The discussion explores the nuanced understanding of separation between churches, highlighting that true separation is unto the gospel of Jesus Christ rather than mere external observances. We also address pressing questions on the nature of suffering, considering scriptural references to disabilities and adversity, and how they reflect the consequences of sin rather than divine intention. Additionally, this episode offers a thoughtful exposition on parables and perceived contradictions in scripture, equipping listeners with a deeper grasp of biblical truths.
00:00:00 Introduction to Baptism of the Holy Spirit
Baptism of the Holy Spirit is an issue filled with controversy. What is it? When does it happen? Is it required for salvation? Well, these are just a few of the questions that we’ll hear today and many more, so stay with us to hear the answers.
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How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith,
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What more can he say than to you he hath said, to you who for refuge to Jesus have fled?
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Fear not,
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You’re listening to the question and answer program of Through the Bible Radio with our Bible teacher, Dr. J. Vernon McGee, whose answers to the questions of his many listeners for over 30 years have been preserved for our education and edification today and hopefully for years to come. Our first question comes from a confused listener who has written a rather complicated question. which has included such topics as the rapture, the tribulation, Armageddon, and the remnant. And he’s made reference to Joel 2, Ezekiel 38 and 39, Isaiah 2, Malachi 4, and 2 Peter 3. He says, I would like to know how to fit these various passages and events into God’s program for the future.
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The best thing to do would be for this party to take each one of these scriptures separately and pinpoint the place and the program of God that he feels they belong. And you’ll find out that it does make a great deal of sense. I’m not going to attempt to give any kind of a program that we believe God will be following, although I would like to hit some high points. And I do want to turn to your question that relates actually to Joel 2.20 and to put it into the place where I think, by the way, it belongs. And I think it’ll be helpful to you if I begin back with Joel 2.19. Let me read now. Yea, the Lord will answer and say unto his people, Behold, I’ll send you corn and wine and oil, and ye shall be satisfied therewith, and I will no more make you of reproach among the Gentiles. Now I’m going to read from my book on Hosea and Joel. I’m reading now from my book. At that time the Lord will give them corn and wine and oil. They will be satisfied and no longer will they be a reproach among the heathen. Even the most radical radical today would not say that this is being fulfilled now. The largest population of Israel is not in the land. There are more Jews in New York City than there are in Israel, and there’s a great company of them even in Russia. This is not being fulfilled at this time. This still looks forward to the future. It’s definitely the period known as the Day of the Lord. which will begin with darkness, move on into the dawn of the millennium, past man’s rebellion that breaks out on the earth, and on to the beginning of the eternal kingdom. From here on, we are bottled into that particular period. Let me say it would be well for this party to take these words, the remnant and the great tribulation, and these other words, the rapture, and all of that, and make a chart and fit them into a time period. And I think it would help clarify a great deal of this for him. Joel 2.20 reads, But I will remove far off from you the northern armies. And I will drive him into a land barren and desolate, with his face toward the east sea, and his hinder part toward the utmost sea. And his stink shall come up, and his ill savor shall come up, because he hath done great things. I’m reading now my interpretation. I will remove far off from you the northern army, Certainly, he’s not talking here about locusts, but an army coming down from the north. This was partially fulfilled when Assyria came down and took the northern kingdom. But God miraculously delivered the southern kingdom from them. It was another hundred years before the southern kingdom went into captivity, and then it was to the Babylonians, not the Assyrians. However, there is still a future fulfillment of the removal of the northern army. This is given in more detail in Ezekiel 38 and 39. In the great tribulation period, Russia will come down from the north, but God will deliver Israel. The description given here fits the description of the battle of Armageddon. Now, may I say to you, that the coming down from the north is not the battle of Armageddon. It fits into the Great Tribulation period, and I believe this is what triggers the battle of Armageddon. Now I’ll go on with the reading. I will drive him into a land barren and desolate, with his face toward the east sea, and his hind apart toward the utmost sea. And his stink shall come up, and his ill savour shall come up, because he hath done great things. The sea of Galilee is on one side, and the Mediterranean sea is on the other side of the valley of Azdraelon, where Armageddon will take place. God will intervene as we have seen in Ezekiel. He will destroy this enemy that comes from the north, and he does it to glorify his name. God is glorified when he judges sin just as much as he is when he saves a sinner. That’s hard for us to believe, but it’s a bitter pill for man to swallow. God is holy, and a holy righteous God is going to judge. Every one of the prophets say that. The Word of God has a lot to say about the judgment of God, but He doesn’t like to judge. We’ve already seen that He’s gracious and merciful and slow to anger. Judgment is a strange work for God. That is why He holds out His hands all the day long and asks us to come to Him. When people refuse to turn to Him, He must judge them in His righteousness and in His holiness. And I’m going to break off the reading there because I think that the thing that you’re after is to fit all of these events into the future program of God. And I trust that what we’ve said might be helpful. I suggest for each one of these books and passages, we now have a book on each one of these books of the Bible. And it’s always well when you lift out a verse of Scripture to make sure that the interpretation takes in the time period into which it fits. Is it speaking of the past, the present, or the future? And what particular place in either the past or the present or the future does it fit in? Those are very important things, by the way.
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A listener in Camillus, New York has a question about separation. She says, is there any scripture to support the thinking of local churches who do not fellowship with other churches who differ on doctrine?
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Well, may I say this, that when you talk about separation, separation, if you notice the epistle to the Romans, is not from something but unto something. Paul says in the first verse of Romans, Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called an apostle separated unto the gospel of God. Now, Paul was not separated from something here. He was separated unto the gospel of God. What is then separation? It’s not giving up drinking coffee during Lent. It’s not not going to movies or not using lipstick and all that sort of thing. That is not real Bible separation. Bible separation means you are separated unto Jesus Christ. We belong to Him. We are engaged to Him, and we’re going to be presented to Him someday. We fellowship around the person of Christ, and I have found that I can fellowship with any person that will meet with me around the person of Christ. Now, if he won’t insist that I accept his mode of baptism, and I have marvelous fellowship with some people that believe that you ought to be put under the water three times, I can fellowship with those that sprinkle. I got out of the Presbyterian church, but I can fellowship with them, provided we meet around the person of Christ. Separation is unto, not just from something. Now, if you get separated unto Christ, You’ll find out you’re separated from something, and you don’t have to withdraw from them. They’ll withdraw from you. I have no problem here in Pasadena about this matter of separation. I find that the churches and pastors here that are liberal, they have nothing in the world to do with me. Not a thing. They talk about brotherhood, but I just do not happen to be in that brotherhood. They talk about loving everybody, but they sure don’t love me. I feel badly about that, too, because I think that I’m a nice fellow, that they ought to love me, too, but they don’t. But if you want to know the truth, it doesn’t bother me a bit, because if they’d meet with me around a person of Christ, we could have fellowship. But we can’t have fellowship unless they do. And so that’s the problem, you see. You don’t have to worry about this problem that you brought up to me. If you will hold up the person of Jesus Christ, and by the way, that means you’ll defend his word also. When you do that, you’ll find out you’re already separated, brother. They’ve let you. And those that believe, though, as you do, they will come to you. That’s one of the reasons that I love the radio ministry. Do you know what it does? It lets me know who believes the Bible and who doesn’t. Those that believe the Word of God and want to see it gotten out, I find they come right to us. Those that don’t, they get as far from us as they possibly can. And I do not have fellowship with them. And tell the truth, I don’t mind that. I wish they would, though, have fellowship with us.
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An Ann Arbor, Michigan listener has a question about the baptism of the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues. He says, I believe the Bible teaches that tongues was never a universal gift for all Christians according to 1 Corinthians 12. If it was not a universal gift then, why should it be now? Am I correct?
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And I want to say to you, you are very correct. Now, the thing that seems to have bugged him, and that is because that it speaks of the fact that Christ at the beginning is the baptizer and he baptizes with the Holy Spirit. And then later on, we find in the New Testament that the Holy Spirit is the baptizer and the individual is put into the body of Christ, or Christ is the receiver there, as apparently the Holy Spirit is at the beginning. And it’s been suggested to him that this first baptism is one that you have to seek. The other one, apparently these people are willing to admit now that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is something that happens just one time, but that this first one is something different, and that’s the one you seek. Well, very candidly, that is to absolutely ignore the clear teaching of the Word of God. When Christ came, John the Baptist had already begun his ministry, and he was called John the Baptist. He was a baptizer. Now, John was never in the church, and he tells us he was never in the church. He says, I ask him, are you the one that’s to come? And he says, no, I’m not, and furthermore, I’m not going to be the bride either. I’m the friend of the bridegroom. And he’s going to be among those that when the church is presented to Christ, he’s going to be there for the wedding and also there for the marriage supper of the Lamb. But he’s not a member of the church. Now, he was a baptizer, and he baptized, and he actually baptized the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, I’m not wanting to go into a great deal of detail about But the primary, basic word for baptize is babto. And babto has the sense of dip. You find that used that way when it says that when the Lord Jesus comes, his garment was red. dipped in blood, and that word babto is used. Something that is put into something, brought under the influence of it, so much so that the garment is actually changed, the color of it is changed. Now, that’s the basic word, and baptizo actually has the double meaning, a basic meaning, and that basic meaning, I feel, is not a two-way thing. Babto would mean there are two actions. You put something in something, then you take something out. But baptizo is primarily that when we are baptized into Christ, we’re never taken out. You are put in there. That is actually real immersion. You’re just put in Christ and never removed from that position. Now, ritual baptism is by water, and that is dipping into the water and taking out of the water. That is ritual baptism. If you really immersed a person, why, you’d be guilty of drowning, be death by drowning. but you put in and take out. Now, the baptism as used like this in Scripture to come under the influence, and I want to give a quotation, a definition of Dr. James W. Dale. And he says, whatever is capable of thoroughly changing the character, state, or condition of any object is capable of baptizing that object. And by such change of character, state, or condition does in fact baptize him. So that we are told that we are buried with him in baptism. Well, when did that take place? Well, when he died 1900 years ago, he was guiltless. I was guilty, I was a sinner, but I was buried with Him in identification. I was brought to Him and we are told that by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body. I’m identified now in that body, put in that body, never to be taken out. That’s the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Now, water baptism by immersion, I think, sets it forward. And there I go using the term immersion, which I actually don’t mean. I mean by dipping into the water and taking them out of the water. But that is a ritual baptism. The real baptism is the baptism of the Holy Spirit. And that only takes place one time. So it’s been very hard for these people to use that. I felt like I should call that to the attention of this individual
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Now, this listener in Huntington, West Virginia, says that he believes in the infallible and errant inspired word of God, which has no contradictions. His pastor, who’s a liberal, goes round and round with him on this issue. And then he says, in Exodus, it says Moses saw God, but the Bible also says that no man has seen God. Is this a contradiction?
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When it says that in the Old Testament that they saw God, I trust that you understand that the Word of God makes it very clear that God is a spirit. And those that worship Him as the Lord Jesus Christ, they shall worship Him in spirit and in truth. And God gave two commandments relative to that. Thou shall have no other gods before me. and thou shalt not make unto thee any likeness of anything. Because anything they’d make a likeness of would be a creature, because God is the Creator, and there’d be no likeness. They wouldn’t know how to make him if they attempted to put it in some human form. And that’s one reason I never like pictures of Jesus, is because no one knows how he looked, because the Bible’s never dealt with that. That’s not the important thing at all. Now, what Moses saw was a likeness of God, a visible likeness. presence, the Shekinah glory was the evidence of the presence of God with these people. And that’s all they saw. So that to say that any one little man has looked upon the face of God, no man has done that. And the Bible does not teach that at all. What they saw was a visible presence. And that visible presence was the glory, I think, the Shekinah glory of God. And I don’t think that you have a contradiction there. And if you think that’s a contradiction, then may I say to you, I don’t think that you’re reading the Scripture accurately, and we ought to be very careful how we read the Word of God.
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A Tarpon Springs, Florida listener has a question which came out of a discussion her Sunday school class had about the people Jesus healed. She says, One woman in class said that God made them that way to use them in their circumstances to bring them or others to Christ. She quotes Exodus 4.11 and Isaiah 45.7 to support her view. Is she right?
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May I say that that’s entirely a wrong way to to express it. The quotation that’s given in verse 11 of chapter 4 of Exodus is, And the Lord said unto him, that is Moses, Who hath made man’s mouth, or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind, have not I the Lord? Well, the whole point of that passage of Scripture is not that God made them that way, but God made the mouth and the parts of our body, and they become as they are because of sin. Sin is what makes the blind. Sin is doing that. And God made it that way, by the way, that your sins are what bring tragedy into life. Now, God set that up that way at the very beginning, and anything that’s contrary to Him, must always eventuate in tragedy and in sorrow. It couldn’t be otherwise. Now I’m going to go over to Isaiah 45, 7. God says, I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things. Now, the word that’s translated evil here is the Hebrew word ra, and it should have been translated sorrow or wretchedness or adversity or afflictions and calamities, but it’s never translated sin. In other words, God created evil Only in the sense that he made sorry and wretchedness and all of these things to be the fruit and the result of sin.
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A listener in Union Gap, Washington, had some difficulty with Luke chapter 13. He says, Could you please explain the meaning of this phrase?
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Now, may I say to you that here is a place where you ought to put together all of the four Gospels. In the Gospel of Matthew, you have in Matthew 13 the mystery parables, and there Matthew makes it very clear that the question was, since he presented, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Well, what’s going to happen to it now with Jesus crucified and gone back to heaven? Those mystery parables reveal a picture of the kingdom of heaven condition, the mystery form of it as it is today. And in it, we are told that there were good fish and bad fish. that’s very clear and what you have is a picture of christendom what you have is a picture of the world where the church is in it this is not a picture of the church there’s a picture of the world as it is today and the church is in the world and there is the bad and the good today and what is happening leaven is taken And that’s evil, always used as evil, and that’s hidden in the meal, and that’s the Word of God. And that’s the reason we have so much false teaching today. And then you have the mustard seed, a little bitty seed, that wasn’t intended to become a great tree, but it got into the vigoro, and the vigoro sort of pushed it up, and it became a tree, and the birds lit in it. Now, we’re told that the birds represent Satan, in the first parable of the sower. So it hasn’t changed. And so here, the birds are Satan getting in to the tree. The tree, I think, is the church in the world today. And it’s become a big organization, and it’s the church of Laodicea. A lot of evil in it, even in the church today. Birds got in. Devil gets in the church, friends. So that there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think would be wrong if you tried to handle it any other way.
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If you’d like to know more about the infiltration of evil into the church, we have several suggested resources that you might want to think about getting. The first are several of Dr. McGee’s sermons on CD. They are Apostasy, The Apostasy Has Arrived, and God’s answer to problems in times like these. Now, we also have the booklet, What Can Believers Do in Days of Apostasy? and our e-booklet, Amazing, Alarming, and Awful Apostasy. The only way to identify what’s false is to know what’s truth. So, in order to recognize the signs of false teaching in the church, you need to be filled with the truth of God’s word through good, sound biblical teaching, which is exactly what you’ll find with the solid teaching of Dr. J. Vernon McGee on the Through the Bible radio program heard on the station and online each Monday through Friday. So join us on this five-year journey through the whole Word of God. And to help you in your understanding of God’s truth, notes and outlines are available for free. You can download them online or we can mail them to you when you call us. For ordering information on any of these products, Just call 1-800-65-BIBLE Monday through Thursday from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Pacific Time. To get the e-booklet as a free PDF download, go to our website at ttb.org, where you can also find our online bookstore. For those of you who would prefer to write, send your letters to Questions and Answers. In Canada, Box 25325. London, Ontario, N6C 6B1. In the U.S., Box 7100. Pasadena, California, 91109. Before we go, we’d like to remind you to pray for us as we continue to take the whole word to the whole world. We believe your prayers play a vital role in our efforts to fulfill the mission that God has given to us to reach the lost and dying of this world. So again, pray for us. Now we pray that our great and mighty God will answer all your questions and solve all your problems. This program has been brought to you by the faithful friends and supporters of Through the Bible Radio Network.
