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!
Please read the following article carefully and recognise that we are commanded to pray for the Jewish people, presently far from God and under His judgment because of their rejection of their Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Remember those solemn and sorrowful words of the Saviour as He wept over the city, when He spoke of its ‘peace’.
“And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, Saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation,” Luke 19:41-44.
In rejecting the Saviour, the Jewish people rejected the ‘peace of God’, as do all rejectors of the gospel.
Believing, as we do in the future conversion of the Jewish nation (Zech 12:9-14; Romans 11:1-2, 23-29), we are COMMANDED to pray that God’s peace will come again to that city and the people of it. In praying for such a peace, we are but praying for the return of the Saviour, as did John in response to the Saviour’s final words. “He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus,” Revelation 22:20.
Sincerely in Christ’s name,
Ivan Foster
