"The Future History of the Church, Part 1"
A typological and midrashic examination of what will happen in the future of the church by seeing how the past history of the church is recapitulated eschatologically; how past events happen again in the Last Days. What to expect, and what to prepare for.
Download or email Part 1 Download or email Part 2 Download or email Part 3 The Connection Between the Covenants
The second issue was the distinction between the two covenants. As it says in Jeremiah 31, the new covenant would not be like the old one.
"I will cut a new covenant with the house of Judah and with the house of Israel; it shall not be like the covenant I made with their fathers."
They had a state church: people in Jeremiah's day thought they were rightly related to God because they were part of the national covenant. Jeremiah came and said, "The new covenant won't be like that; God will write His law on your heart. It will be based on individual response." John the Baptist expressed the same thing. Jesus came and got rid of the state-church relationship; the Temple is destroyed.
Then Paul wrote in Romans 2, “That's it; it's over. There is a new covenant that is not like the old one.” But the very thing that Jeremiah predicts Jesus would get rid of, the thing John the Baptist predicts He'll get rid of, the thing that Jesus dies to get rid of, and Paul confirms that Jesus did get rid of it, gets put back in place by Constantine. Then the Reformers, instead of going back to the Bible, came and also put it back in place. Instead of a Catholic state church there was now a Protestant state church. In order to really reform the church and bring it back to the Bible, the first thing that had to be done was to destroy the unscriptural marriage between church and state. The second thing was to be rid of Augustine's false doctrine of the “visible and invisible church” which claims that the church is made up of the unsaved as well as the saved. They failed to get rid of these things and so in essence put back the old covenant.
Remember, before Satan paganized the church he Judaized it. Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are both Judaizations. They both put back Erastianism, a state religion, and they both persecuted believers who would not go along with it for centuries. The Antichrist will ultimately marry church and state in that way; that is the third thing Jesus warns against. Having a state religion is totally unbiblical. In fact, when you understand the real eschatology implicit in it, it is abhorrent. England has had homosexual kings such as King James and now has a New-Age king coming to the throne, all of whom have taken the title that belongs rightfully only to Christ – “head of the church”.
When you read Acts, you're not only reading past history, but future history also. When you read Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Kings about the Babylonian captivity and what led up to it, that too is future as well as past history. The same goes for Daniel and the story of the Maccabees that he predicted, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the days of Noah. God “declares the end from the beginning”, it says in Isaiah. (Is. 46:10)
This is Page 10 of 16 of PART 3
Scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation.