Well, if I haven’t thoroughly outed myself as a “Piperite”, two posts in one day featuring my favorite pastor should do the trick.
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I read Piper’s 1974 essay on Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth this morning, and could not pass on the opportunity to forward it along.
Since reading Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ Left Behind and witnessing the ensuing marketing phenomenon more than a decade ago, I have been uncomfortable with the assurance, and often the stridency, with which some adhere to the Premillennial/Dispensational eschatological system.
I occasionally listen to a weekend radio program on the local Christian AM station that deals exclusively with this topic. While I do not doubt the sincerity of the host’s faith, I am often disturbed at the passion attached to such a tangential issue (the precise outworking of Biblical prophecy in current events). I am more disturbed by the passion with which this host often criticizes her brothers and sisters in Christ who don’t subscribe to this particular eschatological system (a system that has no history in the Church predating the 19th Century).
Piper writes:
This is the most important: among those who calculate about the time and sequence of the coming events and who try to give detailed descriptions of how it will be, there is, I think, a fundamentally wrong focus, a dislocation of our “blessed hope.” Throughout the New Testament the all-important focus of our hope is personal fellowship with God and our Lord Jesus Christ…
… But for the calculator of the end times this all-important personal focus of our hope gets blurred in a mass of secondary (often speculative) details.
Amen! This is my chief concern with so many Christian ministries wandering into various aberrant teachings. Dispensational end-times speculation, fixations on mystical experience and supernatural charismata, the Prosperity Gospel, the Megachurch self-improvement progams, and a myriad of other modern errors all have this in common: They are all a giant distraction from the main thing - Jesus Christ and His Gospel.
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