Banded together against apostasy

"I Corinthians 11:1 is a verse of scripture I'm convinced most preachers don’t know is in their Bible. Paul writes, 'Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ.'

“There’s not a hard word in that verse; it’s not hard to understand but it’s obviously hard to believe,” he reasons. “Paul is one of only three people in the Bible who said, ‘Follow me,' " explains Richard Jordan.

“Moses was one because God made him the law-giver to Israel. Jesus told the nation, ‘What Moses commanded you, go do that.’ Jesus Christ is Jehovah God the Son who stood on Mt. Sinai and gave Moses the law.

“Jesus, when He came to earth as God in human flesh, as ‘a minister of the circumcision to confirm the promises,’ said, ‘Follow me and I’ll make you fishers of men.’ The idea came out of Jeremiah and is talking about rescuing the Believing Remnant of Israel during the tribulation.

“If you’re going to follow Jesus Christ today, you have to follow Him the way He wants to be followed today, and He’s not being followed today as He was with Moses. The way you follow Him today is not as you did in His earthly ministry, either. The way you follow Him today is through the heavenly ministry He gave the Apostle Paul. It’s this new information that ‘in previous ages was not made known.’

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“When someone says to you that dispensational Bible study is new, you say, ‘No, it’s as old as Paul. It’s as old as Jesus. It’s as old as Moses.’

“The fact is it’s the divinely prescribed method of Bible study and it’s the only way to understand God’s Word. If nobody in history you ever know believed in it, it would still be God’s way to do it.

“A noun generally gets its meaning from its verb form, so the Bible word ‘dispensation’ means ‘to dispense, to give out.’ Another word for the same idea is ‘administration,’ used by Paul in I Corinthians 12: ‘There are many administrations but the same Lord.’

“A dispensation is not a time period; it’s what’s given for man’s obedience during a particular time. The issue is what He gave for man to know and to obey and to follow. Here’s this truth given to Paul and that issue of, ‘Have you heard it or not?’ is the key.

“People say what we teach started with John Nelson Darby and that kind of thing, but that’s nonsense. I like to quote a guy from the Protestant Reformation era who, when asked, ‘Where was your faith before Martin Luther?’ answered, ‘The same place your face is before you wash it; behind the dirt.’

“So, there’s just common-sense ways to understand things that don’t require . . . when people require you to be able to show them your history in history you know those are people who don’t really care about that Book sitting in front of you.

“Historic theology is where you study the development of history and the development of theology through history. The problem with this is it requires you to know everything there is to know about everything anybody’s ever thought, written or done in history for you to tell me everything that people knew in history. You understand how impossible that is, right? What about the stuff you didn’t find?

“People who calls themselves a historical theologian, a scholar, pretend to make you think they’ve already studied everything there is to study and know exactly when something started. When somebody tells you a particular thing began to be taught at such and such a point by this certain guy, just run up the flag because that assumes they know everything prior to that and they don’t.

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“When you study the history of dispensationalism what you’re studying is the history of Bible study. In the mid-1800s, the zenith point out of the Protestant Reformation for understanding and learning the Bible, there was what was called the Bible Prophecy Conference Movement in  America. The Scofield Reference Bible was published then.

“If you know the department store in Chicago, Carson Pirie Scott, Mr. John Pirie was a Bible Believer who helped finance the publishing of the Scofield Bible. In fact, it was his idea. He took Scofield aside and said, ‘I will raise the money to finance you getting the thing done.’

“So these were great days in the late 1800s, early 1900s, of people who studied the Scripture. Our understanding of Mid-Acts dispensationalism, Paul’s distinctive ministry, comes out of that study.

“If you look at Ephesians 3 in a Scofield the last thing the note at the bottom of the page says is that ‘in Paul’s writings alone are found the walk, the doctrine, the duty and destiny of the church.’ They knew Paul was our apostle and that’s where our doctrine comes from.

“I can draw a diagram on the chalkboard and go through all the names where you go from Darby and others like William Newell, H.A. Ironside, Donald Barnhouse. You go into the late 1800s and there’s James Coates, Fritz Ridenour, Howard Grant. They were the predecessors teaching a great host of people. J.C. O’Hair, who is more or less our ancestor, worked with those people (O’Hair’s North Shore Church on the North Side of Chicago is the church I’m pastoring now in its current incarnation).

“The Independent Fundamental Churches of America, which was founded in 1930 and is still in existence, represented a bunch of fundamentalist groups fighting the Fundamentalist-Modernism controversy; the modernism of the World Council and the National Council of Churches. (according to a website, "These churches banded together to forcefully stand for the major doctrines of the Bible in opposition to the apostasy of that time.")

“It started at the Cicero Bible Church (founded 1892), Billy McCarrell’s ministry on Laramie Avenue in Cicero, Ill. The next year it met at North Shore Church. J.C. O’Hair was in the founding group. The next year it met at Grand Rapids at Dr. M.R. DeHaan’s church. O’Hair spoke at the dedication of their church.”