Posted on 08/07/2006 6:18:10 AM PDT by topcat54
David Brog has written Standing with Israel: Why Christians Support the Jewish State. The ten reviews I read on Amazon were quite favorable, and it is being advertised on WorldNetDaily. The fact that the Foreword was written by John Hagee, author of Jerusalem Countdown, From Daniel to Doomsday, Beginning of the End, and Final Dawn over Jerusalem, is a clear indication that the book’s thesis fits with the modern-day prophetic system known as dispensational premillennialism. I doubt that the book covers what this article reveals.
In my debate with Tommy Ice at American Vision’s Worldview Super Conference (May 26, 2006), Ice pointed out that one of the unique features of the dispensational system is that near the end of a future, post-rapture, seven-year tribulation period, Israel will be rescued by God. After nearly 2000 years of delayed promises, God will once again come to the rescue of His favored nation. Ice and other dispensationalists imply by this doctrine that they are Israel’s best friend, and anyone who does not adopt their way of interpreting the Bible is either anti-Semitic (Hal Lindsey) or a methodological naturalist (Tommy Ice).
In the debate, I wanted Tommy to explain how a belief in Israel’s glorious future results in the slaughter of two-thirds of the Jews living at the time the Great Tribulation nears the end of its seven-year run. I quoted the following dispensational writers to show that there is no glorious future for “all Jews who are under siege,” to use Tommy’s words, in the dispensational version of the Great Tribulation.
There are geopolitical implications to the dispensational system that some people have picked up on.
Dispensational theology as it relates to Israel is alarming to some Jewish leaders as well. Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, asks, “To what extent will a theological view that calls for Armageddon in the Middle East lead [evangelicals] to support policies that may move in that direction, rather than toward stability and peaceful coexistence?”(2) The most probable scenario is that prophetic futurists will sit back and do nothing as they see Israel go up in smoke since the Bible predicts an inevitable holocaust. It is time to recognize that these so-called end-time biblical prophecies have been fulfilled, and Zechariah 13:7–9 is certainly one of them. Those Jews living in Judea prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and who fled before the assault on the temple were saved (Matt. 24:15–22).Convinced that a nuclear Armageddon is an inevitable event within the divine scheme of things, many evangelical dispensationalists have committed themselves to a course for Israel that, by their own admission, will lead directly to a holocaust indescribably more savage and widespread than any vision of carnage that could have generated in Adolf Hitler’s criminal mind.(1)
1. Grace Halsell, Prophecy and Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1986), 195.
2. Quoted in Jeffery L. Sheler, “Odd Bedfellows,” U.S. News & World Report (August 12, 2002), 35.
Gary DeMar is president of American Vision and the author of more than 20 books. His latest is Myths, Lies, and Half Truths.
Permission to reprint granted by American Vision P.O. Box 220, Powder Springs, GA 30127, 800-628-9460.
That's what I said. :>)
Alex, pretrib premill DOES posit a tribulation based on scripture.
That occurs after a falling away.
The falling away occurs after a great period of successful evangelism.
There is NO position that does not have some form of dire circumstance overtaking the earth.....Peter is clear that the earth burns up in fervent heat. All NT writers are clear that there will be a judgment in which God separates the wheat and the chaff, the chaff for burning.
Exactly. As I mentioned before Jews don't obsess about who's in or who's out. The "elect" was an issue not conceived until the intertestamental writing of Enoch (Psuedypigraphal) emerged. Most of those writings were sprinkled with concepts brought back from the nations after the first diaspora.
All who consider themselves Jews by birth, and Christians because Grandpa was an Episcopalian, are not necessarily among the Elect.
Again, Jews would rather leave who's elected and who's not up to God.
That is a definite possibility and has to do with the nature of the kingdom of this world which is run by totally depraved individuals....unless of course you think that leaders or groups are not troubled by total depravity.
That's what I believe too. I think the Church as a whole (not every individual member, obviously) has been complicit in preventing Jews from coming to the Messiah by presenting them with a false picture of who Yeshua truly is--so false, in fact, that the Jews as a people may have actually been showing their fidelity to God and the true Messiah of Israel by rejecting this "Jesus" who supposedly commands them to no longer keep the Torah! (Obviously, that situation did not exist in the first century, when the Gospel accounts and Epistles were penned and all those Jews who rejected the Messiah did so with full knowledge.)
Baruch haba b'Shem YHVH.
217 ?
214 ?
If you'll look at the above, you'll see a little number in the bottom middle...221...right next to private reply.
That is the number of the post that you probably are answering. It is the post on which you hit "post reply."
The previous post, about which you asked, had the number 151 as the post to which I was responding.
thanks
B'shem Y'shua
Futurists do not distort God's promises or prophecies. They take them as future events and then attempt to place them in some context.
That is precisely what was done with first advent prophecies about the coming of the Christ.
"Rachel weeping for her children...."
How terribly must God have hated Bethlehem, little boys, mothers, and the areas surrounding Bethlehem to predict such a thing, and then to allow it to happen! How ANTI-BETHLEHEM God must be!
225 posted on 08/08/2006 5:31:49 PM MDT by Buggman
after I reviewed Psalm 118-26 I see that it doesn't say Lord but instead says YHvH
You have refreshed me and blessed me.
Blessings on You and Yours.
b'shem Yahu'shua
Come to think of it, isn't that what preterists do, only using Josephus' histories instead of the world as we see it today?
How terribly God must hate Jews to kill them that way in the Destruction of Jerusalem predicted by Jesus! (/sarcasm)
(BTW, since there hadn't been a "coming to Jesus" by 70 AD, how could there have been a "great falling away?")
All that said, it's clear that Revelation was written in the 90's AD, so it's obvious that modern preterism is bunk.
Full Preterism is probably heresy.
Have you read The Wisdom of the Hebrew Alphabet
There is an interesting discussion on Vav,
the sixth letter.
Some say it means man.
Rabbi Munk says it is the symbol of
Completion, Redemption and Transformation.
This is why I use lower case v in YHvH.
Baruch haba B'Shem YHvH
For you who believe in the free choice of man, this violates your own theology. You can't make this claim unless God looked down the "corridors of time" and saw that all of Israel would choose to follow Jesus. At which I would wonder what on earth this passage is even talking about.
Jewish believers, as I stated somewhere above, IMO have a higher understanding of the things that are of God. To me the believing Jews are like the priest who could go into the temple and understand the things in the temple but they are not allowed in the Holy of Holies (which is for Christ). Us Gentiles must wait outside. But that is my personal belief.
But if you want me to believe that Paul felt ALL the Jews are beloved, you are most assuredly wrong. Christ told some of them that their father was the devil. I think that is a big NO.
Paul isn't talking about all the Jews just as he isn't talking about all the Gentiles begin grafted into Christ. Paul is only talking about believers.
Yep. They read Jospehus and say "Here is Christ!"
Back when I worked for Ravi Zacharias, I spent some time chatting with Paul Copan (yes, yes, forgive the name-dropping) and I asked him where he stood on eschatology. He told me, "You know, Michael, I think that when it's all said and done, we'll find out that all three major positions (i.e., preterism, historicism, and futurism) will have turned out to be correct."
Maybe he was just trying to avoid an argument, but his words struck me as profound. Since studying our Jewish roots, I've become even more convinced of his wisdom.
In the West, we think of time as linear and of prophecy as simple prediction-and-fulfillment. But in the Hebrew and other Ancient Near East cultures, they think of time as circular--not in an ultimate sense, as in Hinduism, but in the sense that things have a tendency to repeat--and of prophecy as the fulfillment of a pattern.
So then, let's consider a prophecy that there should be little debate on, 2 Sa. 7:12-16:
And when thy [David's] days be fulfilled, and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee, which shall proceed out of thy bowels, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build an house for My name, and I will stablish the throne of his kingdom for ever. I will be his father, and he shall be My son. If he commit iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, and with the stripes of the children of men: But My mercy shall not depart away from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away before thee. And thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever before thee: thy throne shall be established for ever.So, does this prophecy refer to Solomon, or to the Messiah? The answer is both.
Solomon followed his father David, built a house for YHVH's Name, and God established his kingdom. When he committed idolatry, God punished him "with the rod of men"--specifically, the sword of Hadad the Edomite (1 Ki. 11:14) and Jeroboam the son of Nebat (v. 26). But God did not take Israel from him as He did Saul, but waited until Solomon had passed and his son had taken the throne, and even then He took away only the northern kingdom (vv. 11-13). And so David's line continued on the throne.
Yeshua also followed His father David. He is building a spiritual house for YHVH's Name in the Church (1 Pt. 2:5) and will also build a physical Temple for the Millennium (Ezk. 40-48). While He never committed iniquity Himself, He became sin for us so that by His stripes, administered by the rod of men, we could be healed. And though the Father's mercy departed from Him for a brief time as He hung on the Cross, it did not depart forever as it did from Saul, nor was the Kingdom taken from Him--on the contrary, by His eternal life, the throne of David is forever secure.
Prophecy may even refer to past events which prefigure future ones. We are all familiar with prophetic types, as when Abraham "sacrificed" his son Isaac on Mt. Moriah, or Joseph was sold by his brothers as dead only to be made king over them. Or consider Matityahu's (Mathew's) use of Hos. 11:1 in Mat. 2:15. Consider the prophecy in context:
When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called My son out of Egypt. As they called them, so they went from them: they sacrificed unto Baalim, and burned incense to graven images.Was Matityahu wrong to quote this as a Messianic prophecy, as Jewish anti-missionaries claim? Or did he perhaps engage in a legitimate bit of "newspaper exegesis," seeing that the Messiah, just like Israel, had gone down into Egypt for safety in a time of trouble, only to come back out to the Land God had promised Abraham? In doing so, Matityahu shows us the connection between the Messiah and Israel, one that cannot be broken.
Therefore, I actually agree with the preterist and historicist that the Olivet Discourse and the Revelation (the latter in spite of its date of authorship) actually do prophecy of the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. I also agree with the historicist that the Revelation has within its scope the last 2000 years of Church history.
Where I disagree with both is that it ends there. Therefore, preterism and historicism are not so much wrong as they are incomplete. The chiefmost gripe I have with each is not in what they assert, but in what they deny: That God has yet a place for "Israel of the flesh" in His plan.
I prefer clean prophecies, to be honest with you, but it is true that some of them are not so clean. The out of Egypt prophecy, the slaughter of infants prophecy, and others are (as I was taught in seminary) fulfilled, and then completely fulfilled.
That's not really your point, though. Your point is that there's some truth in each of those other eschatalogical positions.
I was raised, however, to believe that positions are either correct, incorrect, or a mixture....mixtures being the seed to verbalize a new position. That is different, however, than saying that we are prior to the events happening, and that it is only fair to keep an eye on all the eschatological positions to see which ones are working out and which ones aren't.
I guess that takes us to full preterism first. It obviously is incorrect because it says that Jesus has already returned. Jesus clearly has done no such thing, and this position is in violation of Jesus' own words to be aware of those saying that he has secretly returned. The makes full preterism most likely to be heresy.
Partial preterism that posits a 70 AD date by which every prophetic event except the return had happened is incorrect because Revelation was written in 90 AD. Nonetheless we bear with them and their symbolizing of everything under the sun because they're very vocal and prolific writers.
Amillennialism should be watched because of its better ideas that include a tribulation, an actual return of Jesus, and a post-trib consummation of all events. Its weakness is its symbolizing of nearly everything that gets in the way of its legitimacy.
Historical premill is a decent position for the reasons that premil is a decent position. It is weak in that it subscribes prophetic completions to highly speculative historical events that it apparently applies with minimal regard for logical explanations to the contrary.
Dispensational premill is a decent position for the reasons that a futurist premil position is decent. Prophecies are treated as future events, there is a millennium posited, and there is a return of Jesus to the earth. Being almost entirely futurist it is open to much debate and mudslinging....not just from opponents but between various camps within its own position. It is weak in that it subscribes prophetic completions to highly speculative CHURCH ages that it apparently dreams up with minimal regard for logical explanations to the contrary
Postmil is another futurist position, imho, that simply won't be known to be true until time shows it to be true. When things start getting better n' better, then we should probably open a postmil book and look at the events to come. Up to now, though, it's not easy to claim that things have gotten better 'n' better.
Then there's my position and your position. They are right, of course, because we are neeners. :>)
{!}
And I agree with both of you.
As long as neither of you are too dogmatic about it.
N3
{!}
I'm working on a hypothesis that a lot of prophecy is recapitulation of previous events. So, when Christ was called out of Egypt, that was an intentional parallel to Israel's odyssey. I think Christians have too narrow a definition of "prophecy" to refer only to "Evidence that Demands a Verdict" style proofs.
That is most likely because you, too, are a neener.
It doesn't hurt you, though, that you are suave, debonair, and possessed of impeccable taste.
N3
Of the non-listed branch of Neenerdom
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