Originally published in "The Lord's Coming Herald & Wesleyan Bible Prophecy Advocate," Fall Edition 2005
Dispensationalism's Distortion Of The Kingdom Concept
Dispensationalists typically downplay, distort, or out-right deny the New Testament teaching that Jesus establish God's messianic kingdom of redemption on earth at the time of his first advent.
They do this in order to maintain the consistency of their commitment to dispensational ideology, which is based centrally on the interpretative organizational structures derived from Sir Robert Anderson's theory of the Seventy Weeks.
In dispensationalism, the messianic kingdom is postponed, not because the New Testament teaches that it was postponed, but because such a concept is demanded by Sir Robert Anderson's teaching of a separation between the 69 and 70th weeks in Daniel's prophecy of the Seventy Weeks.
In order to maintain the system of biblical interpretation demanded by the acceptance of Sir Robert Anderson's theory, the attempt has been made to differentiate between the two New Testament expressions of "kingdom of heaven" and "kingdom of God." In this vein, the kingdom of heaven refers to the spiritual presence of the kingdom in the church during this present age between the 69th and 70th week, while the kingdom of God is is thought to more properly point to the need for some post-second coming Jewish millennial reign.
Such a silly attempt to differentiate between two kingdoms (one heavenly for the church and the other earthly for Israel), based on semantics here, is utterly false. A simple comparison of the following references prove this point.
Matthew 4:17 compared with Mark 1:14-15
Matthew 11:11 compared with Luke 7:28
Matthew 13:31 compared with Mark 4:30-31
Matthew 13:33 compared with Luke 13:20-21
Matthew 19:14 compared with Luke 18:16
Now we have just one more good reason to give Darby's discredited dispensational theory up.
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