I’ve been going to a Bible study on Thursday nights that is sponsored by the church that I am currently attending. The study is completely unmoored from the normal restraints of context, historical relevance, and using the Bible to interpret the Bible. The result is often fantastical and disjointed.
Amos is the third minor prophet that we have been reading since I started attending. Last Thursday, for the first time, the leader actually had done a bit of research on the book and its historical fulfillment. Even after reading the notes related to our reading—chapter one—many in the group were unconvinced that any of it had been fulfilled between the time Amos made the pronouncements of impending judgment and the time of Christ. They kept demanding that Amos must really be about the “end times” and couldn’t possibly be history. Some also invoke the idea of double or triple fulfillment which to me renders the text no better than the ravings of Nostradamus.
Folks, if I could ban three words during the study, most participants would be mute. Those three words are “rapture”, “end”, “times”. Many people say that the Bible is all about Jesus, but this group believes that church is just a cute bus stop while we wait with oil in our lamps for the Rapture while doing nothing in the meantime, so we don’t miss His Return. In their minds, the church has nothing else to do. Somehow that whole “discipling the nations” thing is for another era—probably a future one.
This Israel is not that Israel
I hear a lot about Israel and how all those nations mad at Benjamin Netanyahu will get punished by God because to disparage the modern nation of Israel is to attack God’s People.
If you point out that the modern nation of Israel is not the one in the Bible and that the current nation calling itself “Israel” is not based on the teaching of Moses, you get crickets. It doesn’t matter because we just have to be living in the “end times.”
If you dare to point out that only the followers of Jesus are part of the true Israel, they look at you like you have a third eye or rebuke the comment in the name of Jesus. Just because that is what the New Testament teaches matters not because Scofield doesn’t agree.
Meanwhile Netanyahu has stopped Christian worship at the shrine of the Holy Sepulchre, implemented the death penalty on Palestinians, and blocked 200 Palestinian Christian teachers from teaching at private Christian schools in Jerusalem which many have been doing for several decades.
All of these abuses by Israel have happened in the last week as most people are looking only at the war with Iran. I guess other guys don’t let a good crisis go to waste either.
Folks, my California editorial staff is correct that nothing will change for the better in this country as long as the Baby Boom generation is running the show. The so-called adults running this place are broken as are lots of their offspring.
Judgment begins on Us not the Pagans
The other theme that people in the group keep saying is that God will Rapture us out of this world and then punish the wicked. My gentle contribution for the last two weeks is this, the Bible says judgment begins with the house of the Lord. 1 Peter 4:17.
For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?
Judgment does not begin after the Rapture, or on the heathen, but on the Church. This concept does not compute in this group. It has no pigeonhole in their theological system. It seems to be a good wedge to drive into Scofield’s theological system. Hopefully it will take root and expand the understanding of some in the group.
There is a still small voice in some corners of the Reformed camp saying the American and Western Church’s failures are due to unbelief. Dear Church, the Devil can only take what you have voluntarily given to him. Most of this is due to the poison of Scofield’s premillennial dispensationalism heresies. Yep, I said the “H” word. It is a lie to say Scofield’s views on eschatology are valid for Christians to hold. The more I see it up close and personal, the more I wretch when I hear it. Yes, I once believed that way but no more. God heard my prayer in the litany, “… from such as these, good Lord deliver us.”
Final Thoughts
There is sometimes a fine line between seasoning a conversation with salt and casting pearls. God is having me examine the idea that a few insurgents in this congregation can coax it towards orthodoxy. I am not alone in my views but clearly in the minority in this congregation. In the plus column, they do practice weekly Communion and at least one teaching Elder rejects the “sinner’s prayer.”