Originally published in "The Lord's Coming Herald & Wesleyan Bible Prophecy Advocate," April Edition 2009
Biblical Christianity Is . . .
I. A body of revealed truth
1. That body of revealed truth is that Jesus Christ established God’s messianic kingdom of redemption on earth at the time of his first advent. He did not postpone the kingdom to the Jews, or anyone else, at the end of the first sixty-nine weeks of Daniel’s prophecy of the Seventy Weeks, as falsely taught by modern dispensational premillennialism.
2. That body of revealed truth contained in the Christian gospel is that Jesus is coming again to resurrect the dead (one general resurrection event) and judge all people (a universal judgment scene) on the basis of the one standard of true righteousness already full revealed in the Christian evangel. It is not to preform any split-off/any-moment secret pre-seven year tribulation rapture of the church, nor to return after seven years with his church to set up any earthly Jewish millennial reign; again, as falsely taught by modern dispensational premillennialism.
If you have swallowed “hook, line, and sinker,” the erstwhile fables of modern dispensational premillennial end-time Bible prophecy theory, friend, then you are majorily deceived about the revelation of God, and are in a cult of false doctrine concerning what constitutes true biblical Christianity. The place to begin, then, is to get intellectually “dug out.” We are here to help friends do exactly that!
II. A precious personal experience
1. The precious personal experience involves relishing in the
consciousness of a full pardon of sins. “If we confess our sins, he is
faithful and just to forgive us of our sins.” “Whosoever is born of God
doth not commit sin.” Jesus came to save his people from (not in) their
sins.
Modern Antinomians teach that salvation is merely the
imputation of Christ’s own personal righteous to covers over all a believer’s
sins: past, present, and future; and that Christians must, of necessity, still
sin in thought, word, and deed every day. Added to this is the concept that when
once one confesses Christ as Saviour, one can never loose thereafter one’s
eternal security in heaven.
The intellectualism described above, friends, is not the
same thing as heart-felt Christian experience. This modern popular revival of
“antinomian” teaching regarding personal Christian experience also roots,
historically, in the late nineteenth century advent of dispensational
premillennial theory. These truncations of sound Christian doctrine, we repeat,
originated in a common historical matrix, a situation that was also greatly
influenced by the advent of modern liberal theology (neo-orthodoxy) with its
religious focus on total human subjectivity, or existentialism.
Dispensational teaching and neo-orthodox existentialism, though on opposite poles of the modernist/fundamentalist spectrum of Calvinistic religious controversy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nevertheless, worked singularly toward a common goal. That goal was to de-historize the eschatological, or to bring orthodox end-time Bible prophecy teaching into scandal and disrepute. The achievement of this goal is now seen in widespread attitudes of indifference, skepticism, and unbelief concerning our Lord’s return.
2. Biblical Christianity is more than a body of revealed truth. It is also a precious personal experience, which involves one’s assurance of the full pardon of all of one’s sins. And, more than this, for the faithful believer in Christ, there is also the maturity of a subsequent divine in-filling, called “entire sanctification,” or heart purity and perfect love.
John Wesley at one time stated what the history of the Christian church has since well proven. “The more we press all believers to aspire after full sanctification, as attainable now by simple faith,” he wrote, “the more the whole work of God will prosper.“
Never did the work of God prosper more abundantly than it did during the great Wesleyan Methodist revivals of the nineteenth century. The influence of the holiness emphasis on the Second Great Awakening was far reaching and profound, so much so that the world-wide missionary enterprise of the ensuing twentieth century is said to have been a direct result of it.
With the rise of many new cults of false doctrine in the latter half of the nineteenth century, including that of Darbyite dispensational premillennial salvation history/end-time Bible prophecy theory, the fortunes of experiential Christianity shifted dramatically toward Keswickian antinomianism and charismatic emotionalism, each with its peculiar misplaced emphasis--on intellectualism and subjectivism--respectively.
Religious piety, as traditionally expressed in “holiness of heart and life,” has increasingly been lost. Many now claim an “experience” with God that is not based on Christian truth. While it is not incumbent upon us to judge other people’s character or destiny, the challenge before us today lies in recovering both the objective knowledge, and experience, of Biblical Christianity.
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