my new music

I hope I can get this to work.  I want to embed some music onto my blog.

Wagner, Dominionism, and the issues of Eschatology (the Last Things)

Recently, one of my friends left me an article found through Charisma Magazine in which Dr. C. Peter Wagner, Chancellor of the Wagner Leadership Institute, expounded some of his eschatology and spoke against Pretribulation Rapturism.  It was pretty insightful as to some of the finer points of Dominion theology, about which I have experienced a bit of ignorance.

 

The article is as follows

I can still remember prophecy teachers who tacked rows of charts and diagrams on the church wall and explained spell-binding details of the past, present and future. I cut my spiritual teeth on the Scofield Bible and devoured Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. My seminary professors instructed me in pre-tribulationism and premillenialism. I quickly categorized anyone who disagreed as a “liberal.”

Now I look back on those days with a strange combination of regret and amusement. How is it that I was so wrong for so long? As I analyze my change, I can sum it up by admitting that I simply did not understand the kingdom of God.

Let me explain what I mean by starting with the Great Commission.

The Great Commission has been central to my life. I committed myself to missions the night I was saved when I was 19. I spent my first 16 years of ministry as a field missionary and the next 30 as a professor of missions.

My heart’s desire was to help fulfill Jesus’ mandate to “make disciples of all nations.”

However, the time came when I had to make a radical shift in the way I interpreted those words of Jesus.

Formerly, I thought my task was to go to as many nations of the world as possible and save as many souls as possible and plant as many churches as possible. Now I take the Great Commission more literally when it tells us not to make as many individual disciples as we can but to disciple whole social groups—such as entire nations. This is kingdom theology.

When God created Adam and Eve, He told them to take dominion over all His creation (see Gen. 1:28). This was God’s plan until Satan succeeded in persuading Adam to obey him rather than God. The result was that Satan usurped Adam’s authority and took dominion himself.

But Jesus came as the second Adam. He brought the kingdom of God to earth and sent His disciples out to preach the gospel of the kingdom. He has now commissioned us, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to advance His kingdom, to push Satan’s kingdom back and to retake the dominion that rightly belongs to the human race.  This is the Great Commission.

It still includes healing the sick, casting out demons, saving souls, multiplying churches and feeding the hungry, but it goes far beyond these activities. It is putting feet to the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray: “Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

How has this played out? The human race is enormously better off now than it was when Jesus died and was raised from the dead 2,000 years ago! Satan is losing ground more and more rapidly.

Those who think the world is getting worse and worse are missing the big picture of human history.

I now regard my former pre-tribulationism and premillenialism as escapist eschatology.

I do not plan to give any territory back to Satan or his Antichrist.Yes, there will be setbacks, but the advances will far outnumber them. Instead of an escapist eschatology, I expouse a victorious eschatology!

My favorite term is “dominion eschatology.” Why? Because Jesus did not give His Great Commission in vain.

The battle will be ferocious, and we will suffer some casualties along the way.However, we will continue to push Satan back and disciple whole nations.

We are aggressively retaking dominion, and the rate at which this is happening will soon become exponential. The day will come when “‘The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever’” (Rev. 11:15, NKJV)!

C. Peter Wagner is president of Global Harvest Ministries, chancellor of Wagner Leadership Institute and presiding apostle of the International Coalition of Apostles.

I would like to respond the the article as follows, point by point, evaluating the article on its own, since I know very little of Wagner’s other writings.

I can still remember prophecy teachers who tacked rows of charts and diagrams on the church wall and explained spell-binding details of the past, present and future. I cut my spiritual teeth on the Scofield Bible and devoured Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. My seminary professors instructed me in pre-tribulationism and premillenialism. I quickly categorized anyone who disagreed as a “liberal.”

Wagner starts off by describing what many evangelicals have seen:  the charts of endless timelines:  Some of the usual pillars of dispensational premillenialism.   And, like many dispensationalists at the time, he also anathematized anyone who held an opposing view as liberal.   So it is a summation of how he used to view eschatology, and then says, presently, that he remembers those days with regret, and his change from Premillenialism was based on a changed outlook of the Kingdom of God as described in the Great Commission.

The Commission became central to Wagner’s life, and he committed himself to mission from his salvation at the age of 19, and then he nutshells his ministry experience with missions work and teaching work, and his desire was focused on making disciples of all nations.

Then his interpretation of the words “make disciples of all nations” changed from winning individuals to winning whole people groups.  Commendable it would seem, I am not sure the text supports this broad of an interpretation, nor does it seem the primary interpreation-the plainest sense of Scripture.   I can understand the theological leap, but am not sure that this jives with the rest of ‘Scripture, which says in Revelation that there was a multitude of every nation tribe and tongue.  But what are multitudes made up of if not individuals.   Granted, discipling whole communities is ideal, as Saddleback Valley Community Church shows, but we are called to make students (individuals) that hail from all nations (people groups).  That says we build relationships with said individuals and make gospel presentations to those individuals.  Now, if it is possible, I would agree with discipling whole nations and people groups (that is the nature of a church indeed, a group of people being discipled) but that is not always possible or practical.

The Adam and Eve part is a decent interpretation of Scripture, but I am not sure it is applicable to the context of missions or the apostolic.  In my own marriage and family, I strive to establish a Pre-Fall environment and Pre-Fall relations, since my wife and I are new creations in Christ, and I would love to pull as much of heaven into my situation and station on earth, but I do not know how much of that is possible.  I just want everything I can get that the L-rd has for me and for my family.

 

Likewise, I would contend the same for my neighborhood, city, county, state, region, nation, continent, and world.  L-rd, give me as much of heaven on earth as is possible now.  I want everything He has for me, and I suspect you would too.

I agree that there is a dominion that belongs to the human race, and I want to take back as much of that authority and reestablish the kingdom, wherever possible, but it is not so that Christ can come back once I have done the leg work. It is so that I can change the spiritual climate and be a vessel and channel for the movement of the Spirit of God to heal, deliver, and liberate.  That is not.  We are to heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons, plant churches, and influence societal structures as much as possible.  But we are not going to completely establish the kingdom fully and completely.  But that should NOT stop us from trying to establish a kingdom mentality everywhere we go, and that is the attitude of discipleship and the parables of Yeshua which were all about discipleship and healing and evangelism.  All of the fivefolds of the minsitry that Yeshua gave us the church before his ascension were to build up the church into the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.  Ephesians 4:11-13.

Now, where do I stand with respect to dominion Eschatology.

 

We are called to fight period (2 Corinthians 10:4, Ephesians 1-6).  There are demonic forces we are called to wage a war against.  We are called to arrest in faith the powers of darkness wherever the Spirit leads.  And we are to obey the voice of the L-rd, wherever that leads us.  God can and does call us to the political arena, to teaching, busieness, medicine.  And we are to disciple and evangelize everywhere possible, by every means possible.  There are just as much ministries in the marketplace as there are classical forms.

But, ultimately, until the bowls of Wrath are done being poured out, things will not be 100 percent.  We still need Adonai Yeshua ha-Mashiach to do his work.  We still need the Millenium to clean things up fully, and we need Christ to set things up once and for all.  We can do much to advance the kingdom in every area of life, but we still need that final push to finish the work of Christ.  We need Him to sovereignly move.  We cannot usher in completely His kingdom, but we can do as much as we are given of the Spirit to assist in that ushering.  We are Christ’s apostles, and that means we are ambassadors on a mission from G-d.  We have a G-d given duty to do what He has called us to do.  We must do everything we can, and we must start now, and we must not put limitations on what the Holy Spirit can do in us.

 

Dominionism in that we are the ones who fully establish the kingdom seems to have some holes in it, the largest being our assumption of Christ’s role on earth.  However, in the sense that we are called to do something, to attempt great things for the kingdom of God, even if we risk failure.  That is something worth doing.  Lets go for and get all we can and save as many as we can, and just obey and do what He has called us to do.

 

THese signs will accompany those who believe.  In my name they will drive out demons, they will speak in new tongues, they will place their hands on the sick and they will get wel, they will pick up the serpent, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them.  Mark 16:15-18.

More of this later.

the taste of the biblical languages

Let me qualify what follows by saying:

I do believe that we have several excellent translations available to us of the holy scriptures.

I do believe that they have certain flaws, which I will not detail here due to other more important matters.

Having said this, let me begin.

I would love to see every believer equipped to handle the scriptures in their original languages.  I was motivated to write this blog after my best friend responded to a quote on my facebook profile.  The quote comes from a Evangelical Presbyterian minister’s profile.

The quote is this:

“Reading the Bible in translation is like kissing the bride through a veil.”

Sh’muel Agnon

How that sums it up immediately and so comprehensively.   Think about it! When we are about to get married, we are caught up in the greatest expectation outside of salvation that we can possibly have.  We anticipate the first sight of our betrothed enfolded in the purest, most expensive garments our money can buy.  We await our bride at the end of a long and painful march that requires so much of us in terms of character and integrity that we might arrive in full obedience at the place of character and holiness that the L-rd has intended for us.  We say our death-ending vows before the holiness of His throne and the witness of many who compass us round about, and we literally on that altar are altered as we lay down a substantial sum to purchase that bride through the exchanging of a diamond engagement ring, and if we are blessed, have only the stress place on us by our crabby families being forced to sit next to each other and somehow figure out a way to get along for the sake of those two (nowadays some would say stupid) kids recklessly pledging to ante up their lives and go all in for each other, and to hell and back, if necessary, whether that means abuse or violence from all corners of this world, their flesh, and the devil, and unfortunately in some cases from each other.

Then when all is said and done and life is given up to death as the pledge, we are allowed the privilege of pulling back the veil and kissing our lover’s satiny, stage-ready lips.

But if our lover does not allow us to pull back the veil, what do we get a mouthful of? Lace? Silk? Synthetics? Cottons?  Some cellulose-laden alternative?  Without the pullback of that veil, there is no full intimacy.

Such is it with knowing and reading the scriptures in their original languages.

I remember the feeling at the end of my first semester of New Testament Greek. I was armed and equipped with a few tenses and much of the more common vocabulary, and ready to translate all of the New Testament.  It felt like a new playground had been opened up to me.  And when January came., we dove straight into what all New Testament Greek students start out with: 1 John.  Now, I know they say it’s because the Greek in 1 John is the simplest in all of Scripture, but I tell you, that is a heavy and strong dose of prophetic medicine to start students out transtlating on, and it effectively says some really pride-breaking and flesh-convicting pithy statements, some of the heaviest in all the Bible.

And so the veil came off for me, and I found something I was really anointed to do and passionate about doing, besides other things I do.  There is nothing quite as sweet for a child of God to find what Eldredge calls “what makes you come alive.”  We need more people who have come alive.  I had the same reaction to my poetry workshop in college.  It was like some veil had been lifted and I was sharing intimately and speaking and thinking intimately in a different way than I had ever been accustomed to sharking, speaking, and thinking.

And the taste.  It’s interesting when you become a believer, and with believing eyes and a believing spirit you come to Scripture in a translation and the Lord begins to open things up to you about His word.  But then the same thing happens, when you are saved, and come to the Scriptures in thier original languages.  Something in you comes alive.  But a more full alive.  Because while translations tell you something, the original languages color and paint and express and expound and litigate and soliliquize in ways the translations never could.  We learn in a translation that the darkness was pushed back because the light was revealed, but in the original languages, we learn the ways and the hows and the many dimensions in which that darkness was pushed back, because we are reading words that have more than just the translated meaning,  all compacted in one text.

It’s like the L-rd is doing several things with the text.  Adonai is so adept and dexterous with language.  You notice this with the wordplay and punmanship of our Lord with the text.  Take Adam’s name.  He was man and he was Adam and he was also Dirt.  And then Elijah’s name, which means “Elohim is my Yah” but is also a play on the word Aliyah, meaning ascension or ladder.  And you recall that Elijah ascended to heaven by a whirlwind and a fiery chariot.

Like a child with an intricate toy

Like a skilled craftsman with a toolbelt

Like a master poet with a pallate of words

Like an master physicist with strong and weak, electromagnets, gravitation, and tensor mathematics

Like a master director and actor with the perfectly improvised script

Is our L-rd with the Holy Writ.

Is Adonai El Elyon Adonai Tsevaot with His Holy Wit

Never has one person said so much with so few, and done so much with so little as He.

How great is Yeshua

How great is our G-d.

Being perfectly honest

I saw a movie last night that I thought would be okay, and it turned out not to be okay.   This thing we have in our culture that says it is okay to watch certain things, to enjoy certain sins, to tolerate certain entertainment pumping through out houses, and eyes, and minds, is part of the reason many will stand on the edge of eternity and Yeshua will say to us on that day that He never knew us.   Oh God, the damnation that awaits us for not repenting, but for harboring these sins is incalculable.  Utterly incalculable.  Bonhoeffer refers to cheap grace.  And it is so true.   We are purveyors of cheap grace that gets us by.  We do not know the weight of judgment that awaits us for our lukewarm Christianity.

John 3:6

We have a responsibility to show forth the light of Christ.  The notion that we are are called light by Christ coincides with the fact that He is the light of the world.  Now the light is not God, that we should follow the light, but rather we are to get to the source of the light that we might obtain the source of that light, and that we would also be obtained of the source and so by this interaction, the light that emanates in Christ, emanates from us as his lights in this dark world.

When I read the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus out of the New testament, one phrase jumps off the page.  Verse six says “that which is spirit spirit generates, while that which is flesh, flesh generates.  Flesh is absolutely incapable of giving birth to anything spiritual.  Also, spirit is utterly incapable of breeding anything except spiritual things.  The two are utterly different on the genetic and molecular level.  Even if they tried to masque their children as each other’s offspring, the nature of each would show forth eventually from the material provided by their parents.

That is so powerful and liberating, because that means we cannot nor should we even try to attempt to manufacture anything that is to His glory.  Only He in us, working through and by and in us can manufature anything of use to the kingdom. d

A decade later…

I was thinking earlier this week about how Saturday previous was 10 years since I was originally called to overseas missions.  It’s nearly laughable, since I have not once left this country to set foot on any foreign soil.  The Bahamas do not count since they are Florida’s backyard.

I am still waiting on the Lord to fulfill his promise to us, my wife and I, that is.   I know He will, and it’s just a matter of His timing.  Meanwhile, I watch my boys grow up and spend time growing closer to Kresha.

Our trip to Florida was fantastic.  We got to see some of the old Gatekeepers.  Casey, the Ralstoni, the Dennisi, and brother White.  Ate some pizza in the old city, and went to the basillica.  I would have posted pix, but the wife had to develop them so we could have more room on the memory card.

Alas, we also got to go to Night of Joy at the Rat Kingdom.  Kutless is my new favorite band.  Very anointed with their worship.  Strong presence of the Lord there.  Chris Tomlin was also fantastic.  Mike Tait, leading Newsboys also did a fantastic job fronting that band.

The only negative thing that I would say happened was my ex-pastor had a disagreement with me wearing a yarmukle and identifying with the commonwealth of Israel.  I tell you, it is so good to be free from that type of influence.

It is really good to be back in Springfield.  I missed my church home, the freedom in worship, and the Spirit’s presence there, as well as the absence of the judgment.  Looking forward to worshiping with my wife and kids tomorrow.  I cannot believe that church can be as easy and relaxed as my church.  The presence of the Lord is so deep, real, and magnificent.  The liberty is so refreshing, since it is completely the opposite in so many other places I have been.  And the manifest presence of the Lord that comes to dwell there, is like a drug.  I love it!  To those who have not experienced the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, you have no idea how fantastically satisfying the Lord can be.