Hebrews Lesson 100
NKJ Psalm 119:9 How can a young man cleanse his way?
By taking heed according to Your word.
The last couple of weeks I
have taken a little bit of a detour in Hebrews to look at dispensations because
there is a change that is at the root of what is being talked about in Hebrews
7 and especially into Hebrews 8 when we talk about the New Covenant. So I took time just to give you an overview and
a little brief introduction into what dispensations are.
A dispensation is an
administration by God during history of these sequential periods in history as
God is working out His plans and purposes in the human race.
There is also a distinction
between what we might call ages and dispensations. One of the key elements in a dispensation is
that there must be new revelation. There
must be new information from God so that there is a basis for either the human
race or a portion of the human race to understand that the way God is
administering human history. The
expectations, the requirements, the responsibilities are shifting. So that is usually revealed in a covenant;
but not every covenant changes dispensations.
For example the Land Covenant in Deuteronomy 30, the Davidic Covenant in
II Samuel 14, and the New Covenant in Jeremiah 31 do no change
dispensations. However when the New
Covenant goes into effect, actually when all three of those find their ultimate
fulfillment which is at the Second Coming of Jesus Christ then of course there is a shift in
dispensations. But, the revelation about
those covenants doesn’t change a dispensation as the Abrahamic Covenant changed
dispensations, as the Noahic Covenant changes dispensations or the earlier
ones.
Now last time when I finished
I was putting together a chart or overview of the dispensations and I thought I
had added one that dealt with the end with the Church Age, Tribulation and
We start off with biblical
dispensations. We have the Age of the Gentiles
and the Age of Israel. So these are the
broad ages that cover the Old Testament period.
Then we have the Age of Perfect Environment which is the initial dispensation
from creation to the fall. The
information is revealed in what I call the Creation Covenant, what Scofield
called the Edenic Covenant. This is
revealed in Genesis 1:28-30 and Hosea 6:7.
There is a responsibility that is delineated. That is to fulfill the covenant – to rule
over the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky and the beasts of the field, to
guard and keep the garden and not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge
of Good and Evil.
There is a failure. They ate the fruit – Genesis 3:1-6. There is a divine judgment of spiritual death
and expulsion from the garden.
Then we have because of the
outline of the condemnation, we have a new dispensation that has been called
human conscience. The reason it is
called human conscience is there is no established authority structure outside
of the individual or outside of the family we can say. There is no government per se. There is no authorization that we know of in
Scripture revealed for human government.
So the covenant that governs this is the Adamic Covenant – Genesis
3:14-19. The responsibility is animal
sacrifice. Once again salvation is based
on grace. It’s an issue of sacrificing
that which God has created. Man does not
produce or make the animals. Later on
(this is what confuses some people) in the Levitical sacrifices you have grain
offerings and you have various other offerings that involve bringing produce. They serve a different function. So we begin at the time of Cain and
Abel. There is the understanding that
the foundational sacrifice is a blood sacrifice. Cain brings an offering from the fruit of the
field, but Abel brings a sacrifice that is honored by God because it is a lamb
from his flocks and he sacrifices it.
So you will read some people who
say, “Well, there was not really an issue there. It was Cain’s attitude, not the sacrifice.”
But what they are doing is
reading back into Genesis 4 aspects of the Mosaic Law which doesn’t come along
for another couple of thousand years. Their failure was evil and wickedness as described
in Genesis 6:5-6 and the judgment is a worldwide flood.
Then we have a new
covenant. The new covenant is the Noahic
Covenant which establishes human government.
They are again mandated to multiply and fill the earth just as they were
in the original Creation Covenant.
Rather than scattering, they build the
Then we get to
Now here is an interesting
question. If somebody is a descendent of
Japheth and they’ve migrated up into what is now
From this point on God is
going to bless the rest of the human race only through Abraham. That’s why we have a dispensational shift now
at this particular point. You don’t
leave this off into some sort of transition period. It is clearly part of the Age of Israel. They are to remain distinct. They may fail because they start – the sons
of Jacob begin to intermarry with the Canaanites. They start to think like Canaanites, act like
pagans, and become assimilated to
Then we have their
deliverance. In the book of Exodus God
gives the Mosaic Law which is the next covenant. It is a temporary covenant to govern His redeemed
people. It is not a means of salvation,
neither was it necessarily a means of sanctification. But it was the body of laws to govern the
nation
You didn’t have a massive
return to the land following the Babylonian Captivity. You still had vast numbers of Jews who stayed
in
Then we have another age
which I call the Messianic Age. The
reason I use the term “Messianic Age” is because Jesus comes to offer Himself
as the Messiah to
It was a genuine offer of the
kingdom. So this is the Messianic Age
because at least for 80% of that time period of Jesus’ public ministry on earth,
He is offering the kingdom to
Now a lot of people have
asked questions about that. If you look
at Scofield and you look at Chafer and you look at any number of
dispensationalists even today, you look at the Tim LaHaye Prophecy Study
Bible - they follow this old Scofield scheme. But I think that you can take this criterion that
we have that is laid out for a dispensation. Is there new revelation that they
are accountable to that’s distinct? What
were the Jews in the Old Testament responsible for? They had to believe in a future provision of
a Messiah. But if Jesus is standing in
front of you, what are you responsible for?
Remember when Jesus is talking to Mary in John 11, or to Martha.
He said:
NKJ John
Do you believe this?
It is present, real
time. It’s not “believe that God is
going to send a Messiah in the future”; but that “I am He.” It was real time so you have a definite
change in the message. So you have
Jesus presenting Himself as the Logos.
NKJ John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and
the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
NKJ John
So we have a new revelation
in the Son. The responsibility is now to
accept Him as the Messiah. They failed
and rejected Him as the Messiah – Matthew 12.
The Sanhedrin, the Pharisees, the Sadducees rejected Him as Messiah. Even though thousands of Jews trusted Him during
the incarnation as the Messiah, the leadership did not and the vast majority
did not. Even after the church begins
and there were still thousands of Jews that trusted Christ as Messiah; but it
wasn’t the majority of
This is foreshadowed by Jesus’
response to the Sadducees and Pharisees in Matthew 12 when they say, “Well, you
are doing all these miracles in the power of Beelzebub.”
That was when they rejected
His messiahship. They are attributing the
testimony that God the Holy Spirit was giving them through Jesus’ miracles and
they are attributing the work of the Holy Spirit to Beelzebub.
So Jesus said, “You have
blasphemed the Holy Spirit.”
Now there are all kinds of
people that come along with different ideas as to what the blasphemy of the
Holy Spirit is – that it’s the unforgivable sin. There are a lot of people who
say that it is the unforgivable sin. There
is no unforgivable sin. What about not
believing in Jesus? Well, Jesus either
paid for every sin or He didn’t. That
sin is paid for, it is just not accepted.
He has to pay for every sin or
you have a problem. So there is no unforgivable
sin. The blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is
not an unforgivable sin. It is the Pharisees
as the leaders of
If you don’t believe in
Christ you’re not sent to hell or the
The reason I brought that up is
about 5 times this last week it seems I have heard somebody mention something about
not believing in Jesus is the unforgivable sin; so I thought I would run down that
rabbit trail a minute.
The cross is the ultimate revelation
of God and His provision of grace for us. Then just after the cross we have a
new dispensation begin. Fifty days later
we have the Day of Pentecost and the Church Age. The New Covenant was established on the cross,
but it is not enacted. This is something
we are going to go over ad over again as we get in to Hebrews 8 dealing with Jeremiah
31 and the New Covenant. The New
Covenant is between God and
NKJ Jeremiah 31:31 " Behold, the days are coming,
says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of
Do hear of the church
anywhere in there? No.
When you get into Hebrews 8 you
see the same thing. It is a direct quote
from Jeremiah 31.
NKJ Hebrews 8:8 Because finding fault with them, He
says: "Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new
covenant with the house of
… and the church. Oh no!
Wait a minute. It didn’t say
that. So where is the church? The church benefits from this covenant.
If I entered into a contract
with another person and I say on the basis of this legal contract this provides
a foundation for being able to provide for these other people. The people that are being provided for on the
basis of the legal contract are not contract partners. They are beneficiaries of the contract.
We have the precedent set in
the Old Testament in the Abrahamic Covenant when Abraham said, “I will bless
those who bless you and you will be a blessing to all people.”
The contract is between God
and Abraham, but all people are blessed through that. The contract simply provides the basis. So the contract is sealed in the ancient
world with a sacrifice. That is what
happens on the cross. But the contract
if you read the provisions and we will go into them as we get there in Jeremiah
31 – that has never happened. It is not
happening in the Church Age.
Somebody says, “Oh well, wait
a minute. You forgot. The Apostle Paul said that we were ministers of
the New Covenant.”
That’s right. Those who engage in evangelism are ministers
of the New Covenant because the foundation for the salvation of Church Age
believers is still the New Covenant. It hasn’t gone into effect for
If you say it is in effect,
you have a problem because when the New Covenant goes into effect, the kingdom
begins. Either we are in the kingdom or
we’re not in the kingdom unless of course you are a professor at Dallas Seminary
and you have bought into George Eldon Ladd’s solution which was called the
“already not yet” view of the kingdom.
That means we are already
there in some sense, but not yet really.
Scholars just love this. We live
in a postmodern age. It is easy to believe these things and believe two
different things. So we are already in
the kingdom, but we’re not yet. In what
sense are we in the kingdom? Is Jesus
sitting on David’s throne? And you had a
couple of Dallas Seminary professors. Darryl Bock and Craig Blazing came up
with this idea that Jesus is now sitting on David’s throne. It has been spiritualized. They interpret the passages in Acts 3 in the
same way that a-millenialists do. We are
going to get into this in a little bit. It is call progressive dispensationalism
because the kingdom comes in and it’s progressively coming in. It was
inaugurated with Jesus and it’s progressively coming in. Whereas, what I believe and traditional dispensationalists
teach is that the kingdom was offered, the people rejected it so it is postponed.
It doesn’t come in at all. We are not in the kingdom in any sense.
“Well, we’ve got the Holy
Spirit.”
That’s doesn’t fit the
parameters of Jeremiah 31. So this is
one of the things and not everybody at
The issue in the Church Age
is faith alone in Christ alone. We now
understand that the person that we are believing in is Jesus of Nazareth who is
Jeshua Hamashea. He is Jesus the Messiah.
In the Old Testament they
didn’t have a clear fix on who exactly it was going to be. So they believed that God is going to provide
a redeemer, but they don’t understand specifics. That becomes important too as we will see
when I get into the lessons later on.
But most people are going to reject
Christ. This is hard for most people to
believe, to understand. But in each
dispensation the vast majority of people in the world have not trusted in God’s
salvific promise. The vast majority are
going to go to the
“Well, they grew up in the
South. They went to some church. They probably heard the gospel when they were
young. They are probably a believer.”
Unless there is evidence to
the contrary, they weren’t. The indication in Scripture is that a vast
majority miss the narrow road. They take
the wide road and they end up in the
What we didn’t get into last
time was this. Church Age - all those
who die, unbelievers go to Hades as a holding place. At the end of the Church Age, all believers
are raptured, alive and dead, to be with the Lord in the air. That is followed by a 7 year tribulation. All unbelievers who died during the
tribulation go to Hades. In heaven we
have the Judgment Seat of Christ followed by the marriage supper of the
Lamb. Then there is the Second Advent at the time of
the Battle of Armageddon. There is a judgment of tribulation survivors. Then we go into the
Now let’s go to some other issues
related to dispensations. I’ve talked a little
bit about covenant theology. The term I
used actually was replacement theology. Now replacement theology is a much broader
term than covenant theology. Covenant
theology relates to the theological systems that have their heritage in reformed
theology specifically the theology of Calvin and Zwingli who was the Swiss
reformer and Henri Bollinger. Bollinger,
Zwingli and Calvin really are the fountainhead of what is called reformed
theology which is distinct from Lutheran theology or Baptist theology. You would think of it more in terms of
Calvinism or Presbyterianism or in some cases congregational churches.
Up in
Now the theological system
that dominates among Presbyterians is called covenant theology. As I pointed out in covenant theology, the
covenants that they are talking are not the biblical covenants of the Adamic
Covenant, the Noahic Covenant, and the Abrahamic Covenant. They believe in three theological covenants
that we will get into in just a minute.
The basic definition of
covenant theology is that it is a system of theology based on two sometimes
three covenants which are governing categories for understanding the Bible.
Now let me go back and review
something with you. There are three
things that make you a dispensationalist.
Charles Ryrie defined it as the sine qua non, a Latin phrase “for
without which nothing”. These are the essential
elements that make a person a dispensationalist. It doesn’t have anything to do with how many
dispensations you believe in. It has to
do with more fundament issues.
In covenant theology, they
would disagree with that. They would say
that the Church Age today is modern
The key issue is how they
understand the Bible. They interpret the
Bible through this grid of these two or three theologically inferred
covenants. According to them all of
God’s work in history is the outworking of these particular covenants.
They are first of all the Covenant
of Works. The Covenant of Works was an
agreement (according to them) between God and Adam in which God promises life
to Adam for perfect obedience, but if he is disobedient then the penalty is
going to be death. It is called a Covenant
of Works because Adam would have achieved eternal life if he had just obeyed
God. If he had done what God wanted him
to do, then he would have earned as it were eternal life. So that is called a Covenant of Works. Adam broke the covenant when he ate of the
fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil so that nullified the covenant
and it would have nothing whatsoever to do with us today. It was only in effect during the time of the
Garden of Eden.
In contrast to that,
dispensationalists would believe that there was a Creation Covenant or an Edenic
Covenant that Adam did break it but there wasn’t a works basis there. It was just obedience or disobedience – not
merit. Adam is still +R, in the image of
God.
Louis Burkoff,
a reformed theologian, said that it is perfectly true that there is no such
covenant recorded in Scripture and that the Scripture contains no explicit
promise of eternal life for Adam.
They say. “But it’s implied.”
I’ve read through Genesis 1-3
a lot, but I haven’t seen an implication of that. The problem is they can’t go to Scripture to document
these covenants. They are theologically
inferred and then imposed on Scripture.
This is the biggest danger that people have. They come to some conclusion that X principle
is true and then they go read it back into the Scripture rather than getting it
out of the Scripture.
Now the second covenant is
called the Covenant of Redemption. But not
all covenant theologians believe in a Covenant of Redemption. This is a covenant that those who hold to it
say it is a covenant between God the Father and God the Son. It is not with man. God the Father and God the Son enter into this
covenant and the Father promises the Son that He will become the head of the
elect and the Son agrees to die for the elect.
Again I will quote from Louis
Burkoff. He
said that “this is the agreement between God the Father and the Son giving the
Son the headship and being the redeemer of the elect and the Son voluntarily
taking the place of those the Father had given Him.”
But as I said not all
covenant theologians hold to this.
The third covenant they call
the Covenant of Grace. This is the major
covenant in their system. Everything
from the fall of Adam to the end of history is under the Covenant of Grace.
Burkoff say:
This
is the gracious agreement between the authentic God and the offending but elect
sinner in which God promises salvation by faith in Christ and the sinner
accepts by believing a life and promising a life of faith and obedience.
See that is where you are
going to get lordship salvation eek out of this because if you don’t have a
life of faith and obedience, then you didn’t have genuine faith to begin with
and you aren’t really saved.
Now what is interesting about
all this is that within covenant theology even though we don’t have any
revelation to this effect, they believe that everybody in the Old Testament is
saved the same way as everybody in the New Testament is saved. By that I don’t mean by faith alone in a
promise of deliverance by God, but that they actually have revelation they were
believing in Jesus Christ. Nothing
changes.
In contrast dispensationalists
believe in progressive revelation. All
Adam understood was that the seed of the woman would be the deliverer. So he’s believing that God is going to send a
descendent, the seed of the woman and He will be the deliverer. If he trusts in God for that and assemblized by animal sacrifices then he’ll be saved.
Now Abraham has a little
greater in progressive revelation.
Abraham understands that it is going to be a promised seed and it is
going to come through him and Sarah and through Isaac later on. So there is a little tightening of that. Later on we learn that the line of the seed
is going to go through David. Then you
have additional promises – Isaiah 7:14 that the seed of the woman is going to
be born through the virgin. Then Micah
5:2 – He is going to be born in
So for them this is a basic
problem. Everything is squeezed into one concept. They must say that God’s plan of salvation is
always specifically the same. It is identical.
Burkoff says:
In
determining the degree of knowledge of God that the ancient peoples of God had,
we are not to be governed by our own capacity of discovering from the Old
Testament scriptures the doctrines of grace.
What amount of supplementary knowledge they received from the prophets
are in direct revelation we don’t know.
In other words they knew he
was going to be named Jesus of Nazareth, but the Old Testament just doesn’t
tell us that. Just because you can’t
find it there doesn’t mean that it’s not true.
So that is part of covenant theology.
So they emphasized the Covenant of Grace. Again I remind you that their concept of
covenants isn’t what we are talking about biblical covenants.
So covenant theology assumes those
covenants and interprets everything in the Bible on the basis of those
theological covenants. That’s called a
top-down or theologically driven exegesis of Scripture.
So you have three
problems.
Now covenant theology has
some really damaging affects in different areas of theology. First of all in hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is
the science of biblical interpretation.
Many covenant theologians are very firm on literal interpretation until
they get to prophecy. Then, all of a
sudden they begin to theologize and to allegorize or spiritualize the promises
so that when God promised Abraham a specific piece of real estate that is
bounded by the
They say, “Well,
So God changes the terms of
the covenant? No, He still made that
promise to Abraham that Abraham would possess it. Abraham never possessed it. The only thing he had was a piece of real
estate he bought near the
It leads to significant
problems in other areas, for example in their understanding the church in ecclesiology. They have the idea that there is only one
people of God, the elect. The church and
So that creates various other
problems. Then when it comes to
soteriology - oh man that really affects a lot of stuff. This is where you come up with lordship
salvation, coming out of part of this that you don’t really know that you have
the right kind of faith to be saved unless you have works that are in keeping
with it. The slogan that you’ll hear is “while
saving faith is alone, the faith that saves is never alone.” Let me say it again. “While you are saved by faith alone, the
faith that saves is never alone.” What
they are doing is, they’re introducing works through the back door.
What they are saying is, “You
are saved by faith alone, but see if it is real faith, if it is genuine faith
if it is saving faith; then you are going to see a change in your life. That is the evidence of your salvation. If you don’t see that change, then you better
wonder whether you are actually saved. You
could have been a false professor. You
have a pseudo-faith in Jesus.”
They try to go to the
Scripture to prove that you can have a genuine faith in Jesus and a non-saving
faith in Jesus. Just look at those
people who saw all of those signs and wonders that Jesus performed in
NKJ John
Pisteuo eis. The trouble
is that pisteuo eis
is used everywhere else in the gospel of John to indicate that which a person
does to be saved. You are to believe in
Him – pisteuo eis.
NKJ John
Piesteuo eis. But these people did believe in Him. Why?
Why did they believe in Him?
Well, two verses later it says Jesus knew what was in their hearts and
He didn’t trust them.
“See if they were really
saved, they would be trustworthy.”
The implication of that is
that every believer should be perfectly trustworthy because they have been regenerate. That is why you have things like Christian Yellow
Pages. What? I don’t care if my car
mechanic, where he is going to end up eternally as long as he can fix my
car. I don’t really care where my
cardiologist is going to end up eternally as long as he keeps me alive. I mean I do care where they end up eternally,
but you understand what I mean. Their
relationship to God has nothing to do with their physical skill, so why do I
want a Christian Yellow Pages to find some incompetent Christian to work on my
car who is going to take advantage of me because you know, I am a gullible
Christian.
That’s where they end up
going. You have this pseudo-faith in
Jesus so you can believe that Jesus died for your sins and you are not really
saved. You have to look around and make
sure you have the right kind of works.
So people become fruit
inspectors. So how much fruit is the
right kind of fruit? And how do you
know? See one time I asked John McArthur
this. He had just come out of his book on
The Gospel According to Jesus which is the bible for lordship alvation. Tommie Ice had come up from
When it came to question and
answer I said, “Well Dr. McArthur, if you died today are you sure you are going
to heaven?”
He said, “Well I am 98% sure.”
At least he was consistent
with what he was teaching. You can’t
have assurance of salvation. See people
confuse eternal security with assurance of salvation. He is not saying you can lose your salvation
because they believe if you are truly saved you are secure. It is just that you can’t truly know that you
are saved unless you have the right kind of works and you don’t know that until
you die because you have to persevere all the way until the time you die. So that is how covenant theology works itself
out in terms of salvation. It also as
other impacts because they see the general purpose of history as salvation, they
have always been extremely weak in angelology and demonology and not
understanding spiritual warfare or the angelic conflict. It is a major hole in their whole
system. There are various problems like
that.
So what under girds all of this is hermeneutics.
Herman who? Hermeneutics. That is the science of interpretation. How do you interpret things? As I always say, you need to interpret the
Bible the same way you interpret the instructions to fill out your income tax
return. If most Christians interpreted
the IRS instructions they way they interpret the Bible, they would all be in
jail.
They all want to allegorize
and spiritualize it and say, “Well, you need to give 15%. What does that number
represent? That’s really a symbol; I
can’t take15 literally. It must mean
.01%. That feels comfortable with
me. Okay, let me pray about it and see
how the Holy Spirit leads me. I feel
much better about that so I will give .01% and…”
What is wrong with that? We get into all kinds of subjectivity and
everything falls apart after that which is a problem.
So what is a good definition
of hermeneutics? This is D. L. Cooper. Some of you have probably never heard of D.
L. Cooper. Dr. Cooper was Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s pastor.
He died back in the late ‘60’s I believe. He was a Jewish believer. That is where
This is a great concise statement
of literal, plain hermeneutic. He said:
When
the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, make no other sense.
In other words when it makes
sense the way you read it, don’t try to make it mean something else. Don’t look for some hidden meaning, something
between the lines or anything else.
Therefore take every word at is ordinary, usual,
literal meaning, unless the facts of the immediate context studied in the light
of related passages and axiomatic and fundamental truths indicates clearly
otherwise.
In other words there has got
to be good contextual evidence that figures of speech or idioms or things of
that nature are being used. When we talk
about literal plain understanding of Scripture, that’s what we mean. It’s not that there are no figures of
speech. It is not that we don’t believe
there are idioms, but that’s how people understand it. Idioms and figures of speech wouldn’t make
sense unless there was an underlying literalness. So every time you use a figure of speech,
people know what you mean because that figure of speech has become axiomatic or
idiomatic and everybody knows what that means.
It isn’t to be understood in a wooden fashion. So that is a good definition of literal
hermeneutics. Sometimes it is simply referred
to as normal interpretation. Sometimes
people refer to it as plain or simple interpretation, just using the standard
norms of interpreting speech in order to understand things.
A good statement on this is by
Lange. Lange’s Commentary on
Revelation says:
The
literalist (the so called literalist) is not one who denies that figurative
language, that symbols, are used in prophecy nor does he deny that great
spiritual truths are set forth therein; his position is, simply that the prophecies
are to be normally interpreted (i.e., according to the received laws of
language: as any other utterances are interpreted) – that which is manifestly
figurative being so regarded.
In other words, you can tell
when somebody is speaking literally or when they are using an idiom or a figure
of speech. So that is your basic understanding. Now how do we know that
prophecy should be understood literally?
Well, three lines of evidence.
There
is a good quote on this from Gordon H. Clark.
He says:
If
God created man in His own rational image and endowed him with the power of
speech, then a purpose of language, in fact the chief purpose of language would
naturally be the revelation of truth to man and the prayers of man to God. In a theistic philosophy one ought not to say
that all language has been devised in order to describe and discuss the finite
objects of our sense-experience. On the
contrary, language was devised by God, that is, God created man rational for the
purpose of theological expression.
So
God created man to communicate to him so man can understand it. You don’t have to work at it. So the
second reason that we should interpret prophecy literally is because that is
the way language functions.
Somebody
over here may say, “Well, I think this symbol means X.”
Somebody
over here says, “Nah. That symbol means
non-X.”
Well,
who’s right? Well, let’s pray about it
and see who’s warm and filled.
Alright? There is no certainty.
There is no objectivity. There is no
standard for understanding what something means. If you don’t know what it
means, how can you be held accountable for it?
But, it is clear from Scripture that God intends to communicate to us
and that we are expected to understand precisely what He means and what He
doesn’t mean and that we are held accountable for it.
So that’s the foundation for
understanding hermeneutics for dispensationalism. Now I am going to come back and continue this
next time and get into some more details, especially the major problem that
people seem to run into or talk about is how the Old Testament is used in the
New Testament because what covenant theology says is that the New Testament
tells you what the Old Testament means.
But when they say that, they come along and they change the meaning.
“So that…didn’t realize
Abraham but God wasn’t really talking about that piece of real estate, He was
talking about heaven. But you have to
read the New Testament before you get that in place.”
Really?
For them the New Testament
tells what the Old Testament means which is really different from our thinking that
the Old Testament is the whole idea of progressive revelation and the New
Testament fulfills that which the Old Testament reveals.
We will get into that next
time.