God's Glorious Church: Understanding the Purposes of God

GOD’S GLORIOUS CHURCH

Understanding the Purposes of God-

the Destiny & Mission for His Church

Untangling the Confusion of Bible Prophecy

Who are the True People of God?

The Kingdom of God

The Rapture

The Church in God’s Eternal Purpose

George Rohrig

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© 2011 George Rohrig. All rights reserved.

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First published by AuthorHouse 5/5/2011\

ISBN: 978-1-4567-1681-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-1679-0 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-1680-6 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011901053

Printed in the United States of America

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Table of Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

Fallacy:

Chapter 1

Understanding Covenants and Dispensations

Chapter 2

Dispensational Delusions

Chapter 3

Dispensational Fallacies Under Scrutiny

Chapter 4

A House of Cards

Chapter 5

The Church and the New Covenant

Chapter 6

The People of God

Chapter 7

Adopted or Born?

Chapter 8

First the Natural

Then the Spiritual

Chapter 9

Promises to Israel Fulfilled in the Church

Chapter 10

The Kingdom of God

Chapter 11

The Nature and Extent of the Kingdom

Chapter 12

Daniel’s Visions

Chapter 13

The Glory of Mount Zion

Chapter 14

The Second Coming

Chapter 15

Trees of Righteousness

Chapter 16

The Ultimate End of the Glorious Church

Chapter 17

You and the Triumphant Church

Dedication

I would like to dedicate this book to my mother—Ruth A. Rohrig—as I owe much of my spiritual heritage to her. She was a wonderful teacher and preacher, both in the home and in the church, and was the founder of the church of which I became pastor for over forty years before turning the ministry over to others. At the time of this writing, my daughter Victoria and her husband, Ric Marchi, Pastor one of the churches that continues the heritage of Victoria’s Grandmother Rohrig,

I would also like to recognize and give thanks for my wife and the mother of my children who passed away at the age of forty-six after a long battle with leukemia. Doreen was a large part of any success God gave to us as we shared ministry together for over twenty-six years.

After her death God provided another lovely lady (Lin) to minister with me for twenty years before her death from complications of rheumatoid arthritis and neuropathy.

To both of these godly women I leave these words as a testimony to their faith and love for God and His kingdom.

To Lila—a wonderful woman of God, a published author and my present wife—I offer thanks for her encouragement and also for the rewriting of certain portions of this book for clarity. I owe her my gratitude for her patience and determination in helping me complete the manuscript.

I also offer a special thank you to two of my grandchildren who designed and painted the cover for this book. Cate and Scott are special. I love you both.

Epigraph

Brothers, let me take an example from everyday life. Just as no one can set aside or add to a human covenant that has been duly established, so it is in this case. The promises were spoken to Abraham and to His seed. The Scripture does not say and to seeds, meaning many people, but and to your seed, meaning one person, who is Christ. What I mean is this: The law, introduced 430 years later, does not set aside the covenant previously established by God and thus do away with the promise. For if the inheritance depends on the law, then it no longer depends on a promise; but God in His grace gave it to Abraham through a promise. What, then, was the purpose of the law? It was added because of transgressions until the Seed to whom the promise referred had come (Galatians 3:15-19 NIV).

Introduction

Why should you believe what I have to say in this book? The answer is—you should not! I believe what I have written stays true to the message of the Bible; however, as a Christian you should only believe the Word of God after a thorough searching of the Scriptures for yourself. In fact, God’s Word admonishes us to do so. It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter (Proverbs 25:2). The hidden truths of Scripture are not always easily understood through a casual reading of the Bible or simply taking as truth what someone else has said.

Our glory is to discover those truths by a diligent searching of the Bible in its entirety. I have a deep love for God, His Word, and His Church. It has been my glory to search out the Scriptures for more than fifty years of pastoral and teaching ministry. May I invite you to join with me in discovering the beauty of God’s Word and His destiny for us and, in so doing, discover also the beauty of God Himself. You cannot know God without knowing His Word, for they are one and the same.

All who have put their trust in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and accepted Him as Savior and Lord have been born into the family of God by spiritual birth and by an incorruptible seed which is the Word of God. We constitute the many-membered body of Jesus Christ in the earth and, therefore, should know, understand, and become partakers of the vision He has for His Church. Seeing how important it is to discuss how this affects our eternal purpose as Christians in the economy of God, it is my hope that you will consider carefully the questions raised—and I trust answered—in this book.

It is impossible to know specifically how many Christians and non-Christians alike have been left in utter confusion by the plethora of prophecy books and television teachers speculating about the events purported to take place surrounding the second coming of Jesus Christ, but there must be many. The ever-changing predictions of people named as the Antichrist, the prediction of dates for Christ’s return (which never come to pass), the Battle of Armageddon, and the varied interpretations of the book of Revelation leave most everyone in mass confusion and bring into question the validity of Bible prophecy and even the second coming of Christ itself.

In the middle of the nineteenth century an explosive new doctrine, which I call dispensational futurism, was introduced to the Church of Jesus Christ. This teaching, formulated by a group of Plymouth Brethren scholars led by Charles Darby, was included in the footnotes of the Scofield Reference Bible. I am sure these well-meaning men loved God, but that does not guarantee they were right in the message they espoused. It did, however, gain rapid acceptance by many in the evangelical community, bringing a change in the focus of God’s eternal purpose away from the Church and placing it with Israel in a future age. This parenthetical pause had the effect of relegating the mission of the Church to an afterthought in the overall plan of God.

This doctrine is still prevalent in the Church today and it is the foundation upon which the confusing—and I might add controversial—teaching and predictions centered around the events of Christ’s second coming are based. In the following chapters I will contrast this view of Bible interpretation and its many distinctive components with a more simple view based upon the covenants God has made with man. These covenants are clearly set forth in Scripture and lead us to God’s eternal purpose which He revealed in Christ and intends to complete in the Church.

In my view, most, if not all, of the confusion is due to a lack of understanding of the biblical relationship between Israel and the Church. Most prophecy books and teachers do not have a proper understanding of the covenants God made with Abraham, Israel, and the Church. This has led to the conclusion that the Church is a parenthetical insertion between God’s plan for Israel before and after the Rapture of the Church.

It is my intention to first unravel the confusion by explaining what has led to it and second, by discovering what the covenants reveal about the glorious destiny of the Church and its mission and purpose.

In this book, I will answer from the Bible Four Basic Questions:

1. Does the Bible teach two separate and distinct plans of redemption—one for Jews and another for the Gentiles?

2. Who are the true people of God and heirs to the promises?

3. What is the kingdom of God and when and where does it exist?

4. What is the significance of the Church in God’s eternal purpose?

Fallacy:

"A false or mistaken notion

Misconception

Misbelief

Illusion"

Webster’s Dictionary of Basic English

The Synonym Finder, J I. Rodale

These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to Him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned (1 Corinthians 2:13-15).

Chapter 1

Understanding Covenants and Dispensations

I woke up the morning of September 12, 1988, and nothing had changed. Millions were not wondering where the Christians went. Driverless cars were not smashing together and airplanes without pilots were not crashing to the ground. I had not been left behind. The birds were still singing, the sun was still shining—and I was still here. Jesus had not come to catch away His Church in a secret Rapture.

Millions of copies of a book written by Edgar Whisenant— 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988—had been gobbled up by eager Christians looking for His coming, only to be deceived again by those falsely interpreting the Bible prophecies. Whisenant’s book was just another false alarm. Certainly, however, he was not alone in predicting the time of the coming of the Lord as prophesied in the Bible. He was only one of hundreds of Christian teachers and so-called Bible scholars over the years that have fallen into the trap of trying to predict the date of Christ’s coming, but they always fail. Surely He will come in His time, but that time is known only unto God.

Two Views of Biblical Interpretation

The problem with most of the scary and erroneous predictions is that they are trying to figure out the date of Christ’s coming on a questionable premise of Bible interpretation. It is a system that inevitably leads to erroneous conclusions relating to the second coming of Christ and events following.

There are two major perspectives prevalent in the Church today with respect to understanding and interpreting the Scriptures. One is dispensational futurism and the other is from a covenant perspective. A further description of the term dispensations as used to interpret Scripture would seem to be in order here to help those unfamiliar with the term to understand what we are talking about in this chapter.

Dispensational Presuppositions

Dr. Charles Ryrie, in his book The Basis of the Premillennial Faith (p. 12), presents the following two presuppositions as fundamental to dispensational premillennialism. I cannot overemphasize the importance of these two suppositions as they are integral to the entire foundation upon which the complete system of dispensational futurism stands or falls. These two tenets are as follows:

1. Israel and the church must be kept distinct. A man who fails to distinguish between Israel and the church will inevitably not hold to dispensational distinctions. This simply states that God has separate purposes for Israel and the Church. The nation of Israel is the earthly people and the Church is the heavenly people (see John F. Walvoord, The Rapture Question, pp. 15-16; J. Dwight Pentecost, Things to Come, p. 193). I might add that the entire framework of the dispensational teaching rests on this presupposition. If God’s covenant with Israel is consummated in the national rejection of Christ, as Jesus indicates in the parable of the wicked husbandmen (Matthew 21:33-46), His explicit words in Matthew 23:27-38, Paul’s plain teaching in