In this episode of ‘Through the Bible,’ Dr. McGee addresses listeners’ questions about the scriptures with clarity and depth, unraveling perplexities about the creation narratives in Genesis and different gospel reports about Jesus’ early life. Through thought-provoking answers, the discussion clarifies common misunderstandings and underscores the singular purpose of the gospel accounts to present the redemptive work of Jesus. Listeners are encouraged to explore the boundaries of divine guidance in daily life and ponder on themes of trust, submission, and biblical interpretation.
should we confess our sins to one another? Or do we confess our sins to God and our faults to one another? If it’s the latter, then how should we distinguish between faults and sins? Or can one do that at all? Well, this is just one of the topics that we’ll deal with today. So stay with us.
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of foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in his excellent word.
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What more can he say than to
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You are listening to the question and answer program of the Through the Bible Radio Network. Our Bible teacher, Dr. J. Vernon McGee, answered the many questions of his listeners for over 30 years, and they’ve been recorded and preserved for future generations of believers to grow in their faith. Now let’s get to our first question, which comes to us from a faithful listener of this program, and she says, Why was it that only a woman was forgiven of adultery in John chapter 8? Did not a man ask Jesus for the same forgiveness? Or is it a greater sin for women?
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Certainly, it’s no worse degree of sin for women by any means. But after all, they didn’t bring the man, you see, at that time to the Lord Jesus. They let him off, and they’ve been letting the man off ever since. But today, I noticed that the Los Angeles Police Department, so the reports are, But now they arrest the man also. And if they start that, why, the fact of the matter is the prostitutes will be out of business. And they do not approve of it, by the way. And they’re willing to bear the blame and the shame. And, of course, today there’s no shame in this permissive society in which we live. And the reason was that she was the only one that was brought to him. And that, of course, is the very simple explanation of it. You remember the Lord Jesus says, is there some man that blames you? You see, the Lord Jesus got rid of that crowd because none of them were guiltless. And when you raise the question about the forgiveness of the man, that crowd that brought her were guilty. And if I may take a moment to give what I believe is the interpretation of it, you remember that’s when he stooped down and wrote on the sand. And I think that one old Pharisee there that was so insistent upon the Lord Jesus saying she should be stoned, I think he wrote down the name of a girl that that Pharisee had an affair with in his early life. And the old Pharisee didn’t think anybody knew anything about it. But Jesus did, and we’re told that they began one by one to slip away. So when you say that he didn’t forgive them, the whole thing is he didn’t forgive them. They all left without asking forgiveness. They could have asked for forgiveness, and he would have forgiven them. But they didn’t. They all got away. And you remember, he said to her, is there any man that condemns you? She said, no. And he said, neither do I condemn you. And why? Because I think they should have brought the man. I think that was what the Lord Jesus is saying. You’ve got to have them both here. And therefore the woman was forgiven, but also with the injunction, go and sin no more. He labeled it sin, and let’s understand that also.
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Our next question comes to us from Escondido, California. The listener writes, I heard you say that we should confess our faults to one another and our sins to God. I agree with you, but could you make a distinction between faults and sins? Is there a line that can be drawn?
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No, my answer is no. I don’t think that you can draw a line between certain things, and they’re both false and sins, and sins and false. And when they do, then you have a two-way confession to make. If you have harmed somebody, it’s been a sin against God, then you will make that thing right as far as the individual is concerned. You remember that Zacchaeus, who had wronged many people, he said, if I have taken anything by false accusation, I’ll restore it. But he needed also forgiveness of God, too. And you remember David and his great sin. He recognized that it was against God, and he said, against thee, thee only have I sinned. But he’d certainly committed against others a terrible thing that he needed to rectify. And I believe that as far as David was able to do it, he did rectify that sin so that there is a two-way confession to make when there’s any question about it.
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We come now to a question from a listener in Connersville, Indiana who says, I heard you say that a woman shouldn’t be expected to obey a godless man or an unsaved man. Now, Dr. McGee, my husband is not saved and neither was I when we got married. I’ve been a child of God for almost eight years now and how I’ve turned my husband away from Jesus by my holier-than-thou attitude. Finally, I am paying attention to the Lord and what He says about subjection. I am claiming the promise, If any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the behavior of the wives. My husband doesn’t enjoy Christian radio, going to church, or saying grace, but delegates it, which is his prerogative since he has the authority. I blamed him for all of this until the Lord showed me that I wasn’t showing him the love that Jesus can give. I now know it’s not important to win any worldly skirmish because my victory is in Jesus. Our marriage is now beautiful. He will be saved. What do you think?
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patience of this woman, and some time ago I had another letter that you’ve heard already on the radio of someone else who disagreed with me, and they too had had a marriage in which she took 1 Peter 3, although she didn’t mention it, I’m sure that’s what she did, and was subject unto her husband, she said. Well, may I say that you girls probably put me to shame, and you make me look bad, don’t you, by doing this. Now, this woman has not won her husband, and that’s been eight years. I’ll be frank with you. Again, I must say, I certainly admire her patience and all that sort of thing. And I think that you’re following, both of you are following rightly, the scripture. And I’m going to read this 1 Peter 3 now. Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands, that if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives. And conversation here means the life of the wives. while they behold your chaste life, coupled with fear, whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel. But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God, of great price. For after this manner in the old time, the holy women also, who trusted in God, adorned themselves, being in subjection unto their own husbands. even as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord, whose daughters ye are, as long as ye do well, and are not afraid with any amazement. Now, let me say, first of all, that you two women, and the example the other woman gave me, are indeed fortunate, and you have a husband who that 1 Peter 3 works with well, and both of you tell about adopting a holier-than-thou attitude when you were first converted. And surely you were wrong in that, no question about that, but that you were wrong in adopting that attitude. And now you have adopted a Christian attitude, and is working for one of you. The husband has already been one. The other one, he’s not yet but one, but you have faith that he will be. And apparently, both of you say that you’re having a beautiful marriage relationship. And my, that’s thrilling to hear. But the question I was answering had nothing to do with women in your class. You see, the danger of just taking one scripture And using it, you have a husband that you can be in subjection to. Suppose you had a husband who was a drunkard, who beat you. I had a woman in my study, as I mentioned before, every finger on both hands was broken by a drunken husband who repented of it the minute he got sober. but he was an alcoholic, a drunk, and this woman’s life actually was in danger. He had threatened to kill her on several occasions. I have a letter from another woman that has practically the same situation, a husband that is godless and drunken, and he actually is… trying to force her to have a relation with another man for the sake of his job, that he might get a promotion. Now, suppose you were in that situation, you women that have not a Christian husband, but at least he’s a good husband, and there are a lot of unsaved men that make good husbands, and Peter’s talking to those. Now, Paul over there is talking to the ones that are Spirit-filled. When he says there to be in subjection to your husband, he also says you to be subject one to another. That’s when you’re filled with the Spirit. He didn’t say that to a woman married to an unsaved man at all. The whole point is that there must be a response on the part of the husband And these women that wrote are actually one woman was going to a psychiatrist. Her health was breaking under it all. May I say to you that she was in danger, actually in her home, and she was being told that she should continue under that. And I think, frankly, her life would have been in jeopardy, at least one of them. Her life would have been in jeopardy had she continued in that situation. Now, I don’t think Peter’s talking to that kind of a situation. He’s talking to your situation, but not to this other situation. And Paul, in the fifth chapter of Ephesians, he’s not talking to that situation. He’s talking to Spirit-filled people. Now, I can’t find where any woman, and where I said that you misunderstood me and you misquoted me, that a woman should be expected to obey a godless man, an unsaved man. I said a certain kind of a godless and unsaved man. Now, if you can win him by subjection, Fine, but actually it’s your manner of life before him, the way you live your life as a Christian before him. That’s the important thing. And a Christian thing is not to yield as these women were being forced to do by a drunken husband. One was taking her to the bar, humiliating her before the crowd that was there. telling them all, what do you think, I brought in a Christian here today, and she may want to preach a sermon to you, and stuff like that. May I say to you, friends, Paul and Peter both are not talking to that situation at all. And I think that these women today should not be told that. It’s very easy for a counselor to tell somebody else to, you know, to go in the lion’s den. I’ve always thought that, you remember when the king looked down at Daniel and began to, you know, to say that to give him a little sermon about his God could take care of him and all that sort of thing. I’ve always felt that it’d been nice if Daniel at that time had said, King, come on down here and spend the night with me. You know, it’s very easy, you know, to stand up and look in the lion’s cage and tell somebody else how to do. So I think we need to be very careful how we’re interpreting the Word of God today. For you, yes, but I wasn’t talking about women in your situation. I was talking to a woman that had not only a godless and unsaved husband, but a man that I would say was a beast. In fact, several of them. And believe me, Paul and Peter are not talking into that situation.
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Moving on, we come to a question from a listener in Marshall, Missouri. He says, According to Luke 2, verse 21 and following, Jesus was taken to Jerusalem for presentation to the Lord, after which the family returned to Nazareth. How does this correlate with Matthew 2, where we’re told that Joseph took Mary and Jesus to Egypt from Bethlehem until the death of Herod? After Herod’s death, we’re told they made their home in Nazareth.
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Well, may I say to you that I don’t quite follow you in finding an inconsistency in that. I rather suspect you were not with us as we went through the Bible in the Gospels, because at that time we’d have made it very clear, or we did make it very clear, that each one of the Gospels is written from a certain viewpoint. There’s no contradictions. Each one is bringing out a certain thing, and another one omits something else. Now, Luke… in his account, and I think probably I should turn there to Luke 2, 39, and just read this verse, and I’ll not go to the other one, but in Matthew we’re familiar with it. And when they had performed all things according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee to their own city, Nazareth. Now, can’t you see that Luke is giving you an abbreviated record here? He’s not giving you a detailed record at all. Why? Because he presents Jesus as the man. Now, why did Matthew give the incident about him going down into Egypt and coming up out of Egypt? Because it has to do with the purpose of his gospel. He’s presenting the Lord Jesus as the king. And he was born a king. And Herod was after him to kill the child because he was a king. And it’s necessary to tell how God protected the little child by having Joseph take the mother and the child down to the land of Egypt. But they ended up in the same place. They came back to Nazareth, their hometown, and that’s all that Luke says. There’s no contradiction there. Luke just didn’t record that because he’s presenting Jesus as the man, the perfect man. And that part of the life of Jesus is irrelevant as far as he was concerned. And he leaves that out. I wish that this, and I don’t mean to apply this to this individual at all, but I do wish today that we could read the Word of God with the same kind of common sense that we use in reading any other book. That we can see that in the gospel certain things are left out. Not because there’s a conflict. There’s no conflict. It’s because one writer is emphasizing one thing and the other writer is emphasizing something else. And listen to this. When you put all four Gospels together, you do not have a biography of the life of Jesus because not one of them wrote for that purpose. And even when you put them together, you do not get a complete biography of the life of Jesus. Why? Because that’s not what they’re doing. These men are presenting the one who died on a cross for the sins of the world. And all four of them get to that. And all four of them emphasize that. And let’s give the writers of Scripture credit for having, you know, the intelligence that writers of history today and writers of biography exert. Not everything is recorded.
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For our final question, let’s take up this one from a listener in Indianapolis, Indiana. She writes, I’m enclosing an article from the Indianapolis News and would like to hear your answer to it. I’d like to know how to respond to someone when they ask me about the statements regarding creation brought out specifically in the second paragraph.
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And I’m only going to read the paragraph of this article. It’s written apparently by some individual. It’s written to the editor And the paper naturally always plays up anything that’s anti-Bible, and it says Bible, bad biology, bad morality. Now, this part it says here in this article and this paragraph that I shall read now. The Bible is a poor source for biology. The first two chapters of Genesis have two creation stories, which contradict each other on several points. Whether man was made before or after animals, whether man was created in the likeness of the gods or from the dust of the earth by the Lord God singular, whether a woman was made with man or later from his rib, whether days and nights can be counted before there is a sun, whether there are oceans above the clouds like those beneath the clouds, and whether man could live before there were trees, beasts, and fowl. Now, may I say that this article, the entire article, reveals a colossal ignorance of the Bible and a bias that is absolutely bent double. I have never read really anything that is such a display of ignorance. Let’s go down that for just a moment, and I’ll not go into detail, but I’m sure the average person today knows how wrong this is. The Bible is a poor source for biology. Well, I would say that you’re accurate in that statement. I don’t think that Moses… had in mind of writing a book on first-year biology. What he wrote was not biological or biology, but it doesn’t contradict biology, and you are wrong from then on. The two chapters of Genesis do not have two creation stories. If you were acquainted with the Bible, you would understand that there is a law that goes through all of the Bible known as the law of recapitulation, that the Spirit of God has a way of describing a series of events in a large way, and then coming back and in a detailed way lift out that which is important. Now you have the creation of the heavens and the earth, including man, in the first chapter. Then man, who happens to be important for the story, his creation is lifted out in the second chapter. And then this part is totally unaware of the fact that the word Elohim is not dual, as Hebrew has a dual, And it is plural, and since a number is not put with it, it generally means three. It would come up with three. So we actually are talking about the Trinity here. And I have a notion this brother would not know much about the Trinity either, so that we do not have several gods and then one Jehovah, and that word has a particular and peculiar meaning. in the New Testament. He’s identified as a savior, as the one that is the one that protects and watches over mankind. This party, of course, was totally unacquainted with that, and there is no thought that woman was created out of the dust as Adam was. She passed through Adam and and came out of Adam. And so that is clarified in the second chapter. And the scripture makes it very clear, when you’ve given the detailed account, that woman came along later than man, much later, by the way. And whether days and nights could be counted before there was a sun, and that would be very easy to do, as around the earth there evidently was a cloud cover, but the sun was up yonder, and so was the moon, and they were just brought through. I find here in Southern California, when we have a foggy day, that we have morning, and we have afternoon, we have night. We don’t see the sun or the moon at all, but you can have that, and maybe this brother, where he lives, he’s experienced that sort of thing. And may I say that there is not water above the clouds, But the water’s in the firmament, in the clouds. And that was something man didn’t know at first. You know, the Lord pumps up the water out of the ocean and takes the salt out of it, moves it out over the land by his special method of transportation called the wind, air currents. And then he opens up the faucet and lets it come down on the dry land. And actually, he’s been doing that for a long time. and there’s nothing quite wrong with that. I would say that this is an article that reveals a bias and an ignorance that is colossal.
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Well, that brings us to the close of our program. We sure hope that Dr. McGee’s responses have answered some of your questions, or at least spurred you to dig deeper into the Word of God yourself. If you’d like assistance with understanding the Scriptures and how to locate answers to your own questions, then we suggest you get a current copy of our resource catalog. One resource you might consider is Dr. McGee’s five-volume hardback set of edited messages containing his teaching on the Word of God based on the radio broadcasts. This invaluable set will greatly assist you in learning the whole counsel of God. To order any of our materials, including a CD copy of today’s broadcast or the edited messages, call 1-800-65BIBLE Monday through Thursday from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Pacific Time. Thank you for watching. Be sure to join us this week on the Through the Bible radio program as we continue Dr. McGee’s five-year journey through the whole Word of God, book by book and chapter by chapter. And we pray that God will answer all your questions and solve all your problems.
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