The Narrow Path 09/30/2026

Steve Gregg: Good afternoon and welcome to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we're live for an hour as usual on weekdays taking your calls. If you have questions about the Bible or the Christian faith or you disagree with the host, feel free to give me a call. We'll talk about that. The number is 844-484-5737. By the way, yesterday when I mentioned that we really do appreciate people calling in who disagree, our first caller was one who said he disagreed. His name is Russ from Denver, Colorado. I was hoping we'd have a good conversation, but his phone was bad and we never got to hear what he had to say. I know he was going to talk about the Eucharist, but I was hoping he would call back. He apparently did not get a chance. Russ, if you are out there listening now and if you get a chance to call in today, I would love to talk. I'm sorry we weren't able to talk because of the technical problems. Hopefully, you could call from a good place and we could have a conversation. Right now the lines are full, but the number is again 844-484-5737. Beginning tomorrow night and about ten times over the next nine days, I'm going to be speaking in Michigan in various places. If you're in Michigan or Ohio, because I'll be near Toledo, Ohio at least one of those nights, and want to find out where I'm speaking and possibly attend, feel free to look at our website, thenarrowpath.com. That's thenarrowpath.com under the tab that says announcements. All the information you need will be there. All right, we're going to go to the phones and talk to Darwin in Detroit, Michigan. Hi, Darwin, welcome to the Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.
Guest (Male): Hi, Steve. How you doing? It's good to hear from you. I saw you last time in Hamtramck, Michigan last time you was here. I'm looking forward to seeing you again. I need your opinion. I heard on the radio a pastor talking about radical Islam. Their main goal is to expand their birth rate in the world and the United States to take advantage of the election and the voting by becoming voting their own personnel into office. I wanted your opinion. Is this a way radical Islam is to persecute the church at the end times?
Steve Gregg: Well, it certainly is part of their plan. I don't know if they'll succeed or not. The Bible doesn't mention Islam. The Bible does talk about the Christian church being persecuted, but not just in the end times. Throughout all church history, the church has been persecuted. We just haven't seen much of it where we live, which is a very unusual bubble in history. Virtually everywhere in the world, the church is persecuted and through almost all church history. Muslims have been among those, not the only people, but they have been among those who historically have persecuted Christians. It is true that countries like the United States and Western Europe, because of Western civilization and because of strength, have kind of held back the threat of the Muslim desire to basically evangelize the world with their religion and impose Sharia law. Not all Muslims want to do that, but the ones who don't are not the ones we have to be concerned about. The ones who do are the ones we want to be concerned about. There's millions and millions of Muslims and I think someone said maybe only like 1% of them want to take over the world and force their religion forcibly on everybody else. But with one in a million of them, it meant like there's 200,000 of them or something like that. It's a huge number of radical Muslims who would love to do that. Now, one of the ways that they hope to gain control of the West is by immigrating here. I mean, they've stated this. This is their strategy. They're immigrating here and then also having a lot of babies because the Muslims, like the Mormons and some others and even some Christian groups, believe in having a lot of babies. Of course, most Westerners are not having a lot of babies. We're kind of on a suicidal death spiral when it comes to reproduction in the West. Most Western countries are not even having enough babies to replace the parents when they die. So, it's a declining population of white Westerners is one of the phenomena taking place in our time. But that isn't affecting the Muslims adversely. It's actually helping them because they don't limit their birth rate. So, it's just a matter of time. A generation, maybe as little as twenty years, if these trends continue, that the Muslims can, of course, take over the country quite peacefully. But if they do take it over peacefully, the kind who want to do that, it's not going to be a peaceful thing for Christians because they want everyone to follow Islam. So, yeah, those are things that are going on. Now, that's just stuff that's going on. I'm not saying that's fulfilling Bible prophecy because the Bible doesn't talk about Islam. As far as I'm concerned, the Bible doesn't really talk about the end times. I know that surprises a lot of people, but almost all of the passages which are popularly applied to the end times are actually, if you read them in their context, talking about things that already happened in history. The idea that there's a lot of things in the Bible about the end times comes from the fact that a great number of Christians have made that assumption and therefore they read that into passages which, without that assumption, you would get the impression that they were fulfilled hundreds of years ago. I believe that is the correct thing. Most of the prophecies that people quote today as being fulfilled are actually prophecies that were fulfilled after the time they were uttered, but still many hundreds of years ago now. So, I don't think there's a lot in the Bible about the end times. But one of the things that isn't in there about the end times is anything that has to do with Islam. So, in other words, I can't critique the whole spread of Islam into the West on the basis of Bible prophecy or end-times theories. But I can do it on the basis of just socio-political things that are going on and actual threats to Christianity in the Western world and to freedom, too, since Christianity is the basis of freedom. There were no countries that knew anything about the kind of freedom we have until Christianity came and it's a Christian concept. We assume almost everybody loves freedom. That's one of the mistakes we've made in the Middle East. Go over there and take out a dictatorial regime and think, "Oh, the freedom-loving people will just rise up and cause a democratic government." Well, that hasn't really turned out to be the case because under Islam, the idea of human freedom and human rights just isn't in their religion. It's not in their mind at all. That's an entirely Christian concept, a Judeo-Christian concept. That being so, we'd be surprised. If you think, "Well, the Muslims I know are pretty peaceful people. If they took over the country, they'd probably want to just live and let live," you're assuming that Islam has a lot more in common with Christianity than it does. No, all the freedoms that we take for granted came from Christianity. You get rid of Christianity, you get rid of the freedoms soon enough. Anyway, that is a concern. That is a concern, but it's not one that we can point to a chapter and verse about in the Bible. Thanks for your question. Jacob in La Verne, California, welcome to the Narrow Path. Thanks for calling.
Guest (Male): Yes. Hi, Steve. Thank you for your show. I just started listening a few months ago and I appreciate your nuance and thoughtfulness. I'm calling because my wife died nine months ago, leaving me with our two children. I read your autobiography on your website and I saw that you had also experienced being a widower and raising children on your own. I was just wondering if you could provide some kind of advice or counsel for someone like me, especially in regards to faith, because I've been quite lost and not really knowing who I am anymore. My wife and I were Catholic and that was a big part of our life together. But now I find myself questioning everything, including faith itself.
Steve Gregg: How old are your children?
Guest (Male): They are very young. My son is ten months and my daughter is three.
Steve Gregg: Do you have family nearby?
Guest (Male): Yes, I do. So I'm not completely on my own. Thankfully, I have my parents. I have lots of friends.
Steve Gregg: Well, I'm very sorry for your loss. You're right, I have experienced widowhood and divorce. I've had a wife who left me with four children. I had another wife who died when we had one child. So I raised five children as a single dad much of the time over sixteen years. It's hard. It is definitely hard. In the first case, my first wife who I had to raise one child from, that child was a baby, one year old at the time. The other children were from another marriage and they were closer to their teens. In fact, three of them were in their teens and one was ten years old. So I've raised a wide range of them. Now, I have to say, I thought I was a pretty good dad. I thought I did things right, but I really can't say that I can point to the results I was looking for in my children. My children were, I would say, traumatized in some respects and I didn't actually know how to help them recover from it because it was totally unexpected in both cases. Of course, I had raised my children to be Christians and they seemed to be Christians. I mean, not only Christians, they seemed to be zealous Christians. What they did in their spare time often had to do with learning to sing the hymns all the verses or reading through the Bible on their own. One of my sons wanted me to take him out on Saturdays to do evangelism on the street. So we're not talking about just kids who kind of said a sinner's prayer and then we kind of pretended they were Christians. My kids really seemed to be fairly strong Christians, but they all experienced some stumbling with the loss of their mothers. I guess that's understandable, though I would think they would recover more easily. In any case, I didn't lose my faith, but it certainly was a great trial both to lose a wife and also to see the children flounder like that. Especially when your only goal in life is to raise a godly family, which was the case with me. So I'm not sure. Your background is Roman Catholic, mine is a little different, but I didn't live near any of the grandparents when these things happened. Well, I take it back. In the first instance, my parents were nearby. But you have the grandparents nearby. I suppose you'd do well to lean on them as much as you can. God will provide. The Bible just says, Jesus said, "If you seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, all the things you need will be added to you." That would include, I believe, probably childcare from relatives or friends or something, too. God provided for all my needs and I was poor. I mean, I was very poor. So God still provided. We never lacked for anything. So I could just say just trust God in the matter. Losing a wife is a terrible thing and I'm so sorry for your loss. I will tell you this, if you had to lose one through death, a faithful wife through death, or an unfaithful wife through divorce, the loss of an unfaithful wife through divorce is actually more traumatic, much harder. A faithful wife who dies, you lose something very good, but you know that she's with the Lord. You know that she didn't abandon you. You know that she didn't seek to abandon her children. You know that she's in a better place. An unfaithful wife who leaves, none of those things are true. She did betray you. She did abandon the children. You would have no way of knowing if she's going to be with the Lord when she dies. So there's more traumatic things involved in an unfaithful wife leaving than in a faithful wife dying. I've been through both, and what you've been through, though it's horrible, it's actually the easier of the two. But I would just say there's plenty of support groups among Christians for people who've lost loved ones. There's child-raising groups that support each other and so forth. The main thing I would just say is don't lose your faith because there's no reason to. When my wife was killed in an accident suddenly, people asked me sometimes, "Well, did you get mad at God for that?" It never occurred to me to be mad at God. Why would I get mad at Him? You don't get mad at someone unless they do something wrong, and I'm not aware of God ever having done anything wrong. It's part of my faith system that He doesn't do anything wrong. Whatever He does is right and good, and it's not as if God has to explain Himself for setting a particular date for my wife to die as opposed to some other date for my wife to die. My wife was going to die. I knew when I married her she's going to die. But I kind of thought we might live many decades together before that happened. But I realize that there's not really any better time than another to lose a loved one. I'd gladly die any day. I've been ready to meet the Lord, and so was my wife. So I don't have any pity for her. She went to be with the Lord and quite suddenly. But to lose a loved one, there's never a good time for that. Any time you lose a loved one, child or a wife or something like that, you might say, "Well, I don't know why God took them at this time." Well, what time did you want them taken? How did you want them to die? The truth is they're going to die. Even if they outlive you, they will die. So this is something that's just a reality that hits us hard when we're the ones who lose. But being rational is a lot wiser than being visceral about it. To say, "Listen, this is God's choice. God can take anything I have anytime He wants to." I'll tell you, if He takes my kids before I die, or if He takes my wife now before I die, I'm not going to be very happy about it, but I'm not going to blame Him. We're all going to die. So I've always trusted that God knows best. So I just suggest that you make sure that your faith is strong and that you avail yourself of the best resources that God puts in your way. I hope there are people, not only your parents, hopefully, and maybe your wife's parents, but maybe in the church or in some other non-church Christian group that you can find. It's only been nine months for you, so you're probably still very raw and it's very hard to adjust to taking care of little children. Brother, are you employed full-time?
Guest (Male): No, at the moment I'm not.
Steve Gregg: Okay. So are you making it financially okay?
Guest (Male): Yeah, I live with my parents and people have been generous to me, so that's been helping me.
Steve Gregg: Okay. So you're in a very un-ideal situation, but much better than it could be. Your parents being there is a very huge advantage. My parents helped me a little bit when I had a one-year-old to take care of too. Actually quite a bit, I shouldn't say a little bit, they helped me a lot. So anyway, brother, I can't when you say what counsel I'd give. My counsel to anybody going through a crisis is draw near to God. When we go through trials, these are a test of our faith, and people will go one way or the other. They'll get mad at God and blame God and have their confidence in God shaken, or the opposite. They'll run toward God. They'll recognize that in a time like this, there's nobody except God who can make this okay. I've always run toward God. So to me, I've been through a few trials of that sort, but it's always brought me closer to God, not otherwise. I just advise you to make sure that's the direction you go to.
Guest (Male): Yeah. I guess my follow-up question to that would be how? Because I feel sometimes I don't even know how to reach out to God. I know how to pray, but it feels like I'm just mouthing words. How do I even reach out to God? I feel a yearning in spite of everything, that's why I'm calling now that I've been listening to radio programs like yours, but it feels always intellectual, not spiritual.
Steve Gregg: Sure. I was going to say you should talk to a minister, but I have to tell you the truth, many ministers, it's only intellectual for them too. But there are ministers who, and I say minister because you are Catholic, you'd most naturally go to somebody that you call a priest. I'm a Protestant, we don't call our ministers priests. The thing about a priest also is that a modern Catholic priest has never been married. So although he may intellectually know that people hurt when they lose their spouses, he's never lost one. He's never had a spouse, I presume. So you might want to talk to a minister who's an evangelical because that person could put you in touch with God too. You don't really need somebody else to put you in touch with God. That's got to be you doing it. But there are people who can steer you better than others can. I would suggest that as you read the Bible, I would suggest every day you read the Bible. Read the Psalms, read the New Testament. When you do that, just pray that God will make it alive to you, that He will reveal Himself personally to your heart. That's the only hope we have for really getting to know God. Other people, ministers and so forth, can tell you about God, but you don't find God unless God reveals Himself to you. But He does, He says if you seek for Me with your whole heart, you'll find Me. So I just say make sure that's your direction. Let me suggest, have you been to my website and listened to any of my lectures there?
Guest (Male): Not yet, I've just read your autobiography and whatnot on there.
Steve Gregg: Well, at our website, you may not know this, there's like fifteen hundred lectures of mine that are free. You can listen to for free, you can download them. But there's a set of lectures called Making Sense Out of Suffering, which includes a lot about losing loved ones and things like that, and it might be helpful to you. And it's free, of course. It's only four lectures. But if you go to thenarrowpath.com and there's a tab that says topical lectures, find the series called Making Sense Out of Suffering and sometime when the kids are asleep or whatever, see if that's helpful to you.