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Straight to the End
Selected Scriptures
July 30, 2017
Lord’s Day Worship
Sean Higgins
Download the bulletin.
Download the Kids’ Korner.
The sermon starts at 17:00 in the audio file.
Or, What is a Dispensationalist? (Part 1)
Maybe you’ve heard it said before that the Millennium is one-thousand years of peace that Christians like to fight about. There are certainly other doctrines that provoke fierce debates among believers. Arminians and Calvinists have been arguing since before the foundation of the world, at least in the eternal counsels of the Trinity. But eschatology has been a ground for conflict for at least a few centuries, and will probably continue to be so, until it’s all over.
Eschatology is the doctrine of the eschatos = the end things. It is the study of what will happen in the “last days,” or it starts with determining when the last days were, or are, or will be. The study of the end times is a study involving prophecy and it is especially difficult, compared to other biblical doctrines, because everyone agrees that at least some things have yet to take place. Eschatological hindsight is 20/20, and many have more hind than sight.
Eschatology and confusion go together like water and electricity; water will conduct the energy but it’s hard to control. The genre of apocalypse is full of jolting imagery and it shocks the imagination. It also taxes the exegetical effort. One of the more important charges Paul gave Timothy was to:
Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. (2 Timothy 2:15).
There is one word for “rightly handling” in Greek, orthotomounta. You can hear “ortho” at the beginning, the word for “straight.” It referred to cutting a path in a straight direction, perhaps cutting a linear piece of leather for a tent, a practice with which Paul was familiar. The NAS translates it as “accurately handling,” which is also okay. Back in the KJV it has “rightly dividing,” and this is especially interesting for a couple reasons.
First is that Dispensationalists, a category for those who believe certain things about the end times, are usually the ones who most maintain that they are the straight cutters. I agree, for reasons that will be stated later. It is why I’ve emphasized the irony over the past few weeks of those who claim to be the best Bible-readers missing other key parts of the Bible. Dispensationalists, though, can get a little scissor happy. They parse the prophets with a razor’s edge and cut their Kuyperian throat in the process. This is no good, though I’d maintain this is a failure to carry the reading principles all the way through, not a failure of the reading principles from the beginning. A Kuyperian can’t be a Darwinian, a Deist, or a Dualist, but he can (we’d say should) be a Dispensationalist.
The second reason why “rightly dividing” is an interesting phrase is because one of the largest flame-books against Dispensationalism is called Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth by John Gerstner. He argues not only against the Dispensational reading, he makes up straw men and torches them.
Even in the context of 2 Timothy, Paul is urging Timothy to study the Word because of quarreling about words “which does no good, but only ruins the hearers” (verse 14). There is “irreverent babble” that leads people “into more and more ungodliness, and their talk will spread like gangrene” (verse 16), “upsetting the faith of some” (verse 17). Paul was not thinking about “last things.” And this is not to say that anyone who disagrees over eschatology is necessarily behaving in such an ungodly way, but there certainly are too many discussions that uglify the doctrine rather than adorn it.
Why not just avoid the subject altogether? We should be concerned with eschatology because we should be concerned with God’s promises, those fulfilled and those yet to be fulfilled. He is the God of promise and we are His people. We should be conc[...]
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By Trinity Evangel ChurchSelected Scriptures
July 30, 2017
Lord’s Day Worship
Sean Higgins
Download the bulletin.
Download the Kids’ Korner.
The sermon starts at 17:00 in the audio file.
Or, What is a Dispensationalist? (Part 1)
Maybe you’ve heard it said before that the Millennium is one-thousand years of peace that Christians like to fight about. There are certainly other doctrines that provoke fierce debates among believers. Arminians and Calvinists have been arguing since before the foundation of the world, at least in the eternal counsels of the Trinity. But eschatology has been a ground for conflict for at least a few centuries, and will probably continue to be so, until it’s all over.
Eschatology is the doctrine of the eschatos = the end things. It is the study of what will happen in the “last days,” or it starts with determining when the last days were, or are, or will be. The study of the end times is a study involving prophecy and it is especially difficult, compared to other biblical doctrines, because everyone agrees that at least some things have yet to take place. Eschatological hindsight is 20/20, and many have more hind than sight.
Eschatology and confusion go together like water and electricity; water will conduct the energy but it’s hard to control. The genre of apocalypse is full of jolting imagery and it shocks the imagination. It also taxes the exegetical effort. One of the more important charges Paul gave Timothy was to:
Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. (2 Timothy 2:15).
There is one word for “rightly handling” in Greek, orthotomounta. You can hear “ortho” at the beginning, the word for “straight.” It referred to cutting a path in a straight direction, perhaps cutting a linear piece of leather for a tent, a practice with which Paul was familiar. The NAS translates it as “accurately handling,” which is also okay. Back in the KJV it has “rightly dividing,” and this is especially interesting for a couple reasons.
First is that Dispensationalists, a category for those who believe certain things about the end times, are usually the ones who most maintain that they are the straight cutters. I agree, for reasons that will be stated later. It is why I’ve emphasized the irony over the past few weeks of those who claim to be the best Bible-readers missing other key parts of the Bible. Dispensationalists, though, can get a little scissor happy. They parse the prophets with a razor’s edge and cut their Kuyperian throat in the process. This is no good, though I’d maintain this is a failure to carry the reading principles all the way through, not a failure of the reading principles from the beginning. A Kuyperian can’t be a Darwinian, a Deist, or a Dualist, but he can (we’d say should) be a Dispensationalist.
The second reason why “rightly dividing” is an interesting phrase is because one of the largest flame-books against Dispensationalism is called Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth by John Gerstner. He argues not only against the Dispensational reading, he makes up straw men and torches them.
Even in the context of 2 Timothy, Paul is urging Timothy to study the Word because of quarreling about words “which does no good, but only ruins the hearers” (verse 14). There is “irreverent babble” that leads people “into more and more ungodliness, and their talk will spread like gangrene” (verse 16), “upsetting the faith of some” (verse 17). Paul was not thinking about “last things.” And this is not to say that anyone who disagrees over eschatology is necessarily behaving in such an ungodly way, but there certainly are too many discussions that uglify the doctrine rather than adorn it.
Why not just avoid the subject altogether? We should be concerned with eschatology because we should be concerned with God’s promises, those fulfilled and those yet to be fulfilled. He is the God of promise and we are His people. We should be conc[...]