Covenant versus Dispensational

And we are really privileged this evening to have Andrew Rappaport with us.

Some of the background, for those of you who don't know, and for those of you who do know, some of the background, he grew up in a

Jewish home and was saved at the age of 16. We do wanna hear a little bit about that somewhere along the line.

That's a great story. He went to Calvary Baptist Theological Seminary where he got a master's in theological studies.

He and his wife, Yip, live in Langhorne, PA, where he serves as a preaching pastor at the

Master's Church in Bucks County. And so we're privileged to have you here. They have two adult children,

Timothy and Shannon. Some of his background, he's the founder and president of Striving for Eternity Ministries.

That's the banner on the table out there, isn't it? Yes, it is. He has lots of good stuff out there for you to purchase, to take home.

He is the author of a book, What Do They Believe? And then I think there's also a book out, What Do We Believe?

They're both. Systematic Theologies, What Do They Believe? Systematic Theologies of Major Western Religions.

Good things to know. It's good things to know when you're in and amongst the enemy's camp to know what they are.

His seminars include biblical hermeneutics, systematic theology, world religions, and cults.

And today his intent is to talk to us about dispensationalism and covenant theology.

And then next week he's gonna go deeper into the topics of dispensationalism.

Before I ask Andrew to come up, I encourage you next week to come back at six o 'clock.

And I apologize for those who heard that Andrew's presentation was gonna start at six.

It starts at 6 .30. Andrew's presentation will start at 6 .30 next week.

But at six o 'clock we're gonna have a good old -fashioned hymn singing for about 20 minutes. And so we invite you all for that next week before we bring

Andrew up. With that, I'm going to step down because I'd love to be up here. And let Andrew, please, thank you.

Well, good evening. How many of you have been here before when

I've been at the conferences that you guys have held? Okay, so I'm new to some of you.

Okay, then I guess I will give my testimony. I was trying to get away from it. I think

I've given it every year that I've been here. So some of you might be able to come up and do this testimony, right? I was raised in a

Jewish home, so therefore I was saved the exact same way everyone else was.

There's nothing special about a Jewish person that gets saved. Okay, that aside,

I think that people are somehow surprised that a Jewish person gets saved, so they want to hear more. And it really is not,

I actually thought for many years that I used to say I didn't have a very exciting testimony.

I'd listen to all these people that are down and out, and mine was just logical. I'm an engineer by trade. I mean, it's just,

I had a guy that in three and a half hours took me through the Old Testament prophecies and New Testament fulfillments, and I did some calculations in my head and realized that it is mathematically impossible for the

New Testament to have not been written by God. You cannot fulfill the prophecies that I put in the category of coincidence by chance.

And so I believe the New Testament didn't know anything about Christ. I'm still believing that Jesus Christ is Hitler's God, because that's how

I was raised. And so with that, I basically had, told this guy

Chuck, tell me more about what the Bible, you know, what does the

New Testament teach? So he talked about this guy, Jesus Christ, dying and being buried and raising from the dead three days later, and I was like, stop, stop.

Dead people don't rise. I came up with, have any of you read Josh McDowell's work, More Than a Carpenter?

Okay, so some of you. So I have every one of the ones that, of the arguments of how to explain the resurrection, like they got the wrong tomb, or maybe he just fainted and he walked out late.

I came up with all of those. I got one that, as far as I know, is still original with me. My last argument to Chuck was, well, maybe the disciples dug a hole under the tomb, came up through the body, through the center, took the body out and snuck it out.

And Chuck goes, in three days? They didn't have heavy equipment back then. And so I hung my head and I said, you know,

I said, that's a problem. And he says, what's wrong? I said, well, if Jesus Christ rose from the dead, then that means that he's God.

And if Jesus Christ is God, then I'm accountable to him. What do I have to do to be saved?

So in three hours, three and a half hours, I went from believing that Jesus Christ is Hitler's God to a follower of Christ.

So that's the short version. If you want the longer version, I have a couple podcasts that go into it. And I have the testimony on the website that has the longer version.

But I'm gonna open in a word of prayer and then let's start talking about, this isn't so much where we're gonna be opening scriptures because this is more of theological systems.

So it's more of a teaching time. So with that, I don't mind if you have questions to ask them now.

I know Pastor Jeff said to do about an hour and then a half an hour Q &A. We'll still do the half an hour Q &A.

But if you have questions in the middle, that's fine. But let's start with a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, we come before you at this hour.

Lord, it's a time where we're not so much studying your word itself, but studying about how to interpret your word.

And we don't wanna be wrong in that area. For if we're wrong in how we interpret it, we come up with wrong interpretations.

So Lord, during this time, may you help us to understand the history, how we've come to understand the interpretations.

We ask this in Christ's name, amen. I will admit, by the way, I have some great notes from myself for tonight, and they're sitting on my desk at home.

It's great, that's where they should be. Have a whole bunch of history.

Now I gotta do it from memory. So we'll see how well I do. Hopefully, none of you have a background in church history, and I could say anything, and you'll just believe it and don't check it.

If I'm wrong, I'll just have to correct it next week. See, that's the advantage of coming back next week, right? All right, so anyone familiar with the terms dispensationalism?

Raise a hand, just so I understand. Okay, how many people know the term covenant theology?

Okay, how many people know that covenant theology is what the

Roman Catholic Church teaches? Yeah, see, this is where we start from.

Where we start is that when we look at the way the church formed, the Catholic Church is what actually started teaching what's called covenant theology.

So you have, if we go early back to the early founding fathers of the church, you end up seeing that you started very early on with a man that we end up seeing as Augustine.

Many of you may know that name. He popularized a way of interpreting the scriptures by allegory.

Now his theology was very sound, but he would take the Bible and he would look for hidden meanings.

Anyone familiar with the book Pilgrim's Progress? I like that book, it's simple. You don't have to figure out much about the characters.

Christian is a Christian. Worldly wise man is a worldly wise man.

I mean, it's really easy to figure out who the characters are. I like that, so simple. But that's an allegorical book where everything has meanings that you read into it, right?

They just make the allegories really easy. You don't have to guess. When you meet ignorance, you know what ignorance is.

He's ignorant, right? So you end up seeing all of that in his allegory.

But when you start looking at the Bible, one of the things that many people who studied the

Bible started to do was to recognize the fact that, gee, you know, if you dug in and you said, well, this looks something similar to over here, and you start slamming a whole lot of scripture references together, it looks really impressive.

And it does. It looks really impressive when you hear someone stringing this whole system together, and it seems like it just fits so perfectly.

And, you know, this really means this, and it really means that to fit into what you're trying to get with your system.

And people were very impressed. It's kind of like today if you see like an evidential apologist.

An evidential apologist is a guy who studies all the science, and he can give you all these cool facts, and you get really impressed and go, wow, that guy's so amazing,

I can never learn that. And then a guy like me who's a presuppositional gets up and goes, it's in the Bible. That's not very impressive.

Right? Like everyone's like, well, I could do that. Yes, that's right, that's really it. It's just that easy, right?

So you just, God exists, he has spoken. There's presuppositionalism right there, right?

And it's not impressive. Well, the same thing was happening. You had these preachers that started looking for more in the

Bible than, and trying to find ways of interpretation. And so you had the, what was called the

Alexandrian school, which was the idea that things have extra meanings, double meanings, a spiritual meaning.

Augustine was one that's most popularized, but others like Clement, Origen, some of the other early founding fathers had really started doing this.

And then came a school known as the Antioch school. Now the Antioch school of thought, the person most known for that is

John Constantinum. He was called Golden Tongue. He was such an eloquent preacher that they called him

Golden Tongue. And so he had come later, but he believed in taking the

Bibles for what it says. You take it literally, you read it literally, and don't look for some extra meaning or hidden meaning.

And what really happened was the Catholic church had really taken this allegorical way of approaching the scriptures.

And they looked at this, and they started to build this. Now if we understand Roman Catholicism, you can understand why it benefits them to be viewing it allegorically.

Because they're gonna be looking at anything they want and making it say, well this really means the church. On Peter is the rock.

Oh, that church is founded on the popes. No, that's not what it says there, right?

Oh, no, but Peter really is a symbol for all the popes, and therefore

Jesus was saying that the church is the authority. You see, you could do that when you're doing allegory, and the

Catholic church did a lot of that. And so what ended up happening is you had a guy like Luther.

And Luther was studying, and he was reading the Bible, and he looked at it and says, wait, no, this is literally what it means. And so he would read it literally.

And then we had a guy named John Calvin. What John Calvin did was he took the literal understanding from John Cathonsome, but with the theology of Augustine, and we have a reformation.

Now some of you may be saying, now Andrew, you're saying the Catholic church is what teaches covenant theology, but I have friends of mine that believe in covenant theology.

No, they don't. They believe in Reformed theology. That's actually what

John Calvin started, what was known as Reformed theology. Now here's the thing with it.

We understand that people nowadays kind of confuse these two terms. Actually, no, they don't. They just mess it up even more, because when we speak of covenant theology in Christian circles, most people think we're talking about Reformed theology when it was what was

Reformed theology. So then what's Reformed theology? Most people think that's Calvinism. Well, not really, because it's just talking about the doctrines of grace when it comes to salvation.

So we really mess up terms, okay, and that's what makes some of this confusing. So really what we have to understand is that when we look at whether it's covenant theology, and I will use covenant theology or Reformed theology synonymously at this point, because you now understand the history of it, but because so many people use the term covenant theology,

I'm gonna use those terms. Even though the terms, they've kind of morphed, you know?

We should not like words being redefined. I mean, like I still, maybe I'm old school, but I still think boy means a boy and a girl means a girl.

I don't know. Our culture seems to be different, but what we end up seeing is that as we look at this, these are actually ways of interpreting the

Bible. That's really what it is. It's a science called hermeneutics, okay? Hermeneutics is the art and science of interpretation.

It's how we interpret, which is what you, whether you think you know hermeneutics or not, you do. You know how

I know that? Because you're using it right now. Because you know that the words coming out of my mouth are making sense to you and you're interpreting them, but if I say something like blue cow jumps over the red moon, you realize that makes absolutely no sense.

Why? Because you practiced hermeneutics. Whether you realized it or not, you practiced it, right?

You understand things like context. You understand that words have meanings and you're putting those together naturally.

We all apply hermeneutics every day, but the thing is when we come to the

Bible, some people say, well, no, the Bible's a spiritual book, so we have a different way of interpreting that, okay?

And the way that I will end up arguing, do more so next week, is when we look at dispensationalism, a dispensationalist will come to the

Bible and say, no, we interpret this with the same rules of hermeneutics that we use for everything else, okay?

So we look at covenant theology, it is a way of interpreting scripture. When we look at dispensationalism, it is a way of interpreting scripture.

They're just two different ways. One is more allegorical and one is gonna be more literal.

Now notice I say more. I don't say one is literal and one is allegorical, okay?

Because what we're gonna have to understand is there's a spectrum, okay? So over here, we have our extreme spectrum where everything's allegory.

That's Harold Camping, if you ever remember that guy. You know, everything meant something else. It never meant what it actually said, right?

I actually, this is so bad, but I actually called into his program once because I just wanted to see.

In Leviticus, I think it's 14, it talks about a house that has leprosy. Now, what that actually talks about is a house that has leprosy.

We now know that diseases can attach themselves to surfaces, right? We got all from, that's why we all have to practice this social distancing, right?

So what you end up having is a house with leprosy. I literally called into his program because I go, there's no way he's gonna actually say that there's a house with leprosy.

I was right. Oh, he jumped all over the Bible. I don't remember how he got to where he got, but somehow he got somewhere where leprosy actually represented sin and the house was the temple of God.

It was like, I mean, it was almost entertainment for me to see how he was doing gymnastics to get to things. Because he's all the way over here that everything is allegory.

Well, actually, I should do it, well, it works for you. This is my right, so to you, it's the left. We wanna be on the right for the literalness right now.

So you have allegory. Then you have over here where you have really what we'd call covenant theology or reform theology.

I'm gonna say covenant theology for now, okay? Where there's a lot of allegory, but there's gonna be some things that are still, it's gonna be a little literal, so we're going a little bit further on this spectrum than the total allegory would be.

But then you have a camp that's actually, that's come up recently in the last like 20, 30 years called new covenant theology.

New covenant theology is a spectrum that's kinda guys that are in the covenant theology camp, but guess what happened?

They started to like hang out with some of those guys, those evil dispensationalists, or maybe not, but they don't actually wanna admit dispensationalists are right, but they go, but you know what, there's a lot there, so they kinda, they start realizing that things should be more literal, and so they go over here.

Then you have over here a camp, well, actually, we should start over on this side. So you have those super literalists, right?

These would be, you have the, we're sometimes called the hyper -dispensationalists, the people who say only the books of Paul are what we have for the

Bible. Everything else is not for the church. I don't know if you've ever met those people, but there are them. Then you have the classic dispensationalists.

You'll have the guys who, you know, from when dispensationalists first started in the 1900s, they had everything that was really, really literal, but they were working on it, and then they worked on it more, and Charles Ryrie came out over here with Dispensationalism Today, the book that he wrote, and so that's kinda, was a little bit closer in here, and then you have progressive dispensationalism.

Really, progressive dispensationalism and New Covenant Theology, they're right here. I think the only difference between those two is how they interpret the end -time prophecies.

Dispensationalists take a position, and New Covenant Theology goes, I don't know. That's basically what it is.

New Covenant Theology can be anywhere in end times. The only difference there is they don't take the same hermeneutic that they take everywhere else in the

Bible. They don't apply that for the future, and that allows them to be amillennial, postmillennial, premillennial.

They could be any of those. By the way, I'm pro -millennial. If there is a millennium, I am all for it, okay?

So, the, actually, I'm premillennial, but I like the joke.

So, what you end up seeing is that there's a spectrum that we talk about, right? And what the spectrum is gonna be, how allegorical you are to how literal you are.

And we always have to realize that this spectrum, there's people in this spectrum that aren't perfectly in any one of the camps, generally.

And so, when we look at it, we have to figure out how someone does their interpretation, okay?

And so, that's the one thing I want you to first see, is that this is a way of interpreting. And the first thing is gonna be, when we look at it, is how literal or how allegorical.

Now, I'm gonna say that the way we should interpret the Bible is in a normal hermeneutic.

What do I mean by normal? If I say, I'm so hungry, I can eat a cow, how many of you believe that I can eat a whole cow by myself in one sitting?

None of you have seen me eat before, okay. There was a time that I think

I could have. But no, you know that as a youth, as a, I just forgot the word.

But it's a way of speaking that I don't mean it to be literal, right? When I had our pre -marriage counseling with my wife, if you look at my wife, you'll realize she wasn't born in this country.

So, English is her second language. And my pastor sat down, and this literally was the very first marriage counseling that I got from my pastor.

He turns to my future bride and says, if you try to make sense of him, you'll be trying to do that until the cows come home.

And some of you are going, yeah, that's because the pastor's saying that he's crazy, right? You know what she was trying to understand? What do cows have to do with this?

See, she didn't understand that phrase. Okay? It's a way of speaking.

And when we say, till the cows come home, especially anyone that's a farmer or has been on a farm with cows, you realize they go grazing all day, and whenever they feel like it, they come back.

We understand that. If you understand it means, well, just, it's gonna take forever. Right?

If I say that no man knows the day or the hour, does that sound familiar to something?

People ask Jesus, when's the end times? If no man knows the day or the hour, only the Father knows.

And you obviously know that that's a, I wish I could remember what the word is. I hate getting older.

I wanna say euthemism, but it's not that. But it's a phrase of speech. Okay, any idiom, thank you.

Eventually you will think of it. It's an idiom. Any of you know what that idiom is? See, most people will sit there and read that passage of Scripture, and they'll go, well, that's saying that Jesus in his humanity didn't know something that in his deity he did.

Well, if you start splitting his humanity in his deity, you just fell into a heresy. So don't do that.

You go, well, wait a minute, then how could he not know something? Well, it's an idiom for a marriage.

You see, if you understand the Jewish idiom, you don't have a problem reading that. The Jewish idiom has to do with a marriage. See, the son doesn't know the day he's getting married.

Only the father knows. So when you'd ask the question, when you ask a question, because what would end up happening, the way this idiom started was the son would be asked, when are you getting married?

Basically the answer's only the father knows. So he would say, you know, many angels don't know, only the father knows.

And if you actually read the context that two times it's used, you'll see that the idea of the idiom is to be living with expectancy that any day could be.

And if you read the context, they both get us what it says, to live in an expected lifestyle, right?

You also see in there references to a wedding, right?

So it fits with the context. But so many people don't take the time to understand idioms sometimes. Sometimes they take the idiom, in this case, and take it literal.

And what they end up doing is falling into heresy without realizing it by dividing the natures of Jesus Christ.

You see, so if we mess up an idiom, it could be troublesome. And this is a common one that I very rarely hear people that understand it as an idiom.

I remember the first time that particular pastor, my pastor was preaching that, and he's preaching it, and he spent 20 minutes explaining how

Jesus Christ could know something in his divinity, but not know it in his humanity.

And I was like, but the two natures coexist and co -communicate, and there can't be that separation.

How could that be? And I was really puzzled by it. I went up to the pastor afterwards, and I just said, why didn't you just tell everyone it's a

Jewish idiom that means a wedding feast to live expectantly? He was like, it does? I'm like, well, yeah.

See, I thought everyone knew that, but I realized not everyone grew up in a Jewish household, so sorry. Right, so this becomes a thing, is sometimes it's harder for us to understand the scriptures because we don't always understand all the phrases of speech.

That's what takes the study. So we have this covenant theology that a lot of people were believing.

They come out of the Catholic Church. They're now believing in a reformed theology, and then you end up having the dispensationalism.

Now, let me explain some of the major differences between these two camps so you understand them, okay?

There's gonna be three things that really are the, what's called the sine qua non. That's Latin, which basically means without none.

So these are the three things that you cannot, these are three things that define dispensationalism, okay?

And without these, you don't have dispensationalism. One is a normal or literal hermeneutic.

That's what I'm saying when you, you're going to interpret idioms as if they're allegorical because they're meant to be, but you're gonna take everything literal unless it clearly doesn't fit in a literal sense.

So you want to take what's supposed to be literal, literal, what's supposed to be figurative, figurative.

That seems kind of easy, right? Now, in the covenant camp, they're gonna be taking things more allegorically.

So they're gonna be looking for spiritual meanings to things. They're gonna be looking for things that have a dual meaning.

Now, do we have passages that have a dual meaning? Well, yes, because in the Old Testament, where it's going to say out of Egypt, I will call my son, that speaks of Israel.

But then when Matthew says it, it speaks of Christ. Now, a covenant theologian will look at that and say, see, clearly you couldn't understand the

Old Testament without first understanding the New Testament. Well, that could be, or it could be that God meant it for Israel, and he knew he had a dual meaning for Christ.

You know how I knew he had a dual meaning? Because I read Matthew, right?

Just because God does it there doesn't mean he does this everywhere. And when we start looking at the

Bible and saying, well, if he does it here, he's gonna do it here and here and here, we can make the Bible say anything, okay?

And this is why I'm gonna end up arguing, I'm gonna show my bias, right? I'm gonna argue that we should be more in a normal interpretation, okay?

So the first sine qua non is a normal or literal interpretation. The second thing is a distinction between Israel and the church, a distinction between Israel and the church.

Now, again, we had this spectrum over here with allegorical to literal, right?

Well, there's the same spectrum with over here, Israel and the church are completely one.

There is no difference between Old Testament Israel and the church to where if you go all the way over here,

Israel and the church have nothing to do with each other, right, the guys that were over here don't even read anything other than the writings of Paul because everything else was meant for Israel.

He was the apostle to the Gentiles, so we only read the Gentile writings, okay? So you see the extremes.

The extremes are usually always wrong, right? The truth is usually in the middle. So you're gonna have this spectrum.

We use the terms continuity and discontinuity, okay?

Basically meaning how much similarity or distinction is there between Israel and the church?

Is Israel in the Old Testament just Old Testament church and we're New Testament Israel?

Well, the guys over here in covenant theology would say yes. Now, some that are over here would say, well, actually it's two administrations of the same people.

So one body of God's children, just two administrations, an Old Testament and a

New Testament. When you get over here more in the dispensational camp, we're gonna be saying, no, there's a distinction between Israel and the church.

Israel's Israel and the church is the church. And what the covenant theologian's gonna say, oh, but wait,

I read in Romans where Paul says, not all Israel is Israel.

See, so that means that there's a spiritual Israel. Okay, we'll get back to that.

Because that is gonna open a bigger can of worms for us, but I want to set the stage so you understand what we're gonna have to deal with.

So a big part of what we're gonna see in the distinctions between Israel and the church, or sorry, between covenant theology and dispensational theology is really the question, what do you do with Israel?

Are they the same or are they distinct? And how much similarity is there or how much distinction is there?

That's what's gonna bring where you are on that spectrum. The thing

I said about the new covenant theologians, they see that distinction between Israel and the church.

That's why they're very close to the progressive dispensationalists. There really is no difference.

When New Covenant Theology was just getting started, I actually happened to be friends with the guy who literally wrote the book on New Covenant Theology, Fred Zaspel, wrote the very first book on that theology.

And so I was able to have direct contact with all the guys that were working on this.

And when I was in seminary, I wrote a paper on New Covenant Theology. And my conclusion basically was, which some of the more covenant guys didn't like,

Fred came from dispensationalism and went to New Covenant, but the guys that went from covenant to New Covenant didn't like my paper.

Because I basically said that it seems like New Covenant Theology are people that realize dispensationalism is right, they just don't want to admit it.

Because they basically agree with all the premise, but they just still have their foot in the covenant theology because they've been bashing the dispensationalism so long they don't want to accept it.

Needless to say, they didn't like the paper so much. But that's really where it seems to be, is that there is not as much difference as people make it to be.

Interesting thing that one of my seminary professors had said, I remember getting together with him for lunch after I was out of seminary, and he was getting together the week before with one of the guys at Westminster.

Now Westminster's Presbyterian, that's gonna be covenant theology. I was at a Fundamentalist Baptist seminary, we're dispensational.

So I was asking how that works. And he goes, oh for me, he's an

Old Testament scholar, he's like, for me it's fine. I mean I get together with the Old Testament scholars at Westminster, and we just say, we open the

Bible, and we say, what does the text mean? And we agree, he says the systematic theologians, oh they can't get along at all.

And that's an important point, are you looking at just what the text says, and often when you're using a hermeneutic, you're coming to similar conclusions with some of the text, it's our systematic theology that sometimes influences that, sometimes that's what draws the conclusions, not the text.

So the third thing, before I get back to Israel and the church, the third sine qua non, is a difference in covenant theology, they're gonna talk about a

Christological approach to Scripture, in other words, Scripture is about Jesus Christ, and you will find

Jesus Christ on every page of Scripture. This was the very reason

I called into Harold Camping, because I wanted to know how a house that has a disease on it is getting

Christ in there. So it took him a while to figure that out, how he was gonna jump over the Bible to make that talk about Christ.

See, but as a dispensationalist, I'm gonna say that the purpose of Scripture is for God's glory, a doxological approach.

You see, so when I come to Scripture, everything in Scripture glorifies God. It doesn't have to necessarily be about Jesus Christ.

So when I come to a book like the Song of Solomon, the covenant theologian is gonna say, that is about Jesus Christ and his marriage to the church.

And I go, wait a minute, are you telling me that for like 1 ,000 years, nobody knew what

Solomon meant by what he wrote? Like we had to have a church first.

That was 1 ,000 years later. Did no one understand Song of Solomon until Christ?

Well, see, if I take a doxological approach, I could look at Song of Solomon and say, this is a picture of what a marriage should look like.

The love that should be within a marriage, because a loving relationship within a marriage glorifies

God. See, I can look at the Song of Solomon and know what it's teaching without having to wait till Christ.

Okay, and so that's gonna affect some things. Now, when you look at these two systems, covenant theology and dispensationalism,

I had to take a class on dispensationalism in school. Here's the interesting thing. I'm the type of person, and my wife could tell you

I drive her nuts with this, I do original research. So if when I'm studying on Mormonism, I study actual documents from Mormonism.

I'm gonna read the Book of Mormon. I'm gonna read Pearl of Great Price, Doctrine and Covenants. When I'm gonna study

Islam, I'm gonna read the Quran. When I'm gonna study Judaism, I'm gonna study the Talmud. I'm gonna study the original source.

I'm not gonna read someone that is gonna say, oh, well, this is what they believe, because I've all too often found out when you check the references, like someone says, oh, this is what they believe.

Muslims believe that when they die, they're gonna get 70 virgins. You go and you check that fact, and you find out, well, that's not in the

Quran. That's in some Hadiths, but not all Muslims believe that. So now when you say all

Muslims believe this, it's not actually accurate. So sometimes when you go back and you check the references, you find out they don't all work.

So I'm reading a dispensationalist, and he's gonna explain the difference between dispensationalism and covenant theology. I'm gonna paraphrase this, but basically he said something like this.

Covenant theology believes in two ways of salvation. Works in the

Old Testament with a covenant of works, grace in the New Testament with a covenant of grace.

But we dispensationalists believe that ever since the fall, it has always been by grace.

And I read that and went, well, I guess I'm a dispensationalist, because I believe that ever since the fall, it's been by grace. But wanting to be accurate,

I always wanna read both sides of the argument, so I read a covenant theologian. Paraphrasing him, he said that dispensationalists believe in two ways of salvation.

Works in the Old Testament, referencing the Schofield reference notes that was one of the things that many people looked at with dispensationalism, where it actually said that people were saved by works.

And then he says grace in the New Testament. But we covenant theologians believe that ever since the fall, it has been by grace.

And I went, wait a minute. I pulled the other book off the shelf and I looked at them and I went, you know, there's a lot of trees that have died for this.

The irony was, the next thing I noticed was that both of those books that I was reading were by the same publisher, right?

They were making money both sides. And yet, no one's taking the time to actually step back and go, what are you actually saying?

Oh, you believe that? That's exactly what I believe. Like there isn't this distinction that we think. And so this is one of the problems we have within these camps because so much of it throws daggers at the other side that aren't true, okay?

For many in the covenant theology camp, what they think dispensationalism is, is a premillennial view of end times.

They think that's all it is. Anytime I have someone that says, well, you know, I say, well,

I'm dispensationalist. They go, well, I don't believe in premillennialism. That's nice, I didn't talk about that. I'm talking about how you interpret the

Bible, right? I'm not talking about where it leads. See, when you take the

Bible in a consistent, normal interpretation, you're going to end up premillennial.

But that's the byproduct. You never judge a system by its byproduct, right?

And we wouldn't wanna really judge America by our presidents sometimes, right? That's the byproduct of how we vote.

You know, sometimes it does reflect, unfortunately, where America is, but we don't wanna judge a system by its byproduct.

And what we end up seeing is, there's a lot of misunderstanding in these discussions because of the fact that many people have straw man arguments that they've erected, and because of that, it's much easier to burn the straw man down than actually deal with what people say.

And so there's not as much, disagreement in some of the camps as people like to think.

So, let me deal with the big thing of Israel and the church, okay? The reason being is,

Israel and the church is the major issue that you're gonna see between the two camps. But to do that, what

I wanna do is give you a little history lesson, all right? And if I go too quick on this,

I'm gonna give you the benefit, it's all written down in a book that's on a table in the back called

What Do We Believe? Okay? But I have a chapter in my book on the history of the church.

How do we know what the church is? The church itself, the Greek word ekklesia, has morphed over time, it's changed.

See, ekklesia in Ephesus originally meant, it was the original term for when you had people gathering for the purpose of voting, when they'd have an election.

They would gather together, and they would go and vote. And that was the ekklesia.

Okay? But it changed over time. See, after Christ, we see this word ekklesia having a little bit of a different meaning.

Now it has the meaning of where people gather for a specific purpose, not for voting, but for worship of God.

But then, you know, that definition didn't work so well when the Roman Catholic Church started messing things up.

Because now you had people who were told, just by one man's edict, the emperor just goes, we're all

Christian. Now that's not how we become Christians, is it? No, and so you don't have one emperor just say, we're all

Christian, and we're Christian. So now, the theologians were trying to figure out, not everybody in the church, the ekklesia, is really the church.

You see? And so they started to try to say, how do we distinguish this? Well, they started talking about the invisible church and the visible church.

The invisible church is a church that we can't see. It's all believers, everywhere in the world.

The visible church is those that gather. Now, some refer to this as the universal or local church, because those are a little bit easier to understand.

The universal church is believers everywhere. It's only believers, and it's believers no matter where they are, no matter what time period, that make up the church.

Now, those are the church that we'd say is God's children, right, because not everybody is God's children. Only those who believe in Christ have the right to be called a child of God, John 1, 12.

So not everyone is the church, but yet we see people that gather in the church, and we go, you know, we start to realize that there's some people in the church that are not of the church, aren't they?

Right, they sit every week and take up a space in the church building, and yet they're not saved.

And so they started to make this distinction, to make a distinction between those that are the church, those that are saved individuals, regenerate, and those that attend a local gathering that's a mixture of saved and unsaved people.

Does that make sense? Okay, it's gonna be important to remember that, because I believe that all the distinction hangs on that distinction right there, okay?

So what you end up having is the church over time has to be a little bit more specific. During the Puritan period, the

Puritans come along and they're trying to be a little bit more specific because the state now owns the church, and they're trying to wrestle with this.

How do we define what a true church is? So they ended up saying that a true church is a body of believers that gather for the worship of God.

It's made up of local believers that are believers, or a local church is believers and unbelievers, but the universal church is everywhere only believers.

But they gather for the purpose of three things. The preaching of God's word, the practicing of ordinances, and this one's gonna surprise you, the purity of the church suit church discipline.

They felt that church discipline was of such high importance to keep the church pure, that that was the third marker to define the church.

So what ends up happening is as the church keeps morphing, in the 1900s, we have men that were gathered that started to realize that there was some distinction that should be made with Israel and the church.

Now the Reformation occurred, and they have a phrase they have in Latin that's reformed and still reforming.

But those guys are always in this camp, the covenant camp, and I always go, well keep reforming, and you'll come over here where we are, because we're the guys that kept reforming.

You were reformed, and we kept reforming. Because we saw that there was more to the church, and not only was the church a gathering of those for the worship of God, that locally were believers and unbelievers, and universally were only believers, that it would be where you practice the preaching, you practice the ordinances, you practice church discipline, but even more so, it's distinct from Israel, national

Israel. So we reformed more. Now, what you end up having is, when we speak of Israel, there's a confusion.

We speak of Israel, and people think of the nation of Israel. But see, to a covenant theologian, they think of spiritual

Israel. So now this is something that I haven't heard anyone else teach.

This is something just that, as I've studied with it, and engaged with many covenant theologians, I started to recognize something.

And I think this is why Pastor Jeff, when he listened to my podcast, dealing with this, he wanted me to teach on this.

But the thing is that I started to recognize that the problem we have is, just like the early church realized we have a problem when we say church, because what is the church?

I mean, locally, you got believers and unbelievers. When we speak of church in the Bible, we speak only of believers. Which one is it?

Well, actually, in the Bible, sometimes it refers to a church that's a local gathering made of unbelievers. How do I know that? Because we have names of people that were in the church, even some that were deacons, that have walked away.

And we know from John that if they've walked away, they went out from among us, they were never of us.

They were just hypocrites that stopped pretending. And so we know that there were unbelievers in the church, and yet they were called church.

You see that dilemma? The problem with the covenant theologians is they have that same dilemma with Israel.

When we speak of Israel, the question is, are you speaking of spiritual Israel or national Israel? In other words, are you speaking of the universal

Israel or the local Israel? Right? That's the argument that Paul's gonna make.

Not all Israel is Israel. What's he saying when he's saying that?

He's saying that you have the nation of Israel, that's the local gathering, right?

Local or the visible Israel. And they're all there. And they're believers and unbelievers.

But then you have this spiritual Israel that's made up only of believers. That would be the invisible or universal

Israel. Okay, now I'm saying this, say, I don't know anybody that speaks in the terms of universal or invisible

Israel and visible or local Israel. But what I'm doing is I'm taking the same terminology that we have for the church in how we define the church and I apply it to Israel and it really cleans everything up.

Because what you find is most often what people that are in the covenant camp are doing is they're mixing up those two ideas of Israel.

And when they speak of Israel, they're speaking of spiritual Israel is the church.

Okay? But then you say, well, but you're sitting there and listening to me going, yeah, but what are you gonna do with all the laws?

And you're thinking national Israel, right? And that's where we have the dilemma. This is where I think they end up with the confusion.

So when we look at Old Testament Israel, the Old Testament Israel was a nation of people made up of some believers that we know from Isaiah, there would always be a remnant.

And I am very, very happy when I read that. I'm glad when I read that remnant because I'm part of that remnant, right?

So when you look at that, there was a part of the nation that was gonna be saved and a part that wasn't gonna be saved.

So when we read Paul saying that not all of Israel is Israel, that's nothing different than what we would see when we say, what is the church between the invisible and the visible?

He could have said it in the language that we use for the church being invisible and visible.

Not all of the visible Israel is the invisible Israel.

It's the same, if we put that same language, we then see the distinction. And what you end up seeing in covenant theology, because they see that Israel and the church is one, you'll see that with them, the

Old Testament law has more meaning for the church. As dispensationalists, we would say, well, no, we don't have this view of the law.

So a Presbyterian, for example, I remember I was speaking, I was preaching for a pastor for a month and in a

Presbyterian church. Now, me being a dispensationalist, I have no problem going on a

Sunday to a Dunkin' Donuts and picking up a cup of coffee, okay? And I did that this one

Sunday and I got my coffee and I actually was really upset because I forgot it in the car when we walked into church.

It was God's providence, actually, because when the pastor of the church was speaking during the other service, he's talking about the

Sabbath and one of the examples he says is that it's a sin to go to the Dunkin' Donuts, that was his example, because you're making someone work on the

Sabbath and I went, thank you, Jesus, for making me forget, because I was really upset that I forgot that coffee in the morning.

I was really glad by the end of the morning, right? But this was his view that the

Sabbath is for the church on Sunday and you do not work on the Sabbath. Now, we would look at this and say, well, that was for Israel and we're not

Israel. You see how the distinction between Israel and the church can affect the way the church behaves?

So what do we do with the Sabbath? Well, let's go back to Genesis. It's always good to start at the beginning.

When did the Sabbath begin? In creation, what day?

Seventh day, this was supposed to be a softball question. All right. On the seventh day, right, we have the

Sabbath. That is a Sabbath that was constructed by God for the purpose of resting, okay?

That was a universal law for all mankind. But then Moses comes along and gives all these laws that we often don't read about.

Like, they're in the book of Leviticus, it's that book you skip over in your annual devotions, right?

It's like, you know, Jesus is talking about Genesis, Exodus, Psalms, you know? So in Leviticus, you have all these laws to do on the

Sabbath. You know, what you can do, you can't make bread, you can't do this, you can walk this far.

They came up with their own things of how far you can walk. But you had laws that were for Israel.

Now, those were for the nation. But, you know, most of the laws, and this is the thing we have to understand, when it comes to those laws, do you know the purpose of many of the laws?

Now, if you talk to a covenant theologian, they're gonna talk in this language. They're gonna talk about a tri -part law.

Three parts. Ceremonial, moral, and civil.

Okay? Ceremonial, moral, and civil. So they're gonna say the moral law, that's like the 10 commandments, that applies to everyone everywhere.

The civil law, well, those were just the laws for the nation, like the governing laws.

The ceremonial laws, well, those were only laws that were necessary up till Jesus came, because Jesus then fulfilled those laws, and you don't need them anymore.

And so my challenge to people is, okay, let me go through Leviticus. There's 613 laws.

Let's go there. Okay, let me give you the first one. Tell me which one this falls under. Tell me where in scripture it says that that's civil.

Which one's the moral one? Which one's the ceremonial one? You know why that's really hard to do?

Because the Bible doesn't define it that way. All right? But God does tell us that there's a purpose for the law.

It was to keep the nation Israel separated from the countries around them.

You know, there's a biblical word for what it means to be separated. We use the word holy.

That's what holy means, to be set apart. Israel was to be set apart from the other nations.

So God instructed laws for them, such as what they could do on the

Sabbath, what they can eat, what they could wear. All of these laws that they disobeyed over and over and over again, were there to keep them separated so that Israel would be separate and holy until the

Messiah came. Okay? Now, Israel had to learn a lesson much like many of us when we were children.

You know, we didn't quite get it until we got older. Okay, some of us waited until we were much older before we got lessons that our parents tried to teach us.

But what you end up seeing is Israel just disobeyed and disobeyed and disobeyed. In fact, the Sabbath law, they disobeyed that every seven years, they were supposed to let the land rest.

Anyone that understands anything about farming and understands why God said that, because the land either needs to rest every seven years or you need to change your crop around, right, to keep the nutrients.

And so God says every seven years, the land has to rest. But for 70 seven -year periods,

Israel disobeyed that. And God said, you know what? That's it, I'm done with you. You're going into a 70 -year captivity, 70 years for every

Sabbath year you ignored. And after that, you will never give in to idolatry again.

And they didn't. Israel never had a problem with idolatry after that. Legalism was their problem.

They went in, they created, they basically said, God, you have 613 laws, we're gonna add 10 ,000.

That's called the Talmud. There's thousands of laws that they added, okay?

So what you end up seeing, though, with Israel is that there were laws for Israel to keep them separate from the other nations.

There was a purpose to those laws. Ceremonial? Well, yeah, they kind of are ceremonial.

Civil? Yeah, they're kind of civil. Are they moral? Well, actually, in fact, every law by definition is moral, if you think about this.

Even laws that our country makes, it's do this or do not do this. This is good and that is bad, right?

It's just sometimes we disagree when they say, no, it is bad. You Christians can't get together for church and sing.

But we can protest and riot and loot all we want, right? Okay. So what you end up seeing, though, is as we look at this,

Israel had laws that were for Israel. So you say, what do we do with the

Sabbath, for example? Well, see, I would say that there was a Sabbath started on the seventh day. God added a whole lot more laws specifically for Israel, but once that separation was no longer needed because Christ came and now the gospel goes to all the nations, we go back to that same

Sabbath day that was for Adam, a day of rest. We don't have all the other laws.

So we have one day that we devote to the worship of God. Now, that's gonna be very different than the way the covenant theologians are gonna worship a

Sabbath day. The covenant theologians are gonna have other things. I always find it interesting they don't keep kosher.

It's one of the questions I always like to ask them. Because you know what that shows is that they do see some distinction between Israel and the church, don't they?

You see, they see some distinction, but not as much as I might see. And that becomes the question is how much distinction or discontinuity versus continuity do you have?

The more discontinuity you have, the more you're gonna be on the dispensational side, where you're gonna see that they're distinct from one another.

The more continuity you're gonna see, the more you're gonna see covenant theology. And what you're gonna see with those two camps is that they're trying to figure out what to do with Israel and the church.

That's where the big rub is. And when you come to the interpreting of scripture, it affects a lot of scripture.

It's going to affect how you interpret things. How do you view things? Or do we have an obligation to keep the

Old Testament laws? Now, if you're gonna be a new covenant theologian, these are the guys that aren't covenant theology, but they're kind of dispensationalism light, right?

So what they'll say is they refer to a law of Christ. So they'll say, well, nine out of the 10 commandments were repeated.

So we as a church only have to obey those nine. Does anyone know which of the 10 commandments is not repeated in the

New Testament? Nope, that's not one of the commandments. I'll give you a hint.

I talked about it tonight. Just spent a long period of time explaining it. Sabbath. Sabbath is not repeated in the

New Testament. Do not lie, do not steal, those are in there. Now, the tithing is also not mentioned.

So you are kind of right, it just wasn't one of the commandments. Tithing was a law. Now, anyone know how many tithes there were?

You're saying seven? There's at least three. At different times, there was four. So Israel would give actually up to 30 to 40%.

So we always think of a tithe. Now, in a church that's gonna be over here in the covenant side, they're gonna believe that you must give 10%.

Catholic Church many years ago during the Dark Ages used to enforce that. The Mormon Church today enforces that.

You can't be a good Mormon without giving 10%. In fact, in some of the bishops in the

Mormon Church will actually ask to see your pay stub. And they will compare it to your giving.

And if you haven't given enough, you're not allowed to go into the temple. But we would end up seeing that, well, there's no tithe.

There's no command to tithe. Why? We're not a nation. We give.

Now, how much do we give? Well, if we're gonna try and look at some ideas, the smallest amount we have anywhere in the

Bible is a 10th. The most we have anywhere in the Bible is 100%. So if you give anywhere within that, you're good.

But it's supposed to be we give as a cheerful giver. We give out of the abundance of what

God has given us. You see how that changes the way we're gonna view things? We don't do it because it's a command for us.

We do it because we get the privilege to. All right? And so the way we view these laws are gonna be where you're gonna see this difference.

And we're gonna view the laws based upon how much distinction we have with Israel and the church.

So now let me give you how I break down the laws. Because I don't believe in this threefold definition of civil, moral, and ceremonial.

I speak of laws as universal laws. Laws that are universal for all men everywhere.

Such as keeping a Sabbath on the seventh day. Doesn't have to necessarily be on the specific seventh day like Israel had to do.

But having one out of seven days that we're going to have a day of rest. By the way, if you study anything of the

USSR, when they tried to, when communism came in, they figured working seven days wasn't enough.

They wanted to get more work out of people. And they started with a 10 -day work week. And they discovered that people were not as efficient.

And they went back to a seven -day work week. Interesting, huh? So, you end up having things like universal laws.

I would include in that the 10 Commandments. Thou shall not lie. Why is lying something that we shouldn't do?

I'll give you a very simple reason. Because God is not a liar. Thou shall not steal.

Why is stealing wrong? Because God is not a thief. Coveting.

Well, God's not a coveter. You see, when we look at the 10 Commandments, these are

Commandments that God has said He has given to all people so that they understand guilt.

So they understand right from wrong. And they have that guilty conscience when they do something that they know is wrong.

Why do they do that? Because universally, God has put in on our hearts that we know right from wrong in these universal laws.

But then there's laws that are just to Israel. And many of you are glad for that. How many of you enjoy your bacon?

Then you should be thankful that you are not in Israel. Any of you have a cheeseburger?

Well, if you've had a cheeseburger, you should be thankful that you're not of Israel. My wife, we went to a restaurant today and she ordered just a hamburger.

And someone turned to her and goes, are you kosher? So you're not allowed to mix meats and dairies.

Okay, so you can't have a cheeseburger. All right, that's not kosher. And so that's a law to the nation of Israel, that visible

Israel. All of Israel had to keep to those laws. But then there's laws for the church.

Now, if your new covenant theology would say it's the laws of Christ, that's fine if you wanna use that terminology. But I see that there are laws that apply to the church.

So there's things that apply to all of mankind. There's things that only apply to a period of time with Israel.

And then there's things that apply to the church. There's things for the church that don't apply outside the world.

For the church, we shouldn't marry unbelievers. The world doesn't have that command. They can marry whoever they want, which is kind of weird because marriage is actually a thing that God ordains, not the state.

So who actually gets to define marriage, by the way? I think that's God. So if you believe in a separation of church and state, well, we should tell the state to stay out of the church issue.

Let us define marriage the way God has, right? Simple way of doing it. I argued that when our state in New Jersey was going with accepting homosexual marriage, or actually same -sex marriage.

Homosexuals have been married for many years. They always married people of the opposite sex. But same -sex marriage was being accepted.

And I asked our senator when they had an opportunity, and I said, Senator, do you believe in a separation of church and state?

He said, yes. I said, do you really believe that? He said, yes. I said, well,

God is the one that defines marriage. If you truly believe that you'd stay out of this issue, vote no on this bill, and let

God, let the church define marriage as God has, as a man and a woman.

He didn't wanna hear after that. So my time, I thought I had more time. I really did. I thought

I had 40 more seconds, but I guess not. So what you end up seeing is that we have certain things for the church that Christ gives to us.

So when we look at this distinction, a big part of it is there's not as much distinction as people make of it, unless you get to the extremes.

But the big question when you deal with these issues, it comes to how you interpret the

Bible. And the big issue you have with that is the question of Israel and the church. That's the real rub between these two.

What do you do with Israel and the church? That's what you end up seeing is, where you're gonna fall on that line is gonna be where you are with Israel and the church, and how much allegory versus literal interpretation you're gonna have.

And then when you end up with that, you end up having applications like, what do you do with the law?

So I'm gonna open it up for questions, because you guys were supposed to ask questions during and you didn't.

Okay, who wants to ask the second question? No one ever wants to ask the first question. Who would like to ask the second question?

You all just knew this stuff before? Okay. Yeah. So on the more legalistic side, those that would be more covenantal, they're gonna be over here saying that, you know, we should be, and it's gonna be that we should have a

Sabbath day. They will look at the scriptures and say that, that because of Christ's resurrection on Sunday, that the

Sabbath moved from Saturday to Sunday, and that on Sunday, we do no work.

We don't do anything. We don't, and some will even say, you don't go to a store, because going to a store makes someone else violate the

Sabbath. Now, I've always been puzzled by that as a pastor, when

I, you know, I was always like, Sunday's my busiest day of the week. What do you mean don't work? But here's the thing of what the

Sabbath actually was. If you go back to Genesis, the Sabbath was a day set apart from the rest of the week.

If you go through the Old Testament, you see this idea a lot, this idea of holiness being set apart.

We set that day apart unto God. That was the purpose of the Sabbath on the seventh day of creation, and so I'm gonna be in that way to say that we have a day we set apart, that we do things different, okay?

And it's gonna be different for different people. There's, for me, for an example, I do not wear a suit normally.

I prefer never to wear a suit, but on Sunday, you will very, very, very rarely find me not in a suit, why?

Because this day is a day I set apart from all other days. So I do things different on Sunday that I wouldn't do during the week.

Well, there's different ways that we can do, like me wearing a suit is a personal application of that, but the idea of the

Sabbath is that we have one day that we set apart from the rest of the week, but we don't have all the law saying, well,

I can do this and I can't do this, okay? Anyone else?

Yeah. Yeah, next week, what I was gonna do is get into what the different stages of dispensationalism, how it views history and Scripture progressively, okay?

How we end up looking, why is it that we come to a premillennial view? I mean, in short, the simple answer is this.

The reason we would come to a premillennial view is if we take the Bible literally, okay, and we see that Israel, the nation, is going to literally possess a specific area of land that they've never possessed to date.

Well, what do we do with that? If we're gonna interpret it literally, then we say, well, God's not done with Israel yet.

He must have something planned for Israel where they are gonna take, possess all of that land that was literally promised.

Why do we think it's literally promised? Well, because he named specific areas and said in time, you're gonna be here and here and here and here, right?

He made it, all the language was literal. Now, what the covenant theologians do is say that that land was actually allegory and it refers to the church and the church possesses the whole world now.

You see? And then they don't see a future for Israel. Why? Because they just took all those promises to Israel and applied it to the church and they're done with it.

Okay? So once you start to take the Bible literally, you end up seeing, wait a minute, there's still this distinction with Israel and the church.

Once you see that, you realize, well, God's still gonna do something with Israel. How do you work that out? The only way to work that out is to go through and see that there's another week of Daniel.

Okay, so we'll get into next week, the 70 -week prophecy of Daniel because we'll spend actually a good amount of time there because that passage right there is the one passage that I always bring up with people to say, how do you deal with this passage?

Because everything in the text is literal and it has an exact timeline and yet there's one week that hasn't happened yet and there's a gap that can be put in there.

So if the church is this period in the gap, then there's still something left for Israel. Okay? And so that's what we'll get into next week.

God, you sound good to hold over to, right? Yeah. Yeah, so next week we're gonna focus in on, we talk of dispensations or dispensationalism which has several dispensations, okay?

And where you are on the spectrum of dispensationalism defines whether you have five, six or seven dispensations but there's these different, dispensationals, it's the term in the

Greek, it's the word that we have for economy. It's just a governance, okay?

How God is gonna govern and that he's going to govern in different periods.

In other words, the laws he had for Adam and Eve from Adam and Eve to Noah were different than what he had for Noah and afterwards.

And what he had for Noah was different than he had for Moses. Okay? And then when we have

Christ, there's different rules for us. Now, by the way, a common argument that a covenant theologian's gonna make,

I hear this all the time and I love to do this because it shows how little most covenant theologians understand dispensationalism.

They'll say, well, covenant theology is biblical because covenants are in the Bible. That is a bad argument.

Why? Well, because it's actually a logical fallacy. It's called the fallacy of equivocation.

They're using the word covenant two different ways to mean the same thing. A covenant is a contract, okay?

So there's covenants in the Bible. Covenant theology is a way you interpret the Bible. They're two totally different things.

Yes, they have the same word covenant in them. So when I hear that, I say, okay, tell me something.

We dispensationalists have these dispensations. What defines a dispensation? And they go,

I don't know, the covenants. That's what defines the dispensation.

So every time you have a new covenant, covenant with Adam, the covenant with Noah, the covenant with Moses, the covenant with David, the covenant, the new covenant, all of those are new dispensations, okay?

So the irony is I go, well, one of us actually is using the word covenant in the proper sense.

So I think dispensationalism is the one that's more biblical, right? So yeah, so you end up, and you have a progression.

That's one of the things I'll show next week is that you have this progression, not only a progression of Scripture, but a progression of each dispensation is widening more and more people, right?

Adam, from Adam is one man, okay? Then you're gonna go to Noah, and you're gonna have one family, to Abraham with one tribe, to Moses with one nation, to now

Christ, which is everyone, right? So it just keeps getting wider, more progressive. Progressivism is typically a bad thing, but in this case, it's gonna be good.

When it comes to dispensationalism, it's a good thing. Any other questions?

Okay, so preterism, for those who don't know what that is, there's two different views called full preterism and partial preterism.

Full preterism is heresy, okay? Full preterism says that everything, all the promises of Scripture were fulfilled in 70

AD when the temple was destroyed. Destroyed. In other words, there is nothing else gonna be happening.

There's no future anything. It's just, that's it. Is there gonna be a time when it just, that's it, over.

And they see that with the destruction of the temple, all the prophecies were fulfilled. Very few people believe in that.

Most people believe in what's called a partial preterism. And the idea there is that some of the end time prophecies were fulfilled already.

Some of, most people will see that some of those things were fulfilled in 70 AD when the temple was destroyed.

Sometimes you'll see some of the full, partial preterists will do, when you look at the books, the book of Revelation, the seven churches that are mentioned in chapter two and three, and they actually look at each of those as a time frame up to 70

AD. And then at that point, full preterists would say it's all over. The partial preterists see some of that in different time frames up to 70

AD, and then they see that I think there's two churches that were somehow in the last, so I think they have one church is like the

Roman Catholic period, and then one's after the Reformation. So the idea of the preterism is the idea that those prophecies that were for Israel were fulfilled in the church, typically, before 70

AD. And next week, we're gonna look into, it gets really creative what they do with Daniel's 70th week.

Because it's like they take it all literal except that last week. That last week lasts, it's like every one of those times they see is seven -year period, seven -year period, seven -year period, and that last week is broken up into three and a half and three and a half, and the three and a half, they go, oh, that's

Christ's earthly ministry, and that last three and a half, that's what we're living. Now, some say that three and a half ends at 70

AD, which still I go, 70 AD and 33 AD is a little bit more than three and a half years.

I know my math may be bad. I think it's a little bit more. So why was it all literal except for this last half a period?

So that's what ends up happening there. Does that help? Anything else?

Yeah, well, not all amillennials. I'll tell you this, the majority of amillennials do not believe in full preterism.

They believe in partial preterism, okay? Like I said, full preterism would be a heresy because you don't believe

Christ is gonna do anything again. There's no further future. It's just at some point, the end, judgment done.

So all the prophecies have been completed. So that's actually in a heretical camp.

There's not many that hold to that. So, but we'll get, yeah, we'll end up having to get into, because it comes up so often, is what amillennial, postmillennial, premillennial, that ends up coming up only because that's what most covenant theologians think dispensationalism is.

They think of it as just premillennialism. And so I've spent the time to make these differences so that you understand when people say, well,

I'm not premillennial, you now go, wait a minute, that has nothing to do with what dispensationalism is.

The difference is that dispensationalism is covenant theology. It's gonna deal with how you interpret literal or normal, you know, literal and normal versus an allegorical, where what's gonna be your view of Israel and the church, they're gonna be distinct, or they're gonna be the same body, or what's gonna be your view of how we look at scripture?

Is all scripture for God's glory, or is every page gonna revert back to Christ? It's these three things that are gonna make this distinction, okay?

And it's gonna be, it really comes down to how you are going to interpret this book. All right?

So with that, what I'll do is I'll give you, I'm gonna pull these up so I can tell you some of the stuff that's in the back, so you know what's back there.

So I'll start off, I mentioned some of my books, so I'll start off with those, so you know what you could get back there.

My first book that I wrote is called What Do They Believe? This is a book, if you wanna study world religions,

I'll tell you what this book is not. This book will not tell you how to refute world religions. That wasn't the goal.

The goal was to tell you what they actually believe from their sources. So this book will look at six major Western religions.

It's gonna look at Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, Mormonism, Jehovah Witness, and Christianity.

In those six religions, it's gonna break it down by what's their authority, what's their view of Christ, what's their view of God, specifically the

Trinity, what's their view of Christ, specifically his deity, man's sinfulness, salvation, and end times.

You're gonna get a lot of quotations from their authority. Now, here's the thing

I ended up doing when I wrote this. I met with imams, I met with rabbis. I said, review this and tell me if I'm wrong, okay?

I had a Mormon, when I was out at a Mormon outreach, he told me there is no Christian writes a Mormon book, writes about Mormonism, that's right, that's accurate.

I said, well, I'll tell you what, I'll make you a deal. I'll give you a copy of my book, here's the deal. If there's nothing substantial in it, you pay for the book.

And if there is, I'll correct it. So he emailed me. He mentioned, he found three grammatical errors.

They really don't count as substantial. He found two that he, by his own words, said these are so insignificant, but I felt that I had to find something.

And one that he said, this really isn't a big deal, but it was just the birth order of Jesus and Lucifer, in Mormonism, whether they're born at the same time as twins or born separately, and that's actually a debate within Mormonism, so I still feel that I was justified on that one.

Needless to say, he never gave me the $15. My second book is

What Do We Believe? What Do We Believe is a Christian Systematic Theology. Now, I want you to note the size of this.

Think of most systematic theologies you may see, because those are gonna be about like, you know, that, right?

Here's the difference with this book is, I've written this so that anybody can read it and understand it, okay?

What's always surprised me, that I have, I have people that use this for homeschooling, which blows my mind, okay?

But, and we have, we actually have classes that go along with it. But here's the thing that's neat with this book. The biggest struggle that atheists will give to most

Christians is can you trust the Bible? Is the Bible reliable? Most seminaries don't even deal with the issue of textual criticism, how to get back to the original text of the scriptures.

It's a whole science that we have, a whole field. I deal with it in this book for a simple reason.

It's the most, it's the number one issue you have to deal with on the streets when you're evangelizing. So I give a whole chapter on understanding why we can trust the

Bible and know it's reliable, okay? The third book that we have out there, I didn't,

I just wrote a couple chapters on, is called On the Origin of Kinds. This is written by one of our other speakers,

Dr. Anthony Silvestro. What's unique about this book is there's a lot of books about evangelism.

There's a lot of books about presuppositional apologetics. And there's a lot of books about creation science.

But there's no book that I know of that works all three to show you how they work together. And that's what this book does.

It takes all those three disciplines and shows you that they're not either or things, but you use them together, okay?

So now those three books that I just mentioned, we sell at Striving for Eternity. It's, those are any one for $15, any two for, and I'm gonna look at my wife to make sure

I get it right, $25, and any three for $36. Okay, I got a head nod saying yes.

So it's, my board doesn't let me behind the table, okay? They actually told me

I am not allowed to travel without someone that's gonna be behind the table. Because I've actually given away $1 ,500 worth of resources at one event.

So I just, they're like, here, just take it. My board is like, we can't keep losing money all the time.

I gotta be accountable to them. One of the other books I was a co -author on, anyone that wants to study

Mormonism, is Sharing the Good News with Mormons, 24 authors. I'm one of 24.

I wrote a chapter on open air evangelism. I really wanted to write the chapter on textual criticism.

My buddy, Matt Slick, did that one. We all can only get one. And the only other person that did open air evangelism, the editor didn't like the way he did it and like the way

I did it, so I kinda got stuck with the chapter that no one wants to do, right? No one wants to read. But the neat thing about this, even if you don't study

Mormonism, is though geared for Mormons, there's a lot of different ideas of how to share the gospel.

And not all of them are geared just for Mormon. What I teach in open air evangelism, you can do that anywhere. It doesn't have to be just for Mormons.

So there's just 24 different techniques. The editors for this was Eric Johnson, who you guys have had here, for those who remember, the very first conference that you guys had for the

South Jersey Conference, the South Jersey Apologetics Conference, Eric Johnson was one of the speakers.

So Eric Johnson and Sean McDowell were the editors there. Another book that, and this one is,

I think, $18, right? Okay, head nod yes. This book is a short little book.

We've been spending the night talking about harmoneutics. If you don't know much about harmoneutics, this is $12. Strange title,

When the Ox Gourds My Neighbor. That is from Leviticus.

Trying to think if it's Leviticus or Deuteronomy now. But basically, that's a part of the Old Testament law, and he takes that text and he will walk you through in a very easy to understand way, walk you through harmoneutics so you can understand what harmoneutics is.

And he walks you through that text even to saying, how does not having my ox gourd my neighbor apply to us today?

And we go, well, it doesn't, I don't have an ox. And I never talk to my neighbor, I just go into my garage with this little magic button, close the door behind me,

I never see them, right? So he actually will walk you through how to understand that.

Some other things that we have available is we have some online classes.

The classes themselves are on YouTube for free. That's how we make our money. Wait, no, that doesn't work right.

Okay, you see why my board doesn't trust me, right? So we have syllabuses, that's actually how we make the money.

We have the syllabuses for our classes. We have a class, this one's on harmoneutics, which we've been talking about. We have,

I think, 20 lessons on harmoneutics, how to study the Bible, how to interpret it.

Basically, I have young men that go through this when they say, well, I wanna learn how to prepare a sermon, I send them through this class.

There's people that use this for homeschooling. So we have this one, we have four books on theology, there's over,

I think there's like 80 lessons, all on YouTube for free. Then we have books for world religions.

And then we have discipleship, it's all part of our academy. These, what we do with these syllabuses, any one for 25, any four for 75, and all six for 100, okay?

Now, if you want all six, we don't actually, we're out of print on some, and we're gonna be backordered.

So if you order the others, we'll ship them to you soon. Some other things that we have back there are some cards.

This is, if you ever, this is a qualifications for pastors and deacons. If you ever look at the list there and wanna know what qualifies, well, guess what?

We all have to live up to that list, isn't that stink? It's not just the pastors and deacons that have to do it, this is like for all of us.

This is basically, this used to be my prayer list, still is actually, the attributes of God. When I struggled with praying, my pastor said, just pray

God's attributes back to him. So I made a list, and I still pray that today. And so, but this just gives you an idea of the attributes, all the attributes of God.

This here is a, I'm an engineer by trade, can you tell? A flow chart. This is a process of reconciliation, because none of you ever get into conflicts with other believers.

I know, I do, you don't, so I need this. But in case you find someone else that sometimes gets into conflicts with other believers, this could come in handy.

Many of us are familiar with Matthew 18, okay? Well, side two is Matthew 18.

Side one is all the stuff you should do before you do Matthew 18. Like, ask if you're the one in sin, oops.

I call this my chart for social media. Like, Christians should be reading this before they post on social media.

Like, just make social media like a lot better place. We also have, any of you familiar with Justin Peters?

Any of you know of his ministry? Justin Peters is, if you're not familiar, I'm gonna encourage you to get his stuff tonight.

He's just a great brother in the Lord, and he focuses on the word of faith, you know, the

Benny Hinn and all those guys, and the New Apostolic Reformation, your Bill Johnson folks, all the people that believe they're apostles today.

That's the main focus of his ministry. And so he has, with that, he has a

DVD that I think is $20. She's trying to remember, too, so there's a card.

We just resell them, so it's whatever price he gives us. So I think these are $20. This is like eight hours of training.

And what's great about it is he walks you through all of these word of faith teachers and plays them in their own words, and then compares to Scripture.

He also has a little flash drive that's $25. It has, this is just really neat. It has a lot of his teaching.

He has, he just was, he has cerebral palsy, so he's in a scooter, and he just happened to run into some

Jehovah Witnesses and decided to record the evangelism. And he's got like eight, I think it's like eight sessions here of what used to be a podcast.

He broke this conversation up into eight sections, and it's just him evangelizing to Jehovah Witnesses. And then he's got a bunch of other teachings on here.

So this is packed with information. Then he has a book called Do Not Hinder Them. This is a book on whether we should baptize children, okay?

But the real thing that I love about this book, he defines what conversion is, like really well.

So we understand, the reason is that we shouldn't baptize children. His argument is they don't understand what conversion really is yet.

We gotta make sure they really know what conversion is, not just I raised my hand and said a prayer. Anyone here familiar with Living Waters?

Ray Comfort? A couple head nods. Yo, I know you do. I still gotta get you out to meet him.

All right, so we resell a DVD, or not a DVD, a flash drive that he does. Now this is what Living Waters makes me say with this flash drive.

I forget the price that's on there. I think it's like $50, okay? What they want me to tell you is that if $50 is too much, this has all of their full -length movies,

I think like 40 hours of audio, tons of video of Ray Comfort evangelizing, so it's a great tool if you wanna learn how to evangelize.

What they make me do is say that if $50 is too much, then 40 is fine. And if 40 is too much, 20 is fine.

If 20 is too much, 10 is fine. If 10 is too much, five is fine. And if five is too much, feel free to just take one and go home, okay?

So obviously, their board lets them get away with that. My board doesn't let me get away with that. One last thing that I have is any of you have a smartphone?

Any of you have podcasts that you listen to? Okay, a couple of you? All right, well, take your phone out and start downloading some podcasts.

I'm also the executive director of the Christian Podcast Community. This doesn't even have all of them anymore.

We've, I think, doubled since then. We have about 40 podcasts, so we have something for everybody. We have podcasts for mothers, we have podcasts for homeschoolers, we have podcasts on theology, we have some that are sermons, we have two, actually, no,

I think three women's podcasts right now. Nice thing is we have the Presbyterian women, then we have the Baptist women, so at least we're balanced, right?

So we have podcasts for men. We have some that deal with raising up godly men.

We have podcasts for marriage. So whatever your interest is, we probably have a podcast for it, okay?

So check out, and you could just, if you want, you just subscribe to the Christian Podcast Community. It's actually a podcast itself, and it contains all the ones that we host, so you could get them all, all right?

So all that is available. These are actually free for you to just take. There's also bookmarks that are free, and I think, is it that if anyone that buys anything gets a free music

CD from Cary, is that the deal? Was it donation? Okay, whatever.

Okay, if you give a donation, you get a free CD, or two. I'd just give it to you, but.

All right, so with that, why don't we close in prayer? Do you have anything else? All right, why don't we close in prayer, and then

I'll get to see you guys next week, all right? Lord, we're grateful that, even though we don't know everything that we can possibly know of the scriptures, it is so good to know,

Lord, that we can just keep digging in, keep studying, keep learning. Lord, we wait the day that we'll sit at your feet and just learn more, and know that all of us, whether we're covenant theologians, dispensational theologians, or if we're at the extremes of them, we're all gonna agree, and we're gonna sit at your feet, and you're gonna correct us, and boy, will that be rejoiceful, to know that we're getting clear understanding directly from the source.

Lord, we're thankful that you give us your word for us to study. We wanna be faithful to its interpretation, so we don't say, thus says the

Lord, and be wrong. So help us in understanding how to interpret your word.

We ask this in Christ's name, amen. All right, we wanna say thank you to him tonight.