Library of Articles

Matthew 23:39 makes the second advent wait on one sentence Jerusalem has not yet said. Read the whole paragraph and you find what the sentence is about — their treatment of the men God sends them. They killed the prophets, they stoned Stephen, they refused the apostolic witness. The house stands desolate still.

Philip preached Christ, cast out devils, healed the lame, and baptized a city — and he could not give the Holy Ghost. Jerusalem had to send apostles. That one limit explains Acts 8, answers Acts 19, and exposes what is being claimed today.

A graphic circulating online asks how a man never under the first covenant could be redeemed from transgressions under it. The question carries a premise it never states: that the only redemption there is, is redemption from covenant transgressions. Paul says guilt reached men who never had a covenant to break, and so does the remedy.

Who are the other sheep of John 10:16? The dispute turns on a word neither side had stopped to define. Scripture uses fold of a place — something built, entered, left or become — and never once of a people. Define the word and the sentence reads itself: Israel's own scattered, brought back to one fold under one shepherd.

Believers ache for a past that was more moral and more Christian, and grieve a covenant they believe the nation broke. But the remembered age never existed as remembered, no Gentile nation was ever in covenant with God, and Scripture rebukes the longing itself. A look at nostalgia, the Christian nation, and the post God actually gave you.

When Jesus told Peter he would know hereafter, what would Peter come to understand? Rightly divided, the foot washing belongs to Israel's kingdom program — leadership training for the twelve, grasped after Pentecost, not the Pauline mystery. It also shows why foot washing is no ordinance for the Body, and why we take our humility from Paul.

Believers are told to plead the blood over their homes, their children, their fears, even their thoughts. But where did the practice come from, and does Scripture, rightly divided, command it in any dispensation? A study of the blood across Passover, Israels program, and the mystery revealed to Paul.

Matthew stands at the seam of right division. Peter Ruckman hands much of it back to Israel — the Sermon on the Mount, the Disciples' Prayer, conditional forgiveness — then pours the Body of Christ back in through his method of spiritual application. How a book gets wrongly divided even by a man who can see where its parts belong.