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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. […]

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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). […]

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Recommended Reading on the Prophet Daniel

S.P. Tregelles on Daniel[…] In an instant, I have exactly who to recommend on Daniel. First, and most accessible would be S.P. Tregelles’ “Remarks on the Prophetic Visions in the Book of Daniel,” available through Sovereign Grace Advent Testimony in Essex (on line at sgat.org).

Second, or perhaps even first in importance is a much more rare book entitled “Prophetic Interpretations” by P.S.G. Watson. It is available to view on line through the Dallas Theological Online Library, Antiquarian Books. Unfortunately, they have it where it can only be leafed through; it can’t be copied to be printed. If upon your preview of the book, interest should happen to soar, I would be happy to take my xerox copy to a printer here and have a copy made to be sent. I could let you know the cost. But look through it first, and see what you think. In my view, no one is so good as Watson on the case for ‘futurism’ and a literal hermeneutic, particularly in regards to the ‘abomination of desolation’ and the centrality of its place and role in the unfolding of last days events. […]

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David Baron, Adolph Saphir (and other Recommended Reading)

[…] Baron is conservative; he imbibed none of the German higher criticism so stylish in the biblical scholarship of his day. He wrote a commentary on “The Visions and Prophecy of Zechariah”. That one should be readily available through Amazon, or christianbook.com. Among the titles by him are Rays of Messiah’s Glory; The Shepherd of Israel, The Servant of Jehovah, Types Psalms and Prophecies, A Divine Forecast of Jewish History; The History of the Ten “Lost” Tribes: Anglo-Israelism Examined; The Ancient Scriptures for the Modern Jew; and Israel in the Plan of God, also published under the title: The History of Israel: Its Spiritual Significance. There is also one on the Melchizedek Priesthood. These are all back in print through Keren Ahvah Meshihit; P. O. Box 10382, 91103 Jerusalem, Israel. […]

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God’s Covenants: The Obsolete and the Everlasting

[…] It is this “everlasting covenant of promise” that the prophets see as established permanently with the nation in the coming day of the Lord at the end of the last tribulation. And where Israel, as pertaining to the ‘natural branches’ is concerned, it will indeed yet be established WITH THEM at the ‘set time’ (Ps 102:13). But through the revelation of the mystery of the gospel, it is now seen that the power and spirit of that coming day has come already in unexpected advance of the “last day” (the day upon which all Jewish expectation was fixed). So while the ‘first’ covenant of the law is indeed obsolete, nothing of that former covenant can annul the sure confirmation of the oath that came 400 years earlier. It is that unconditional promise that the prophets have in mind when they speak of an ‘everlasting or new covenant’ to be established with the surviving remnant of the last tribulation, the ‘natural branches’. And though the church has gained advance access to the grace and glories of that everlasting / new covenant, the church of this age does not exhaust its fulfillment, since it is yet to be established with those with whom it was originally made. […]

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One People. Two Entities? (Followup)

[…] If there’s anything I’m sure of, it is that the early apostolic church moved with great urgency under the shadow of an imminent destruction of Jerusalem, which they clearly associated with the onset of a final unequaled time of distress that they expected to immediately precede Christ’s return. This context and framework of the mystery is all but lost. Even where it is in some general sense expected, the church is typically absented from the scene, and hence from the responsibility. Jacob’s trouble becomes ‘Jacob’s problem’. Yet there it is: After millennia of comparative silence, Jerusalem is a modern cup of trembling threatening to “literalize” the language of the prophets. Only now, the church has moved so far away from the covenant and apocalyptic perspecitive and expectation of the early Jewish church that we’ve lost the perspective and with it the urgency as well. And not least is Israel’s relationship to how we understand the nature and context of the gospel itself, and there too lies great work to be done in these days of critical restoration. […]

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One People. Two Entities?

[…] But though I agree with Kaiser that there is only one regenerate people of God, the elect of all ages, I also believe that it is not only permissible, but necessary to speak of Israel as the ‘people of God’, or ‘the chosen people’, even now in their present state of unbelief. Even the individual Jew in his unbelief and set to perish apart from gospel regeneration, is nonetheless part of a nation that is UNDER both judgment and promise of a sure and certain destiny. That’s unique to the Jew alone. Even in unbelief, he is part of a body, a nation, a distinct ‘entity’ if you will, that abides in a unique covenant relationship. Though Israel’s covenant does not guarantee the personal salvation of the individual, it does in fact guarantee covenant severity ‘UNTIL’ the end, and covenant mercy ‘AT’ the end. So in that sense, then yes, for the moment only, there are two peoples of God, but not in the dispensational sense. When ‘all Israel’ shall be saved, the two collapse into one forever.[…]

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The Mark of the Beast

But compliance with the mark is a statement of an already existing condition that is only being manifested, namely, total and irreversible spiritual reprobation. The outward mark becomes the sign and seal of an irreversible threshold that has already been crossed. The mark is irreversible only because those that take it show that they have already passed into an irreversible union with the spirit of Satan. The scriptures speaks of those that are ‘past feeling’, and that have grieved the Spirit to the point of no return. There’s a mysterious threshold here that we see again at the end of the millennium. I have reason to infer that the false church in its steadfast resistance to the last prophetic testimony will not be able to repent past a certain point (I think the middle of the week), so that while a multitude that no one can number is being saved all throughout “the tribulation, the great one” (Mt 24:21; Rev 7:14), the false professing church of apostate ‘Christendom’ will have passed into final reprobation and may become some of the most rabid persecutors and treacherous betrayers of the true church.

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“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. […]

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Mystery of Israel
Reflections on the Mystery of Israel and the Church... by Reggie Kelly

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Sam Parsons and Reggie Kelly recently worked on a Podcast called “The Glory of the Story”.

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