Israel & the Kingdom

Should a nation take its penal code from Sinai? The law was addressed to one people, its penalties were welded to a covenant and a land, and the selection everybody makes from it is governed by a rule Scripture never supplies. Leave the law whole, learn from it, and put it back where God put it.

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.

Philip preached Christ, cast out devils, healed the lame, and baptized a city — and he could not give the Holy Ghost. Jerusalem had to send apostles. That one limit explains Acts 8, answers Acts 19, and exposes what is being claimed today.

Paul says there is one baptism. The usual answer is that he means one chief baptism among several. This study tests that reading against every place the word one stands in the Bible, and then against the sentence Paul actually wrote.

A graphic circulating online asks how a man never under the first covenant could be redeemed from transgressions under it. The question carries a premise it never states: that the only redemption there is, is redemption from covenant transgressions. Paul says guilt reached men who never had a covenant to break, and so does the remedy.

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.

Believers ache for a past that was more moral and more Christian, and grieve a covenant they believe the nation broke. But the remembered age never existed as remembered, no Gentile nation was ever in covenant with God, and Scripture rebukes the longing itself. A look at nostalgia, the Christian nation, and the post God actually gave you.

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.