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His
Truth is Marching On Back in 1961 I was holding revival meetings at a
church in Porterville, California. The pastor gave me a book,
The Mission of the Messiah, by H. C. Heffren. He had bought it
some time before at a used bookstore in San Francisco.
"This guy is really off," he told me. "I was just
getting ready to throw the book away, but though you might like
to look at it."
When I first read the book, I was prone to think the
same. I believed the time at which Christ would set up his
kingdom would be his second coming. But Heffren said the mission
of the Messiah was to set up the kingdom at his first coming! He
quoted the words of Jesus in Mark 1:15: "The time is
fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand"! This was at
the first coming of Christ--2,000 years ago!
Eventually, I came to see this verse could not be
ignored. If Christ did indeed set up the kingdom at his first
coming, this placed the whole subject of the kingdom in a
different light. To believe otherwise would require ascribing to
the "postponement" theory--that when Christ came he
intended to set up his kingdom, but because the Jews rejected
him as king, he went to the cross, postponing his kingdom until
his second coming.
Heffren was not as far off as imagined. His teaching
about Christ's kingdom being spiritual in nature and a present
reality was scriptural. It was the "postponement"
theory that was unscriptural. Even John, on the isle of Patmos--suffering
"tribulation"--could say he was, then and there,
"in the kingdom of Christ" (Rev. 1:9). This was in the
first century! He knew nothing about a "postponed"
kingdom.
Later I would meet Henry Heffren--in the late 70s--at
a three day Prophetic Conference at Glen Eyrie (Colorado
Springs) where he and I were both speakers. In the area of the
famed Garden of the Gods, this is a lovely place with its
streams, neatly manicured lawns where deer roam among the trees,
and central building--a castle built years ago by a wealthy
newspaper man.
One day as we sat on the castle steps visiting, Pastor
Heffren was amused when I pulled out the old copy of his book
that had nearly gone into the trash can. The copy I had, being
published in the 40s, included a picture of a much younger Henry
Heffren! He was a Canadian; but his mother, I learned, had once
lived in Riverside, not far from where my mother lives. We only
met the one time--he has passed on now--but I recall him fondly.
From reading Heffren's book and others--as well as my
own studies in the scriptures--I began to recognize principles
of interpretation that I had previously overlooked. Vitally
important questions were these: How did Jesus and the writers of
the New Testament interpret the Old Testament? Did they use the
so-called "literal" method, or did they understand
many of the Old Testament passages as having a greater and
deeper "spiritual meaning?
Thinking only in terms of Christ setting up his
kingdom at his second coming, I supposed that upon his return he
would reign in Jerusalem, that people from all over the world
would go there to worship, etc. But once I came to realize this
teaching is not even "hinted" at in the New Testament,
how valid or major could it be as a doctrine? Jesus himself
totally discounted the idea that men would need to go to
Jerusalem to worship (John 4:21-24.
Jesus said something else that put a different slant
on how we interpret Old Testament passages: In the age to come,
following the resurrection, he explained, people do not marry (Lk.
20:34, 36). Yet the closing portion of Ezekiel, commonly taken
to describe a "Millennial Temple" of the future,
speaks of priests who serve in that temple getting married
(Ezek. 44:22, 25). According to Jesus, this could not refer to
the age to come.
Something else: If Ezekiel, was describing marriage in
an age after the resurrection--why would he say a priest was not
to marry a widow, unless she was the widow of a priest? If this,
was after the resurrection, she would no longer be a widow!
I noticed also that some Old Testament
passages that supposedly referred to the time of the second
coming of Christ, in context, had people in various nations
depending on primitive forms of transportation: riding horses,
mules, and camels!--hardly a picture of modern times!
Some of the Old Testament passages we
supposed taught a Jewish type millennium, at Jerusalem, also
included animal sacrifices (Zec. 14:21). In the light of the New
Testament, Christ is the final and perfect sacrifice in God's
program (Heb. 10:12). The age to come, then, cannot be a time
when God goes backwards--to such things as animal sacrifices in
a rebuilt Jerusalem temple. This would be religion in reverse.
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