You will follow me and we will ride to glory, way up, the middle of the air.
And I'll call down thunder and speak the same and my work fills the sky with flame
And might and glory gonna be my name and men gonna light my way.
Estimated Prophet-Grateful Dead
After watching Les's program (see part 3) on a regular basis and doing my own studying in the scripture and on the internet about it, I found that what he was teaching (but never called it on the show) was dispensationalism.
If you don't know the term, dispensationalism teaches that God has two groups of people. There is Israel, the actual nation, and the Church, the body of Christ. God has different dispensations or ages and Israel's program was put on hold once they rejected Jesus. God then starting forming the Church and that will continue until the rapture and then God will go back to his dealings with Israel, there will be a kingdom on Earth with Jesus as king, God will judge all of humanity and then eternity.
There are a great many charts on the web that illustrate this.
This system made a lot of sense to me. I loved it and was all in. I discussed it with my husband and he liked much of what Les said, too, and in fact, had been coming to some of the same conclusions on his own in his bible listening in the truck.
Dispensationalism is a heavily futuristic theology and most of what is stressed is not so much what is here and now, but what is to come. A glorious rapture of the church and us believers being swept out of the world before all heck broke loose at the second coming. And it was coming soon! YAY.
All this questioning and longing and wrestling with God and the hum drum of daily life was almost over. The world going to hell in a hand-basket was really a good thing, it meant that Jesus was coming back any minute.
I had believed in the imminent return of Jesus back in the pre Catholic days (we'll get there) but they (the RCC) also sees the end times differently. They weren't too worried about it and were more concerned with the here and now. That's where I was during my stay there (plus having a baby every 18 months or so keeps one pretty earthly minded).
But now, refreshed by this new teaching and excited by the idea again, I was ready for Jesus to appear, the sooner the better.
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Les Feldick we do not really believe in too much, I think he is pre-millenial.
ReplyDeleteHe definitely is. I can remember learning about this from his show, it was all so very convincing to me. There is biblical basis to it, too, but of course problems with it. I'll get to that later.
DeleteOf course, the danger in too much "futuristic thinking" is to forget that we are to do our best to prevent the "hell in a handbasket" world...
ReplyDeleteAha! Indeed. In fact, I found that it encouraged me to not really care about it (the world).
DeleteThis is so much a blast from the past for me Alice. So much emphasis in the 70s and 80s for me on the end times. I remember how I loved the two semesters of Revelation that I took in Bible College and was all about when the rapture would take place.
ReplyDeleteReminds me of that Dylan song that says: "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." Growing up in Jesus meant leaving my fixation with eschatology and moving on to things more profitable.
Great Dylan song, I feel that way sometimes.
DeleteI have studied Revelation like crazy over the past several years and I still don't know what to do with it.
Wonder if John ever imagined that his dream/vision would one day garner so much attention? Perhaps he would have annotated and explained it a bit more if he knew? Of course some view parts of the book as history, parts as metaphor and parts as future events. Hard to really know. People have been thinking the end times were at hand since John penned the book.
DeleteVery interesting.
ReplyDeleteThis really rings a bell with me as I turned into a hyper-dispensationalist (although I did not like the term) for a while during my own journey. The book "One Book Rightly Divided" by Douglas Stauffer really revolutionized my thinking for a time.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bibledoug.com
I definitely wandered into ultra (hyper) dispensationalism myself. We used to watch Richard Jordan's Forgotten Truths show on our local Christian station as well.
DeleteI posted some of his videos here before. This was one of my favorites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2L8d8YSjr4
(It's part 2 of 3 I think)
I can't believe I've never heard of Douglas Stauffer. I thought I had exhausted all dispensational teachers:)