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Dispensationalism
The Vision
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Goings On
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I'm on my way home from a homeschooling conference. But my flight has been delayed. Instead of getting home late tonight, I'll be getting home tomorrow morning—late development, afternoon—later still development, night. Instead of spending my evening in a plane, I'm spending it at the airport. Instead of sleeping in my bed tonight, I'll be sleeping, if God should so bless, on an airplane. The dichotomy between the encouragement I receive in being with homeschooling families and the discouragement I feel in being stuck far from my own family is enough to make me eschatologically schizophrenic. On the one hand we are seeing the hearts of fathers returned to their children and the slow erosion in the church of the influence of the greatest weapon the devil has wielded against God's people in the last one hundred years, the government school system. On the other hand I can't even get home on the same day I started traveling. Are we moving forward, or backward? The church at large has been guilty of embracing particular eschatological views depending on its mood. When the world was giddy with enlightenment optimism, when every day in every way the world seemed to get better and better, the church hopped on the happy bandwagon and embraced postmillennialism. When the bulbs of the enlightenment begin to dim, the dim-bulb church hurtled headlong into pessimillennialism. Leading the lemming charge were the dispensationalists. They found in their Bibles reasons for the dread that was within them. I am schizophrenic about dispensationalism as well. In the midst of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy they wore the white hats. They stood on the inerrancy of the Bible, affirming the supernatural. And they did so in a way that again pulls me in two directions. On the one hand I am embarrassed by the lack of sophistication among these heroes. These were not officious scholars, careful to dress the academic part. They talked with accents, and often, with bad grammar. They wore fat ties. Beside the cool erudition of the mainline liberals they looked like redneck fools. And for that I also love them. They exhibited, once upon a time, a supreme indifference toward the approval of their enemies. They were fools for Christ, as we all should be. While their commitment to the authority of Scripture was and is exemplary, their understanding of the Scripture was and is severely lacking. Indeed while they affirmed that all of scripture was God-breathed, they, at least implicitly, denied that all of it was profitable. They became practical Marcionites, excising huge portions of the Bible, including all of the Old Testament except those as yet unfulfilled prophecies, as no longer applicable to them. That was for another age. And we are under grace. Many even excluded from their thinking the gospels, as they preceded the advent of the church age in which we are said to live. They had, therefore, their own brand of schizophrenia, affirming the truth of the Bible but denying its application to us. The results were more calamitous than their visions of the tribulation. In wrongly dividing the people of God, driving a wedge between Israel and the church, they cut their followers off from their own history. If we are living in the parenthesis, we are living outside the very stream of history. We cannot know who we are because we are the great mystery. Because the old covenant did not speak of us, it does not speak to us. And so we lost not only our history, we lost our future as well. The promises are not our promises. We are only promised that we will miss the greatest battle of history, that we will be sidelined. Indeed, we are already sidelined. We were once not a people, I Peter tells us, but we became a people. And now, Darby and Scofield and Ryrie tell us we are again no longer a people. With no history and no promise, we likewise have no job to do. We are not really a part of the family of God, just surprise visitors. All we are called to do is to wait. We're guests in the kingdom, not co-laborers. And therein is the scent of the devil. While dispensationalists are experts at sniffing out assorted conspiracy theories, where there is a bogeyman under every bush that will usher in the one world government——or at least serve as fodder for another best selling prophecy book—they miss this great conspiracy. The best way to track a conspiracy is to follow the money, to ask that probing question: Cui Bono?—who benefits? If you are the devil you are the enemy of the kingdom of God. Your desire is to see it stopped, to thwart its growth. You know that the King has purposed to grow His kingdom through the work of His subjects. You've already infiltrated the mainline churches and caused a retreat of the Spirit who cried out "Ichabod." But the Spirit has continued to work, giving life, regenerating more soldiers. You can't stop the Spirit, for He blows where He will. What you want to do is construct a woridview that will demoralize the troops. Persuade them that they will lose the battle, and they will lose the battle. Persuade them that their Commander has ordained that they would lose the battle, and they will throw down their weapons with force. Persuade them that they will be sent stateside before the battle really heats up, and they'll turn their helmets upside down, and set their fat rumps on them and wait. Here the devil has succeeded. He has persuaded the evangelical church that the sooner we lose, the sooner Jesus comes back. Every effort we make to make known the kingdom of Christ merely delays the consummation of the kingdom of Christ. Who benefits? The devil has paved the road to Dallas. But there are other beneficiaries as well, or so it would appear. The devil did not have to sweat to make this sale. In his The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton recounts for us the conversation between the recruiter for a secret police force and the recruitee. The recruiter is calling men to fight a vast conspiracy of anarchists. "Are you the new recruit?" asked the invisible chief, who seemed to have heard all about it. "Alright, you are engaged." Syme, quite swept off his feet, made a feeble fight against this irrevocable phrase. "I really have no experience," he began. "No one has any experience," said the other, "of the battle of Armageddon." "But I really am unfit—" "You are willing, that is enough," said the unknown. "Well, really," said Syme, "I don't know any profession of which mere willingness is the final test." "I do," said the other, "martyrs. I am condemning you to death. Good day." Christ, the Captain of the armies of the Lord, called us to battle. He bid us to pick up our cross daily. He told us that just as He was persecuted, so would we be. But the devil, in his conspiracy of dispensationalism, has declared all of us 4-F, not fit to fight in the battle. He has gone even farther, suggesting that the battle is not even ours. It is strictly a matter for the Jews. The irony is that this otherworldliness, this view that suggests to us that this world is not our home, we're just a-passing through, turns on us and creates worldliness. Because we have no call to purify the world, to sanctify the world, we have no real call to purify ourselves, and so become colored by the world. We find ourselves watching the movie while we wait for Godot; we pass the time down at Vanity Fair. And why not? We live under grace, not under law. The world, meanwhile, sinks lower and lower into the muck. The salt has lost its savor, and so the meat has begun to turn green, and we are trampled under foot. Remember that when the devil coaxed us into laying down our arms, he did not lay down his own. Cowards not only do not win the war, but they are overrun by the enemy. At the same time, the world continues to follow the church. The world has embraced lawlessness because the church has embraced lawlessness. We have carnal presidents because we have carnal "Christians." We have a culture saturated with ennui, because we too are bored, waiting for the end to come. It all begins with that schizophrenic view of Scripture. They want us to interpret the Bible literally, but within the grid of this system so obtuse that it takes a million charts to explain it. They want to affirm inerrancy but deny applicability. They want us to take the plain sense of the text, yet they build their eschatology around a word that appears to have been raptured right out of my Bible. They claim to be simple country preachers but they preach Mr. Scofield's notes instead of the Word they supposedly explain. We share a great deal in common with dispensationalists. We have the same zeal for the Bible, but we have a zeal for all of it. We have the same rejection of assorted Pelagian schemes, whether Romish or liberal, but we also reject the Pelagian taint on Arminianism. We have the same love of God's grace, but we, by His grace, and in accordance with His law, also love His law. For all that we have in common, however, we share this difference: we are fighting to build Christ's kingdom and they are not. They are not only deserters but they teach others to mimic their cowardice. We, not they, come to the text simply. When Christ says "Seek ye first the kingdom of God" that is exactly what we will strive to do. When Christ says, "Behold I have overcome the world," we believe Him and act accordingly When Christ says we are to be "more than conquerors," we take up our sword and move forward. When Christ says, "Not one jot or tittle of the law will pass away," we refuse to expunge His law from our lives. We, not they, take Him at His word. While they are losing the battle with a defeatist worldliness, we are seeking to win the battle with an otherworldliness of conquest. We separate not to wait, but to win. We do not seek to drag the lost on to our lifeboat, but to draw them to the city we seek to build upon the holy hill of Zion. We seek to let our light shine before men by being set apart from the darkness. While they blindly follow their two hundred year old tradition, we seek to be deliberate. We want to think through the issues of our day, of our lives, with the aid of the great saints through all of church history but with our consciences held captive by all the word of God alone. We do not want to inherit a system, but inherit the riches of revelation of our God, and to inherit the promises that He made to our fathers, the children of Israel. We are trying to be simple in order to build the kingdom of God. We are trying to be separate in order to build the kingdom of God. We are deliberate ultimately in this: we are trying to be sure that everything that we do, everything that we say, everything that we think, and everything that we feel serves the purpose of building the kingdom of God. We have set out to win, through the power of our King, and for the glory of our King; and those who should be our brothers-in-arms, while they may be our brothers, have laid down their arms. May the great Warrior God that we serve see fit to give the dispensational church a Patton-esque slap on the face, and send them out to join the battle.
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Waiting
for Godot