Otis Q. Sellers’s Ecclesiology and Eschatology: An Overview, Part III

Otis Q. Sellers, 1921, the year he attended Moody Bible Institute.

[See Part I, and Part II for notes documenting points this three-part dogmatic summary makes. It was written for those interested in “the big picture” whose details are found in previous posts.—A.G.F.]

“And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together . . . .” Isaiah 40:6

All flesh has not yet seen the glory of the Lord together. One day they will, however, and that prophecy, according to Otis Q. Sellers, is the theme of the Bible: divine terrestrial rule, prophesied from Genesis 1 through Revelation 22.

By “rule” Sellers did not mean merely God’s ceaseless upholding of creation, but His injection of Himself into the flow of human history in a manifest way.

Jesus will inaugurate His rule from His throne, not from earth, His footstool (Isaiah 66:1, Acts 7:49). He’ll do that for centuries before returning to earth “in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Thessalonians 1:8) and then continuing to reign for a thousand years. He’ll be personally present (parousia) with believers, present because of Who He is and What He is.

That’s the Millennium. We’re living premillennially, as will the denizens of the future manifest Kingdom, which is the divine dispensation that will follow the present one of grace and precede the Day of the Lord when Christ will descend from His heavenly throne to crush a rebellion against that Kingdom. Sellers wished he had grasped the truth of the pre-advent (or premillennial) Kingdom much earlier than he did.

The Kingdom—for whose advent we pray in “the Lord’s Prayer”—is future to us, but its initial centuries will be in the past of Christ’s Second Advent. That is, there will be a premillennial Kingdom.

Grace and justice are polar opposites: to be governed is not to receive grace.

God has let man walk after his own ways, but that won’t always be so. These polar opposites do not morph into each other, not even “dialectically.” This antithesis was central to Sellers’s thinking.

That is, there is discontinuity between the present dispensation and the Kingdom, and the latter is not something we’re commissioned to achieve, as postmillennialists teach. We might say the manifest Kingdom of God in its “full grain in the ear” stage (Mark 4:28) has a premillennial phase and a millennial one.

But there were stages before the present dispensation.

There was the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ during which the “Kingdom of the Heavens has taken a step toward (ἤγγικεν, ēngiken) you” (Matthew 4:17). He commissioned twelve men to herald the Kingdom during the Acts period, and when they did, Kingdom blessings followed. Such were the Kingdom’s blade and ear stages.

But then the Kingdom was suspended. Sellers’s warrant for this is Philippians 1:6: Paul writes that the good work that God had begun in the Philippian ekklēsia during the Pentecostal administration was brought to a full end (ἐπιτελέσει, epitelesei) until (ἄχρι, achri) the Day of Christ (not the Day of the Lord). Sellers chose the word “suspend” to convey the idea of “ending something until.”

As Sellers grew in understanding, he came to realize the significance of the period of which the Book of the Acts of the Apostles is the history. It signaled a break with both the preceding dispensation (under which we live) and subsequent dispensations.

In no way could the Acts (or “Pentecostal”) dispensation be characterized as one of grace. Consider the fate of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5): lying to the Holy Spirit was a capital offense then, but today God only shows murderers, liars, and thieves mercy and grace.

It marked a progression of God’s Kingdom from the days of Christ’s earthly ministry, which heralded that the Kingdom of God (and its blessings) approached them, was “at hand.” That’s what the Apostles were commissioned to preach: Peter to Jews in the land (with the exception of the Cornelius and his household), Paul to the Jewish diaspora.

At the close of that dispensation, however, God inserted a “parenthesis,” if you will, between these two periods of the Kingdom. (The material between parentheses form no part of the sentence it interrupts.) God has been accomplishing a new work, hitherto neither revealed nor even intimated, namely, that of displaying exclusively the grace inherent in His character. God acts in grace today or not at all.

This dispensation of grace (Ephesians 3:2) will end, not in fiery vengeance (which would wipe out most of the human race), but in the greatest display of grace the world has ever enjoyed: the inauguration of the manifest Kingdom of God. Those who, in the present dispensation, having not seen, yet have believed, will proclaim God’s grace in an eon that will be marked by its polar opposite, justice.

Sellers believed the Acts of the Apostles has been widely misunderstood.

Sellers’s home, Grand Rapids, MI, 1936, the year he launched Word of Truth Magazine.

Many Christians read themselves into its context, which has not obtained for almost two millennia. Their reasoning goes something like this: if the Apostles did something, there something we can (even must) do today that corresponds to it; conversely, if whatever we do must have its counterpart in the Acts period. By this reasoning, the Apostles are brought down our level, or we’re raised up to theirs, and all meet on the same plane. Finding the biblical precedent for “church officers” is a temptation few can resist.

Virtually all of the Book of Acts is meant for Israelites—“Ye men of Israel” Acts 2:22—and God’s covenant with them, apart from which contract the Bible, especially Christ’s ministry to the “lost sheep of the House of Israel,” is unintelligible.

With exception of dispensationalists who over the past two centuries recovered and emphasized God’s irrevocable promises to Israel, most churches have kicked the Jew out of the New Testament so as to get the Gentiles (in Sellers’s figure of speech).

Irrevocable: “Thus saith the Lord, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The Lord of hosts is his name.  If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever” (Jeremiah 31:35-36).

God’s promises to Israel entail blessings to all nations, but their frame of reference is the future Kingdom. God’s blessings today are in secret; enjoyed, but untraceable (ἀνεξιχνίαστον, anexichniaston; Ephesians 3:8; not “unsearchable”: search to your heart’s content, but you won’t be able to trace it back to God).

When God rules manifestly, Israel will mediate between God’s throne and every other nation. Under a resurrected King David, Christ’s prime minister, the Apostles will judge Israel’s tribes.

During the Acts period, the Apostles gave to the Jew first exclusivity (Matthew 10:5) and then priority (Romans 1:16). First it was exclusively to the Jew; later, to the Jew first. Every Israelite was to be given one clear-cut opportunity to hear the case for Christ and either to accept or reject it.

Under the present dispensation of grace, however, the nations, Israelites and non-Israelites alike, are joint bodies (σύσσωμος, sussōma, Ephesians 3:6). None enjoys “most favored nation” status as Israel once did and will again. Not even the secular state of Israel, whose founding in 1948 fulfilled no biblical prophecy.

This division is reflected in Paul’s epistles written before and written after Acts 28:28, the verse that records Paul’s proclamation of the expansion of the Gospel’s audience and of the authority by which it would be spread.

The salvation-bringing (σωτήριον, sotērion; an adjective, which must modify something) message of God was suddenly made freely available (ἀπεστάλη, apestale) to the nations, as it had not been before. That’s the right message (or “gospel”; εὐαγγέλιον, evangelion) for this dispensation, and it took the form of the Gospel of John.

That Gospel was expressly written that the reader might believe that Jesus is the Son of God and, believing, have life through His name (character). John’s Gospel was written for believers whom Christ deemed “blessed,” those who, having not seen evidential miracles of of the Kingdom’s earlier (i.e., blade and ear) stages, the gifts of healing, or resurrections, yet have believed. They have taken God at His Word and acted accordingly, Sellers’s definition of “faith.”

But the first generation of self-conscious dispensationalists (John Nelson Darby onward) didn’t take their distinction between Israel and “the church” (non-Jewish Christians) very far. Any discontinuity proposed between the out-called individuals or ekklēsia of the New Testament and the organizations called “churches” is was a bridge too far for them.

Sellers’s studies forced him to face this rupture. He continued to enjoy fellowship with believers and minister to them, but he denied that what he formed was a church or that he was its ordained minister.

His theological development was progressive, but gradual. He was as much a creature of his times as anyone else, and he had to manage the tension created by an unpopular idea one believes to be true.

And to divide the Word of Truth accurately. Paul develops this theme in in Philippians, Ephesians, and Colossians. In Romans, however, and Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Paul is addressing Jews living outside the land of Israel and feeling like second-class Israelites, uncircumcised “foreskinners” in Sellers’s delicate translation of ἀκροβυστία (akrobustia).

That was Paul’s evangelical focus. Christ razed the partition between Israelitish insiders and outsiders, which set the stage for the free offering of salvation to all nations.

The promises to Israel are not to non-Israelites, not even non-Israelite believers. The churches have, with a few noble exceptions, read themselves into those promises, supposing God cast aside physical Israel. Earth is the future home of the redeemed. All the redeemed, not just Israel.

Not one more prophecy remains to be fulfilled before God ushers in His Kingdom. His good counsel will declare the end of the Day of Man (ἀνθρωπίνης ἡμέρας, anthrōpinas hemeras, 1 Corinthians 4:3; ἡμέρας means day, not “judgment”!) and inaugurate the Day of Christ, another symbol for the Kingdom.

Resurrections of those who were not alive on inauguration day will follow, but in an order determined by God. It will be an era of justice, government, not grace. We who knew in this dispensation nothing of God’s judgment and only His grace will perform a special service in that day.

Sellers’s studies grew out this focus on the Kingdom, but along the way he picked up insights into many church habits of thinking that he could not square with the Bible, but which tradition sustained, a “pull” to which so-called “low church” members could not resist.

These insights have their own interest, for they show how Sellers’s studies bore fruit even when they did not directly bear upon the prophetic timetable. They showed how he negotiated his exegetical business. They pertained to things like the soul, heaven, hell, and the so-called “church ordinances” of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. His deconstruction of traditional understandings frees the Bible student to see where else tradition may have led the churches astray.

The divine assumption of sovereignty is the key event. It has not happened. It will precede the day of the Lord by centuries. It will pick up where the Acts period left off. It will coincide with the fulfillment of the God’s promises to Israel, their return to their land, the restoration of the Davidic throne—with David on it as Christ’s prime  minister—with the twelve apostles sitting on thrones of their own judging Israel’s ingathered, repatriated tribes. Israel will be mediate between Christ and all the other nations. They will therefore no longer be on equal footing (joint bodies).

Sellers didn’t let institutional considerations influence the way he employed the grammatical-historical method he inherited from his proto-fundamentalist dispensationalist teachers, men (virtually all were men) who came of age in the 19th century. He was their heir, and his adherence to Fundamentalism held for about ten years, throughout the 1920s after he received Christ in late 1919.

His “churchless” theology grew organically from his fidelity to the method others merely espoused. He wasn’t looking for a rationale to leave churches; nevertheless the consequences of opting to leave were severe. His integrity led him to break with the only community of faith he knew at the cost of his livelihood in the early years of the Great Depression.

Once one understands how ekklēsia functions in the New Testament, one is free to identify what post-Acts 28:28 Christians have in common with Christians before Paul’s declaration in that verse that “the salvation-bringing [message] of God has been authorized to the nations and it will get through to them.”

That verse announced the end of the Acts dispensation and therefore the suspension of any ekklēsia function as Sellers understood that term. It wasn’t the end of Christian self-organization, but the end of an early phase of God’s Kingdom purposes.

Otis Q. Sellers, studying the Bible while vacationing in Hawaii. Probably early 1980s.

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