Posted by
ValiantForTruth on Thursday, December 07, 2006 1:25:23 PM
Church History and the Expectation of Truth
‘I will build My church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.’ This statement by Christ leaves the expectation that He will have a people of faith united in truth in every generation. Therefore, there should be a thread of truth discernible in church history consistent with New Testament doctrine. Something new in Biblical Theology impugns the faithfulness of Christ and undermines the faithful men who have gone before us. We all would do well to consider a doctrine’s history and those in church history who have held it and those who have not held it before we embrace it.
To the dispensational brethren, from one who formerly walked that way and was zealous for the Scriptures, but not according to knowledge: by the grace of God, he discovered that the church had a history. Great men of the faith who loved the Scriptures had a completely different view of things. They opened the Scriptures to him by the way they submitted their thinking to the words of Christ and let scripture interpret scripture. ‘I determined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.’
Church history is available for all who will look. Dispensational doctrine is new, relatively speaking, in church history. Not premillennialism, but the distinctively new doctrine that Old Testament prophecies given to national Israel where not types and shadows to be fulfilled in the New Covenant church. This new doctrine says that God has two peoples, rather than one body joined together by faith in the church. They are the Jews and the church, and He is dealing with them separately.
The apostle warned the church that ‘from among yourselves men will rise up, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after themselves. Therefore watch, and remember that for three years I did not cease to warn everyone night and day with tears. So now, brethren, I commend you to God and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified.’ [Acts 20:30…]
Two Resurrections and the Millennium
In John 5 Christ teaches 2 resurrections. In Revelation 20 John writes again of 2 resurrections in the context of the 1000 year period commonly called the millennium.
We take these to be the same 2 resurrections because we believe that the Scriptures are to be understood by every believer and that Revelation does not introduce any new doctrine that is contrary to the New Testament writings. The New Covenant promise is that ‘all shall know the Lord, from the least to the greatest of them’. To properly identify these resurrections will necessarily define the millennium period.
Contrary to the kingdom teaching of Christ, there is great expectation among dispensationalists of a future millennial kingdom, identified with external, visible and temporal blessings. The millennium is said to be characterized by political purity emanating from a worldwide governmental allegiance to Mosaic Law resulting in a state of material prosperity never before seen. Like the Pharisees of old, the prophets are misread and the words of Jesus Christ are not given preeminence as the authoritative interpretation of the Old Testament Scriptures.
The great blessings of the kingdom of God prophesized in the Old Testament are here now, realized at the coming of Messiah. A gradual, spiritual and inward advancement of the kingdom continues to the end of the world. The tares will not be separated from the wheat until the ‘end of the age’, identified with judgment by fire. [Matthew 13:40-42; 49-50] Then, not a temporal millennium, but the eternal, perfected kingdom will have come. No doctrine can stand in the church that is contrary to the words of Jesus Christ.
A mighty moving of the Spirit of God among the ethnic descendants of Abraham may yet sweep this world. If it does, its purpose will be to bring the Jews into the spiritual kingdom already established. Material, social, external blessedness may not be sought in a millennium, but in the consummation of the kingdom at the coming of our Lord.
Part 2 will open the 2 resurrections and demonstrate from the Scriptures that the millennium is the period between the first and second advents of Christ. His first coming established the kingdom, and His second coming will bring it to completion. On this side of the cross we are living in the millennium.