Tag: Kingdom of God

Otis Q. Sellers: Prophetic Prayers about God’s Kingdom

“I will be a king over you.” Ezekiel 20:23

The cumulative effect of the following 25 prophecies is the conviction that God is going to govern this planet. What they pray for has not occurred, but will. Yes, they express happy thoughts—“Wouldn’t it be great if God one day governed the earth . . . ?,” but they do much more. They speak God’s word authoritatively. And that’s what it means to prophesy.

Like the prayer Jesus taught His disciples (Matthew 6:9-13), these prayers are prophecies that are also predictions. Not one describes present conditions. They all await realization. God’s word never returns to Him void (Isaiah 55:11).

I’ve excerpted the following from This I Believe, a 1963 pamphlet by Otis Q. Sellers, the subject of a biography I’m working on.

—Anthony Flood

As the pages of the Old Testament are turned, one reads of a time to come when the entire flow of satanic evil will be overwhelmed by a greater flow of righteousness from one who is the seed of the woman, even Christ (Genesis 3:15).  He goes on to read of a time when

  • All the ends of the earth will remember and be turned to the Lord (Psalm 22:27)
  • All the earth will fear the Lord and all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him (Psalm 33:8)
  • The meek will inherit the earth and delight themselves in the abundance of peace (Psalm 37:11)
  • The streams of God’s river will make glad the city of God (Psalm 46:4)
  • Wars will cease and God will be exalted among the nations (Psalm 46:8-10)
  • God’s way will be known upon the earth and His saving health will be the portion of all nations (Psalm 67:2)
  • God will judge the peoples righteously and govern the nations upon the earth (Psalm 67:3-4)
  • God will bless Israel and all the ends of the earth will fear Him (Psalm 67:7)
  • all nations will call Him blessed and the whole earth be filled with His glory (Psalm 72:17, 19)
  • The world will be established so that it cannot be disrupted (Psalm 96:10)
  • The nations will fear the name of the Lord (Psalm 102:15)
  • One generation will praise His works to another and declare His mighty acts (Psalm 145:4)
  • God will turn His hand upon Israel and purge away her dross (Isaiah 1:25)
  • The mountain of the Lord’s house will be established in the top of the mountains and all nations will flow unto it (Isaiah 2:2)
  • Nations will beat their swords into plowshares and turn all instruments of destruction into instruments of peace (Isaiah 2:4)
  • The wolf will dwell with the lamb and the leopard will lie down with the kid and a little child will lead them (Isaiah 11:6)
  • None will hurt or destroy, and the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9)
  • God’s judgments will be in the earth and the inhabitants of the earth will learn righteousness (Isaiah 26:9)
  • The eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf be unstopped
  • The lame will leap as a hart and the tongue of the dumb sing (Isaiah 35:5, 6)
  • the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all flesh will see it together (Isaiah 40:5)
  • God will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, put His law in their inward parts and write it upon their hearts (Jeremiah 31:27,33)
  • God will fulfill His great promise to Israel to seek them out, bring them out from all peoples and all countries and bring them to their own land, and to set one shepherd over them, even David (Ezekiel 34:11-24)
  • Out of Bethlehem will come One to be ruler in Israel, whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting (Micah 5:2)
  • The Lord will be king over all the earth (Zechariah 14:9)

Check out related posts
Here are a few short studies on the Kingdom by Otis Q. Sellers (PDFs at Seed&Bread.org)
Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) in his library and recording studio

Sellers’s Eschatology: Some Distinctives

Otis Q. Sellers, 1920

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.

First publication, June 1, 1935. Henry “Harry” Allen Ironside (1876-1951) belonged to the Plymouth Brethren movement and was a friend of Sellers. Ironside criticized “Bullingerism” or “ultradispensationalism” in “Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth,” a series of articles in the Brethren organ “Serving and Waiting.”

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. Continue reading “Sellers’s Eschatology: Some Distinctives”

God Has Spoken: Otis Q. Sellers’s Wartime Radio Messages

From March 1-5, 1943, as war raged in Europe and the Pacific, Otis Q. Sellers (whose life and work I’m researching) broadcast five messages on Chicago station WAIT.

The subject was the foundation of his life’s work: the fact that God has spoken to humankind in the Bible, “the greatest fact in the universe.” For Sellers, Scripture was life’s Global Positioning System (a term that was still 30 years in his future): it located him, and his family, his country, in history. “I do not study the Bible in order to get material for messages. I study it because of the needs of my own life.”

As his daughter assured me, Sellers avidly followed the news, which that week probably included reports of the carnage wrought in the Bismarck Sea, Kharkov, and Essen. That we live in the Dispensation of Grace, however, the last divine administration before God assumes sovereignty, dominated his consciousness.

Otis Q. Sellers in 1934 with wife Mildred (right) and daughter Jane (left).

A 42-year old resident of Grand Rapids, MI, having moved there in 1936 from Winnetka, IL, Sellers was married for 23 years and with a daughter in high school. The world was at war. He was not immune to the hardships of the home front: rationing; uncertainty of the return of enlisted family members; dread of what the next few years might hold. (We now see that the die for Hitler’s defeat had been cast at least two years before, but it was not at all clear to Mr. and Mrs. America, who scraped to buy War Bonds as well as food and gasoline.)

 

In a rare reference to contemporary events (which he generally regarded as distractions), Sellers wrote:

. . . I know that the problems that the post-war world must face will be as great as those imposed by the war. Victory will bring its day or week of celebration, and after that comes such things as untold millions of defeated soldiers fleeing back to their countries in dis­order, imported foreign workers and prisoners of war abandoning the countries of their captivity and returning to what was once their homes, the people who were forced to migrate returning to their war ravaged lands. In Russia alone fifty million Soviet citizens will return to the wasted territory of western Russia. Starvation, disease, disorder and chaos is almost sure to have its reign. Our own country may remain untouched by the ravages of war, yet we will not be isolated from the problems of the post-war world. These problems in our own country may be so great that all the combined wisdom of men may not be equal to them. These years are just ahead for us, nevertheless, we can face them with assurance and confidence if we know the personal and the written Word of God. (“Divine Importance of the Word,” March 3, 1943)

1947

Readers should notice in the March 1st message, reproduced below, Sellers’s self-effacing representation as a Christian Individualist. He walked in fellowship with other Christians, but not as members of an organization. In the Dispensation of Grace, Sellers held, God has been dealing with people as individuals, all shut up to The Book. Before Acts 28:28, one had to be divinely commissioned (apostello, traditionally transliterated “apostle”) to herald the Word; on this side of that dispensational boundary line, however, the salvation-bringing message of God is no longer restricted to Israelites within and without the Land of Israel: it is freely authorized (apestole) to all nations. Continue reading “God Has Spoken: Otis Q. Sellers’s Wartime Radio Messages”

Dominion Theology: Salvation or Snare for Liberty?

The following review of Robert Grözinger, Why Libertarianism Needs Christianity to Succeed (Kindle eBook, April 7, 2020) was published on Amazon today.—AGF

Only in this post, not in the Amazon review or anywhere else it was published, I clarified my statement of Scripture’s status as divinely inspired (θεόπνευστος, theopneustos). The writings, not the human authors as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit, are “God-breathed.” —AGF, February 19, 2024

This provocative essay derives from a talk given to the Libertarian Alliance in London late last summer. German economist and translator Robert Grözinger (Jesus, der Kapitalist: Das christliche Herz der Marktwirtschaft, Munich, 2012) argues that libertarianism, which traditionally prides itself on its alleged independence from philosophical frameworks, cannot succeed without one that gives meaning to liberty-seeking itself. Arguments for, say, the superiority of free to hampered markets don’t compensate libertarianism for its lack of an adequate framework of meaning or worldview. Libertarians should identify theirs and persuade others on its terms if they want libertarianism to be more than an intellectual hobby. For if libertarianism’s attitude toward ultimate-meaning frameworks remains as laissez-faire as its politics, its attractiveness will remain limited. Grözinger believes Christianity best meets that need.

Robert Grözinger

Grözinger believes that most people—regular folks, not nerds who read themselves into and out of ideologies—are not libertarian for this reason: they seek meaning as much as (if not more than) economic well-being. Intellectual conviction that in a libertarian society everyone will be, on the whole, materially better off than in any alternative arrangement is not enough to seal the deal. For the masses, liberty may be a great good, especially when they’re deprived of it, but not necessarily life’s chief good around which all others revolve. If one wishes to attain and retain other great goods, the libertarian argues, one cannot neglect liberty. Liberty doesn’t defend itself, so people must learn to make it an object of thought and protection. Grözinger amplifies this insight: theoretically self-conscious defenders of liberty must, no less self-consciously, ground their defense in a worldview that embraces many values, not just one.

In his short book Grözinger packs in enough topics to fill an interdisciplinary graduate seminar in politics and religion; I’ll have to pass over how he draws upon Jordan Peterson, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Friedrich Hayek and focus on the writer who answers Grözinger’s question to his satisfaction: Reformed historian and theonomist Gary North. Of the several scholars whose work Grözinger draws upon, North is the only one who’s also a professing Christian—and one with whom many (if not most) other Christians disagree. Continue reading “Dominion Theology: Salvation or Snare for Liberty?”

Otis Q. Sellers: Maverick Workman (2 Tim 2:15)

Today is the birthday of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), the independent Bible teacher whose life I hope to write. (Another March anniversary: Sellers was ordained into the Baptist ministry on March 20, 1923.) My other book-in-progress, Philosophy after Christ, is my “head” project; Maverick Workman (a working title) is my “heart” project.

Otis Q. Sellers attended Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, from January 1 to December 1, 1921, the year this photo was taken.

In the context of a pandemic, writing a post like this is an attempt to exercise the virtue of hope. I’m hoping that when we’re on the other side of this crisis, there will be a point to reading (and therefore writing) a biography of an obscure Bible teacher. (I dare hope I will be on the other side!) The following are some accumulated notes.

* * *

Otis Q. Sellers was like hundreds of millions of other Christians: his approach to the Bible as the Word of God is theirs. The historical-grammatical hermeneutic method isn’t foreign to them, even if few of them call it that.

In important ways, however, he wasn’t like them. For what he derived from his sixty years of Bible study is subversive of the ecclesiastical order, not only as Catholics, Orthodox, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Calvinists and Baptists understand it, but even as premillennial dispensationalists, out of whose culture he came, understand that order. He was for all the world a Protestant.

Bible study is not child’s play, but neither is it a priesthood reserved for scholars, many of whom are invested (socially, psychologically, professionally) in the institutions that pay their salaries. Rarely will they risk dislodging any pillar of what they deem “orthodoxy.”

There are many key Biblical terms we think we understand when he hear them, but Sellers has shown that we really don’t. “Apostle,” “baptism,” and “mystery,” for example, do not translate apostello, baptizo, and mysterion. These Greek words were carried over into English; into those muffin pans are poured the traditional dough of this or that denomination. After studying their usage, Sellers argued that, respectively, “to commission with authority,” “to identify to the point of merger,” and “secret”actually translate those Greek words.) With equal rigor, he’s shown that there’s no justification for retaining the traditional meanings assigned to other terms, like, “heaven,” “hell,” “church,” and “soul.”

Sellers was interested first in finding out what God said and then understanding what He said. He never conformed his credo to what was popular. He never tried to get people either to join a church or leave one. He never denied the sociological fact that for two millennia, Christians have organized themselves into churches. What he denied was that they were dispensationally continuous with the “outcalled ones” (ekklesin) of the Acts period, with its divine mission to give every Israelite in the Roman empire an opportunity to hear the Gospel preached by a divinely commissioned herald.

He made his own the precept of Puritan Myles Coverdale (1488-1569):

It shall greatly help ye to understand the Scriptures if thou mark not only what is spoken or written, but of whom and to whom, with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstances, considering what goeth before and what followeth after. (From the Introduction to Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Bible.)

If you could show Sellers that his translations were error-riddled or his use of concordances, lexicons and other tools misguided, you’d have his attention. But he simply would not regurgitate “what everyone knows the Bible teaches.” Sellers gave up hand-me-down theology in 1934 and never looked back. Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers: Maverick Workman (2 Tim 2:15)”

To govern is to steer: demonstrably, we cannot govern

“Look also at ships: although they are so large and are driven by fierce winds, they are turned by a very small rudder wherever the pilot desires.” James 3:4

 

Ships of state are ever careering off the courses set by their human pilots.

Their “governors” can hold things together for, maybe, a generation and stave off annihilation; at worst, they steer the people, wittingly or  no, into armed conflict.

By a kind of dialectical irony, they inexorably undermine the very order they depend on.

They manipulate currencies, thereby distorting the signals of markets. They do all of these things for perceived short-term gain.

And the governed go along with their governors whom, ironically, they sometimes have the high honor of electing to high office.

President Donald Trump, America’s kybernesis (1 Corinthians 12:28), is attempting to decelerate social and civilizational decline and reverse certain evil tendencies. Enjoying partial success, he may get re-elected.

(I don’t deny the relevancy to Trump of the Apostle James’s next verse: “Even so the tongue is a little member and boasts great things.”)

But the transient enjoyment I experience is a function of my self-centered projection of my expected lifespan. I’m hoping that the worst possible outcome will occur only after I’m safely dead.

Beneath the waters on which Trump steers the ship of state from one superficial “victory” to another, however, is an undertow of evil. It consists of (to name but a few horrors): slavery, including child sex-trafficking; the African diamond trade; drug trafficking; the predations and designs of the fascist ethnostate of China; radical Islamic terrorism and its state enablers. Let’s not forget the barbarism-promoting communists who are currently vying to replace Trump. There is no permanent escape from any of these scourges in this dispensation.

Continue reading “To govern is to steer: demonstrably, we cannot govern”

Kingdom economics? A speculation.

Like earthquakes, there will be wars and rumors of war (Matthew 24:6) during the seven-year rebellion that follows the Holy Spirit’s lifting of His restraints on His subjects after centuries of government. Today, they continue to occur as they have for centuries. They therefore cannot serve as prophetic signs today. The occurrence of earthquakes will,  however, be significant after centuries of their nonoccurrence.

But what about buying and selling? Any room for that in the Kingdom?

Image result for buying and selling

I recently chanced upon Otis Q. Sellers’s concatenation of Biblical verses that lists some blessings of God’s prophesied global government (Psalm 67:4), that is, during the future manifest Kingdom of God. It will be a centuries-long period of time . . .

. . . when the whole earth is filled with His glory (Psalm 72:19); when the heavens declare His righteousness, and all the peoples see His glory (Psalm 97:6); when God opens His hand and satisfies the desire of every living thing (Psalm 145:15-16; my emphasis); when God’s judgments are in the earth and the inhabitants of the world are learning righteousness (Isaiah 26:9); when no inhabitant of the earth shall say that he is sick (Isaiah 33:24); when God opens rivers in high places, and fountains in the midst of valleys (Isaiah 41:18); when the desert shall blossom as the rose bush blossoms (Isaiah 35:1) . . .

Otis Q. Sellers, “Inheriting the Earth,” Seed & Bread, No. 73

Image result for the kingdom of godThe italicized passage implies global abundance, the opposite of scarcity. We normally don’t pay for air, and that’s because it’s abundant in the economic sense: we can all breathe as much of it as we want without depriving anyone else of breathing as much as they want.

Scarce goods can be traded on markets for other scarce goods. One does not have to trade, however, for what’s not scarce. And scarcity is impossible when God is satisfying the everyone’s desires.

Jesus’ many miracles, such as when He fed multitudes with a few biscuits and fishes (e.g., Matthew 14:13-21, 15: 32-39) were “foretastes” of the Kingdom; indeed, they were the Kingdom in its blade and ear stages; Mark 4:26-29.

Sellers’s distinctive claim is that God suspended His Kingdom purposes at the close of the Acts period, which purposes He will resume when He assumes sovereignty.

Now, if there’s no scarcity, there’s no use for money prices. (No occasion, therefore, for the root of all evil, the “love of money,” to grow in the human heart.) And, therefore, no buying and selling. Yet we are told that during the revolt (apostasia, ἀποστασία, 2 Thessalonians 2:3) against the Kingdom (before the Day of the Lord, which will come like a thief in the night; 2 Peter 3:10) . . .

. . . no man might buy or sell, save he that has the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Revelation 13:7 (my emphasis).

So what we have, by hypothesis, is the return (from the bad, ol’ pre-Kingdom days) of buying and selling. Along with earthquakes and wars, trading in scarce goods will signal the dictatorship of the Antichrist, who seats himself in the (restored) temple of God and gets away with murder and mayhem for seven years. He’s the leader of the conspiracy against the Lord’s rule to which Psalm 2 refers:

The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying,  Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us. Psalm 2:2-3

Before He so breaks them, however, the conspiracy and its eventual suppression must play out along the lines Jesus outlined for His disciples. They had asked Him about the sign of His “coming” (that is, His personal presence, παρουσίας, parousias) and of the “end of the world” (that is, the consummation of the eon, συντελείας τοῦ αἰῶνος, synteleias tou aionos, the aion (or “eon”) in question being the pre-Millennial (pre-Parousia) Kingdom. (See Matthew 24:3ff).

This sequence of events presupposes a centuries-earlier return of the prophet Elijah who will restore all things (Malachi 4:5-6), including the Temple. By the time that future Temple is desecrated, the Spirit will have already lifted the restraints of God’s government.

Jesus’s prophecy of the “abomination of desolation” (τὸβδέλυγμα τῆς ἐρημώσεως, to bdelygma tēs erēmōseōs, Matthew 24:15) highlights Daniel’s הַשִּׁקּוּץ מְשׁוֹמֵֽם, ha-shikkuts meshomem, Daniel 9:27, 11:31, 12:11.

I conjecture that the lifting of those restraints, which gives free rein to the rebels, comes with a diminution of Kingdom blessings, including abundance (and safety, and perfect health). That will entail the return of scarcity and, with that, money prices.

The Kingdom’s faithful subjects will have need of suddenly scarce goods. Without the “mark of the beast,” however, they won’t be allowed to buy them. This is the time of Jacob’s trouble (Jeremiah 30:7), of great pressure (θλῖψις, thlipsis, commonly translated “tribulation”).

God’s Next Move? The Second Coming, not of Christ, but of His Spirit.

On his Gravatar profile this blog’s most recent (and welcome!) subscriber cites a few Bible verses: Titus 2:13, Isaiah 40:5, and 2 Timothy 4:1, 8. He adds this caption: “Awaiting Anxiously God’s Next Move, Having That Blessed Hope: His Appearing, Blazing Forth (Epiphaneia) . . . . The Next Event (God’s Prophetic Clock ).”

That Greek word, epiphaneia, is in each of those New Testament verses. (Our word “epiphany” descends from it.) The Greek root, phaino, means “to shine,” and the prefix epi- intensifies it. Otis Q. Sellers suggested that “blazing forth” does justice to it.

A verse containing epiphaneia that the subscriber tellingly does not cite is 2 Thesslonians 2:8:

And then shall that wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming.

Tellingly, I say, because this violent action of the Lord’s is what most students of Bible prophecy believe is what will happen next (or at least right after the so-called “Rapture”). The “brightness of His coming” translates “the epiphaneia of His parousia.”

That last Greek word refers to Christ’s presence, but not an ordinary presence. It certainly does not mean “coming” (as it’s sometimes mistranslated), although for Christ to be present on earth again he must first arrive. His parousia presupposes His “second coming.” When He gets here, He’ll be present on earth because of Who He is and What He does. It does not mean merely “being here,” as does pareimi. (“Present!” is how  modern Greek students answer their teacher when their names are called; the phrase they use is είμαι παρών [eimai paron].)

The epiphaneia in the cited verses refers to a different event.

. . . while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing [epiphaneia] of the glory of our great God and [kai] Savior, Jesus Christ (Titus 2:13).

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing [epiphaneia] and [kai] his kingdom [basileia]. . . . Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give to me on that Day . . . also to all who have loved His appearing [epiphaneia] (2 Timothy 4:1, 8).

The Greek word epiphaneia does not, of course, appear in the Hebrew of Isaiah 40:5:

And the glory (כָּבוֹד, kavod) of the Lord will be revealed, and all people will see it together. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken (Isaiah 4o:5).

“Glory” translates the Hebrew kavod (doxa in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures). The day is coming when all will see God’s glory at the same time. That revelation will coincide with God’s assumption of sovereignty over the earth. Continue reading “God’s Next Move? The Second Coming, not of Christ, but of His Spirit.”