In this thought-provoking episode, Steve Gregg opens the floor to call-in questions and discussions about the Bible and the intricacies of Christian faith. Join Steve as he delves into the profound insights of 2 Corinthians 12, exploring the paradox of strength through weakness. Engage with a wide array of topics, from the intriguing role of Anna the Prophetess in the Gospel of Luke to the perplexing theological debates surrounding Calvinism and Arminianism. Each segment is packed with enriching discourse aimed at deepening your understanding and challenging your viewpoints.
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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 as usual to take your calls. If you have questions about the Bible or about the Christian faith, we’ll be glad to talk about those with you if you want to call about it. If you see things differently from the host, want to defend an alternative viewpoint, want to challenge something that has been said here on the air, that is always very welcome here. Feel free to give me a call. The number to call is 844- For those of you who don’t know, we’ve been on the air for 28 years. We started doing this daily broadcast in 1997. And although there was a hiatus for about a year at the beginning of the new millennium, I had to do something else. We went back on the air, and we have done about 28 years of broadcasting daily, five days a week. It’s always been the same format, call in with your questions. And I guess the reason I mention that is we finally, apparently, have come to the end of all the questions. There’s no calls waiting. So we now know how long it takes to answer all the questions that anyone has because there are apparently none left. But if you have thought of one, feel free to give me a call because our lines are wide open. It’s a great time to get through. In the meantime, by the way, the number is 844- In the meantime, we have prisoners who write questions to me. I don’t always get to them on the air, and we don’t always write back. Not that we don’t want to. We get so many communications, we just don’t have the staff to write back to everybody. But one prisoner in particular writes fairly often. He sent me a long list of questions. I’ve taken a few of them on past broadcasts, but we’ll just look at another one. Cody, who’s a prisoner correspondent. What does 2 Corinthians 12, 9-10 mean? 2 Corinthians 12, 9-10 is, of course, it’s the conclusion of that portion where Paul is talking about the thorn in the flesh that he has. He talks about, in chapter 11 and early in chapter 12, he talks about the various reasons that he might have to be proud of because of the spiritual privileges he’s had, and yet how much he’s suffered for it. And then he mentions that he has a lot of revelations from God. But then he doesn’t want to be proud. I mean, he definitely has stuff that is enviable about him and not enviable. All the sufferings he went through are not enviable. The revelations he’s had are. But he doesn’t want to take any credit for that. And is this the only place in all his writings where he writes of himself in the third person as if he’s not talking about himself? Because he’s going to say something, you know, remarkable about a person, about all the revelations he’s had. And because he doesn’t want to boast about it and talk about himself, he talks about this person in the third person. And he said in chapter 12, verse 1 of 2 Corinthians, it’s doubtless not profitable for me to boast. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ who 14 years ago, whether in the body, I don’t know, or whether out of the body, I do not know. God knows. Such a one was caught up into the third heaven. And I know such a man, whether in body or out of the body, I do not know. God knows. How he was caught up into, and he heard inexpressible words, which is not lawful for a man to utter. Of such a one I will boast, yet not of myself. He’s being a little coy here. I’ll boast about that man, but I won’t boast about me because, of course, I don’t want to be boastful. He says, I will not boast except in my infirmities. He said, if I’m going to brag about anything, I’m going to brag about how much I’ve suffered. and of my weaknesses. Now, in verse 7, he says, And lest I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of the revelations. Now, here he’s saying because of the abundance of the revelations he has received, there might be a temptation for him to become exalted in his own eyes or in the eyes of others, perhaps. He says, But so that I don’t become exalted above measure by the abundance of the revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me. lest I be exalted above measure. He says that again. Concerning this thing, I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And he said, My grace is sufficient for you. Now this is where we get to the verse that Cody has asked about. This is verse 9. He said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Therefore, most gladly, I will rather boast in my infirmities. Now, it’s this last section that Cody wondered, what do these verses mean? Well, obviously, in the context, he’s talking about how he has received from God tremendous privileges and in terms of revelation, things that it’s not even lawful for him to repeat. Some of them, they’re so lofty. And he says these are the kinds of things that could, if things got out of hand in my spirit or in my reputation, it could make me exalted in the eyes of myself or men way too high because I don’t really deserve that exaltation. But he says in order to prevent that from happening, I have been given a thorn in the flesh to buffet me. Now, he does say this thorn in the flesh is a messenger of Satan, but he also suggests that it’s God who gave it to him and who causes him to continue to have it, because he prayed three times that the Lord would take it from him, and the Lord said, essentially, no, I’ve got a better idea. Your weakness is a good thing. Your affliction has a good purpose. In your weakness, you’re really more strong. My grace… is sufficient for you. And he says, in your weakness, you know, my power is made perfect. My strength is made perfect. Now, this is a strange concept perhaps to some, but it’s not really strange to Paul and other writers like Peter and 1 Peter. They often mention the tremendous benefit spiritually that comes from suffering faithfully for Christ and the assistance that God gives us through his grace. Now, this is not the first time Paul has appealed to this idea of God’s grace giving us a sufficiency for that which we would not otherwise probably be sufficient to handle, at least not in a gracious manner. Because he says in 2 Corinthians, the same book, earlier in chapter 3, he said in, let’s see, verse 6, no, no, verse 5, 2 Corinthians 3, 4 through 6, And we have such trust through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient. There’s that word again. Not that we’re sufficient of ourselves to think anything as being from ourselves. But our sufficiency is from God, who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant. So he says, listen, we’re getting a lot done here. There’s a lot of power in this ministry. There’s a lot of fruit in this ministry. But it’s not me. Earlier in 1 Corinthians, the previous letter he wrote to them, He said in 1 Corinthians 15.10 that he actually had accomplished in his ministry more than all the other apostles. But knowing that, that doesn’t sound very humble. He says, yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. In other words, I can’t do this kind of thing. It’s not my natural talents or brilliance that gets all this done. It’s not me. It’s the grace of God that is with me. Now, it’s in the passage we read in 2 Corinthians 12. He connects the grace of God with that power. Jesus says, my grace is sufficient for you. My strength is made perfect in your weakness. If you’re weak, that gives God the opportunity to demonstrate his strength by doing through you what you could certainly not do yourself and making it clear that it is his grace that is doing this. His grace is strengthening you, which is why in 1 Corinthians 15, 10, he says, I did more than the other apostles, but not me. It was the grace of God that was with me that did it. Elsewhere in 1 Corinthians, he says in chapter 3, verse 10, he says, I, by the grace given to me as a wise master builder, laid the foundation of the church. So everything he did, everything he accomplished, he did by the grace of God that was given to him, which is spoken of as an enabling thing. We often think of grace as just God’s unmerited favor. And it is that because, obviously, we’re saved by grace, not of works. We don’t merit it. God gives it to us as a free gift. And therefore, you know, it’s unmerited. It’s God’s favor. It’s not just his unmerited favor. It’s also his unmerited assistance. God gives grace for trials. It says in Hebrews that we should draw confidently to the throne of grace to receive mercy and grace to help. In time of need. So we come to the throne of grace. We get mercy. That’s what we usually think grace is, is mercy. But we also receive grace to help us. That’s what he’s talking about here in 2 Corinthians. And he has already said in 2 Corinthians 3, we’re not sufficient. Our sufficiency is from God. And later, a few chapters later, in chapter 9 of the same book, in verse 8, he says, And God is able to make all grace abound toward you, so that you always having all sufficiency in all things may have an abundance for every good work. You need to do good works. You need the sufficiency to do that. God makes his grace abound to you so that you have this sufficiency for every good work, he said. Now, that’s in the same book. He’s already said he’s not sufficient. His sufficiency is of God. Then he says that God can make all grace abound to you, so you’ll have sufficiency for everything. And then in chapter 12, he says, now I’m going through this trial. It’s a very perplexing trial. He says, you know, it’s so perplexing, I’ve asked God three times to take it away, but he won’t. Instead, he says, my grace is sufficient for you. Now, what’s he mean by grace is sufficient? Well, depending on context, you might say, well, I’m a very wicked man. I’ve got great sins. I’m great guilt. I could never be right with God. And if God said, well, my grace is sufficient for you, we would be thinking of grace in that case as God’s mercy, God’s forgiveness, God’s generosity. But here it’s not talking about guilt. It’s talking about pain. It’s talking about suffering and affliction. He sees it as a messenger of Satan. Now, he realizes God is the one who allows him to go through it. But it’s a messenger of Satan, just like God allowed Satan to afflict Job. God allows, the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. God is allowing Paul to be subject to afflictions from the hand of the devil, but it’s God’s doing. In fact, we know it’s God’s doing because when Paul prays for God to take it away, God says, I got a different idea than that. I could do that, of course, but it’s good faith. For the things to remain as is such, because my strength is made perfect in your weakness. I think what he’s saying is that the stronger we are in our natural talents and abilities, and even natural endurance of suffering and so forth, our natural strengths, they tend to obscure God’s power in us. Because even in our own minds, we know we’re handling it, But we’ve handled other stuff. We’re kind of able to do this. We can handle this. But God brings us to a place where we can’t handle it. Something that is really beyond our power to handle. So that we have to trust in him instead of in ourselves. And when we trust in him, his power is free to manifest in our lives. And this very idea was also mentioned at the very beginning of 2 Corinthians. You see that Paul… is in this book, very mindful of this. Because he says in 2 Corinthians 1, 8, he says, For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia, that we were burdened beyond measure. Okay, whatever it was, he doesn’t say what it was. He said it was a burden to him. He was afflicted and tested beyond measure. So it’s off the charts. You can’t measure this. And he says, above strength. In other words, we were given more than we could handle. This was above our strength to endure. We were afflicted above measure, beyond measure, above strength, and we despaired even of life, he said. We couldn’t even keep ourselves alive. We were that bad off. But he says, yes, we had the sense of death in ourselves so that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead. Now, There we have it again. God allows us to endure hardship, things that might seem above our strength. In fact, they are above our strength. But God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness. It’s actually a good thing, he’s saying, that I have these weaknesses. Because if I had my own strengths, I could do all this, or think I was doing it, and maybe others would think I’m doing it, in my own strengths. But if I’m manifestly a weakling, if I’m manifestly an invalid, If I manifestly inferior physically or in any other way, I do not come off looking like a strong person, and nobody will give me credit for what’s accomplished for me because I don’t look strong enough to do that, and I’m not. God puts us in positions beyond our strength. You know, some people say, well, God will never give you more than you can handle. They base that on Paul’s statement also that, you know, he said to the Corinthians in the first epistle, that God will not test us beyond what we’re able to endure. But he doesn’t say beyond what we’re able to endure in our own strength. In fact, Paul says he was a burden above his strength. But in the other passages, God will not let us be tested above what we can endure, but will, with the temptation, give a way of escape. So God, again, is the one who gets us through it. He’s the one, he lets us suffer more than we could handle, but That’s more than we could handle ourselves. But the Christian life is not supposed to be lived in our own strength by ourselves. And so Paul, who would at one level certainly much rather have this afflicting thorn, whatever it was, taken from him. He says, yeah, well, Jesus gave me a different way of looking at this. He said, my grace is sufficient for you, which means that no matter how bad it is, how much I lack strength, there’s going to be sufficiency. There’s going to be grace given equal to the need. And God’s strength will be made perfect and manifest as such in my weakness. So he says, therefore, I rejoice in those. I rejoice in my infirmities. Most people just rejoice when God heals them. or when he delivers them from a problem. And Paul did rejoice in times like that, too. He says, I also rejoice in my infirmities, because my weakness is, in a sense, the opportunity for God’s strength to be made manifest in me. So, Cody, that’s what that passage is talking about. And you want to know what? I’ve been talking for 20 minutes, and I think I really have answered all the questions people have, because no one has called. In 20 minutes, I don’t think this has ever happened before. It’s fine with me. Cody gave me a long list of questions. I can take those. But if you just said, hey, I want to call. I don’t remember what the number is. Here’s the number. If you want to be on the air, 844-484-5737. We’ve got another 40 minutes, so go ahead and get in line if you have questions you want to hear or disagreements. Again, the number, 844-484-5737. I guess I might have to consider that possibly our phone lines are not working. But I have no way of seeing that or knowing that. So I’ll go ahead and take another question from our friend Cody, who’s in prison. He said, what does it mean in Matthew 28, 18, when Jesus said, all power is given to me in heaven and on earth? Well, first of all, the word power there in the Greek is the word exousia, which actually means authority. And authority means the right to do something, the right to make the decisions, the right to have your will done. A king is in authority. He may or may not be a very powerful man. Oh, you know what? The phone lines have been full all the time. There was just a bad setting, and the call screener fixed it, so our lines are full. But let me just say, Jesus is simply saying that he is the king. Of everything. And all authority, meaning the right to rule, has been given to him. All the right to rule in heaven and earth has been given to him. And what that means is Jesus is the king of everybody and of everything. Now, some people say, well, if Jesus is the king of everything, how come things are going so badly? Well, because there’s a lot of people in rebellion against the king. But when a man is really the king, even if people who rebel against him, they don’t change the fact that he’s the king. He still has the right to rule. They’re just ignoring it or defying it. But he still is the one who has the right. And what that means is not that he’ll always get his way in everything, but it means that anyone who does not give him his way, anyone who does not submit to him, is in the wrong. And in the case of, you know, you stand against the one that God put in a charge, well, God’s the one who’s going to vindicate him eventually here. So, I mean, God gave Jesus authority. If you don’t submit to that authority… Well, you’ll have God to reckon with. That’s the point. Jesus is the king. He’s on the throne. He’s ruling. He has charge over everything in terms of his right to rule. What remains is for those who have not yet honored that authority, those who have not yet submitted to that authority, to repent and do so. All right, so now we’ve got our lines full. And that happened all at once. So I have to assume in the studio, somebody discovered that another button had to be pushed. So they all came up at once. All right, I thought it was strange not to see any calls there. All right, well, let’s go to the phones and talk to Mark in Egan, Minnesota. Hello, Mark. Welcome to The Narrow Path. Oh, is that the wrong button? It is the wrong button. Here we go. Hi, Mark. Welcome.
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Thank you. Yeah. I’m going to be talking to some Mormons, so I’m preparing for that. And one of the verses that I noticed, was 1 Timothy 2.5, and it says, For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. And when I read that, I’m like, well, they could come back at me and say, how can Jesus be God and be the mediator between God and men? So I’m trying to prepare for that, understand how I can explain that.
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Well, to be challenged on that is to be challenged by somebody who does not appreciate or understand the Trinity. And that is true of Mormons. They don’t believe in the Trinity. A lot of groups that think themselves Christians don’t believe in the Trinity. But part of that is because the Trinity is a very difficult thing to explain or to understand. Now, it should not be thought a weakness in the doctrine that our weak minds have a hard time grasping it. In fact, God is so infinitely powerful. amazing and huge and unlimited, that we should be very shocked if everything about him was easy to grasp by our pea brains. So, I mean, it’s not a weakness in the doctrine. It’s a weakness in our brains. And part of it may not be a problem with our brains in terms of a fault. It may be that God, knowing that we can’t fully grasp those things, has never really explained them very plainly, which is why people have had such trouble with understanding the Trinity from the beginning. My thought is understanding the Trinity is not absolutely essential, because if it was, Jesus would have explained it, or the apostles, or someone in the Bible would have, and we simply have no explanation of the Trinity in the Bible. Do we have allusions to it? Of course. Is it something that’s a biblical doctrine? It is. But it’s not, you can’t just turn to a certain passage and there it is explained. It just isn’t explained. What you do have is… What you do have is various passages saying things about God and about Jesus and about the Father and about the Holy Spirit, which they cannot all be true unless there is a Trinitarian framework for understanding them. But once you say that that is so, it doesn’t mean you understand it. I don’t claim to understand it myself. Now, the point is here that you don’t just… When you’re talking to a cultist who doesn’t believe Jesus is God, you don’t just let them bring up verses that… that they can’t understand alongside the view that Jesus is God, what you do is you show them the verses that say that Jesus is God. Now, you know, a lot of times when you deal with a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon, it becomes a battle of proof texts. You know, you say, okay, these verses say Jesus is God. Okay, there are verses that say that, a number of verses. There’s also verses that talk about Jesus as a separate individual than the Father. Now, both of those sets of verses fit the Trinity doctrine. The idea of the Trinity is there’s one God, but he is, you know, there’s three, as it were, persons is the term they usually use, centers of consciousness, identities in God, the Father and the Word and the Holy Spirit, or we could say the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. But the point is that, you know, those things… All the verses are accommodated by that paradigm, though the paradigm has holes in it where we don’t know exactly how all the things in it fit together. And again, that’s why I say that’s not a problem with the doctrine. That’s a problem with the limits of our ability to understand things that are infinite.
SPEAKER 03 :
But what I was going to say… Would you avoid the verses like this, then, in talking to them?
SPEAKER 06 :
No, no, I wouldn’t avoid it. I would simply say, you know, I don’t have any problem with this verse. I believe God sent Jesus to be, in fact, a mediator between man and God. That’s exactly what it says. Jesus said similar things himself. For example, when he said, I am the way, the truth, and the life, no man comes to the Father except through me. Now, he’s obviously talking about himself as a means by which people come to God. He’s the way. That’s what a mediator between God and man would be. you know, the conduit, the avenue through which we can have come to God. Jesus gave the same idea when he was talking to Nathaniel in John chapter 1. He says, you will see the angels of heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man. That reference to ascending and descending angels is a quotation from Genesis where Jacob, saw Jacob’s ladder in the dream, and it was a ladder upon which angels of God were ascending and descending. The very phrase Jesus used, he’s borrowing from Jacob’s dream. Now, what did he see? He saw access between man and God, between earth and heaven. That’s what the angels of God were ascending and descending on this access way, this ladder, this stairway. And God was at the top and earth was at the bottom. Now, Jesus said, you know, Nathaniel, the time will come where you’re going to see me that way. You’re going to see it as if the angels of God are ascending and descending on me. That is to say, I’m the ladder. I’m the stairway. I’m the way that there is access to God through. Now, to say that Jesus is like Jacob’s ladder and you can come to God through him, in a sense, it’s being as if Jesus isn’t God because he’s the one through whom Somebody gets to God. But that doesn’t mean he’s not God. If it did, then we have to throw out a whole bunch of other verses about him. You really can’t have a theology, not a biblical one, that has to throw out lots of verses of the Bible. Jesus is God in the flesh. And he was sent and came from his Father in order to create access to God for mankind. And, you know, the whole of theology… the whole of the incarnation and the atonement and all the theories on that, they are related to that basic statement. And when Paul says there’s one mediator between God and man, and that’s the man Jesus, he’s simply using fairly clear words to address that concept that is addressed in other ways elsewhere. But I would not avoid the verse. I’d simply avoid letting that hang you up. I’d say, okay, yeah, Jesus is the mediator God. But the Bible says he’s God. So deal with that. I do. I have a Trinitarian doctrine. You don’t. What are you going to do with that? I’m out of time. I’m sorry to say. I’ll be right back. Our website is thenarrowpath.com. I’ll be back in 30 seconds.
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Is the Great Tribulation about to begin? Are we seeing the fulfillment of biblical prophecy unfolding before our very eyes? In the series, When Shall These Things Be?, Steve Gregg answers these and many other intriguing questions. The lecture series entitled, When Shall These Things Be?, can be downloaded in MP3 format without charge from our website,
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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. If you have questions about the Bible or about the Christian faith, I’d be glad to hear from you. The number to call is… 844-484-5737. That’s 844-484-5737. All right, our lines are full at the moment, so we’ll go and talk to some of those who have been waiting for quite a long time now, and that would include Cookie in Katy, Texas. Hi, Cookie, good to hear from you.
SPEAKER 05 :
Hey, nice to talk to you too, Steve. I have a question. Oh, and from Luke about the prophetess Anna. It says, I’m going to just read a little bit of it, and then I’m going to ask you two questions from the passage in Luke 2. It says, Now there was one Anna, a prophetess, a daughter of whoever, of the tribe of Asher. She was of great age and had lived with her husband seven years from her virginity. And this woman was a widow for about 84 years. who did not depart from the temple but served God with fasting and prayers night and day. And coming in that instant, she gave thanks to the Lord and spoke of him to all those who looked for redemption in Jerusalem. My two questions are, because it’s interesting. First of all, her living in the temple, like what would that have meant? And two, the fact is as a woman, even though she was able to participate in the worship in the temple, in the court of women, Who would she have been talking to? Because women’s testimonies were insignificant to men. So who would she have been sharing? It says here that all those who looked for the redemption of Jerusalem. Who would she have been communicating with?
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, she was talking to all those who were looking for redemption in Jerusalem. This refers to the fact that in the time of Christ, and of course this is at the time of the birth of Christ, But it was true before and after the birth of Christ, and obviously at this point, that the nation of Israel, as at all other times in their history, had a lot of people in it that were not real believers. They’re not faithful to God. That’s one of the complaints the prophets had. That’s one of the complaints Jesus had about the Jews of his time. They just really weren’t faithful to God. They were just externalistic and hypocritical. But at every time in Israel’s history, there were also faithful Jews. Usually, they were in a very small minority. They were called a remnant. And the remnant of the faithful remnant. They were the Jews who were, in principle, what the whole nation was called to be. That is, God’s people. Believers following God, obeying Him. They were really God’s people. And this was true before Jesus came, of course, as well as afterwards. Jesus, I mean, in the Old Testament… There were lots of cases like this. Elijah thought he was the only one faithful, and God told him there’s 7,000 more in Israel that had not bowed any of the veil. So there were always some, even when it seemed like there weren’t any. So in Jesus’ day, much of the nation was like at other times in Israel’s history, pretty much alienated from God, basically just keeping externalistic religious practices at the temple, didn’t really have a heart for God. And yet there were exceptions. This woman was clearly an exception. She spent night and day in the temple praying and fasting. She was probably in her 90s if she had been a widow for 84 years, even if she had married at age 13 and then lost her husband immediately. She’d be 97. So obviously she was a very old woman, very respected. In fact, she’s referred to as a prophetess, which is interesting. Because the term can be used for many things. We think of prophets as like the prophets in the Old Testament, like major spokespersons for God, like Isaiah and Jeremiah. But there are also lesser known prophets in the Old Testament, apparently here. People simply, you know, they listen to God and they heard from God and they spoke to people. for God and so forth. Now, you mentioned that women were not respected as witnesses. That was true in the court of law. The Jewish courts did not respect female witnesses. They thought they were too excitable and too unreliable. Yeah, I know. I know that offends us today, but that’s, hey, we can’t change history. That’s what the rabbis thought. And therefore, she lived in a time when she would not have even been invited to give testimony in court. But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t people who recognized the spiritual wisdom of women or even the inspiration of wisdom. Even in the Old Testament, there was a prophetess named Huldah. In the book of Acts, of course, there’s four prophetesses who are the daughters of Philip. And so, you know, and Paul, or when the Spirit was given in Pentecost, Peter, you know, quoted Joel who said, the Spirit will be poured out and your sons and your daughters will prophesy. So, you know, that women could prophesy was accepted in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. Despite the cultural distrust of them as witnesses in a court trial, there were people who overlooked those kinds of prejudices and recognized godliness and wisdom when spoken by a woman who seemed to speak with the Spirit of God. The one she spoke to, I believe, would be, they’re the ones who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem. These were the ones who were still hanging out for the hope of Israel, which was the kingdom, which was the king, the Messiah coming. So she and her acquaintances, whoever they were, would fellowship together. And she might not have been the only one who spoke to them. Maybe they all spoke to each other. You know, it says in Malachi chapter 3, it talks about a time, when Israel was kind of apostatish, you know, kind of far from God, a lot of complaints against them here. But in Malachi chapter 3, it says in verse 16, then those who feared the Lord, so there’s a remnant even in Malachi, most of the Jews he is rebuking would not fit this category, but there were some who did. Those who feared the Lord spoke to one another. And the Lord listened and heard them, and so a book of remembrance was written before him for those who feared the Lord and who meditate on his name. Now, you might think Jews generally did this. No, most of them did not. But the remnant who did, obviously, they were starving for fellowship. You live in a time of apostate religion. Some Christians can relate to this if they have a hard time finding zealous, true followers of Jesus in the churches they go to. You start to feel like, man, it’s lonely here. You’re going to be faithful to Jesus? Who are you going to meet that ever feels like you do about it? Well, you may feel like you won’t meet them, but there are some. And when you meet someone like that, you want to hang with them. You know, if you’re zealous for God, you’re hungry for fellowship with other people who are zealous for God. And that seems to be the case that Malachi describes. Those who feared the Lord, they got together. They spoke to each other. And God made a book of remembrance. Remember, Jesus said to his disciples, do not rejoice. that the demons are subject to you, but that your names are written in heaven. They were part of the remnant of their time. This woman, Anna, was a part of a remnant of her time, and the people she spoke to were apparently others in that who spoke to each other. And so this doesn’t mean that they were her congregation and she was their preacher or something. It’s possible that others in the group sometimes spoke meaningfully to each other, but she happened to have encountered Jesus as a baby in the temple. She knew who it was. And she went and told the others about it. So that’s all. That’s what I understand to be the whole, the meaning of that encounter there.
SPEAKER 05 :
That was a huge amount of information I would have never picked up. So thank you. And Marlon’s going to tell you hello, too. Have a good one, okay?
SPEAKER 06 :
Okay. So hide Marlon for me.
SPEAKER 05 :
I will. Thanks.
SPEAKER 06 :
God bless you, Cookie. Bye now. All right. All right. Let’s talk to… James from Crater Lake Oaks. Is that right? California. Hi, James. Welcome.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, it’s Clear Lake Oaks.
SPEAKER 06 :
Oh, Clear Lakes. Okay, my call screener didn’t spell it right. That’s all right.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s all right. Yeah, I’m calling in regards to Psalm 89, verse 7. Okay. It’s a really short verse. It says, God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the saints and or also to be held in reverence. by all those around him. I thought fear and reverence were synonymous or interchangeable.
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, they can be, more or less. They certainly are overlapping in their definitions. But this is the Psalms. This is poetry. And the main feature of Hebrew poetry is repetition. I mean, when you read Hebrew poetry, like Psalms or Job or Song of Solomon or… Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, these are written in poetry, as most of the prophets’ oracles were. And one of the things, when you study the Old Testament, you encounter a lot of Hebrew poetry, especially in Psalms. And poetry, you know, in English poetry, you usually recognize you’re reading poetry if some lines rhyme with each other, or the meter is consistent in a series of lines. Those are the ways that English poetry is recognized. Hebrew poetry is not recognized by that, but by repetition. So when it says God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the saints and to be held in reverence by all those around him, well, greatly to be feared is the same as held in reverence. In the assembly of the saints is the same as by all those around him. He’s in the assembly. They are around him. He is to be feared in reverence. So reverence… And fear are, in this case and in many cases, pretty much different ways of saying the same thing.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, okay.
SPEAKER 06 :
That’s what I needed. All right, brother. Thanks for your call. Don in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thank you. Thanks for taking my call, Steve. I’ve really been blessed by your ministry in the last couple of years particularly. And I think what I appreciate the most, so I’ve walked with the Lord for over 40 years and taught the Bible and been a minister of music also for many years. I grew up Southern Baptist. But what I’ve appreciated about your ministry and the way you approach the Bible is one of humility, because we all see in a glass darkly, so to speak, you know, as Paul says. And so I really appreciated that. And my question is more of just a comment that I can listen on the air. But growing up basically Armenian and only in 2013 was I for the very first time approached and confronted with Calvinism. And I was attending a Presbyterian church here in Pittsburgh, a very, very good church, by the way. But It was a new thing to me, even though I’d grown up in the church for many years and within the Southern Baptist tradition and other non-denominational churches that I served in as pastor of worship. But I’d never really encountered it within, you know, the actual church I was going to. And the Lord really had us there at this particular church for about eight years. I was serving in music and stuff. But my point here is that as I’ve now in the last eight years really studied Calvinism and… And seeing, to me, that seems such obvious misuse of Scripture to take away free will and to put God in the place of managing, micromanaging everything. My point here, and I guess what I want to hear you comment on, is there’s really, really intelligent people that are Calvinists. And, you know, we can name so many, Sproul and Piper and D.A. Carson, MacArthur, James White, even Spurgeons. And my mystery is the deeper I go in understanding Calvinism, my mind goes, why do they grab, why do they hold on to that, which to me seems so obviously wrong. And again, I want to take you, because I might be wrong too, and that’s what I appreciate about your ministry is your humility. But I guess I’d just like to hear you comment about this, these highly intelligent people, MacArthur and Sproul, how can they hold so tightly to something that seems to me and others so obviously a misinterpretation and really a misrepresentation of God’s character. So that’s my comment and I’ll listen on the air. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER 06 :
Okay, thank you for your call. Now when it comes to, of course, R.C. Sproul and John MacArthur, they aren’t Calvinists anymore. They’re in heaven now, so they they’re not holding that view anymore. But the thing is that, and that’s said somewhat in jest, though I believe it’s true, I don’t mean that as an insult to our Calvinist friends. But obviously, if Calvinism is not true, then we can say that those who go to heaven, even if they were Calvinists at the time they left, they arrive with a different viewpoint. Now, but that doesn’t answer your question. Your question is, why would people who are otherwise very commendable and well-studied and smart… seem to make such a mistake. Now, there’s a couple of parts to that. One of them is that they hold some other important commitments which incline them to see everything through the lens of their system. And by the way, that’s true of Arminians too. It’s probably true of many people, maybe most people, who hold tightly to one side of a theological controversy. That is to say, they may in fact hold their views strictly because they have exegeted the Scriptures. They don’t have any preference in the matter. They just feel like this is what the Scripture points to. But obviously, if that is the case, then somebody is doing very poor exegesis because Arminians and Calvinists are looking at the same Bible. And they have the same degree of education. And they have the same degree of love for God. And many of them have spent equal amounts of hours meditating and studying the scriptures, and yet someone’s getting it wrong. Someone’s doing bad exegesis here. So, I mean, this is not to reflect on their character or on their honesty. This is just saying someone’s looking at this through the wrong lens. Now, the lens that Calvinists look at all the scriptures on these disputed points through is the lens of what they call God’s sovereignty. And Arminians look at everything through the lens of what they would call God’s character, and especially his justice and his love. Now, because of his justice and love, Arminians believe that God would not exclude anyone from being saved. That is, he would not prevent anyone from having the option of being saved. Not everyone will be saved, but anyone could be if they wished. Anyone could turn to God. Even the worst sinners can turn to God and be forgiven and be saved. And that’s because of the love and justice of God. Calvinism, based on another prior commitment, what they call the sovereignty of God, say, well, but sovereignty means, and this is what they say sovereignty means, that God is the one who’s making all the decisions. And since God makes all the decisions, that means he must leave nothing to us. He must leave nothing at loose ends in order for his purpose to be done in every particular way. He can’t leave anything to us to decide. He’s got to orchestrate it all. This is actually the doctrine called, we could better call, you know, it’s more about the providence of God, how God governs. Meticulous providence is the term that is sometimes used. Meticulous means down to the detail. And providence means what God arranges, ordains, and causes to happen. So the Calvinist thinks that God gets all the glory for salvation only because if meticulous providence is true. And here’s how they reason. They say, well, if God chooses some to be saved and then makes them get saved, which is what Calvinism teaches, then they can’t take any credit for their salvation. They had no power to save themselves. You know, God has simply, he reserves all the glory to himself for their salvation. But there’s a downside to that, too, because it suggests that the people who don’t get saved, it’s also God who decided that, since God makes all the decisions. If God can save anyone he wants to, then anyone he doesn’t save, he didn’t want to. I mean, there’s no way around that. If you’re a Calvinist, you have to say, God did not want everyone to be saved. And Calvin and other great Calvinists of the past… I said, that’s true. God glorifies himself in the salvation of the elect, and he also glorifies himself in the punishment of the reprobate, which is the ones he doesn’t elect. He gets glory out of both, and so he wants to be glorified, so he saves the ones he wants to, and the ones he doesn’t want to save, he damns them. But see, the bottom line here is, of course, in Calvinism, he damns them not because… They chose to reject him, but because they had no opportunity but to reject him. He didn’t give them the power to repent. He gives that power to the elect and does not give it to the others. So really, he’s blaming the others for failing to do what he did not enable them to do, and which they could in no sense do, according to Calvinism. So this seems to go against the justice of God. How could God determine before a person is born… that they will not get saved and they will go to hell, and he won’t give them any choice in the matter. And the only reason he even makes them in the first place is so he can glorify himself by tormenting them in hell forever. Now, this does not sit well with people who believe that God’s character is, let’s say, better than ours. Even if it was just like ours, which it isn’t, it’s better. But, I mean, God is love. I’m not. But I’d have to be a very unloving person myself. To say, there’s a bunch of people, I could save them all, but I think I want this proportion, the majority of them, I’m going to burn them. And not just burn them up, I’m going to torment them forever and ever. Why? Because I can. Because I’m sovereign. Well, okay, you may be sovereign, you may be able to do what you want, but that doesn’t mean you’re good if you choose to exercise your sovereignty in evil ways. Now, of course, some people say, you can’t call it evil because God has the right to do what he wants. That’s what sovereign means. And if he doesn’t want to save some, who’s to say he has to? Don’t you choose your own friends? Can’t God choose his? Now, all of this is fancy talk to get around the fact that they’re saying that God really doesn’t want to save very many people, at least not the majority. And the ones he doesn’t want to save, it’s just not that he wants to exclude them from heaven. He wants them to suffer forever and ever and ever for not getting there. But he never gave them even the slightest bona fide opportunity. Now, this strikes most thinking people as an injustice. One that if we knew a human king who did that to his subjects, we’d say he was an extremely evil tyrant. Now, we won’t call God a tyrant because God is good. But how is he good if he does that? Well, the Armenian says, no problem. He is good and he doesn’t do that. That idea that God does that is based on an artificial view of sovereignty. Is God sovereign? He is. What does sovereign mean? That he makes everything happen? No. Sovereign never had that meaning. That’s not the meaning of the English word sovereign, and there’s no Hebrew or Greek word sovereign in the Bible. But the English word sovereign means the person who’s in charge and has the right to make the decisions. So if somebody is in a position of authority, he can unilaterally make whatever decision he wants. He answers to no one. No one can call him on it. Then he’s sovereign. But once you say that someone is sovereign, you have said nothing about what he actually does with this authority. He has authority, which means he has the right to do what he wants to, and no one can challenge him. But what he does with that authority will depend every bit on his character. Is he a kind sovereign, or is he an angry and cruel sovereign? Well, it could be either way. He could be equally sovereign. A sovereign king… may decide he wants to micromanage everyone’s affairs and punish people who didn’t do anything that they couldn’t avoid doing and so forth. But a sovereign might also say, you know, because I can do what I want, what I want to do is give some freedom to people. I kind of like people to make a choice of their own in the question of whether they want to love me or not. You see, a father is in a sense a sovereign over his children. And some sovereigns really govern their homes with a rod of iron. Others give their children some leeway to make some choices, at least with some of their time. Now, a sovereign can do either one. When Calvinists say God is sovereign, they’re insisting that as a sovereign, he has to ordain all that occurs. But if someone’s sovereign, he doesn’t have to do anything. You can’t tell him what he has to do. He’s sovereign. He can do what he wants to do. And if he wants to make creatures that are a lot more like him than the animals are, especially in that they are rational and have free will, well, who can say that a sovereign God can’t do that if he wants to? It doesn’t compromise his sovereignty. It’s an exercise of it. So the underlying thing that Calvinists have is a philosophical notion that God’s sovereignty means he must ordain all that happens. The Bible says nothing to that effect anywhere. Not a word. Of course, the Bible doesn’t even use the word sovereign, but it does say he’s sovereign. He’s sovereign like a king. He’s sovereign like a father. He’s sovereign like a lord. But all kings and fathers and lords we know are sovereign in their domains, but that doesn’t mean they micromanage everything that is done by those that they rule. They may or they may not. That’s up to them. Calvinists think if God can, he will. Arminians say not necessarily. God is sovereign, and he set things up the way he wanted them, and we think he wanted them to be in such a way that there are creatures that aren’t programmed to behave certain ways, like animals are programmed to migrate in their proper seasons and so forth. He wanted there to be creatures more like himself, who he could give dominion to. Now, if you’re going to give someone charge of ruling something, you’ve got to give them choices they can make. You’re not going to be able to have dominion or rule over anything if you can’t make any choices. Ruling is the very making of choices. So God makes a species that is capable of making choices. And he does all he can to persuade them to make right choices. But they could still make other ones. Now, so the Arminian has an underlying foundation for their theology. That is, God is just. There’s certainly nothing that is affirmed more often than that in the Bible. And because he is just, he gives people what they deserve. And the Bible always says that. The Bible says you judge people for their works, their actions, and their deeds on the judgment day. Calvinists know that the main thing about God is his sovereignty. Now, by that they mean his rights, his privileges as God. So the Calvinists… is jealous over the privileges of God. And they think God is jealous over his privileges too. The Arminian thinks he should be jealous over the character of God. And that God is jealous over his character. And which is it? In Jeremiah chapter 9, God said, Let him boast, if anyone boasts, let him boast in this, that he knows and understands me, that I exercise loving kindness and justice in the earth. For in these I delight. That’s his character. You want to know God? Know this. This is his character. Nowhere in the Bible does it say if you want to know God, you need to have a full list of his proper privileges. God has privileges, but he’s not a God who’s jealous of his privileges, which is why it says in Philippians 2 that Jesus existed in the form of God, but did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. He emptied himself, took on the form of a servant. This is a reduction of privilege. But it’s a very great manifestation of character. And so Arminianism exalts in God’s character as it is revealed everywhere in Scripture. Calvinism, which of course didn’t arise until the 4th century anyway, and it came from Greek philosophy. It exalts not in God’s character, although they might say they do. It exalts in his sovereignty. Now, why do good people fall for that? Because they think that’s how you glorify God. They think if you diminish his sovereignty, you’re diminishing God. Arminians think if you’re diminishing God’s character, you’re diminishing God. It’s a different thing. Sovereignty has to do with his privileges. Character has to do with who he is, what he’s like, and what kinds of things he does. So those are the main things. differences between it. I can see how a person who really loves God can be committed if someone gets to them early enough in their life to tell them, hey, God’s sovereign. That’s the one thing you don’t want to compromise. You’ve got to have God ordain everything or he’s not God. Sproul actually says that. Sproul actually said, if God doesn’t ordain everything that happens, he’s not God because he’s not sovereign. Well, none of that is true. The Bible does not say that God ordains all that happens. And it doesn’t say that he’s not sovereign. He can be sovereign and not ordain all that happens. But Calvinists don’t know this. Not because they’re stupid, but because they’re locked into a paradigm. And when it comes to the study of Scripture, the priority of the paradigm seems to win out over the exegesis of individual passages. I’m sorry to take up so much time. We have a lot of callers we didn’t get to. I apologize. We can do it tomorrow if you call. You’re listening to The Narrow Path. We’re listener supported. You can find out how to donate if you are, or just use our resources. by going to thenarrowpath.com. Let’s talk again tomorrow. God bless.
