Our Hope & Things to Come

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.

One of the hardest sentences Paul wrote appears to say a man's bad works can get him destroyed by God. Read whole, it says very nearly the opposite, and the clause most often left off the end is the one that answers it. Here is what defiling means in Paul's own vocabulary, and why the temple was never the thing in danger.

Paul says God hath made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. Being seated is not the believer's location, nor merely his posture, but his position — a finished, shared, heavenly, and permanent place in the risen Christ, a seat that is also a throne. Here is what the seat means, and what it does not.

Salvation and reward are not two names for one thing. One is a free gift that cannot be earned or lost; the other is a wage for service that can be gained or forfeited, yet never touches the gift. Rightly divide the two and the trembling conscience and the careless heart are answered at once.

The church is called the body of Christ, never the bride. Ephesians 5 ends not in betrothal but in one body, His own flesh and bones. The bride, the Lamb's wife, is the New Jerusalem, the covenant people of Israel married, put away, and brought home. Rightly divided, the wife is Israel and the Body is nearer than a bride.

Philippians 2:14-15 rightly divided. The command to do all things without murmurings touches the walk, not the standing. You are a son of God and a light already, by grace. Murmuring cannot dim the light; it only gives the world a complaint and muffles the word of life you hold forth.

Matthew 10:33 and 2 Timothy 2:12 sound like the same threat, but rightly divided they stand worlds apart. The Lord's warning belongs to Israel under the kingdom program; Paul's word to the Body touches the reward of faithful service, never his salvation — and both rest on One who cannot deny Himself.

Before Paul, no one in Scripture was ever commanded to divide the word of truth, and that silence is the argument. Until the mystery was revealed, all revelation ran in one stream to one destination: the earthly kingdom. Scofield and Larkin count the ages but never divide the seas; the one ridge they will not draw is the one Paul reveals.