According to an analysis of Planned Parenthood records which providentially fell into Christian hands, the majority of their customers attend evangelical churches, and can name their pastors. But, that's neither here nor there. Any of us can interpret God's grace as our license to sin "given my unique situation."
One mild correction is in order. Reconstructionism grew as a response to two enemies of God's purposes: the "modernists" who attacked the church from without, by denying the authority of Scripture, and the "pietiests" who undermined the church from within. It can be argued that reconstructionists have a stronger commitment to God's Word than dispensationalists do, since we calibrate our lives on the basis of the "whole counsel of God," rather than upon a few selected verses judged "appropriate to this dispensation."
A a malady that shows up during periods of the church's decline is apocalyptic hysteria. People of faith justify their failures of vision, courage, and nobility by projecting their experience against the screen of an imagined future that is totally disconnected from their own lives. Rather than saying, "We screwed up. Our God deserves better of us," the apocalyptic hysteriac says "God has ordained the total global triumph of evil, which will only be rectified by the parousia. And who are we to think we can or should resist God's program?"
Those immersed in this perspective become de-facto cheerleaders for Satan's team, drooling and fawning over each new potential antichrist who will, they hope, usher in the "end times" and the soon return of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Some day, someone may write a doctoral dissertation on the sequences behind widespread outbreaks of this malady. The pattern seems to be
PS -- you say "I see God's hand at work" when a cult which preaches that our Lord and Savior is boiling forever in excrement manages to impose an anti-Christian socialist regime. Your God beams approval upon those who say that about His Son?
I perceive an anti-semetic tone to your post. Is their sin any worse than yours before you came to Christ?
Politics and religion have nothing to do with the restoration of Israel. It is God's work. It appears to be his preparation for the end of the age of the Gentiles. He will pour out his wrath upon the earth and he will pour out his spirit upon his rebellious children. We have his promise on that.
That may be, but those pastors aren't encouraging their parishes to get abortions, nor is there political liberalism masquerading as the true Faith as there is in so many "reconstructionist" churches.
It can be argued that reconstructionists have a stronger commitment to God's Word than dispensationalists do, since we calibrate our lives on the basis of the "whole counsel of God," rather than upon a few selected verses judged "appropriate to this dispensation."
Oh really? Tell me, on which day do you keep the Sabbath and on what Biblical basis? Unless you a) keep the Sabbath on the seventh day as is repeatedly commanded in Scripture or b) can show a passage in the NT which directly and overtly changes the day of the Sabbath, then you too are guilty of "cherry-picking" your Scripture.
Indeed, R.C. Sproul points out in his book Dispensationalism that if you observe Sunday rather than Saturday, that you agree with the premise of Dispensationalism and are merely dickering about the details. (Please forgive the lack of a full quote or page number--I'm at work, and cited that from memory.)
Rather than saying, "We screwed up. Our God deserves better of us," the apocalyptic hysteriac says "God has ordained the total global triumph of evil, which will only be rectified by the parousia. And who are we to think we can or should resist God's program?"
Your gift for characature remains unparalleled. While futurist premillennialists do believe that there will be a global, political "victory" of evil in the End Times, we also believe that there will be a victory of the Gospel, which will be delivered to every last tribe, tongue, and nation in preparation for the Parousia. The Adversary's political "victory" is therefore no victory at all, but merely his last desperate gasp and lunge, which God allows for His own purposes (among them, to separate the wheat from the chaff and to refine the elect as gold is refined--by fire).
PS -- you say "I see God's hand at work" when a cult which preaches that our Lord and Savior is boiling forever in excrement manages to impose an anti-Christian socialist regime. Your God beams approval upon those who say that about His Son?
I think P-Marlowe is right--your post betrays a stench of anti-Semetism. You may want to try rephrasing it.
But insofar as the Jews have blasphemed the Messiah, how much greater the Church as a whole's condemnation for blaspheming Him to His own people by centuries of persecution in His Name? Indeed, the day the Church decided to ignore the teachings and examples of Yeshua HaMashiach and His Apostles by actively forbidding Jewish disciples of a Jewish, Torah-observant Messiah to remain Jewish and Torah-observant, we lost all right to condemn them for rejecting Him:
What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it. If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, "Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them"; Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for YHVH your God proveth you, to know whether ye love YHVH your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Ye shall walk after YHVH your God, and fear Him, and keep His commandments, and obey His voice, and ye shall serve Him, and cleave unto Him. And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from YHVH your God, Which brought you out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, to thrust thee out of the way which YHVH thy God commanded thee to walk in. So shalt thou put the evil away from the midst of thee.When the Church presents a wonder-working, prophetic Jesus who came to do away with the Torah, abolish the Sabbath, destroy the Feastdays, and command the Jews to stop walking in the way that YHVH commanded them to walk at Mt. Sinai, then the Jew is right to reject such a "messiah"--and indeed, to suppose him the object of God's punishment. How much more so should they think this Jesus a false prophet and an anti-messiah when the Church in his name has done the deeds of Antiochus Epiphanes!Deuteronomy 12:32-13:5
Mind you, the first-century Jews had no such excuse--none of them could find Yeshua guilty of violating the Torah, and the Nazarines, the Jewish believers including the Apostles, were known for their zealousness for the Torah. But once the Church got in bed with the Roman culture and government for the sake of not suffering the persecution being inflicted on the Jews after Judea's two failed rebellions, and once we stepped over the line of forcing Jewish believers to give up everything Jewish, we were the ones guilty of putting back up the middle wall of partition that the Lord tore down in His own flesh.
Moreover, you blaspheme the Lord even now to any Jew who reads this thread with your spiteful, arrogant diatribe. I think, for the sake of not putting a stumbling block in the path of the blind, you should stand down and apologize.