Library of Articles

A preacher told of a street evangelist who asked drivers at a red light whether they believed Jesus is the Son of God, and took a yes for a convert. The question is Scripture and the answer is true. This study sets out what the kingdom was told to believe, what Paul says to believe, and what a yes to that one question does not show.

Matthew 23:39 makes the second advent wait on one sentence Jerusalem has not yet said. Read the whole paragraph and you find what the sentence is about — their treatment of the men God sends them. They killed the prophets, they stoned Stephen, they refused the apostolic witness. The house stands desolate still.

Who are the other sheep of John 10:16? The dispute turns on a word neither side had stopped to define. Scripture uses fold of a place — something built, entered, left or become — and never once of a people. Define the word and the sentence reads itself: Israel's own scattered, brought back to one fold under one shepherd.

Opposition to once saved, always saved seldom turns on the verses it quotes. This article traces the objection to its root — a righteousness a man built himself, and the distance from other men that grace erases — then divides the passages. Israel's salvation is an inheritance received at the end; the Body's was handed over at the beginning.

A revival is being proclaimed across the nation's campuses — crowds, conversions, and a call to reclaim the nation for God. But the renewal of a nation is not the gospel of grace, a faith with no shared creed is not the faith once delivered, and a summons back to Sinai revives the wrong program. A look at what the campus revival actually revives.

When Jesus told Peter he would know hereafter, what would Peter come to understand? Rightly divided, the foot washing belongs to Israel's kingdom program — leadership training for the twelve, grasped after Pentecost, not the Pauline mystery. It also shows why foot washing is no ordinance for the Body, and why we take our humility from Paul.

Matthew stands at the seam of right division. Peter Ruckman hands much of it back to Israel — the Sermon on the Mount, the Disciples' Prayer, conditional forgiveness — then pours the Body of Christ back in through his method of spiritual application. How a book gets wrongly divided even by a man who can see where its parts belong.

Popular readings make the pearl of great price into salvation, or Christ, or the Body of Christ. But the parable names its own subject — the kingdom of heaven — and presses its surpassing worth on the generation to whom it was offered. A study in rightly dividing the mysteries of the kingdom.