Time's running out . . .

Jordan, at a Bible conference the other weekend in Royal, North Carolina, said, “You guys see Bill O’Reilly a couple of weeks ago with Bill Maher? That’s the most pathetic thing I ever saw. Old Bill says to Bill, ‘You don’t really believe there’s a boat where everybody drowned and people survived?’ And Old Bill says, ‘No, no, that’s all allegory!’

“Tweedle-dee, tweedle-dum. You guys who think Bill O’Reilly is your hero—he’s a Jesuit-trained Roman Catholic; that’s why he thinks that way!

“There’s no salvation in him! Glenn Beck is a failed Catholic converted to Mormonism. There ain’t no help in him! They tell you enough truth to get you hooked so they can go to the bank.

"I’m sorry, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, on the other side, are Jesuit-trained Roman Catholics too. Ooh. And that don’t scare you? That doesn’t alarm you? That doesn’t alert you? You’ve forgotten things your forefathers knew! And you wonder why things are the way they are socially, politically, economically?!”

*****

“People try to take Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and make one big story out of it. If God wanted you to have one account of the life of Christ He’d have wrote ONE! He wrote four because those four gospels give you a four-fold doctrinal presentation of the Messiah that matches the four ‘behold statements’ and the four ‘branch titles’ of the Old Testament.

 “God told Israel, ‘Behold your Messiah is going to be a king, He’s going to be a servant, He’s going to be a man, He’s going to be God, He’s going to be the righteous branch of David,  He’s going to be a servant, the man who’s name is the Branch and He’s going to be the Branch of the Lord. So look for Him and when He comes, He identifies Him and you have a doctrinal thing that anybody who knows anything about the Bible . . .  

“You folks look at it and say, ‘That’s wonderful; we understand why there’s four gospels!’ If you don’t have any spiritual eyes to see those things, you think what we really need is one composite story. Why? ‘Because that’s how we study history, Brother Rick.’

“There’s a spiritual mind and there’s a secular mind. Now if you go to school today and study A.T. Robertson’s ‘Harmony of the Gospels’, know he’s a saved man and a good guy, but he just didn’t have a concept of what was really going on in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John doctrinally. He wasn’t a dispensationalist. He wrote commentaries on the Bible and he wrote a book this thick on the Greek language, but he was blind as a bat flying backwards when it came to understanding the Gospels and how that ought to effect the way you study the Bible.

*****

“Clement, along with Philo, are the fathers of the allegorical school of interpreting the Bible. Allegorical is opposite of dispensational. Dispensationals say, ‘When you talk about Adam and Eve, it means there’s an Adam and there’s an Eve. There was a real flood.’ Allegorical says, ‘Well, it don’t make any difference.’ ”

(Editor’s note: To be continued . . .)