The God of the Covenant versus the God of Dispensationalism

The doctrine taught by dispensationalists (that is, classical dispensationalists, such as Scofield) that I find most objectionable is that God has provided different methods of salvation down through history, as man has failed each previous one. Some of them claim, for example, that Jews were (or still are, some say) saved by obeying the Law. They claim that salvation by grace through faith only became an option when the Jews rejected their Mosaic Messiah by killing Jesus. Grace through faith is Plan B. Actually it is Plan G, if you go by Scofield's seven dispensations.

I think that is ridiculous! And, apparently, so do most dispensationalists, because few still hold to that doctrine. Yet, even these progressive dispensationalists, as they call themselves, place a firewall between the Old Testament and the New Testament. In order still to be applicable, they claim, an Old Testament commandment must be repeated in the New Testament.

Where is the biblical justification for that claim? I can't seem to find it.

Rather, I find just the opposite.

One problem with that is that it has God coming up with a new plan, because His previous ones have failed. What kind of God is that?

In contrast, the bible tells us of God that, "God is not man, that He should lie, or a son of man, that He should change His mind. Has He said, and will He not do it? Or has He spoken, and will He not fulfill it?" (Numbers 23:19). And, "The Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for He is not a man, that He should have regret" (I Samuel 15:29). In other words, the God of the Bible is not a bumbling human being, who cannot achieve what He says, and has to come up with contingency plans! Yet, that is exactly the God described by dispensationalism.

In contrast, the God described by covenant theology is a God who has had one plan from before the creation of the world. He has had one expectation, that man would fall into sin; it was not a surprise. And He has had one plan to deal with sin, to send His divine Son to shed His own blood for those sinners chosen for salvation. That plan was first revealed, in seed form, in Genesis 3:15, called the Protevangelium by theologians: "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel." And that plan has been shown in increasing light ever since, until it was achieved on the cross and in the resurrection of that same Son, Jesus Christ. More light, not different light.

The True Tradition of the Eucharist Held by the Reformed

The Church of Rome teaches that the elements of the Eucharist - or communion, if you prefer - are literally changed into the flesh and blood of Jesus. The Council of Trent made that dogma official: "Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly His body that He was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation." Notice especially the assertion that "it has always been the conviction of the Church of God." 

However, I deny that it has "always been the conviction." Rather, within the Catholic Church, there was a debate on the topic, and the doctrine of transubstantiation merely became the dominant view.

For example, Saint Augustine very explicitly states that Jesus is present in the Eucharist, but only to the faithful! He starts Sermon 272, which is about this very topic, with, "What you see on God's altar, you've already observed during the night that has now ended. But you've heard nothing about just what it might be, or what it might mean, or what great thing it might be said to symbolize. For what you see is simply bread and cup - this is the information your eyes report. But your faith demands far subtler insight: the bread is Christ's body; the cup is Christ's blood. Faith can grasp the fundamentals quickly, succinctly, yet it hungers for a fuller account of the matter." I recommend reading the whole thing (it is very brief), so that you can see that I have not  misrepresented his overall message. He describes the elements as the body and blood of Christ to the faithful, not as a physical reality to which the unbeliever would have access.

This view was unchallenged until a debate broke out between Radbertus and Ratramnus in the Ninth Century. Radbertus advocated the doctrine of transubstantiation as we now know it. Ratramnus defended the Augustinian view of a spiritual real presence to the believer only. The position of Radbertus came to dominate, and was later spread further by Aquinas and, as quoted above, Trent.

The significance of this is that the view expounded by Augustine and Ratrumnus is exactly that taught by Calvin and held by the orthodox Reformed (excluding Zwingli and his descendants) to this day. For example, the Westminster Confession of Faith XXIX:7 (1646) says, "Worthy receivers, outwardly partaking of the visible elements in this sacrament, do then also inwardly by faith, really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually, receive and feed upon Christ crucified, and all benefits of His death: the body and blood of Christ being then not corporally or carnally in, with, or under the bread and wine; yet as really, but spiritually, present to the faith of believers in that ordinance, as the elements themselves are to their outward senses."

What we see here is that the claims of Rome to be holding to the "traditional" view in her doctrine of transubstantiation is committing historical revision. The fact is that she repudiated what had been the historical view to adopt a particularly-superstitious perversion. It is the Reformed alone who hold the historical doctrine of the church.

Oneness Claims Refuted, and Trinity Sustained

One of the arguments that Oneness Pentecostals use to argue against the Trinity is analogy to a man. A man can be a father, a son, and a brother, yet he is just one person in different roles. That is how they believe God is.

The problem with that analogy is that those roles are defined in terms of what a man is to other people, not to himself. That is completely unlike the respective Persons of the Godhead. The Father is a father, and the Son is a son, and the Spirit proceeds, all in internal relationship to each other. They would be the Persons they are even if the world had never been created or any other sentient creature were ever born.

The Oneness analogy fails because the man is not father to his own role as son. Yet that is exactly what the Oneness believe about the Godhead, which helps to explain why Oneness arguments are convincing only to

themselves.

The analogy also ignores what Jesus Himself says. For example, in John 8:18, He tells us, "I am the one who bears witness about Myself, and the Father who sent Me bears witness about Me."

Jesus is referring to the two-witness rule: "A single witness shall not suffice against a person for any crime or for any wrong in connection with any offense that he has committed. Only on the evidence of two witnesses or of three witnesses shall a charge be established" (Deuteronomy 19:15). His own testimony of Himself, corroborated by the testimony of the Father, proves His messianic ministry.

No individual man can fulfill this requirement, no matter how many roles he fills, because he is counted as only one witness, not one witness per role. Therefore, the Oneness analogy is false, and their doctrine is refuted.

The Storm Is from God's Hands: Contra American Deism

It is popular among Christians of every theological stripe to quote II Chronicles 7:14: "If My people who are called by My name humble themselves, and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land." And there is good reason to quote it; it is a promise that inspires great hope.

However, verse 14 is the second part of a sentence that begins in verse 13, which I have never heard quoted: "When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command the locust to devour the land, or send pestilence among My people..." That makes most people too uncomfortable. How can God say of Himself that He is the one who sends natural catastrophes?

The answer is that most American Christians have no concept of a biblical worldview. While nearly everyone claims to believe in Jesus, American religion is actually Deism, not Christianity, as I have said before. "God" is the name we put on our religious stuff, but it has nothing to do with the rest of our lives. We talk about God when someone is extremely ill, or has died. We don't talk about God when it comes to our jobs, child-rearing, politics, our relationships with our neighbors, or natural events.

As the saying goes, God don't play that. He claims absolute control over all things, including the weather or agricultural disasters. As I write this, it has been two weeks since Hurricane Florence brought massive flooding to my home state. I deny the Deist claim that a hurricane is just a natural event. Rather, it happened according to the purposes of God, even if I don't know what those purposes are. It was a supernatural event!

The Flood and the Sinfulness of Those of Any Age

I often hear people claim that children are not accountable for sin. Some people say that there is an age of accountability, not because Scriptures say so, but just because it just must be. Others state it in a more-sophisticated way, saying that a person can only be held accountable for what he understands to be sin, on the supposed basis of Romans 4:15 (while ignoring Romans 2:15). And others claim that children are innocent (not comparatively, but absolutely).

However, not only does Scripture not exempt any class of people from accountability for sin, from conception until death, but rather it makes explicit statements regarding the universality of sin.

The first such statement is in Genesis 8:21: "I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth." This is the statement by God after the Flood that He will never again judge the world in that way. Why? Was it because sin had been eliminated? No, it was because the elimination of sin would require the elimination of mankind, "from his youth." God here explicitly states His perfect judgment that there is no such exemption on the basis of age or mental sophistication.

God says one thing but human sentiment insists on the opposite. Why? Because human sentiment is part of that very sin nature!

The Words of Jesus Contra "Soul Sleep"

The Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses have a similar doctrine regarding the intermediate state of the human spirit. According to that doctrine, the soul sleeps (SDA's) or is destroyed (JW's) after the death of the body, only to be awakened or reconstructed at the judgment. Both deny that the spirit of the Christian goes to heaven. However, whichever view one considers, it isn't biblical.

The proof is actually very easy to find. In Mark 13:27, Jesus says of Himself, "Then He will send out the angels and gather His elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven." The essential element here is the last phrase, "the ends of heaven." That is, Jesus Himself, surely a trustworthy witness regarding the matter, tells us that some of the elect are already in heaven. The others are on the earth, i. e., still alive.

Jesus, the God of the Burning Bush

"Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, 'I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.' When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, 'Moses, Moses!' And he said, 'Here I am.' Then He said, 'Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.' And He said, 'I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.' And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God" (Exodus 3:1-6).

This scene is one of the best-known stories of the Old Testament. In fact, the picture of a burning bush is used in a lot of church imagery, such as stained-glass windows, and the symbol of my own church. Yet, O think that little attention is paid to what happens in it.

Most importantly, I want to look at who is speaking. Everyone knows that it is God, of course. But is that all we are told? No, it's not.

Notice first that "God" is not mentioned until verse 6. Before that, Moses tells us that it was the Angel of the Lord, and then just the Lord. That is not God the Father! And, when Moses does refer to God, he says that he was afraid to look at Him. That clinches the exclusion of God the Father, because we know that no one has ever seen the Father (John 8:46). Both this and the reference to the Angel of the Lord tell us that this appearance was by the preincarnate God the Son, whom we know as Jesus Christ.

Jesus Himself would later confirm this identity. As Moses continues, He tells us that the Person who addressed him indicates that His name is I Am (verse 14). Then, during His earthly ministry, He told the Jews that He was that same I Am (John 8:58). Some cults try to deny that it was His purpose to identify Himself with the God in the burning bush. However, the Jews understood exactly what He meant and sought to stone Him for His claim (verse 59 and John 10:33).

This is an extremely important claim. By claiming to be the Person who spoke to Moses from the bush, Jesus claimed to be the same God who redeemed Israel from Egypt. He was (and ever shall be) fully God, and their and our salvation depends on that truth!

Jehovah's Witnesses try to pull all sorts of tricks to deny the deity of Jesus. But the fact that their claims are contrary to the profession of Jesus about Himself proves that they are beyond the pale of the Christian faith. No matter what terminology they use, their claim to be Christians is refuted by the denial of the glory of the Christ from whom that name is derived.

American Pharisees: Lost Without a Physician

"There are those who are clean in their own eyes but are not washed of their filth. There are those—how lofty are their eyes, how high their eyelids lift!" (Proverbs 30:12-13). 

Among Americans, Satan's primary attack against biblical Christianity is not atheism, alternative religions, or evolutionism, as bad as those things are. Rather, he attacks the faith through complacency.

Luke describes the conversion of Levi (another name for the Apostle Matthew): "Levi made Him a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them. And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, 'Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?' And Jesus answered them, 'Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance'" (Luke 5:29-32). At the house of Matthew, Jesus sat at dinner with tax-collectors, a class hated by the Jews, and other sinners. The Pharisees saw this, and rebuked Him for His bad taste in companions. After all, were the Pharisees not the cream of Jewish society? 

But the rebuke of Jesus must have caught those Pharisees completely flat-footed: "I have not come to call the [supposedly] righteous but sinners to repentance." In their moral satisfaction, the Pharisees had no desire for what Jesus had come to give, redemption in His blood. However, the tax-collectors and sinners in Matthew's house knew their spiritual condition, and were looking to Jesus to forgive their sins and restore them to righteousness: "Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of Your name; deliver us, and atone for our sins, for Your name’s sake!" (Psalm 79:9).

And this explains the spiritual anemia of America's professing Christians. Too many of us are satisfied with our moral superiority. Rare is the man who can say from his heart, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" (Luke 18:13). Yet Jesus tells us that is exactly the point to which we must come to find Him.

The Example of William Carey: The Two Sides of the Missionary Endeavor

There is an unfortunate tendency among Christians to define everything in two opposing theses. That is unfortunate because life doesn't work like that. It has a lot more than just two options in almost any circumstance. Think of a questionnaire that asks your favorite flavor of ice cream, and then gives only the options of vanilla or chocolate. Can no one prefer strawberry?

One particular example is the definition of mission. Liberal churches still send out men and women that they call missionaries. However, their work is devoted to social activism or welfare institutions. Under no circumstances do they call anyone to repent, believe in Jesus, and form Gospel-proclaiming national churches. On the other hand, fundamentalist missionaries define their task strictly in terms of how many people have been called to believe. Social institutions are poo-pooed as diversions from their task.

That is a false dichotomy. Have we forgotten William Carey, a pioneer in the modern missionary task? While he translated the Bible and preached the Gospel, in order to gather converts, he also built a missionary infrastructure, such as colleges and orphanages.

Does the Bible address this dichotomy? Yes, it does. "Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute. Open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy" (Proverbs 31:8-9).

God's concern is certainly the spreading of the Gospel to unbelievers. The Great Commission is a command to that end, and is so important to Him that He repeated it in different words in Matthew 28:19-20, Mark 16:15, and Acts 1:8. But He also tells us, "If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, be warmed and filled, without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead" (James 2:15-17). The Christian who preaches the Gospel, but has no concern about the physical well-being of the people to whom he ministers is practicing a truncated and unbiblical Christianity. 

I didn't quote that great Commission on purpose. I will do so now: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Matthew 28:19-20). Notice that it doesn't tell us to explain only how to be saved, as vital as that it, but also to observe, or obey, everything that God commands. And that necessarily includes a concern for the less-fortunate.