it's completely an exegetical fallacy to assume now that we can read that back into the Galatians passage and assume that what Paul was talking about are pharmaceutical drugs. He uses other examples, too, like Hilarion, the English equivalent being hilarious.

God loves a hilarious giver, yeah. Yeah, that kind of thing. So could you comment on that and whether you agree with D.A. Carson on those points?

I do agree on those points. I think another one would be an example. I don't remember if he gives this, but he might, is the word dunamis.

Yeah, he does. Which means power, and of course our word dynamite comes from it. So sometimes creatures will say, well, you will receive dunamis when the Holy Spirit comes on you. That's the word that our word dynamite comes from. Well, it is true. Our word dynamite does come from dunamis, but it doesn't mean that anyone in the Bible times had any concept of dynamite. So then you would agree then, wouldn't you, that to do that would be an anachronistic misuse of the word because really what's really important is how the word was used in the first century Greco-Roman world. Yes, of course, I would agree with that. In other words, you can't say that since the pharmacist makes Tylenol and since, you know, pharmacy, pharmakeia is a sin and we got our word pharmacy from pharmakeia, therefore you shouldn't take Tylenol. That'd be ridiculous, of course, but there are principles that are not ridiculous to apply because, as I was saying, you know, we don't have any reference to consciousness altering drugs at all in the Old Testament, and yet they had wine, they had alcohol, and there's every reason to believe that the problems associated with altering your mind with that substance would be easily transferrable to altering your mind with any kind of chemical substance. And, I mean, one who's trying to really look for not — a person who's legalistic is always looking for a specific statement that forbids the thing that they want to do, and if there's not, then it's okay to do it. And that may be true of some things, but it's certainly not true of things that in principle seem to be forbidden, or there's criticism in principle of something, and even though the specific thing you're considering doing is not mentioned, it might be condemned in principle by what is mentioned.

Yeah, so in principle, it sounds like what you're saying — and I totally agree with this — is that you're saying that it doesn't really matter what it is. If it enslaves you, it's not a good thing, whether it be alcohol, whether it be a recreational pot, whether it be anything, even pain medication. Even food. Even food.

It's not good. Remember when Paul was talking about food, he says, you know, all things are lawful to me, but I will not be brought into bondage to anything. He's talking about eating certain foods. Yeah, you don't even want food to be an idol to you.

Nothing should bring you into bondage, or else you're not free. I'm going to let you go, but the next time I talk to you, which is going to be this week sometime, it's going to be along the same line of reasoning. I don't want to take up your time now, but it's a book that's come out by Brian Marescu, and he talks about how wine was used in the ancient world to do certain things, and I'm going to call you about that this week, because I want to ask you about that. It's very interesting. All right. Excellent.

Okay, so thanks for all the info, and I'll talk to you later in the week. Okay, Richard. Thanks. Good talking to you. Okay. All right. Thank you. Bye. Bye now.

Okay, let's see. Benjamin from Hookset, New Hampshire. Welcome to The Narrow Path, Benjamin. All right. Thank you, Steve. I appreciate your ministry.

Thank you. My question is from Psalm chapter 8, verse 2, where it says, Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants you have ordained strength because of your enemies, that you may silence the enemy and the avenger. I find it interesting that David indicates that God's enemies will be overcome by babies, but my question is, who are the enemies of God, and in particular, who is the avenger that he refers to?

All right. Well, that's a good question. First of all, I'd point out that the way we read it in Psalm 8, 2 in our Old Testament is translated from the Hebrew text, and it says, Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings you have ordained strength. In the Septuagint, which was the early Greek translation of the Hebrew, it actually reads somewhat differently.

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings you have ordained praise. And Jesus quoted that verse, of course, from the Septuagint. So he quoted it, thou hast ordained praise. Some people feel the Septuagint might actually be closer to the original Hebrew than our later Hebrew manuscripts are, that in other words, the Septuagint might preserve the original wording, though it's a translation from the original, better than the manuscripts in the same language that have been passed on and perhaps have been, in some way or another, slightly altered.

That's hard to know, hard to know. But Jesus apparently approved of the Septuagint in this particular verse. And it's when, of course, these children were praising him on Palm Sunday as he was riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, and his critics were saying, oh, don't you see they're saying things that are inappropriate, namely basically calling him the Messiah, and his critics didn't believe he was the Messiah.

So he said, well, haven't you read that out of the mouths of babes and sucklings you have a view of perfected praise, which is the Septuagint version. The point here is Jesus didn't sing about because of the enemy and the avenger. And so I'm not really clear if when David wrote it, he was thinking of the wording that Jesus used or the wording that we have now in our Hebrew Masoretic Text, which is represented in our English translations.

But I tend to think, well, both are there. I mean, both thoughts, that to perfect praise is not the opposite of, but is perhaps part of, ordaining strength against spiritual enemies. Now, David's enemies, I don't know which ones he had in mind. I don't think David knew very much about the demonic realm or even the devil, simply because there wasn't much in the Old Testament ever revealed about it. David knew there were demons because his chief nemesis Saul had been afflicted by a demon, had been demon possessed, an evil spirit had come upon him and made him throw spirits at David and things like that. So David certainly knew about evil spirits. But as far as the idea of a realm of dark spirits that are attacking and trying to get us to sin and deceive us and so forth, we have information about that in the New Testament, but not much in the Old. And I don't know if David was thinking of spiritual enemies like that. I think David's enemies were usually normal kinds of enemies.

He was a king and his enemies were political enemies, either of his own country, like his own son Absalom, or others, Shimei, and others of his own nation, or of other nations. Now, he said that God has ordained strength out of the mouths of babes and succulents. He might simply be saying this, because I'll tell you, the people of Jerusalem who were not, that is before it became a Jewish city, it was a Jebusite city, and David conquered it, and the people of the city said, the blind and the lame of the city will repel David's forces. Now, they weren't really going to mobilize the blind and the lame. What they're saying is, we are so superior to you, to your armies.

Your armies are so unimpressive that even if we only armed our blind and our lame, they'd still beat you. I mean, it's obviously a hyperbole. They didn't mean it literally. But David might be saying something very similar about his enemies, that God can defeat them using the babies among us. Even the little children among us may be sufficient to defeat God's enemies, if God is against the enemies, of course. I don't know if that's what David meant or not, but I don't know that he had a concept of spiritual enemies, certainly not one as well developed as we have in the New Testament. So, he might have been saying something very simple, using an idiom similar to what people had said against him when he attacked them, that the most inferior among us could defeat you. And he's saying, well, the most inferior among us can defeat our enemies, assuming that God is with us, if we're praising God, if we're honoring God, and God is on our side.

Now, David didn't live late enough to know of an exact case like this, where it wasn't the babes so much, but it was the defenseless, in the days of Jehoshaphat, who was one of David's later descendants and was king of Jerusalem after it was David's city. They were surrounded by a huge army of three different nations and very much overwhelmed and unable to defeat them. And a prophet of God came to Jehoshaphat, this is in 2 Chronicles 20, and said, you know, don't worry, this battle is not yours, it's the Lord's.

In fact, you won't even have to fight. You just send your musicians out there and your singers and have them praise God, have them sing praises to God, and God will take care of things for you. And so they did that, and when the people began to praise God in song, God confused the enemies. They made them kind of insane, so they began to kill each other. And the Israelites didn't even have to fight them. The enemy was defeated by themselves, by God throwing him into confusion, which basically showed Israel's defense is not due to their own military strength, but because of God. And yet it was done through praise and through worship of God. So, it may be this reason, which later the Septuagint took the phrase ordained strength and changed it into perfected praise, I don't know. There are things about the wording here, especially the mention of babes and succulents, that in terms of David's meaning or even the meaning of the Septuagint translators, I don't know exactly how they were meaning that.

I made a suggestion, but I don't know if I'm right. But Jesus' use of it actually made it literally about children who were praising him and were being criticized for praising him. And he found the words of the Septuagint of this passage useful in saying God has perfected praise from the mouths of babes and succulents. Now, he was saying this to the scholars. He was saying this to the scribes and Pharisees, and they were like the experts and the babies of course knew very little. And the experts were saying it's inappropriate for these people to be proclaiming you as the Messiah. Well, that's the time when Jesus said, well, they're silent.

The rocks themselves will cry out, which are even less capable of praising and understanding things than children are. He's kind of pointing out that the children were seeing things. They were more in touch with reality about what was going on than even the Bible scholars were. And it's a little bit like what Jesus said in the 11th chapter of Matthew where he said, I thank you, Father, you've hidden these things from the wise and the prudent, and you've revealed them to babes, which is, again, a use of the same term, babes.

He was not talking about actual babes, babies in that particular statement, but people whose intellect, or at least whose education, was no better than that of little children. Most of these people were probably fairly illiterate in contrast to the educated Pharisees. And yet, God revealed the truth to the babes, as it were, or people who were analogous to babes as though they were adults, and had hidden them from the wise and the prudent, the educated guys who didn't see the truth. And there may be something of that in Jesus' statement. You know, here's these Pharisees. They don't see that Jesus is Messiah. In fact, they're so far from seeing it that they think it's blasphemy to speak of him in that way. And Jesus could be saying, well, it's hidden from you, apparently, but these babes see it, and if they didn't announce what they knew, the rocks themselves would announce it. So, I mean, these are some of the things involved in this setting where this was quoted, but it leaves some parts of your question certainly unanswered because I don't know if the answer is really that available to us.

It'd be nice if it was. Well, thank you very much. Okay, Benjamin, thanks for your call. I appreciate it. Sorry I couldn't be more insightful. Let's talk to Joe from Seattle, Washington.

Joe, welcome to The Neuropath. Thanks for calling. Hey, thanks. Thanks, Steve.

Good to talk to you again. Question on Acts 27, which is primarily a travelogue trip that Paul took trying to get to Paul's travels. Right. And going back to Timothy, 2 Timothy 3.16, where it says, all Scripture is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction, et cetera. What are we supposed to learn from this travelogue in Acts 27? Well, we're supposed to learn, I guess, the truth of the matter of Paul's travels.

There are, you know, the passage is not necessarily thick with spiritual lessons because it is simply historical narrative. But, I mean, we do have Jesus appearing or an angel of Jesus appearing to Paul and predicting that there will be a shipwreck, the ship will be lost, there will be no lives lost. It would take divine knowledge to be able to predict that, and Paul was able to predict it and it happened just as he said.

You know, there are things that happen in Paul's life which show, because his whole life demonstrated the reality of God. And you've got some of that in here, but not every line in the Bible has a depth of spiritual meaning for us to get out there. You know, when Paul said all Scripture, first of all, I believe he only had the Old Testament Scripture in mind. And I'm not saying that the New Testament Scriptures would not, that this couldn't apply to them, but I'm not asking how this could apply. I'm thinking of what did Paul have in mind when he spoke? And we know that in 2 Timothy chapter 3, only a couple of verses earlier, he had said to Timothy, well actually two verses earlier and the verse before, verse 14 he says, But as for you continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of knowing from whom you have learned them, that from childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through the faith which is in Christ Jesus.

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, et cetera, et cetera. So he's just referred to the Holy Scriptures in the previous verse that Timothy had been instructed in from his childhood. Well, when Timothy was a child, then no part of the New Testament had been written.

In fact, Paul hadn't even gotten to Lystra yet to evangelize. So nobody in Lystra where Timothy grew up had even heard of Jesus, much less the New Testament, none of which had been written yet. So the Scriptures that Timothy, the Scriptures Timothy had been instructed in were the Old Testament Scriptures. And we read that he had a Jewish mother who is the one who apparently taught him from the Jewish Scriptures. But he said those Scriptures were able to make him wise unto salvation.

He says all the Scriptures are profitable. Now, when Paul wrote that, there was no collected writings called the New Testament. Of course, most of Paul's earlier letters had been written at this time, if not all of them, and maybe some of the other books, too, of the New Testament. But they had never been collected into a group called the Scriptures. They were simply isolated letters, letters and historical documents that were circulating and which at a later date were collected into what we call the New Testament. And then they were called Scripture. So when Paul said all Scripture, at the time of his writing, there were no New Testament Scriptures.

Timothy certainly had not been. So he's talking about the Old Testament. And basically what he's saying is that, you know, though we are not under the law, the Old Testament Scriptures still are full of spiritual truths for us. And it doesn't mean that every single verse is going to yield a profound truth.

But there's no part of the Old Testament that you'd want to exclude as if it couldn't be beneficial to you spiritually. Hey, I'm sorry I'm going to have to cut off here because my music's going on. Oh, that's great. Okay. God bless you, too.

No, you answered questions. Thank you. God bless you.

God bless you, too. You've been listening to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg, and we are live Monday through Friday at the same time. We are listener supported.

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