The following is an article which appeared in the Sovereign Grace Advent Testimony magazine, ‘Watching and Waiting’, October-December 1983.
It was brought to my mind when a recording of a panel discussion at a ‘Youth Meeting’, sent to me, indicated that they had been told by one Free Presbyterian minister, who ought to have known better and whose name I will not reveal for I would not wish him to be embarrassed by a public exposure of his folly, that a verse in Psalm 122 did NOT mean what it plainly said!
The verse was: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee,” verse 6.
The young people were told that the word ‘Jerusalem’ did not mean the city of Jerusalem but rather the ‘church’!
This is the thinking of the ‘A-millennialist’, who has learned his eschatology from the notions propounded by a heretic from the third century, one Origen.
There is a simple maxim that every Christian should remember regarding our understanding of the Bible. It is: ‘God says what He means and means what He says’! We should ever take the words of Scripture literally except where we are told that they are parabolic or figurative or symbolic. We do not need men to come to us and tell us, ‘When God said this, He really meant something very different!’
Those who would put forward this notion want to place themselves between the reader of the Bible and God and be a ‘mouthpiece’ who can tell them the real meaning of Holy Scripture.
That is ‘priestcraft’ and can only lead people astray as we see in Roman Catholicism today! (more…)
