The Narrow Path 11/16

Music Good afternoon and welcome to the Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we're live for an hour each weekday afternoon and during this hour we take your phone calls. If you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith, we welcome you to call.

If you have a different viewpoint from the host, we welcome you to call and talk about that as well. 844-484-5737. Once again, that's 844-484-5737. Our first caller today is Lisa calling from Hillsboro, Oregon.

Lisa, welcome to the Narrow Path. Thanks for calling. Hi Steve. Thanks for taking my call and just want to thank you again for all you're doing. My family and I really appreciate you. Right. I remember meeting you up in Albany, right?

Yeah, yeah. It was really a good night that I had with my sister and my friend and we came and it was really enjoyable. We had a great conversation about everything on the way home. It was nice.

Great. This is just a little question I had when I was doing my reading yesterday and I was wondering if you could maybe answer it. I was reading in 2 Timothy 4, 14-16. It says, Alexander the coppersmith did me much harm. May the Lord repay him according to his work. You also must be aware of him for he has greatly resisted our words.

At my first event, no one stood with me but all forsook me. May it not be charged against them. So it seems like at first he's saying, may the Lord repay him according to his work, but then he says may it not be charged against him. Is he contradicting himself?

No, no. The people who betrayed him, that is those who should have stood with him when he was on trial but they abandoned him because they were cowards, he prayed that that would not be held against them just like Jesus prayed that those who crucified him would be forgiven. Stephen prayed that the sins of those who were stoning him would not be laid to their charge.

This is basically loving your enemies. Now what he said about Alexander the coppersmith is different because he says in verse 5, you must also be aware of him for he has greatly resisted our words. So Alexander the coppersmith has not simply been an enemy to Paul, he's an enemy to the gospel and therefore he is seeking to deceive and the rebuke of him and the hope that he'll be rewarded accordingly is very similar to that of Jesus denouncing the scribes and Pharisees who said, you know, you not only will not enter the kingdom of heaven yourself, but you are forbidding those from coming in who want to come in. And that's sort of like Alexander, he was like the Pharisees, he was not Jewish probably since he was a coppersmith and probably made idols, but he was resisting the gospel. Now there's a huge difference between forgiving somebody and wishing no harm on somebody who has done me personal harm on the one hand and wishing no harm on somebody who's opposing the kingdom of God and leading to the deprivation of souls from being saved. You see the same thing in the Old Testament in Psalms where David sometimes wishes, you know, harm on the wicked. But if you read those Psalms very carefully, generally speaking, his concern is not for the people who are necessarily just his personal foes. After all, when Saul tried to kill him, David wept over Saul's death, he wouldn't kill him, he wouldn't, you know, take matters into his own hands and he was not even pleased or happy when Saul died. And likewise, when Absalom, his own son, tried to kill him, he was very forgiving toward Absalom, he didn't want Absalom to be put to death for that.

So, I mean, David was a man who could absorb injury graciously, personally, as Paul was and as Jesus was and as Stephen was. But when David speaks and asks for God to judge the wicked, the wicked he's describing are those who reject God's law, who oppose God. In fact, you can even see this in a very notable Psalm of his, Psalm 139, I'm sorry, Psalm 100, maybe I'm thinking of the wrong Psalm here. Oh, which Psalm does he think I'm thinking of here?

There's so many of them. Anyway, there's a Psalm where David is concerned about those who are God's enemies. And he says, I make them my enemies. And he says, I hate those who hate your law. Let me see, I'm going to find it here, I'm pretty sure I've got it in Psalm 130, Psalm 139, am I wrong? I could be wrong about that.

OK, wherever it is. Yeah, I don't have the Psalm number memorized there, but David says, how I hate those who hate you, I count them as my enemies. He says now notice he adopts them as his enemies, not because they've done him wrong, but because they're God's enemies. When someone's an enemy of God, those who are on God's side have got to take a stand for God and have got to wish harm on the side that's opposing God.

But when it comes to people who've simply hurt me, I don't have any reason to hold a grudge against them. And David and Paul and Jesus, I think all had that basic mentality. You do wish harm on those who are trying to destroy God's influence and trying to eliminate the kingdom of God.

And that's what Alexander the Coppersmith is doing. He is greatly opposing Paul's words, which made a difference. The psalm I'm talking about was 139. I was right about the psalm number. I just didn't find it real quickly when I looked in there. That's Psalm 139, verse 21.

No, it isn't. Let me see here. I'm looking at the wrong place. Oh, that was my problem.

I was looking at the wrong page. That'll do it every time. Yeah, it's Psalm 139 verses, let me see, verse 19 and following. David says, Oh, that you would slay the wicked, O God. Depart from me, therefore, you bloodthirsty men, for they speak against you wickedly.

Your enemies take your name in vain. Do I not hate them, O Lord, who hate you? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with perfect hatred. I count them my enemies.

Now, see, he keeps saying, God, these are the people who rise up against you. They're against you. They're bloodthirsty men who are wicked, and they speak against you wickedly. And I hate them because they're your enemies. I don't hate them because they're doing anything to me.

I'm just on your side about this. There's a war between God and mankind. And those who are actively participating in the war against God are the ones that we're operating against also. We don't physically harm them.

That's not our place to do. But to pray that God would harm them is perfectly within our rights. I mean, they have to be harmed eventually unless they repent.

Of course, our prayers would have the subtext, you know, unless they repent, in which case, save them. Because we'd love to see anyone saved, even enemies of God, like Paul himself, before he was converted. He was an enemy of the gospel.

But he said he didn't know it. He said he was doing it in ignorance, and therefore he found mercy. But when people are simply making themselves enemies of the truth, we who are on the side of the truth wage a warfare against them back through prayer, not through physical violence that we would commit, but simply asking God to avenge himself, to vindicate his own name and his own cause. And so when Paul says, may the Lord reward him according to his works, he's not wishing particular mercy on this man. Of course, again, the subtext, unless he would repent, that would be a different story. Everyone would love it if every evil person would repent. But if they don't, then they're simply pursuing a career of opposing the kingdom of God. And for us to pray that the kingdom of God will mow them right down, steamroll over them, and that they won't succeed, is very much in keeping with praying your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. So that's the difference between those two things that Paul wishes. He wishes well for those who have simply cowardly, in their cowardice, have betrayed him.

He's not angry at them, but he's upset with those who oppose the gospel. Well, thank you so much, Steve. That really helps it clear up for me a lot, not just on this particular, because I've had questions about those same other things, like the scriptures that you were talking about that David and Psalms, and that just really helps it to put in a better context some of the stuff that I've had questions. So I really appreciate that. Thank you so much, and God bless you. Thank you. Same to you. Good talking to you. Okay, bye. Bye now.

Okay, Richard in Seal Beach, California. Welcome to The Narrow Path. Yeah, Steve, I heard a sermon last week, and it was about the due prophecies that are fulfilled in the Bible.

And of course, he was talking mostly about dry bones in 1948, and he named a few others, but what came to my mind was Daniel 12, verse 4, the increase in knowledge. And I was just wondering, what is your opinion on prophecies that have a dual fulfillment in our lives? And I'll listen to you on the radio. Okay. Okay, thank you for your call.

I'll be glad to talk about that. Well, most prophecies do not have dual fulfillments. At least if they do, the Bible leaves us entirely in the dark about them. For example, when it talks in Zechariah about the Messiah riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, that happened. You know, that happened when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey on Palm Sunday. But I don't know of anybody who would suggest that there's another fulfillment coming up where Jesus is going to do that again. In Micah 5, 2, it says the Messiah be born in Bethlehem. Nobody I know thinks that's going to happen again. It did happen once, but usually when God predicts something and then it happens, there's no reason in the world to think that it has to happen again unless we are given some reason for thinking that.

Now what kind of reason would do that? Well, if after the first fulfillment of the prophecy, there's a recognition in the Bible, usually in the New Testament, that another fulfillment is to be sought or has occurred. So we have, I wouldn't call it dual fulfillment, I would call it typology, when there's a type in the Old Testament that is a type of Christ and then it's fulfilled in something Christ did.

But it might also have been fulfilled earlier in a sense. For example, God made a promise to David's son that would be born after he was dead, that would sit on his throne after he was dead, I should say, and would reign forever. It says in 2 Samuel 7, 12 that a seed of David would rise up after David's death on his throne and would build the temple or build a temple to the Lord and would reign forever. Now, of course, Solomon was the son of David who ruled after him and did build the temple, but Solomon himself didn't reign forever. And we recognize that the seed of David is a term that is also used for the Messiah, so that Solomon would be seen as a type of Christ in that he ruled after David on David's throne, he built a temple, Jesus said, upon this rock I'll build my church, and Jesus is seated on the throne forever in heaven, he's reigning at the right hand of God.

So we can say that Solomon was a type of Jesus, and as such, the prophecy about him, it was partially fulfilled in Solomon, but it more fully was fulfilled in Christ himself. And there are situations like that in Isaiah chapter 7. There's a prophecy, of course, about the virgin bearing a child, and it goes on to say, his name will be called Immanuel before he shall reach any advanced age as a child.

The two kings coming against Ahab would be demolished, finished. And, of course, we recognize in the New Testament that that has a fulfillment in Christ, but Christ isn't the one who, in his childhood, the king of Syria and the king of Israel were destroyed by the Assyrians. And we see in the very next chapter of Isaiah that in chapter 8, Isaiah had a son, and he calls him Immanuel. And it says also before he reaches a stage beyond his infancy, before he knows to say, my father, my mother, these two kings will be gone. So there's a prediction that a child will be born, his name will be called Immanuel, and before he knows to choose the good and refuse the evil, it says in chapter 7, chapter 7, verse 16 of Isaiah, before that happens, these two kings will be gone.

And then the next chapter actually has the birth of a child. He's called Immanuel in the chapter, and it's said of him that before he is able to say, my mother, my father, these two kings of Syria and Israel will be gone. So you can tell that Isaiah's own son in chapter 8 is the initial fulfillment of this prediction. But the New Testament tells us that Jesus is also a fulfillment of it. Now, we could call that a double fulfillment, or we could say the son of Isaiah, whose actual name is Meher-shalal-hasbaz, was actually a type of Christ. And Christ is what would normally be called the antitype. So there are predictions that have a short-range fulfillment, short-term fulfillment at the time they're uttered in some person, but that person is a type of Christ, and so the New Testament identifies that same prophecy as having to do with Christ. We could call that double fulfillment, or we could call it typological fulfillment. But most prophecies are not like that.

Now, some are. There's a number of prophecies about God restoring Israel from captivity in Babylon and bringing them back to the land. This happened initially in the time of Zerubbabel, of course, in the book of Ezra in Nehemiah, and yet the return of the exiles from Babylon, just like the exodus from Egypt, are both types and shadows of salvation in Christ.

And that is why the New Testament sometimes quotes these as being fulfilled in Christ, even though the first aspect of it, them coming back from Babylon, was fulfilled in the past. But it's similar to the fact that we look back at the historical exodus from Egypt and recognize that as a type of salvation. Paul uses that whole scenario of the exodus being a type of our salvation in Christ in places like 1 Corinthians 10, verses 1 through 6. And, well, 1 Corinthians 5, 7, where Paul talks about Christ is our Passover and was slain for us. That's looking back at the exodus and the Passover. In Luke 9, it tells us that when Moses and Elijah were on the Mount of Transfiguration with Christ, they were talking with him about the exodus that he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem. So we can see the New Testament recognizes the return of the exiles from Egypt in the exodus as having a sort of a secondary fulfillment in our eternal salvation in Christ, and likewise the return of the exiles from Babylon. So you can read in Ezekiel or Jeremiah passages that talk about God bringing back the people from Babylon, and then it morphs into a passage about the Messiah and us being saved in him.

So, again, Old Testament events or persons sometimes are types of a spiritual phenomenon in Christ, and so the New Testament sees them that way. But most prophecies don't have secondary fulfillments. When the Bible predicts the fall of Edom or the fall of Moab or the fall of Ammon or the fall of Babylon or the fall of Tyre, these are things that were fulfilled in the Old Testament. There's chapter after chapter of these predictions, and we don't expect a secondary fulfillment of them. Moab doesn't even exist anymore. How could it fall again?

Same thing with Edom. So I think that it's a dangerous thing to take an Old Testament prophecy, which has already been fulfilled in history, and say, yeah, but that's going to be fulfilled again unless we have New Testament verification for that, which, of course, for most of these things, we don't. People often like to make second fulfillments of prophecy in their own imaginations just because it suits them. For example, when Jesus predicted that Jerusalem would fall within that generation and there'd be wars and ruins of wars and earthquakes and diverse places and all this stuff, he said that'll happen in that generation, and it did.

It happened when Jerusalem fell in 70 AD. But many people, because they've thought that that discourse from Christ is talking about the end of the world, they say, well, okay, yeah, maybe, okay, so it did happen in that generation, but couldn't there be a second fulfillment in the end times? Well, there could, but I know of no instance in the Bible where Jesus makes a prophecy that is later fulfilled, and then it's going to have another fulfillment.

Generally speaking, typological fulfillments all happened in Christ. That is to say, all the prophecies of the Old Testament that might be said to have a secondary fulfillment were fulfilled in the New Testament. But to say that prophecies made in the New Testament are going to have double fulfillment would be strictly making it up out of our own heads, and that's the thing. When we read about these things in Revelation or in the Olivet Discourse, we often hear a huge talk about things that happened, as they say, shortly taking place afterward. Sometimes we say, okay, well, okay, those things did happen. I mean, once you read about 70 AD, you realize, oh, yeah, they did, actually. Then some people say, yeah, but there's also a second fulfillment in the end times. Well, I'd say you can believe anything you want about that, but there's not a line of scripture that would support you in it, so you're kind of just making it up out of whole cloth.

So be careful about people who talk about second fulfillments unless they can show you an instance where the Bible, in fact, identifies a second fulfillment of a prophecy that was fulfilled earlier. All right, let's talk to Sadok in Los Angeles. Hello. I need to turn your radio down.

Sadok. Yes, turn your radio down. Okay, yes. Hi.

Yes, you're on the air. Okay. Yeah, my question to Pastor Steve is, I believe it's in the book of Ezekiel, where it talks about Lucifer and how God created him, and he was this, you know, cherub, very, very important to God's creation, and it specifically starts to speak in very details about how he was, what was his role in heaven. But then at the end, almost to close the chapter, it says he was this until evil was found in him. So my question is, if Lucifer was in heaven, where did that evil come from if according to the Bible there is no evil in heaven? Yes. That's one of my questions that has been, you know, stirring me up and saying, well, I mean, was there a creation in heaven? Okay, I've heard your question.

I'm going to have to put you on hold because there's so much noise on your line in the background there, but I can answer your question. First of all, you're talking about Ezekiel chapter 28 verses 12 through 17 or so. There's no mention of Lucifer in this passage. The word Lucifer doesn't appear anywhere in it, but you're right in thinking that this is a passage commonly applied to Lucifer. Lucifer is only mentioned one place in the Bible, and that's in Isaiah 14, 12, and even there, I think it's a mistake to see Lucifer as a proper name because Lucifer just means bright shining one or morning star, and that being so, it's a label, not a name, and it's a label that is given in Isaiah 14 to the king of Babylon, and you can see that, I mean, anyone can prove that to themselves, even though their teachers may have told them otherwise.

You don't have to go with what your teachers say if the Bible says something different. In Isaiah 14, this prophecy that's supposedly about Lucifer, it says in verse 4 that you will take up this proverb against the king of Babylon and say how has the oppressor ceased and the golden city ceased and so forth. So it's talking about Babylon, the city, the king. It talks about the king of Babylon. It says the city of Babylon has ceased.

So this is about the fall of Babylon and its king. Now, at verse 12, it begins to, it's still speaking to him. The whole chapter is speaking to him until you get to, oh, about chapter, about verse 28 probably, but it calls him bright shining one in verse 12, which in the Latin Bible is Lucifer, but Lucifer is not a name. To call this king the morning star, which is what it says, is not really using the term any differently than when the book of Revelation calls Jesus the morning star. It's a term of reverence for a king, like your honor or your majesty, something like that, and Jesus is certainly in that sense a king and is called the morning star. The king of Babylon is also called that. By the way, another term that is used of Jesus in the New Testament, which is king of kings, the king of Babylon is called the king of kings in Daniel chapter 2.

So these are royal titles. They're not the names of anybody, and so the king of Babylon is referred to as the bright morning star, and it talks about how his ambitions were to exalt himself above God, which many rulers have sought to do, and how he will nonetheless be brought down to the pits of Sheol. Now, when you come to Ezekiel chapter 28, which is usually applied to the same person, there's no evidence that it's the same person. In fact, in verse 12, which begins this prophecy, it says, Son of man, take up a lamentation for the king of Tyre. Now, Tyre was a kingdom just north of Israel, and there are several chapters about Tyre in this section. Chapter 26, chapter 27, and chapter 28 of Ezekiel all talk about the fall of the city of Tyre, and when it says you're going to say this to the king of Tyre, then he says all those things you were referring to. In other words, there's no reference to Satan here or Lucifer, and so he does say to him, you were perfect in all your ways until evil was found in you or iniquity was found in you.

Well, that's not talking about in heaven. That's talking about in Tyre. The city of Tyre, the king, became corrupt. He wasn't initially corrupt, but he became corrupt, and it says of him in verse 18 that he defiled himself with his trading. Now, Tyre was a merchant city, a commercial city, and so by your commercial activity, you defiled yourself. Now, some people who want this passage to be about Satan, although the passage doesn't say a word about Satan anywhere in it, some of them want to say that he fell out of pride. Well, in Isaiah, the king of Babylon is said to have fallen out of pride, but in Ezekiel, it says that the king of Tyre fell through his commercial success, probably became covetous and greedy. And so, you know, it's an amazing thing that for hundreds of years, there have been teachers who've said that these two passages are about Satan, but they really can't point out anywhere in the passage that mentions Satan. And you can, when you read them, find out who is mentioned.

In Isaiah 14... I'm sorry, we had a break here and I didn't know it. Okay, I'm going to take a break right there. Go ahead and play the recording. Welcome back to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. If you're listening in the first half hour, I kind of talked through part of what should have been a recorded message, partly because I didn't hear any music played to cue me in that we're at the end of the first half hour. But we're back now for another half hour. We're taking your calls.

And if you'd like to join us with questions you have about the Bible or the Christian faith, we'll be glad to talk to you. The number is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. Our next caller is Rodney in Detroit, Michigan. Hi Rodney, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Hi Steve, thanks for taking my call. I just had a comment about the earlier call about dual prophecies. When I look at the Old Testament, I see a lot of dual prophecies, and I just wanted to bring up two of them and get your opinion on them.

I kind of think that he was more talking about this than kind of the answer that you gave him. But the two I want to bring up is, there's a prophecy, I think it was Isaiah, about Babylon falling. And it gives the quote, Babylon has fallen, has fallen. And then we see in the New Testament in Revelation that obviously there's going to be a future Babylon that falls also. So we see almost like an immediate prophecy in Isaiah and then the dual prophecy fulfilled in Revelation. And the other one was, I believe it was Ezekiel, about the angel that marked the foreheads of those with the inkworm. And we see that in Revelation. Yeah, we see that also in Revelation where the servants were sealed and the forehead also. I think those are two examples of the Old Testament dual prophecy.

I think there's many others in the Old Testament also. Okay, so you think that if you read Ezekiel 9 about how six angels were going out to slaughter the people of Jerusalem, because this represents the Babylonians coming in and destroying the city, but God had an angel put a mark on the forehead of those who sigh and cry over the sins of Jerusalem, and that they would be spared, you think that that is predicting the same thing? I think it's like he was talking about, it's a dual prophecy. Not only was it talking about something that was happening at that time, but it was also almost a glimpse into the future where that exact thing was going to happen again in a different scenario. I think that was like a dual prophecy. It was kind of predicting something in the future, but at the same time was showing something happening at that time.

I think that's more what he was talking about. I think that there's a lot of those in the Old Testament. And I think because the terminology is used almost exactly, for example, Babylon has fallen, has fallen, and you see that exact quote in Revelation, that was examples of dual prophecies from the Old Testament. Okay, so you may be right because I have no problem believing that Babylon in the Old Testament is a type of apostate Jerusalem in the New Testament, and that Revelation refers to Jerusalem as Babylon. But the Bible, the fact that the book of Revelation uses the same language as some of the prophecies doesn't necessarily mean that they're seeing it as a typological fulfillment, though they could, and I wouldn't have any objection to it, but I don't see any necessity of seeing it that way because Revelation actually quotes hundreds of times from a dozen books or more of the Old Testament, and sometimes it mixes the quotes up. I mean, it'll take imagery from Joel or from Zechariah or from Ezekiel or from Daniel or from even the Exodus, and it'll use the language from these Old Testament passages to kind of intermix it with its own way of expressing what it's predicting. Now, I believe it's predicting the fall of Jerusalem, so we could do that, and we could do it. We could say the prophecies against Tyre that Revelation alludes to could tell us that Tyre's fall to Alexander the Great was actually a type of the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans. That might be making too close a connection, more than the book of Revelation intends, but it's possible. So, you know, when the locusts come out of the pit and they have teeth like lion and heads like horses and things like that, the fact that this is quoting something from Joel chapter 2, which was actually about a locust plague in Joel's time, we could say, well, that locust plague then was a type and a shadow of these locusts coming out of the bottom of his pit. Now, it could be.

I mean, you know, I'm not going to go to the mat fighting over those kinds of things. There are many, many things in the Old Testament in the prophets and in the historical narratives which are regurgitated in their own way in the book of Revelation. And if we want to say, well, therefore Revelation says that all these things were a type of the things it's talking about, that's fine.

I mean, I don't have any problem with that. I just think that that's kind of more what the caller was referring to. I think when you were giving an answer, like you were talking more about typology things, which I think is a little bit different than dual prophecy because dual prophecy is talking about something that actually happened in Old Testament history, but also was given to look forward to something else that was going to happen very similar in the future. And I think by the wording of it, I think we can be sure that that's exactly what it was talking about in the Old Testament. Well, you know, you're using different words for it, but you're saying the same thing I said. I said that there are things that were predicted in the Old Testament and they have a short-term fulfillment in some Old Testament event or person, but they serve as a type of a later fulfillment in Christ. So, I mean, I think you're saying the same thing. I'm just calling it typological fulfillment.

You're calling it double fulfillment. The Bible does use the word type, by the way. It says in Romans 5, 12, it says that Adam was a type of Christ, for example. You know, Paul said that the experiences of the Israelites coming out of Egypt were a type of our salvation in 1 Corinthians 10, 6.

And a number of other places, the word type issues. Peter indicated that the flood of Noah was a type of our baptism. So, you know, I've got no problem with saying types and anti-types. I'm just saying typology is different than dual prophecy. But thanks, Steve.

I appreciate your answers. Okay. Well, if we don't see it as… Sure, thank you.

Yeah. If we don't see it as type and anti-type, then we have nothing to base dual prophecy on. You know, if we say this happened to Solomon, but he was a type of Christ, and look, the same thing applied to Christ. That's fine, because it had a fulfillment after the prediction was made.

And we could just say, okay, it's done now. Except because Solomon is a type of Christ, we could say, ah, but it happened to Solomon and to Christ, which is why he is a type of Christ. Now, if we just take the idea that prophecies, whenever we want them to, can have double fulfillments. Well, even when we're not told they do, and even when there's no typology involved, then I think we're in danger.

And I think that a lot of people do that. For example, I had a pastor who told me that Lot escaping from Sodom before the fire and brimstone came was a type of the church being raptured before the tribulation. Well, there's not anything in the Bible that would support that idea.

The Bible doesn't say that. And the same pastor would tell me that, you know, the flood of Noah, the people going into the ark was the rapture of the church. The flood is the tribulation. And Enoch, who went, I'm sorry, they would say that Enoch, who ascended before the flood, that's the rapture. And then they would say going into the ark is the Jewish remnant in the tribulation going into the ark, and then the flood is the tribulation. Now, those are very neat things to say, but the Bible doesn't support any of them. In fact, those examples are being used in support of a doctrine the Bible doesn't teach at all, but it actually refutes. The point is, when people just want to make secondary fulfillments and there's no connection to the general pattern of how prophecy is fulfilled, then we're stuck in a totally arbitrary realm of hermeneutics. But if we recognize that there's a great number of things in the Old Testament that are types and shadows of New Testament things, and therefore a prophecy about some of them is occasionally seen to be a prophecy about the antitype, which is, of course, the fulfillment of the type as well.

Anyway, this is perhaps over the heads of some of our listeners, but I think most who have understood their whole idea of types in the Bible would probably be able to follow that idea. Thank you for your call. We're going to talk to Nathan from Eugene, Oregon, and we have some lines open right now if you'd like to call in before the show ends in about 20 minutes. The number to call is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. Nathan, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Thanks for taking my call, Steve. I just read your book, and it's great, so thank you for writing it. And my question is about, one of the things you talked about was the difference between entering and inheriting.

Yes. And my question is about, in Luke and Mark, the rich young ruler, where he asks, what must I do to inherit internal life? But then in Matthew, it's just, what good thing must I do to kind of get eternal life? My question is, do you read anything into that, and how do you explain both the question and Jesus' response? Is it a question about being saved, or is it a question of inheriting kind of like rewards? I'm wondering what you think about that, or am I reading too much into that language and the differences in the account?

Right. Well, in Matthew 19-16, the rich young ruler says, teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life? Now, whether he means that I could have it now, or I could have it when the kingdom materializes, I'm not sure. It's very hard to know exactly how he himself understood eternal life.

If he was not a disciple of Jesus, he would not have heard the term very often. The term eternal life only occurs once in the Old Testament, and that's in Daniel 12, excuse me, in verse, I suppose it's verse 2, where it says those who sleep in the dust shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to everlasting shame and contempt. And so that's the only place where everlasting life is mentioned in the Old Testament. So it's not clear what the rich young ruler meant by eternal life, but probably there's a good chance he was thinking of the resurrection of the dead, which is in fact when you do inherit the kingdom. And when you said, Mark says that he came saying, what must I do to inherit eternal life? He may have been thinking in terms of the resurrection and inheriting the kingdom, because eternal life, which is a term used very frequently in the book of John, although the term kingdom of God is rarely used in the book of John, it seems to be equivalent to inheriting the kingdom or possibly even to entering the kingdom. But the difference I made, as you mentioned, is that we enter the kingdom now by being born again. When you're born again, you enter the kingdom of God. And so Paul says that we, who have been born again, have been translated out of the power of darkness into the kingdom of God's own son. But we inherit the kingdom when Jesus returns and inheriting the kingdom is different than entering the kingdom in this respect, that when you enter the kingdom, you enter as a subject of the king. You embrace Christ as your Lord and your king, and that's entering his kingdom as one of his subjects. But when you inherit the kingdom, you actually inherit a scepter and a throne and a crown. In other words, those who enter the kingdom as servants of Christ in this age, when Jesus returns, will inherit a throne to reign with him. That's what Paul says in 2 Timothy 2, verse 12, he says, if we endure, we will reign with him. Or in Revelation 5, 10, the inhabitants of heaven say that God has redeemed, you know, men from all nations, kingdoms and tongues and so forth, and says they shall reign on the earth.

Now that's the future. Jesus said to his disciples, Blessed are the meek, they shall inherit the earth. So in the rich young ruler, we don't really know what his frame of reference was. He was not a follower of Christ, so he didn't really probably know or understand, certainly not any better than the disciples did, what Jesus was talking about, nor did he have much Old Testament information to go on. So when he says, what must I do to have eternal life, as Matthew records it, or to inherit eternal life, as Mark has it, whichever term he used, it's not clear how he meant it. So we don't know, but we do know that the New Testament speaks of inheriting the kingdom of God when Jesus comes back. As we see, for example, in Matthew 25, the parable of the sheep and the goats says, he'll say to those on his right hand when he has come back, inherit the kingdom that was prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

So they inherit the kingdom as they inherit thrones and a reign with Christ when Jesus comes back. But I wouldn't worry too much about the rich young ruler's wording, since he was inquiring from a point of view that was very inadequate compared to what we would know now from reading what Jesus taught in general and what the apostles taught later. He was coming in as a stranger, just a man with Jewish background, but not much understanding, I'm sure, of Christ's teaching. Okay, so you think Jesus' response was kind of to show that the rich young ruler has got the cart ahead of the horse and needs to worry about following him rather than worrying about what's going to happen, you know, eternal life or inheriting the kingdom type stuff?

I think probably. And, you know, it's hard to know exactly how the word eternal is to be understood and how he would have understood it, because the word aionius can mean pertaining to the age, meaning the messianic age. So aionius life, though it's translated eternal life there, in many Greek scholars say it should be translated, what must I do to inherit the life of the age? And that would be of the messianic age. Again, there's some ambiguity about the word itself in the Greek, but also about what the background is of this man who's asking the question, since we don't know how much he knew about anything other than Judaism before he came on up to Jesus.

And, you know, Judaism didn't have a real complex revelation from God about the inheriting of eternal life. All I'm saying is, yeah, I don't know what he I don't know what he thought, so I can't really answer for you. Yeah, thank you very much. And yeah, volume two of the book will be out December 8th, I guess. It's already out on Kindle. All right.

Thank you, Nathan, for your call. God bless you. For those of you who don't know what he's talking about, I've just recently written a two volume work on the Kingdom of God, volume one and two. Volume one is out.

It came out last month. Volume two will be out in December, although it's already out on Kindle. Both can be found at Amazon. The book is called Empire of the Risen Son. And book one is called There's Another King. And book two is called All the King's Men. Now, the first book talks about the kingdom of God explaining the biblical teaching on the subject. But book two is really about discipleship, about living in God's kingdom now. And so, again, the first book is out.

The second one will be out in less than a month. All right. Let's talk next to Mark in Vancouver, Washington. Mark, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.

Vancouver, Canada, actually. But Steve, I just wanted to quickly refer to something that Rodney from Detroit said. I have a couple of other quick examples of the dual prophecies. And, of course, Matthew, of course, when he referenced the 40 pieces of silver pertaining to Judas, obviously that situation, Zechariah, did pertain to something that was happening at that time of Zechariah. Also, as you know, because I just listened to your Isaiah 7 lecture recently, that Isaiah 7-14 clearly was originally about a son of Isaiah, but clearly also Matthew, you know, relates that to obviously Jesus himself, right? Right.

Okay. Now, here's the point, though, that obviously those two things were obviously fulfilled in the first century at the time Matthew was speaking. But when Matthew in chapter 24 speaks about the events which clearly pertain to the 70 AD destruction of Jerusalem, it would not at all be a stretch in light of what we just talked about to suggest that those conditions and aspects of what would happen in 70 AD could also be projected to the end of the age. Matthew obviously lived 2,000 years ago, so he could clearly comment on Isaiah 7-14 as being already fulfilled in Christ, as well as the original Isaiah at the time of Isaiah. And also, likewise with Judas, that was something that he had hands-on experience with at that time. So again, given those two factual occurrences of what we just talked about, it's not at all a stretch to project those 70 AD occurrences, which Jesus spoke about, to also a dual fulfillment at the end of the age, correct?

Okay. Well, I'm not sure how much of a stretch it would be. It would certainly not be evident in the passage. It is true that there is, I mean, certainly there's going to be some bad times at the end of the age. So, I mean, I'll accept that. But that doesn't mean that the specific things prophesied in Matthew 24, which all happened in the first century, can be expected to recur in the same way, or that that prophecy would describe in any detail of anything that will happen in the future.

It might. It's not too hard to imagine that things like he described could happen many times in history, and perhaps at the end of the world, too. But the passage gives us no reason to see it that way. And I'm always nervous about trying to give an interpretation of the passage where the passage itself has nothing in it to warrant the interpretation I'm giving. So, to say it wouldn't be a stretch to see it as, you know, the first of two fulfillments, well, I don't know how much of a stretch it is.

It's kind of, in a sense, it's made up out of whole cloth. So, you know, one could say, well, I still believe it's true. I think there is a second fulfillment at the end of the age. Well, I won't say there can't be.

I'm just saying that I certainly would never say there will be, because the Bible doesn't give me any information to warrant such a prediction. That's just my position. I appreciate your call. Let's talk to Nicole in Massachusetts. Nicole, welcome to the Narrow Path. Hey, Nicole, turn your radio off, if you would.

Go ahead. Not sinners, because we're all sinners. But, you know, ever since I really got saved, I tried to not sin. But when I do, I feel really hard on myself. And I know, I hear, like, you know, I always hear, we all sin.

So, I mean, we can't really avoid it. But I'm just confused, because I feel like, you know, people tell me, you can't be perfect. And I know that, but I just, I don't know why I get so hard on myself. So, I mean, how do you think Jesus feels when we sin after we've been saved? Well, God doesn't like sin, obviously. And therefore, we should not want to sin. When we repent and become Christians, we're putting our life of sin behind us with the intention of being obedient to God from that point on.

That's our intention. But everybody who's made New Year resolutions knows that, you know, our intentions are not always realized. And so, I mean, what makes a person a true convert is the fact that they have, in fact, you know, determined that they're going to follow Jesus. And that very following of Jesus means instead of sinning, instead of being disobedient to Jesus, I'm going to be obedient to Him.

But we have to be realistic also. It says in 1 John 2, in verse 1, he says, and 2, no, I think it's just the first one, he says, little children, he says, these things I write unto you that you do not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. Now, John says, I'm writing to you so you won't sin. That is, of course, every Christian's goal is to not sin. It's every Christian's determination because they have repented of their life of sin, and now they are determined to be followers of Christ, which is not the same thing as sinning, obviously. So, he says, I'm writing to you so you don't sin.

That's the ideal, and that's what Christians need encouragement about. And yet, he says, but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous, who's the propitiation for our sins. So, he's saying, we, of course, want to not sin, but unfortunately, sometimes people do, and because they do, we need to know that we have one who's made a sacrifice for sin, one who is an advocate for us before God, and that is Jesus Christ, the righteous. So, there's a recognition there that sin is not the way of life for the believer. But as James said, in many things, we all stumble. So, stumbling happens. Sin happens.

We aren't happy that it does, and we shouldn't be apathetic about it either. We should recognize that God doesn't want us to sin, and therefore, since we want to please God, we don't want to sin either. And so, when you feel bad that you sin, yeah, there's a place for feeling bad about sinning, because just like there's a place for feeling bad if you spoke rudely to your parents and didn't respect them, and you hurt their feelings or something, or to your husband or wife or children, and you realize that you didn't do what you should have done, and you feel badly about it, and rightly, you should.

It should lead to apologies, of course. And 1 John 1 says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all our righteousness. So, we have to hold these facts in our minds all the time. One is that we're not supposed to sin, and we better not sin. But we do sometimes, and if we do, then we need to confess our sin, and he'll forgive us our sin, and we need to realize that we have him as our advocate before God, so we don't live in condemnation. Now, the devil wants to condemn you.

He's the accuser of the brethren. And therefore, even after you've repented, he'll try to make you feel guilty, because he gets a lot of mileage out of you feeling guilty. It prevents you from having confidence toward God. It prevents you from being able to effectively pray and change things in the world through prayer. The devil doesn't want you to pray and change things through prayer. So, to make you feel condemned is the best way he has to neutralize your prayer life, and therefore your spiritual power.

And this is a warfare, so he's always glad to neutralize the power of his enemies, which includes us. So, don't let the devil put condemnation on you if you've sinned. And if you have truly repented of it, you've confessed your sin to God, just know he forgives you. Now, God, by the way, is probably not as shocked at your sin as you are, because God knows people sin all the time. You should see the kind of stuff he sees every day going on around the world.

Probably a lot worse things than what you're doing, but from your point of view, it's still not okay. We know that God isn't, you know, blown away saying, you know, I can't believe you did a horrible thing like that. He knows.

He's not surprised. He knows our frame. He remembers that we're dust. He knows that the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. But we still need to be determined to live a holy life and an obedient life.

So, when we have sinned, we repent, and then God forgives and we move along and try to do better next time. You've been listening to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. We are listener supported. You can write to us at The Narrow Path, PO Box 1730, Temecula, California 92593, or go to our website, thenarrowpath.com. We'll talk again tomorrow. God bless.