Correct Partitioning
CONTENTS
Part One — Body And Bride
Part Two — Looking At The Prophecies
Part Three — The Greek Scriptures On The Bride (Matthew Through Acts)
Part Four — The Pauline Parenthesis
Part Five — The Greek Scriptures On The Bride (Hebrews)
Part Six — The Greek Scriptures On The Bride (James Through Revelation)
Part Seven — The Letters of Paul - Charter Of The Church
FOREWORD
HUMAN beings do not crave justice; they accept it when they can recognize it or get it, provided it does not interfere with their comfort. And as truth is related to justice, so, rarely do people crave truth for its own value. What humans long for is understanding through sympathy. And one who has an emotional understanding of people has the strongest influence possible. Everyone hungers for the bread of kindness; and this God knows perfectly well, and in due time He will satisfy the desire of every living thing. That desire is, not merely for sustenance, but for happy and understanding companionship. And to satisfy that desire is the purpose of God’s plan. When the consummation is reached God will be All in all (1 Cor.15:28). He Himself, in Himself, and of Himself, will satisfy the desire of every creature.
God has always been over all. That is, a mere question of sovereign power. But even wise earthly rulers see that a sovereignty resting solely on power is of small worth. They must engage the affections of their subjects until the very thought of subjection is lost in happy appreciation and oneness of purpose. Rarely is such fealty seen in human affairs. But Omnipotence knows no failure. And Omnipotence is such not because it can sustain the bodies but because it can draw and hold the hearts it has created. God will be everything to everybody. No creature will eclipse His glory. And He will be supreme in the affections of all because of His perfect understanding—the thing men crave. He will draw all men unto Him and hold them there when He shall have shown to all that He knew all along what they needed and not only had made provision but is Himself that provision.
So then, let no one love truth because it is a convenient tool for controversy, but rather because it reveals God to us and helps us to understand that He is the Understanding One. The most glorious truths of God’s Word may be made into a party shibboleth or wielded as a partisan shillalah.
On the other hand, let no one spurn the truth because it is inconvenient. The truth is always costly. “Buy the truth and sell it not” (Prov.23:23) implies that it is so costly as to be worth holding on to at any price.
But care should be taken to distinguish between truth and a set of our own opinions about truth. God’s Word is given us that our concepts of truth might be rectified respecting earthly things, and formed respecting heavenly things. We must ever go and keep going to it, lest the prejudices with which we are born and others which we have acquired obscure the light of truth as it is in fact and in God.
One difficulty with most people who would like to be students of God’s world lies in their impatience to get everything all analyzed to a nicety, labeled and set up in rows on their mental shelves. They want to get their stock of truth in so that they can open up shop and do business. That is not always the most productive method, however; for truth does not always appear in one hundred percent purity. God’s truth is pure—His Word being the truth—but our concepts of it are usually colored more or less by teachers. We incline to look to this teacher and away from that one because this one speaks as though everything were crystal clear and that one says, ‘This will bear closer investigation,’ ‘Here is a fruitful field for research,’ etc. The ability to discern fractional truths in teachers or groups of believers, to see and to say that ‘this man’s teaching is valuable and Scriptural on that point but faulty and unsupported on this’ has only a heavenly reward in the present time; for certainly there will be no plaudits from men.
People west of the Atlantic like to have their thinking dished out for them, predigested and ready to swallow. The intimation on the part of a teacher that they should watch what they take into their mouths and that they should chew it well is right annoying, so annoying that they will likely hunt up another chef. People flock to those who speak as oracles, whether it be in politics or religion. Whoever says this man or that teaching is wholly right and the rest are wholly, hopelessly, and irretrievably wrong, will find himself surrounded and supported in very visible manner. But to attempt to judge dispassionately and discriminatingly is to invite loneliness on the human side at least.
Another difficulty is the danger of making facts accessory to one’s ideas rather than fundamental to them; menial rather than parental; hovering around, as it were, on the chance of being called on for service, yet occupying no indispensable place in the family. In other words, there is a tendency in the human makeup to conceive a theory and then look for the facts, rather than to look for the facts and then see what God’s Word says them to mean.
May God guide us in this study as minutely as will best accomplish His good purposes. Not new light, but more light is needed.
Fredrik Homer Robison
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