We have such a wonderful church family, and God has blessed us with so many precious gifts.  And every once in awhile, as I think about our church, I'm reminded of a text that came to mind this evening, and it's just a very brief word.  And it says in the Third Epistle of John, Verse 4, "I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walked in truth."  And I echo the sentiment of John the Apostle, that in terms of ministry, in terms of serving Jesus Christ, there's no greater joy than to know that your children walk in truth.
 
     We teach you the Word of God on the Lord's Day.  We teach it to you through the fellowship groups and through the Sunday school classes, and through the flocks and flagas and seminary classes and seminars and training sessions and discipleship and books and tapes, and every way we possibly can.  We have perceived through the years that you are more noble than most, for you search the Scripture to see if these things are so.  And that's cause for great joy.
 
     And it comes to be a necessity in our fellowship from time to time, to allow you to respond to the teaching, and we've done this through all of the years that I've been here, periodically just giving you opportunity to ask questions.  I think the last time we did it was in February.  It's been quite awhile, at the conclusion of our series on the family.  We had a little time for questions.  We want to do that again tonight. 
 
     Now, you'll notice there are three microphones, one in the middle and then those two on the side aisles, and you can go and stand behind those microphones and we'll just move across from person to person.  You will find there one of our pastors, who will go at this point, if you will, men, and he'll kind of get you organized.  No more than five people at a microphone, all right?  And then you can wait till someone sits down.  Okay, we've got plenty of room in the middle one here, if somebody wants to come around the back or something.  Great.
 
     Now, the idea is not stump the pastor, okay?  I mean, I know you can ask me things that I can't answer, but what we want to do is to deal with things that are of importance, and we'll do our best to give you an answer out of the Word of God.  You know, in the book of Acts, it says Paul reasoned with them out of the Scripture.  It means he dialogued with them.  And one of the great teaching ways is question and answer.  In fact, throughout the early years of the church, there was a developing question and answer mode in teaching.  It became sort of refined into what we know as catechism, which is a series of teachings based upon the question and answer process. 
 
So, we just encourage you to feel free to ask a question, and we'll do our best to speak right to the point.  Keep your questions short.  Don't give us a big, long, drawn out thing or we'll never get everybody's questions answered, all right?  And we'd like you to give us your name, your first name at least, as we start, so we know who we're talking to.  Okay, we'll start over to my left.
 
JERRY:    I'm Jerry Roth, and my daughter, who's a full time student at Lagas told me today that this question has been kind of discussed by some of Lagas students, and she can't be here tonight, so she asked me if I'd ask it.  She wanted to know how Christ, who was the second person of the Trinity, no beginning, could also be begotten of God.
 
JOHN:     All right.  The answer to the question, I think, is found in Hebrews Chapter 1.  The question is how can Christ be the eternal God and still be begotten of God.  I think that basically there's a twofold emphasis there, but you'll note that it says in Hebrews 1, "God, at sundry times and diverse manners, spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets as in these last days, spoken unto us by His son, whom he appointed heir of all things, by who made the world," so forth.  So, God has spoken by His son. 
 
     In verse 4, it says, "Of the son, he was made so much better than the angels, as he hath, by inheritance, obtained a more excellent name than they, under which the angels said He at any time, thou art my son.  This day have I begotten thee, and again, I will be to Him a father and He shall be, to me, a Son.  And again, when he bringeth in the first begotten into the world, He said," and it goes on.
 
     I think the concept of Christ being begotten is not that Christ as a person was begotten, but that Christ as the incarnate one was begotten.  In other words, He always existed as the second member of the Trinity.  From eternity to eternity, he always existed.  But He was begotten in the sense that He was born into the world, that He took on a human form and there was a beginning of an actual human being, a God man, the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
     So, it's there in verse 6, "When he bringeth in the first begotten into the world," and that has to do with the incarnation of Christ. And that, I think, is the point of his begetting, or being begotten, as it were, as a son in the human sense.  Now, let me take you to step number two in that thought.  I also believe that Christ is called the begotten, not only because of His incarnation, but because of His resurrection, He is called the first begotten from the dead.  So that he went into the grave and came out of the grave, He is the first begotten of the dead. Not first in chronology, but first in primacy.  Of all those that have been raised from the dead, He is the primary one. 
 
     So, He is begotten in the sense of His incarnation.  He is begotten again from the dead in the sense of His resurrection, and that is not in any way to say that He did not eternally exist.  For in John 17, He says to the Father, "I have finished the work you gave me to do.  Now restore me to the glory I had with you before the world began."  And there He affirms His eternal nature. 
 
     Okay, good question.  Steve.
 
STEVE:    Hi, I'm Steve.  I would like to - I feel this question needs to be asked, in the sense of clarification to which you talked two weeks ago on binding and losing whatever is bound in Heaven.  I'd like to, in light of what the charismatics have done, I'd like a little example and boundaries of what we can do. It may make some examples from Scripture how we can bind something and how we can lose something, and bound in Heaven and Earth and not get way off on the tangent.
 
JOHN:     Okay, Steve.  The answer to that question is very simple.  The only basis on which we can bind, and that means to forbid, or lose, and that means to permit, is if what is being permitted or what is being forbidden is clearly referred to where?  In the Scripture.  We have no right to go beyond the pages of Holy Scripture and bind things, or that is, permit things or forbid things.
 
     The concept of binding and loosing was a rabbinical concept, a rabbi's - binding and loosing is an old, archaic thing.  It would be permitting and forbidding in our terms, and Jesus said to the Apostles, you remember that whatever you forbid on earth shall have been forbidden in Heaven.  Whatever you permit on Earth shall have been permitted in Heaven.  In other words, He's simply saying when you act in agreement with the revelation of God, Heaven is acting on your behalf.
 
     It becomes difficult, for example, in Matthew 18.  Let's say you know somebody's in sin, and so you want to go to that person and you want to confront them and you say you're bound in your sin.  You must repent.  You must get your life cleansed.  This is wrong.  And then you proceed to discipline the person.  You take two or three witnesses, you tell it to the whole church, and that's difficult to do because you think, well, boy, I hope I'm right about this, because I want to put this guy's name out through the whole church, right?  You want to be sure you're right.  You want to be sure you have the permission to do this. 
 
Some people say, "Don't do that.  It's not loving to do that. Oh, my, don't do that."  Just accept them.  In fact, somebody said to me a couple of weeks ago at the - I guess only a week ago, at the radio conference.  We have people in our church who have gotten divorced, they're remarried other people, and the whole time they've stayed in the church, and the divorce was un-Biblical and the remarriages were all un-Biblical, but the church feels the best thing to do is say nothing, because they don't want to ruin the reputation of the people, make things hard for them, et cetera, et cetera.
 
And so, there is that natural tension, and that's why the Bible says that when you pursue the matter of discipline, you should do so knowing you have the right to permit certain things and the right to forbid certain things, because if they have been revealed as such in the Bible, Heaven has already done it anyway and you're only acting in accord with Heaven. 
 
So, the limit on that, Steve, is the limit of the authority of the Word of God.  Now, the charismatic people, many of them have gone to the point where they talk a lot about binding Satan. Now, that's not in the Bible at all.  That's just totally foreign to Scripture.  There's no such thing as binding Satan in the Bible.  You can't, frankly, permit Satan to do anything or forbid him to do anything.  He is a free individual, within his own boundaries to do whatever he chooses to do, within the confines of God's limitation.  The only freedom you have is to respond or not respond.  But you can't control Satan.  You can't say, "Satan, you can't come here.  Satan, you can't go there, you can't do this."  You're not God.  You don't control Satan.  But you do control your responses to him by the power of the Holy Spirit.
 
So, binding and loosing has really been kind of pushed beyond its Biblical parameters in that sense.  Yes?
 
MARK:     Yes, my name is Mark Sherman, and I would like to ask you a personal question, if I may.
 
JOHN:     Sure.
 
MARK:     In characterizing your own life, what kind of a man do you think you are?  [Laughter]
 
JOHN:     Well, that's a fair question.  6'1 ½, 195, human being like all other.
 
MARK:     If the question's too general, then I - you don't need to answer it.
 
JOHN:     No, I'll answer -
 
MARK:     It's pretty general.
 
JOHN:     Yeah.  I'll answer it.  Let's see.  In terms of the physical, you can see what I am.  We'll get on with that, something else.  In terms of the mental capacities, I have certain limitations, but I learned a long time ago to work hard. In terms of spiritual qualifications, I see myself as a sinner saved by the grace of God.  I see myself as one, who if it weren't for Jesus Christ's sovereign love in my behalf, I would spend forever in Hell.  I see myself as a person with no merit to commend myself to God.  He has saved me, and I thank Him for that.  He has called me into in the ministry.  Again, it's just as gracious as was my redemption, so I have no right to be here on my own, any more than I have a right to be saved.  And so I'm as thankful to God for this as I am for my salvation.
 
     I see myself also as a person who's totally committed, basically, to the knowledge and understanding of the God who has written this word.  And so, I've committed my life to study His Word.  That's the spiritual dimension.  That doesn't mean I don't sin.  That doesn't mean I don't fail.  It doesn't mean I'm better than anybody else.  That's not the case.  It's just that I have a unique calling.
 
     In reference to this church, I see myself as given the spiritual responsibility to work with a group of men, particularly in leadership here, the elders of the church.  I see myself as a leader among those men, by the grace of God.  Maybe that kind of gives you sort of a rounded thing.  I see myself also as a husband and a father, and that is a tremendously important thing to me.  I have a great, great love for my wife and my children.  I am bound to them in my heart totally.  I have a great love for other people who are friends.  I see myself as a human being like everybody else, except God's put me in this very difficult place, and I've asked Him to give me the grace to be able to handle the things He's given me to do.  When I fail, it makes me more dependent on Him.  Okay?
 
MARK:     Thank you.
 
[Applause]
 
JOHN:     Does that mean I can stay?  [Laughter]  Over here.
 
IRV:      I'm Irv Olson, and the Scripture I'd like to have explained.  It's 1 Peter 3:21, the part where it says, "In corresponding to that, baptism now saves you.  Not the removal of dirt from flesh, but the appeal to God for a good conscious."
 
JOHN:     Right.  What that verse is saying is that - Peter's just talked about - we're talking about 1 Peter 3:18, "Christ has once suffered for sins.  The just for the unjust, it might bring us to God," and so forth.  And it talks about there, Christ's provision of salvation.  And then it says that when His body was on the cross, dead, His spirit was alive.  Not the Holy Spirit there in verse 18, but His spirit.  And He went and preached to the spirits in prison, and I believe these were demon beings and the word preach is not to preach the Gospel, you want galindso, but haruso to proclaim the triumph. 
 
     I believe that when He was dying on the cross, this is a marvelous truth.  When He was dying on the cross, it looked to Hell and the demons like perhaps they had won the victory.  And so, at the very moment when His body was dead, during that period of time, His spirit was alive, it says in verse 18.  And He went right down into the prison where the spirits are kept.  And you want to know what spirits they were, verse 20 says, "They were the ones disobedient during the time of Noah."  And you remember, in those days, the time of Noah, God sent the flood because the sons of God commingled with the daughters of men, so they were spirit beings who cohabitated with women, creating a sort of Rosemary Baby race of people, and God destroyed them all in the flood.
 
     So, these are demon spirits.  That's all you really need to know.  He went into the place, proclaimed triumph over the demon spirits, even in the midst of His death.  And then it talks about the ark, in which people were saved by water.  The ark, then, becomes a symbol.  And in verse 21, "The like figure under which even baptism doth also now save us, but it is not the putting away the filth of the flesh."  In other words, He is saying that as that ark was saved in water, so are we saved in water.  But it is not external water.  See that?  It's not the water that washes the flesh, the physical body.  Not that at all.  But it is that purification of the conscience, it is the purification of the conscience that He's really referring to.  In other words, it's symbolic.  As the ship was saved by the water, it floated on the water.  The water wasn't salvation. 
 
So, we are saved by a certain kind of being in water.  But it is not the water of the physical baptism.  What water is it?  Titus 3:5 tells us, "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy, He saved us," here it comes, "By the washing of regeneration."  Okay?  It's that washing of the heart.
 
Now, you go back with Peter, and you go back with Paul to a Jewish concept that really starts in the New Testament with Nicodemus, doesn't it?  Jesus says, "You must be born of," what? "Water."  John 3.  Spirit.  Now, what water was that?  Well, what would Nicodemus understand?  Nicodemus was a Jew.  He was the teacher in Israel.  He was an erudite scholar of the Old Testament, and he would know that back in Ezekiel's prophecy, in chapter 36, Ezekiel said, "Someday, God is going to come in a unique way, and He is going to wash you with clean water. "Take out the stony heart of flesh and give you a heart of flesh, and put His spirit within you." 
 
So, Nicodemus knew that some day, the Messiah would come, and He would do a washing work in the heart and plant the spirit.  That's the water and the spirit of John 3.  And so, water, which always in the Old Testament, outward cleansing symbolized inward cleansing, always does the same in the New.  So, the ark, then, becomes a figure of being saved through a water, and that water is not an external baptism.  This verse in Peter argues against baptismal regeneration, but rather, a washing of the heart through the working of God and forgiveness through Christ.  Okay?
 
IRV:      Thank you.
 
JOHN:     Good question.  Yes?
 
MALE VOICE:   My question is, did God establish salvation on the basis of faith because of Adam and Eve's lack of faith?
 
JOHN:     Did God establish salvation on the basis of faith because of Adam and Eve's lack of faith?  No, I don't think so.  Now you're into a very difficult area of theology, which is known as lapsarianism, right?  Sub-lapsarianism, supra-lapsarianism, or infra-lapsarianism.  Does that bless your heart?  [Laughter]  And what it basically means is, you're really asking the question, did God establish salvation because of what Adam and Eve did, or did God establish salvation before Adam and Eve did anything, and what did God establish first, and what is the sequence and what is the order, and the answer to all of that is I don't know.  But some people are sub-lapsarians, some people are infra-lapsarians.  Some people are supra-lapsarian, and then there are Labrador Retrievers, and I really don't - [Laughter]  I'm really not able to tell you what God did first.
 
     So, I tend to say that God didn't do anything as a reaction to what men did.  I believe that the reason God has given us salvation by faith, just simply, is because it most exalts Him.  Because it eliminates anything that we might do, right?  Okay.
 
MALE VOICE:   This next question is on salvation as well.  Do you want to take it in order?
 
JOHN:     Sure, sure.
 
ALAN:     Hi, my name is Alan Gordon, and I just moved here from Florida.  And before I moved, a lot of people said that if I came to this church, that they believed in election.  And I don't understand it completely, and I'd like to get it cleared up, because so far, what I do understand, it seems right.
 
JOHN:     Okay.  Welcome, we're glad to have you here from Florida.  God bless you.  Thanks for coming.  Election, well, this is easy.  Let's see.  [Laughter]  In other words, what people always ask, and I'll frame the question for you, Al.  Are we chosen to be saved, or do we choose ourselves to be saved, right?
 
ALAN:     Right.
 
JOHN:     Did I come to Jesus Christ because I was irresistibly drawn by God and had nothing to do with it, or did I come to Christ because my heart said, "I want to come to Christ."  And the answer is yes.  [Laughter]  Isn't that simple?  Now, let me see if I can explain it to you simply, okay?  The Bible teaches election.  It uses that word many times.  It says we elect accordingly to the foreknowledge of God.  It says we were chosen in Him before the foundation of the world.  It says our names are written in the Lamb's Book of Life and before the foundation of the world.  It says, "You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you and ordained you."  In the book of Acts, it says that God said, "I have much people in that city."  People that weren't even saved yet, but He had His name on them to be saved. 
 
You cannot deny election.  Ephesians 1, "Chosen in Him before the foundation of the world."  We know we are elect, so when you come to a passage on election, you preach it with all your heart.  You just preach it.  It's there, you can't argue with it.  We're elect, chosen by God.  Nobody ever came to Jesus Christ except the Father and did what?  Draw Him.  So, we are saved because of God's pre-determined love and that's it.  I mean, we are elect of God, and what a marvelous thing it is.  And that's so important, the doctrine of security, because if He elects us, He's gonna hold us, right?
 
All right.  So we teach that, and we preach that, and when you come across a passage on election, you just preach it fully and completely, because that's what the Bible teaches.  But the Bible also teaches human volition.  Jesus said, "You will not come to me that you might have life."  Jesus said, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how oft I would have gathered thee as a hen gathereth her brood, and you would not."  In other words, Jesus on the one hand said, "You can't come to me unless the Father draws you," and on the other hand, if you don't come, you're to be blamed.
 
Now, in our minds, those seem like opposites, don't they?  Paradoxes, unresolvable.  And they really are.  Over here, if you're saved, it's by God's election, and over here, if you're damned, it's your own choice.  Now, let me tell you something.  That shouldn't be a problem for you because of this.  God's mind is greater than our mind, right?  If I could understand everything, I'd be God, and if I was God, the world would really be in bad shape.  [Laughter]  But man loves to think he's God.  He wants everything to fit into his mind, so what he does is take those kinds of things and try to find a truth in the middle that accommodates both, and in the end, he destroys both. 
 
And so, you come up with this thing where, well, you see God looks down at the world and He says, "Uh huh, I see the way they're going.  I know what's going to happen.  Boy, they're going to go over there and slide, just won't elect them, cause I can see that."  And so, God becomes the victim of the things that men do.  That isn't what the Bible teaches.  If you deny election, you've denied something in the Bible.  If you deny the choice of men, where it says, "Whosoever will, let him come.  Taketh the water of life freely."  Revelations 22.  You can't deny either one.  You leave them there and if you try to harmonize them in the middle, you've destroyed both of them.  See, just leave them there.
 
You say, "But I don't understand."  That's good.  You know what that proves?  You're not God, and that makes us all very comfortable.  [Laughter]  And I'll tell you another thing.  There is - John Murray, the theologian at Westminster Seminary says there is an apparent paradox in every Biblical doctrine, every major Biblical doctrine.  For example, I'll ask you a simple question.  Who wrote Romans?  Who wrote Romans?  Paul?  God?  Holy Spirit?  Who?  Did Paul write a verse and then God write a verse, then Paul write a verse, then God write a verse?  You say, "Was it all the Holy Spirit?  Is every word in Romans from the mind of the Holy Spirit?"  Yes.  Is every word in Romans from the mind of the Apostle Paul and his heart and his vocabulary?  Yes.  Who wrote it?  Well, it's all God, and it's all Paul.  Well, how can it be all God and all Paul?  Well, it can't be in our human thinking.  That's paradoxical.  But it is.
 
Let me ask you this.  Was Jesus God or man?  Yes.  [Laughter]  Half God, half man?  What's half a man?  What's half a God?  Nothing.  He was 100 percent God, 100 percent man.  You can't be that.  That's right.  It's paradoxical.  But if you try to make it in the middle and mix it and take away a little of His deity and a little of His humanity to come up with a hybrid, what have you just done?  You've destroyed the person of Jesus Christ.  So you leave it alone and you say to yourself, "I can't know that.  The secret things belong to the Lord," Deuteronomy 29:29. I will not play God and assume that everything has to fit into my computer to be true.
 
I'll ask you another question.  Who lives your Christian life?  Who does?  Do you?  Are you out there saying, "I'm going to live my Christian life if it kills it me."  [Laughter]  Do you say, "No, it's Christ in me.  I don't do anything.  I just flop, but He does it all."  No, no.  I am crucified with Christ.  Nevertheless, I live.  Yet, not I.  [Laughter]  But Christ lives.  See, same paradox.  See, whenever you try to reduce the truth of God down to the human brain, you're gonna have some stuff left over.  Understand that?
 
And consequently, you've got to be able to allow for what we call Divine Tension.  Just leave it there.  God will teach us election.  God will teach us human choice.  Let it teach both.  God understands how it all goes together.  We don't.  That's a matter of faith, isn't it?  He'll come up with something, in the middle, you destroy both.  So, people who want to say, "Oh, we can't believe in election cause it messes us up on this end," are really doing what they have no right to do.  They're saying, "We've got to reduce God to our own thinking processes and assume He's going to do only the things that we can fully understand."  And that's not so.  Okay?  Good.
 
MALE VOICE:   John, concerning last week's teaching on the illumination of the spirit of the Scriptures.  How is it that - how do we understand that so many spirit filled and studious men come up with so many different documents about -
 
JOHN:     Yeah, that's a good question.  Why is it that good men disagree, right?  If it's the spirit of God as our teacher.  Okay, let me tell you, and this is hard to, you know, to clarify in a simple way, but look at this.  We're all going to be wrong somewhere, because we lack perfection.  True?  I know I have errors in my theology.  I just don't know where they are.  If I knew where they were, I'd change them.  [Laughter]  I'm working real hard and I believe everything I say.  I really do, and I preach it that way.  Don't you get the idea that I really believe what I say? 
 
Now, I know that I'm imperfect, and so I, to start with, no one person is the repository of all divine truth.  And I say that to say this, that all of us are made, to some extent, incapacitated because of our humanness.  And so, there will be times, for example, when we're working on a passage, when we're interpreting a passage, that it'll go into our permanent file and we've done less than adequate scholarship on that passage.  And so, that part of what we've done may not be truly representative of what that text teaches.  So, you're dealing, one, with the human element. 
 
Secondly, the reason there's disagreement is because of background and pre-suppositions.  In other words, men are raised in a certain environment with certain definitions and parameters in life and certain pre-suppositions.  The hardest thing in Bible study is to divorce yourself from all your pre-suppositions and take every text purely on its own merit.  We tend to go into the text with all of our preconceived ideas and then fit this thing into the system that's already been developed, rather than to keep the system open enough to take what that thing said.
 
Thirdly, I think there's a very important reason why good men don't agree, and that's because many good men don't really dig deep enough, and they're too superficial.  And if they really were faithful, to dig with great diligence, they'd find themselves coming together much more than they do.  And that's important. 
 
The fourth reason that good men don't agree is because some texts are obscure and difficult to interpret.  And since you can't really be utterly, absolutely, dogmatic about them, there is room for latitude at that point.  But the thing that is so wonderful in all of this is that those who are those, who represent the Word of God and who believe the Word of God, and who teach the Word of God as the Word of God, and love the Lord Jesus Christ, will have differences, but they will inevitably be peripheral differences.  The core of the main line of God's revealed truth will be there, see? 
 
And the differences will come through their background, through their scholarship, adequate or inadequate, through their pre-suppositions, through their diligence or lack of it, through the fact that this text doesn't have enough information for us to really know.  For example, we're talking about the Baptism for the Dead, in 1 Corinthians 11 - or rather, 1 Corinthians 15.  But I think that good men basically agree right down the lin