“What about the Apocrypha?”

Steve Brown:
What about the Apocrypha? The answer to that and other questions, on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
This is Key Life, dedicated to the message that the only people who get any better are those who know that if they don’t get any better, God will still love them anyway. That teaching raises a lot of questions, so here’s author and seminary professor Steve Brown, along with Pete Alwinson from ForgeTruth with answers from the Bible that will make you free.

Steve Brown:
Hey Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey man. Happy Friday.

Steve Brown:
You know, I’ve forgotten everything I knew about the Apocrypha. So, you’re going to have to answer that question yourself, and I’m going to check after we finish this broadcast to make sure you did it right.

Pete Alwinson:
Or I won’t be back.

Steve Brown:
We know too much dirt on each other. We’re both going to be here.

Pete Alwinson:
There you go.

Steve Brown:
We’re not going to hurt each other, are we? That’s Pete Alwinson. Check out ForgeTruth.com great and deep website. And a great podcast that you might want to check out there, too. Pete comes in and we answer questions. And we’ve been doing that for a lot of years on Friday’s broadcast. And we really do love your questions. You can pick up the phone anytime, dial 1-800-KEY-LIFE, record your question, and we often put that on the air. Or you can write to

Key Life Network

P.O. Box 5000

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or, in Canada

Key Life Canada
P.O. Box 28060
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or you can e-mail your question to [email protected] and if you can help us financially, I promise we’ll use it to help others who can’t. And if you can’t or don’t feel called to help financially, we understand that. When you think of it, say a prayer for this ministry that we remain faithful, that we continue to use the gifts that are given to us for God’s glory. Talking about prayer, Pete, lead us in prayer and we’ll get to these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
You got it. Our Father, we do come to you right now at the end of this week. And on this Friday, we come, we honor you. We praise you. We stop for a minute and we shake our heads. Some of us are a little tired. Some of us are perplexed at decisions we have to make or even about those things that happened to us this week. And so, we come before you and we thank you that we can trust that you are good and holy and righteous and just and trustworthy, powerful, and that you love us and that you have a plan for us. And so Lord, with all of the challenges that we face, we come before you and we tell you there’s times we don’t have a direction. We need your Spirit to communicate to us about decisions we ought to make or steps we ought to take. We come to you, we need you, and we look forward to meeting you in worship. Even this week-end, as we go to be with your people, and we ask Father that in a powerful way, you would take our worship leaders and pastors, teachers, priests, and those that disciple us and develop us and preach to us, that you would use them supernaturally to communicate your grace, love, power, and truth to us. Change us, set us free, now that we might honor and glorify you. And now, we give you this time of Q&A and pray that you would be glorified in it and through it. For we pray in Jesus’ holy name, Amen.

Steve Brown:
Amen. Pete, let’s go to our phone lines.

Caller 1:
What does God think of the Apocrypha?

Steve Brown:
Good question. You know, really, I was kidding about not remembering a lot about it. I grew up in a home where we bought a family Bible, where you wrote in your grandparents and your great grandparents name. But there was always the Apocrypha that was a part of that. And so, I grew up reading some of it. But it was not a part of the Canon.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
Talk to us a bit about that.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. No, that’s a great point. A lot of people had it in their Bible, but they don’t know what to do with it. So, the early church at the time of the Reformation, let’s put it that way, back in the 1500s, those Apocalyptic books, there’s 14 of them. 14 Apocrypha, which means hidden. And they were in that intertestamental time period between the Old and New Testament. And the early, the Jews didn’t put them in as Canonical and the early church saw them as pious books and somewhat helpful, but not Canonical, not authoritatively written by a prophet or an apostle in the New. So, that’s why at the Reformation they fought over it and the Protestants took it out and the Catholics left it in.

Steve Brown:
And they are good books. If you can find a Bible with them or want to Google it, you’ll find good wisdom. You’ll find some silly stuff there too, but you’ll see a difference between the Apocrypha and the Canon of Scripture. And there is a significant difference in terms of depth and profundity and wisdom and balance that we get in Scripture that isn’t always possible or present in the Apocrypha.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, that’s well put. It, again, pious literature written by people of God, generally speaking. But not on the level of Scripture. And you can tell the difference when you read it.

Steve Brown:
Oh yeah, you really can.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s great.

Steve Brown:
Okay, this is an e-mail. It is my understanding that because God allows only sinless people into heaven, that’s why Jesus died on a cross, so God the Father can count us sinless. How then did Satan, in the Book of Job, enter heaven?

Pete Alwinson:
That’s a good question.

Steve Brown:
Well, I’ve never heard that before. It is a good question.

Pete Alwinson:
It is good. And, you know, and I would say, well, number one, God only allows in his presence who he permits. And so, he was called there. I think Satan didn’t just come show up. I think he was called there, called to account and he came. But we noticed that he wasn’t, he didn’t enter heaven savingly.

Steve Brown:
That’s right. He wasn’t one of us.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. So he came and that goes back to that whole point that we believe, of course, that the Bible is not dualistic, not two equal powers. God is the Supreme King of heaven and earth. Satan is called, he comes and he accuses, he goes to his nature and accuses Job and God shows that interaction.

Steve Brown:
That’s true. Good stuff. I’d like to know, this is an e-mail, when I can blame Satan, and when I can blame my sinful nature for my sinning. I understand that although God in his sovereign plans all things, I am still morally responsible. So, does it mean that every time I sin, it’s because of my fallen nature or did the devil make me do it?

Pete Alwinson:
I love that question.

Steve Brown:
I do too.

Pete Alwinson:
So, how do you go about answering that?

Steve Brown:
It’s kind of a mix. I, you know, I really do, and I don’t think you ever get that together so that you’re sure this came from the devil. And who was the comedian that used to talk a lot about the devil made me do it?

Pete Alwinson:
Flip Wilson.

Steve Brown:
Flip Wilson.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, the devil made me do it.

Steve Brown:
And I think if you find yourself using that as an excuse, that’s a sin in itself. We really are responsible for our actions. And by the way, that’s okay. That’s, you get to, you get a path of getting hugged. That’s what repentance is, so it’s not a bad thing. I’ve said, and said this week on the recordings of Key Life, that the best gift you have is your sin when you know it. And the worst fear you ought to have is your faithfulness when you know that, because God uses every bit of it. But, I don’t know if you can ever say, you know, the devil made me do it, or unless you’re at a seance and the devil shows or something, I guess you could say that is. But when I do bad things, it’s part me, it’s part the flesh, it’s part the devil.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. And those are our three enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil, you know, and, and that’s why the Scriptures call us to allow him to renew our minds so that we think Biblically, we think in terms of what God wants us to do and be, we think in terms of the gospel. So, we need to have our minds regenerated because our minds affect our behavior typically.

Steve Brown:
Good stuff. What does it mean that our bodies are temples of God?

Pete Alwinson:
Oh, yeah, amazing that the Bible would even say that, but it shows that the earthly temple, which was the meeting place between heaven and earth has been replaced. The temple in Jerusalem has been replaced by the temples of our body and the church.

Steve Brown:
That’s good. And that you mentioned it plurally, in I Corinthians 3, when Paul is talking about being the temple of the Holy Spirit, that’s plural.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
He doesn’t, it’s not talking, it’s not the kind of thing that you shouldn’t eat stuff that’s bad for you because your body’s the temple of the Spirit, that verse doesn’t work there. He’s saying y’all

Pete Alwinson:
Right. Right.

Steve Brown:
for the temple of the Holy Spirit. And in fact, the church, the real church, is the resident place of the God of the universe.

Pete Alwinson:
Mm hmm. That’s right. And that’s why one of the guys who’s the assistant pastor at our church, he says, when, by way of welcome, the church has come into the building.

Steve Brown:
I like it. That’s a good way of putting it. I like that. Did Jesus fulfill Old Testament prophecies?

Pete Alwinson:
Yes, he did. How many are there? Six hundred.

Steve Brown:
Oh man. There are many of them and some of them very specific. You know, if I were an unbeliever, I would become a believer because of prophecy. You know, you read that chapter in Isaiah about the suffering servant. And if you don’t, if you’re talking to somebody who is not a believer and isn’t familiar with that passage, ask them who it’s talking about.

Pete Alwinson:
And if they have any idea of the New Testament and have read any of the New Testament, and then Isaiah 53 is just, it’s obviously got to be Jesus, you know, it’s powerful.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. It really is powerful. So God, and by the way, when we’re talking about prophecy, that’s one of the ways, but It is, people say you’ve got to put your mind on the back burner if you become a Christian. You know, it’s all your feelings and nobody argues with it. No, it’s not.

Pete Alwinson:
No.

Steve Brown:
The Scriptures and the Christian faith is an extremely rational and cogent and systematic worldview that works. In fact, it’s the only one that does.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That is right. And that’s why we have it in a book form because we can study it over and over and have our views continually reformed and conformed to it. And that changes our minds.

Steve Brown:
And as our culture moves away from that, you know, everybody’s concerned with what’s going on in our country and in Canada.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And they’ll give you a bunch of reasons for it, but let me tell you the real reason is we left our roots. We left the God that we worship. We left the verities that were revealed to us about how a nation and a people should live. And when we do that, it all goes to pot.

Pete Alwinson:
Pastors, preach the word.

Steve Brown:
That’s right. Stay with it. Oh, we don’t have time for another question. And we don’t have time to sing.

Pete Alwinson:
No, no, we don’t have an audience that could bear it.

Steve Brown:
Hey guys, Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.