The Narrow Path 09/07/2026

Steve Gregg: Good afternoon and welcome to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we're live for an hour each weekday afternoon, commercial-free, taking your calls. If you have questions you want to call in about the Bible or the Christian faith, we'll talk about those. If you disagree with the host about something, we can talk about that too. You have to bring it up and we'll talk about it. The number to call is 844-484-5737. That's 844-484-5737. There's a couple of lines open right now. If you call now, you can get through and get on the switchboard and we'll get to your calls today easily. This coming weekend, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights and in some cases daytimes, I have speaking appointments up in the Sacramento area. I think I'm speaking six times in three days. Several of those times will be at one church and then there will be some other locations. If you're up in the Sacramento area and interested in joining us for anything that I'll be speaking at, you can find out about them, time and place and what I'm talking about, by going to our website thenarrowpath.com. thenarrowpath.com and there's a tab there that says announcements. That's the one you click on to get the information about where I'll be this coming weekend in Sacramento. All right, we're going to go to the phones because we've got a lot of people waiting. Interestingly, our first two callers today are both calling from the San Francisco Bay Area. Thomas is our first caller from San Francisco. Hello, welcome.
Thomas: Hello, Steve. Good afternoon. My question is about the Lord Jesus' teaching in Matthew chapter 5, verses 27 through 30 regarding his warning that everyone who looks on a woman to lust for her has committed adultery with her already in his heart. And that if your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out. Should we then understand the right eye in that context to be the offending organ responsible for the lust that therefore should be torn out? And if that is not what is being taught, how then should we understand his teaching?
Steve Gregg: Well, this idea about cutting off a hand or an eye is also found in Mark chapter 9 and there's no connection with adultery in the heart there. It's just a standalone teaching. So in Matthew 5, although it's adjacent to his teaching about adultery in the heart, what he says about the eye and the hand, cut it out and so forth, is a standalone teaching that's not only related to that. Now, it's no doubt related to that too. The idea though is not that your eye is really causing you to offend, because it's really Jesus said in Matthew 15, what really causes fornication and stuff to happen is the heart, it's not the eye. I'm quite sure that if I were to lose both my eyes, I would be still capable of having lustful thoughts because it's in the heart, not in the eye or in the hand. When Jesus says if your eye causes you to stumble or causes you to sin, and if your hand causes you to sin, better to remove it and go into life without it than to keep it and be thrown into the fire of Gehenna. Now, this "if" is a hypothetical. I don't believe that your hand ever caused you to sin or your eye either. I think it's your mind and your heart. The eye and the hand are simply instruments of your body which are directed by your heart. And so whether you had a hand, you could lose both hands and still have an evil heart. You could lose both eyes and still have an evil heart. So, I don't think he's saying if you are lusting after one in your heart because you're looking at her wrongly, then you should pluck your eye out. Obviously, that wouldn't help and that's not what he's saying. Looking after one to lust after her is, of course, indulging in a mental sin to be sure. And Jesus says it is a sin, just as surely as an outer act of adultery is sin. So, a mental act of adultery is sin. And therefore, he's basically saying don't trust the Pharisees to guide you in what's pleasing or not pleasing to God because they teach only external obedience. They teach that you should not kill, but I say you should not hate. They say you should not commit adultery, I say you shouldn't even look at another man's wife to lust after her. That's adultery in the heart. But then this business about cutting off the hand or the eye, plucking out the eye, this is more of a standalone teaching that if there's something in your life, and it may be ever so valuable to you, ever so seemingly indispensable like your eye or your hand. Now, in most cases, it's not going to be your eye or the hand, but the point is if it's something even so indispensable as an eye or a hand, you should still be prepared to get rid of it if that would help. That is, if it will keep you from sinning. Now, as I said a moment ago, getting rid of your eye or hand will not keep you from sinning. So this is a hypothetical. But there are things that are in our lives: relationships that are improper relationships perhaps, possessions, secret habits and so forth, even some of our hobbies. They may put us in the wrong circles and we are tempted and fall into sin through any kind of involvement in these kind of things. Doesn't matter how much you love it, how valuable you feel it is, you'd be better off without it if it's preventing you from entering into life. And that's what Jesus is saying. It's better to enter into life lacking virtually anything that is otherwise of value to you, better to get rid of it because nothing is as much value to you as life itself. And so to avoid sin so that you avoid the fires of Gehenna, King James and most translations say of hell, you know, that's definitely a good trade. It doesn't feel like a good trade if you don't really believe in hell, if you don't really care about your soul. Getting rid of your hand or your eye or frankly anything of value, and most things of value would be literally of less value than an eye or a hand. But he's saying that even if it's that valuable, better to do without it than to be cast into Gehenna. So the teaching can be applied to the lust in the heart thing. It's obviously right next to it in Matthew, although as I say, the hand/eye teaching is standing without that context in Mark chapter 9. So it's a general teaching. The general teaching is whatever would keep you from following Christ, whatever would keep you from abandoning your sin, get rid of it. Better to be without it and enter into life. Now, in the connection with a person who's got problems with lust in the heart, there are things that they may have in their life that it would be hard to get rid of but they should. It may be that they have a TV. It may be that they have the internet; almost everybody does have those things, or even a smartphone. And it may be that they've got an addiction of some kind or a bondage in their life to pornographic images. And these things, they just can't get away from them. Every time they sit down at the computer, there it is. Or at least they can't stop themselves from turning to those things. Well, this may seem really radical, but for about 6,000 years every human being lived, including people who were happy and productive and fruitful in their lives, without cell phones, without computers, and without televisions. Now, you may say we can't live without those now. Well, if you can't live with it, then maybe you're better off living without it. Jesus said it is better to enter into life without it than to be deprived of life with it. I remember talking to some youths in Santa Cruz, a surfing town as you know because you're in San Francisco, many years ago and answering questions. And some were saying, "We're all surfers and we go out there but there's a lot of women out there really provocatively dressed and my eyes tend to wander and lust and so forth." I said maybe you should give up surfing. Now, that's easy for me to say. I've never surfed, I never cared about surfing. But with people who do surf, it's often the main thing they think about all the time. It's practically an idol to them in some cases. And yet I said, "Well, you know, if you want to enter into life, it's better to give up any habit, any hobby, any activity that you find is continually causing you to sin." I'm not saying that surfing causes people to sin, but if going to the beach exposes you to things that you do not have the power morally to resist, then don't go to the beach. I mean, I know that sounds radical, but do you think Jesus didn't sound radical when he said pluck out your eye or cut off your hand? That sounds even more radical. I think people would sooner give up going to the beach than cut off their hand or eye. And that's just the point. He's stating an extreme example. If that would keep you from sinning, then do it, get rid of it. But of course, as I said, cutting out your hand or your eye would never keep you from sinning. Whatever sin you're committing with your eyes and hands intact can go on in your heart without your eyes and hands. So he's not actually giving instructions literally about maiming yourself or disfiguring yourself. He's basically saying when it comes down to priorities, you should be willing to get rid of anything you have to in order to enter into eternal life. In, you know, there's sacrifices we make when we follow Jesus. We deny ourselves, we take up our cross, we follow Jesus. But it's only for a lifetime, which is a really short time compared to eternity. In eternity you won't miss it. It's hard to imagine some of the things that we love now that we won't have in eternity and we think, "How can I be happy without that?" Well, that's like a child being told that when he grows up he won't want to ride a tricycle anymore. And yet at the time, the mentality that child has, he thinks, "I could never be happy without my tricycle." Yeah, well, that's because the child doesn't understand how grown-ups think. And we don't understand how we will think when we've been glorified, when we're in our eternal bodies and so forth. I mean, we're going to have somewhat different tastes. I mean, the very fact that Jesus said there's no sex or he said no marriage in the resurrection strongly suggests that our desires are going to be of a different sort than they are in this life. And while we might say, "But I like this," well, that's like a child saying, "I like my little play soldiers, I don't want to get rid of those." Yeah, but when you get older, you put away childish things and you actually have deeper satisfaction in things that are much more meaningful. So we don't know what we're going to be like and what we'll feel like, but we know that God knows that. And if he tells us to give up something that we in this life find very difficult to part with, he's not trying to rain on our parade. He's trying to tell us, "Hey, listen, there's going to be a time when this will mean nothing to you, this thing that you cherish so much, it'll mean nothing to you and having eternal life will mean everything to you. Think like that now, because when that time comes you'll wish you had." So that's how I understand what Jesus is saying about those things. All right, Michael in the Bay Area also, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.
Michael: Hi, Steve. My question is about Ananias and Sapphira in Acts. To me it seems Peter's behavior is completely inexcusable. I mean, he's acting like a prosecutor. But I have never heard a single religious leader say Peter is wrong. But the bodies aren't washed, there's no time for mourning, they aren't put in their own graves, and the Sanhedrin aren't called to deal with the dead body. Also, the entire church is gripped with fear after that, where love is supposed to drive out fear.
Steve Gregg: Well, I'm not sure that you and I have the same frame of reference. First of all, fear is a very good thing if it's the fear of God. And I think that's what is implied here. They feared the Lord. Where there's no fear of God, men are unrestrained. The Bible says by the fear of the Lord men depart from evil. The Bible says the fear of the Lord's the beginning of wisdom, which means if you don't fear the Lord, you haven't even started being wise yet. That's the very foundation for being wise is that you have enough good sense to fear being on the wrong side of the creator of the universe. Now, the truth is perfect love casts out fear in this respect that while we do reasonably fear the creator of the universe, when we walk in love, there's nothing to fear. That is, we should fear, for example, lightning. If I'm out in the middle of a field and there's a lightning storm, I should be somewhat afraid that the lightning might hit me. But if I can go indoors or go somewhere that's safe from it, then that fear of lightning has made me make a wise decision and I'm no longer afraid because I'm now in a safe place. To be in danger of something that's immensely powerful and destructive if it hits you is good to be afraid of that. But fearing it puts you in a position where you can change in ways that you're no longer afraid of it. If we walk in perfect love, there's nothing to fear from God. It's when we don't that we don't. So the fear of God is frankly, Jesus said to fear God. Jesus said do not fear him who can kill the body and can do no more, but fear him who after he kills the body he can throw the soul in hell. So I'm not on the same page with you about fear being a bad thing. I hope we all live in the fear of God. But the fear of God is something that's kind of at a foundation in our lives that's the foundation of wisdom. And by making wise choices, we live unafraid of that danger that is posed by being on the wrong side of God. And so we don't live in terror, we live in love. And so we don't feel afraid. But when we contemplate getting on the wrong side of God, that should make us terrified. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 5, or 2nd Corinthians 5, he said, "knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men." So Paul knew the terror of the Lord. The early church knew the fear of God. They were walking in the fear of God. That's a good thing. Now as far as Peter being out of line, Peter was the one, well, he and the apostles were in charge of maintaining the conduct of the Christian community. Jesus put Peter and the others in charge of that. Now I don't know if you're aware, but the Christian community has some standards it's supposed to keep, supposed to obey Jesus. Jesus said in Matthew 18 if somebody sins you should try to get them to repent and if they don't repent you should put them out of the church. There's discipline there. Paul said the same thing in a number of places. He said it in Romans 16, he said it in 2nd Thessalonians 3, he said it in Titus chapter 3. There's a number of places where the Bible tells us to maintain the standards of obedience to Christ in the church because we're the body of Christ. The church is the community of followers of Christ. If we live like the world outside that doesn't follow Christ, then there's, we don't really have much reason to exist as a body. So anyway, for Peter to maintain the standards and say, "Listen, you can't be lying to the Holy Spirit like that," what else would a good pastor say? What would a good preacher say to somebody who's living and doing things that are horrendous? Now Peter didn't strike them dead. This is something that people say, "Why did Peter strike them dead?" He didn't. He just rebuked them. He just said, "You lied to the Holy Spirit," and then they dropped dead. He didn't tell them to drop dead. He didn't smite them, he didn't hit them, didn't even curse them. He just rebuked them for what they did and God struck them dead. Now you said they didn't wash the bodies, they didn't have the Sanhedrin treat them or whatever. I don't know what they did or didn't do. The story is told with great brevity. It is said that Ananias was sent out, his body was taken out and buried, and then his wife came and she died and she was buried also. But we're not told that they didn't follow normal burial customs. I don't expect every detail to be given to us in a rather rapid telling of the story. So you and I are seeing this very differently. First of all, I think Peter had every right and obligation to confront sin in the church. Secondly, I don't know that they neglected the rites of burial. There's no suggestion that they did neglect those things. And third, that the fear of God came on the church is stated actually as a positive thing. It's intended to mean that the church was doing well and they were going to be considerably less compromising because of what happened there. So that's what I think. I appreciate you sharing because you raised some thoughts that don't usually come to my head, but it's good to do so. I welcome people to do that, to bring those things up. Have a good day, Michael. James in Memphis, Tennessee, welcome to The Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.
James: Yes, thank you for taking my call, Steve. There was a person that said that the mother of James and John was Salome. I guess that's how you pronounce it.
Steve Gregg: Salome, I would say, yeah.
James: Yes, was the mother of Mary.
Steve Gregg: No, the sister. Sister of Mary.
James: Yes, excuse me, sister. That would make Jesus and John cousins, first cousins, right?
Steve Gregg: That's right. That's correct.
James: Is that found in the scripture, is that outside information?
Steve Gregg: No, that is in the scripture, but it's not found in any one place. You have to compare statements from three different Gospels. It comes from looking at the lists of women who came to the tomb of Jesus when he'd risen and comparing those with the lists of the women who were at the cross and watched him buried. And in the different Gospels, it lists the women somewhat differently. And if you compare them, Salome is mentioned in one of them and she appears to be the same woman that is said in another list to be the sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus. So that's where the idea comes from. You have to kind of compare the lists of women and the most reasonable, most simple interpretation and harmonization of those lists would make Salome the sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and therefore Jesus and the sons of Zebedee were first cousins.
James: Steve, in regards to the last caller, you know, it said that his wife came about three hours later. And then the men were at the door of this... so there was at least a three-hour lapse between her burial and his.
Steve Gregg: Yes. So they could have gone through the right rituals. I think you're saying, right?
James: Right.
Steve Gregg: I hear you.
James: Okay, that's all I had to say.
Steve Gregg: Okay, James. Thank you for calling.
James: Yes, sir. Thank you for taking my call. Bye-bye.
Steve Gregg: Sure. God bless you. Priscilla from Vancouver, British Columbia, welcome to The Narrow Path.
Guest (Female): Hi, Steve. Greetings, salute. First question, when referring to house or tribe within the Bible, what is the difference? And second question, what is objective truth solely based on the Bible or how would you... I'm sort of studying these terms. Could you clarify what objective truth is?
Steve Gregg: Sure, I'd be glad to address that. Thanks. As far as, you said what is the difference between the house and tribe. Well, Israel was divided into 12 tribes, the 12 sons of Jacob. Each became families and they became extended families and then they became tribes. And later on, there were lots of them, I mean like thousands, tens of thousands in each of these tribes. And so the tribes refer to a tribe descended from each of these 12 guys. So people would be of the tribe of Judah or the tribe of Issachar or the tribe of Gad or the tribe of Dan, whatever. Now, as far as the house, this would be something that would be probably more narrow, like the House of David. David was of the tribe of Judah, but his descendants were said to be of his house, or his dynasty really. I mean in his case, since he was a king, the House of David was the dynasty of David. In 1 Samuel chapter 2 and verse 30, a prophet comes and speaks to Eli the priest and says, "I said indeed that your house and the house of your father would walk before me forever." Now walk before me, that's an idiom that means to be priests in the temple or the tabernacle. Now he said, "I said that your house and your father's house would be priests forever." Well, his father's house would be Aaron. Aaron was the first priest and his sons and his descendants were the priests. But they were of the tribe of Levi. So the priests would be of the house of Aaron, which was a family within a larger tribe of Levi. So the tribes could be, you could speak more particularly about. A tribe is a larger association, a larger identity than individual houses or families would be, or lineages would be within the tribe. So that's I would say that's what the difference is. Now what is objective truth? Objective truth is in contrast to subjective truth. Subjective truth has to do with how I feel about things. Objective truth is about how things really are, no matter how I feel about them. Objective truth is the same whether I feel one way or another about it, it's still the same, it doesn't change. In fact, objective truth exists in its present form whether there was anyone to know about it or not, or to believe it or not. God is objectively true. The world is objectively true. It exists. If there was no one who ever was on the earth, let's just say there's a planet on a distant star that's objectively real but has no life form, so no one knows it, none of us even know it exists, but it's there. And so objective truth refers to that which is true independently of what anyone thinks about it or believes about it. So for example, our gender is objectively true. No matter how someone thinks about their gender, they are a certain sex that they were born, and that's objective truth. You can think differently about it, but it won't change it because it's reality. Now the Bible teaches us the truth. And when it tells us things about God, when it tells us things about right and wrong and so forth, these things are true, they are objectively true. Sometimes we might not feel they're true, sometimes we want to make excuses for doing the wrong thing and say, "I could justify this, this could be right." But if the Bible says it's wrong, it's objectively wrong, no matter how we manipulate our brains and think differently about it, we're still doing the wrong thing if we do what the Bible says is a sin. So when God says something is true, and especially if he's talking about something that's absolutely true all the time to everybody, then it doesn't matter how we feel. We might subjectively feel this isn't really that bad, but objectively if God said it is, it is. And so that's what objective truth is about. It's not just biblical truth because there are ordinary natural facts that are objectively true. But the Bible when it speaks about God or right and wrong, it is objectively telling us what is true and what we need to know and need to conform to. I need to take a break. I hope that helps you. You're listening to The Narrow Path. Our website is thenarrowpath.com. We have another half hour coming, so don't go away. I'll be back in 30 seconds.
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Steve Gregg: Welcome back to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we're live for another half hour taking your calls. If you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith or you disagree with the host and want to talk about that, you may call at this time. I'm looking at three open lines on our switchboard. That's a lot of opportunity for you, though they may fill up soon. If you want to be on the program in the next half hour, give me a call now: 844-484-5737. Again, that's 844-484-5737. And I want to remind our listeners, if you weren't listening in the first half hour, I'm going to be speaking three days, this coming Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, in the Sacramento area. I'll be speaking twice a day and so six times I'll be speaking in this coming weekend. If you live in that area or you're going to be there and want to come to one of our gatherings, feel free to do that, of course there's no charge, just show up. But you'll need to know where they are and when, and you can find that out by going to our website, thenarrowpath.com. That's thenarrowpath.com, under the tab that says announcements. Find the dates and you'll find the information. All right, we're going to go to the phones again now and talk to, now I've pronounced this name wrong before, but let me see, is it Yoshi from Knoxville, Tennessee?
Yoshi: Yeah, it's Yoshi.
Steve Gregg: Yoshi, good. Okay, welcome.
Yoshi: Thank you, Steve. So I have two hopefully quick questions. One's from your testimony. I heard you speak of one of your previous marriages as being maybe partially physically abusive and you said there was a divorce. And my question was just after that, did you wait for her to get remarried and consummate before you got married?
Steve Gregg: I did. Well first of all, I never divorced her. I never divorced her. It was 20 years. There was abuse, but it wasn't physical toward me. There was definitely screaming and stuff like that toward me, but there was some physical abuse toward the children on her part. So it was an abusive situation. I was abused, but never physically struck. She was smaller than me, so nothing like that happened. But there was mistreatment of the children and anyway, they were kind of scarred from that. Now, she, I didn't divorce her. She after 20 years left and divorced me. Now, I didn't remarry until after she had remarried. In fact, I didn't remarry until about seven years after she remarried. I was single for ten years because I had four kids at home to take care of. She left the kids and me and I had ten years as a single dad. And during that time she married again and divorced again. But I will say this, that although I did want to wait until such a time as she would remarry, there is such a thing as being rightfully free from a marriage if your non-Christian spouse departs from you against your will. Now, she was a professing Christian, but everything about her behavior at that time was certainly advertising her not to be a Christian. So, I mean, I could have probably justified getting married if she had never done so, if she had never remarried, simply on the fact that she was certainly an unbeliever who had left a believer. And Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7, verses 12 through 15, that such a case, if the believer does not leave but the unbeliever does, that the believer is free. Paul said is not under bondage in such cases. So I believed that there was true grounds for divorce, but I didn't want to divorce. I mean, she had divorced me, I wanted reconciliation. I was, I mean it was not fun being married to her, but I never marry just for fun. As far as I'm concerned, when you get married you make vows before God and even if the other person breaks those vows, well, I've always been kind of radical. I always thought my integrity should remain intact even if hers doesn't. So I didn't want to divorce, I didn't want her to divorce me, and I didn't want to end the possibilities of reconciliation. But once she did remarry, I just figured, okay, that's it.
Yoshi: Yeah, thank you, Steve. Thank you for clarifying that. I've been wondering about that myself. But yeah, my second question is about circumcision. At work, the subject came on, and I didn't, I mean one of the guys at work was just describing circumcision and the question came up of why circumcision, like in the details of it, like why did God specifically have to pick that as the mark of the covenant?
Steve Gregg: Yeah, well, that's a very good question because God made a covenant with Abraham and with the children of Israel that required them to do some ritual things that other people don't do. And those rituals were supposed to be the marks of the covenant that they had with him. One of those was circumcision, which he says in chapter 17 of Genesis would be the mark of the covenant, and any male who was not circumcised would be cut off from the people. Later on in Exodus chapter 30, I think it is, or 31, God said that keeping of the Sabbath was also a mark of the covenant that God made with them at Mount Sinai. So God had the Abrahamic covenant and the Sinaitic covenant with the people of Israel and there was a mark that he gave them, a ritual mark for them to participate in and declare that they were part of that covenant. So circumcision was part of the Abrahamic covenant and Sabbath keeping was part of the Sinaitic covenant. But both circumcision and Sabbath keeping are, frankly, ritual laws. I mean, they're not specifically a violation of morals to break them, but they were a violation of covenant commands. Now, why? We know why he said to keep Sabbath. He said it was because God rested on the Sabbath and he wanted them to rest on the Sabbath. And also when he restated the law of the Sabbath in Deuteronomy chapter 4, he said it was because God had given them rest from their slavery in Egypt and he wanted them to commemorate that by keeping a day of rest per week. Now, why circumcision? Of all the things that God could have said, "Hey Abraham, I want you and your kin to have this mark on your body that shows you're mine." Well, a mark on the body, but that's a part of the body nobody looks at. I mean, why not have a special magic ring or something that they wear? Why not have a tattoo on their forearm or something like that? What is it, how is it that circumcision is a mark that shows they're part of the covenant when in fact it's on part of the body that is not publicly displayed? In fact, it's frankly a part of the body that nobody sees. Probably in those days even a wife didn't see it. They didn't have artificial light in their tents; they probably did everything in the dark. You know, I don't know that, but it's entirely possible that a man's foreskin being circumcised would be something that not another human being would ever see after he was an adult. So why that? Well, I think it's twofold the reason. One is because, well, I mean it's all part of one reason actually. Abraham had one mission in life and that was related to reproduction. He was to have a seed, he was to have a descendant or descendants. He had no other assignment from God than to have a baby. And of course, the male organ is that part of you that produces, or at least begins the production of, a baby. And therefore, it was through that organ that his ministry to the world was going to be carried out. Now, that's a type and a shadow in the New Testament says of circumcision of the heart. We don't carry out the mission of the kingdom of God through reproduction, although if we are reproducing we should do that for the kingdom of God too. But the point is it's our heart. It's a spiritual thing. It's a spiritual circumcision, so to speak. It's from the heart Jesus said that the things of importance flow. It's not through your physical organ. And so God's looking for a changed heart through which the love of God flows out to the nations, flows out to the world. Abraham would bless the nations simply by having a baby who would be a blessing to all the families of the earth, the Bible says. And that would be Christ. We are a blessing to the world through the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, the Bible says. So our hearts are the organ, not the physical heart but the spiritual metaphorical heart is the organ through which our service to God is performed. Now, therefore, the circumcision of the male organ was considered to be the cleaning of it. An uncleaned, uncircumcised Philistines, for example, were disdained because they were considered to be dirty because they're uncircumcised. And so Abraham's, what he produced for the kingdom of God, namely a child, had to proceed from a clean conduit, through a clean organ. So what we do for the kingdom of God has to come from a clean heart too. It's a spiritual thing, but also the heart is the part of you that people don't see, just as the male organ is the part of a body that people don't see. It's the secret part. The Bible says God looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart. Man looks on the outward appearance, God looks on the heart. The part of man that no one sees but God is where the cleanness has to be. Now if you're going to represent that by doing some operation on a physical part of the body, the most private and unseen part is, of course, the male organ. But that's symbolic of the heart, the unseen part of a person, in contrast to his physical body. And the cleanness of that organ being that God wants Abraham's ministry to come about through a clean conduit. He wants ours to come through a clean conduit too, but ours is our heart. So I consider that to be the reason why circumcision was chosen. Now there are also, you know, unrelated as far as the Bible is concerned, reasons that God might have chosen circumcision because there are hygienic benefits that apparently accrue to those who are circumcised. For example, cervical cancer apparently is much less common among women who are married to circumcised men. There's a variety of hygienic benefits that have been claimed. Now I'm not a medical expert. Someone's going to say, "Well, no, that's not true." Well, I've read it's true from medical doctors, so they could be wrong, but sounds to me like they were quoting statistics and tests that were done. So it may be that God wanted them circumcised for hygienic reasons too. But I think that all rituals, including circumcision, their primary purpose was to represent something spiritual, a spiritual counterpart. So that's what I would how I would answer that.
Yoshi: That's brilliant. Thank you, thank you for that. One also quick other thing. Do you have any other plans, this might be a question for your wife, but do you have any other plans of coming to the Southeast by any chance? Like Tennessee?
Steve Gregg: Yeah, or in the area surrounding states. You know, I don't have a trip down there planned for the remainder of this year. I did go to Tennessee I think twice last year or the year before. Yeah, you know, I just await invitations. The truth is there are quite a few places in Tennessee that have invited me and would invite me if I said I was coming that direction. But I don't usually volunteer to make a trip. I've got enough trips that I have to make because people invite me. So when people call and ask, then that's when we set things up.
Yoshi: All right, well I'll keep my ear out. But thank you, Steve.
Steve Gregg: All right, brother. Thanks for your call, bro. All right, our next caller is Bill from San Ramon, California. Hi, Bill, welcome.
Bill: Hi, Steve. Thanks for your ministry. It's really been a help to me. I had a question for you on the difference between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. Under the Old Covenant, if I understand things correctly, they aren't regenerated, they don't have the Holy Spirit, Satan hasn't been conquered yet by Christ and the resurrection. So, but then they're expected to keep the law, to keep the Ten Commandments. Wouldn't they just be still captives of the devil, slaves to sin?
Steve Gregg: In measure, yes. In measure, in measure the people under the Old Covenant were more slaves to sin and to the devil because Christ had not come and defeated Satan and brought the grace of God and the Holy Spirit to enable us to supernaturally change and resist and defeat sin. So they didn't have all those advantages. And yet God expected them to behave. Now, I believe, see some people say it was impossible to keep the law. I don't think so. I mean, there are people in the Old Testament who kept the law. Job lived before the law was even given and God said he was a blameless man who avoided evil and so forth. That probably doesn't mean that he never had an evil thought or anything like that. We're not talking about absolute spiritual purity, I'm sure. But he worked at it. In Job 31, he even says in verse 1 that he made a covenant with his eyes that he wouldn't even look at a young woman. Now, that's pretty enlightened when you're talking about he's living before the law of Moses was even given. He knew he needs to keep a pure heart. Now, I think that people who know there's a God know that they should keep their hearts pure before him and be righteous before him. The question is how much is a priority for them. Now even for those who have made it their priority to be obedient to God, there are still failures, we're human. It says in Psalm 103, God knows our frame, he considers that we're dust. He knows our weaknesses. And Jesus said the same thing about his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, he says, "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." So God is sympathetic toward the fact that we have a flesh that is continually working against our best intentions. But the question is where are those best intentions? Do people really intend to please God or not? In the Old Testament, it was possible to intend to do so. And even John the Baptist's parents, which of course this is before Jesus was born, it says of them in Luke chapter 1, verse 6, "They were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless." So I mean, this is before Jesus even came. And Paul says some things similar about his own life before he was a Christian. He said that in Philippians 3:4 he says, "Though I might have confidence in the flesh, if anyone thinks he may have confidence in the flesh, I more so. I was circumcised on the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews; concerning the law, a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the church; concerning the righteousness which is in the law, blameless." So he's not saying I was a sinless man. But he was saying when it comes to keeping the law outwardly, which is the principal way that the Jews knew to do, he did it. And I think the Pharisees sometimes did it too. Now Jesus rebuked the Pharisees because they kept the law very meticulously, they even paid their tithes of garden herbs they grew in their window boxes, but he says you're neglecting the weightier matters of the law. Now he didn't say the weightier commandments of the law, the weightier matters, issues. There are issues in the law that are God's concerns which were neglected by Pharisees and probably by many other people who were trying to keep the law too. Jesus said those matters were justice and mercy and faithfulness. Well, that's the high bar that we should all be aiming at. And I think people in the Old Testament, some of them aimed at that too. They wanted to be just, they wanted to be merciful, they wanted to be faithful, and in measure they succeeded. Now we'd be wrong to say that they never sinned because frankly all have sinned. But God knows if somebody is sinning despite the fact that they have every intention to try to please and obey God on the one hand, but they fail because they're weak. And on the other hand, someone who's sinning because they couldn't care less whether they please God or not. And both kinds of people existed in the Old Testament. And frankly, if we're not informed by Jesus' deeper instructions in the Sermon on the Mount, as the Jews were not in the Old Testament, it would not be impossible to keep the Ten Commandments, frankly. It's not impossible to avoid bowing down to idols. It's not impossible to avoid taking the name of the Lord in vain. It's not impossible to honor your parents. It's not impossible to avoid murdering a person or committing adultery with his wife or stealing from him or bearing false witness in court against him. These things are not impossible to do. Now, of course, Jesus made it very clear there's spiritual aspects of these things which would be extremely hard to do, if not impossible to do regularly or consistently. But they still provide something that in the Old Testament people were expected to aim at. And the word "sin," the etymology of the word "sin" means to miss the mark. And to miss the mark means you're aiming at a target but you just don't hit the target. And everyone who sins has missed the target, but some were aiming at it at least. If you miss the target because you were shooting wildly and not aiming at the target, well shame on you. If you're doing your best to hit the target and miss it, I think God takes those things into consideration. He knew if people's hearts were right, if they were trying to please him. And yeah, they wouldn't be perfect, but they could be essentially blameless before God because their hearts were right before God and because they were trying to do what he said. So the coming of the Holy Spirit, which allows us to, Paul said, if you walk in the spirit you will not fulfill the lust of the flesh. That's considered to be a great boon to people who otherwise wanted to please God. They didn't have that assistance that we have. And so what the New Covenant has brought is he wrote his laws in our hearts and gives us his spirit and the grace to overcome temptation and so forth. And so we should be living much more consistently holy than any of them did. But it's amazing to see that even under the Old Covenant there are people who said they kept the law. They kept the law and they lived in God's sight blamelessly, which is pretty cool actually.
Bill: Yeah, that's pretty impressive that they were able to do that without the indwelling Holy Spirit.
Steve Gregg: But there were also people who did have the Holy Spirit. It's just that God didn't give the Holy Spirit to the whole, to everybody back then. He put his spirit on some special people, prophets and some of the judges and some of the kings and stuff; they had the spirit come upon them. It was an unusual thing. Whereas in the New Covenant he gives his spirit to everybody. He pours out his spirit on all flesh, your sons and daughters, your maidservants, manservants and so forth. So in the New Covenant, the Holy Spirit is given generally to all of God's people. In the Old Testament there were a select few that he put his spirit upon for special purposes. But anyway, that's what I see as the difference between those two. I appreciate your call. Mike in Cool, California, we don't have very much time but welcome to The Narrow Path.
Mike: This is a pretty easy one. Of course they all are, right? Thanks for taking my call. Where do you stand on: are we born sinners or are we born pure and become sinners?
Steve Gregg: Well, there's a sense in which we're born inclined toward sin. But that's only because we don't have the strength or the knowledge, I think, of what's right and wrong and we have fleshly desires that are therefore not governed by knowledge of what's right and wrong. A baby when it's born does things that are very selfish, very disruptive to the home, things that if an older or more mature person did, we'd consider that to be very rude, very sinful. But a baby doesn't know it and no one blames the baby for that. So the baby develops habits of selfishness and self-indulgence before it is even old enough to even know what's right and wrong. The Bible speaks about a baby reaching that point in Isaiah chapter 7, verse 16. It talks about a baby being born says, "before that child shall know to refuse the good and choose the evil," such and such events will occur. Now it mentions that children do reach a point where they know to choose the good and refuse evil. But before they get that point, they've already been doing things that technically are self-indulgent selfish things and are now in bondage to that behavior so that by the time they know what's right and wrong, they're already kind of slaves to their own selfishness. So there's a sense in which, yeah, we're all born with that bent toward selfishness and sin and by the time we want to do something about it, we're really enslaved. Now there are some people who believe that babies are not only born with an inclination toward sin, but already guilty of sin. Not because they did anything, but because Adam did something and they believe that Adam's sin is imputed to everybody who's born of Adam. Now the Bible doesn't say that anywhere. The Bible doesn't ever say, even when Adam sinned God didn't say, "Well now your sin's going to be imputed to all your offspring." Not a word of it. Not a word in the Old Testament and really the closest thing to a word in the New Testament is a very vague statement Paul makes in Romans chapter 5, verse 12 through 14. Some people see there a reference to "we all sinned in Adam," although it doesn't say that. That's not how it reads in the Greek. But Augustine saw it that way and so that's become a fairly standard way to read Romans 5. Now of course David said, you know, "I was conceived or I was what, born in iniquity and conceived in my mother, my mother conceived me in iniquity" in Psalm 51:5. And some people see, "Well he's saying that he had a sinful nature." I don't think he is saying that, it doesn't, and I'm not sure where he'd get that idea because it wasn't in his Bible. Nothing in Genesis or the law ever said that people are born with a sinful nature, so I'm not sure where David would have that idea. But also the words simply could be, could mean something very differently without any extension of the imagination very far. What does it mean "in sin my mother conceived me"? Actually has a fairly clear meaning if you don't have a context for it. So I'm not sure the Bible teaches anywhere, I don't think the Bible teaches anywhere that we have Adam's sin on our record when we're born. But it certainly does teach that we all sin and we do so from very early on because frankly when we're born we don't care about anything but ourselves and that's what sin basically is. I hope that clarifies a few points. We're out of time. I appreciate your calling Mike and God bless you. You've been listening to The Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we're live Monday through Friday for an hour a day doing just what we've been doing this past hour. If you've never listened before, make it a habit. If you do listen regularly, thank you for listening and maybe supporting us. We are listener-supported. If you'd like to help us stay on the air, we pay for radio time. That's all the money you give goes to radio time, nothing else is purchased. You can write to The Narrow Path or you can go to our website thenarrowpath.com. If you want to write through the mail our address is there at the website at thenarrowpath.com. Thanks for joining us.