Hmmm ... ten commandments on tablets of stone, but one was apparently written in chalk.

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Tom Albrecht
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Rev. Toby Holland
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Tom, comments like this are part and parcel of the reason why many dispy folks run the other way from covenant theology and discussions on Calvinism. They show a lack of grace, charity and the maturity in Christ that should mark an elder or one who has held the office.

No dispy that I've ran across believes it was written in chalk. Rather, it was fulfilled in Christ...along with the rest of the ceremonial law.

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I'm trying to follow their reasoning. How do they use Deut. 5 to say that just the Sabbath was given to Israel, and not the rest? Why is just the Sabbath part of the ceremonial law?

At first, it made sense because it says:

Deu 5:15 And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the LORD thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the LORD thy God commanded thee to keep the sabbath day.

But isn't the whole passage given to Israel as well?

Deu 5:6 I am the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.
Deu 5:7 Thou shalt have none other gods before me...

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Bob Howes
Framingham, MA

A reoccurring thought:

Rev 22:20 He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.

Hey Bill - you actually have it nailed. They'd combine those verses alongside of 'The Sabbath is the only command given to Israel not repeated in the New Testament' to get out of Sabbath observance.

Slightly , but did you happen to catch Truth For Life recently (Alistair Begg) ?

He just completed a series on the Sabbath. It answered a lot of my questions and actually convicted me quite a bit regarding my time management.

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I still haven't personally been able to square Sabbath observance against Hebrews 3-4 and found Begg's treatment of Col. 2 and Romans 13 to be superficial. But his other arguments as far as the proper use of the Lord's Day.... I do believe there is much wisdom in observing the Christian Sabbath.

So, if one or more of the others weren't repeated in the NT, what would that mean to them. Let's pick one: Thou shalt not kill. If that weren't repeated somewhere in the NT...

I'm also wondering:

Rom 3:19 Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God.

If I understand this verse correctly, the law makes all who are under the law guilty before God. If the law was just given to Israel, how is all the world under that law?
No, never heard of Truth for Life. Thanks for the link. I'd like to listen sometime.

Of course they do. The ten words are not ceremonial law. That is plain from all the language surrounding their institution and maintenance. The dispy cannot get around that fact.

So it is difficult to take their hermeneutical system seriously when they make such claims, their radical Israel/Church dichotomy being preeminent. Within their faulty system, Sabbath is absolutely part of old Israel.

I think they are running away because they cannot stand the rigor of covenant theology and its implication for how we deal with all the Bible. I know because I have interacted with enough of them (and I used to be one many moon ago).

For the record, I agree with you.
The 'hang-up' that the dispensationalist would have with that example, though, is that Gen. 9:5-6 and Cain murdering his brother would predate Sinai as a 'universal moral law' (likewise adultery and others). They'd jump back to the 'God only led Israel out of Egypt not the whole world, therefore Deut. 5 applies only to Israel and not everyone'.

There are some who try to have their cake and eat it too and say 'well, as long as you take A DAY (and reference Romans 13 here as giving us the freedom to choose "a" day for a Sabbath, also saying that there's great wisdom in doing so...).

The usual dispie anti-Sabbath reaction, though, isn't so much against the LBC II and WCF, but against Seventh-Day Adventism, since they're both usually fighting for the same crowd of people.

No, never heard of Truth for Life. Thanks for the link. I'd like to listen sometime.[/quote]

You'll like him. He's a FUNNY guy, yet also very convicting. One of the rarer examples of a LARGE reformed church (reformed baptist). He's from Scotland originally.

If they get past the R.A.T.S. (Reformed Arrogance and Theological Snobbery) and actually listen to what you have to say, you'll find quite a few will actually AGREE with you. Unfortunately, if your attitude and approach here are any indication of how you approach them, it's not so much what you say but HOW you deliver it.

I've made a concerted effort to be a lot more graceful in my presentation - even with theology that is damnable. Let the offense come from truth, not from my presentation of it.

A little wisdom from my own interactions with plenty of non-Calvinist-dispensational folks who've moved over to being Calvinists or are 'on their way' over from the past 2 years. You can be as right as you'd like to be a still not be heard.

Honestly, I think that for many of them the issue is the Pauline dicti regarding preferencing one day over another and the way in which Hebrews seems to interpret the Sabbath.

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But wouldn't they say the same thing about Gen. 2:3?

To which you'd get the answer: So ? They wouldn't see any greater significance other than God blessing THAT particular 7th day, say it was a part of the Old Covenant, say that Him blessing it doesn't make it a law and then pointing to Romans 13 and saying it was a matter of liberty which day YOU choose to worship on.

Honestly, I haven't ran across any that use the Hebrews 3-4 argument. Aside from my first pastor and John MacArthur, most dispies I know stay clear of Hebrews 2-6 with only occasional jumps into 6:1-9, 7, skip 8 and go to 9, 10 and 11, ignore 13 or hardly preach from it. While most classic and some modified dispies still think Hebrews 8's citation of Jeremiah 31 is for some future period, when I was brought up (and my old pastor studied under Ryrie), we were briefly ran through just those verses and shown how they were OT citations fulfilled by Christ in the NT (minus all the other info surrounding it so we couldn't connect it all together).

The major thing that began unraveling dispensationalism for me a few years back was Romans 11:1-6 followed up by Galatians 3:29, since if they were true (and with the dispensationalist 'literal interpretation', they HAVE to be taken as written), then the only 'real' "Israel" today would be those in Christ. After that, one thing after another cascaded and I ended up becoming a progressive dispensationalist (some of my posts from those days are still on this board) and THAT pushed me straight over to covenant theology.

As for me personally, Hebrews 3-4 and Col. 2:16-23 are still problem areas for me regarding the Sabbath....or rather, regarding a strict sabbath observance as a law rather than an exercise of wisdom and a good use of time as a gift from the Lord. But I don't think this is just a dispie issue, since there are many 'reformed' folks who don't hold to a strict Sabbath observance for the same exegetical reasons.

So you don't disagree with what I said, you just don't think that dispys will like the way I said it. Fair enough. The comment was not for dispys.

BTW, are you saying that you view dispensationalism as a damnable heresy?

Doesn't matter if the comment was for the dispys or not. Our private language or intra-Calvinistic jabs at times will come out when we're in discussion with those who aren't Calvinists. It slips. We need to be on guard with our speech ALL the time.... you don't know who's listening....or reading.

I point people over to PB on a regular basis (non-reformed folks) who have all these inane notions of what it means to be a Calvinist and they are too 'scared' from their interactions with the few 'high calvinists' they've met and are used to people dealing with them more graciously, kindly (even in disagreement) and tenderly.

Christ always reserved his anger for those in clerical office who taught false doctrine. He never blasted the laity that was simply caught up in the teachings of the day, but instead was merciful to them. He didn't condone their sin, always told them the truth, but never treated them the same way He did the Pharisees in John 8.

In addition, with specific reference to you, the bulk of your comments regarding dispensationalism have always been against classic dispensationalism - and most modern dispies aren't classical at all. Whereas the original Scofield Study Bible inconsistently taught in some of the notes that salvation was by works in the OT (other places it taught that it was by faith), every modern dispensationalist from Ryrie (who overlaps the modified period of 1950-1990 and the present time) will all agree with the reformed (and biblical) viewpoint. Even as a dispy, that's what I was taught.

Much of the polemical material against dispensationalism from the reformed side is out of date. And whether you choose to believe it or not, representing someone's viewpoint correctly when interacting with it (even if it is wrong) is a mark of Christian charity. Snide comments in an ungracious tone combined with a caricature of what they believe..... feeds right into Dave Hunt-esque and George Bryson-esque misrepresentations of Calvinism.

People are humans, not just automatons that intake doctrinal positions and assent to truth or not. I've learned (once I got outside of hanging in a 'reformed ghetto') that we can sit on PB or in our churches all we want and critique false teaching from afar by reading the works of every polemicist that God has blessed the church with and that won't teach us to deal graciously and patiently with people (2 Tim. 2). When you're trying to point people to truth, great patience, graciousness and kindness are needed. One former non-Calvinist who now holds to the doctrines of grace once told me that the 'process' is akin to major surgery....especially if you're dealing with someone with more of an emotive-bent to them (which is most of the US church today). Jabs, jokes and such - in private speech - eventually slip out in public and show the true condition of our hearts.

Calvin didn't 'jab' back at Servetus though Servetus sent back his letters marked up with all kinds of blasphemies and insults scribbled in margins. Luther's "Here I stand, I can do no other!" was probably a lot more humble than the movies have made it appear....

So it's both what you've said AND how you've said it that are disturbing.

What have I said that made you ask that question ?

Man 'innocent' and the Covenant of Works correspond. Both say that God gave man a duty, he failed to do it, and man suffered the judgment (curses of the covenant).

Covenant of Redemption is more wholistic than the dispensations listed after the fall. While we (covenant theology) recognize that God has various 'sub-administrations' of the same covenant of grace, we recognize that everything after the fall has been covenant of grace....man saved the same way in all eras.

The dispensations put too much of a division between God dealing with men after the fall and they fail to recognize (even though Ryrie tries in his revised version of Dispensationalism back in 1994) the overall unity of all the 'dispesnations' in terms of man's responsibility toward God and His graciousness toward His visible people during the time before Christ.

The average, better-read dispy would disagree with me and say that they do acknowledge it, but a simple reading of all the classic, modified and modern material up to this point will show otherwise. The progressives have recognized this and that's why their system has developed (as a corrective to the shortcomings of both modified and most of modern dispensationalism). Many of the modern dispensationalists today are becoming more MacArthur-ish as their theology becomes better informed. You'll find a lot more concessions on older-dispensational theology to covenant theology in writers like Paul Enns (Moody Handbook of Theology).

Well, I’m not sure where you get your statistics, but the vast majority of my interactions are with classic (Scofield, Chafer) or neo-classic (John Walvoord, Hal Lindsey, Tommy Ice) dispensationalists who still carry their Scofield Bibles.

It's apparent from their expressed views they have far more in common with Tommy Ice than with Blaising and Bock.

They generally know nothing of the current crop of progressives at DTS. And those who do, along with folks like Tommy Ice, believe they are compromisers who border on heretics from the (classic) faith.

These folks are quick to label all non-dispensational theology as "replacement theology", a term they have picked up from their (neo-)classic masters. I understand the progressives are more sensitive, but I don’t find many of them running around in public.

Maybe I just don’t hang out in the right places.

BTW, saying that dispensationalists believe the 4th commandment was written in chalk is not inaccurate, even thought it may not be politically correct or terribly sensitive.

I’m, not aware of anything I’ve said that misrepresents what the dispensationalists I’ve have encountered believe. My comments may be a bit stark, but I think they are true based on my experience and encounters.

BTW, do you think John MacArthur’s comments from last year’s Pastor’s Conference were sensitive and appropriate for that forum?

"I've made a concerted effort to be a lot more graceful in my presentation - even with theology that is damnable."

In the context of this discussion I was wondering if dispensationalism somehow fell into that category.

Nope. I think they were not only mis-informed and misrepresented the amill viewpoint horridly, but ridiculously divisive and graceless. I also didn't think his 7 min premill-rant at the tail end of his presentation at Together for the Gospel in 06' was appropriate either.....especially KNOWING that at least 50% of the room was amill.

Just proves John MacArthur is a sinner like the rest of us. Still love him, though. It was funny how everyone just sat there with a blank expression while he went on....but everyone just gave him a free pass publicly.

I'm curious to know what other pastors (Piper, Lig, Sproul, etc...) said to him privately.....

Oh, ok. No, I don't believe dispensationalism is damnable. I had someone else in mind (not on this board) when I typed that, but I could see how you picked up that I might be using it in reference to this convo. My bad for the misunderstanding.