In this thought-provoking episode, Steve Gregg explores hot topics such as replacement theology and the fulfillment of prophecy. Delve into the debate on whether the church replaced Israel or is a continuation of it in God’s divine plan. Learn about the complexities of substitutionary atonement explained in simple terms worthy of a six-year-old’s grasp, yet profound enough to impact believers of all ages.
SPEAKER 1 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 02 :
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 so that we can talk in real time by telephone. If you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith or you have some problem with something that you’ve heard this host affirm, feel free to call in. We’ll talk about those things. The number to call is 844- 484-5737. We have a few lines open. Maybe about half of our lines are open, and so you can give me a call right now, and you’ll get through. 844-484-5737. Our first caller today is Larry Collin from Dallas, Texas. Hi, Larry. Welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.
SPEAKER 06 :
Thank you for having me, Steve. God bless you as always. I called you last week and talked about the controversy about Peter being the rock or Jesus being the rock of the church. Because I’ve been discussing with somebody at a home study group these different deep theological topics. Another, I don’t want to say agreement, but anyways, another a conversation about how I believe that Jesus the Christ was in pre-incarnate form like that. He was actually in Bendigo. We’re throwing the furnace that says the Son of God was there to rescue them, but that was Jesus. And then also, like when Jesus was talking to Pharisees, he said that, I am that I am. They got so angry because he was talking about when he talked to Moses.
SPEAKER 02 :
He said before Abraham was, I am. Yeah. So what would your question be?
SPEAKER 06 :
My question is, am I right on this or not? Because this other person says that in every circumstance, from the examples I’ve given you, then also like 1 Corinthians 10, 1 through 4, where it talks about Jesus is the rock that followed them. when they were in the desert for Israel, he says that’s all God the Father, and that Jesus, and also like, maybe also like Melchizedek, the priest, he says that’s all God the Father, that’s nothing to do with Jesus the Christ. And I disagree.
SPEAKER 02 :
And what is his position? Is he the one you were arguing about, Peter, or a different person now?
SPEAKER 05 :
No, it’s the same person. It’s the same person.
SPEAKER 02 :
So I would have thought, because of talking about Peter the way he was, I would have thought he was a Roman Catholic. But from the statements you’re now making, it doesn’t sound like he is. No, he isn’t. So he’s just kind of casting around for things to argue about. Well, I mean, he can believe that Jesus did not personally appear in the Old Testament, but I think he’s mistaken. One reason I think it is because… that Jesus said, Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it. And the Pharisees said, you’re not yet 50 years old. When did you see Abraham? So they understood his words to have the meaning that he saw Abraham. And he did not say, wait, that’s not what I meant. No, he said, well, I’ll tell you how I saw him. Before Abraham was, I am. So he does indicate that Abraham and himself saw. had been in contact with each other. Now, we have at least one case, indisputable, where God appeared in a human form to Abraham, and that is in Genesis 18, 1, where God appeared and he was in a human form. Now, it does say Yahweh appeared to him, God, but the Trinitarian doctrine is that Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the Father are all And now, you know, I think that this man and maybe even most Christians may be making too great a distinction between the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, or they may not be making great enough a distinction. There’s no real guide to this in the Bible is to know exactly how distinct are they. You know, we know that Jesus emphasized when he was on earth that he was distinct from his father. And, of course, he’s spoken of distinctly from his father in the New Testament a fair amount of times where it talks about, you know, God and our Lord Jesus Christ, you know, mentioned separately. So we know there is a distinction between the father and the son, and the Trinity has always acknowledged that. But there’s also some identity between them. And the degree of distinction, on the one hand, from the degree of identity between them is never explained in Scripture. And that’s where I think theologians get in over their head. But I could believe that since Jesus, prior to his incarnation, according to John 1.1, Jesus was the Word. Now, the Word is spoken of with personal pronouns, as if it’s a he. And when the word becomes flesh, it is a he. It’s Jesus becomes flesh and dwelt among us. Now, but before he came to earth as a man, is it possible that the word was more identified with God and less separate from him than when he took on human form? I don’t know. is it possible that the word logos, which is translated word, simply means the expression of God’s mind, which is what our words are. Our words, they express our thoughts. And that before he created the world, God had his self-expression of his thoughts. And this self-expression eventually found its way among us as a human being, before which it was not a human being. But if the word could become flesh and dwell among us in Jesus, then there’s certainly no reason to doubt that he could take on a human form temporarily in the Old Testament to meet with Abraham or be in the fiery furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and so forth in the cases you mentioned. I don’t think it’s an article of Christian faith that these appearances of God in the Old Testament were necessarily appearances of Christ. theologians call these appearances theophanies, which means appearance of God. But some Christians prefer to call them Christophanies, which means appearance of Christ. Well, whether it’s a Christophany or not, it certainly is a theophany, because Christ and God were in most ways indistinguishable from each other in the pre-incarnate times. Philippians chapter 2 says that Jesus existed in the form of God. But then he didn’t cling to his equality with God and lowered himself and took on the form of a servant to live among us and to die on the cross. So, I mean, before he was here, he existed and he came down. Now, if the person is saying there was no preexistence of Christ, I’m not sure what he’s basing that on. He’s certainly not basing it on the New Testament because there’s numerous places in the New Testament that speak of Christ’s preexistence. In fact, he even said… to his enemies, you are from below. I have come down from above. I have come down from my father. You know what I mean? Well, obviously, if you’ve come down from above, you were previously above. And that’s what it says also in Ephesians 4, around verse 13 or so. It says, in that Christ ascended, meaning after his death and resurrection, he ascended. What is it but that he had first descended to the lower parts of the earth? And the fact that Jesus ascended to heaven, required that he first descend from heaven to earth. And so, I mean, the theology of Jesus and the apostles certainly argues for Jesus having a preexistence. Now, there are cults like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons that agree that Jesus had a preexistence. But they would suggest he existed, but not as God, but as something else, an angel or something. But there’s nothing in the Bible that would suggest that his preexistence was not as God. And if he’s the word in his preexistence and the word was God, according to John 1.1, well, then I think the Trinitarian and certainly those who believe in the deity of Christ and the preexistence of Christ as God, they’ve got a solid case. Now, whether those theophanies in the Old Testament were God the Father or God the Word or God the Holy Spirit taking on human flesh is a point that the Scripture makes no issue of. Unless, of course, Jesus is referring to that when he says, before Abraham was, I am. And your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day and saw it. It’s not something I would… I would go to the mat about on this matter of the, you know, are these Theophanies or Christophanies? But the man sounds like he doesn’t really have either much knowledge of or much respect for the New Testament in general, which, you know, makes him apparently contentious. Hey, I need to take another call, but thanks for your call. Tom from Gainesville, Florida. Welcome to The Narrow Path. Hello. When did you first discover… that the Bible was the Word of God? Well, that’s something that has been confirmed to me over the years. It wasn’t initially a discovery. It was what I was taught. I was raised in a Christian home, and I was taught that the Bible is the Word of God. Now, I did discover later that many people did not believe it was the Word of God and that they gave their criticisms and their reasons for not accepting it which I examined. In fact, I’ve been examining it recently again because I’m writing a book about it. But the truth is that I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all the reasons that people have denied that the Bible is the Word of God, and they’re unimpressive. I mean, basically those arguments come from what looks to me like a either prejudice or ignorance, but it’s not, they’re not convincing. You know, many of the writers claim to be writing the Word of God. You know, the expression, thus says the Lord, or the Word of the Lord came and said, you know, that kind of stuff. Those kind of expressions are found like 4,000 times in the Bible. And though not every author uses those expressions… They all do claim to be speaking with the authority of God or at least truthfully from God. They don’t all claim the same kind of inspiration. Like, I mean, a prophet who says the word of the Lord came to me and said, you know, I am, you know, the one who brought you out of Egypt or whatever, you know. That person is speaking as if their mouth is God’s mouth and they’re speaking of God in the first person. More often, biblical writers speak about God as you and I do in the third person. They’re talking about God. but not necessarily oracularly as a prophet, as though they are God speaking. On the other hand, even those who speak of God in the third person, generally speaking, are claiming to have some kind of divine authority given to them. In the case of the New Testament writers, they are apostles, and Christ gave them the authority to write for him as his agents. In the Old Testament, they’re generally prophets of one kind or another. But, you know, I don’t go further with this than the Bible says about itself. And I believe there are even ways that Protestants can be just as superstitious as Catholics can be about some things. And I think some fundamentalists sometimes have a view of Scripture that’s a little more… it goes beyond what the scripture claimed for itself and I don’t feel the need to say more about it than the scripture says for itself but I do believe the biblical authors told the truth and where they claim to be writing directly words directly from God’s mouth I accept that so you asked when I first discovered the Bible’s word of God it’s rather that I was taught it and then I cross examined it later in life and then more convinced than ever that it is the Word of God. Thank you. Okay, Tom, thanks for your call. David in Dallas, Texas. Welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thank you, Steve. Steve, do you think that all prophecy was fulfilled back in 70 A.D., or do you think it’s ongoing through present day? And the revelation of prophecy is ongoing.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. Well, I mean, biblical prophecy, there are the prophets of the Old Testament, and then there’s prophets of the New Testament. And I believe the Old Testament prophets were primarily focused on the coming of redemption through the Messiah. Now, they did prophesy other things, too. They prophesied the destruction of wicked nations that were going to be destroyed by Assyria or by Babylon. one way or another. And those are things that were fulfilled in the past. I mean, when the prophets speak about the destruction of Edom or Moab or Ammon or Assyria, those nations don’t really exist anymore as they did then, and they all were destroyed. So we have no reason to think that any of them are still being fulfilled or will be fulfilled. There are prophecies in the Old Testament that speak of the establishment of the new covenant and the new order and the Messiah that and of his eternal reign. And, of course, that was inaugurated in our past when Jesus was here, but continues to be true in our present and on into forever. So there’s a sense in which some of the prophecies are ongoing, as I think the term you used, in the sense that they prophesied a permanent arrangement that would be established when the Messiah came. And he did, and it has been, and it is permanent. So it’s now, too. Now, as far as specific events, I don’t know of any specific events that were prophesied in the Old Testament which have not yet been fulfilled. Now, the New Testament, then, the prophets in the New Testament made their own prophecies different from those of the Old. Some of them overlap because both the Old Testament and New Testament writers sometimes predicted the end of Jerusalem. the Old Testament definitely predicted it. And Jesus said that when Jerusalem was destroyed, he said in Luke 21-22 that this would be so that all that was written might be fulfilled, meaning all the Old Testament prophecies. So Jesus indicated that the Old Testament prophecies spoke of this, and we know that Jesus spoke of it numerous times. But also, I believe Jesus and the apostles had something else also that they predicted that had not, as far as I know, been predicted in the Old Testament. And that is the end of the world and the second coming of Christ. Now, a lot of people have taken Old Testament prophecies and applied them in their own imagination to the end of the world and the second coming of Christ. Generally speaking, I can’t see why they do this since they’ve already been fulfilled. And there’s not a suggestion that they would have a double fulfillment. So, I mean, I don’t see any reason to take Zechariah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel to be relevant to any future events when it’s easiest to see them as already fulfilled. But on the other hand, when Jesus predicted certain things and Paul and Peter about the end of the world, In my opinion, that hasn’t happened yet, and I think it’s referred to Jesus’ second coming. So I’m thinking that there are New Testament prophecies that have not been fulfilled yet and will. Old Testament prophecies have either already been fully fulfilled or at least the inauguration of their ongoing fulfillment took place in the first century. That would be my assessment of the whole body of biblical prophecy in the Bible.
SPEAKER 04 :
All right. Yes, that sounds great. May I ask you one further question?
SPEAKER 02 :
Uh-huh.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay. This concerns the doctrine of replacement theology.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 04 :
And I know you know what that means. I would like to know personally. I don’t stand with that myself. But I would like you to, could you relate to us what you believe?
SPEAKER 02 :
I’d be glad to, but can I ask you what it is that you believe a replacement theology is?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, I think it’s the replacement of Israel by the coming, by the church that Jesus Christ established for the Protestant churches, you know, to believe in. But I don’t think Israel has ever been neglected by God. As a matter of fact, current events tell me he’s on top of it very well. So I’d just like to hear what you believe about the subject. You don’t have to tell me how you believe, but, you know. Yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, my belief is if replacement theology is the view that the church has replaced Israel, I wouldn’t believe that. I don’t think the church replaced Israel. I believe the church is Israel and always was. The word church in the Greek New Testament is ekklesia. The church is the ekklesia. In the Old Testament, the Greek Old Testament, which is the Septuagint, that was used to refer to Israel. Israel was called the ekklesia. And so the church, if we translate ekklesia consistently, the church in the New Testament is also the church ekklesia. In the Old Testament, which was Israel. Now, when Stephen was giving his talk just before they killed him, he mentioned Moses, he said, was the one who was with the church in the wilderness. Of course, he’s referring to Israel. So Moses was with the church in the wilderness, which is, of course, the nation of Israel. Now, in the New Testament, God made a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, as Jeremiah said that he would. And Jesus did this with representatives of the faithful remnant of Israel who were with him in the upper room. And he made that new covenant with them. Now, Israel now is under a new covenant. Original Israel was under a covenant that was made at Mount Sinai, but that’s defunct now. The Bible says the Sinaitic covenant is defunct. It says in Hebrews 8.13, where there’s a new covenant, the old one’s defunct or is obsolete. So the old covenant that defined Israel in the Old Testament has been replaced with a new covenant. And if we want to call that replacement theology, that the old covenants were replaced by the new covenant, I think we’d have good biblical grounds to do that. That’s not how most people describe what they call replacement theology. And the Bible, of course, never uses the term replacement theology. So that’s why I asked you what you mean by it, because anyone who uses the term can mean whatever they want by it. I generally do not like the term replacement theology because… Most people who use it are using it the way you described. They say that it’s the teaching that the church replaced Israel. Well, like I said, that certainly isn’t my view. But my view is that in terms of defining who Israel is, a new covenant has replaced the old covenant. So that would be certainly not, shouldn’t be controversial in the New Testament. It’s very clear the New Testament has come and replaced the old. And the writer of Hebrews says it, you know, unambiguously. So today, while Israel or the church, as it was called in the Old Testament, was defined by a covenant made at Mount Sinai, today Israel or the church, which is, you know, is called in the New Testament, is defined by the new covenant, which has replaced the old covenant. So it’s not that the church replaced Israel. You know, if you look at Romans 9, excuse me, Romans 11, and Paul’s use of the olive tree in verses 16 through 25, Paul is borrowing an idea, an image from Jeremiah 11, verse 16, where Paul, God referred to Israel as a green olive tree and mentions, in some translations, says your branches are broken. Some translations say your branches are burned. But the point is, it’s an olive tree, Israel. And the branches, some of them, have gone into captivity in Babylon. The Jews, the Jews are the branches. And the nation as a whole is the tree. Now, Paul picks up on that imagery and says that since Christ has come, many of the Jews have disbelieved in Christ, and they are broken off the olive tree. Just like the Jews who went into Babylon were separated from Israel, so the Jews who reject the Messiah are separated from Israel. They’re not on the olive tree anymore. But he said that Gentiles who have believed in Christ have been grafted in. Now, One might say that those Gentiles have replaced the Jews who were broken off, but that’s not the same thing as saying that the church replaced Israel because the tree is still Israel. It’s also the church. Israel and the church have always been the same thing in Old Testament times and now. So what’s happened is membership in Israel, being a branch on the tree of Israel, is now defined by being a believer in Christ. That’s the terms of the new covenant. The Jews who reject Christ and Gentiles who reject Christ are not part of it. The tree has not been replaced. Some branches have been replaced by the branches because of the unbelief of the former and the faith of the latter. But Yeah, the tree has never been replaced. Israel, the church, is the tree as it was in the Old Testament. So what’s been replaced is mostly the covenant that defined them. And that’s my understanding of what most people call replacement theology. I would call it fulfillment theology or remnant theology or something like that. But the Bible doesn’t use any of those terms for it.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thank you, Steve, so much.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right, David, good talking to you. Thank you for joining us. Bye-bye. All right. Marilyn from Snohomish, Washington. You know what? I think we won’t be able to take your call quite yet. We do have a break, hard break I can’t avoid. And then we have another half hour. So I’m going to put you back on hold. I apologize for getting your hopes up. And we’ll take your call right after the break. Now, for those of you who have not gotten on the air yet, feel free to Stay put if you’re online, and if you’re not, call in and be waiting, and we will have another half hour to talk to you about your questions. The number to call is 844-484-5737. I want you to be aware of our app, and this has to be explained a little bit, so please pay attention if you don’t have the app already. Usually when you get an app, If you’re on Apple, you go to the App Store. If you’re on an Android phone, you normally go to Google Play or somewhere like that, and you get apps there. Now, we have apps in those places, too, but those are old apps. We have a better, improved app, which you can’t get at those two locations. You have to go to a website and download it on your phone from there. That website is thenarrowpath.app. Just like our website is thenarrowpath.com, the app site to download it onto your phone is thenarrowpath.app. Now, you go there on a browser. Don’t go to the App Store or Google Play. Go to your browser, Google or Safari or something like that. And just like you’re going to any website, go to thenarrowpath.app. There you’ll find instructions to download that onto your phone. And there’s a drop-down menu. up in the top left corner, to the how-to. We’ll tell you how to do that. And then you’ll have all the resources from our website, including the live broadcasts and archived broadcasts of the show, right there on your phone. Go to thenarrowpath.app and get it that way. We are listener-supported. If you’d like to help us out, you can go to our website for that, thenarrowpath.com. And I hope you’ll stay tuned, because in 30 seconds, I’ll be back to take another half hour of your calls.
SPEAKER 01 :
If you call the narrow path, please have your question ready as soon as you are on the air. Do not take much time setting up the question or giving background. If such detail is needed to clarify your question, the host will ask for such information. Our desire is to get as many callers on the air during the short program. There are many calls waiting behind you, so please be considerate to others.
SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome back to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. We have another half hour to discuss your questions from the Bible or the Christian faith if you call them in. We will talk to you about it. We’ll have a conversation on the air about that. And right now there are some open lines on our switchboard. I would suggest if you want to get on the program today, seize this opportunity because within a few minutes they may be full and you may not be able to get on. We have a half hour, so we’d love to see the switchboard full. The number to call is 844-484-5737. That’s 844-484-5737. Before the break, we’re ready to talk to Marilyn from Snohomish, Washington. I cut her off because we had to take that break, but now we’ve got no rush. We can take your call, your question, Marilyn. Go ahead.
SPEAKER 07 :
Okay. Thank you, Steve. I went to a church about a year ago, and a pastor at a Monday night class thing was saying that modern-day prophets do not have to be 100% accurate. It kind of hit me wrong because, first of all, I don’t know if we have modern-day prophets nowadays. That’s one of my questions, do we? And I do know that in the Old Testament they did have to be 100% accurate. Can you speak to that?
SPEAKER 02 :
I certainly can sympathize with your concerns about that. There was a movement, well, about 20, almost 30 years ago, called the modern prophetic movement. And in it, the assumption was made that God in the end times will restore to the church what they called the five-fold ministry. Now, the Bible doesn’t use that term, five-fold ministry, but they’re referring to Ephesians 4.11, where Paul said that God gave to the church gifts, including he gave some apostles and some prophets and some evangelists, and some pastors or shepherds and teachers. Now, there’s five things mentioned there, unless shepherds and teachers are identified as the same than they were before. But this movement referred to the five-fold ministry, and they say that many of these offices disappeared shortly after the apostles’ time. The apostles and prophets, in particular, they think, disappeared. And they believe that in the end times, God is going to restore them. the five-fold ministry, including apostles and prophets, to the church. Now, I don’t know of anything in the Bible that says he’s going to do that. He can do that if he wants to. I’m not going to forbid it. I can’t forbid God to do anything. I’m all for his purposes and his will being done. I simply can find no prediction in Scripture that that is to be expected. But this is the foundation for what you’re referring to. The movement… because they felt that God was restoring prophets to the church in these last days, as they interpreted it, therefore we should be welcoming prophets. And maybe since we don’t have many people in the church who prophesy, maybe we should be training people to be prophets. Now, to my mind, I don’t think anyone was ever trained to be a prophet in the Bible. It seems to me the Holy Spirit came upon a person who, And they prophesied, and even if they didn’t want to, they still had to. I mean, Jeremiah said he got tired of prophesying and the flack he was getting from people for it. He said, I decided I’m not going to speak anymore in the name of the Lord. But he says, I couldn’t help it. The word of the Lord was like a fire in my soul. I couldn’t hold it in. I had to speak. And so, you know, it says in Micah, I think it is, no, Amos. It says in Amos, you know, the Lord has spoken. Who can but prophesy? In other words, the prophet can’t keep from it. So I don’t know of anything in the Bible that says people who don’t prophesy, you can teach them how to do it. Well, then how is that a word from God if you teach them how to do it? Now, there was a ministry centered in Kansas City at the time, and there were other places too. But in the late 90s in Kansas City, there was a ministry that was trying to raise up these prophets as kind of a center for this prophetic movement. And they had these prophetic schools. And they had to make excuses for their prophets because their prophets weren’t very good. They would predict things, and they’d teach them to predict things. But unfortunately, most of the things they predicted just didn’t happen. They were not very good prophets. And so an apologetic for them developed, claiming that prophecy is a gift that you develop, that once you first get it, you’re not going to be great at it. You’re going to have to practice it. You’re going to have to grow in it. And they actually referred to some people as baby prophets. And I actually heard from some of their literature numerous times, you know, a baby prophet might only be 10% right or only right 10% of the time. Now, I remember thinking, then in what sense is he a prophet? I don’t claim to be a prophet at all. And I can be right 10% of the time about almost anything I want to predict. I might even be I might even make 20% of the time. Who knows? How do you identify someone as a prophet if he’s wrong 90% of the time? Or for that matter, if he’s wrong 10% of the time and right 90% of the time? How can, I mean, what good is a prophet? A, if they say they’re speaking from God so that you can supposedly respond to them as if it’s the word of God, and yet you can’t be sure they’re right. You know, any given word they speak, even if they’re right 90% of the time, according to this view. Well, how can you know if this time, maybe this is one of the 10% of the time they’re wrong? In other words, I can’t take them seriously. How can I trust them? How can I take any word from these people seriously when anything they say might be wrong? So this is, to my mind, human nonsense. It certainly is not what the Bible teaches. The Bible does teach that prophets can be tested. In Deuteronomy 18, I’m sure you’re familiar with the passage that says if they predict something is going to happen, they’re not speaking from God. They’re not prophets. Now, I don’t think they had any baby prophets who grew up, because generally speaking, if a prophet spoke inappropriately, they were put to death in Israel. Because the idea was Israel needs a reliable witness from God. And they didn’t have exactly the Bible. They had the law of Moses. But they needed strategies from God in their wars. They needed to have all kinds of corrections from God. And for that purpose, God sent prophets. And Israel was supposed to be able to rely on the fact that if these prophets spoke in the name of the Lord, they either were really speaking God’s word, or they’d be put to death for being so irreverent. You know, it’s taking the name of the Lord in vain to say, thus says the Lord, and then you give your own opinions. That’s very irreverent, and God is not to be treated that irreverently. And yet, the prophetic movement didn’t have that conviction, apparently. But that’s, apparently, the pastor you heard is either in that movement or which I haven’t heard much from for the past 20 years or so. But he may be in that movement, or he may be reading somebody who was, and he may be just a man of very little discernment.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah, I’m not sure. He talks about movements, but we haven’t gone to that church in a while, so I’m not sure where it’s gone. Yeah, I don’t think I would either. All right, Meredith.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thanks for your talk. God bless you. Let’s see here. We’ve got David from San Jose next. David, welcome.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hey, Steve. Good talking with you again. I wanted to – this is actually a question from my wife. She wanted me to ask you. She is – I don’t know if you remember, but she’s a first-grade teacher at a Christian school. So she gets all the, you know – amazing questions from six-year-olds almost every day. And one question that she wanted maybe a little bit of help with or maybe your advice is explaining substitutionary atonement and about how Jesus paid our debts. How do you answer that question in a clear and concise way to a six-year-old?
SPEAKER 02 :
I’m not sure it’s even possible. I mean, well, there are some six-year-olds that you can explain it to very simply, and they’re just fine with it. Others may be deeper thinkers and they say, but wait a minute, you know, why would this person be punished for somebody else? They didn’t do anything. How does that settle the score? I have to say most six-year-olds didn’t think that deeply, but I know when I was that age I had those kinds of questions. So I don’t know of a way to explain that in such a way that they’ll get it. I would say that the question of how the atonement accomplished what it did in God’s sight is a deep theological matter that even very, very astute theologians have explained in different ways contrary to each other. The Bible uses a lot of different imagery for what Christ did. We’ve got the imagery of the sacrificial system in the Old Testament. We’ve got the imagery of the slave market where somebody liberates a slave by paying a price. We’ve got the… We’ve also got the ransom motif that Jesus said he came to give life a ransom for many. There’s also what they call the Christus Victor understanding where the main focus seems to be on Christ conquering Satan. you know, when he died. There are some who believe that since Peter said that Jesus gave himself for us, leaving us an example that we might follow in his steps, I think that’s probably 1 Peter 2, maybe verse 23, somewhere like that, that it’s mainly an example for us to be obedient unto death like Jesus did. In other words, there’s a lot of different things the Bible says about the death of Jesus. And they don’t all fit one paradigm perfectly. What they do is try to apparently unpack a multifaceted phenomenon by using illustrations that we are familiar with in this life. And that shouldn’t be too surprising. For example, we really have no illustration given to us in the Bible of what the Trinity is like, which is a different theological issue, but hard to understand. And yet people are continually… you know, tempted to come up with illustrations that are supposedly making sense of the Trinity, you know, whether it’s water in its three forms or whether it’s an egg with its three parts or, you know, the people come up with all these kinds of things. And we don’t know if any of these things are exactly true. good illustrations of the Trinity, but they are attempts to say, you know, God is in some sense three and in some sense one, which I believe is a biblical thing. But in what sense? Who knows? And likewise, I think the Bible teaches that in some sense, Jesus’ death on the cross was God’s solution to our sin problem. And there’s different kinds of analogies and different things about what God accomplished through it. And I’m not one of those people who says we need to latch onto one view of the atonement when there are maybe five or more that the church has held. And we have to insist that our view is the correct one. The main thing is that God knows which is the correct one. Now, the illustration that I received when I was a child in Sunday school for the substitutionary, atonement was that of a child who uh i remember hearing many times in bible in bible or you know sunday school or whatever a story of a teacher who said that uh whoever was stealing lunches from the other children as someone was done was uh if they’re caught they’ll be beaten with a rod this back in the days when teachers were allowed to do that kind of thing so um anyway the next day uh A boy’s lunch was stolen, and it was found in the desk of another boy, a poor boy who didn’t have, you know, came from a really poor home and stuff, and he’d stolen the lunch. And so the poor boy was brought up before the teacher for the beating, but the boy who had the lunch stolen from him said, no, I’ll take that. I’ll take the beating for him, you know. And so he let the other kid off, and he absorbed the loss and the pain. and the penalty on himself. Now, this is the idea of a substitutionary atonement. The question becomes, is that really just? I mean, it’s a moving story if it’s really true, but is it really justice? Well, It may or may not be. One thing we can say is it works as an illustration of how Christ has died in our place, or he received a punishment that we deserved, and that we have been freed from that punishment for it. I believe those things are true biblical statements, but the illustrations we come up with for them may be extremely limited and even flawed. I don’t know. You know, a lot of people, on the Internet you find a lot of people arguing over the Atonement Doctrine. And, of course, atheists, they latch onto it, too. And they say, well, you know, is God guilty of child abuse? You know, he sent Jesus to be beaten and killed. for a project that God wanted to see fulfilled. And yet, I think they’re missing the whole point. The whole point of the atonement seems to be that God is the offended party, and he himself was willing to take on himself the loss that was caused and incurred by the people he’s trying to save. And in some way, this is the expression of his mercy toward us so that we can be saved. Now, does this resemble a ransom? The ransom theory always was challenged, even in history. by the question of who was the ransom paid to? Did God require a ransom to forgive us? Why didn’t he just forgive us without it? Or was it the devil who required a ransom to release us? Well, if he got a ransom, didn’t he win that transaction? You know, if the guy who gets the ransom, even if he has to release the captive, he won. He got what he wanted. So, I mean, there’s all of these human illustrations have their flaws. And what I would say to a six-year-old is that we don’t understand completely everything about how Jesus died for us and how that brought about our rescue from sin and our restoration to God. But the Bible affirms that this is true. And some illustrations we might come up with might help us understand it, but these are not illustrations that the Bible itself gives. And so we can’t really have complete confidence in our illustrations, but if they help us to understand some aspect of it, then there’s nothing wrong with thinking of them. But we should do so knowing that this is just us trying to figure out something that God fully understands and we don’t. And the only thing important… is that God understands it because he’s the one we’re reckoning with here. You know, if we’re redeemed from our sin to be reconciled with God, then God is the one who has to understand that more than us. So I’m kind of wishy-washy, obviously, on it, not because I doubt anything the Bible says, but because the Bible says too many things to settle on just one of them as the explanation. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and I think that’s why she wanted me to ask you to try to help give her a better answer.
SPEAKER 02 :
I think the one illustration that we do have in the Bible, though we’re not told that it’s exhaustive in its meaning, but certainly it was one that God made Israel acquainted with, was that of animal sacrifices. not only on the Day of Atonement, but especially on the Day of Atonement. The sacrifice there was a representation of Christ dying for us. He’s the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. And the concept there was that a sinner who deserved to be punished and die could be substituted for with a lamb, a lamb that was innocent and didn’t deserve to die. But the ritual involved the priest or the worshiper, or maybe both, laying a hand on the head of the sheep and confessing the person’s sins over it and then killing the lamb in place of them. And the transaction, the ritual, suggested a transaction where the guilt of the person was being transmitted to the sheep so that now the person didn’t bear it, the sheep did, and the sheep was punished in its place so the person didn’t have to be. That’s That’s the substitutionary atonement concept illustrated probably hundreds of times a day in the temple for 1,400 years. And Jesus, obviously, is the Lamb of God who fulfills that. But there’s still unanswered questions. I mean, the Lamb clearly did not literally become guilty. The Lamb didn’t commit any acts. But his guilt was symbolically transferred. That is, the person’s guilt was transferred to the land. And, you know, whether, I mean, whether that’s a symbolic thing that corresponds to a literal thing, where the Bible says in Isaiah chapter 53 and verse 6, all we like sheep have gone astray. We’ve turned everyone to his own way, but the Lord laid on Christ the iniquity of us all. Okay. Okay. Or it says in 1 Peter 2, again, I think maybe verse 24. I’m not sure the verse. It’s near the end of 1 Peter 2. It says that he himself bore our sins in his own body on the tree. Okay, so he bore our sins like a lamb led to sacrifice bears the sins, allegedly, of the worshiper. Now, in the case of a ritual with the lamb, it’s all symbolic. But with Christ, there’s something real about it. And God somehow makes it a reality, which was only symbolically depicted in rituals. And that’s, you know, like I said, it’s one of many ways that the death of Christ remedying our problem is illustrated in Scripture. It’s probably the most common illustration, which may be what gave a substitutionary view of the atonement, such, shall we say, majority view, you know, in the church. But I think there’s several things that the Bible says the atonement accomplishes. That seems to be one of them. And maybe the lamb illustration is, since God uses it, maybe that’s one that works best for the children.
SPEAKER 03 :
Awesome. Thank you, Steve. I’ll let her know what she says.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, David. By the way, this program, if that answer is useful to you, you can have her listen to it in the archives and you won’t have to repeat it.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, yes.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, also her. Thank you. God bless you, David.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, bye now.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yep.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right, we’ll talk next to Terry from Sardis. Is it Mississippi?
SPEAKER 08 :
Yes, hi, how are you? It is Mississippi.
SPEAKER 02 :
Hey, welcome to the Neuropath.
SPEAKER 08 :
Yeah, wonderful. Yeah, thank you so much for allowing me to speak. I just want to just express my gratitude for your program and how enlightening and inspiring it is to people like me, who are Christians, who just believe and want to continue to believe. My question is the ethnicity of Christ. Oftentimes, there’s certain ethnicity struggle. And in the book of Isaiah, it talked about the coming Christ and how his suffrage was And although he suffered for our salvation, it’s more like the African people or the African diaspora and the African American people, there are some similarities of Christ’s struggles, not to compare anybody or anyone to the divine, but there are a lot of things that hint towards the suffrage of certain races, the strength of certain people that have overcame, And I know when I did study the genealogy of Christ and particularly Mary, her genealogy, he was born in more of the Middle Eastern, the northern eastern part of Africa. Could you tell or could you go into some of the explanation as to what his ethnicity was? I’m just curious. It’s just a curious part of me just wants to know because there are a lot of similarities.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, we don’t have to wonder about it. We don’t have to wonder about it because actually the ethnicity of Christ, as you say, Mary’s genealogy, in my opinion, is given in Luke chapter 3. It’s a little ambiguous whether that’s Mary’s genealogy, but I believe it is. And it goes back through David. to Abraham, to Shem, one of Noah’s three sons, and then back all the way to Adam in that genealogy. Now, all people on the earth came from one of Noah’s three sons, and Abraham came through Shem. Now, the African races, if we’re talking about Ethiopian and Egyptian and Libyan and other North African peoples, they are mentioned in scripture as having come from Ham, a different son of Noah. So the people of North Africa, and we have no information about South Africa specifically. We have to assume probably the North African people just eventually filtered down and immigrated to other parts of the continent. But the African people appear to be descended from Ham, and the Abrahamic people, which would include Jews and Jews, and Arabs and many other people, they descended from Shem. And so they’re not of the same race. Now, Abraham himself was from Mesopotamia, which is Babylonia, which is north, not south, of Israel. It was not in Africa. It was up in the east, you know, the Mideast. It’s basically where Iraq is today. That’s the region that Abraham originated from. But he was descended from Shem. And he migrated down into what we call Palestine today. It was called Canaan then. We call it Israel today usually. But in any case, this people were not the same people as the African people. In fact, they weren’t the same people as any other people. This was an ethnicity that God more or less started with Abraham. And he said that through his offspring, all the nations of the earth would be blessed. Now, all the nations of the earth would include African people and Asian people and European people and Australian people, every people. will be blessed through the seed of Abraham. Now, that seed is Jesus. So it’s a very important biblical doctrine and reestablished many, many times in Scripture that Jesus descended from Abraham and that he is the seed of Abraham through whom all the nations will be blessed. Now, this would be the people who historically were known as the Jews. There have been some people who’ve questioned whether the people who are called Jews today are all descended from the people that the Bible called the Jews, but I’m not going to speculate about that. I don’t have the genealogical records to question it. But I do, I will say this, that the ones that the Bible calls the Jews were a Middle Eastern people. They were not a North African people. Jesus was not born in the northern part of Africa. He was born in Bethlehem, which is only about six miles from Jerusalem, and Jerusalem is in Israel. So, There’s not really, biblically speaking, there’s not really any question about his ethnicity. He was Jewish, and the Jewish people came from Abraham. And in particular, Jesus absolutely came from Abraham, because that was the most important thing about Abraham, was that Jesus would come through him, and that all the nations will soon to be blessed through Abraham’s seed. Now, you mentioned the black people have suffered a lot, and Jesus suffered a lot, but that doesn’t tell us much about Jesus’ ethnicity. The Jews suffered a lot, too. In fact, I would say the Jewish people historically have suffered probably as much as any race have. Certainly a lot of black races have suffered at the hands of others. A lot of them suffered at the hands of other black nations, but also they’ve suffered at the hands of white people, too. Asian people in their own turn have suffered. The Uyghurs in China have been terribly treated. The Kurds have been badly treated. A lot of nations have really been treated badly by other races, but we can’t really find anything out about the genealogy of Christ from that, but from what the Bible says. He was a Middle Eastern Jewish man. I’m out of time. You’ve been listening to The Narrow Path. We are listener-supported. You can find out how to support us if you go to our website, thenarrowpath.com. Thanks for joining us. Let’s talk again tomorrow.
