J. Smith, please see my response to your comment in this new post. I respect your views, but please understand where I’m coming from in this.

Blessings to all because of Jesus,

Bob Hayton

You have completed a good set of articles. You were very kind in your assessment of dispensationalism. I expect your articles are going to be used more by less experienced Christians, and agreeing Christians, than by those committed to dispensationalism. Because we were entrenched in its process at one time, we should understand how difficult it is to shake that system out of one’s system. In my case, dispensationalism blinded me from Scriptural truth, and it absolutely did not focus me on Christ. My dispensational friends also are wrapped in patriotism, Iraeli defensiveness, conservative politics, etc., all the things you have mentioned. I am also patriotic, conservative and on Israel’s side in defending their land. And these things are connected to my Christian world view. But they have no place in worship, and they do not define the meaning of Scripture.

I can say that I have not yet found a dispensationalist that has patiently defended the system without accusing all other disagreeing folks as being something less than a fully equipped and properly thinking Christian. (Maybe you know of one.) When I was chained to that system, I was also very defensive (primarily because Scritpure really did not back up what I had been taught by dispensationalists).

I also agree with Arthur Pink in his suggestion of who the author of that system really is.

Anyway, you have an excellent series of article, and I have enjoyed them very much.

Joe

It has been a fun, and challenging enterprise, but very rewarding.

Bob

I just wanted to let you know, I’ve enjoyed this series much, and I think you constructed an excellent case for a very necessary and meaningful doctrine. Keep pressing on.

Nathan

I have reached many of your conclusions, Bob, simply by reading the Bible without an agenda. I have seriously contemplated any number of different theological approaches to the gospel and doctrine and, while I would not agree with you on every issue, on these particluars I am in complete sympathy.

I am anti-Religious Right, but I am also anti-Godless Left which most often are hedonistically anti-life when that life (unborn or old) is an inconvenience to a person of that persuasion’s pursuit of “happiness”. I am becoming a pacifist, but not an isolationist, because I agree with your assessment that our job is not to expand the borders of Israel, but those of the Kingdom of Heaven, through evangelism, missions, and compassion in the name of Christ to all of the world.

Patriotism is grand, but not to the extent that it becomes the heart and lungs of the church. Flag waving has no place in the worship of our true King, for we are, as Peter puts it, “strangers and pilgrims” in this present world.

Like you, I can forbear a person’s belief in a post-trib millenium, but believe a pre-trib rapture to be a lie of the devil, since scripture will not support that view for an honest searcher. Preterism is a big problem for me, because it is too radically militant to be of God, in my opinion. The Crusades were the wretched result of such thinking, while the militant and apocalyptic ana-Baptist seizure of Munster in 1534 was the result of a combination of both trains of thought.

Finally, I admire your exegesis, with the one exception of baptism being symbolic. I have come to the conclusion that Paul never implied symbolism where many today do and Peter’s reference to symbolism is construed in the exact reverse of what I believe he plainly expressed. Hopefully that is something you will address as thoroughly as this dissertation on the scriptural fact of covenantal fulfillment and replacement.

God bless!