Underground Exiles

There is another serious flaw in the premillennial interpretation of the eschatological texts, centered around Israel and the Old Testament.

Every major dispensational theologian from Walvoord to Pentecost to Ryrie to John MacArthur, insists that God has two distinct redemptive programs – one for national Israel and one for the Gentiles. In opposition to that, I see that God’s purpose is not to save two distinct peoples (divided by ethnicity), but to save his people (the elect), a multitude which no man can number (Revelation 7:9), and which includes each and every one of those whom God has chosen, whether they be Jew or Gentile.

In Ephesians 2:11-22, Paul addresses this very point when discussing God’s redemptive purpose for Gentiles and national Israel. Here, Paul flat-out contradicts the dispensational assertion that God has distinct redemptive purposes for national Israel and for the church. According Paul, God’s purpose in the New Covenant is to remove the ethnic distinctions between Jew and Gentile (between Israel and the church) which had been dividing them. Paul says that Jesus came to tear down the barrier wall which formerly divided the two, in order to make the two peoples into one so as to form Jew and Gentile together into the one living temple of the Lord–the church. In this spiritual temple, Christ is the chief cornerstone, and the foundation is the prophets and apostles.

While dispensationalists will concede that this is God’s purpose for the present age, they say Israel’s distinct role resurfaces again after the Rapture when the Gentile church is removed from the earth. This dual redemptive purpose then carries on throughout the millennial age after Christ comes back. If true, this means that it is Christ’s purpose to make the two peoples one is only temporary. God intends to divide Israel (ethnic Jews) again from the Gentiles after the resurrection (1 Thessalonians 4:13-5:11).

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There are several serious weaknesses with premillennialism.

The first weakness is that premillenniarians have to explain how it is that people make it through the return of Christ and yet remain in natural bodies.  Jesus taught that his return marks the end of the age (Matthew 13:39) and that after his return, people no longer marry or are given in marriage (Luke 20:34-36).  At Christ’s return, he judges the world, making it tough for someone to be judged and yet not eternally condemned or rewarded with eternal life (Matthew 25:31-46).  This is especially problematic for premillennarians, since they claim that their view is based upon a “literal” interpretation of prophecy.  Where, then, is the one-thousand year gap between the return of Christ and the judgment (which, according to premillennarians takes place at the end of the millennium) when Jesus teaches that judgment takes place at his return?  Those who take the Bible “literally” find themselves having to insert a gap into the biblical text which isn’t there.

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Psalm 82.3-4 is a passage that parallels Proverbs 24.11-12 in many ways:

Vindicate the weak and fatherless; do justice to the afflicted and destitute.  Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them out of the hand of the wicked.”

Through passages like these God is calling his people to intervene whenever the vulnerable are threatened, be it an individual or an entire group.  Masses of German Christians should have com to the active defense of their Jewish countrymen, and a much larger segment of the American church should have joined the fight against slavery and segregation.  Why didn’t this happen?  Why don’t more Christians today follow these passages into the active defense of unborn children?  I would suggest that most of us, myself included, have too narrow a definition of who our neighbor is and too narrow a view of what it means to love him.  Regarding widespread oppression and injustice, we tend to confuse opposition in principle, with opposition in practice.  We content ourselves with the idea that we’re not participating in injustice, failing to consider the fact that we’re often doing nothing to stop it either

Martin Niemoller, a German pastor imprisoned for his opposition to Hitler, made the following statement in 1946:

Christianity in German bears a greater responsibility before God [for the Holocaust] than the National Socialists, the SS, and the Gestapo.”¹

How could he say this?  Because he recognized that those who have been rescued unto salvation are far more accountable to God than those who remain mired in blindness and unbelief.  If we don’t get a better grasp of what it means to love our neighbor, history is going to again look at the church with the same indictment:  “Where were all of the Christians while innocent babies were being murdered en masse?”  We would do well to turn our attention to the Good Samaritan.

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1. Quoted in Hitler’s Cross: Erwin Lutzer, Hitler’s Cross, Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1995.  p. 191 [↩]

While Proverbs 24 gives us the general command to intervene on behalf of those who are being killed, Exodus 1 provides us with a very specific example of this command in practice.  A new king has come to power in Egypt, and fearful that Israel’s phenomenal growth will threaten Egypt’s security, he orders every newborn Hebrew boy to be put to death.  To ensure that his command is carried out, he tasks the Hebrew midwives with following through on the decree.  We learn in Exodus 1.17-21 that his plan did not succeed:

But the midwives feared God, and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the male children alive.  So the king of Egypt called for the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this thing, and saved the male children alive?”  And the midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are lively and give birth before the midwives come to them.”  Therefore God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and grew very mighty.  And so it was, because the midwives feared God, that he provided households for them.”

The implication of this passage is that those who fear God will do what they can to keep mothers from killing their babies.

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I recently interviewed with a church on the South Carolina coast, and the conversation with the gentleman I would have been working with left me a little upset.

On a good day, at most I’m a four and a half point Calvinist.  Other days, I’m maybe a three-point or at most four-point Calvinist.   I still just can’t figure out where I fall on the Limited Atonement question, so I often oscillate back and forth.  I didn’t become a Calvinist by just jumping on a bandwagon; I arrived here after throwing myself against the Gospel of John and the Letter to the Romans for about 2 years.  For reasons of biblical faithfulness, I hold to a Reformed theology.

The gentleman I would have been working for on the coast is an all-out Arminian.  These two teams of Calvinist and Arminian have been holding different theological positions for several hundred years - the argument between them ain’t new by any stretch.

So as I sat and talked to this man, he was the most hostile person to Reformed theology that I’ve ever met.  I was actually taken aback at the amount of venom he spoke with; to be honest, I was shocked, since I’m not that angry about folks holding to Arminian theology.  I believe since I arrived at being a Calvinist by a lot of theological reflection, then obviously an Arminian must have as well.  I think that stands to reason.

At any rate, our conversation got me thinking down a particular vein: why can’t we get along?  I’m convinced that there are good, biblical reasons to be Arminian in your theology.  I don’t think that the Arminian position says anything the Bible doesn’t say, I just don’t think it says everything the Bible does.  Nevertheless, it’s not heresy; this is an in-family debate.  I can’t think of a single Calvinist I know personally that would berate or browbeat someone of a Wesleyan Arminian theology.  Why is it then that Calvinists have the reputation of being bullies, when it’s the Arminians I know that are hostile?  I just don’t understand it.

There are only three questions I have to have answered to be able to work with someone:

1. Do you love Jesus?
2. Do you love the Bible?
3. Do you desire to see people reached with the gospel?

As long as the answer to all three questions is yes, I can work with you, no matter what you believe about election and predestination.  As long as we both love the Bible, we can disagree, and still have a place to go back to to settle our disagreements, since we both hold Scripture to be the final authority.

Has anbody else experienced this?