Sound Doctrine vs 'Spiritualizing' — Art Katz

Hey there. I know that all of you have noticed that Brother Art has finally arrived. We were looking for him for the whole convention. And we didn't want to close the service this morning without giving him an opportunity to address this.

I know that all of you would like to hear from him. Is that right? Brother Art, would you come and just share with us a little bit this morning?

My heart really goes out to you guys. I don't know that I would have the capacity to absorb and to take and to hear the volume of things that you've been hearing in these days. I meant to have one final guy come up.

I had so serious a word in my heart that for the first time in all the occasions that I've had opportunity to share something in this movement, I actually wrote it out. And I feel that it might well be my farewell statement.

Final and last statement unless the Lord shows otherwise. And I'm speaking with an absolute candor because I really agree that the time is very short. And from my own peculiar perspective, I'm unhappy if not distressed by things that I hear expressed and by just the character of the proceedings and various other things that I can't even identify or enumerate.

And I'm just wondering if that's just my peculiar subjective way of viewing things or it's a perspective that God intends for you to hear and to take into your own consideration. So I just want to pray and ask you to summon the spiritual stamina to hear me out in this prepared statement which strangely at the last night's address has got to do with doctrine.

And so you'll have to determine whether I am some kind of dog or one who is trying to affect that concision of your flesh or whether there is indeed a legitimate place for doctrines in the faith. And that the burden of my own heart is the neglect of doctrine that has been to the detriment of the church that needs again to be restored.

So if you can somehow reconcile what Buddy had to say last night and what I'm saying now then we will owe it to the grace of God. So Lord I just ask that grace now, that mercy, that enablement my God to bring forth a statement of your own heart Lord that you have peculiarly impacted in me and want now to be expressed to this people at the conclusion of this convention indeed at the conclusion of this year.

That's at the end of something that we might enter into something my God that will bring honor and glory to your name. Be with my mouth Lord and give such amplification of this as shall please you. Give saints if they are in any way weary, tired my God a freshness to hear an acute ear to hear Lord the detailed statement.

And we just thank you and praise you for this now in Jesus name. Amen. I entitled this an expression of loving concern and it begins with an acknowledgement of my appreciation for the relationship that I've had with this movement over these past years that God himself birthed that I never sought and that by the ordinance of God through even Sam's statements about me a place was made by which I was invited to share and something has continued from that time and the various occasions when I've attended these conventions.

It's been a privilege and my most recent experience was to be in Alaska and to touch the life in the various communities there which has always impressed me and I had always half jokingly commented that your life was greater than your doctrine and that in fact the quality of your life has saved you from the error or the deficiencies of your doctrine.

And that might be actually more true than I know but how long can we lean upon that and that there needs to be a bringing into symmetry and harmony both the quality of the life and the doctrines of the faith that that life might be preserved, be abetted, be aided and be made yet more full.

And I can't think of a more inadequate vessel to express this than myself because I am not a man who promulgates doctrines. The ironic thing is I'm the kind of man that would be more in the tradition of what was expressed last night, eminently a man of the spirit, eminently a man who trusts, who is willing to suffer the humiliation of failure, who just stands up and opens his mouth believing God.

So for me to prepare statements with regard to doctrine is altogether unprecedented and it may well be that there's such a dearth, d-e-a-r-t-h, of men available to God to speak something of a corrective kind that the Lord has to employ even one who is calling it is not.

So God has birthed this relationship and I think that it's an important one all the more because of the differences that have all along through the years been expressed in it. The remarkable thing is our ability to continue despite the differences and it may well be that God is wanting something in those differences that will bring us both to a better place.

So you have been gracious to allow me, I've said this also about you, that you've not been defensive, you've not been exclusive and you've allowed statements to be spoken that are not necessarily out of your ballpark, that come from another place that you're willing to hear and that has been, I think, a great virtue and a saving grace and a privilege for me and I'm enjoying that privilege right now.

So I want to take this occasion to state what I believe to be the historic apostolic consensus on those points of doctrine for which this movement has been censured over the years and been looked upon with suspicion by those in the faith who represent a much more orthodox or conventional evangelical point of view.

Maybe you're not even aware of that, but I am and I'm just taking the liberty now to express that. We all know about Sam, I never had the privilege of meeting him, that he was an unquestionably significant great man, powerfully anointed, rich, and his understanding of the knowledge of God and his ways is beyond dispute and we can all see what was birthed through so extraordinary personality.

But we would be naive and, I don't know what other adjectives to use, not also to acknowledge that Sam was the kind of man given as was expressed here to make exaggerated statements in order to express his point, that he had a zeal of such a kind, that he did not hesitate to make statements that when you read them years later it's enough to make the hair go straight up on your head.

They are not only scandalous, they border on or actually constitute heresy. And yet, if you were there in the moment of the speaking, in the exuding of the spirit of that speaking, probably it made a much more seeming sense.

But that's not a reason to allow some of those statements to remain on the book, so to speak, without clarification or even repudiation, if indeed they violate points of the truth of the apostolic faith made in the excitement or heat of the moment.

So we know that there's a tendency toward hyperbole, that means an exaggerated statement in order to make one's point. But there's a point in which exaggeration can become error. And I believe it may well be that those points have been occasioned in the history of this movement and that it's not enough to swallow them down, that they have a continuing effect, a consequence for the health and for the life of the body, and that probably if there were a courageous acknowledgement of some of the errors to which Sam himself was subject in his exaggeration, healing might come to those who have been bruised by the misunderstandings that have flowed by statements of that kind.

For some, it may have taken the impression of being sacrosanct. In other words, if Sam spoke it, it's not to be questioned, that if anything comes forth from a vessel that is so richly anointed, we have to assume that everything that comes forth is to be unquestioned and to be equally as accepted.

I think that that would be a very dangerous and naive assumption, whether it's for Sam or myself or any speaker who enjoys the anointing of God. In fact, we might well be fingering the very area of greatest danger by which the heresies of the end of the age will find its place in the body of Christ, that we will be so carried away by the impressiveness of anointing that we will not bring a critical examination of the words that are spoken, assuming that the anointing itself sanctifies or condones or affirms or approves all that is said.

This, by the way, happens to be the very way by which, I believe, the heresy of a pre-tribulation rapture came into circulation in Christendom. Outstanding teachers like Darby and Schofield and men of that kind who were remarkably gifted and anointed teachers in certain areas of truth began to venture into other areas that were not legitimate and began to formulate doctrines of which the early and historic church knew nothing.

And because of the impressiveness both of their person and of their ability in the scripture and of their anointing, unassuming and naive saints took the bait and took everything that was spoken that today those doctrines have been established with such a kind of sanctity that to question them is to question the very foundations of the faith, that you're considered out of the faith to raise the question of whether a pre-tribulation rapture is indeed a biblical expectation.

So we need to be careful not to be wise above what is written or to speculate and to be fanciful. And I'm reading from a quotation from a book that is a critique of the pre-tribulation rapturists written by a man who had formerly been a participant and part of that movement whose eyes were opened as to its own errors and recognized the leaven that was in the lump of men who have a propensity to discover new terms and meanings to God's words when the old explanations seem prosaic, conventional, ordinary.

See, there's something about the very nature of conventions themselves that require an excitement, that require either a new word or something hyped up to give the people something to sustain them. It's almost a challenge to resist the extraordinary dynamic that adheres in large meetings that almost promotes the exposition or the statement of some novel thing.

Somebody said that those who profess to be apostles today try to establish that credential by bringing some kind of doctrine or understanding that was not known to previous generations of saints. And I believe that that's essentially true.

My reaction to that statement was that my test of a true apostle is not one who brings a novel new exposition, but one who rather recovers the old that has been lost to the church and needs again to be understood and to be insinuated into our consciousness and into our life.

It's not novel things that we need, but the old ways, the things that have been historically and apostolically approved that had been lost to us and need again to be regained. And it's one of those doctrines that I want in my brief time today to speak on.

And that doctrine is the doctrine of the second coming of Christ, the literal, physical return of the specific Lord Jesus Christ according to the scripture as it was historically approved and understood apostolically by the church and the church fathers.

And I want to turn to some scripture in Titus chapter 2. And just a little footnote that when we say bodily return, we mean the glorified body of the resurrected and ascended Lord. In chapter 2 of Titus verse 11, we read,.

For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Now, there's a reference made already this morning to hope. And the hope that was posited for us was the hope of sinless perfection or the hope of immortality, which is not an historic doctrine of the church that was apostolically approved.

I, in fact, would count that as the kind of novel innovation rather than exposition that we need to be warned of in this very hour. You say, what's the difference, one hope or another? We're so needing for a hope that indeed if the blood can be made to pound and a little excitement be incurred and a little incentive with it through talk of immortality, doesn't that suffice?

No. There is a blessed hope, looking for the blessed hope and the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. That hope is particularly blessed. There's a dynamic that inheres in that hope, in that expectancy that is not to be found in any other.

We need jealously to God that doctrine of the apostolic faith, for if we lose that, we lose a hope that brings with it a quotient of energy, a dynamism, an expectancy, I don't have a word for it, that was distinctive in the character and the life of the early church and has been absolutely lost to our own.

One of the reasons why we unconsciously excite speakers to promulgate novel views is because there is a lassitude, there's a grayness that hovers over our congregations because I believe it's the statement of the want of the dynamic and the energy that would be in the body if we were actually looking for something imminent which is not the appearing of ourselves corporately in the body.

And as I hope to show from the scriptures, and if we'll be careful about the grammar and the plain evident meaning of the words, it is clear that we do not constitute our own hope, but rather He constitutes that hope by which we are transformed in the very expectation of His coming and in the very moment of His coming, in the twinkling of an eye, we shall be changed.

So no amount of pulpit thumping and hysterical notes and inflated hyperbolic preaching about immortality or perfection is going to obtain what only God Himself will confer. In the moment of His own appearing, we shall be like Him when we shall see Him as He is.

That I am stating the clear, traditional, historic understanding of the apostolic church. This is utterly kosher. This is not a novel view. And when we use the word tradition, don't let something rise up in your heart that in some way finds that word suspect.

The word tradition means that which was held by the church, the early church in all of its generations and throughout its church and apostolic fathers. It was a tradition of understanding of men who were in unbroken continuum with those by whom the doctrine was originally given, none other than Paul himself.

These are the traditions that need again to be restored to the faith. There is a looking for. And of course, I'm stating a doctrine, but if it is only for us a doctrine, it can become the dead letter of which Buddy warned us last night.

It's a doctrine of which we need to be reminded that the looking for would be a living expectation of such a kind as actually to hasten the day of his appearing. Seeing these things, what manner of men ought we to be?

Peter says. Looking for and hasting the day of the Lord's appearing. This is not some fixed chronological event that is going to take place. It waits upon our waiting. It waits upon our expectancy. God is waiting for those who long for his coming.

But I want to say that if we have subsumed something else and have another substitute for that hope, even in the one by which we ourselves are that fulfillment, we coming in the body, that fullness of the corporate man, it's a strange contradiction, but it frustrates the very thing that we desire.

It makes us our own object and takes from him the glory that should belong to him alone. We cannot long for ourselves. It's a contradiction in terms. There needs to be an object, one outside of ourselves, other than ourselves.

It is he himself, as I believe the scriptures in all of these references clearly state, if we take the literal, excuse the dirty word, the literal, evident, grammatical sense of the word. I want to ask, why in heaven's name shouldn't we?

What's wrong with taking the literal and evident sense of the word, all the more as that's what was historically and apostolically understood by the early church, which was the most glorious expression of the church in its whole history to this hour.

If it was good enough for them, why is it not good enough for us? Why do we need to seek a hidden and deeper meaning that can only come by a spiritualizing of a text or a word when the clear and evident meaning stands for all to see in a first reading?

There's something about that that borders on a kind of spiritual vanity. It's a presumption that somehow we stand above the word of God and impute to it a meaning that it does not have in its own statement.

And that somehow the secret of the things that we by such a process bring forth is really the deeper meaning of the faith and that's the kind of thing that is going to make us the end time saints that we ought to be.

The fact of the matter is that we're not what we ought to be and that it is not performing that work. So I want to suggest in what well may be my farewell address a return to the tested, approved, historic understanding of the faith, particularly in those statements that clearly require literal, evident meaning that we should live soberly in the present age, righteously godly.

There is a moral quotient to this kind of apostolic expectation that nothing else can supply. Paul talks about being blameless in the day of the Lord's appearing. I think it's becoming evident to us anything less than blamelessness will not suffice.

But the only inducement for blamelessness is to be in the condition that would be appropriate in the day of the Lord's appearing. What I'm trying to say is that this is the dynamic of that hope. This is the energy and the power of that expectancy.

That it brings to us a moral requirement that nothing else itself can give that will enable us to be found in that day blameless and that if we substitute other interpretations for these historic understandings of that hope we lose the moral power and incentive by which blamelessness itself can be obtained.

Isn't it interesting that not long after this statement Paul says, speak these things, exhort and rebuke with all authority, let no one despise you. These things need to be spoken. These doctrines need to be elaborated.

And the thing that chafed my spirit last night, as I have already shared with Buddy briefly, is that I felt that it was not a right dividing of the word. It left the impression with me at least that somehow there's something intrinsically wrong with doctrine.

That somehow there is a natural antagonism between the issues of spirit and the issues of doctrine. That it's almost either or. That there's not a place in the whole balance of faith for both doctrine and the primacy of spirit.

That in fact one could even almost be suspect about those who would seek to exposit doctrine as being those who are trying to circulate a dead letter. Now maybe that was not Buddy's intention but that was the impression that I received from that speaking which I think needs to remind us that as ministers of the word how careful we need to be lest we leave our ears with some kind of imbalanced understanding by which somehow they might think that we are denigrating doctrine itself as being somehow synonymous with the law or the dead letter of the word.

I want to say that the doctrines of God are living, vital, powerful, necessary. And that if you want a formula for deception and collapse we can find it historically in the history of the church when the Montanists so celebrated the Holy Spirit to such a degree that they looked with extreme suspicion on anything that would be considered the word or doctrines and so on as being dead letter.

They sought to rectify an indifference to the spirit that seemed to be growing up in the church as it was moving toward a greater institutionalization as bishops began to assert their authority as the church was losing its original Pauline, prophetic and apostolic character and so in reaction against what seemed to be a movement away from the spirit they celebrated the spirit to such an extent that indeed they went off the trolley altogether and became so deranged that finally they and others like them have cluttered the dustbin of fallen movements in the history of the church.

What might have been a salutary, life-giving, healthy input into Christendom became a kind of deranged excess because men probably were not careful in the right dividing of the word and allowed certain understandings to exist by which in time doctrine itself became suspect.

We need to distinguish between the doctrines of men and the doctrines of God. And I'm saying with all candor and I want to put it for your consideration whether the doctrine of immortality and sinless perfection that we're hearing is indeed a doctrine of men.

That something can be obtained this side of the Lord's coming by somehow some painstaking attention to the issues of sin in our own life short of that which comes with the resurrection from the dead and the receiving of glorified bodies in the moment of His appearing is some other doctrine of which the early church knew nothing and that we already might be dangerously close to encouraging something even while we're talking against doctrine expressing doctrines that are questionable.

If this movement has any virtue if this movement has any distinctive I've just now taken the liberty to express it namely that we're so earnest about God about His purposes that we indeed are so profoundly impressed with the shortness of the time that we're in it in such a truth that even publicly we can speak as I'm speaking and even take issue with each other as Paul did with Peter and that publicly and to his face for the truth of the gospel's sake.

Isn't it interesting that in the one hour when that kind of reality existed in the church the Spirit of God was so prominent and so powerful that the very shadow of Peter the very man whom Paul censured publicly brought healing.

That the Spirit of truth that the Spirit of God the Spirit of His power is eminently and first the Spirit of truth before it is any other thing. And that the time is so short that we cannot be that guarded and that indeed I want to be searched as exactingly as I'm willing to search others lest there be eleven of corruption and indeed if I've enjoyed any benefit in this movement it has been that kind of examination of me.

So are we eagerly waiting as it says in 1 Corinthians 1 .8 for the coming of the Lord. There's something so peculiar to that expectation that has been lost to the church for which there's no other substitute and condemns every other hope as false hope.

Do we have it? Let's look at 1 Thessalonians 3 .13 has not its power and is therefore false. Let's look at 1 Thessalonians 3 .13 so that he may establish your hearts blameless in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all His saints not in all His saints with all His saints.

And I think that we need to give very careful attention to the particulars of the word or we lose its meaning and with it its hope. There's a blamelessness in holiness that comes with establishing our hearts at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all His saints.

It's not to say that we should not strive to be sinless but to think that we can attain it short of His appearing is already a novel innovation that is not part of the historically tested understandings of the church in my opinion.

In my opinion. I'm already getting a little reaction on the platform here. This is at the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ with all His saints. And then in the very next page in chapter 4 the very familiar verses 1 Thessalonians 4 about hope that we should not be as those who have no hope in verse 13 For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus.

For this we say to you by the word of the Lord that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself I mean can God be more explicit?

If Himself no longer means Himself and I can no longer have confidence that what God means He says I'm ready to close the book and sit down and go to something else. There's no confidence. There's no trust.

There's no assurance. If the word of God does not mean what the word here explicitly says Himself the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout with the voice of an archangel with the trumpet of God and the dead in Christ will rise first.

So we who are not dead and remain need to be seen as distinct from someone else whose coming actually brings the resurrection from the dead which is not our appearing but His. 2 Thessalonians 1 .10 talks about being admired by the saints when He comes in that day to be glorified in His saints and to be admired among all those who believe because our testimony among you was believed.

Again a reference to the blessed hope to the explicit event of the coming of the Lord who will be glorified in His saints and be admired among them. Not admire themselves having come to full perfection and maturity corporately which is a theme that you guys continually flay but that it's He who is to be admired.

Can you understand that? How can I say this? It's a safety device. It's God saving us from the final ultimate spiritual deceit by which we almost elevate ourselves into deity. Not understanding however brilliant however glorious is the genius of the body of Christ which is His body which filleth all and all of which He is the head.

There is yet a God and a person a deity apart from and distinct who has to be glorified and admired by which these two things are not to be confused. And in fact if they are we actually stalemate and frustrate the very maturity the maturation of the body and the completion of its perfection that comes because He is distinct and other from it that He might be admired by His saints as well as be glorified with them.

In 1 John we read chapter 2, 28 Now little children abide in Him that when He appears we may have confidence and not be ashamed before Him at His coming. We don't have to be a grammarian to recognize that there are distinct pronouns here that refer to different things.

There's a He and a we that when He appears we may have confidence not that when we appear as Him. Okay. Okay. If this is doing nothing more than getting something off of my chest I'd like to take a look there in 1 John because if you're not guilty of it then I know that there are others who are.

Beloved now are we the children of God and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be but we know that when He is revealed we shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He is. There's a He and a we and there's something that occurs by the dynamic and power of God in that very moment that transforms us and completes us into His image.

And that is a hope to which we should cling and for which we should be looking and hasting with fervent longing and expectancy that cannot be the mere issue of doctrine because it's got to be the issue of longing.

It's for lovers and everyone who has this hope in them purifies himself even as he is pure. Can you see why if I'm being extreme myself or I'm being unnecessarily defensive of what I think are the apostolic distinctives of the faith it's well that we can indulge a man like me.

You've listened to worse than what you're hearing now even at this convention. So if it's no more than the reiteration of what you all along knew was true I would have been glad to tell me if I'd only asked.

I just want to go on record for saying that I am standing for the classic, traditional apostolically approved and understood clear, implicit, literal statements about the return of a literal Lord Jesus Christ who will be recognized not only by us but by my own Jewish kinsmen for when they shall see Him whom they have pierced they shall mourn for Him as one mourns for one's first born son.

I won't mention names but just to show you faulty exegesis I was shown that by an eminent teacher in your movement that that verse is actually quoted at the scene of Jesus' own crucifixion where it says and therefore the scripture is fulfilled that says, and He shall be wounded because there at the crucifixion of course He was wounded so the point was that's the fulfillment of that verse but that is not an exegetically responsible statement it's taking something out of the context in which it was given in Zechariah 12 that sets it at the end of the age, that puts it in the context of God's dealings with Israel that have been brought to a final pitch of their own distress by which He comes as their deliverer and they shall see Him whom they have pierced to say because the phrase is in the verse in Matthew and so the scripture is fulfilled that that's when it was fulfilled is not a careful expositing of the word and if I'm jealous over you guys, I'm jealous with a godly jealousy because it's for that kind of slipshod exegesis because we are so bent on establishing the truth of our position and that we take that kind of liberty in the dealing with the word that can be our undoing especially when it comes to those who have responsibility as ministers of the word which God says that we shall be the more greatly accountable.

Where did I get it? That somehow well I got it because again without naming names there are ministers in your body that just cannot bring themselves to confess that they actually believe that there's going to be a return a literal return of the crucified resurrected and ascended Lord Jesus Christ.

They can't say with assurance. And yet I want to say that that kind of ambiguity is not tolerable. And I think that God would indeed have us to say and have us to confess. It's very interesting that the very formula for the spirit of antichrist is the inability or the unwillingness to confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.

And I'm wondering if I'm not taking the liberty now by suggesting that the inability and unwillingness to confess that he will be coming again in his glorified flesh is something of the snub of the same error, the same spirit.

The spirit of antichrist is not a spirit that is against Christ it is the spirit that is like unto Christ that wants to be as him and like him. And I can understand that if we have come to an exalted place about our own coming forth in the body of Christ that this can dangerously flirt with a kind of unconscious self-deification by which something happens in the realm of our own spirit that finds it very difficult to confess what the historic and apostolic church had no difficulty confessing at all and counted the blessed hope.

So it says in 1 John 4 3. And every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist which you have heard was coming and is now already in the world.

Let me be God's fool let me be asinine let me be infantile, let me take unnecessary precautions to assure myself and you that we are not in any way unconsciously slipping into the spirit of this kind of error that cannot quite bring ourselves to confess that the one who is coming is literally the one who was taken up.

There is a now and a not yet and a shall be. It does not yet reveal what we shall be now. We are the children of God. And I think that part of the error might be the impatience, the inability to wait for that perfecting that comes only by the power of God and the mode that he himself has prescribed it's to obtain now on this side of the resurrection of the dead an immortality and a perfection that waits only in his coming may be a statement of a kind of impatience and inability to wait which will make us susceptible to error.

And by the way anyone who thinks that he is not susceptible to error or to deception is himself the greatest candidate for the same. And I don't know of any people more likely to be subject to that than people like ourselves who think that we are it, we are the end time people of God and that we have a handle on truth and an understanding that those in Babylon don't see and don't want to see, it's that kind of exclusivity and awareness, you see there are dangers that are peculiar to us by the very nature of what we are as an end time move that we need to recognize or we will be the victim of it, a kind of subtlety of exaltation that is not carnal but spiritual.

I don't know why you guys are always talking about carnality. That's not your problem. Your problem is not carnal sin. Your problem is spiritual sin exalted spirituality and special meanings and innovative understandings that the early church never knew but you see and you understand because you have special light that would be the kind of danger to which we are subject.

So I'm very concerned when I find eminent ministers unable to bring themselves to the place where they can actually say and actually confess that yes, the blessed hope of the church is the literal return of the same one who was crucified and ascended to heaven and is coming again that this was the historic hope.

And it needs again also to be ours. The failure to be able to confess that and to say well I'm not sure what form it's going to take sounds like a very modest and meek, humble kind of reticence but I want to say it may well be just the opposite.

It may be the statement of a kind of egotism and arrogance that refuses to say what the historic church has all along been able to say to it's glory. And that we need again to be to say also to confess that there's a lord coming in his own glorified body whom my own people have pierced and we by our own sins what right have we to ascribe another meaning to that which has been so clearly articulated by the lord and the apostles and understood historically by the church fathers as the hope of the church is that not itself the very essence of arrogance.

Is that not itself a conceit that we have to find a meaning which somehow they were not required to have. And if we have that kind of egotism albeit it's not carnal but spiritual how then are we in his image.

How is that the image of the lamb of god the meek one when we ourselves have come to an exalted place in our own spirituality as to find hidden meanings for which the early church had no requirement or to encourage a hope for immortality that is biblically reserved for the last trump at the appearing of the lord when the dead will be raised incorruptible and we shall be changed.

What necessity to articulate another doctrine another hope, another way of obtaining what god has clearly already prescribed in the scripture is the way that he intends to provide it. Is that not an egotism.

Is that not a kind of arrogance. Is that not the kind of thing that can lend itself to a deception. Some commentators link the restoration of Israel with the coming of the lord. I believe that myself and that when Paul says and what shall they return be but life from the dead is more than a statement of the kind of value that will come to the world by a nation that has been apostate and now becomes the nation of Paul's with a great evangelical heart for the nations that they now presently despise that will be true.

But it may also be true that with their repentant return the lord who is pent up in heavens waiting for all the things that have of which the prophets have been spoken to be restored is himself released.

And that by his appearing the dead rise so that the restoration of Israel is indeed keyed in and joined with the resurrection of the dead in Christ. So what will their return be but life from the dead.

But of course if I were to speak to you about the doctrine of the return of Israel the restoration of Israel from historic apostasy would I be dealing in circumcision. Would I be a dog. Would I be promulgating some dead letter or rather something that was alive in the consciousness and expectancy of the apostolic church.