Hello Reggie, hope and pray that all of you are fine while preparing for your Event! Reggie, I was reading your article ” Recommended reading ……, well done. But I want to ask you one important question, is it NOT Time now to explain to the readers about the destruction […]
Followup: “I Pray Not For The World”
[…] Future Israel will be living proof of God’s sovereign ability to bring about the necessary repentance and faith of a naturally unwilling people through mighty judgments and powerful constraints. Do such extreme measures nullify or circumvent Israel’s moral responsibility to choose life? Of course not, but it is not far to see that God has certainly ordained the precise conditions that will powerfully incline that nation’s will at the “set time to favor Zion” (Ps 102:13), so that His people are made “willing in the day of His power” (Ps 110:3), and not a moment sooner! (Compare Paul’s view of God’s sovereign timing of his conversion; Gal 1:15-16).
Here, I have suggested that reconciliation between the two passages should be sought in making a distinction between God’s care for all, and His eternal purpose to save only those who believe through grace. Others propose a different solution. They believe that the answer lies in assigning a more hyperbolic sense to the words, “all men.” In this view, it is not ‘all men’ without discrimination, but ‘all men’ in the sense of men of all kinds and stations of life. In this view, whenever the scripture says, “God so loved the world,” Jews are being reminded, and gentiles are being comforted, that the salvation of Christ extends to all nations and not to Israel only (compare Jn 11:52; 1Jn 2:2). Here, the contrast is being made between a narrow Jewish view of God’s love for Israel and the revolutionary new revelation of God’s unexpected intention to open a door of faith to the gentiles […]
Kept From The Hour
But as I have said before: Even if it is insisted that “kept from the hour” should be interpreted as physical exemption, the word “hour” in Revelation is never used of the entire tribulation, but most particularly of the day of God almighty at its end (compare Rev 16:14-16 w/ […]
Women and Prophecy
[…] I believe a woman’s glory, which is no less than a man’s, is to be worship-fully and willingly submitted to what God has chosen in precisely the way He has chosen it. And to bear whatever yoke that comes without complaint or chaffing in resigned trust of the perfect wisdom of His sovereign decree. Of course, it is no different for the man, since he is no less ‘under authority’. But until the final perfection, God has ordained an equality and dissolution of all distinction in one place only, namely, “in Christ” / “in the Spirit”. In the meantime, and while this creation continues through to the end of the millennium, He has chosen to leave certain distinctions and differences in the creation for the sake of His demonstration and statement to the principalities and powers. One of those distinctions is between male and female. Another is the one He has established between Jew and Gentile. Those distinctions form no barrier in Christ, but are left in the creation for the sake of a needful contrast that shows the true nature of unity through the Spirit. […]
One or Two Peoples of God: Reflections on the Mystery of Israel and the Church
… It is correct to distinguish between the ‘Israel after the flesh’ and the church. But dispensationalism incorrectly divides between the seed of Abraham after the Spirit, saying that saved Jews before Pentecost and saved Jews living in the millennium do not belong to the church. In this way, there are two distinct ‘regenerate’ peoples of God belonging to two eternally distinct entities with different destinies. This constitutes a false view of the nature of the church. Hence, they fail to see that those of the natural seed of Abraham that are predestined for national salvation at Christ’s return will be as much a part of the body of Christ on earth as any living now before the Lord’s return. It is a question of what defines the church. …
Sin. Who created it?
[…] So how is God not directly responsible for the fall that was indispensable in His preordained plan of redemption? Well, I’ve already mentioned the implications of Ro 8:20, and a considerable collection of other passages combine to show that redemption was never a divine afterthought. So I theorize that God cannot be justly charged with injustice if He did not elect to extend special grace that might have upheld Adam in the day of powerful temptation. God does not have to impose sin in order to ordain that it serve a role in His perfect and unalterable eternal purpose in grace.
Nothing can be more glorious to God or precious to man as the grace of Christ, the Father’s greatest eternal delight. Grace will be the theme and song of all eternity. This is the glory that the persons of the Godhead rejoiced in before time, in perfect contemplation and enjoyment of what would be accomplished in the foreordained goal of creation. […]
The Dangerous Presumption of ‘Exemption from Tribulation’
[…] The great tribulation is not called ‘unequaled’ simply because of some unprecedented degree of human suffering. Though the ‘scale’ of human suffering will indeed be without precedent during the last tribulation, what individuals might face personally cannot be worse than what others of our brethren have faced throughout history without a rapture. The the final tribulation is said to be without equal because it extends to all the natural order. So, of course, human suffering will be co-extensive with the upheaval of a creation that has come to its greatest time of travail.
Therefore, it is not the ‘degree’ of personal suffering that makes this tribulation exceptional from all others, but its ‘scale’ of impact on the world of nature. So I ask: Do we detect a certain selfishness, or subtle presumption of moral superiority in the modern church’s expectation of exemption from a last repeat of the same kind of persecution that their ‘fellow servants and their brethren’ have faced in every age (see Rev 6:11)? I must say that such a doctrine sounds suspiciously accommodating of a soft and untested church that has embraced the cross only in theory as a historical fact in Jesus’ experience, and not as the invariable pattern of the very ‘way’ of God in the experience of every believer before and after Christ (but see Act 14:22). […]
“Reliance” on Doctors
[…] It would appear that the “beloved physician” laid all aside to devote himself to the missionary enterprise, as did the fishermen and tax collectors, but I can’t see where continued use of his medical skills would be in the least conflict with the gifts of healing in the church. A couple of things do come to mind. Anyone that is biblical understands that a living faith in the promises of God is incompatible with a carnal ‘reliance’ on man or mere nature. Asa’s death was attributed to his defection of faith in that he looked to the doctors rather than to the Lord (“Yet in his disease he sought not to the Lord , but to the physicians”). However, Isaiah prescribed a poultice (“For Isaiah had said, Let them take a lump of figs, and lay it for a plaister upon the boil, and he shall recover”). Hence, it is obvious that the believer is no less a believer by his or her use of many things in nature. We ‘use’ many things that we dare not ‘rely’ on, theologically speaking. “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman wakes in vain.” That doesn’t mean it is vain to employ a ‘watchman’. What is vain is to put one’s trust in the sufficiency of anything ‘apart’ from the blessing and grace of God. It is the independent and self-sufficient spirit that God hates and will at length bring down. However, anything that is agreeable and compatible with the humility of the Spirit is, in my view, agreeable with God. […]
Dispensationalism & More on “One or Two Peoples of God?”
… With the new revelation has come a new language. But this is where we need to exercise caution. We learn from the doctrine of Christ’s pre-existence that for something to be newly revealed does not mean that it has come newly into existence.; This is an important distinction when we are speaking of Christ and the church. Much has come to light in the gospel that had real existence before the dispensation of the fuller revelation. This applies as much to the ‘body of Christ’ as to Christ Himself and the unity of persons in the Godhead. …
Calvin and Freedom of the Will
[…] All the language of the covenant (the divine “I wills”) is writ large with the prevailing power of transforming grace, which is also keeping grace. It’s the gospel of Old Testament promise, and this is precisely what’s at stake when it comes to the question of Israel in Ro 8-11. The very name and glory of God is at stake in this issue of ‘prevailing grace’. The gift of such a transforming revelation doesn’t occur in a vacuum, nor does it do violence to what I like to call ‘the rules of the race’. There is a preliminary work of the Spirit that prepares and goes before the Lord in His sovereign design to ‘quicken whom He will’. Only such ‘prevailing grace’ can guarantee that there will always be an “election according to grace.”
Now this implies no violence to the freedom of the will (properly understood). It simply leaves to God the sovereign prerogative to liberate the will from its natural bondage through a process of death and resurrection, a process that breaks the pride of our power, that shatters carnal confidence through tribulation preparing the way for revelation (compare Lev 26:19; Deut 32:36; Dan 12:7). But none of this without the hearing of faith, which assumes the role of the church as witness (Ro 10:14, 17; 1Cor 1:21). “The people (Israel) shall be ‘willing’ in the day of His power” (Ps 110:3). The time to favor Zion comes only at the ‘set time’ (Ps 102:13; “seventy weeks are ‘determined’; “that which is determined shall be done;” “the end shall be at the time appointed” etc.). And we know that that ‘set time’ is the time of Christ’s post-tribulational coming (Dan 12:1; Mt 24:29-31; 2Thes 2:8). It is then that the Deliverer comes out of Zion in order to “turn ungodliness from Jacob,” as nothing short of His return will finally accomplish the turning of the nation (Mt 23:39 with Acts 3:19-21). Paul said “when it pleased God to reveal His Son in me.” It is the same with the nation; I’m sure of that. […]
