“Am I going to be left behind?”

Steve Brown:
Am I going to be left behind? The answer to that and other questions, on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
Welcome to Key Life. Our host and teacher is Steve Brown. He’s no guru, but he does have honest answers to honest questions about the Bible. God’s grace changes everything, how we love, work, live, lead, marry, parent, evangelize, purchase, and worship. So, here’s Steve and Pete Alwinson from ForgeBibleStudy.com with street-smart Bible teaching for real life.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey man. You doing all right?

Steve Brown:
Yeah, I am. You doing all right?

Pete Alwinson:
You know, I am. And you know, it’s, but it’s good, it’s good to be in here with you. I, I have to check on you. That’s my call.

Steve Brown:
No, you come in here to rest. I got your number, man. This is a good place cause it’s soundproof.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
And once that door is shut, nobody knows you’re here. And if anybody comes after you, the staff will say, you can’t go in there.

Pete Alwinson:
No, that’s right. I want, I just want to be alone.

Steve Brown:
They’re recording for a national broadcast.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
See, I’ve got your number.

Pete Alwinson:
Thank you Steve. I’m a little overloaded, just needed to be alone.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. Right. That’s Pete Alwinson and go to ForgeTruth.com and if you live in Central Florida, you ought to be involved in Forge. It is a dynamic, unbelievably powerful ministry. I have some friends that are very involved in that and I can see what it’s done in their lives. You might want to check that out. You can find out about it by going to ForgeTruth.com and while you’re there, you might want to check out the podcast, all things Pete Alwinson and it’s a great website. As you know, Pete comes in and every week we answer questions and take Friday’s broadcast to do that. And we love getting your questions and I mean that. You can call 1-800-KEY-LIFE, 24 7, and then press the right button and record your question, and we often put your voice on the air. Or you can send your question to

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or you can e-mail to [email protected] and listen if you can help us financially, those are touch places, and we will rise up and call you blessed. Do you know you can give on your phone. Take a note, text Key Life at 28950 and just follow instructions. And if you can, do, if you can’t, we understand, do say a prayer for this ministry. But if you do send us a gift, I promise we’ll be faithful with it. Pete, why don’t you lead us in prayer and then we’ll get to some of these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
Good, good, good way to start our time. Father, thank you that we can come into your presence and pray and we come before you boldly but humbly because of the work of our Lord Jesus. And we honor you. We praise you, Lord, we know right now that you know us and you know everyone listening and you know our needs because you are sovereign, because you are infinite, because you are all knowing and all loving. And we give you praise. We thank you for our great salvation, Jesus, and ask that you would enable us to continue to understand your grace in such a way that it sets us freer and freer and that it energizes us in our growth in Christ. Now, we thank you for Key Life and those that do so much behind the scenes. We thank you for our supporters, our givers. Lord, we pray you’d be with the needs that we have and now we commit this time of Q&A to you and ask that you would use it perhaps beyond what we can imagine. Now, we admit it to you and pray it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Steve Brown:
Amen. Pete, with fear and trepidation, let’s go to our phone line.

Pete Alwinson:
All right, here we go.

Caller 1:
I’m listening to an audio book called Left Behind. It’s by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. It says in the millennium, when a child reaches a hundred and hasn’t received Christ as their savior, they die. I never heard this teaching before and I’d just like your opinion on it. Is it Scriptural?

Steve Brown:
I haven’t heard of that either. Have you?

Pete Alwinson:
No. And I read most of those books and I don’t remember that.

Steve Brown:
They were fun stories, but remember their fictional stories.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. Right.

Steve Brown:
And that position that is taught throughout that series, as much fun as it is, is not a majority view in the church, in the history of the church. A lot of people don’t buy into the timeline, into the way the rapture is described, and certainly in the way that during the millennium, if you reach a hundred, you’re going to die and go to hell. It’s, I’m not sure, I don’t remember that in that particular series, but.

Pete Alwinson:
No, and I hope it’s not true in this life either cause, you know, we’re working up on those numbers.

Steve Brown:
I know, I’m getting close to it.

Pete Alwinson:
But no, it’s, no, no, I’ve never heard that as a serious theological position.

Steve Brown:
No, I haven’t either, but the position expressed by Tim LaHaye Jenkins in those Left Behind books is a legitimate Biblical position held by a whole lot of Christians.

Pete Alwinson:
The general perspective of the millennium.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, the perspective of those, of that whole idea of a rapture, a tribulation, of a certain period, that the Christians won’t face, the millennium, the reign of Christ. All of those things are held by a lot of Christians. And a lot of Christians don’t. And you don’t make fellowship on the basis of eschatology.

Pete Alwinson:
Right, right, right.

Steve Brown:
I mean, I don’t think anybody knows for sure how all this is going to work out.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
Except the one thing. And that would be that Jesus is going to come back and clean up the mess.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And he wins. But other than that, we have to be very careful about chiseling and concrete and then building fellowship on those particular views.

Pete Alwinson:
So, so true. I do believe the Book of Revelation was meant to be a book for every generation of Christians.

Steve Brown:
Oh, I do too.

Pete Alwinson:
And I think the big picture is not so much the specific details of how it’s supposed to work out, but really the spiritual warfare that is going on, the worship that we should be giving to our triumphant Savior, our Great God in the meantime and what you said, that it will all come to pass according to his power.

There is so many images in the Book of Revelation and so much unique apocalyptic language, that it’s trying to encourage us to stay in the fight, to understand the spiritual warfare behind the scenes. And that we win. So

Steve Brown:
That is so good. It really is.

Pete Alwinson:
It’s much more positive in the big picture.

Steve Brown:
And, you know, I, Peter says that he’s talking about Old Testament prophecy. And he says it wasn’t written for the people who said the prophecy. It was written for the people who live in the time of the prophecy. And so, we’ll know when these things start happening, it will be clear. And Dr. Addison Leach, who was then the Dean at Gordon Conwell Seminary and I were having dinner one night and one of his students came up and said, Dr. Leach, what are you pre-millennial or post-millennial? He said, I don’t know. I said, if I was forced to, and then he expressed his views, but he said, you know what I believe? I believe at some point somebody, and it will probably be a layman, will say, this is what I think it means, and everybody will say, Wow. You’re right.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Brown:
And that will be in the time that is prophesied. So, meanwhile, it’s fun to talk about it, it’s fun to surmise about it. But don’t chisel it in concrete and be kind of careful about that. What does the word? This is an e-mail. What does the word reformed mean?

Pete Alwinson:
Ah, well, just like it sounds, it really came at the time of Martin Luther in the 16th century and all of those theologians and pastors that God raised up to bring a cleansing to the church. And it was to try to bring that idea of the gospel back into Biblical teaching. And it was a reforming coming back to the Biblical

Steve Brown:
So, it didn’t mean reform school or anything

Pete Alwinson:
not reform school, I used to think it would’ve meant I, I lived in fear. Did you, I mean, you and I were not great little boys. Did we get, did you live in fear of being sent to reform school?

Steve Brown:
No, killed.

Pete Alwinson:
killed

Steve Brown:
But reform comes from reformation. And there should still be reformation.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s why I love the people that truly get reformed. It’s not a dirty word. People ought to understand that. You know, but those of us in our denomination talks about being reformed, reforming, but always to be reformed according to Scripture. And this almost goes back to what we were talking about in the previous discussion. It occurred to me today as I was doing some reading where Paul says in I Corinthians, where we know in part, and we prophesy in part everything that we know now is really in part. And even as we study and teach the Scriptures and the gospel, we just don’t know everything. So, we have to keep being reformed to Scripture as God helps us understand more and more truth.

Steve Brown:
That’s good stuff. And by the way, reformed is one of the heritages within the larger part of the church. A particular way of looking at Scripture, particular understanding of that sort of thing.

Pete Alwinson:
The truly spiritual ones, the better, the better one.

Steve Brown:
The better looking ones too.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. Right.

Steve Brown:
And there are a number of other different views of living in Scripture, and that again is not a place where we don’t have fellowship. We sit and we talk and we bring our gifts to the table. And we learn from one another. We bring sovereignty of God, the Methodist their organizations, and the Episcopalians a fifth. And then we bring on, I’m joking, don’t, don’t, don’t send me letters. Very quickly, how do we know God’s will?

Pete Alwinson:
Well, you know, we know his will and the word of God, and that’s his prescriptive will. But also his decretive will, we find out what he decrees and what’s not going to change. And so, we also in those, in that shady area, the gray areas where we just don’t know what job should I have, who should I marry? We can know his will through the word of God, through counsel. And through godly counsel, good people, wisdom that he gives us.

Steve Brown:
And then occasionally, and probably less than any of those others combined, God will lead in a specific, talk to me kind of way.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. He can get our attention.

Steve Brown:
But you have to be careful, that can be very presumptuous, if you’re not careful. You ever have anybody come and tell you, God told me to tell you.

Pete Alwinson:
Not exactly. Not in quite those words.

Steve Brown:
But close.

Pete Alwinson:
I learned from you to say you may be right and you may be wrong.

Steve Brown:
But tell him to mention it to me.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
Guys, we’ve got to go. It is a privilege that you would spend time with us each week on Key Life. And we thank you for doing that. We’ve got to go. Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.