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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 the reason for that is so you can call in during the program.
If you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith, you can call in. If you have differences of opinion with the hosts, you can call in about those as well. Right now, I don’t advise you to dial the number because the lines are full.
But this will not be the case for the entire hour. And if you want to try before the hour is over, and frankly, the earlier, the better to get in line, you can use this number. The number is 844-484-5737.
Again, don’t call right now, but if you call in, say, five minutes or something like that, there’s a good chance lines will open up for you. Again, the number is 844-484-5737.
Our first caller today is Bob, calling from Honolulu, Hawaii. Hi, Bob. welcome.
Thanks for calling. Hello, Bob. Hello.
Hi. Did you mean Chuck?
Well, it must be Chuck. It must be Chuck. My call screen thought it was Bob.
Go ahead.
Oh, that’s right.
I guess you’re right. Yeah, I recognize your voice.
I wanted to add.
I called you once a couple of times before, and I was saying that the universe is eternal, and that matter is eternal.
It doesn’t wear out.
It doesn’t use up.
It just works over and over and over and over and over. And you had an objection to that for some reason. I was wondering if it’s because of this idea of in times where Christians believe that God’s going to destroy the universe and make a new one.
No, my objections to it are based on both the Bible and science. The Bible indicates that matter was created. It didn’t always exist, so it’s not eternal.
I mean, I do believe matter in some form is intended to be prolonged by God in the new creation. I think it will be somewhat different than the present order of things, but I don’t think it will be immaterial. So, but matter is not intrinsically eternal.
God might prolong its existence and maintain it for eternity if he wishes, but it’s not in the nature of matter to be eternal. But the Bible indicates it came into being. The other thing, of course, is scientifically, there’s the law of thermodynamics, a second law that would suggest that everything breaks down.
So if matter is made of atoms, eventually, left to itself, nature would have it all break down into individual atoms again. In fact, now, of course, atoms are matter, but it would never be reassembled. The point is that the idea that the world or the material universe has always been, which was called the steady state theory of science, of cosmology, was a view that many atheists held up until the mid 1900s, when the Big Bang cosmology tended to rise and replace it.
And the Big Bang cosmology says that matter had a beginning. The Big Bang was the beginning of matter and of time. Now, I don’t know that the Big Bang cosmology is true or false.
I’m not a scientist. I would not be able to confirm or disconfirm that, but scientists do believe that matter had a beginning. And all scientists know that it’s disintegrating, because that’s the second law of thermodynamics.
Now, again, once it gets down to, you know, if God doesn’t intervene to keep it longer, it will eventually, it might take billions of years, but it will eventually break down to just individual atoms again. And then those atoms presumably will eventually break down into subatomic particles in time, because that’s what the second law does to everything that’s material. Anyway, I don’t have a particular stake in the question, and I’m not sure why it matters to you either.
It really doesn’t matter to me, but I was just disagreeing with you, because I think both the Bible and science would tell us it’s not eternal. Now, if you mean that now that it exists, it will exist forever, that’s possibly true. I mean, I’m not going to argue against that because of the new creation.
We don’t know much about the nature of it, but maybe, maybe matter is to be from this point on eternal. But to speak of it, to just say matter is forever, I mean, that’s not self-evident from science or the Bible. So I was just not agreeing with your proposition.
But I don’t have, I have no emotions about it. It seems to matter to you the more. All right.
Well, thank you for your call. Chris in Michigan, welcome to The Narrow Path. Hello.
Thank you. I had called you before about a question about animals going to heaven, but that’s not what I’m calling about now. My question now is, did God give the devil rain over the earth until Jesus comes back?
Well, I don’t think God gave that to the devil. No, I think that man may have, but then the devil has lost that now because Jesus regained it for man. That’s what Jesus accomplished, is that he conquered Satan.
He conquered death and all authority, which means all the right to rule in heaven and earth, which is the whole universe, is now given to Jesus. So whatever authority Satan might have been given by our first parents, it was taken from him by Jesus, just the second Adam, or the last Adam as he might be called. But as far as Satan getting authority over the planet, this was not God’s doing.
God gave that authority to Adam and Eve. And according to the way many people understand theology, and understand what was going on in the Old Testament, the fall of Adam and Eve delivered to Satan power and authority over them and over their offspring. However, God, of course, has reversed that through Christ.
That’s how I understand it. All right. Let’s talk to Patrick from Torrance, California.
Patrick, welcome.
Hey, Steve.
Happy Friday. How are you doing? Good.
Thanks.
You know, the first caller about the steady state model or if he was talking about the origin or the universe not having the gang, I was thinking along the lines that, could you hear a science says, science says, wouldn’t it be, and this wasn’t why I called it real quick, as I’m listening to the discussion, wouldn’t it be more of a historical question? The origins of the universe can’t be figured out or determined by any modern science or past science. It’s got to be something that has to do with the realm of history.
Well, technically, that is in fact true, that whether something happened in the past or not is a question of history. Science cannot observe the past, and the realm that science can speak authoritatively into is, with reference to repeatable observed phenomenon. If you can go into a laboratory and do repeatable experiments and find that they are consistently getting the same result, that’s what science is.
But you have to observe. The scientific method has several steps. The first is observation.
And if you can’t observe something, you can’t prove anything about it. So we did not observe any historical events that happened before we were born, and we certainly didn’t observe the origins of the Earth. Now, what a scientist would say is that we can observe the current movement of the bodies in the universe, and we can sort of extrapolate backward from that to where they have moved to in our observable lifetimes.
If you extrapolate that same movement backward, you can conclude that it all began with a big bang. But the thing is, we don’t know how far back history goes. All this movement could be existing without having begun that way.
I mean, God could have made it yesterday and had all this movement happening the way it is now. So, I mean, it’s really a historical question, because science cannot observe the origins of the universe, right?
Yeah. Okay. So, I just finished a book in the Appendix.
The title is The Place of Israel in Historic Post-Millennialism. And there’s a quote here, it’s real short. It says, Owen and Edwards, both of whom emphasize the importance of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 8070, also believed in a future conversion of National Israel.
And then here’s the main point that I want to get from you. Historically, it has been the all-millennial position that denies a future large-scale conversion of the Jews. Given the fact that most of the reform creeds in the Puritans and after the Reformation, there was a huge belief in post-millennialism.
And they talk about the conversion of the Jews at large, according to Romans chapter 11, which I know you know very well. But is it accurate and is it true that the all-mill view does not have a picture of Paul and Romans talking about a future large conversion to national Israel?
It is true that post-millennialism has always predicted that the Jewish race will be converted. I don’t know that they have always said anything about whether the nation will be regathered in the end times. But the salvation of Israel has always been understood by post-millennialists from Romans 11-26 to be something that will happen.
But then again, post-millennialists believe everybody should be saved. So it’s no really special thing that they think all the Jews will be saved. They believe all the Gentiles will be saved too.
That’s post-millennialism. So yeah, it is correct. Now, post-millennialism was not really the view of the reformers.
Ommillennialism was, but it was in, I think it was in the early 1700s that Daniel Whitby is considered to be maybe the first one to formulate post-millennialism. So it’d be like a couple centuries after Luther. And still, even after post-millennialism arose, Ommillennialism still prevailed, I think, as the majority view, but post-millennialism had a very popular surge in the 1800s.
And in the early 1900s, many historians of theology say that it was World War I and World War II in the early part of the 20th century that kind of ended the prominence of post-millennialism because post-millennialism indicated the world is going to get better by the conversion of everybody. And World War I and World War II were so disastrous that that optimism seemed to be abandoned. Now, of course, real post-millennialists shouldn’t be bothered by World War I or World II in terms of proving anything wrong about the theology because post-millennialists could say, well, yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of evil still.
World War I and World War II were great examples of it. There’s plenty since then, too. We’re not saying, I mean, I’m not post-millennialist myself, but they would say, we’re not saying that we’re near the end of the world.
We’re just saying that before the world ends, there will be the conversion of the nations. That might be 5,000 years from now. You know, I mean, so.
Actually, I heard Douglas Wilson, who’s a post-millennialist, say not too long ago on a YouTube debate, he said that it’s very possible that we’re at the, we’re in the infancy of the church.
Yes, I’ve actually, I’ve made reference to that myself on occasion, that not that I’m post-millennial, but we have no idea how long the church age will go. So we might be in the infancy of the church. It’s only been 2,000 years, maybe it’ll go 10,000.
And if it goes even 4,000. Well, when you think about it, the church started out with 120 people 2,000 years ago. Today, 2,000 years later, one third of the human population claims to be Christian.
We have no idea how many of them are really Christian, but it’s still an amazing statistic that in 2,000 years from zero to 33% of the population is confessing Christianity. Now, that being so, what might be accomplished in the next 2,000 years? I mean, if there is time ahead, no one can prove that post-millennialism is false.
But I don’t believe that the scriptures that are used to prove it necessarily have to be understood that way. I’m what’s called an optimistic amillennialist. I don’t insist that the Bible teaches the conversion of the world, but I do believe the Bible predicts that the kingdom of God will be victorious.
And that’s good for the world. How far it will go before Jesus interrupts it and comes back, I do not know. Now, you were asking about amillennial views of Romans 11 and the Jews.
Yeah. Unlike the dispensationalists, amillennialists have never felt the Bible predicts an end time regathering of the Jews to their homeland. Okay.
And therefore, I don’t believe the Bible teaches that. Unlike the post-millennialists, I don’t think that the Bible teaches that all the Jews will be converted. There may come a time when they are, but I don’t think that taught in the Bible.
I don’t see anything in the Bible that teaches that. Romans 11, 26, amillennialists have typically understood to be referring to Paul is talking about how the Old Testament promises that Israel will be saved are in fact being fulfilled in Christ. You see, there are passages in Isaiah and Jeremiah and some others that speak of God saving all Israel, and some others that talk about saving the remnant of Israel.
But Paul in Romans 9 through 11 is addressing the question, which naturally would arise in the Jewish minds, if you’re saying that Jesus is the Messiah, how can it be that the prophets said the Messiah would save all Israel? And Jesus has come and gone, and all Israel is not saved. So, you know, he can’t be the Messiah.
That’s the objection that Paul is addressing in Romans 9 through 11. And so, what he starts at is pointing out that, well, first of all, when God says Israel, he may not be thinking the same thing you’re thinking of. Paul says in Romans 9, says not all are Israel, who are of Israel.
That is, there’s two different ways to think of Israel. There’s the ethnic Israel, but then there’s the Israel that’s, you know, that’s a smaller subset. Paul goes on in Romans 9, 27, to mention that Isaiah said only the remnant of Israel would be saved.
And then Paul goes on in Romans 11, 5, and says, and even today, there is a remnant, you know, of Israel that is saved. And he’s pointing out that not, the predictions about Israel being saved really only applied to the remnant, the faithful remnant within the nation. He’s not, that the prophecies do not apply to the unbelieving in Israel.
Okay, I see.
And so then he goes to the olive tree illustration in Romans 11, 16, he starts that. And he talks about the olive tree, which is Israel, it had natural branches, the Jews were born naturally Israel. We said some of them had been broken off because of their unbelief.
Okay, so the tree once had all the Jews on it, but the ones who don’t believe in Christ have been removed. So the tree then only had left the remnant of Israel, as Paul’s been talking about, the believing branches are the ones that were not broken off. They’re still part of the tree, part of Israel.
But then he says, and Gentile branches because of their faith have been added to it. So now the tree has believing Jews and believing Gentiles, and that is Israel. And he says, in this way, all Israel shall be saved.
In other words, he’s saying, as we know. In this way. Yeah, in this way.
He says, Romans 26 begins with the word thus, which means in this way in the Greek. So by this means, by this means all Israel will be saved. He’s not saying that all ethnic Israel should be saved.
He’s already in Romans 9. He said, that’s not going to happen. He says, yeah, only a remnant is going to be saved.
He said in verse 27. So all Israel that will be saved is the Jewish remnant, the faithful remnant of the Jews and the believing Gentiles who joined them in the tree. And that’s Israel.
So in this way, by removing the unbelieving Jews and adding believing Gentiles to the believing Jews, this is how Israel is in fact saved, is to be saved. And so he’s identifying really the church, the believing Jews and Gentiles, with the Israel that is being saved.
And therefore, in that way, God did keep his promise. He never went back on his promise. And there’s no contradictions.
Exactly. And I’m not sure that I’ve never talked to a post-millennial. So dispensationalists understand Paul’s whole argument totally differently.
They think that in Romans 9, when Paul is raising the point of why Messiah has come and gone and Israel is still not saved as the prophets said Israel would be saved, dispensationalists think that what Paul is saying is, yeah, you’re right. Jesus really didn’t save Israel. It’s been postponed.
But someday, it’s going to happen in the future. All the Jewish people will be saved. And that’s how they understand Paul.
But they have to ignore everything in chapters 9 and 10 and the first, at least the first 15 verses of 11, to get that meaning out of it. Because Paul doesn’t say anything about the future in that passage.
That’s the parenthesis view. The church is kind of like a second plan, and God is going to come back and work on Israel later down the road.
Yeah, that’s the dispensational idea of the parenthesis. The church is just a parenthesis. Yeah, that would be that.
Okay. Wow, you gave me a lot to talk about. That made a lot of sense.
I appreciate it, Steve.
All right, brother. God bless. Bye-bye.
Bye now. All right.
We’re going to talk to Oscar from Mount Vernon, New York. Hi, Oscar. welcome.
Yes, sir.
Yes, sir.
Yeah.
Concerning departing from the faith, is it possible for a person to have a Christian experience, but in reality, it’s not a Christian?
I’ll just ask him.
Yeah. Well, a Christian experience, I assume what you mean by a Christian experience is the experience of being regenerated or born again. Because apart from that particular experience, being a Christian simply means believing and obeying and following Christ.
But when a person does believe and obey and follow Christ, they also, if it’s genuine, they also receive the Holy Spirit and are regenerated or born again. Now, that’s the experience. But can a Christian have that regenerating experience?
And then what was the question? Can a Christian fall away and not be a Christian anymore? Well, I believe so.
Yeah, I certainly believe that can happen. I don’t know how often it really does happen. It may not be very common because an awful lot of people who do fall away, there’s a very good chance they weren’t really Christians in the first place.
You know, we don’t know. I mean, we can’t really say. But it would be a huge presumption to say that everybody who falls away was never a Christian.
Because I’ve known lots of people who had every reason to believe they were Christians, every evidence of being Christians, and for that, that for decades. And then they fell away, you know? And so to say, well, they weren’t really Christians because they fell away later.
So those 20 or 30 years that they had every reason to believe they were Christians, just like I have reasons to believe I’m a Christian, they had the same kind of reasons to believe they were. To say, well, they proved later they never were saved. They just were deluded.
Well, then, how do I know I’m not deluded? How do I know I’m saved? I mean, how can anybody know that they’re saved?
If you can have every evidence of being a Christian for decade after decade, but you really weren’t saved, and the only way you know that you weren’t is that you fell away. Now, the Bible indicates that we are saved as we abide in Christ. But a penguin does not abide in Christ.
They’re cast forth like a branch and withered, and they are gathered and burned, as Jesus said in John 15.6 to Anderson.
So, you know, yeah, you can be a branch that has the life in you, and that would be a Christian experience, I suppose. And yet, if you don’t remain in him, you’re cast forth as a branch and withered and burned.
Thank you very much.
All right. Great talk to you, Osser. Thanks for talking.
Rudy from Vista, California. welcome to The Narrow Path.
Yes. Hi, Steve. I have a question, and then I have a quick comment.
On the Romans 11, one of the teaching ministries that I study under, the idiom to cut off, which is used extensively all over the Old Testament, when Paul says that the Jews can be grafted back in, that would mean that they were cut off. And that’s how all Israel will be saved. Because if you think of Israel as being Jesus Christ, somewhere along the way, if God cut everybody off except for Jesus Christ, perhaps when he came out of the Jordan at his baptism, and I think that it makes sense when Paul uses the rest of the terminology there.
Well, Paul actually uses the term, Paul uses it, broken off. Paul uses the terminology of being broken off, which is, I think, I believe he’s getting that, if I’m not mistaken, from Jeremiah 11, 16, about how Israel is compared with an olive tree, with some of the branches broken off. But the idea there was that a lot of the Jews who had been part of Israel were now in exile in Babylon.
They were broken off from the main group. But Paul is spiritualizing that. It’s not so much that the unbelieving Jews are just broken off the group geographically, they’ve been spiritually broken off.
And of course, Paul is talking about unbelieving Jews. He says they were broken off because of their unbelief. So these are Jews that were part of the tree.
You can’t be broken off if you weren’t originally part of it. So they were part of Israel in the natural sense. But because of the rejection of Christ, they’ve been broken off from it, and they’re no longer part of it.
And others have been having in.
So I’ll study that. You said Jeremiah 11?
Jeremiah 16, 11. I’m sorry, no, 11, 16.
Okay, thank you.
No, no, I’m honest. It’s 11, 16. Yeah.
Okay, thank you. And then here’s my question. I’ll frame it in a provocative statement, and then I’ll hang up and then listen on the radio.
Thank you. When a Christian accepts the terms of the New Covenant, he becomes a Christian and the spirit indwells him. And what I’m trying to wrap my head around is, if people start believing false doctrines, I believe at this stage of my development and understanding that for every false doctrine, it soaks up space where by the Spirit of God could have indwelled.
And I’m talking specifically about dispensationalism, and people that are hard headed and they don’t want to study, they have it all figured out. And our government is run currently by a lot of Christian and Zionists that are actually doing damage not only to the country, but to the body of Christ by misrepresenting. What say you?
Well, I’m not really sure what the question is there. It sounds like, it sounds like, OK.
OK. The question is, how can people be promoting killing Amalek, the Palestinians, and they’re so adamant that they’re right, because Israel has got to do what it’s got to do.
Yeah.
So that’s a false doctrine that is not allowing the Spirit of God to effervesce in these people’s lives. They might, I’m not questioning whether they’re saved or not, but like the parable of the soil, you know, and the sea. OK.
Let me jump in.
Let me jump in. So are you asking the people who are believing these doctrines, are they spiritually withering and probably in danger? Is that the, I think that’s what you’re saying.
I need to take a break at this point, but I will come back to it. The delegate, the question, right?
OK. Yes. OK.
I’ll come back to that after our break. I appreciate it. All right.
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welcome back to The Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg, and we’re live for another half hour taking your calls. And if you’d like to call in with a question or disagreement with the host about the Bible or anything like that, feel free to give me a call.
There’s one line open at the moment. It’s 844-484-5737.
It looks like that line just lit up. Okay, before the break, Rudy from Vista Caldin was, he was talking about, I think, the spiritual danger that he believes Christians face in embracing Zionism. Now, Zionism, of course, is the doctrine that the Jews should live in their ancient homeland, in Israel.
Of course, until World War II, it was pretty well accepted for thousands of years, couple thousand years, that Israel didn’t have a homeland. They were scattered throughout Gentile nations, and that’s pretty much where they were accustomed to be, where they belonged. But after World War II, well, actually, frankly, the Zionist movement began in the late 1800s, but it really took off and really succeeded in causing the ancient land of Israel to be given back to the Jews, and the idea that they should go back to the homeland, that’s Zionism, and that we should support them doing so.
That’s what Zionism means. Now, obviously, if you listen to a lot of Christian preachers radio, you get the impression that the Bible does teach that Israel should go back to their land, and yet that’s a relatively new doctrine, both politically and biblically, church-wise. I mean, that was not the view of the church throughout most of history, and I don’t believe the Bible specifically teaches it.
By the way, I’m not opposed to the nation of Israel existing. I’m not opposed to the idea that Jews have a place, a homeland in itself. That in itself is not the least bit objectionable to me.
The problem is, of course, how is this affected? How does it impact the people who already lived there the last 1300 years, the Palestinians? And is this giving of the land to Israel, is this at the expense of unjustly taking it from people who had no reason to be removed from it or brought under subjection by it?
This is the problem. It’s not an anti-Semitic thing. It’s not wishing ill on the Jewish people or begrudging them having a home.
The real issue is, at what cost and who suffers for it? I mean, if the Jews are given somebody else’s land, what do we do with the people whose land they were given? These people still are there.
So that’s the complexity of it that many Christians don’t know much about. Now, Rudy was asking, you know, do you think that people’s spiritual lives can be compromised, maybe diminished, maybe even eventually lose their salvation? I think is something that he didn’t, he actually didn’t say that outright.
But I mean, the question is, by taking this view of Zionism, can this be harmful to your spiritual health? In my opinion, it can be, although probably it by itself is not. If this thing is hurting you spiritually, it’s probably not the only thing that is.
It’s probably one of the symptoms that there’s something not quite focused correctly in your Christian life. You see, the focus of Christianity is Christ. But many Christians or people who are called Christians have re-shifted their focus to Israel.
And frankly, there are some pastors and some religious movements that encourage this. I mean, I’ve read many evangelical preachers say, you know, we need to keep our eyes on Israel. They’ve said Israel is the center of concern.
They say that you need to keep your eyes on Israel because all of prophecy is about Israel. Well, actually, the Bible says all of prophecy is actually about Jesus and that our focus should be on Jesus. So this is what I call a replacement theology.
Now, they would say I have a replacement theology because I’m not a Zionist. But actually, I think when Christians say, okay, we’ve been thinking about Jesus for all these thousand years, let’s think about Israel now for the rest of the time. That’s replacing Christ as the focus with Israel.
And that’s, is that spiritually unhealthy? Of course, any distraction from Christ for Christians, any obsession with something other than Jesus himself, is spiritually unhealthy. No question about that.
Now, Rudy mentioned, he’d heard someone say something like, the Amalekites are the Palestinians, and just like God told Joshua to wipe out the Amalekites, or told Saul to wipe out the Amalekites, actually, that Israel should wipe out the Palestinians. You know, certainly that view is not only based on error, but it’s absolutely not a Christian position. Christians are actually not in favor of genocide.
We’re not in favor of the Jews being wiped out. We’re not in favor of the Kenyans being wiped out. We’re not in favor of the Kurds being wiped out, or the Uyghurs, or we’re not in favor of Palestinians being wiped out.
Christians are not genocidal. Christians want there to be peace and would like for everyone to treat everybody else justly because that’s what God wants. So, you know, Christians are now saying, well, those Palestinians, they’re just like the Amalekites, got to wipe them out.
First of all, there’s no reason in the world to believe the Palestinians have any relationship to the Amalekites or to the Canaanites. As far as we can tell, they may be related to Ishmael, who is the son of Abraham. So they’re certainly not Canaanites.
But the thing is, we’re not told that the Jews have authorization to wipe out anybody today. That was the old covenant when they were taking the land, when it was theirs, when it was given to them. Now, God took it from them.
The Bible is very clear about taking it from them because of their rejection of Christ. Now, some people, I mean, everybody knows that God took it from them, but some people think he’s given it back to them now. Though why he should is never really made biblically convincing.
And I’d love to talk to anybody who’d like to show me in the Bible, you know, that this is something we should understand, that God is giving them back the land now. But if he is, there’s no corresponding mandate on their part to wipe out the existing inhabitants. And especially since among those existing inhabitants, the Palestinians, there’s a much higher percentage of them that are Christians.
Yeah, a lot of people think of them all only as Muslims. No, there’s a higher percentage of Palestinians who are Christians than there are Israelis who are Christians. A much higher percentage of Palestinians are Christians than the number of Israelis that are Christians.
So, if we’re in favor of Israel annihilating our Christian brothers and sisters, there definitely is something wrong with our theology and probably our spiritual lives. Now, I think the one issue that Christians have always been required by God to have, and this is to the end of the world the same, is Christ. Promotion of Christ and his kingdom, not taking sides in ethnic disputes, because we’re on the sides of all ethnic groups.
So, yeah, I mean, it is definitely a slide in one’s spiritual life, if they get wrapped up in this kind of concerns. Because our concern is Christ. Christ is everything.
Christ is all in all. Israel is not. The Palestinians are not.
But, and Christians should never be in favor of wiping out Israelites or Palestinians, but should be only in favor of, as much as possible, having peace and justice and the opportunity to convert these people to Christ. All right. Thank you for your call.
Let’s talk to Robert from Sacramento next. Hi, Robert. welcome to The Narrow Path.
Hello, Steve.
How are you doing?
Fine.
Thanks.
I have a question about Hebrews 10, 26-31. It talks about, there’s no more argument, no more sacrifice for those who are trampled under the foot of the blood of Jesus Christ. Can you please explain to me your understanding of that verse from 26-31?
Sure. The difficult verses for most people are verses 26 and 27, but you’re right. The idea is carried out through verse 31.
Verse 26 in particular is the troublesome verse for many people. It says, for if we sin willfully after we’ve received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sin. Now, most Christians, because they know that we are saved through the sacrifice for sin that Jesus offered, it sounds alarming when it says, well, a certain situation could arise where there remains no sacrifice for sin.
And if they’re thinking that this has to do with Christ’s sacrifice for sin, then that’s very alarming because it means that, you mean, Jesus’ sacrifice for sin can not exist anymore? Of course, that’s not a possibility. That’s not what it’s saying.
Now, under what conditions do they say there remains no sacrifice for sin? Well, he said, if we sin willfully after we’ve received the knowledge of the truth. Well, the knowledge of the truth, of course, is a reference to the gospel about Christ’s lordship, Christ’s kingship, his kingdom.
And after we’ve received that knowledge, and assuming we’ve embraced it, if we go back to a life of sinning and willfully doing so, in other words, apostatizing from Christ, if we do that, well, there remains no sacrifice for sin. Now, he’s not saying the sacrifice of Christ doesn’t remain, although I would say my own understanding is any effects of his sacrifice cease to be of any good to you if you apostatize, if you abandon Christ, you know, to go somewhere else from him, I don’t think you can take with you the benefits of his sacrifice when you leave him. Those are only found in him.
And as you abide in him, you enjoy them. If you don’t abide in him, you forsake them. You know, you don’t have them anymore.
Now, but this particular case is talking about people abandoning Christ to go back to Judaism, because that’s the whole setting of the whole Book of Hebrews. The Book of Hebrews is written to Jewish Christian people who are tempted to and some already have, it says in verse 26, not verse 26, but verse 25, some already had forsaken Christ and the assembly of his people. Why?
Because these Jewish people who became Christians were persecuted for it by their Jewish friends. And therefore, some of them were strongly tempted to say, well, hey, I don’t need this. I’ll just go back to being Jewish.
After all, God gave us a temple and animal sacrifices and so forth. And those are still going on in Jerusalem. Not now, of course, as you and I are speaking, but back when this was written, there is still the temple sacrifices going on.
So a person who grew up in Judaism had counted on these temple sacrifices, but now they had become Christians, and they were counting on Christ instead. But the writer is saying if you go back to living in sin, that is, of course, abandoning Christ because you can’t live in sin without abandoning Christ. If you go back to living in sin and then counting on the old temple system as you did when you were younger, well, guess what?
There remains no sacrifice for sin there. In other words, he’s saying you’re going back to something that doesn’t exist in the temple system. God doesn’t acknowledge any sacrifice for sin there.
And therefore, if you leave Christ, there remains no option. There’s no alternative sacrifice for sin in the temple. Now, how do I know that he means it that way?
Well, because I’ve read the chapter. If you go back a few verses, he quotes Jeremiah saying that in the New Covenant, in verse 17, he says, their sins and lawless deeds, God says, I will remember them no more. And then the writer of Hebrews makes this comment.
If God is going to remember their sins no more, he says, now where there’s remission of these, as of sins, there is no longer an offering for sin. And the word offering means a sacrifice. What he’s saying is, if God doesn’t remember our sins anymore, there’s no validity in the ongoing practices of the temple and the sacrifices.
There is no more sacrifice for sins. He means in the temple. It’s very obvious.
Just read the chapter. I mean, he’s talking about the abolition of the temple system and the sacrifices there. And especially in the beginning of the chapter, the special sacrifices on the day of Atonement, Yom Kippur.
Now, the point here is he’s saying, because of the New Covenant, because God has taken away our sins, there’s no more sacrifice for sins. There’s no more temple sacrifices that God would observe. They’re defunct.
They’re kaput. And so that’s in verse 18. And so it’s eight verses later.
He says, you know, if you’re going to go back, you’re going to find there’s no sacrifice for sin remaining there. In the temple, there is none. And his readers were thinking about leaving Christ to take the heat off from the persecution they were receiving from their Jewish friends and relatives, and saying, well, why don’t we just go back to what we did before we were Christians?
Yeah, we lived in sin. No one can avoid that. But at least we had the sacrifice in the temple.
Let’s just go back to that. We won’t be persecuted by our friends for that. And he’s saying that, well, maybe not by your friends, but you got, there’s no sacrifice there.
God doesn’t acknowledge it, is what he’s saying. So he’s not saying that, you know, something you do is going to evaporate the sacrifice of Christ. When he says there’s no sacrifice, he means there’s no alternative.
He’s describing someone leaving Christ, going back to living in sin, after becoming a Christian or going back. And he’s saying, well, you must be going back to the alternative sacrifices in the temple. They don’t exist.
I mean, they did exist in the sense that Jews were still doing it. But he’s saying as far as God’s concerned, they don’t because the new covenant has come and rendered all those sacrifices obsolete. So don’t abandon Christ because there’s really no other options out there.
That’s what he’s saying.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you for your call. Roberto from Kansas City, Missouri. Hi, welcome to The Narrow Path.
Thanks for calling.
Yes. Hello, Steve Gregg. Would you please be so kind as to summarize the three theologies, the Kingdom Now, the New Apostolic Reformation, and Dominion Theology, please.
And just so you know, you and Dr. Michael Heiser are my wife and my favorite biblical teachers. I will take your summaries off the air. Thank you.
All right. Thank you for your call. Okay.
Well, you mentioned three things. Two of them I consider to be the same as each other. Well, maybe not, but usually when people say Kingdom Now, very often they’re talking about Dominion Theology or what’s called Christian Reconstructionism.
Now, Kingdom Now wouldn’t have to refer to that, but I think they usually use it that way. Kingdom Now would be suggesting that Christ’s Kingdom exists now. Now, this is in contrast to Dispensationism, and those who criticize the Kingdom Now Theology usually are Dispensationists, because they believe Christ’s Kingdom is not now.
They believe that he offered his kingdom when he was here, it was rejected by the Jews, and therefore, he withdrew it and postponed it, and the kingdom will not be established until the millennial reign when Jesus comes back. So, but all millennialism and post-millennialism, frankly, historic Christianity, always have taught, as the Bible does, that Christ did establish his kingdom. There’s not a hint in the Bible that it was ever postponed, nor that God was dependent on the Jews accepting it in order for him to accomplish it.
When Jesus reached the end of his life and prayed to the father in John 17, he said, I have finished the work you gave me to do. There’s no mention there of it being postponed or thwarted by the Jewish unbelief. I mean, he was going to die the next day after praying this prayer, but he announced to his father, mission accomplished, I’ve finished the work.
And what was the work he was sent to do? Well, to establish the kingdom. So the Bible doesn’t ever give any indication the kingdom has been postponed, and therefore, from the time of Christ to the present and beyond is the kingdom.
Now, in other words, it shouldn’t be considered controversial to say, I believe in the kingdom now. I believe in the kingdom ever since Jesus was here and until eternity because it’s an eternal kingdom. But usually kingdom now is a term that people have used, especially as a pejorative of Christian reconstructionism, which is a blending of post-millennialism, which teaches that the world will be converted before Christ comes back.
And dominion theology or what’s called theonomy, the idea being that in addition to the world being converted, you know, or as a consequence of it, everything is going to be Christianized. So the government will be Christianized, education will be Christianized, entertainment will be Christianized. I mean, we’ll have all these things still in the world, but they’ll all be sanctified by Christianity.
Now dominion theology, therefore, teaches that when the world is converted, obviously the politicians will also be converted. The legislators will be converted. As they make laws, they’ll make laws that are agreeable with Christianity.
And therefore the church will have fulfilled its mission that God gave to Adam and Eve to take dominion over the world. Now, this emphasis on these aspects is never really found in the Bible. And therefore, to what degree this may or may not ever happen is speculative.
I mean, it could be that such a thing would happen, but that certainly is not in my, that’s not my focus. And I don’t see, I’m not sure that it will happen that way. But post-millennialists are very optimistic about the gospel having these, making these victories, and that the gospel of Christ, the kingdom of Christ, the ways of Christ would have dominion, not only politically, but including politically, but throughout the whole world in all ways, which includes politics.
And so sometimes those who hold this view, and again, they’re called Christian reconstructionists more properly, they sometimes advocate, you know, making Christian laws now. Now, I believe that Christians, and to the extent they involved in politics at all, should be advocating laws that are consistent with Christianity. But by that, I mean laws that are good and wholesome and just, righteous laws.
These are not specifically Christian laws because even non-Christian, the better societies also aim at justice and freedom and things like that, I would say. So it’s not just Christianity, but simply righteousness and goodness and justice that we should aim at in the legal system. We shouldn’t seek, for example, to make laws imposing Christianity per se on people saying, okay, everyone has to go to church, everyone has to give a tithe to the church, everyone needs to get baptized.
I mean, that would be making laws that are specifically Christian, and I wouldn’t believe in that at all. So I do believe that laws should be made that are just, for example, murdering unborn infants should be illegal, just like murdering anybody else should be illegal. That’s not specifically Christian, that’s just human.
That’s humanists should be in favor of that too. Everyone knows, I mean, except those who are deceiving themselves, that an infant in the womb is a human infant, and it’s alive, it’s growing. If it’s not alive, why is it growing?
If it’s not a human, what species is it? It’s a human life, and it’s alive, growing. And everyone knows that murder is the snuffing of an innocent human life.
So abortion is obviously murder. By any definition, it’s not by prejudice set against it. So to argue that we should have laws against abortion is just the same thing as we should have laws against murder and theft and all other horrible crimes against people.
But that’s not a specifically Christian law. But theonomists would like to have Christian laws made. And so that’s them.
Now, you ask about the NAR, the New Apostolic Reformation. They teach a kingdom now kind of thing too, but they’ve got to, I think they have a different emphasis. So they probably, they may very well have a dominionist emphasis too.
The main emphasis I know that they have is on, you know, doing miraculous things. They believe, for example, when we pray, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. They say, well, there’s no cancer in heaven, so there shouldn’t be a cancer here.
So we should go on healing all cancer miraculously. You know, we should not allow any sickness or poverty or bad stuff of any kind. My impression is that the NAR emphasizes doing these things supernaturally rather than through the law and legislation.
But I’m not that familiar with all that they teach. They might recommend doing it through legislation, too. Anyway, these things do have, these are overlapping ideas, but they’re not synonymous.
Although Dominion theology and Kingdom Now theology are sometimes interchangeable terms for what’s usually called Christian Reconstructionism. There’s different names for this kind of thing. I hope you’re not more confused after I answered your questions anywhere before.
But it’s, it’s hard to get through all that in like the format we have here to just speak for a few minutes and try to cover that stuff. Junior from Maryland. welcome.
Junior. Hey. I’m sorry, Junior, you’ll have to call back sometime when you’re going to be on the phone there.
Jacob from tacoma, Washington. welcome.
Hi, Steve. I have a couple of things, some statements and some points.
No statements, just points. We’ve only got, we’ve only got like three minutes, so let’s stick with the questions.
Got it. I was told that I’m of Israel this last week, and I actually believe myself to be a Gentile. But what you were saying today sounds pretty interesting.
Maybe there’s a way that we can be connected to Israel. I know the New Covenant is for Israel. I used to be a New Covenant believer.
I’ve been a Torah observant, an Israelite. But the one thing that you said, you were talking about the olive tree. And I was wondering if the rich root of the olive tree was something different than Israel, like with the new man not being Israel.
Well, I’m not really sure what that question means, but the olive tree is a picture of an organism, and its various parts, just like the vine is. And just like the body of Christ is, these are illustrations of organisms, a human body, a plant, various kinds of plants, a vine or an olive tree. These are illustrations used to point out something, that there’s a common life that is shared by all who are part of that organism.
The organism collectively is Christ, or the body of Christ. Christ is the vine, the whole plant. He’s the whole olive tree.
But being part of him, being part of his body, being a branch on the vine, being a branch on the olive tree, has to do with our, of course, being joined to him and abiding in him through faith, being his disciples. So actually the picture of one new man, which is also in Ephesians 2.15, the same as the body of Christ, is the new man. You know, that is an overlapping illustration with the olive tree.
And the idea is that just like a human body is made of individual parts, yet they all share the same identity in life. We all share the identity of Christ in him, although we are like branches on a vine also. I mean, a branch can be disconnected, can be broken off or cut off.
Same thing with a branch on an olive tree. Same thing with a limb of a body. I mean, if through an accident, one of your arms gets removed from your body by an injury, that arm is no longer you.
It once was, but it’s not anymore. And the life of you is no longer in it. So these are what these illustrations are talking about.
I’m not really sure where you were going with that song, and we ran out of time, I’m sorry to say, to go any further with it. I want to remind our listeners that I’ll be in the next couple of months in Seattle and in Nashville and in Sacramento and in Arkansas, all of these in the next few months. The details about those things are at our website, thenarrowpath.com, under the tab that says Announcements.
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Have a good weekend.