Hamas, Bible Prophecy, And Dispensationalism

As we come to the last post in Advent, it’s evident that even many Christians don’t know how to think about Christ’s return.

It occurred to me to check the Bible prophecy sites to see what they were saying about the Israel/Hamas war, and I was not disappointed. Greg Laurie focuses on Ezekiel 37-39, which tells about the ingathering of Israel, whereupon Gog and Magog would attack Jerusalem. Gog is identified with the “Rosh”; that is, the Rus, the Russians. (The New King James version uses that translation.) “Magog” is the “prince of the Rus”; that is Vladimir Putin. They will be helped by other countries, including “Persia,” which is Iran: “Persia, Cush [Ethiopia], and Put [Libya] are with them, all of them with shield and helmet” (Ezekiel 37:5).

Whereupon God will smite them with a great slaughter and the Messiah will return.

This kind of reading of the Bible, which sees its interpretation in current events, is rampant today. Daniel G. Hummel has written The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation. In his review for Religion & Liberty, Michael J. Lynch traces the movement.

The big problem, though, is not with reading the Bible through the lens of current events. It’s the way Dispensationalists posit different means of salvation according to the time period in the Bible. C. I. Scofield, whose study Bible was published by Oxford University Press, sketched out seven different dispensations:

1. Man innocent

2. Man under conscience

3. Man in authority over the earth

4. Man under promise

5. Man under law

6. Man under grace

7. Man under the personal reign of Christ

We Lutherans are amillenialists and we are certainly not dispensationalists. We studied some of this in our Bible class at church. Our pastor pointed out that the specific ancient nations were active back then. They were not nations today. And that the Israel/Hamas war is simply an example of the “wars and rumors of war” that Jesus told us to expect (Matthew 24:6). And that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalpyse have been riding for a long time (Revelation 6).

So Christ could return at any time. And we always must be ready.

Photo: C. I. Scofield (1920) by Unknown author – http://library.dts.edu/Pages/TL/Special/scofield.shtml, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12023515