The Kingdom of Promise and Prophecy

by Robertson L. Whiteside

2. As God is no respecter of persons, how can any believer in Christ argue that a Jew, because he is a Jew, is yet to enjoy blessings that a Gentile cannot hope to receive, no matter how faithful he is, simply because he is not a Jew. The theory contradicts the fundamental principles of the gospel. Those who hold to that theory judge after the flesh—a thing Jesus condemned. (John 8:15.) The theory encourages the Jew to glory in his fleshly descent from Abraham—to glory after the flesh. Such glorying Paul said was foolishness. (2 Cor. 11:17, 18.) It teaches the Jew to have confidence in the flesh, his Jewish flesh. Paul had no such confidence; to him such relationship was but refuse. Or, as the King James Version has it, he counted such dependence on Jewish flesh as but dung. (Phil. 3:2-8.) Such is your teacher’s theory. Christ died for all. (2 Cor. 5:15.) Now notice the next verse (verse 16): “Wherefore we henceforth know no man after the flesh.” Notice the force of the word henceforth—from now on. Yes, the Jews are still in the world; so are the Japanese and Chinamen. So what does that prove? The person who assumes to know what God knows or does not know is about like a worm assuming to know what Solomon knew and did not know.

3. Any theory about the woman of chapter 12 is merely a guess, for the record does not say who she was. Some commentators, perhaps the majority of them, say she was the church, the dragon was the Roman Empire, and the child was Constantine. I do not know. But if the woman was the Jewish nation and the child was Jesus, then she was a very unnatural mother, for she killed her child! But that leaves the dragon out of the picture, and leaves us wondering about verse 6.

Pointed Paragraphs:

CREATING A DEMAND

Sometime ago a Christian man asked a gospel preacher: “Why do we not have great gospel sermons like those we used to hear?” The reply was: “There is no demand for them.” Do that question and answer reveal conditions as they are? Have we reached the point where preaching is trimmed down to fit the demands of the times? Is preaching thus reduced to a matter of trade?

Some factories make only those articles that are in demand. But occasionally an article is offered for sale for which there had been no demand, but the makers of such articles proceed to create a demand. They do extensive advertising; they extol the uses and virtues of their article till people want it. And cannot we in the same way create a demand for the pure gospel in communities where there is no demand? We cannot do it by dealing in religious soup. There is a demand for the unadulterated gospel, for great gospel sermons; but the demand is not as extensive nor as intensive as it should be. Even in some churches of Christ there is not as strong demand for gospel sermons as there should be. When an elder can say, as some of them have said, “So far as I am concerned, I do not care whether our preacher can preach or not,” it is time we were waking up.

QUESTIONS ON REVELATION 20.

E. B. Taylor asks seven or eight questions on the twentieth chapter of Revelation. To give answer to all these questions would require an exegesis of the chapter. For me that is impossible. The chapter abounds in figures of speech. Many have read into that chapter things that are not in it. They also make some of it figurative and the rest literal, as the needs of their theory require. With them a day in some of the prophecies is a year, but they take the thousand years as literal. Yet they will not say that the devil is a real snake, nor that the chain is a literal chain, nor that the beast is a real four-footed animal. Here are some of the things in this chapter that I do not know: Who the angel is, what the key is, the great chain, why the devil is called a snake, what the binding means, the thousand years, when the thousand years end, the abyss and how it was sealed, length of the “little time,” who sat on thrones, what judgment was given them, the extent of that judgment, what the beast is, the image, mark of the beast, the war of verse 8, Gog and Magog, the camp of the saints, how devoured by fire, the lake, the beast of verse 10, who the false prophet is, nor how there can be day and night in eternity. Yet the chapter makes some plain statements.

We may not know who the martyrs are, yet it is affirmed of them, and of no one else, that “they lived, and reigned with Christ a thousand years.” When or where this reigning is, was, or is to be, is not stated. But it is stated in verse 6 that those who have part in the first resurrection “shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.” Hence, they are to be priests and to reign at the same time—a royal priesthood. It is plain that they were to reign while they were priests, but Christians are priests now. Leaving out to be, words supplied by the translator, Revelations 1:6 reads thus: “He made us a kingdom, priests unto his God and Father.” Being kings and priests, Christians are a royal priesthood. (See 1 Pet. 2:9.)

In 20:12, John saw the dead standing before the throne. The dead, not a part of the dead. This is in perfect harmony with the Savior’s description of the judgment in Matt. 25:31-46. It is argued by some that this is a judgment of nations—kingdoms—instead of individuals. But nations in the Greek is neuter; but the pronoun them in verse 32 is masculine, and, therefore, refers to people, and not to nations as such. At the judgment, therefore, all—the small and the great—will stand before the throne. This is also made clear in 2 Thess. 1:7-10. There it is declared that Jesus will take vengeance on the wicked “when he shall come to be glorified in his saints.” And the last verse in the twentieth chapter of Revelations shows that some will be at that judgment, whose names are written in the book of life.