Dispensationalists vehemently maintain that the Church (ekklēsia) was unknown to the Old Testament writers. The so-called church age is said to be a “mystery,” a parenthesis, a gap in prophetic time, until the pre-tribulational “rapture” when the church will be removed from the earth and God will deal with Israel again.
If they are correct, then the New Testament writers were awfully confused, in spite of the fact that they, like their Old Testament counterparts, were under the direct inspiration of the infallible Holy Spirit (2 Tim. 3:16–17). Of course, we know they weren’t confused in the least. If they had wanted to make such a distinction between Israel and the “church” they certainly would have used a word other than ekklēsia, which possessed a continuity of meaning spanning both the Old and New Testaments of the Greek Bible.
Prophecy Wars
At this symposium, the participants barely scratched the surface in their presentations of their respective positions. A great deal was left unsaid and unchallenged. That’s to be expected. Because there was not an opportunity to respond to a number of claims and charges made by Mr. Hamilton, who holds a historic premillennial position, and Mr. Waldron, who advocates for amillennialism, Mr. DeMar decided to respond in print with this short book.
Buy NowOn today’s podcast, Gary responds to a video where a pastor claims you must “rightly divide the Bible,” based on 2 Timothy 2:15. By this he means that you must rightly divide the “people” of God into Jew and Gentile and understand New Testament passages in light of “the Church age.” The Bible never speaks of a “Church age” but this does not prevent many from claiming that it must be there all the same. They claim it is inferred and is the “key” to correctly interpreting Jesus’ prophetic words in the Olivet Discourse.
“Rightly dividing the word of truth” (a more accurate translation is “accurately handling the word of truth”: 2 Tim. 2:15), a favorite Scofieldian phrase, does not mean dividing up the Bible into sealed off redemptive divisions. The NT itself makes this clear by declaring that there has been a change in the operation of God’s covenant as is obvious from the book of Hebrews and Paul’s writings.