SANCTIONS AND DOMINION - EntreWave

PREFACEblessings are both literal and future. These blessings are the kinds ofblessings that postmillennialists and premillennialists (9) expect duringa literal, future era of millennial blessings. These historical blessingscannot be allegorized away without compromising the text, yetallegorizing is the only exegetical option for an amillennialist. Thispassage unquestionably destroys the case for amillennialism. Nowonder amillennial Bible commentators and theologians growhyperbolic and allegorical on those exceedingly rare occasions whenthey deign to offer comments on this, their position's exegeticalAchilles' heel. (10) The positive sanction of long life is just too positivefor their would-be future realm of Satanic persecution of the church.Sinners who die at age one hundred will be accounted as children:early death. Covenant-keepers will live much longer than this. Butthese demographic conditions reverse the prophesied amillennialfuture, where evil always increases in strength and receives externalblessings, while righteousness is increasingly confined to thepersecuted ghettos of life.The historical sanctions of God during the final phase of the NewHeaven and New Earth, as described by Isaiah, conform to thepostmillennial system: righteousness is rewarded with greater wealthand power in the long run, while evil becomes increasingly impotent.Such a view of the future, we are assured by amillennialists, isheretical. It is obvious who ought to be the chief heretic in the canonof amillennialism: the prophet Isaiah. (11)My main point here is that God's historical sanctions are indissolublyconnected to the process of corporate inheritance and disinheritance inhistory. That is, eschatology and historical sanctions are indissolublecovenantally. To discuss either without reference to the other is tocommit a major exegetical error.Covenantal Sanctions and the Protestant ReformationThe issue of oath-bound sanctions served as the great dividing issuetheologically in the Western church from the Protestant Reformationuntil the late nineteenth century, when eschatology replaced sanctionsas the primary dividing issue within the Protestant community. (12)Martin Luther broke with Rome over the practical question of the saleof indulgences. He asked: Does the Papacy possess the authority tohttp://freebooks.commentary.net/freebooks/docs/html/gnsd/preface.htm (4 of 27) [5/26/2000 1:29:36 PM]