Questions and Answers, Part 41

Selected Scriptures

      All right, tonight we're going to have some time to interact a little bit in question and answer, as you well know.  And I hope you have come prepared to ask some questions that will be significant and helpful.  We have some of our men stationed at each microphone to talk with you.  I don't know who is going to be where...let's see, there's Stan Carter over there.  Good, Stan, did you have a question or are you just....?  And Lance Quinn in the middle and Dr. Dick Mayhew is going over to the other side.  And they're just there to help you kind of form up your question in case it's not clear and so that you can kind of hurry and ask the question, we want to cover as many questions as we possibly can.  So if you just want to step up to the microphone and kind of get in line, we'll get started.  Whew...boy, good....ha...you're after me.  You've been waiting, storing it up, huh?  Okay.  That's great. 

     Scripture talks about dialoguing, you know, it says the Apostle Paul reasoned with them out of the Scripture.  The word it uses is dialego, to dialogue.  That's a very important part of ministry.  So we hope that this will be a good time for you to touch the issues that are on your heart.  Okay?   

     Now the first thing we have to do, gentlemen, in each of these lines is if there are any ladies in the line we have to move them to the front.  Isn't that right?  Isn't that right?  All right, ladies, move up to the front.  That's very good...that's very good.  Chivalry may be dead in our culture but it's not dead at Grace Community Church.  We still understand those kinds of things.  We're not going to have those ladies stand there for a long time.  All right.  Are you ready, Stan?  All right, let's go over there then.  Give me your name first.

ROXANNE:  My name is Roxanne Bartoush(?) and the question I have is Matthew 5:42, "Give to him who asks of you and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you."  Does that mean we give to everybody that asks of us? 

JOHN:  I think that's a general principle, yes.  Give to him who asks of you.  The assumption is that he's not trying to take advantage of you.  The assumption is that the need is real, that the need is genuine.  What you're really asking is if I see a beggar do I give money to a beggar...that's not the point.  There's a general principle and that is the principle that when someone has need, legitimate genuine need, and they come to you and ask for that need to be met and you have the resource to do that, then you should do that. 

     Let me just say this.  One of the principles that I operate on as I travel around the world is never to give any money to a beggar...none.  Because when you do that you make begging successful.  And when begging is successful it becomes a career.  When we were in India, for example, little children come up and literally hang on your clothes, hang on your arm with these great big dark eyes and they plead with you for money.  And, of course, you realize that around the corner is the guy who owns all these little kids who has them doing this and collects 75 percent of everything that they collect.  And it's an absolutely massive enterprise.  You find that in most third world countries of our time.  So you have to be very judicious and very careful that you don't grow a beggar, that you don't feed that kind of thing.  But where there is a situation you know to be a genuine need and you have the opportunity to meet that need, you're to do that. 

ROXANNE:  I see, okay, thank you. 

JOHN:  Okay?  Thank you for asking.  Right here. 

??????  First I'd just like to ask a couple of quick yes or no questions...

 JOHN:  Good. 

?????  Before I get to my main question, if that's all right.

 JOHN:  You're going to warm me up, okay. 

?????  First of all, there's nothing in us that would obligate God to save us, is there? 

JOHN:  No. 

?????  We're all sinners saved by grace. 

JOHN:  That's correct. 

?????  And once saved there's nothing we can do to lose our salvation. 

JOHN:  That is correct, but let me say it another way.  There is neither anything you could do to lose it nor anything you would do to lose it. 

?????  Okay.  All right, then I need to ask you a question about a quote you made a couple of months ago in the second part of the biblical view on abortion.  I'd just like to read what you said that night and then ask you to reconcile it with your answers to the first two questions. 

JOHN:  Okay. 

?????  All right.  You said, "It is my conviction that God redeems murdered infants, that His grace reaches out and takes those little ones to be with Himself.  The Bible is very clear that people perish in hell because they refuse to believe that hell is for those who rejected God and who rejected Christ.  Something an unborn infant could never do.  And so God not having a just basis either internally or externally by virtue of the attitude or the action of an unborn child would have no basis on which to sentence them to hell except for the depravity they inherited in Adam which is never a cause for damnation apart from its evidence and behavior or attitude.  God must then embrace them into His own Kingdom."  I had a problem with this, a couple of problems with it. 

JOHN:  Boy, I thought that was a great statement, did I say that?  Go ahead...what's the problem? 

?????  The problem I had with it was that if an unborn child is saved until he becomes unsaved by a sinful attitude or action, then what does that do to the doctrine of eternal security?  And also the other problem I had is that... 

JOHN:  Let's take the first problem.  The unborn child is not saved until he...he's not saved until he...what was that you said, if he's not saved until... 

?????  Well in your quote you said that God not having any just basis either internally or externally by virtue of the attitude of the action of an unborn child would have no basis on which to sentence them to hell except for the depravity they inherited in Adam. 

JOHN:  Right, now that doesn't mean they're saved.  An unborn child...an unborn infant, a child, a baby before the age of accountability is not saved otherwise they would lose their salvation when they reached the age of accountability, that's your question, right?  Then you don't have eternal security because if all infants and all babies are saved before the age of accountability, when they get to the age of accountability they lose their salvation and they have to get saved over again.  No.  They're not saved.  God redeems them when they die.  There's a difference.  They're in a situation where they are...they're sort of in the middle ground.  They're not saved, or in the technical sense they're lost, of course, but not in the sense of having rejected God in unbelief or unbelief of Christ.  They are not saved which can only occur through faith in Christ.  So there they are, they're not saved and they're not...how can I say it, I don't want to say they're not unsaved...but they're not confirmed in unbelief.  They're neither.  If they live they maintain the same situation of being unsaved, if they die I believe God saves them.  So the salvation doesn't come into play unless they die and at that point. 

?????  Well if that were the case then parents could guarantee the salvation of their children by killing them before they were born, couldn't they? 

JOHN:  That's true. 

?????  That's true? 

JOHN:  That's true. 

?????  Well doesn't it say in Psalm 51 verse 5, "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin my mother conceived me?"   

JOHN:  Yes, there's no question about the fallenness of man, but people...Jesus said people are damned because they believe not on Me.  Unbelief is always the damning action.  In other words, no one is damned apart...no one is damned singularly and only because of their fallenness, they are damned because they choose to reject God.  Read Romans 1, "That which may be known of God is in them."  But instead of accepting what was known of God and believing it, they turned away from that.  They created gods of their own flesh, you know what Romans 1 says, and therefore the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against them, against all unrighteousness and ungodliness. 

     Now these are very difficult questions.  You know, you're dealing with a very difficult issue.  All I can say is this, no one is ever saved unless they believe in Jesus Christ personally.  Whatever may be said about election and sovereignty and predestination and choice by God, no one is ever saved unless they believe.  Conversely, no one is ever damned except through the rejection of the truth of God which is in them and around them and made manifest to them, so that a child can neither be saved because the child or the infant or unborn cannot comprehend saving truth, nor can that child be in the confirm sense doomed to judgment because the child cannot willfully reject God either.  So in that state God has to exercise His own wisdom and mercy, and I believe in mercy He would redeem that one because there is no basis in terms of unbelief and rejection by which to condemn them.  That's what I was trying to say in that statement. 

?????  Okay. 

JOHN:  Okay? 

?????  Yes. 

JOHN:  That's good, I appreciate that.  All right, next... 

?????  Okay, we know that sin entered the world through man.  I assume the word man is used in a generic way since all enter the world in sin.  So if Mary by her own admission needed a Savior, making her a sinner, and since Jesus was part of her flesh as well as that of the Holy Spirit, I accept by faith that Jesus was sinless, but don't understand how Jesus would not be tainted by sin since He was born from her body. 

JOHN:  Well that's a good question.  And you don't understand it and neither do it, neither does anybody else.  So you're in good company.  But it's the fact, it's an absolute fact.  And now you're...you people are getting in deep here...you understand now, you're asking me to unscrew the unscrutable because basically the question you're asking is how is the sin nature passed...how is it passed.  Is it passed through the blood stream?  Is it passed through DNA?  Is it passed through, you know, the genetic code?  Is it passed through the chromosomes?  I mean, that's a very difficult question to ask, certainly the capability of the human body to grow old is passed through the chromosomes, the DNA genetics.  And Jesus' body grew old.  The ability of a body to be injured and wounded, even die, Jesus experienced all of that.  So there was some of the essence, and understand this, there was some of the essence of what it means to live in a truly human form to say there was some of the components of real humanity which has the capacity to feel pain and suffer and hunger and thirst and die, Jesus had that and that came through the very real flesh of His own mother.  But somehow God filtered out in that process any influence of sin whatsoever.  How He did that, He knows, I don't know.  I don't know.  

     But your question is a good one because it does assume that one sinful parent should be enough to make a sinner out of you.  And in any other circumstance we would say that is true.  I mean, one sinful mother, we could certainly understand, could beget a sinful child if one could beget singularly, and one can't, but hypothetically.  But in the case of Mary, though she was a sinner, God somehow filtered out the sin that normally would be passed to the child, He did that miraculously.  It shouldn't surprise us that He did that miraculously since it's even miraculous that He conceived within her that child by planting the seed, not by having a man.  So the whole thing is miraculous.  How He did it, I don't know. But Jesus came out fully human bearing all that is full humanness and yet without sin.  God just filtered that part out...screened that out somehow supernaturally.  Okay? 

     Okay, we have a lady right in the middle. 

?????  Dr. MacArthur, we have read quite a few commentaries about this and I had a dear pastor tell me that the Bible casts a lot of light on the commentaries, but I still have a question I need to ask you. 

JOHN: (Laughter) Okay. 

?????  Who or what is Babylon the Great as listed in the seventeenth chapter of Revelation? 

JOHN:  Well I'm not there yet but I will be in a few...years. (Laughter)  I think Babylon the Great represents a world‑wide religious system in chapter 17, a restoration of the original anti‑God paganism that was associated with the Tower of Babel in Genesis and thus it bears the same name.  But I think it's a world‑wide religious system and it appears to me, if you read carefully through chapter 17, it centers itself in a city with seven hills which isn't too hard to figure out, Rome.  It seems to me, too, that it's bigger in Rome because it's drunk with the blood of all the martyrs which means it takes all false religion that has massacred the true church throughout all the centuries, amasses all of that in one final great massive religious false system.  The Antichrist, along with the false prophet, allow this system to exist for a while and then consume that false religious system when the Antichrist establishes himself as the only one to be worshiped.  And that sets up the final Babylon which is more of a secular world economic situation that you see in chapter 18.  But I see it as a conglomerate system of false religion world wide that is centered in the city of Rome and has as its ticial(?) or head very likely the pope whom some believe would even be the kind of person that could serve as Antichrist or the false prophets.  So I see it as a world religious system sort of centered in Rome.  Okay? 

?????  Thank you. 

JOHN:  Thank you.  And we have another lady over here to ask a question. 

?????  I was just wondering, the Bible teaches that as a Christian when we die we receive different degrees of rewards in heaven.  And I'd like to know if you could expound on those different degrees, but also if there are different degrees of suffering in hell. 

JOHN:  I think yes to both of those questions.  There will be varying degrees of reward in heaven. That shouldn't surprise us.  There are varying degrees of giftedness even here on earth.  To get a good glimpse of what heaven might be like, look at the church.  From the moment of your redemption the Lord put His Holy Spirit within you and according to 1 Corinthians 12 He gave you certain spiritual gifts, right?  He gave gifts to all of His church.  They differ. What are gifts?  They are varying capacities for ministry, varying capacities for service to God in His church.  And I think the same thing will be true eternally.  I think in eternity we will all be given according to our abilities and according to our faithfulness varying capacities for glorifying, serving and worshiping God.  So I think it's going to be based upon two things...one would be the sovereignty of God who would choose to give as He wills as in 1 Corinthians 12, as He gives spiritual gifts in this life to the church in whatever way He chooses to do that, that's a sovereign thing.  And secondly, I think there is another component and that has to do with faithfulness here.  I believe our eternal reward will be in some way determined by the level of faithfulness we have had here. 

     Now the reason we...there are a number of reasons why we assume this. One of them was it's conversation Jesus had with the mother of James and John who said, "My boys want to sit on Your right and left hand when You come into the Kingdom," and He said, "It's not for Me to give that, it's for My Father to give that."  And there He said there are going to be some people elevated.  Somebody is going to be on My right, somebody is going to be on My left and some others are going to be going down the line here, it's not for Me to decide that, it's the Father.  But then He went on to say the criteria by which that is going to be decided is faithfulness unto death.  So I think the greatest reward in the future is rewarded for the most faithful people and that probably plays itself out in those who were faithful unto death, the martyrs, those who gave their live.  You could give your life in living as well as give your life in dying, couldn't you?  You know what I mean by that, you could make the self‑sacrifice to the maximum extent even while you're alive where you sacrifice everything else and be what Paul called a living sacrifice.  So I think there is definitely going to be in heaven varying levels of service just as there are with the angles.  There are archangels and there are cherubim and seraphim and principalities and powers and rulers and all of those varying levels of angelic hierarchy.  I think in eternity we're all going to be sorted out within that eternal worshiping community and given varying capacities and varying responsibilities which are determined by the sovereignty of God and our faithfulness here.  That's why John says look to yourselves that you lose not the things you have wrought but that you receive a full reward.  It is possible that you could be faithful and the Lord be ready and prepared to give you a full reward but by some sin in your life toward the end of your life you could begin to forfeit and those things would be taken back off the list, added to the wood, hay and stubble kind of thing and your reward would be less. 

     What is it? Is it going to be some people with bigger crowns?  No.  We're not going to be going around saying, "Ha, I got a big one, you got a little one," it's not going to be that.  Whatever we get I believe in the picture of the twenty‑four elders, we take our crowns and cast them at the feet of the Lord, but I don't believe they're going to be anything that's visible, I think it's going to be a capacity for serving God fully and completely.  And I don't think you'll have any sense of loss or any sense of missing anything because each individual's capacity will be reached to its maximum.  But I think what we want to do is have the greatest capacity for worshiping God as His sovereignty would give us and as our faithfulness would warrant. 

     Now in terms of the other, there will be degrees of suffering.  Hebrews 10 says, "How much greater suffering will come to the one who has trodden underfoot the blood of the covenant and counted it an unholy thing done despite to the Spirit of grace."  To put it simply, it means this...the more people know about the gospel and reject, the greater degree of suffering they will experience when they trample underfoot the blood of the covenant.  That is to say the pagan who never heard anything about the gospel of Jesus Christ will not suffer to the degree that the apostate would who heard it all, understood it all and blatantly rejected it all.  Okay? 

?????  Okay. 

PHIL:  Hi, my name is Phil Bock(?), we were members here until about five years ago when we moved to Utah.  In an adult Sunday school class in our church back there we were going through the book of Galatians and in chapter 5 which I was teaching a couple of weeks ago we came to Galatians 5:2 and 5:4 which talk about the consequences of accepting circumcision or coming under the Jewish law or doing anything legalistic.  Paul writes in verse 2 that Christ is of no benefit to you that were severed from Christ, verse 4, fallen from grace.  Got in to quite a discussion with a fellow in the class about whether this meant you could lose your salvation which was the position he took, in fact he got so upset that he got up and left.  I just wanted to ask how you would respond... 

JOHN:  We hope he wasn't angry enough to have lost his salvation. (Laughter) 

PHIL:  I tend to think he doesn't have it to begin with.  Anyway, how would you have dealt with that situation?  What would you suggest to me? 

JOHN:  First of all, again you're back to context and I think what he's saying here, Galatians 5, he's writing to believers and yet he knows that in the wings are the Judaizers, those people who went around saying, "We're Christians but we believe before you can enter into Christ you have to keep the Mosaic Law and go through the physical rite of circumcision."  And so this is adding law to grace and Paul's viewpoint as always, if you add law to grace you nullify grace.  I mean, that's clear in Romans 3 and Romans 4.  As soon as you add any law to grace you've nullified grace.  As soon as you say "Yes, salvation is by grace if you do this and if you do that..." and there's some kind of temporal action that you can do like keep Mosaic ceremonies and get yourself circumcised, and that's part of salvation, you have now nullified grace.  And so what he is saying is if you are receiving circumcision believing that this is contributing to your salvation, then Christ is of no benefit to you.   

     In other words, you have now forfeited a salvation purely and only by grace and you've clouded the issue by your works.  You are now saying yes it is grace plus my works and that negates the only means of salvation which is grace.  And verse 4, you are really severed from Christ if you're seeking to be justified by law, you have now fallen from the grace principle.  He doesn't mean you are saved and now you've been lost, you have fallen away from the only means of salvation which is the principle of grace.  Circumcision was a very important symbol, but it was not a means of salvation.  But those Judaizers were trying to make it a means of salvation.  

     Does that cover it? 

PHIL:  I was wondering if you thought those verses had any relevance to believers once they're saved, and if so what that was. 

JOHN:  Well, if you say that then you're going to say a believer that Christ is of no benefit to a believer and in verse 4 that he has been severed from Christ.  If I'm going to say this is going to be applied to a believer, now I'm going to have to say the believer somehow lost his salvation.  But I don't want to pre‑ suppose that you can't lose your salvation and read it in to the text.  What I want to say is Paul has been preaching through this entire book salvation by grace, I mean, he's back in chapter 3 he says, "Look, you began in the Spirit, you can't be perfected by your flesh."  I mean, being justified by the Spirit through grace you're not going to be perfected by the law through works.  And the principle of comparing grace to law goes through this whole book.  And I think all he's saying here is, "Look, Christ set us free to be free, keep standing firm, don't let somebody come along