“Does God tell his people the future?”

Steve Brown:
Does God tell his people the future? The answer to that and other questions on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
If you think laughter isn’t spiritual or that faithfulness to God means conformity to Christian stereotypes, then this program probably isn’t for you. But if you’re looking for honest, Biblical answers to honest questions, welcome to Key Life. Here’s our host, author and seminary professor Steve Brown, along with Pete Alwinson from ForgeBibleStudy.com.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Steve, you’re going to get in an accident on the way home.

Steve Brown:
Don’t do this for me Pete. Hey, by the way, Pete’s going to be on next week on the regular Key Life program. He’s going to be teaching on James and I’ve heard some of it and you’re in for treat. And don’t mess it up. Okay Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
I’ll try not to.

Steve Brown:
Do your best.

Pete Alwinson:
Thank you for the opportunity.

Steve Brown:
Pete really is going to be in next week. And you want to, you want to make sure that you’re a part of that. Pete, as you know, comes in on Fridays and we’ve been doing this for 25 years. I mean, we were children when we started this. Your hair was all black or brown.

Pete Alwinson:
Blonde.

Steve Brown:
And I had hair. Oh, you had, I don’t remember.

Pete Alwinson:
No, I never had blonde hair.

Steve Brown:
It’s been a long time ago. Okay. Anyway, we do love to get your questions. You can call 1-800-KEY-LIFE, 24 7, and we’ll use your voice on the broadcast. Or you can, you can do that 1-800-KEY-LIFE anytime you want. You can write to

Key Life Network
P.O. Box 5000
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In Canada, it’s

Key Life Canada
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Or you can e-mail us at [email protected]. And we love to get your questions. And if you can help us financially, it’d be great if you would include a gift in your question, we’ll still answer your question if you don’t, but we’ll like you a whole lot better if you send money. And that of course is a joke. Some can and some can’t and if you can, you’ll touch a lot of others, more people than you would believe. And if you can’t, say a prayer for this ministry. Pete, lead us in prayer and we’ll get to some of these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
Father, we do come to you today on the last day of this work week, on Friday. And we just, we just come to you thankful that we’ve been able to connect with you, right now, just for a short period of time. Thank you that your access to us as never limited that we belong to you because of Jesus and that your Spirit sometimes conveys to you, our hearts that convey our thoughts that are even unclear to us. So, we love you, we thank you that you loved us first and that we belong to you. Lord, we do have a lot of questions and we pray that your word would be clear to us this week-end as we listen to the messages of our pastors and priests and teachers, and that even as we take of the Lord’s Supper, you would bind us together in unity and give your church the power to talk about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And so, build in us your grace and may it work out and flow out through our lives. Thanks for Steve and all those that do so much behind the scenes here at Key Life. We just commit this ministry to you and our time now. In Jesus’ strong name. Amen.

Steve Brown:
Amen. Pete let’s first go to the phone lines.

Caller 1:
You think that God’s still warned people, calamity might be coming to them? I have this gut feeling that I might soon get sick with COVID and God wants that to happen, help grow my faith and make me stronger. And do you think it’s reasonable to think that this idea is from God? If it’s just Satan, or just me overthinking?

Steve Brown:
That’s a good question. Wait around and see, that’s pretty uncompassionate. But yeah, I guess sometimes in God’s sovereign will, he reveals stuff, but not most of the time, you know, I lost everything in hurricane Andrew. And if he’d just told me before it happened, I wouldn’t have been there.

Pete Alwinson:
And you knew the hurricane was coming because they knew it was off the coast and you got the reports.

Steve Brown:
I didn’t know it was going to be that big.

Pete Alwinson:
Well, and nobody knew your, you didn’t know, they didn’t tell you you’re going to lose everything.

Steve Brown:
No, really didn’t. And I didn’t, and I’m not, still not altogether happy with that particular time.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
But yeah, I think for God’s own purposes, sometimes he lets you know. And I was kidding when I said, just wait and see what happens. But there is a sense in which we all do that, don’t we?

Pete Alwinson:
A lot of that. So, somebody goes in and they have, in our churches, they have a negative test and the doctor says, we need to get some more tests and you can’t go all the way down the road to cancer, cause you don’t know, but you’ve got to wait and see with each test. So, you walk by faith. However, on the other hand, Peter and Paul both had a sense, and were told, you know, Jesus told Peter, somebody’s going to take you away.

Steve Brown:
Yeah.

Pete Alwinson:
And Paul, the laid aside by earthly vessel

Steve Brown:
That’s right. He knew too.

Pete Alwinson:
was imminent

Steve Brown:
Yeah.

Pete Alwinson:
He didn’t know exactly how it was going to happen, so God can do that, but it’s not a normative principle that he does that.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. And sometimes it’s being neurotic, you know,

Pete Alwinson:
I agree.

Steve Brown:
almost all of us. I’m a fearful person, you know, during this COVID thing. And there’s, you know, there’s still problems. And, you know, I wasn’t sure whether it was just nonsense or whether we were all gonna die, but I didn’t get any special revelation about whether I was gonna get it or not.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
And the people I know don’t know either. So, what do you have to do? You trust God.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. We walk by faith, not by sight.

Steve Brown:
That’s right.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s true before salvation. And it’s true after salvation and let the joy of the Lord rule our day by day. And that’s why we need brothers and sisters to help us do that.

Steve Brown:
You know, speaking of that particular question, which is a good question. And when we get off the air, we’re going to pray for you because I know how you feel, you know, you get whatever bad could happen is gonna happen. Ask Jesus to say to you, whatever is good, that could happen, it will happen because I’m a favored child of the king of the universe.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
And I believe that, you know, I look at my life and there have been bad things, but there have been so many good things and God has been so kind and gentle and whatever you have to go through, you won’t walk into the dark by yourself.

Pete Alwinson:
Right. That’s right. That’s good.

Steve Brown:
We interviewed a guy who had Alzheimer’s one time on our talk show and he had written a book titled, it was a great title, I’m Beginning to Miss Me.

Pete Alwinson:
Oh.

Steve Brown:
And, it was a hard interview because he was dealing with some of that, but it was filled with joy. And he said, when he discovered he had Alzheimer’s, that Jesus said to him, when you go into the mist, I’ll go with you. And he did. And it was obvious that was happening. Speaking of that kind of thing, this is an e-mail, I was witnessing to a friend who is a victim of familial sexual abuse, who bluntly told me that she could not believe in God who used incest to populate the earth, obviously referring to the creation story. What can I tell her? Well, in terms of the technical exegesis of the text, you must remember that at the beginning, the Scriptures on incest were not there because the problems, the genetic problems that are part of that simply had not infected the human race yet. And so, it was a different kind of dip thing. But, and so it isn’t God approving of incest in the sense that you think of it, it was at a whole nother situation.

Pete Alwinson:
It was natural. It was the natural propagating tool that got used. And so people didn’t see it as incest.

Steve Brown:
No. And later on, it became one of the real big sins.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
And horrible ones.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
But back to something else, if you’re going to not believe in God, because of bad things, then you’re not going to believe in God. Cause we, you know, I hear we get letters from people that are going through horrible things. In fact, I’ve gone through some horrible things and you have to, and if you’re going to request from God that you go through a rose garden with Jesus and you never get cancer, that you never get an accident, that there’s no abuse, there’s no pain, there’s no darkness. You’re living in a dream world.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, that’s right. And I think once you understand back to Genesis what this world is all about and what God has done from the very beginning to bring about salvation and redemption, that he started right after the curse, right after the fall to bring about a savior. You know, why does God do something about it? Well he has, and he is doing something about it.

Steve Brown:
And, you know, there is a sense in which, Alsur, I got this argument from, which is a good one. He said, if people from Mars landed on the earth and you told them, you believed in a loving, kind God, and they read the newspaper that morning. They would tell you, you were crazy. And they’re right, man. There’s a lot of war and pain and bloodshed and starvation in the world. And then Alsur said this, if all of the factual data would suggest that there is either a mean God or no God at all, where in the world did we get the idea there was and he was loving. And then the light goes on and you say, oh, I never would have dreamed it up. It must be true. And that’s true. You hope when there’s nothing to hope Chesterton said. You asked me what I was reading. And I said, I was reading orthodoxy again by Chesterton. Chesterton makes that point, that hope when there’s nothing to hope for and yet you still hope is the proof of the existence of God. And so don’t question, I mean don’t, every time something bad happens, that’s to be expected. And Jesus told you.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s right. And I do find it interesting as we get to know all these different people that we know, that some people have this consistent train. Why has God done this to me? Why did, God owes me something different. But a lot of others just, they don’t, they don’t even think of God that way, that God owes me a perfect life. They’re not putting those demands on God. And that’s really a better way to go.

Steve Brown:
It really is. And I, and we see it a lot, you know, in the book Lament and Laughter,

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. It’s going to come out soon.

Steve Brown:
that is going to come out probably, well, 15 years from now, God and publishers move at a very slow pace. But as I was working on that, I became so aware of the kind of people you just described, who go through horrible things. And yet in the middle of it, they’re leaning on God. They’re trusting, and even laugh

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right

Steve Brown:
in the middle of it.

Pete Alwinson:
I don’t believe God owes me anything, but he’s giving me everything.

Steve Brown:
That’s right. That’s true. So, if you’re going to make a case against God, you can do that. But, I wouldn’t go there, I just wouldn’t. I’ll tell you though. I will go because we’re at the end of this broadcast. And Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.