At a distance, Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) might appear to be just another independent Bible teacher, the kind that can be found across America, in big towns and small. It would be lazy to describe his spot on American Christianity’s map as “nondenominational.” Christian Individualist” is how he positively referred to his walk as a believer in and follower of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The personal and theological merged in his life. Unless his ideas matter, only family and friends will care to read the biography I’m working on. My interest in his life grew out of my fascination with his ideas. My hope is that your interest in both will grow together.
We’re not disembodied, ahistorical spirits. We struggle with ideas while we raise our families, maintain our health, and pay our bills in concrete circumstances. Sometimes our responsibilities threaten to crowd out our projects which, if the threat is repulsed, can speak to people in times and places different from the author’s.
With difficulty, but also with perseverance and God’s grace, Sellers balanced his life and ministry. He wasn’t an academic theologian writing for colleagues (and neither am I). Sellers does deserve academic attention, however, and I hope this book will stimulate it. He was an industrious, self-educated man who fought for every insight to help the average believer understand the Bible. He changed his mind as his studies dictated. “My latest writings are my latest light,” he’d insist. I don’t say this to preempt criticism. My appreciation of his work won’t prevent me from pointing out errors.
Research for this project requires the absorption of seventeen volumes of Word of Truth (1936-1967); 199 issues of Seed & Bread, four-page Bible study leaflets (1971-1987), whose contents total over 375,000 words; 570 43-minute tape-recorded studies, that is, over 400 hours of additional material; and dozens of pamphlets. All of these materials are freely available online.
Before considering some of his distinctive ideas, let’s have before us a non-distinctive, namely, his non-negotiable starting point, which he shared with millions of other believers:
My conviction in regard to the Old and the New Testament is that they are the verbally inspired Word of God, that they are without error in their original writings, that they are of supreme and final authority in regard to all matters of faith. By “verbal inspiration” I mean that supernatural work of the Holy Spirit by which, without setting aside the personalities and literary abilities of the human instrument, He constituted the words of the Bible in its entirety as His written word to you and to me. I believe that every word of scripture was produced under the guidance of God’s Spirit, that “holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). This conviction has stood the test of more than a half century of personal Bible research and study. (“The Importance of Acts 28:28), Seed & Bread, No. 11. No date, but probably 1971, the year this series began.)
That was his conviction, but he left the job of defending it to others. He had too much exegetical work to do. He knew where his strengths lay. He was no philosophical theologian. Others will have to decide if that alleged shortcoming is fatal to his work.
He believed that the theme of the Bible was the idea that God intends to set up His Kingdom on Earth. God will govern the earth from heaven; our treasure is laid up for us there, but we’ll enjoy it here.
Kingdom means government. The Government of God was heralded by John the Baptizer just before Jesus Christ heralded it; a taste of its blessings were enjoyed during those three years and “the thirty-three years of which the Book of Acts is the history” (as Sellers often referred to it).
God suspended His Kingdom purposes to inaugurate a “secret,” heretofore unprophesied global administration of grace to demonstrate the grace inherent in His character. The preceding Pentecostal dispensation was not one of grace, at least not exclusively, but also of judgment (as Ananias and Sapphira found out the hard way; Acts 5).
This change was announced at Acts 28:28. Whereas before that change the salvation-bringing message of God had to be delivered by a commissioned (apostello) evangelist, to the Jew first and then to the “Greek” (the Greek-speaking exiled children of Abraham), now it will be made freely available to the nations.
Before Acts 28:28, Paul was a “mediator between God and man”; after only one Man qualified, the Man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5). Even when Paul wrote those words, he was no longer such a mediator. Inspired writer, but no mediator. Paul’s epistles should be sorted according to this dispensational boundary line in mind.
First and Second Thessalonians, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans were written before the dispensational change, and in many passages set forth the distinct truths that prevailed only in the Acts period. Philippians, Colossians, Ephesians, 1 Timothy, Titus, 2 Timothy, and Philemon were written after the dispensational change and they take on the character of the time in which they were written. (“The Importance of Acts 28:28), Seed & Bread, No. 11. No date, but probably 1971, the year this series began.)
Having written the first group of epistles, the Apostle Paul declared that he had preached “none other things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should come” (Acts 26:22). But there was one thing he taught in the second group about which the prophets and Moses had nothing to say: the salvation-bringing message of God is now freely available to all nations, not just to Israel. Israel, in this dispensation, will be just one of the nations, on equal footing with all others.
That is, it was a divinely guarded “secret” (musterion, μυστήριον; traditionally transliterated “mystery”), not divulged to the prophets and Moses, but to Paul.
. . . [A] new revelation was given to Paul, one never before made known by any channel or means of divine information hid from the eons and from the generations (Colossians 1:26). (“The Consummation of the Eon,” Seed & Bread, No. 193. No date, but mid-1980s.)
To become a Christian during the Acts period, a non-believer had to be evangelized by God-commissioned men, “apostles” (which transliterates but does not translate ἀποστόλους. apostolous). They were mediators between God and men. They were called to positions in God’s government; they will resume those positions in the future continuation of God’s government. For now, however, during the suspension (ἐπιτελέσει ἄχρι, epitelesei achri, “bring to a complete end until”: Philippians 1:4), every believer in Jesus Christ is on equal footing with every other.
Analogously, the people Israel will be the mediatorial nation, but today there is no Most Favored Nation: they are “joint bodies” (σύσσωμα, sussoma, Ephesians 3:6)
We find this [Greek] word [syn, “with”] used as a prefix three times in Ephesians 3:6: sunkleronoma, sussoma, and sunmetocha. These words are plurals, and they mean “joint-enjoyers of a portion,” “joint-bodies,” and “joint-partakers” of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. The word we are particularly interested in at present is sussoma, joint-bodies. This is the declaration that tells us that at the present time, under God’s present Administration of Grace, all nations are joint-bodies in His sight and are being dealt with on the basis of absolute equality. (“The Nations Now Joint Bodies,” Seed & Bread, No. 157. No date.)
The country called “Israel” today, founded in 1948 by descendants of Israel, fulfills no Biblical prophecy. God’s promises to restore Israel to her land are irrevocable, but not being fulfilled in this dispensation.
Eschatology cannot escape anthropology. “Where do we go when we die?” implicitly asks for a theory of man. If earth is not only our present but also our future home, then the answer is “Nowhere”: death is the return to the soil whence the formerly living being came. It is a decomposition. The breath of life doesn’t “go” anywhere to continue an extraterrestrial career. The soul that sins will die (Ezekiel 18:20); death is not disembodied life. It’s an enemy to be avoided, mourned, defeated.
The man is dead, not his body, and God resurrects the man by calling his name while breathing back into him the breath of life. Therefore, Lazarus was not exfiltrated from heaven (or hell, or purgatory) to earth. When Jesus said “I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore” (Revelation 1:18), He didn’t mean, “I was alive in one sense, then alive in another, and then alive forevermore in the first sense,” did He?
God’s next move is gentle, not violent.
He’s going to inaugurate His terrestrial government firmly, but gently. He will stop evildoers in their tracks. Their jaws will drop. Blessings will come to all who are alive in that day, but not all will be permitted to continue to live.
Conversely, there will be those who will not be alive when God assumes sovereignty but who will be raised from the dead to “everlasting” or “eternal”, i.e., eonian life, life flowing out of Christ like water. Believers will be numbered among them, of course, but so will all those who will be resurrected because they feared Him and worked righteousness (as Cornelius happily learned, Acts 10:35)—God, not human sentiment, being the sole and final arbiter of what counts as fear and righteous work.
(Don’t be surprised if the hundreds of millions of children who died before the age of reason, whether through accidents, disease, abortion or other crimes will be blessed with eonian life to replace the life of which sin and death robbed them.)
What will be decidedly not gentle will be Jesus’ crushing of the rebellion that will arise at the end of the Kingdom dispensation (2 Thessalonians 1:8). Jesus will return, not to rule, but to be personally present because of Who He is and What He. That presence will last a thousand years (χίλια ἔτη, chilia ete, Revelation 20:2; the Latin is millennium).
Let’s focus on His presence, not the duration. It’s a post-Kingdom event; the whole Kingdom (not just the “catching up” of believers) is therefore premillennial. Future, God-initiated, but premillennial. It’s not next on God’s prophetic timetable. Sellers highlights the absurd consequences of thinking otherwise:
. . . (W)hen Jesus Christ does come back, He will take vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ. These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power (2 Thessalonians 1:7-10). Thus, if the Lord came back today, the earth would be wiped clean of its inhabitants—all who know God having previously been removed—and there would be no nations or peoples left to whom God could fulfill all the glorious promises of the Old Testament, especially those that concern the future of Israel. (See Ezekiel 20:33-44.) All the talk of Israel’s finding Christ as a result of the wrath poured out in the Great Tribulation is sheer nonsense. (See Isaiah 1:5.) (“Kingdom Blunders,” Seed & Bread, No. 32. No date, but there’s an internal reference to the “fifty-four years” since the year He began studying the Bible in 1919.)
What can happen at any moment is “his blazing forth” (ἐπιφάνειαν αὐτοῦ, epiphaneian autou) even His Kingdom (καὶ τὴν βασιλείαν αὐτοῦ, kai ten basileian autou).
What can not happen at any moment (because God’s Word cannot be broken) is Christ’s return: it has conditions that have not been met.
They include the antichrist’s defiling a yet-to-be-rebuilt Temple, which the miraculous return of the children of Israel to her land must precede, which in turn presupposes the return of Elijah to set restore everything (Malachi 4:5-6). As Sellers’s rhetorical question had it: “Who comes first, Christ or antichrist?” (“Positive Biblical Theology,” Seed & Bread, No. 99, no date.)
Such positions set Sellers’s eschatology apart from the rest.
