Transcript

ANNOUNCER: What are tough texts in the Bible about salvation? Why are they tough? And how do we handle them? Hello, friend. We’re beginning a new series today for the next few episodes called Tough Texts. And we’re glad that you’re with us today. Grace in Focus is the radio and podcast ministry of the Grace Evangelical Society. Find us at faithalone.org. And we also have a YouTube channel, YouTube Grace Evangelical Society. We release short videos there. We hope you’ll come and watch them. YouTube Grace Evangelical Society. And the website faithalone.org. 

Now to kick off our new series, here is Bob Wilkin, along with Ken Yates. 

KEN: And we are going to do a series of podcasts on Tough Texts. 

BOB: Okay, so now what’s a tough text? 

KEN: Well, a tough text would be a text that seems to contradict or say that salvation is not free or you could lose your salvation or something like that. 

BOB: Right. Theoretically, you could get into texts where if people would reject inerrancy, by the way they understand it, theoretically that might be called a tough text. But for the most part, what we call tough text are texts that if they’re misinterpreted, they actually change John 3:16 into “Whoever behaves in Him will not perish but has everlasting life.” 

KEN: Sure. For example, like in James 2, when you hear people say, “Well, faith without works is dead.” So if you don’t have works and your faith is dead, you’re never saved. Right. So there would be an example. 

BOB: Or modern Calvinists would say, if you don’t continue to add works to your faith, you won’t win final salvation. The new Calvinists say you get initial salvation when you believe and then you’re on a race to see if you can win final salvation. 

KEN: And the older Calvinists would say, well, you were just never saved to begin with.

BOB: Right. The older Calvinists, but the newer Calvinists like John Piper or Tom Schreiner, I believe you even had him, didn’t you? 

KEN: Yes, I had him in class. 

BOB: Yes. Right. When you were in the army, you took, what did you get? Did you get a master’s at Southern Seminary?

KEN: I did. I got a Master’s in Biblical Ethics at Southern Seminary. 

BOB: Ken’s got so many degrees. You know, he’s got over a hundred. 

KEN: That’s right. I have about 123, I think, you know, 

BOB: most of us are 98.6, but not Ken. Okay. So one of the things about tough texts that reason I wanted to do it is that there’s a book by Zane Hodges, which I’m in there with him because years ago, I think it was late 90s, I interviewed him and we recorded the interviews and we did about 20 interviews over various passages and we transcribed those and converted that into a book. So we have a book called Tough Texts and we’ll go through some of the chapters and talk about the passages, the book talks about. But we also offer in GES Seminary, our free online seminary, we offer a class in tough texts, which you have taught, right? 

KEN: Yes, it is a class I’ve taught. 

BOB: Are you going to teach again in the future? 

KEN: Yes. 

BOB: Yeah. So we’ll be talking about some various passages, but here, let’s first talk about some of the issues on how we handle tough texts. We’ve kind of identified what a tough text is. It would be some passage which seems to deny faith alone or seems to deny eternal security, seems to deny the faithfulness of God, etc. 

KEN: Could you even make it more general and say you got a text that seems to deny a fundamental doctrine of the faith? 

BOB: That’s good. Anything that would seemingly deny, like if it seemingly denied the resurrection of the dead. 

KEN: Right. Or when it says Jesus was hungry and someone would say, well, many couldn’t have been God or you know, or something like that. 

BOB: Right. So in general, how do we handle a tough text? When you come to a tough text, Ken, what are some of the things you do and don’t do? 

KEN: Well, one thing I do is I say, okay, I know I can look at a passage of Scripture and even if I don’t know what it means, you know, like, wow, that seems strange, seems to deny that I know what it’s not saying. You know—

BOB: So how do you know what it’s not saying? 

KEN: Well, for example, we know that from the Gospel of John, very clearly, we know that salvation is absolutely free. It’s by grace alone through faith. And so if I come to a passage, it says, you know, oh, no, you got to have works. Then I know it’s not teaching me that. I know that it’s not denying what the Scriptures is clearly teach. 

BOB: Now it can. There are verses that teach salvation by works, right? 

KEN: Right. I’m talking about eternal salvation. 

BOB: Right. And so you have to ask the question, salvation from what or what type of salvation, but your principle is Scripture can’t contradict Scripture. It’s called the analogy of faith. And in the analogy of faith, you take a Scripture that’s dealing with the same and you interpret the difficult text in light of the easier text. 

KEN: Or you interpret the unclear by the clear. You know, the Bible clearly teaches this.

BOB: Okay. Let me give you a quick example. If you look at the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14-30, what you find is the third servant is cast into the outer darkness where there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth. And that’s routinely taught to refer to eternal condemnation, right? 

KEN: Right.

BOB: Yet there’s a parallel parable and that’s in Luke 19, verses 11 to 27, the parable of the minas. And in the parable of the minas, the third servant is not slain. And after the third servant has his mina taken away from him and the mina clearly symbolizes rulership and the life to come. So he has his city taken away from him, the text then says, “But bring here those enemies of mine who did not want me to reign over them and slay them in my presence.” 

KEN: And these are not servants. 

BOB: These are not servants. And so commentators, even from a Calvinist perspective, will say clearly the third servant here is not part of the group of the slain. The third servant is clearly born again. And so if you go to that and you compare the two passages, you would say no, when you look at Luke, it’s clear the third servant is born again. So we better take another look at what the outer darkness is and what you find is the expression “outer darkness” only occurs three times in the whole New Testament.

KEN: It’s in Matthew.

BOB: All three in Matthew and all three in context, dealing with ruling and reigning with Christ in the life to come. 

KEN: All dealing with believers. 

BOB: Yeah, all dealing with believers, Matthew 8, Matthew 22, Matthew 25. 

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BOB: And so you come to a different perspective, but it’s the Matthew 25:14-30 is somewhat of a problem text. If you somehow look at it and say, well, the outer darkness must be hell. 

KEN: Well, yeah, and so what you see is on these tough texts, unfortunately, a lot of people in Christendom, what they do is they do the reverse—instead of understanding the unclear by the clear, they understand the clear by the unclear. 

BOB: Okay, now say that again. 

KEN: Unfortunately, there’s a lot of teachers who what they’ll do instead of saying, okay, the Bible clearly teaches this. So if I come to a passage that is not as clear, I’m going to interpret the unclear by the clear ones. They reverse that. 

BOB: All right, let me give you an example. And by the way, what you just said, the reason I had you repeat it is so true. And that’s why it’s dangerous to read commentaries. Now I read commentaries, but I read them critically because I know that most of the time the commentaries are going to be wrong, especially on problem passages. 

To give you an example, Dallas Seminary, our alma mater came out with a commentary on the New Testament called the Bible Knowledge Commentary. And one of my professors I had for one class, John Martin, wrote the commentary on Luke. And when he came to Luke 19:11-27 and the parable of the minas, he said the third servant, we know, is an unbeliever and he’s going to hell. And we know it because of Matthew 25:14-30.

KEN: There you go. So he’s interpreting the clear Luke passage by the unclear outer darkness and Matthew. 

BOB: Exactly. That’s exactly what he did. And if you own the Bible Knowledge Commentary, I’d encourage you to look it up. But he’s a good guy, John’s a good guy and everything. But he got it wrong. He got it wrong because he forgot John 3:16, which his own view, then ultimately what he was saying is if we’re not faithful to the end, we’re not going to make it into the kingdom. And it’s different ways people can explain that. They can say, well, if you’re truly saved, then you’re going to make it. 

But I think one of the things we’re saying is you compare passage. And another thing is you look carefully at the context, right? 

KEN: Absolutely. Who’s he talking about? Like in those, it’s very clear. And he’s talking about servants. 

BOB: And unbelievers are not called servants. 

KEN: And they’re not—

BOB: He doesn’t entrust them—

KEN: Exactly. 

BOB: Do business until I return. 

KEN: Yeah. And he doesn’t give them whatever you say the money is or the weight is the mina, you know, and the talents. These are given to believers. These are given to his servants. These are given to those who believe that he’s the king and then he’s coming back. The question is, what are they going to do with it? 

BOB: Okay. That’s so true. Now, here’s another thing—we’ve already talked about. One of the keys is to look at keywords and phrases. So let’s talk about some of the key words and phrases. We already talked about the outer darkness. We already talked about salvation. That’s a biggie, right? By my study about 7 times out of 10 salvation in the New Testament, soteria or sozo does not refer to salvation from eternal condemnation. It refers to something else. All five times in James, it refers to deliverance from judgment and calamity in this life. People get it wrong all the time. What are some of the other words or phrases we have to be careful of in tough texts

KEN: Well, I think inheritance. 

BOB: Okay. Especially inheriting the kingdom, right? 

KEN: Right. And reward. 

BOB: Okay. Like in Mark 8:34-38, He talks about He’s “going to return to the glory of His Father, and then He will recompense a reward each according to his works.” What does that mean? 

KEN: Another word is death. 

BOB: Oh, yeah. What is death? 

KEN: Most people say well death means Lake of Fire. 

BOB: Right. And then everlasting is an important issue because some people don’t think everlasting means everlasting. Any other words or phrases that come to mind in terms of—

KEN: oh, there’s so many like perish. 

BOB: Okay. What does it mean? In my book, The Ten Most Misunderstood Words, I have a chapter on “perish”. About 90% of the time it doesn’t refer to going to hell. 

KEN: Right. So you got perish. I mean, there’s so many words that we run into when we’re studying the Bible that we—because of our evangelicalism or whatever we believe that they mean a certain thing. 

BOB: And by the way, perish is the same Greek word for lost when Jesus says He came to seek and save the lost. What does that mean? Does that mean people who’ve lost their way or does that mean unregenerate? 

KEN: Exactly. And we got to look at the context to see what does in that case, perish means. Well we’ve got to look at the context for all these works or all these phrases. And then we also have to see how a book uses that word. Like you mentioned James. It’s very clear when you go through the book of James that death doesn’t mean hell. I mean, you can look at, did you say it occurs five times? 

BOB: Well, and you’ve got the salvation of the soul is another key expression in James. So in James 1:21, in James 5:19-20 talks about the salvation of the soul, but that expression, Jerry Pattillo did a master’s thesis at Dallas Seminary on that. And he showed that that refers to saving one’s physical life. 

KEN: Absolutely. Yeah.

BOB: All right. Well, thanks so much, Ken. And we’re going to go in future episodes going through various tough texts, both of the ones taught in the class and the ones in the book Tough Texts. And in the meantime, let’s all keep grace in focus. 

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On our next episode are all believers guaranteed the blessings of the Beatitudes. Please join us for that and until then, let’s keep grace in focus.