~ By James Fire
The Glorious Gospel to Israel and the Church
I’ve been told that this epistle is often taught in colleges of law, not for its spiritual content, but for the irresistible logic that Paul the apostle uses to build his Scriptural arguments in assertion of the fundamental principles of the Gospel and all that this entails.
We have seen how the Law of God is used lawfully as a means to establish the holy standard of God’s righteousness and thus revealing the universal condition of mankind’s sinfulness and this without exception: all are condemned by the holy Law – the immoral pagans, the moral Gentiles and the religious Jews.
We have then seen how the Gospel is established as the exclusive means of salvation for all the world through Jesus Christ, the Messiah of Israel and Savior of all the world (that is, for all who call upon His Name) and the justification that is offered by His blood atonement on the Cross.
We then observed how sanctification is brought about in the life of the saint, once they enter into salvation via the justification of Jesus Christ; this is an initial step upon justification but also an ongoing process in the life of the saint that will know its completion once we are brought to heaven and meet our precious LORD face to Face.
At that time, we shall know glorification, and shall inherit incorruptible, immortal bodies fashioned after the LORD’s own glorified body which He presented to His disciples after His resurrection.
We then examined the latter half of the epistle in chapters nine, ten and eleven where Paul produces his evidences for Israel and how this nation yet still has a viable, and foreordained future (that is, the believing remnant) once the Messiah returns to claim His own and they receive Him as their reigning King – Who at that time will defeat the anti-Christ, the False Prophet and the kings of the earth that oppose Him at the so-called ‘battle’ of Armageddon.
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~~ by James J. Fire
A PRELIMINARY WORD -
Having completed the study in the book of Ephesians on the blog FROM the MIND of FIRE, I thought it would be more profitable if I left out chapter 6, verses 10 through 18 and treated this portion of scripture in a more detailed study on our spiritual warfare, here on The TRUTH Under FIRE.
In today’s world, churches in error seem to be polarizing, to a large degree, between these two groups of fellowships: the one group hardly recognizes, or not at all, the existence of Satan, the kingdom of darkness, spiritual warfare and are involved in this world merely as social agencies, self-help institutions, and a platform from which to address entirely earthly, non-spiritual, political and social issues. Rick Warren is a prime example of this.
The other group seems fixated on nothing but spiritual warfare, the kingdom of darkness, and Satan; their battle strategies and objectives seem centered around “reclaiming this world/nation/city for God” which is something the LORD Jesus Christ never did, nor did any of His apostles.
The church received no such command to “reclaim” (A review of JOHN 17 where the LORD Jesus Christ prays to the Father is most revealing in this regard). They get into unbiblical practises which in themselves can lead a Christian astray from the Truth just as effectively as the Emerging Church Movement and its proponents (like Rick Warren as mentioned above); included among these would be such teachers as C. Peter Wagner and the late Derek Prince (strangely enough Wagner has been a spiritual mentor of R. Warren’s for a long time).
Those are the extreme positions (of course not all churches can be accounted for in these two groups), and as usual the Truth resides somewhere in-between; precisely that is, in an accurate appraisal of the Word of God, the Holy Scriptures.
An exhaustive treatment of this subject would be worthy of an entire book (and there are some, though not many that have been already published which prove useful; I have a list of such books at the end of this article)!
Obviously this study will not be exhaustive, but I do pray that the LORD will enable me to construct at least, a very thorough, exact and balanced treatment of this very necessary and biblical subject!
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