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 and 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? I think 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 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.

Andrew Rappaport's Testimony and Introduction to the Topic

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 like 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, 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. 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 for, 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 of podcasts that go into it. And I have a 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 there's, you know, this is more of theological systems.

So it's more of a teaching time. 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 your 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 known 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? 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 and trying to find ways of interpretation.

And so you had 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 Cosanthrum. 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.

You know, on Peter is the rock. That the, oh, the 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. 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 was 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 have been, they've kind of morphed.

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. 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 you end up having 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. 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?

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 come up recently in the last 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 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, from when dispensationalism first started in the 1900s, they had, everything 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 could 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?

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 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, 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. I venture 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 and 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 had 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 is only the father knows.

So he would say, 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. You also see in there references to a wedding. 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. Sorry. So this becomes a thing, and 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 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.

When 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.

Right, 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.

Like Muslims believe that when they die, they're gonna get 70 virgins. You go and you check that fact and you find out, oh that's not in the Quran. That's in some Hadiths, but not all Muslims believe that.

Right, 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 want to 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. 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 pre-millennial 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 pre-millennialism. 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 pre-millennial.

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, you know, 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?