Bible Q&A with Steve Gregg - September 7, 2020

well it's good to see all you people here tonight i guess you must have heard we had air conditioning draw them all in that way uh we're just have a q a tonight which we do usually when we're here and um i just want to say this some of you already know but this is the first copy i've received of my new book it's not published yet i mean this one is this one is i wish i had copies i could give out here if i was an ordinary speaker who wrote a book i'd have my wife in the back selling copies but we don't do that kind of thing we will never do that kind of thing we only give things away as that is until we run out of them but right now this is the only one i've got and uh and it belongs to my wife it's a gift to her so but i just want you to see how it is it's 430 pages it's called empire of the risen sun a treatise on the kingdom of god what it is and why it matters and then uh this is book one there's another book the same size coming out about a month behind this one and that's gonna be book two of the same same title book two but book one is called there's another king book two is gonna be called all the king's men it's about discipleship so um and women of course but you know the poem i'm alluding to doesn't say all the king's men and women so we didn't worry about being gender-neutral but anyway this is i i just want to show it to you because it is in print but it's not uh released yet and it will be released i guess i mean they haven't given me an exact date but i have the impression it's going to be the middle of october but if you want to leaf through a copy there's one here um just don't steal it all right chairs are almost all full tonight that's uh better than usual we usually have people coming after we've started too so we might need some more chairs let's pray and we'll get started thank you father that we can be in a climate-controlled place on this day where it's about 100 degrees outside or more and and we can be comfortable how many people there are who gather as christians around the world who have no such comfort uh and yet they gather and they're zealous and they sing and worship and they do all the things that we do but uh but they do it without the comforts that we have we thank you that we have these comforts but we pray we won't get too soft because we need to be able to do these things even when it's not available and that may come but i pray father that as we have our gathering tonight that you will be among us teaching us through your spirit i pray we'd all learn more than we now know about your word and that you direct the questions and answers so that we actually hear from christ and and your word tonight we ask it in jesus name amen all right well we're packing all kinds of things into the car including books and food and tables and stuff a tripod here and the one thing i forgot to bring is a bible but frankly i usually don't have a chance to open one anyway so uh i mean we can we can answer most of the bible questions from the bible without taking the time to open one usually so um i i don't like to be without a bible but it usually hasn't made any difference okay if i need it i'll let you i'll take it thank you very much susan oh there's an oh yeah there's bibles in the back sure excellent it's always nice to have one handy in case i really have to look something up that's an niv so we probably won't open it but we'll see okay at these q and a's we have uh well q a and if so if you have a question you can ask it uh and we'll try to answer and then someone else to ask a question on a different subject if they want or a follow-up on the same subject and uh does anyone have one they want to start out igor first time we met igor tonight he's from russia yeah yes yeah he said he's part of the he he uh interfered with the elections four years ago but we let him come anyway okay um my question about do you believe in official history timeline chronology of artificial history bc and ad together and based on that um born a timeline of dispensation dispensation dispensationalism yes which is uh change a lot of um i would say change a lot of scenes in a christian community it's uh the truth being uh completely in my opinion um opinionated let's let's put this word but uh question is he study official history chronology timelines is a bible chronology and timelines do you believe in that official history yes or not and what are you seeing why is that dispensionism came in the place in 1718 uh 18 30 rounds 18 well in the end of 18th century beginning of 19th century yeah now when you say official history you mean the official history like you learned in school well yes it's um you know like when i learned school so the versus uh around rounds and within space which i i was a pilot so i doubt that uh i learned so he came we became a monkey and like million million uh years of history of human life [Music] okay so that's that's the official history talking about it okay well um i mean i'm i don't take everything that historians say you know without some skepticism especially when you're watching television programs reading books that talk about what happened a hundred thousand years ago or uh 100 million years ago i i don't personally believe in the old earth theory there's of course the young earth theory and the older the younger theory is that that the bible teaches the earth was created thousands of years ago not millions of years ago not billions of years ago and the old earth theory is that it was it is billions of years old and that the new that the the bible uh in some cases speaks in a in a way that's not intended to be taken as historically accurate uh for example there are people who think that genesis chapter one the six days are not really supposed to be six literal 24-hour days they think they're supposed to be long ages there's other people who think that the six days might be literal 24 hour days but there might have been millions of years between each of them so there were actually six days of creation but there are millions of years between each each act there's all different kinds of views that people take i myself have always just found it easier to take it kind of in a childlike way i believe that i believe the bible suggests the earth is its ages measured in thousands of years but there are different ways to interpret the bible that have led people to other views but maybe maybe i it's this wasn't i didn't intend to people talking about millions years it's mostly about uh ends of 18th century beginning of 19th century why would the dispensionism started because if it is events already happened so if the bible teaches this antichrist is already elevated lots of them around us simply a person who doesn't believe jesus is a lord he he was a man he came in okay so so you're saying official history you mean like what the dispensationalists say about the end times why they started that in the end of the 18th century why did it start yes because before that wasn't a problem and late and in that particular time they said oops no let's change history no it didn't happen okay well if you're so your question seems to be why do i think uh things happened as they did so that dispensationalism arose when it did right and uh dispensationalism arose actually with a man named john nelson darby in 1830 or thereabouts there were probably some precursors to it i know there was a guy in the late 1700s a baptist pastor who seemed to suggest there'd be two stages of the second coming like jesus coming for the saints and coming with the saints and that's a today that's a dispensational position but it was not held by church fathers or church you know the medieval church or the reformed church or anything like that and i don't know this this one guy morgan oh i forget his name is morgan something was a baptist pastor i think in the late 1700s who first suggested a two-stage coming of christ now darby when he started dispensationalism incorporated that that became part of his view but he's the one who put the system together and the timelines you've seen printed out of history you know of the end times and things like that why would it occur at that time well i mean i don't know for sure why it occurred at that time it could well be that uh that darby was reacting to uh the deadness of the church in england he was an anglican and uh he was fascinated with the bible and the study of the bible and what he realized was there's a lot of things in the bible that the church has not historically taken literally and i think he assumed that the failure to take these things literally is what led to the deadness of the church and he decided we need to take everything in the bible quite literally and he began to teach that in the plymouth brethren movement in england and it attracted people because frankly the institutional churches weren't teaching the bible really at all and the plymouth brethren they had these bible studies and i know very well what it's like when you're raised in an institutional church and find and it isn't teaching the bible you find someplace where someone's really expounding the bible you just get excited especially if they seem to know what they're talking about they can make sense of it all and that's what darby did darby was able to make sense of it all but he had his own system it was a different system but i think for many people is the only way they'd heard the bible taught except and i mean they went to churches but the churches didn't teach the bible so i think that there's a real excitement about hearing the bible taught for the first time unfortunately it was being taught by a man who had assumed certain things and assumed that the whole church before him had been wrong and he assumed that that's why the church was dead because they didn't take uh things literally like in the old testament there's a lot of prophecies about israel or jerusalem which darby said we should take those literally but the church had taken them spiritually the church had understood israel to be a reference to the israel of god that paul talked about and that jerusalem was the heavenly city not this physical city of jerusalem and that's how the church had always understood it and darby thought well no that's that's missing the whole point if we need to take that all literally so he began to formulate an end time scenario where these promises made to israel and jerusalem had to be fulfilled literally you see the church always had taught and i personally teach myself what the church always taught on this that those prophecies were fulfilled in christ but they're fulfilled in a spiritual way but darby said no you can't spiritualize that that's that's compromising you need to take it all literally so he said well obviously these prophecies have not been fulfilled literally and and therefore they must be future and so he began to take uh made a system where all these prophecies could be taken in a literal way and applied to some future scenario i won't go into detail that all about all of his details but that's where his system came up but i think since he was really one of the few people he and the movement he was part of he was part of the dispensation he was part of the he created dispensations he was part of the plymouth brother movement and uh they were in england probably the only people who were really teaching the bible some of my greatest heroes were plymouth brother including george mueller and hudson taylor and uh people like that they were part of the plymouth brotherhood they knew darby darby and they were acquaintances uh in the movement so i mean some great people were in that movement it was a great movement darby himself by some measures could be called a great man he was a great scholar uh he had his own grit he was looking at everything through just like cultists do but he he wrote he wrote lots of books he made his own translation of the bible which you can still read on you know blueletterbible.com or something you know the darby translation is there i mean if the guy can translate the whole bible himself and writes bunches of books he's he's he's got a brain in his head he also some people said he was not a very nice guy and i know that there are different opinions about that some people say he was very fond of children which is a good trait other people said he didn't get along with adults very well and we do know this that he did split the plymouth brethren movement he even excommunicated george muller because george muller wasn't willing to be as exclusive as he was he wanted people only to agree with all his views and he started a group called the exclusive brethren apart from the ordinary plymouth brother so darby's group of exclusive brethren was very narrow and and our darby x communicated everyone even from the brethren movement that didn't go with his views so he's kind of kind of can tankers but why did it happen at that time it may have happened because as i say the church was dead he was teaching the bible in a in a way that made sense and by the way anyone who's sat under good dispensational teaching anyone for example has gone to calvary chapel on a regular basis and listened to verse by first season you say this makes sense i mean i mean some people have told me uh dispensationalism never made sense to me well it made sense to me i have to say that when i was a teenager and listening to it it's the first time anyone made sense of the whole bible to me and uh that's impressive you know and it gets you excited think wow suddenly this mysterious book is starting to all fall together and i think it became very popular not only in england but came over to america and it kind of took over the evangelical moment over here back in the early 1900s but if there's a more sinister reason why it began at that time it might be because there was a lot of i'm i don't want to be too harsh a lot of demonic activity dividing the church in the mid 19th century that's when joseph smith said that god revealed him the true gospel which had been forgotten since the time of the apostles that all the other churches were heretical that's a little divisive a short time and that was the same year that darby is is saying darby was in england joseph smith was here in america and they both around the same year came up with what they both claimed had been forgotten since the time of the apostles and revealed to them essentially darby didn't claim that an angel revealed to him he just figured he he figured it out and no one else had before him but joseph smith of course claimed that an angel it was also at the same time called hebron it's uh napoleon and it's a lot of wars and it's been affected whole europe including russia and its coldest region of roman empire it's been changing and right the world was changing rapidly and some of that could be attributed to demonic power a friend of mine an old man who's now dead and the first all millennials i've ever met i didn't even know what all millennialism was at the time and i didn't learn it until after he was dead but i heard him say things that after i became a millennial i realized oh that's what he meant that's what he was talking about i didn't it just went over my head when i was i was a pre-millennial dispensation so i met him but he uh he kept saying you know he thought satan had been loosed back in the 19th century he said you know beef he said before the 19th century there was no technology of any particular impressive type he said the power that man had available to to travel or to do work was manpower animal power and wind power you know i guess hydropower if you put a windmill in or put a water wheel in your creek or whatever you you could get some of the forces of nature to do some work for you but people were still doing this work the same way in the early 1800s as they had been doing it for 6 000 years they couldn't travel any faster in the 1800s or the early 1800s they couldn't travel any faster than people had traveled in the days of adam and eve you know how fast can a man run how how fast can a horse run well that's about as fast as you can do anything he used to say you know when george washington died it took two weeks for the news of his death to get through the colonies because people couldn't get information and then of course he talked about how in the 1800s uh all kinds of things changed very rapidly you've got first of all the steam engine then you're going to have the eventually you're going to have the uh internal combustion engine you know you've got uh airplanes you've got jets you've got rockets uh you've got then like electronics you've got rapid communication with telephones and telegraph you've got eventually computers and and it's like it all just like for six thousand years or almost six thousand years man didn't make any progress at all in these areas then suddenly boom and he said in his mind he felt that was evidence that satan had been loosed for the little little while at the end of the of the thousand years in revelation and again that didn't make sense to me i didn't it i didn't know it didn't make sense because i didn't know he wasn't pre-millennial i just i didn't know anyone was not prim millennial back then i thought everyone was pre-millennial but anyway he didn't come up with once like once i got thinking like he was thinking and i'm not saying satan was loosed at that time but once i was thinking along those lines i think yeah the middle 1800s that's also in mormonism uh jehovah's witness or christian science all kinds of cults within the christian movement dispensationalism came up then darwinism shortly after that you know marxism and so forth and and you begin to say well it does seem like all of a sudden christianity was under attack as it had not been in a very long time and on a global scale so if you say why did dispensations would come at that time i don't know the answer but one possible answer is that it was part of a whole deception scheme now see i don't want to say that sounds awfully harsh because it makes my dispensational brothers and sisters seem like they're part of a cult or part of a demonic conspiracy now by the way they wouldn't mind saying that i'm part of last day's demonic conspiracy they say it all the time preterism prednisone you know replacement theology it's a last days demonic heresy well that's what i believe so i mean i guess i'm part of a last days demonic heresy although i teach what the church taught for 1800 years it's they they're the ones who changed things in the last days so maybe they're the last days heresy but i don't i don't go around telling people their heretics i believe their views are mistaken i believe that a lot of people have been deceived by that modern view and uh and it's interesting that that particular modern view came up the same time a bunch of groups that we know are cults arose so that might be the answer i don't know we need to actually move on to someone else but did you want to have a last statement you just uh follow up questions because you said so they call you how did how do they label you usually because so i just i just found you three days ago and i'm here so how they they label you well a lot of dispensations in this area where we live here are all of one denomination now lots of denominations have dispensationalism but there's in this area almost all the dispensations are in one big big big denomination the nomination i once was part of and uh it's one of the ten largest denominations in the world today it's called calvary chapel and um most of the people in calvary chapel they don't know what to call me because they don't know anything about the history of theology the history of the church they don't know anything about any theological system but the one they've been taught and they think that's the one that jesus taught because they've never been allowed to hear anything else uh and i mean that when i say that not being allowed to of course the preachers can't stop them from listening to the radio or getting a book or a magazine that's not of their group uh so i mean it's hard to keep them down on the farm with all the media that's out there now yeah especially on youtube but but but for a very long time um i mean and i'm not trying to criticize calvary chapel but that's what i'm talking about okay i was part of it i was part of calvary chapel um calvary chapel's philosophy is you don't want the sheep to be confused by hearing other views then what they call sound doctrine they call they use the term sound doctrine for what they teach and anything else is heresy they and some of them say it very loudly and very adamantly so the view they hold that's only really been around for less than 200 years is the only sound doctrine and the whole church throughout history has taught heresy until they came along and now still everyone in the church who doesn't teach what they teach is still a heretic so they call they'd call me a heretic but they don't know why they don't know what i i mean if they hear that i'm a millennial the average church goer who's who goes one of those churches they say oh amelia i've heard that where i think that's a heresy oh he teaches replacement theology i know that's heresy because my pastor always says that's a heresy and uh you know there's you know whatever it is i teach that's different from them and they don't pick on me i i say i don't feel picked on i don't have calvary chapel people attacking me they're friendly to me but they when they talk about my views and they're not talking about me they're talking about the views i hold and they're not mentioning me but they but they call them heresies they call them demonic they call them you know a last stage deception and so forth but um but the name the name for my views that they disagree with technically is uh millennialism partial fraternism and there's a view called supersessionism which they call they call it replacement theology it's called supersessionism the official title of that doctrine which is what the church taught throughout all history until the dispensation this came so um so basically i mean because something was taught by the church throughout history doesn't mean it's true but it certainly raises questions as to whether we call it last days heresy since it's not a last days doctrine at all it's the historic doctrine the whole church for the first 18 centuries uh so anyway that's if they they don't know what the labels mean but they know the pastors use those labels and say that's very bad whatever that is the average uh i i dare say the average calvary chapel person who's been in the movement for 20 years or 10 years or five years uh if they said do you believe in replacement theology i would say well i do believe in what you probably would call replacement theology that's not what i call it but can you tell me what the doctrine is you're asking about and the most informed answer i've ever heard them say is well you think the church replaced israel well that's not really what reform that's not really what supersectionism teaches but it's a simple way of putting it without having to think about any of the relevant passages but um in other words if you haven't been allowed to hear other views like you'll never hear a debate at a calvary chapel there are tens of thousands i think of calvary chapels in the world i don't know if there's tens of thousands there's a lot of them thousands and i do not think you'll ever hear a debate on the subject of the end times conducted at a calvary chapel they're against it philosophically they believe they'll confuse the sheep that's what they say ask them i've talked to so many calvary pastors i was in it i was an elder coverage i know the language they'll say you don't want to confuse the sheep you need to give them sound doctrine and don't let them get confused by these things in other words they're saying our sheep are stupid they're real dumb and if they hear that there's more than one view they can't think about two things at the same time they can't walk down the street and chew gum at the same time they can't study the scriptures and look at it from different points of view like we can which they don't by the way i think those pastors often do think that we could do it they just don't bother what's the use why study anything else when you have the truth and no one else does but but truly they do not want are people to hear debates about this we some of you know that there's three calvary chapel pastors who did a video that my wife made me respond to and they were talking about they weren't talking about me i'm not even sure they knew who i am but they were talking about the views that i happen to teach and they said last day heresy it's the antichrist it's so forth and so on and there are like three guys on a panel and they're all just glad handing each other oh yeah i'd like i see it your way too right you're so right on they didn't have one person on the panel who had even knowledge of what the other view teaches obviously from what they said especially the main host he's a very famous pastor here in the area and he was the main host it was clear he didn't even know what what the view is they're talking about he couldn't represent it but he knew it was heresy that's for sure and that's just that's i think a dangerous way to do church i think that uh back two generations ago there were things that were not considered polite to talk about in public what they were politics and religion you don't talk about politics and religion why not well you might hear something your pastor doesn't agree with you don't want him to don't want to have people think about something different and everyone two generations ago pretty much stayed in the same denomination probably the same church the same town most their lives their kids were raised in it too their grandkids and so if you were raised in a baptist church two generations ago you'd probably die in the baptist church or lutheran or presbyterian or catholic or whatever any church you choose whatever you're born in is probably what you're going to die in because you just didn't hop around from church to church and because you only heard the views of your church and it was implied to talk about religious things at work or anywhere else you never heard anything except the doctrines of your church and it was very easy for pastors to keep them down on the farm you know but that's before there's the internet that's before there are all kinds of christian books popularly going out there that teach different things that's before christian radio is you know uh quite the thing that it has become and there's in tv you know you just these pastors who are trying to keep their flock from hearing things that will confuse them are fighting a losing battle because their flock watch youtube they're on facebook they hear radios programs they read books and uh and therefore these pastors must be tearing their hair up because it used to be so easy to keep your fam your your group indoctrinated but now people talk about religion at the workplace they talk about religion with their neighbors i mean you wouldn't be allowed to do that if you're a a polite person two generations ago but how they gonna keep them down on the farm now they're not and so i really think that for a pastor to not let his sheep know the best arguments for all the views that are different than their own is a very dangerous way to go i'll tell you what because i was in that group and i had to discover through my own biblical study that my group was wrong they never told me there was even another possibility and when i realized i'd say i say i got angry at him i thought why didn't you tell me about this didn't you know about it i mean there's this whole historic view that all christians held for centuries and you may you never even let me know this you like kept me in this echo chamber where we all say the same things and call everybody else a heretic and i i've met other people who have that same reaction and i think that the best way to disciple people in a world of lots of ideas is teach them how to think not what to think don't teach them what to think about everything teach them how to think how to read the bible how to analyze the scriptures how to compare scripture to scripture how to think rationally how to critique if you can teach people that but see they don't believe they're sheep or smart enough to do any of those things their sheep are just mind-numb robots apparently but in their view i don't think they are i think dispensationalists can think for themselves they just aren't given the chance very often and so i've said a lot more about dispensationalism about calvary chapel than i would ever usually say i'm not i'm i don't count myself to be a critic of calvary chapel i mean i don't i don't walk around being angry or feeling i'm in in competition with them but it answers your question uh that is what i think is going on yes gary do you uh know anything about vernon mcgee's teaching jv mcgee i've listened to all my life since i was young my grandmother loved him she gave lots of money to him and uh and you know he's he's probably the most familiar voice on christian radio uh my parents and my grandparents went on these tours to places with them you know hawaii and places like that israel i think i'm not mistaken but um i have to say j vermee doesn't mcgee doesn't go very deep now he is a he is a like myself he's very opinionated and uh and i don't share some of his opinions about things first of all he's dispensational secondly he's more calvinistic than i am um thirdly he's the cessationist he doesn't believe the gifts of the spirit are for any time except the apostolic age and he's very strong about those things when he gets on those subjects um he's a nice guy you know i mean he was he seemed like a very nice guy and i did i think i went to his church uh when he was at the church of the open door in los angeles i think i visited once with my grandmother uh and heard him speak there when i was quite young but i've been familiar with him forever all my life and i have to say i don't listen to him very much he doesn't make me angry i mean i do listen to people i don't agree with i don't get angry with them you can't listen to the radio without hearing people i disagree with but uh frankly jay vernon mcgee's teaching i never thought he went very deep i mean he's going through the bible in five years and you know in in a half hour program he's going through a whole chapter maybe two chapters of a book and um and he's he leaves an awful lot of passages unspoken about which are the ones that you that you'd want some explanation of in a sense i mean it's like commentaries most commentaries you get uh they're very good at explaining the things you already can understand it's the things you want to look up that you that just are perplexed and you look up and they skip right over them you know they don't it's like there's things that no one seems to understand and and i don't claim to understand them all but i but when i listen to a teacher i want him to wrestle with those things i don't want a teacher just to talk about things that everybody can see when they read the text i mean it's it's good for some people because some people don't read the text very much and don't think much about it i i a lot of people tell me they got an awful lot of benefit from chief and riggy um and i think okay teaches one i've just even when i was young i didn't really feel like i got a lot from his teaching but uh i never disliked him i always thought he was kind of a charming kind of a guy and uh no doubt a good man i have no doubt but he's not he's not my choice but then i have to say anyone on the radio now i mean i don't want to just broad brush all radio preachers but i just most of them are not the kind of teachers i'm looking for right now most of them are pastors giving a sermon on a sunday morning recording it and putting on the radio and it's taught to people who again don't seem to be encouraged to think about alternative ways of looking at things and i guess i don't know where i got it in my head to start looking at alternative ways i think it was when i first you know what it was i think it was when i was going to calvary chapel and to my mind everything chuck smith said was gospel when i was going to calvary chapel uh he had a very strong opinion that christians could not be possessed by demons and so i did too i had the same opinion and then i have to say just some people i met and experiences i had made me wonder you know okay that seems maybe like these people are christians and yet they seem like they might have demons but i've been taught that the bible says that can't happen so i decided to read the bible on that subject specifically i actually took two years to read through the bible looking for everything i could find on that question and at the end of two years my conclusion was it doesn't say anything about whether christians can have demons or not as near as i can tell it talks about people having demons it doesn't talk about them being christian or non-christian there's nothing that promises that a christian cannot have demons in that sense and so i i came out of it agnostic on the point you know that is to say i didn't i don't claim to know whether christians can have demons or not now i've had some experiences that make it seem to me like some people who seemed an awful lot like they were christians also seemed an awful lot like they had demons and were delivered so i'm not i don't have an uh a position to push in that but i i realized that when chuck was telling me when he was so strong on the bible saying christians can't demons i did my own research of that i don't think he i don't think the bible says that anywhere you know and it was it was that i was still locked into dispensationalism and everything else but it was that very study i did that i think made me think i'd better think for myself i remember before before i did that i was going to calvary chapel and to me everything chuck said was gospel and i remember my parents were going to calvary 2. i was like 16 years old we'd come home after calvary and talk about the sermon and i remember my dad was pretty amenable with calvary chapel but but he there was one time that we came home from church and he said i'm not sure i agree with chuck on this some some particular point chuck made it a sermon i don't i don't know what it was i just remember my reaction i was aghast how can you challenge chuck smith he knows the whole bible by heart he knows the bible and all of us in this house put together you know how how would you and he's been filled with the spirit we were baptist we didn't even know about being filled this way he's been baptized in the spirit since he was a kid he was four square you know i thought so he's a spirit-filled christian from day one of his life and i'm and we weren't anything like that and i just thought how could anyone like any any peon like my father or me ever challenged someone like chuck and then after i did this research on the demon thing i thought well you know demon chuck's pretty strong on that but the bible is silent on it and so i thought okay maybe i should think for myself about these things and it was over quite a long time in my own private bible study that i then abandoned the pre-trib rapture later i abandoned the the the pre-millennial view i still held into a future tribulation antichrist for a long time until i was exposed to some preterist information about what happened in 70 a.d and i realized whoa i mean once i saw what josephus said about what happened there and i thought well that's what the bible says was going to happen i thought that was supposed to be the end times you know that happened in 1780 you know so it just over and this all took a decade or more for me to transition out of that but i was not looking to change i'm not looking to change at any given time i you know it's always easier to stay the same and to stay popular with the people that believe what you do um but i just thought you know once once i realized that there could be one thing he's wrong about i thought well i'd better not just assume he's right about everything else too but i was not in any sense looking to find him mistaken or to change my views i just wanted to follow the bible and in my studies i became more of how many different positions there on on a certain broad range of doctrines and i just thought well i better better not be too smug about my views i'd better you know have some theological humility here because there's people smarter than me who've held some other views i don't hold and i would still say that there's still people smarter than me who hold some views i don't hold and uh i i think they're mistaken but i can't i can't be a hundred percent sure about many of these things because the bible's unclear about some things and if there's people smarter and more spiritual than me i mean i think like george miller to my mind george mueller is smarter he's dead now but he's smarter certainly far more spiritual than i am and yet he was a very uh he's very calvinistic and he was very dispensational i heard that he renounced the dispensational part before he died but i think he still was a calvinistic when he died but hey he's a better man than i am so you just can't really you can't mcarthur john macarthur is calvinistic and his dispensation again i studied it calvinism is the doctrine um that that makes god the one who does everything man is man doesn't have any real determining power over his own salvation that you god has determined whether you're whether you'll be saved before you're ever born god's already either predestined to be saved or be lost and god you know controls everything in that way that we right that's that's that's a calvinistic position so yeah macarthur is calvinistic and dispensational but and he's also cessationist as he he thinks that you know that you're a little bit fringy if you believe in the gifts of the spirit but but he's got some good sermons you know i mean he's written some good books i love his book the gospel according to jesus i thought that was a dynamite book commentary but i was going to tell you i really like the way you said opening my mind to say how to think instead of what to think that really rang true in my head because and and i really believe you're honest about when you're sincere about what you're saying now we've found a college chapel a long time that we're but i extended to hogan's witness i studied mormonism before i became saved and i was a loser yeah so but the point i'm trying to make is that that is a good point you made because we need to not put people on a pedestal and i i mean i i think chuck smith was a very humble man he was he was a great man yes but you know what he was human too and he would be the first to admit it if you know and he would probably debate with you about the demon thing you know uh he would well he would i know the scriptures he would use and he would definitely i mean i actually uh when i was still going to coffee cosmetics when i came to this uh this doubt about his view about the demon thing i actually made an appointment to see him and about a month later i was able to see him uh because it took a month to get into scene there's so many many people want to very cordial he knew me he knew me because i had played in a band in the church and he he knew me by name and stuff and uh and you know he's cordial i told him that i was having doubts about this and he quoted back the scriptures that he always said in the sermons i already knew uh yet chuck was a sweet and charming and loving and humble man um and he was my first mentor in ministry and i still owe a great deal of the things that make me abnormal to him you know he's he was an abnormal kind of a pastor himself i remember you stating this kind of things on the radio and it perked up my ears and i thought oh this is good because we don't want to be locked in like the hope is this is the only way right and and i would i would it always makes me uncomfortable when i uh when someone tells me yeah we're having this debate about this and someone kept saying well steve gregg says steve greg says he brings this i think i don't i don't want people doing that with me either you know i'm not an authority i mean the the the bible is the authority yeah and whoever whoever you know represents what the bible says best speaks for the most authority on that point but you know it's possible i might be right and some other person wrong do you ever listen to brian on a subject i don't listen to brian much i mean i don't listen to radio magics uh when i'm except when i'm driving you know and i'm not usually in the car right after my show when when brian's uh well is he is he on pastor's perspective he is but you know what we switched from listening to that to you because you answer the questions so thoroughly um they've gotten a little bit more um just socializing instead of answering the questions you know some of the guys on that show have actually spoken well of me which surprised me uh not often not often uh but uh someone sent me a link to that show where it wasn't brian but he might have been in the studio too but we listened to him at seven that's a sermon part we really felt he was a good teacher when we went to costa mesa and so we listen to him in the morning and uh he's not a very social person but he is very good at teaching i have no ex to grind against any calvary chapel pastor everyone i've met well i don't want to say everyone i've met but almost all the ones i've met have been very wonderful men of god sincere i think they love the flock i think they love the but they have come up in a system where they haven't really heard very much outside the reservation you know and so uh anyway i so have most people in most denominations i mean let's face it i'm not this is not a bashing company that's just the way denominations are and calvary is a denomination well so today yeah yeah when i went to calvary chapel the first time in 1970 they had something printed on the back of their bulletin which is still on the back of some of the calvary chapel bulletins it's chuck wrote it back in 1969 probably 70. and one of the things that is calvary chapel is not a denomination per se nor are we against denominations only against the over emphasis of certain um secondary doctrines that divide the body of christ now i when i first wanted to calibrate that i like that that's i i agree with that unfortunately there's no denomination i've seen that divides the body of christ over eschatology now more than calvary chapel does i don't think chuck ever wanted to divide it but i mean there are other churches that are dispensational for example but it's not what defines them and if you go to those churches and you don't hold the dispensationalism they're not too shocked but if you go to most calvary chapels now not brian brosnan brian broderson is more open-minded i've heard that so again what i'm saying about calvary chapel has mostly to do with the calvary chapel i was in and that i've interacted with for the last uh let's just say until chuck died so you don't really know tommy no no because he is very good at prophecy when you're talking about especially okay yeah he teaches that well i'm not yeah i don't want to spend the whole night talking about calpers chapel because there's probably other questions but yeah i i want to say that calvary chapel saved my life i was a christian before i went to calvary chapel i was even a preacher i was a teenage preacher i was a leader in my baptist youth group they'd have whenever the youth group had the church service on sunday night i was the one chosen to preach i witnessed to my friends at school i was a i was an evangelistic baptist but i was spiritually largely dead and uh in the jesus movement a friend of mine took me to calvary chapel probably february of 1970 and i heard lonnie frisbee preach and then i came back and heard chuck preach and i heard i i went every night there's some chuck preach about three or four times a week and i heard him and all the others and love song was playing the first night was there and of course that just thrilled me and i mean i just sucked right in and but what i really was sucked into was the revival not not the music or whatever though that was electrifying but that i sat down and i got there on a wednesday night was pouring down rain the parking lot of the little chapel wasn't even paved yet it was all dirt and mud and all the cars were angled in there was no parking uh spaces marked but there were hundreds of cars in this muddy parking lot in the middle of the lake on a wednesday night now in the baptist church i went to you might get 300 people on sunday morning but you got maybe 30 people on wednesday night to the prayer meeting this is a wednesday night and the church was packed to the gills the pews the floors everything even on the stage people were sitting all over the floor and my first impression was wow they they really got a good crowd you know midweek service here on a on a rainy night and then i thought it was like that every night and no rain or shine uh and it was it was wonderful but i remember i sat down i couldn't get into the main building i had to sit in the northx as they call it on the floor and uh i was there most people were hippies i was not i was not a hippie but most of the people were and there's this real hippie looking guy kind of spacey who's sitting next to me says hey brother do you know the lord and i said yeah and he said how long do you know the lord i said well i think about 12 years now he said wow he don't you know i'm going to say like two weeks and uh but he'd been delivered from drugs and alcohol and he'd led his parents to the lord and his blood was friends but i hadn't let anyone to the lord i'd witnessed but no one ever got saved you know i i just didn't have the spiritual life there but i had been to revival meetings at our baptist church before which were good and i came to calvary it was like revival every night and uh you know dozens of people getting saved every night and most of them hippies and the music was great and but it wasn't just the great it wasn't just that music was good it was anointed it was like spiritually anointed music and spiritually anointed preaching and spiritually anointed worship and everything was like electric and it was like powerful the holy spirit was there and that's where i first heard about being filled with the holy spirit and lonnie frisbee some months later laid hands on me and i was baptized in the spirit that changed my whole life and uh i mean that that i remember more than my own conversion because i got saved i was a little kid went forward at altar called i don't remember it very well but uh but that was that was the turning point in my life right there and and then sitting under chuck oh man i absorbed everything he said repeated it because i was teaching uh home bible studies shortly after that so i was just a parrot of chuck smith and um yeah so but i loved him man and i still do even though he's gone i still love chuck he's never never did anything to make me angry yes yeah um forgive me i'm a rather blunt personality so you too yeah when we go to matthew 7 he says a good a good tree cannot produce bad fruit the battery cannot produce good fruit you don't get uh figs from thistles and and thistles from a victory and then he says not all those who say lord will enter in but those who do the will of my father right amen but in that day many will say have one prophesied how about we cast out demons haven't we uh anybody works it mighty works in your name and he says apart from depart from me you evildoers i never knew you now the last time we talked about this you talked about abiding of christ which i agree with but there he does not say well i knew you once and you abided in me but you don't anymore so then i was going to the teachings on the kingdom which you have and i think it was the third one it started with this statement in there you started that one if it's the third or fourth you said now anything i say i don't want you to misunderstand is you're earning your salvation and then for the next hour that's all i heard now everybody hears or looks through a window uh-huh but i that's what i heard i heard that if you don't do these things you ain't gonna make it and it reminds me of a of a kid i knew that was a friend of mine he was a jw and we were at his house and we were sitting there and his mom comes out and says you better get out there and do something for jehovah or you ain't gonna make it yeah and that's what i hear when i hear some of these teachings i hear if you don't do these works you're not going to make it well then either i'm not a very good communicator or you're not listening well enough it could be my fault but no i do not believe that you're saved by doing any works at all but the scripture you just quoted i don't remember if you included this first but it's right in the middle of the scripture you quoted jesus said not everyone who says me lord lord will enter the kingdom of heaven but those who do the will of my father in heaven so then he said many shall say to me lord lord we prophesied your name we cast out demons we did mighty works your name and i'll say i never knew you department for me you workers of iniquity so he starts up by saying you won't enter the kingdom of heaven if you don't do the will of the father now many people think they're doing the will of the father because they're prophesying casting out demons but that apparently isn't what the father's will is and that's not that's what will get you saved but i mean the view of faith and and works that the bible teaches is that you're saved by grace through faith but the next verse in ephesians says you're created in christ for good works which god forbid that you should walk in them so so paul says you're saved by grace through faith not of works but you're created for good works okay and it says in ephesians uh and titus chapter 2 must be around verse 12 i guess or 13. it says that christ gave himself for us that he might redeem us from every lawless deed and acquire for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good works now everywhere in the scripture that paul writes he paul never assumes that any christians are devoid of good works because he says they're fruitful in good works that's why you saw the colossians you're fruitful in every good work uh a tree produces fruit and if you're if there's no fruit the tree is sick or dead you know now what the bible teaches is there's a lot of people who claim to be believers but what they believe is the name better than what the devil believes the demons believe and they tremble too but the kind of faith that does do good work it does help is one that generates behavior agreeable with what it says it believes now paul himself said the same things james did james james is sometimes ostracized from the new testament like luther kind of ostracized him he said james it's an epistle of straw because he said faith without works is dead but paul said the same thing in galatians 5 6 paul said in christ jesus circumcision doesn't count for anything uncircumcision doesn't come from anything but faith that works through love so paul says what you need is a faith that works not faith plus works a faith that that works you see i think too many times we think of faith as simply acquiescence to certain propositions okay the christian propositions jesus is god's son jesus was sent and died for our sins he rose again the third day do you believe those propositions okay i can acquiesce sure i believe that okay then you're a christian well wait wait wait faith in the new testament the devil can acquiesce to all those points too he's not a christian you know james said the kind of faith that saves and paul says the same thing is a faith that changes the way you live and if your faith doesn't make a difference to you it doesn't make a difference to god either why should it why should he think it's important if you don't you know so the point here is that a person who's saved is now a follower of jesus christ a disciple and jesus said if you continue in my words then you are my disciples indeed indeed meaning really you know there's a lot of people who think their disciples said you're not really one if you're not continuing my words and when he told the disciples in the great commission go and make disciples he said teach them to observe everything i've commanded you so when you make disciples you're teaching them to observe what jesus commanded to obey him in other words obedience peter referred to the church or to the christians as those who obey him in uh i think it's in acts chapter five where he's talked to the sanhedrin he says we are witnesses to these things and so are and so is the holy spirit and that he's given to those who obey him you know um you know it's like christians are people who obey people who don't obey what are they i mean what do they believe you see when we say you have to believe in jesus well the one thing paul said you have to believe is that he's lord he said if you'll confess with your mouth that jesus is lord and believe in your heart that god raises dead you will be saved so the a person is saved by faith but in in what well they're saved by the faith that jesus is the lord what's a lord well he's like an owner and a boss he's like a king he like owns you and he and you obey him and she said why do you call me lord lord you don't do what i say you see so it's not that you have to get saved or or or come to faith and then go and do some work so that you can be saved it's that if you are saved you it shows in your behavior i agree and what is it first john where he talks about those leaving he said they would have never left if they were truly part of us there were many he said like that yeah i believe that once a person truly comes to christ he who began a good work and you will bring it to completion that's a done deal and how do i know that those are the real ones because they endure to the end i don't truly i don't believe you can lose that ever now like and i know a lot of people who i was relating to the guy i was witnessing to i used to work here i'm a southern baptist who cares yeah you know what does that mean that doesn't mean anything right now what what you would say is a person like that was never saved correct what i believe and i think the bible teaches is i don't know if that man was ever saved he isn't now that i'm not because he's smoking a joint but because he's not concerned about following christ a person who's not a follower of christ is not a christian the word christian was coined in acts 11 26 to describe the disciples says the disciples were first called christians in antioch what to disciple if you continue in my word you're my disciples indeed go make disciples teach them to observe everything i've commanded a disciple is someone who's following and obeying jesus and if somebody isn't doing that they're not what the bible calls a christian the bible doesn't have any other definition for a christian than a disciple and by the way the word christian only appears three times in the bible but the the first time is the only time it's defined and it's defined as a disciple of jesus a christian is so i think that what we've done is we've given people the impression that they are christians or disciples because they have said a prayer they've acquiesced to certain points that we say they should agree to once they've agreed to them we've told them they're saved and they go off and and think they're saved even if they're not changed a real christian is a changed person you're born again if the holy if the god who created the universe comes inside you and nothing changes how can that be you know um so my understanding is that conversion the word conversion means what if you convert something from a audio file of a certain type uh analog to an mp3 file you convert something or you convert something from 110 to 220. you're changing it the word convert means change if a person's converted they're gonna be changed if they're not changed not converted it's just that simple uh we have watered down the gospel so much to give people the impression that whether they follow jesus or not they're still saved as long as they've said the prayer and as long as they've said they believe certain things now you and i would differ on only one point and that is you believe if a person is ever truly saved that they will always they will persevere that's that's the the fifth point of the calvinistic tulip perseverance of the saints um i personally don't think the bible teaches that i understand the verse you say he who began the good work in you shall perform until the day of christ jesus paul told the philippians but i believe he's talking to the church collectively he's not saying that every individual in there is see i believe when paul writes the churches he's writing to the collective church about its its collective life not every individual there are people in the churches who can be cut off uh jesus himself said that a branch that does not remain in him will be cast forth and will wither and be burned uh paul said the same thing about the branch and the olive tree in romans chapter 11. in verse 22 he said behold therefore the goodness and the severity of god on those who on on those who fell severity on you goodness if you continue in his goodness otherwise you also will be cut off so i mean everything it's the bible always states it that you are saved by believing but there's no guarantee that a person who believes today will always believe remember in the parable of the sower in luke chapter 8 jesus said that those that fell on stony ground are those who believe for a while yeah they believed for a while and they sprang up they had life in them but when the sun came and persecutions and so forth they quickly fell away so they weren't believers anymore the bible said paul says many shall depart from the faith but you can't depart from something you've never been at you know if you're not in the faith you can't leave the faith uh you can you can depart from professing the faith but that's not what paul is saying anyway i it's not my interest in debating that point here it goes on and on i do have a lecture on the website called eternal security and i talk about all the description on both sides of that argument well until the tape run out i always talk too long yes that says something like if somebody continues people people understand it that way when they read first corinthians 5 when paul says about the man who's living in fornication with his father's wife paul says deliver him to satan for the destruction of the flesh so that his spirit might be saved in the day of christ jesus that's first corinthians 5 i think is around verse 5. yeah first corinthians 11 says that he says for this reason many are sick among you are weak and sick among you and some have died because they were dishonoring the body and the blood of the lord in communion right and then he says for if we would judge ourselves we would not be judged but when we are judged we are chastened by the lord that we might not be condemned with the world right so what he's saying is that christ chastens us when we're going the wrong way uh to prevent us from going all the way the wrong way so we won't be condemned with the world right well i mean he might with some unfortunately there's something he didn't kill first i mean paul's companion demas the lawyer is one of paul's ministry associates in some of the early epistles of paul in second timothy says demas has forsaken me having loved this present world well it says the first john if you love the world the love of the father's not in you and you know it's like he's gone after the world he's given up on following christ he's following the world now and people do it i mean all of us have known some people like that now our theology could tell us everyone i know who used to follow jesus and who now has fallen away and maybe died in that condition i know some people like that we could say well they must never been saved but when you realize that some of the people you have to say that about are people who are miraculously delivered from addictions they were powerful witnesses for christ they won many people for christ think of lonnie frisbee for example and uh and many others i knew in the jesuit people who had powerful testimonies of god's deliverance in their life and they loved the lord and they served lord for years and then eventually something happened and they kind of drifted off now what i'd have to say is if they were never saved even in those years when they had all the dramatic evidence of salvation maybe i'm not maybe you're not you know what they certainly thought they were they certainly loved god they certainly changed their lives and repented and were following the way of righteousness instead of the way of sin they had done everything the bible says you have to do to become a christian and if we say yeah but years later he fell away so they must not earn christians that means that we might all be like them there'd be no assurance of salvation if that's the case in calvinism the only assurance of salvation is that you persevere until the end without falling away because if you have every other evidence of being saved but you fall away before you die you prove you never were saved which means calvinism doesn't allow any assurance of salvation until you take your last breath and you didn't fall away because no matter what else would give you assurance of salvation it can be canceled if you happen to be like some people who deny christ there's there are atheists on the debate circuit in in america right now you can see them on youtube who used to be pastors they used to be worship leaders they wrote some of the worship songs that are sung in our churches they they love the lord they say i mean who knows but i mean some of them maybe they weren't really saved i can't say but it's awfully hard about some of the people who have fallen away to say they never knew the lord i traveled when i was 19 years old i traveled to europe with it with john wickham and with another guy named eddie boland and um john wickham is phil wickham's dad and uh you probably know who phil is maybe you don't know john if you're not old enough but john went to high school with me he was in my band with me and we went to germany together and a guy named eddie poland went with us and eddie before he got saved to the jesuit he had taken so much lsd his mind was fried everyone called him crazy eddie and then because he just was nutty and then he got saved at calvary chapel and he just saturated his mind with the bible he became very biblically literate he practically memorized the book of proverbs uh when we traveled with him across country and in in europe you know he'd caught a proverb for everything that was going on oh here's what the proverb says about that and he loved the lord he actually he got 2 000 tracks in spanish and we were in germany and he got trained in spain and handed out 2000 tracks on the streets just a zealot for god he came back from germany went to college and i don't need to say much more but uh he got stumbled and he became an atheist he went back to his drugs he died of a heroin overdose now there's no one can convince me that eddie buller was not a christian when he was evangelizing with us in europe uh he died we could say well god took him so he wouldn't lose the salvation but before but before god took him he was an atheist for a few years and rejecting christ so i think god didn't take him soon enough you know if he was going to do it that way i think that what paul's saying in first corinthians 11 is that because the church is so out of order that god is disciplining the church by bringing allowing sickness and even mortality to be a part of the church's experience they're losing people they'd rather keep it doesn't necessarily mean that the people who died had lost their salvation or were in danger of it some of the people who died might have just been old people who you know got covered or something you know i mean it does it it's there's there's no assurance given that the people who were sick or dying were themselves the ones who had committed the greatest sins the church was sitting the church was not disciplining itself the church was allowing this uh sacrilege to take place and because of that the church had lost some of its members now it may be and maybe we would we might suspect that the ones who died were the bad ones but that's not always the case in isaiah in chapter i think it's chapter 57 1 if i'm not mistaken it says the righteous perish and no one takes it to heart and no one realizes that god is taking them away from the evil to come you know they're righteous people perishing because the nation is under judgment you know so you can't really from what paul says about the church losing some members that way because the church is sinning it it doesn't quite make the point that the people who died were backsliders and god took them out before they could backslide too far i have heard that from the time i was a baptist on that i've heard that i heard that doctrine that if you're saved and you're really kind of blowing it then god will let you die before you backslide all the way out of the kingdom but i don't know i i have a feeling there's too many scriptures and too many frankly too many case histories of people who have fallen away and died but they didn't die before they fell away so anyway i know for some people this eternal security thing is a very very important doctrine to and uh i remember someone telling me back when i was a teenager it's a backslider's concern you know and i understand that you know the whole question of can you lose your salvation what do i care i'm not going to you know that's that's for vaccines to worry about i'm not planning to backslide are you is that like an option you're holding open like maybe if i don't if i won't lose my salvation maybe i'll leave christ and live in sin and die that way maybe die a satanist and still go to heaven is that what you're concerned about unless you're going to backslide you shouldn't have to worry whether that doctrine is true or not it would only be a backslash concern then i got older and i realized no it's the backslider's mother that's concerned about it so many people in my generation including myself have children that were saved serving god zealously when they're in their pre-teens and teams and then some of them went off and became not christian anymore and i know many many mothers come for themselves well at least he said the sinner's prayer when he's five years old you know i've told the story before that when jimi hendrix died i was in i was riding with i was living with another guy who was an evangelist and and we worked for an organization with both single guys so we shared an apartment and we're driving someone who heard on the radio jimi hendrix died and we were both stunned wow jimi hendrix is dead and uh and i remember saying to him wow it's so amazing like yesterday jimi hendrix was like a superstar he was like an idol to a generation he was wealthy and power you know powerful in in the industry and today he's in hell burning and gary said yeah then gary said well maybe not maybe when he's a little kid he accepted jesus i remember thinking yeah i remember that was such a relief yeah maybe jimi hendrix is it even though he was a satanist when he died maybe he accepted jesus when he's like four years old now he's in heaven you know and that's how that you know that's my baptist eternal security doctrine talking but nothing in the bible ever suggests that someone who dies a satanist is ever going to heaven it doesn't say so anyway so well right but here's the thing eternal life is in christ okay that's what it says in first john 5 11 and 12 it says this is the message that god has given to us eternal life and this life is in his son and he that has the son has life and he that does not have the son of god does not have life now what he's saying there eternal life is ours in jesus and of course she said abide in me remain in me you know and you'll bear much fruit but he says if he does not remain in me he's cast forth as a branch now here's the thing the life i have as a branch attached to christ is eternal life if i should renounce christ and fall away from christ and wither and die it's still eternal life i just i'm not tapped into it anymore the the life is in the vine it's in christ it when the branch is attached to the to the vine it's drawing on the life of the vine and that's eternal life the it's it remains eternal life even if i cut myself off from it because that life in jesus is forever and everyone who abides in him is going to have it forever it's so but it's ours to it's our responsibility to walk with the lord to walk in the spirit and to persevere and to keep the faith and not to fall away and things like there's so many warnings to christians about falling away i mean think of hebrews chapter 3. hebrews 3 1 he addresses this chapter in the whole book to what he calls holy brethren partakers of the heavenly calling okay he's talking about real christians you know talk to fake christians here he's addressing holy brethren who are partakers of the heavenly calling in verse 12 he says beware lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living god and then you know he says some things about what happens to people when they depart from the living god now he's talking to holy brethren he's already identified his his readers are holy brethren christians he said you've got to be aware that you might depart from the living god if you allow an evil heart of unbelief to take hold there i mean warnings like that are you know there's at least half a dozen very serious warnings like that in the book of hebrews um and you know i was debating a calvinist once in in idaho he's a pretty well known guy and he made the point uh well no i made the point that all these warnings would suggest that there must be a danger of falling away why would god make warnings not to do something if it's impossible to do it why waste ink i mean ink was not cheap in those days no parchment either they don't say things just to use up the last few drops of ink let's say something that we don't need to say don't fall away we know they can't but i had to say something you know we had some ink drying on it in our bottle no they they said it because it was there's a danger now what my calvinist friend said was well that's all part of the providence of god how he helps us persevere these warnings are the means by which the righteous who take them seriously persevere and i was thinking yeah but as soon as we realize that we can't fall away we the warnings are have no teeth you know in other words he's saying because of these warnings we who are elect persevere but that would have mean that we who are elect are not calvinists because if we're communists we know that we can't follow anyway so the warnings are empty empty warnings so why would they make us persevere you know there's no sense in warning people not to do something that they're not in danger of doing and and frankly jesus paul the writer of hebrews certainly peter in second peter chapter 2 jude and revelation they all talk about people falling away and warn against it one more short statement i believe the reason people myself included desperately don't want to hear you can lose your salvation because i know what i am it fits up to me i ain't making it for me to abide in that vine has to be by the grace of god and the grace of god alone but we have the grace of god i have no no responsibility but if there's any chance that it requires me to abide i know myself why god help me i know myself well that's it sounds like maybe you're thinking of abiding as meaning like living a perfect life that's that's i don't understand that that way it's like i stay with my wife it doesn't mean i live a perfect life or that she does we have vows we've made we keep those vows we're still devoted to each other uh i may in some measure fail to keep my vows on occasion she might on on occasion too not in a big way but in ways we said we'd love and cherish and be like christ in the church and we're not we we can't claim that we're always just like christ in the church so we fall short but we're not divorced but people can get divorced you see and therefore you know when i come to christ i'm in a covenant relationship with him i'm part of the bride of christ and he's the bridegroom and the bride is to be faithful now the bride will be faithful but i as an individual may not because i'm not the bride personally the whole church the whole the whole community of disciples is the bride of christ i'm in it or out of it as i am a disciple if i'm a disciple following christ i'm part of the pride if i stop following christ i'm not part of the right but i've heard many people say and i think it's even been people like like important people like john macarthur i consider him an important person i've heard him say well if i could if if we could fall away we all would fall away i think really i happen to know that i could fall away from my marriage but i'm not afraid i'm going to and not because i'm proud it's because i've already made a decision i'm i'm going to be a faithful husband and to say you know if i could be unfaithful i certainly would no i could but i'm not going to you know i as you know i've been married more than once in very hard marriages i've had wives that were unfaithful to me but i've never been unfaithful i mean i i happen to know that i could but it's against my principles i've already decided that's not gonna happen i closed the door to that in my mind it's not an option same thing with denying christ it's not one of my options to me i mean i could do it if i got angry god said well i'm you know life has been too hard you should have done better by me i i'm just going to make you i'm going to punish you by walking away from you that's the stupidest thing a person could say but many do it uh well i i could do it but why would i you know i've just decided that's not one of my options yeah i often say this could i kill my kids in their sleep could i it's a possibility but could i not being who i am i can't you know i you know i i could never get i my wife knows i can't even kill a spider much less my children you know so she has to do it you know i take it outside but but anyway anyway that's i mean the point here is that if we think abiding in christ means i never make i never fall i never sin i never you know then you're right none of us can do that but even with the grace of god we still on occasion fall we have the grace of god and i agree with you if not for the grace of god none of us could be faithful to god amen but we're not without the grace of god we have the grace of god and but the grace of god is grace it's not shackles we aren't we aren't god doesn't shackles and say now you're mine and i don't care what you want to do you're never going to be anything else but mine you had free will to country but you don't have any more free will now that you're with me you know you're stuck with me like it or not but god doesn't do that it's his grace that draws us it's his grace that we respond to and as we walk in response to his grace and faith we receive all the strength we need to to be followers not perfect people but followers obedient committed to christ and you know i i do believe uh there but for the grace of god go i when i see someone who falls away i think well if not for the grace of god i could fall away too but i'm not without the grace of god you know and i'm not going to neglect the grace of god you know at least that's my determination so i'm not really afraid of ever losing my salvation and and so i think when people say if you could lose it you would i know i you know i'm sure i've heard macarthur say that some others of that type of thing yeah that does make sense to me i can do a lot of bad things that i'm not gonna do so why should i assume that renouncing christ and becoming an apostate if that's an ability ability i have that i'd necessarily do it why should i i don't even want to do it yeah um first corinthians 15 24 um speaking about jesus it talks about him like handing the kingdom over to god mm-hmm i haven't had a chance to listen on that but like i always think jesus being the king forever right that is a very peculiar verse because it's the only verse in the bible that addresses that point that paul addresses there he talks about how christ must reign until he brings all of his enemies under his feet he's talking about christ at the right hand of god reigning now we are some of the enemies that have been brought under his feet that's what he's doing he's bringing his enemies under his feet when he's done with that then it says then he'll turn it over the father and the father god will be all in all now does that mean jesus won't be king anymore and yet the bible everywhere says the messiah will reign forever and ever and ever and ever uh i mean isaiah 9 6 and 7 says that and so many other places about the messiah he's going to reign forever so what's up with that i think that i think jesus will hold the status of you know co-rule co-ruler with his father but i think that what paul is saying is that christ has been given a special assignment by the father right now he said him in his right hand so there you are you're ruling with me at my right hand go and conquer your enemies meaning through the gospel through his governing the church and the missionary outreach of the gospel go and bring your enemies in and when you're done with that i think when he's done that jesus said father here's what you gave me to do i've finished your work that you came to do here here's what i've done and now what's my next assignment you know i i think that remember paul talks about in the ages to come we'll be you know learning more about what god's purposes are um you know the church aid's been like 2 000 years that seems like almost an eternity just for us it certainly must be the last thing of importance that's ever going to happen but uh there's gazillions of you know ages to come and who knows maybe a different kind of assignment maybe the new worlds to win who knows but we paul says nothing about that uh elsewhere except that one verse nor does any other passage in the whole bible so it's like remember paul was caught in third heaven he heard things that he wasn't even lawful to he couldn't explain you know but he knew about them he alluded to them from time to time you know i think that might be one of the things he he got some insights about that that he couldn't really that was never really explained in his epistles but it's like he's kind of leaking something that he knows that uh no one else seemed to know or mentioned but uh that's a that's a hard one it's a hard one i mean it's very clear jesus is going to reign forever but at least this stage of his reign is going to come to an end at some point he's going to hand it over to the father as a finished project and then probably okay so what's the next project you know i got to pick up my grandkids okay thanks for coming okay so we know you're not leaving man [Laughter] okay god bless you john good to see you us being taken as captives yes uh oh you mean in ephesians when he said he has sent out how he took a host of captives that's what you mean uh you know i guess that's one possibility usually there's different uh interpretation than that usually uh he took a host of captives when he ascended on high it's taken to mean one of two things usually to mean that those old testament saints who were in shale and were not able to go to heaven until jesus died and rose again that when he died rose again and ascended he took them to heaven so they had been captives in shale but he led them when he ascended he led a host of captives with him to heaven that's one interpretation another interpretation is that he's referring to the fact that his resurrection actually made captives out of the demonic powers the principles of powers became his captives and that he led them as it were in a triumphal procession uh as his captives in heaven like like the roman generals would take you know the the people they conquered that take their rulers their their leaders and and have a uh procession of triumph through the streets of rome before they killed them uh so it's like they bring their trophies uh and so some people think that when it says that christ led a host of captives that it means his death and resurrection defeated satan and the demonic powers and they were like paraded as defeated foes as his captives in heaven as a result why of his take people to heaven i believe it would be a figure of speech honestly because he uses the same thing uh in colossians chapter 2 and verse 5 he says that christ he disarmed the principalities and powers and made a show of them openly triumphing over them in the cross uh some translations in the cross some say in himself but the point is through his death he triumphed over the principles and powers which the demonic forces now three imbueo is the is the greek word triumphed over and it's a word that was specifically a reference to what the roman generals did when they paraded their captives through the streets of rome through the arch of triumph and so forth so it's saying that christ did that to the principalities and powers through the cross that he defeated them and paraded them as defeated now of course we if we picture this very literally it's like you know what he took him up into heaven and chains and kind of walked down the streets of heaven and threw an arch of triumph and and then executed him no i think what he's saying he's using the language of the roman practice to say christ's victory over the demonic powers is parallel or is comparable to the this roman practice of parading their enemies defeated and and basically i think what paul's saying is the defeat of satan and the principalities and powers is is proclaimed and demonstrated through the cross and that i don't think he's talking about a literal parade anywhere going on actually in second corinthians chapter two he also talks about us as um i think in the king james it says he christ always leads us forth in triumph i think is maybe that's not the king james but one of the translations he leads us fourth in triumph it's in second corinthians two and um and many commentators think what it means is he's led us forth as as his captives in his triumph procession that is that we are the captives yeah but so there's but but usually it says he took a host of captives when he ascended on hike uh i like i said that could be a third interpretation usually i've heard it explained as a reference either to bringing the old testament saints out of sheel or else as a uh parading the demonic powers as defeated foes but we are also defeated foes yeah we are also christ's former foes who have been defeated we've been conquered by the gospel and have been made willing slaves of his so that's another possibility through studying yes and i just gave some qualification on um you've said that well okay god says that he wanted him to utterly destroy hunger shall receive are all of those communities technically yeah there's some i mean there was there were uh i think there were ten if i'm not mistaken i think there's seven there okay there were there's a certain number of uh city-states in the land of canaan and uh they all had to be defeated and but the land was called canaan so all these different tribal groups pagan tribal groups were called canaanites sometimes on one occasion they were called the amorites which is also one of the groups but sometimes the whole all over called emirates like when when god said to abraham the iniquity of the amorites is not yet full he's talking about all the canaanites pretty much but um that yeah there were these different tribes that had their city-states there and their own kings and stuff in the land they probably warped against each other sometime but they banded together against the invading israelites and so sometimes the whole the whole nation of these groups was called canaanites because it was the land of canaan other times probably one of the groups was called canaanites separately from the others like amorites was also used that way so it's like sometimes just one of the tribes would kind of give its name as an umbrella for the whole group you know that happened in the northern kingdom of israel once the kingdom divided in in rehoboam's time that the northern kingdom had 10 tribes one of which was ephraim but the prophets often refer to that nation as ephraim yeah hosea does a lot and and some other places in the new testament or old testament do that the northern kingdom of course was technically called israel and it had 10 tribes but sometimes it was called ephraim the whole nation was called ephraim even though it was only one of the tribes but it was the prominent tribe the same thing in the southern kingdom it's called judah although there's two tribes there's the tribe of judah and the tribe of benjamin we're both there but judah was prominent so they called the nation judah so if there was a tribe of canaanites a tribe of amorites gurgazites you know and these others that are mentioned uh it may be that sometimes one was more prominent than the other and they just kind of gave their name to the whole local you know group can you tell me a little bit about the amalekite yeah the amalekites were not canaanites they were of another lineage uh they were from ham just like the canaanites were but they came through a different line than the canaanites the amalekites were just a band of ruthless uh you know nomadic bedouin warriors and um they first come into the picture in exodus what chapter 17 is it or i think it's 17 when they attack israel when israel has come out of the promised land into the out of egypt on the way to the promised land they're in the wilderness they they start picking off the the slow and the weak israelites in the ta in the back section of the parade and uh so israel defended themselves and a war was fought moses went up on a hill with aaron and her and that's when moses he had joshua leading the armies and when moses hands were in the air the israelites prevailed when his hands got tired and went down the amalekites prevailed so aaron and her sat moses on the rock and stood next to him held his arms up until israel prevailed and there was a curse in that chapter stated on the amalekites the god said he'll have perpetual uh hostility toward the amalekites now um in the days of saul the first king of israel god actually commissioned saul to go out and wipe out the amalekites in terms of the old curse and uh you know he did more or less but he left ag their king alive and that got him in trouble with god because he kind of took the liberty of changing changing the assignment you know he was supposed to kill them all it's including a gag but he kept a gag as a trophy and it was because of that that samuel said to him rebellion is as the wind sin of witchcraft you know till obey is better than sacrifice and because you've rejected the word of the lord the lord has rejected you from being king over israel that was in the case of the amalekites interestingly ironically uh because some al-qaeda did survive that it was an amalekite who later claimed that he had killed saul when when saul fell on his sword uh and he either killed himself or was wounded so badly that he wasn't yet dead an amalekite came along and by the amalekite's own report in the first chapter of second samuel uh he reported to david that he had found saul wounded mortally and that saul said you know kill me so the amount so the philistines don't come and and this amalekite says that he killed saul and uh there's some question as whether the man was lying uh or whether he's supplementing things that are not told us in the previous chapter at the end of first samuel but in any case he was an amalekite who took credit for saul's death although saul was supposed to earlier have wiped out all the americans um i don't remember if amalekites appear later on um there's an agagite now ag was the king of the amalekites and in esther heyman the bad guy was a gagite a descent of aegon who was in malachi so he had some he was persian but he must have had some amalekite ancestry too but um they were just another bad old tribe that had to be punished but apart from the canaanites and the amalekites god didn't ever instruct israel to annihilate whole races you know he when they fought against the [ __ ] or against the midianites or the moabites they were never supposed to go out and annihilate men women and children and do all that stuff those those uh those annihilations were strictly for the canaanites and the amalekites whom must have been worse than most if god ordered that on their society uh yes uh rocky hasn't had rocky when an unclean spirit goes out of a man he goes looking for waterless places and finding any returns bring seven worse with him yeah i think that's made clearer in the parallel in matthew in chapter 12 because jesus does talk about the behavior of evil spirits when they go out he's talking about an exorcism when a man has a demon cast out of him the demon goes looking for another home apparently if he doesn't find anything suitable and what would make one suitable is not explained so that's a little mysterious uh but if he doesn't find a suitable home he comes back and if the original man which is referred to as his house is you know he's he's been liberated he's free he's cleaned up his act but he says the house is empty and which i think suggests that there's a vacancy for the demon um that it brings seven worse with it to and and the latter state of that man is worse than the first now when matthew 12 gives that story jesus follows that story by saying so shall it be with this generation in other words the generation of the jews that were living in his time were like a man who through jesus mystery was liberated from demonic bondage but they didn't follow him and so in 1870 when they're locked in their city and the romans were there the season the demons came and the nation was inhabited by demons in a much greater way which is explained uh very graphically by josephus how they behave they're totally out of their minds sort of like some people in the cities of america today uh if demons have been unleashed upon them that would explain a lot and that did happen to the jews and i think that jesus used that as an illustration for what was going to happen to his nation but uh you were perhaps wondering how that might uh interact with what we're talking about earlier with christians having demons maybe was that what you're thinking yeah right well because jesus yeah because jesus said if the demon comes back to the original house and finds it swept and cleaned and empty he comes back in and so i think most preachers are saying empty means they haven't asked jesus into their heart you know they got delivered from demons but they didn't become a christian then then they're just vulnerable to the demons coming back in force and that is probably true uh some might take from that the assumption that if the person has become a christian there's no way the demons could come back in and no doubt in most cases that'd be true when i say that the bible does not clearly say the bible does not clearly say that christians are exempt from demonization it doesn't mean christians have to be worried about it uh back there was a big controversy over this whole question of demon possession christians back in the late 70s and jack hayford the pastor of the church on the way in van nuys came out with a bible study uh which he was somewhat open to the idea that christians could have demons but but he said uh he had a sermon called can a christian have a freedom the question that was being debated is can a christian have a demon and he's saying well can a christian have freedom can a christian be free from demons yes the answer is yes can christians be exempt from demons yes they can i mean put on the whole armor of god they may withstand in the evil day and having done all to stand that you may withstand all the evil ploys of the devil you know uh you know take the shield of faith it'll quench all the fire darts of the enemy yeah if you're if you're doing what you're supposed to be doing as a christian if you've got the armor of god you're waging the good warfare uh you know you're walking with jesus you're filled with the spirit there's there's no room for a demon to get an advantage but let's face it not all christians do that you know peter said in first peter chapter 5 be vigilant be sober because your adversary the devil walks around like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour and he's writing to christians he said you better watch out because the devil's out there looking for a vulnerable person to devour i don't know what he means by devour but it doesn't sound like something that christians want you know and in fact it sounds like the kind of thing that my teachers would have said christians are exempt from but if peter thought they were exempt from him he wouldn't say be diligent be sober watch out there's this danger there's a lion out there who wants to devour you now my teachers used to tell me yeah he's a roaring lion but he's got no teeth because jesus has taken all his teeth out and uh you know hahaha and so forth but and uh well i mean that the bible doesn't say anything about the teeth being present or missing it talks about the roaring lion but um you know you can read stuff in but it's not implied necessarily i mean there's a danger there's a lion out there who wants to devour you and if he can't do it why bother me with that information you know if the devil can't devour me no matter how careless i am why bother me with having to be diligent and be vigilant and and be sober and make sure that i'm aware of this lying out here well what do i care if you can't get it if you can't do anything to me what do i care if he's out there let him wear himself out you know uh you know all these warnings are given you know paul said at the end of first corinthians 9 he talks about how he fights the battle he says i'm not fighting a sham battle i'm not one who's punching at the air he says but i says i buffet my body i keep it under subjection lest having preached to others i myself should become reprobate now most translations don't say rapper but he uses the word there the same word in the greek that he used in romans where he says god gave them over to reprobate mine he says i i fight a real battle i'm running like a an olympian i'm i'm keeping my body under control so that i will not become a reprobate and why would he go to so much trouble if there's no danger of becoming a reprobate when you're a christian paul is certainly a christian no one can say you know paul wasn't saying i'm not sure i'm saved if i were if i was sure i'm saved i know i couldn't fall away but i i don't want to fall away because i'm not really sure what i'm saying that's not what paul is saying paul knew he was saved he also knew that it's not just automatic you get saved and cruise you know you got to be this is a war zone here we live in a war zone and people get hurt and people get killed in war zones there's lions out there they eat people uh i mean this is the language throughout scripture there's there's not i mean there's a few favorite a few favorite proof texts that are used to speak of certain exemptions that people think christians have and we do have exemptions when we're trusting god when we're fighting we we're we've got the armor of god i mean when we're we're you know resisting the devil he resists the devil he'll flee from you greater is he who's in you than who he is in the world i don't worry about demons at all i'm not the slightest bit concerned about demons in in my own case but i have seen people who i thought pretty much were christians who have gotten themselves in just as bad a shape with demons as a non-christian eventually because of their compromises usually it has to be occult um but it can be other things the point is i don't have any interest in necessarily the question of whether a christian can have a demon or not i'm not afraid of having demons uh because i you know it's sort of like about luke can you lose your salvation well only if you're backslider i'm not so what do i care you know what i what do i care if i could lose my salvation i can't lose my salvation while i'm doing what i'm doing i can't lose my salvation when i'm following jesus the only way you lose your salvation is by rejecting jesus by apostasizing by renouncing christ that's not going to happen i've never had the slightest interest in that happening no matter how bad things get nothing will make me ever want to do that and the same thing with the demon thing well people don't just walk down the street and find themselves demon-possessed out of nowhere people get demon-possessed by involvement in the occult and by things like that by playing games with the devil i'm not interested in those things you know you don't can a christian be liberated from demons can a christian be free yes that's the guarantee if you walk in the spirit you'll not fulfill the lust of the flesh if you wear the armor of god you will withstand in the evil day and having done all still stand you'll quench all the fiery darts the wicked one you'll uh you know you'll you'll be protected against all his devices uh the lion who's out there roaring won't get you if you're being vigilant and sober uh but you see everywhere in the bible the assumption is christians are something that christians in fact were in those days but not everyone who calls themselves a christian today is lots of people call themselves christians but they're not disciples of jesus i mean the first step of being a disciple jesus said if anyone would come after you let him deny himself take up his cross and follow me and he said unless you deny yourself you unless you take up a cross you cannot be my disciple unless you hate your own life you cannot be my disciple and unless you forsake all that you have you cannot be my disciple jesus said those are all quotes from jesus now you can't be a disciple unless you're all in there's not like a part-time christianity i knew someone who's in like the what is it the reserve national guard or something like that and like on weekends or a few weeks a year or something they go off and have training and stuff like that yeah but they're not in a war you know you can't be a part-time soldier in a hot war this is not a cold war this is a hot war and uh your devil the devil's always there wanting to drag you but you don't have to worry about it jesus is there holding you too as long as you're holding him as long as you're trusting him we're kept peter said in first peter 1 he says we are kept by the power of god through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time i am kept by the power of god that's more than the power of satan by a factor of a gazillion you know so i'm not even afraid of what satan can do is i'm kept by the power of god but peter said you're kept by the power of god through faith oh what if i give up the faith well no promises there you're kept by the power of god through faith well i intend to trust god that's faith i intend to have faith i have faith i don't plan to give it up i'm not going to depart from the faith and i'm not saying that with some kind of business i've i've been tested in this dozens of times in in the 60 years i've been a christian and i've had some pretty hard things that some people have fallen away when they've had less hard things than that but i'm just i know i'm not interested in i'm not interested in life about jesus you know i sometimes wonder how would i endure if it comes back to the like it was in certain times of church or christians being tortured i'm a wimp i don't even like to you know my wife will tell you i don't even like to watch medical shows on tv where it graphically shows the doctors working in the or i have to look away i don't like guts i don't mind blood i don't like guts and i'm a wimp if someone's cutting me open and saying well renounce christ and they do those kind of things to christians in some parts of the world i think well how could i stand that the answer is well first of all the grace of god god gives the grace to when the trials are hard he's he always did it for the martyrs he'll do it for me he's not going to ruin his perfect reputation on my account by failing me but the point is even even if there was no grace i think what else is there to do if they're going to torture you for unless you renounce christ well i can't renounce christ that's not even an option i can't pretend not to know what i know i can't pretend that god hasn't been you know my my king and my lord all that there's just no i'm just not a dishonest person yeah you know so and i also know that christians are not the only ones who suffer you know if you renounce cries to avoid suffering that doesn't mean you're going to suffer equally badly in other ways you know horrible ways to go um so life is just not a bit of roses and uh and it's certainly the christian life is not but it has been reasonably easy for us in this part of the world at this time in history which means we're not really very well prepared uh we're not very conditioned if you were a christian in russia or china during the height of communist depression uh or maybe in north korea today or in the roman empire during the brain of nero and some of these other guys donation and uh a lot of these emperors that did horrible things you read fox's book of martyrs horrible stuff now i'm sounding like trump horrible it's very bad very bad you know but uh very bad stuff terrible now they you become a christian then you know you're signing up for probable torture and death and you probably don't have all that many people signing up they didn't have these uh mega churches during the roman persecutions um and they probably won't have them if such persecutions join us here um because we are not conditioned for it we don't we think that christianity means we can have all this in heaven too you know but uh all of this is a passing thing i mean it may not pass right now but it's got to pass sometime all this immunity to suffering i mean that's not a human condition that's natural we've been very very uh very blessed and uh yeah we may have our turn because the people the people who have been martyred and who've been tortured they weren't worse christians than us a lot of them were better christians than us you know it's like it's not like we're god's favorites the 20th or 21st century christians in in america we're just we're just the best christians there ever were and so god of course would never let those things happen when i was pre-trib i used to say and hear other people say i don't think god would want it would make us go through the tribulation well that's a stupid thing to say it's a very provincial attitude isn't it it's like it's like thinking i don't know anything that's going on outside of my neighborhood um like christians being tortured right at this moment having the children tortured in front of them i just want to ask you a question i know it's getting kind of close probably that um i i i work as a caregiver i have my caregiving business for 32 years and so just recently i was approached by one of my clients who was dying and he was so afraid his wife had passed already he was about in his 70s he was very young he was very sick and he was so afraid that she wasn't in heaven because of the time that she died she wasn't really following christ but um now i want to know if i was writing telling because he was so worried about himself so i prayed about it and i said lord i want to encourage this man and let him have peace before he goes so i found the scripture where i said if you confess your sins he is faithful or just to forgive and i said i believe that if your wife confessed to jesus that she was sorry for what she had done or what for for going away a little bit because you keep saying backsliding and backsliding and apostasizing okay that's different in backsliding you can still um you haven't lost your faith in jesus you still believe right but you you're you're not practicing sin necessarily but you've gone to the point where you're just like you know oh i'm keeping repeating this in my review this symbol i know i have to stop but i can't stop lord help my stuff and finally you stop and there's been a lot of people i've come across that have had that happen to them even pastors and um but that doesn't mean they've rejected christ they've fallen and so i've learned that if you fall you can get back up again a righteous man falls seven times but what is our righteousness abraham his faith was counted for righteousness because our righteousness is a special grant so i was right to tell him that that's what i meant yeah i don't say that i don't see anything wrong with telling them that yeah i like yourself i believe that people can fall and not be lost okay i just wanted to clarify that yes it sounds like you know okay i mean in your experience you will not and you're pretty sure you won't and i'm i'm very thankful that you won't because there's not too many upright men around that will say that emerald falls oh but i will fail and everybody does yeah at a time and we all sin every day so we can't walk this christian life perfectly i mean my husband and i've been married for 12 years we've been married a few times before i have he has only been married once but for 30 years he was single and i was single for 20. it's been real difficult for us to combine our lives because i'm very independent i've been independent he's independent so i'm just thinking you know well well i'm getting off the track now but anyway that's what i wanted yeah let me say something about backsliding versus apostasy apostasy is a biblical word it means basically to give up on the faith to give up on christ um backsliding the bi the new testament doesn't have the word backslide or any form of backslide in the new testament in the old testament it only occurs i think in jeremiah it might occur in one other place in the old testament but where it does it actually refers to israel as like a backsliding heifer like a cow backsliding now the imagery is obviously of a cow trying to climb a hill a muddy hill probably and losing his footing it slides back it's back sliding you know and see it's sliding backward and uh although the term is only used corporately of israel the nation backslides there's never a reference to an individual backslider but you can see that the term could apply i mean the word to backslide something is to lose ground you know to slide back from where you are and lose ground for where you are and there are definitely times when christians lose ground yeah david and yeah definitely david did not renounce god not in his heart or otherwise but he he certainly failed god uh he he definitely lost ground in a big way but he regained most of it back he's there were still consequences you know but i mean backsliding doesn't necessarily mean you can't regain ground right it means you're losing ground now apostasy is when you turn away from christ now it's hard to judge somebody who seems to be vaccinated to know are they are they apostate or vaccine god knows right just like your examples of your friends that were yes on fire for the lord evangelized and brought people to the lord right right and i and i think they're in heaven i i hope they are i i frankly i think god wants everybody to be in heaven so he loved us while we were still sinners yeah so i you know i can't really say about any individual case exactly except judas yeah but um is a greek it comes from a greek word that means disapproved it's actually the greek word approved with the letter a at the beginning which makes it negative so like atheist means no god you know reprobate is a greek word for approved that's negated so disapproved now when paul says that god gave them over to a reprobate mind it's a mind that either is not approved or not approving some people say it's a mind that doesn't have the capacity to approve or disapprove it becomes more like sociopathic but uh others could just say god doesn't approve god they they don't have god's endorsement uh that is god doesn't if they stand before god he's not going to approve of them you know and um so that's that's what reprobate means apostate means one who's a paw in the greek means away from that's a preposition and state uh apostate i i assume that comes from the word uh i'm i'm not sure what the what the word the second part of that word comes from off the top of my head i have to look that up but um yeah i thought i knew but i don't think i can remember it uh anyway these an apostate is definitely someone who's rejected the faith a reprobate is somebody who it's not saying so much about their mental state as god's attitude toward them he disapproves they're not approved of god um backslide as i say is only an old testament word but it i mean you could use it if someone who's slid backward from where they were now if you slide backward you presumably if you never move forward again you could slide all the way back off the cliff you know you could probably get a place where uh i mean i believe that if a person begins to compromise in their life they can still be a christian god will convict them and they and hopefully they'll repent if they don't repent quickly well what remember what what jesus said about jezebel in revelation chapter 2 i gave her space to repent but she didn't repent so i'm going to throw her into great tribulation kill her children with with death you know um now we don't know if that woman had ever been a christian but god gave space to repent and i think that when a christian begins to go the wrong way god gives some space repent he doesn't just say you're not mine anymore he's waiting you know will you repent you've got some time here you know i'm going to give a chance um but it seems to me that when a person sins and doesn't repent and they keep sinning they get hardened in that state and it becomes more difficult they harden their hearts and and it seems to the person who persists in that could become hardened enough that they just say well i don't even don't even believe in god anymore i don't believe in jesus anymore and i've known people who've gone that way um and i have to say some of them have been my own children um my own children who definitely loved the lord when they were young and uh i'm not sure where they'd say they're at now but they're i don't think that anyone would say they love the lord or that they're christians so hard to say what some of them are saying anyway um yeah we're out of time actually it's time to time to quit here so we didn't get i think i don't know if we got through everyone's questions or not but uh we'll just call it because it is late so thank you father for this opportunity we have it's just good just to be among each other talking thinking about the word thinking about the ramifications of different things even iron sharpening iron where there may be disagreements but we know that everyone here who is a follower of yours is growing and growing partly through this kind of contemplation of what your word says and means and how it applies i pray that you'll make us always the type who will meditate on your word day and night and be learning and be like trees planted by rivers of water who bring forth their fruit in season and their leaves never wither we will not be those who slide back in any degree but we'll go forward and and as trials and challenges come i pray that you'll find us looking to you uh and trusting you for the grace to do what pleases you and glorifies you in the hard situations and we ask this in jesus name amen okay we'll call that

Channel: SteveGreggVideos

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Keywords: Bible, Bible study, Christian, answers, questions, God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, Israel, scripture, apologetics

Id: NM__ABs3HLk

Length: 124min 0sec (7440 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020