What’s the story behind dispensationalism? How did it shape the modern state of Israel? And what lessons can we learn from the Book of Job and the struggles of anxiety? Steve Gregg answers listener calls and offers biblical insights in this episode of The Narrow Path, weaving together theological history, scriptural interpretation, and personal growth.
00:18:47 Discussing Anxiety in the Christian Context
SPEAKER 1 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 03 :
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 to take your calls. If you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith, we welcome you to join us in this hour and give us a call and we can talk to you about those things. The number to call is 844- 484-5737. That’s 844-484-5737. And any of you who happen to be in the Temecula area or Southern California area, there’s a gathering at a man’s house that he’s a brother who He comes to some of our meetings, and I come to some of his. And he has me speaking at his house this Saturday morning in Temecula. And the address is posted at our website, thenarrowpath.com, under announcements. And if you’re interested, that’s 8 o’clock. This Saturday, he wants me to come and talk about the Jesus Revolution, the Jesus Movement, and so I will. I’d love to talk about that. I was there, and it’s certainly something I’d love to remember. Anyway, that’s happening this Saturday. If you’re in the area and want to join us, go to thenarrowpath.com, look under Announcements, and you’ll find for this Saturday – the announcement and the description of where that’s going to be. All right, let’s go to the phones and talk to Timothy from Ontario, California, who hasn’t called us for quite a while. Hi, Timothy. Good to hear from you again.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, thanks, Steve, for taking my call. That meeting on Saturday morning, does that bring your own cereal? No, he cooks something there. He cooks up stuff.
SPEAKER 03 :
It’s a pretty good group of men, at least when I visited there before. Yeah.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, I wish I could make it, but unfortunately I won’t be able to. But my question is, often we hear a lot of talk about dispensationalism and its theology, but we never really talk about or hear about the founder of it. And I was wondering what information you could give me about the founder, John Nelson Darby.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, well, Darby was an Anglican. He was Irish in the early 1800s. He was a Bible student, scholar. He wrote a lot of theological works. He made his own translation of the Bible into English, in addition to the King James, which already was in use. You can still, many Bible books. websites where you can read different versions of Bobby. You can find the Darby version there. That’s his. He did that. He is most famous for inventing the dispensational position. Now, there are people, dispensationalists usually, who say he didn’t originate it. They say he was just combining things that other Christians had held throughout the centuries together. And that’s in one sense true. There are a few things that Darby taught which became part of his system, which a very small minority of Christians at different times had held something like it. Darby, of course, is the one who came up with the idea that the nation of Israel, even after they reject Christ, still are God’s chosen people. and that God still has some promises to fulfill that God made to Abraham, which he has not yet fulfilled to the nation of Israel, and that those will be fulfilled in the last days. Now, Darby did come up with that, and yet you’ll find some of the Puritans a few centuries before him did believe that Israel would come back to their land at some point, but they didn’t necessarily say that that’s because there were unfulfilled promises that God owed them. In fact, I don’t believe they believed that. I don’t think anyone believed that before Darby. They just believed it was part of God’s judgment on Israel that they were going to come back and the Antichrist. In fact, the Puritans said that the Antichrist, well, I would say some church fathers actually said the Antichrist will draw the Jews back into their land. They didn’t see it as God fulfilling some promise, but something that was going to be very bad for Israel. But Darby is the one who said, no, Israel is going to be brought back by God to their land. And that’s because God has made promises to Abraham that have not been fulfilled yet. And so he owes them some fulfillment of his promises. So that’s the biggest innovation that Darby came up with. And, of course, dispensationalism is accepted by possibly the majority of evangelicals in America today. But this came up in 1830. He also came up with the pre-tribulation rapture. Now, again, dispensationalists will say, no, there were people who taught rapture before Darby. Well, there were a few. There were a few people who seemed to have thought that there would be a rapture maybe three and a half years before the second coming of Christ. These were definitely in the minority. It was not a majority view. Darby changed it a bit and said, no, there’s going to be a rapture that’s going to be before the tribulation, which he identified with the 70th week of Daniel and so forth. So he said it’s going to be seven years before Christ comes back. So Darby changed. did pick up some ideas that had some analog in some minority groups that had existed before him. But he put it together into the system, which is now called dispensationalism, and especially the idea that Israel are still God’s chosen people, even though they reject the Messiah. That’s Darby. That’s Darby all over. And that’s, of course, what a great number of Protestant denominations as well as non-denominational churches teach today. In fact, it’s probable that the majority of megachurches today hold that view either by default or very actively.
SPEAKER 04 :
Do you think dispensationalists or the view of dispensationalism had a direct effect in somehow causing Israel to become a nation?
SPEAKER 03 :
Absolutely. Even Israeli historians know that. I’ve seen more than one Israeli historian writing the history of modern Israel saying this would never have happened if it wasn’t for the dispensational movement in American evangelicalism. We know that a man named William Blackstone wrote a dispensational book back in the late 1800s, called Jesus is Coming. And it was distributed to, I think, most pastors in the United States. It was hugely… It was like, if you’ve heard of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, which sold 40 million copies or something like that and changed the whole… emphasis of the evangelical church to the immediate second coming of Christ, Blackstone’s Jesus is coming, he’s like the Hal Lindsey of the late 19th century. And so he was a huge influence on American evangelicalism. And he also made what he called a memorial memorial. And each time there’s a new president of the United States, he presented a memorial to the president, which I’m not sure why he called it a memorial, but I just call it a document, signed by some of America’s most important, you know, entrepreneurs, bankers, politicians, religious leaders, very, very, very influential people. rich Americans, and not always rich, but just influential. And this document was actually requesting that the president of the United States would support the creation of an Israeli or Jewish state in the Middle East. And this was done for several presidents before Truman. Prior to Truman. Prior to Truman, yeah. And most of these presidents, they didn’t mock it or anything like that, but they just didn’t move on it. But Truman did. And what happened was, after World War II, because of the information of the Holocaust reaching the world, and everyone being aghast that the Jews had been so mistreated in Germany and so forth, there was a renewed interest in what was already called the Zionist movement. The Zionist movement… had begun in the 1890s in Europe. A guy named Theodor Herzl had started it. He was not a religious Jew. He’s Jewish, but he was not observant. For example, his son was not circumcised, and he himself was not observant. But he started the movement, and it became somewhat popular among some Jewish people in Europe. But it never really took off until after World War II when tremendous sentiments of the world, especially the United States, were on the side of Israel because of what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust. And so, of course, Truman was influenced by that pressure. And so he, you know, through the influence of Blackstone and others, he decided that he was going to support the nation of Israel being founded. in the Middle East, and this was a decision made by the United Nations, and apparently it looked as if the United Nations didn’t have enough votes to support it until Truman made some phone calls to various smaller nations that benefit from the United States and saying if you don’t vote for this, then we’re going to diminish or withdraw our support for your nations. So there got to be enough votes in the United Nations to agree to it. And so that’s, you know, Truman was very strongly, perhaps not only, but very strongly influenced by American dispensationalism. Now, there’s more to it than that. And I do have a lecture at a website called The Modern State of Israel that goes into that history in more detail. But, yeah, dispensationalism, even Israeli historians will strongly acknowledge, easily acknowledge that dispensationalism helped create the state of Israel.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s very interesting. Thank you for your information, Steve. I really appreciate it. All right, Timothy.
SPEAKER 03 :
Good talking to you.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay. Bye-bye.
SPEAKER 03 :
Bye now. All right. Benjamin in Greenville, Ohio. Welcome to The Narrow Path.
SPEAKER 02 :
Hello, brother. Hi. So I just finished reading the book of Job. I don’t know if I’m doing what my dad used to call putting emphasis on the wrong syllable. Yeah. But as I read… Job’s three friends came, and I feel like they were offering him correction through the reading, and then I get right to the end, and the Lord kind of rebukes the same friends. I feel like I’m missing something.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, the friends were hoping to bring correction. They were hoping to bring help to Job. In fact, they’re sometimes called Job’s comforters, though they didn’t bring him any comfort at all. All they brought was really accusation. Now, at the end, as you say, God rebuked them because he says they did not speak rightly of the Lord as Job did. Now, not everything Job said was right either. Job said some things that were kind of immoderate and angry, and his friends were getting angry at him. Here’s what was going on. Job had been a successful, rich guy, the greatest man of the Middle East at the time. And then all these trials came upon him. He lost his wealth. He lost his health. He lost his family. And so his friends came to visit him to try to comfort him in his grief. But they held a theology which Job himself also says he had held also previously. And that is that if you’re a good man, you’ll prosper. And God will give you good circumstances. But if you are bad, God will bring harsh circumstances on you. Now, this is a view that is probably held by default by many religious people, even though it’s not scripturally true. But, I mean, it’s kind of a common sense belief unless you have divine revelation putting a finer point on it. So they felt like, okay, God had been happy with Job when he was all rich, but now that all these disasters came, God must be angry at him. Therefore, even though Job did not have any obvious sins in his life, he must have had some secret sins, and they were calling upon him to admit it. They’re calling him to repent. They’re calling him to do things which a Christian might even call an unbeliever to do. The trouble is Job wasn’t an unbeliever and he wasn’t guilty of anything. God himself had told Satan that Job wasn’t guilty of anything. He said that he had afflicted him without cause, it says in chapter 2 of Job. And of course, both in chapter 1 and 2 of Job, God says to Satan that Job was a man who was blameless and did righteousness and avoided evil. So God’s recommendation of Job was very high, but You know, it was a mystery to everybody why a good man would suffer such disasters if their theology was correct. Now, the point is their theology was not correct. It might be generally correct or often correct. It is often the case that God brings blessing on righteous people and disaster on bad people. But we know also, as the psalmists often mention, God seems to prosper the wicked sometimes, while the righteous are often poor and downtrodden. So, in other words, their theology was true, except when it isn’t true. Their theology was, they universalized a principle that might be true some of the time, but it’s definitely not true all of the time. Now, unfortunately for them, it wasn’t true in this case. Job was not being punished for anything wrong he had done. But their theology was inflexible. And Job was telling them, he said, I used to think that way, too, until this happened. He said, I guarantee you, I haven’t done anything. I don’t have any secret sins. I haven’t done any criminal acts. I’ve been faithful to God. And they were angry that he kept saying that because their theology said, no, we can see with our own eyes that you’ve suffered disaster, which means disaster. our theology being true, that you must have done something to deserve it. And they would not let go of that theology. And Job wouldn’t let go of his. I mean, he said, I used to think that way, but I know better now. And so this is where they spoke wrongly of God. They thought they were speaking rightly of God. But all they ended up doing is accusing an innocent man because their theology was wrong. I think of this sometimes when I think of certain theologies around today. People, for example, there’s one school of theology in some churches that if you have enough faith, you’ll never get sick. If you have enough faith, you’ll never be poor. Now, if you do get sick and poor and you don’t get over it, then the assumption is you don’t have enough faith. It’s your fault. So you end up accusing the victim. instead of having compassion, realizing, well, your theology may not always be right. At least at that point, theology may not. Sometimes there are some Calvinists, because of their doctrine of total depravity, they’ll say, well, everyone who’s not regenerated, everyone who’s not a Christian, is a hater of God, and the thoughts and intentions of their hearts are only evil continually. Well, that’s not true of everybody, and the Bible doesn’t say it’s true of everybody. So, you know, but their theology tells them that, and then you’re going to see people who aren’t Christians who aren’t that way, and you’re going to think badly of them that way, and that’s what bad theology does to relationships. It makes you assume that your theology is correct, enough to condemn people who may, in fact, be innocent. You know, the Pharisees were that way, but when they saw Jesus’ disciples picking grain on the Sabbath, technically. That was a violation of the Sabbath. They’re not supposed to work. They were harvesting on the Sabbath. And Jesus rebuked the Pharisees, said, if you had known what this means, and he quoted Hosea 6.6, I will have mercy and not sacrifice. He said, you would not have condemned the guiltless. So the theology of the Pharisees condemned people who were not guilty of anything. Job’s friends did the same thing. Now, they thought they were doing right. I imagine the Pharisees probably thought they were doing right, too. I imagine everyone who’s got bad theology thinks they have good theology. But, you know, this was the issue. Job’s friends didn’t have good theology. What they said was true much of the time, but they weren’t allowing that there are other kinds of circumstances. God isn’t always, he’s not like a slot machine or a vending machine where you put a you know, the money in and then you push the buttons and the product comes out, God has his plans. And he has different plans for different people. And sometimes good people suffer in God’s plan because there’s something good he hopes to bring from it. But their theology, now we can’t blame them much because they didn’t have a Bible. Not one book of the Bible had been written when Job lived. It’s almost certain that Job was the earliest book of the Bible written. So, you know, we can’t really blame these guys for not knowing any better. They’re just kind of speculative theologians without any scripture, without any revelation from God. But when Christians do that with a Bible available, then we’ve got much more to be blamed for.
SPEAKER 02 :
Sure. All right. Great, brother. I appreciate the help out there.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, Benjamin. Good talking to you. Thanks for joining us. Cheryl from Lincoln, California. Welcome.
SPEAKER 01 :
Hi, Steve. Thank you. I have a question for you. I need some more clarification from you about I’ve heard you say on the radio program or topical lectures that anxiety is a sin. And I want to push back on that just a little bit, having dealt with anxiety since childhood. I’m now 67. Is it is it Actually, that’s plain and clear, or is it more like the way I’m addressing it in my life now with God is I have this tendency, and I bring it to the Lord, and I work through it with Him. Like you were saying, you think of Jesus when we’re told to think of something that is true, noble, right, and all those things. You think of Jesus because He’s all those things. And so is it more about what we do with it that becomes a sin?
SPEAKER 03 :
Of course.
SPEAKER 01 :
Or is just having anxiety a sin?
SPEAKER 03 :
Anxiety is just a species of fear. And there’s all kinds of fear. There’s intimidation. There’s anxiety. There’s, you know, terror. There’s all kinds of fears. And fear is a temptation, I believe. I believe fear is itself a good thing in some cases. For example, if you are thinking about crossing the street, but you can see that the traffic’s going very fast and there’s not a break in the traffic, and so you decide not to do it because you could probably get killed, then your fear of getting killed by cars is a good thing. It keeps you from doing stupid things. And, of course, animals have fear of the same kind. Basically, they’re afraid of predators and things. They’re afraid of a man shooting at them and things like that. So, I mean, fear is something that can motivate people to be wise, and to lack that kind of fear is to just be stupid. Now, on the other hand, fear, it’s an emotional response. It’s a visceral response to certain stimuli. You don’t choose whether you have fear or not, but you have to choose what you will do with the fear. For example, if you see that somebody is drowning, out in the ocean, and there’s sharks out there, and you know how to save people, but you’re a little afraid of the sharks, now what do you do? Well, probably, if you’re in most circumstances a Christian, would go out to save that person and take the risk, even though they have fear. And they should have fear. It’s a dangerous situation. But having fear doesn’t mean you’re going to let fear dominate your choices. You need to follow your convictions and what’s right and wrong, rather than your emotion. Fear simply tempts you.
What’s the story behind dispensationalism? How did it shape the modern state of Israel? And what lessons can we learn from the Book of Job and the struggles of anxiety? Steve Gregg answers listener calls and offers biblical insights in this episode of The Narrow Path, weaving together theological history, scriptural interpretation, and personal growth.
