Some observations on the doctrine called ‘Partial Rapturism’ or ‘Conditional Kingdom’

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 1991.

Opening remarks

Thank you for letting me see your paper.

I gather that you have come to embrace the same doctrinal position as G. H. Lang, G. H. Pember and D. M. Panton. I knew Mr G. H. Lang personally and had some detailed correspondence with him. I have also read many of his books and some of the works of Mr G. H. Pember, from which Mr Lang, according to his own admission, culled many of his ideas. I myself was at one stage in life almost persuaded that this doctrine was correct. I came to see, however, that it contradicts some of the basic teachings of the gospel.

Moreover, though its main exponents have been motivated by grief at the laxity of living that is so prevalent among many of God's people; and although they feel that this laxity has been occasioned by an unbalanced emphasis on the doctrine of unconditional grace; and although they feel that the partial rapture doctrine is well calculated to restore the balance and promote godly living—in spite of all that, it seems to me that the partial rapture doctrine very seriously devalues the solemn warnings of Scripture. Whereas Scripture solemnly warns those who constantly practise sin that they are not children of God but children of the devil, partial rapture doctrine tells them that they could well be children of God, and that, though they will miss the millennial kingdom and will have to spend a while in purgatory, nevertheless they will be in God's eternal heaven.

Since this is the conclusion that I have reached after personal encounter with both the doctrine and at least one leading exponent of it, I imagine you will understand and forgive me if sometimes the tone of the enclosed paper seems severe. I write it, I assure you, with respect for those who propagate these views, which appear to me to be so seriously wrong; and with respect, of course, and Christian love to you.

A brief sketch of the doctrine

I propose in this paper to deal briefly with some of the interpretations of Scripture put forward by those who have embraced the doctrine which is known as partial rapturism, or conditional kingdom. Its basic principles are as follows:

1. When our Lord spoke, as he frequently did, of the kingdom of God, he was mostly referring to his millennial kingdom, to be inaugurated at his coming in power and great glory.

2. At that time our Lord will inherit and reign over the whole earth, and some believers whose behaviour has qualified them for this high honour will share our Lord's glory and reign with him.

3. Not all believers will so qualify. Those who do not qualify will miss participation in the millennial kingdom, and some of them will have to submit to indefinite periods of purgation throughout the period of that kingdom before they are finally admitted into God's eternal heaven.

4. In this connection, partial rapturism distinguishes between justification and eternal life on the one hand, and all other benefits and blessings on the other. On the basis of Scriptures such as Romans 3:24—'Being justified freely by his grace' (freely = Greek dōrean), and John 4:10—'the gift of God' (gift = Greek dōrea), partial rapturism holds that justification and eternal life are unconditional gifts which a believer cannot forfeit, however unworthily he lives. All else, including participation in the rapture and the first resurrection, is conditional upon the believer's behaviour, and can be forfeited if the behaviour is inadequate.

5. What will actually happen when the Lord comes is variously described by those who propound partial rapturism. All seem to agree that, at some point, there will be a selective rapture both of dead and living believers, who will thereafter reign with Christ throughout the millennium. The rest of the believing dead and the believing living will not be taken to heaven at that time.

There seems to be disagreement over the details in this programme. Some seem to hold that the partial rapture takes place before the great tribulation, and thus saves those who qualify for this rapture from passing through the great tribulation. The rest of the living believers will have to undergo the great tribulation, and they will be raised from the dead and/or taken to meet the Lord when the Lord comes in power and great glory. Those of them who have been sufficiently purged by the sufferings of the great tribulation will then enter the millennial reign of Christ, and be rewarded with positions of responsibility in his kingdom. Those who are found to be utterly unworthy will be excluded from the kingdom and disciplined with few or many stripes (see Luke 12:47–48). Only after being thus purged will they be re-admitted to the Lord's immediate presence.

Other exponents of partial rapturism seem to hold that this partial rapture occurs at the Lord's coming in power and great glory immediately before his millennial kingdom; and that those who do not qualify to be raised or raptured on that occasion will not meet the Lord in judgment until the great white throne, at which point they may have to be 'hurt by the second death' for a while, until they have been purged, and only thereafter will they be admitted to heaven.

6. In spite of these differences, partial rapturism holds that, because they are believers, those who have been unworthy and have had to be disciplined and purged will retain their justification and eternal life, and will certainly enter heaven one day.

This, then, is a very brief sketch of partial rapturism; though of course it does not claim to be an exhaustive account of this doctrine.

The motives underlying the doctrine

Perhaps the first thing we should notice about these doctrines is the motives of those who teach them. They are praiseworthy indeed. In the first place, they are grieved at the laxity of living that is so prevalent among many of God's people, and naturally they are concerned to understand and to remove, if possible, the causes of this laxity. Their diagnosis is that the laxity has been occasioned by unbalanced emphasis on the doctrine of unconditional grace. This unbalanced emphasis allows people to think that, no matter how poorly they live, so long as they have once trusted Christ for salvation they not only are justified by faith and possess eternal life, but will also automatically inherit all the other blessings that God has promised to those who love him, including a share in the glories of Christ's millennial reign. The proponents of the doctrines of partial rapturism and conditional kingdom feel, therefore, that this version of conditional grace is seriously defective and needs to be corrected. They feel also that their special doctrines are calculated to restore the proper balance in the thinking and behaviour of God's people. Their motives, therefore, are unexceptionable; but the results of their doctrines are disastrous.

In the first place, instead of upholding the solemn warnings of Scripture, as they claim to do, they seriously undermine them. Scripture solemnly warns those who constantly practise sin that they are not children of God, but children of the devil (1 John 3: 6–10). Conditional kingdom doctrine tells them that they could well be children of God who have been justified by faith and have eternal life, and that, although because of their unsatisfactory and sinful living they will miss the millennial kingdom and have to spend a while in purgatory, nevertheless they will be in God's eternal heaven. It is over this very matter that the Apostle John pleads with his 'little children' not to let anyone lead them astray. It is, then, a serious matter when conditional kingdom doctrine undermines the solemn statements of God's word.

In the second place, there is the even more serious consideration that the doctrine of the partial rapture and conditional kingdom contradicts the basic doctrines of the gospel, as Paul enunciates them in the Epistle to the Galatians; and thus they are in grave danger of bringing upon themselves the anathema that Paul pronounces on any who distort the gospel.

The conditions on which believers inherit the kingdom

Let us therefore first investigate what Scripture has to say upon this basic question: On what conditions do believers inherit the kingdom which God has promised to them that love him? (See James 2:5).

Paul deals with this question at great length and in considerable detail in his Epistle to the Galatians. The main thrust of the early part of that Epistle is to show that justification is by faith and not by works; and in order to show this, Paul quotes the legal precedent laid down in the case of Abraham: 'Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned unto him for righteousness' (Genesis 15:6; Galatians 3:6). If Abraham was justified by faith and not by works, it sets a precedent for all subsequent centuries. Everybody else who is justified must be justified on exactly the same terms.

But in order to clinch his argument that justification is by faith and not by works, Paul proceeds in the following verses to point out that a number of other things are granted to the believer on exactly the same terms. Those other things mentioned in Galatians are:

The blessings of Abraham	3:14
The promise of Abraham	3:14, 18, 29
The covenant	3:15–19
The inheritance	3:18–29

Let us begin here by considering the matter of the inheritance that God promised to Abraham and to his seed, and of the covenant by which God guaranteed that inheritance. The record of this covenant is to be found in Genesis 15, and the circumstances of the making of the covenant were as follows.

First of all, God promised Abraham, 'Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if you are able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be' (Genesis 15:5). Faced with that glorious promise, Abraham 'believed in the lord; and he counted it to him for righteousness' (Genesis 15:6). In other words, it was precisely over that matter of God's promise that Abraham was justified by faith.

But God had something more than justification to give to Abraham, and so in the very next verse we read, 'And he said unto him, I am the lord that brought you out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give you this land to inherit it'. Faced with such a wonderful statement of God's purpose, Abraham immediately asked on what ground he could be certain that he would obtain this inheritance: 'And he said, lord God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?'.

God's answer was to make a covenant with Abraham so that, on the grounds of this covenant, Abraham could know for a certainty that he would inherit what God promised to him (Genesis 15:8–21).

We naturally look to see, therefore, whether this covenant was an unconditional covenant given by God to Abraham and to his seed; or whether it was a conditional covenant that made the inheritance depend on Abraham's meritorious behaviour. To put it another way: we look to see whether the covenant was a one-party covenant, in which God alone had conditions to fulfil; or whether it was a two-party covenant, so that Abraham's receiving and entering of the inheritance would depend not only on God fulfilling his part but on Abraham fulfilling his part as well.

The matter is clear beyond dispute. The covenant that God made with Abraham and his seed was a one-party covenant, and it promised the inheritance to him as an unconditional gift. According to ancient practice, a covenant was ratified by the following method. The covenant sacrifices were placed in two rows, and then the parties of the covenant who had terms to fulfil walked solemnly between the pieces. If it was a two-party covenant and both parties had conditions to fulfil, both parties walked between the pieces. If it was a one-party covenant and only one party had conditions to fulfil, only one party walked between the pieces. Genesis 15 tells us explicitly and in detail how God's covenant with Abraham and his seed was ratified. Abraham, under God's instructions, placed the sacrifice in two rows. When the birds of prey came down on the carcases, Abraham drove them away; but when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abraham. So, clearly enough, Abraham did not walk between the pieces; when the covenant was made he was in a deep sleep, and the terms of the covenant were communicated to him in a vision or dream. Moreover, not even in that vision did Abraham see himself walking between the pieces of the sacrifice, as John in the Revelation saw himself walking and being conducted in various directions. God himself, and only God, passed between the pieces; his presence being indicated by a flaming torch (see Genesis 15:17).

Compare the covenant which the princes and people made in the time of Jeremiah, when they undertook to let their slaves go free. Because it was the princes and people who undertook to do this, it was they who passed between the parts of the covenant sacrifice (see Jeremiah 34:18–19). In this case God himself had no conditions to fulfil, and therefore he did not pass between the pieces. It too was a one-party covenant. Only, in this case the one party that had conditions to fulfil was not God, but the people.

The covenant then was a one-party covenant, by which God promised the inheritance to Abraham and his seed unconditionally. And this we can see if we contrast this one-party covenant with the altogether different covenant that God made with Israel, as recorded in Exodus 24:1–8. This latter covenant was a two-party covenant, in which both God and the people had conditions to fulfil. The conditions which the people had to fulfil were written in a book and then read out to them in detail. The people were invited to declare whether they were prepared to undertake these conditions or not. They replied that they were prepared to undertake the conditions: 'All that the lord has spoken we will do, and be obedient'. On the declared grounds that the people would fulfil the conditions, Moses then ratified the covenant by taking the blood and sprinkling it on the people, and saying, 'Behold the blood of the covenant, which the lord has made with you concerning all these words'. The difference in nature, therefore, between this covenant of Exodus 24 and the covenant of Genesis 15, which guaranteed Abraham and his seed the inheritance, is clear and explicit.

Before we move on, we should notice one more thing about the covenant with Abraham, namely the nature of the inheritance that was promised to him. It was to be the land of promise, and its geographical dimensions are spelled out (see Genesis 15:18–21). Now Israel has never yet completely and fully entered into this promised inheritance. All enjoyment of that inheritance has, up to this moment, been partial and incomplete. When shall Abraham and his seed come into their full possession? Here, the partial rapture and conditional kingdom doctrines would agree that they will do so in the millennial reign of Christ.

Now let us turn to Galatians 3 and study Paul's commentary on this covenant with Abraham and his seed. First of all he points out that the term 'seed', used in connection with the covenant, refers, strictly speaking, to Christ himself (see Galatians 3:16). And at the end of the chapter he will maintain that it is only in and through Christ that anyone, Jew or Gentile, will enter and enjoy this inheritance with Christ (Galatians 3:27–29). Christ and his people will, of course, inherit far more than this both earthly and heavenly inheritance, but they will not inherit less than this. Psalm 2 assures us that, when Christ asks the Father, the Father will give him the uttermost parts of the earth for his inheritance. Christ is not going to be content with some heavenly and spiritual inheritance. He will inherit the whole world as well, and the whole world will include the inheritance that was promised to Abraham and to his seed.

The next question that Paul deals with is the conditions upon which the promise of the inheritance was made under the terms of the covenant. The covenant with Abraham and his seed, so Paul points out, was made four hundred and thirty years before the law—this shows, incidentally, that the covenant Paul is referring to is in fact the covenant of Genesis 15. He argues, therefore, that the law cannot be added to the terms of the original covenant. In other words, you cannot interpret the promise of the inheritance covenanted by God to Abraham and his seed in Genesis 15 to mean that Abraham's and his seed's actual enjoyment of that inheritance depends on keeping the conditions of the law laid down at Sinai, nor indeed on the conditions of any other law. If the original promise of inheritance had been conditional upon the behaviour of Abraham and his seed, those conditions must have been spelled out in the original covenant. But no such conditions were attached to the covenant when God made it with Abraham; and therefore, argues Paul, no such conditions may subsequently be added, either by the law of Sinai or by any other law (Galatians 3:15, 17).

Why must such conditions not be added? Because, Paul points out, to make the inheritance conditional upon the keeping of any law destroys the nature of God's original promise: 'For if the inheritance is of the law, it is no more of promise: but God has granted it to Abraham by promise' (Galatians 3:18). Here, then, we learn what the term 'promise' means in contexts like this. It means a statement by God that he is going to give someone an unconditional gift.

Compare Romans 9:9: 'For this is a word of promise, "According to this season will I come, and Sarah shall have a son"'. We remember in this connection that Abraham and Sarah earlier thought that, when God promised them a son, he meant that they had to do their best and devise means, such as the use of Hagar, in order by their own efforts to fulfil God's promise. Of course, they were grievously mistaken. God's promise was an unconditional promise. Its fulfilment did not depend on the merit or works of Abraham and Sarah. They had to learn to receive the gift of a son as an unconditional gift of God's grace. When God promised to give them a son, he meant give them; not that they had in some way or other to earn it, or to qualify for it. Paul takes up this point in Romans 4 to remind us that we get justification on the very same grounds and terms as Abraham received the gift of a son (see Romans 4:18–25).

Now, in Galatians 3:18ff, Paul applies exactly the same argument to the grounds on which we receive the inheritance. The inheritance was granted to Abraham by promise. If we make the receiving of that inheritance depend on our merit or on works of the law, then we destroy the nature of promise. Instead of the inheritance being an unconditional gift of God's grace, it becomes something that we have to earn or qualify for: 'it makes the promise of none effect' (Galatians 3:17). We see at once how serious it is to make the inheritance depend on keeping the law. It is every bit as serious as making justification depend upon the keeping of the law.

In Galatians 3:19 Paul now turns to deal with an objection that his proponents would bring against him. If the inheritance is an unconditional gift from God, not dependent upon keeping the law, why ever did God give the law at all? Paul answers this question in the verses that follow.

1. 'The law was added because of transgressions, until the seed should come to whom the promise has been made.' The promised seed in this verse is, once more, Christ. Paul is saying therefore, that the law was interposed as a temporary measure, 'because of transgressions'. We need not now stay to consider exactly what the phrase 'because of transgressions' means. Important as it would be to arrive at its exact meaning, this would not affect the drift of the main argument, which is that the law was a temporary measure, imposed only until the promised seed should come. This situation can be illustrated, as Paul himself points out in Galatians 4:21–31, by the story of Hagar and Ishmael.

As we have already observed, Abraham and Sarah mistakenly tried by their own effort to bring about the fulfilment of God's promise. When Hagar saw that she was going to bear Abraham a child, she began to put on airs and graces. As a result, Sarah treated her so badly that she ran away. But, in order to teach Abraham and Sarah the folly of trusting in their own efforts, God sent Hagar back into their home, and there Ishmael was born. And there both he and his mother remained until the promised seed—that is, Isaac—came. So in Genesis 21 the first paragraph tells us about Isaac's birth (Genesis 21:1–7); the very next paragraph tells us how, at Sarah's suggestion and with God's approval, Hagar and Ishmael were cast out. The reason for their being cast out was enunciated by Sarah as follows: 'The son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac' (Genesis 21:10). Notice in passing what the issue at stake was here: not justification, but inheritance. Notice also how Paul applies the analogy in Galatians 4. Hagar represents, he says, the old covenant and the law from Mount Sinai. To imagine that one must qualify for the inheritance by keeping the law, or by any work of merit, is the same in Paul's estimate as Abraham and Sarah using Hagar to produce Ishmael, and it comes under the same condemnatory fiat in Galatians as in Genesis:

But what says the Scripture? Cast out the handmaid and her son: for the son of the handmaid shall not inherit with the son of the freewoman. Wherefore, brethren, we are not children of a handmaid, but of the freewoman. With freedom did Christ set us free: stand fast, therefore, and be not entangled again in a yoke of bondage. (Galatians 4:30–5:1)

7. Paul next observes that the covenant of the law given at Sinai was a two-party covenant. God on the one hand, the people on the other; and in between them both angels and Moses (Galatians 3:19–20). By contrast, the covenant that God made with Abraham was a one-party covenant. There was no mediator between God and Abraham in that covenant. As we have seen, God was simply stating and guaranteeing his intention to give the inheritance to Abraham and to his seed. In the new covenant, of course, there is a mediator; but that does not mean that the new covenant is a two-party covenant, for the mediator is himself God incarnate.

8. Next, Paul raises the question: if the inheritance does not depend on keeping the law; and if any suggestion that the inheritance does indeed depend on keeping at least some laws would destroy and nullify the very nature of the promise; then does that mean that the law is against the 'promises of God'? Paul's answer is, no. 'If there had been a law given which could give life, then surely righteousness would have been of the law' (Galatians 3:21). But, of course, the law could not give life, and therefore it could certainly not give the inheritance. What God has done, therefore, and done through his law, is, as Paul puts it in Galatians 3:22, to shut up all things under sin, that the promise—this promise of the inheritance, which depends solely on the principle of faith in Christ Jesus, might in actual fact be given to those who believe; and be given on that principle of faith and not on the principle of law-keeping and merit.

9. Next, in Galatians 3:23 Paul observes that this principle of inheritance by faith is so fundamental and so indisputable that God used the law to close off every other possible avenue and make it evident that faith was the only way. A farmer who wants to get sheep into a certain pen will use his sheep-dogs to cut off every other road and head the sheep relentlessly towards the one and only opening that the shepherd wishes them to enter. So God did with his people under the law. They were 'kept in ward under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed'.

The analogy that Paul himself uses is not one of sheep-dogs and sheep, but of a tutor and children. The kind of tutor Paul refers to here is the ancient pedagogue; a slave whose duties were to make sure that the children arrived at the schoolteacher's and did not run away down some side street, or otherwise play truant. The pedagogue was responsible for controlling their behaviour as best he could when the children were on their way towards the schoolmaster, but his task was not to educate the children himself; simply to make sure that they got to the schoolteacher, so that the schoolteacher could educate them. The law, says Paul, has therefore been 'our pedagogue to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith'. It is to be noticed how, in the course of this argument, Paul talks now of justification, and now of inheritance, as though they were interchangeable terms. Of course, the reason is that, in Paul's teaching, the inheritance is on the exact same conditions as justification by faith. There is no justification through the law; neither is there any inheritance through the law.

10. Still using his analogy Paul states in verses Galatians 3:25–26 that 'now that faith has come, we are no longer under a pedagogue'. Why not? 'Because you are all sons of God, through faith in Christ Jesus.' In the sense intended by this context, we are not little children about whose eventual sonship, legally speaking, there is still doubt. Through faith in Christ Jesus, we have been given the legal status of 'sons of God'. How, we may ask, did we come to this exalted status? Paul's answer is, 'For as many of you as were baptized into Christ did put on Christ' (Galatians 3:27). The metaphor he uses is that of a large garment which, when put on, covers everything else and obliterates all distinctions. When we were baptized into Christ, we put on Christ as a garment. That garment covered us completely, so that, 'There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and female'. All such distinctions are gone, 'for you are all one in Christ Jesus' (Galatians 3:28).

But again at this point we must be careful to stay with the thrust and thought flow of Paul's argument. He has not suddenly diverged into a sermon on church unity. What he is discussing is the terms upon which we inherit the great inheritance promised to Abraham and to his seed. He has shown how it is impossible to merit that inheritance on the grounds of keeping the law. How, then, can we inherit it? Through faith in Christ, by being baptized into Christ, by putting on Christ. And the relevance of these processes is finally brought out as Paul brings his argument to its climax: 'If you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise' (Galatians 3:29). It is of the utmost importance to pay the closest of attention to this conclusion of the argument. It does not say—though it would be perfectly true if it did—'if you are Christ's, then are you Abraham's seed, and justified according to the promise'; but 'you are Abraham\'s seed, and heirs according to the promise'. Paul, I say again at the risk of tedious repetition, is arguing that inheritance is on the same terms as justification.

11. But now let us notice that Paul is not simply saying that believers become, through faith, heirs of God. He is saying that the heir to the inheritance promised by God to Abraham is, strictly speaking, Christ himself. Christ is the seed, Christ is the heir, Christ is the one to inherit this great inheritance. How then do we come into the matter? We shall inherit along with him because we are in him. We cannot inherit apart from him. Apart from him we have no title to the inheritance; but in him and of him we inherit on the same terms as he inherits. Listen again to the triumphant declaration: 'If you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to promise'. We inherit therefore along with Christ, as being in Christ.

Now this is an exceedingly pertinent point, because, on the basis of Romans 8:17, conditional kingdom doctrine teaches that, while all the children of God are heirs of God on the grounds of their new birth, which is a free and unconditional gift, not all believers are joint heirs with Christ. That is not a free and unconditional gift; joint heirship with Christ is to be earned by suffering with Christ. And therefore, says conditional kingdom doctrine, when Christ enters his inheritance in his millennial reign, some believers will miss that inheritance because they have failed to suffer with him.

That, as we now see, flatly denies what Paul has been arguing for throughout the whole of Galatians 3:15–29. The believer will inherit, says Paul, because he is in Christ. And being in Christ, he becomes the seed of Abraham, just as Christ is; and he thereby becomes an heir on the same terms as Christ does. That is, on the basis of the covenant that God made with Abraham and his seed. To deny this fact and to teach that the inheritance does not depend simply on being in Christ, but upon earning the right of inheritance by one's personal suffering, is a very serious matter. To teach that the inheritance depends on our meritorious attainment is just as serious an error as teaching that justification depends not solely on our being in Christ, but upon our meritorious attainments, and in particular on our sufferings. Paul would anathematize both doctrines.

12. Before we proceed, let us examine a little further the Scripture in Romans 8:17. The conditional kingdom contention is, as we have said, that all believers are heirs of God simply on the grounds of faith and of the new birth; but not all believers will prove to be joint heirs with Christ, as only those who merit that position by their sufferings will be his joint heirs. At first sight, this exposition of the verse seems calculated to instil great godliness in the heart of believers. A little thought will show that it is liable to do the very opposite. According to this exposition, if you refuse to suffer with Christ, you cannot be a joint heir with him in his millennial reign; but apparently, if you refuse to suffer for God, you can still remain an heir of God.

This is very similar to the conditional kingdom doctrine's exposition of the text, 'If we deny him [that is Christ], he also will deny us' (2 Timothy 2:12). It takes the verse to mean that, if a believer denies the Lord Jesus, he will be excluded from the millennial kingdom, but not from God's eternal heaven. But why not from heaven as well? Because, according to conditional kingdom doctrine, sharing the millennial glories with Christ is a conditional gift, which a believer will forfeit if a believer denies him. Whereas sharing God's eternal heaven is for the believer an unconditional gift, which a believer will not forfeit even if he denies God. And that, need it be said, is an alarming doctrine to teach. According to Titus, the people who profess to know God, but by their works deny him, are not lax believers; they are not believers at all. 'They are abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate' (Titus 1:16). The word he uses for 'disobedient' is the Greek word that is never once used of a believer throughout the whole of the New Testament; it denotes those who, having heard the gospel, deliberately refuse to believe it. Partial rapture and conditional kingdom doctrines, therefore, start out with the motive of spurring believers to live godly lives of self-sacrifice for Christ, and their motivation is of the highest. The implication of their doctrine, however, is the very opposite.

Objections to the exposition of Galatians 3, based on Galatians 5:21 and Ephesians 5:5

Now let us turn to consider objections that conditional kingdom advocates are liable to make to the exposition of Galatians 3, given above. They will say that there are verses in the New Testament where Paul explicitly says that, if believers misbehave, those believers will not be given any inheritance in the kingdom of God. And, since the term 'the kingdom of God' in a context like this means the millennial reign of Christ, it means that believers who misbehave will forfeit all inheritance in the millennial reign of Christ; but they will of course be admitted into God's eternal heaven after a suitable period of purgation. Galatians 5:21 is just such a Scripture:

of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.

Another such Scripture is Ephesians 5:5:

For this you know of a surety, that no fornicator, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.

Partial rapturists read Galatians 5:21 as though it said, 'I forewarn you now, even as I did forewarn you, that if you practise such things you shall not inherit the kingdom of God'. But Galatians 5:21 does not say anything of the sort. It says, 'I forewarn you now, even as I did forewarn you, that those who practise such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God'. The difference is not one of mere phraseology: it lies at the heart of question. Paul is not saying that if believers misbehave they shall not share in the millennial reign of Christ. He is saying that those who consistently and continually practise evil things are not believers at all, and therefore they will not inherit the kingdom of God.

He spells this out even more plainly in Ephesians 5:5: 'For this you know of a surety, that no fornicator, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God'. Who are these evil people he is talking about? Are they believers who, like King David of old, have yielded to a passing temptation and stumbled? Is it indeed true that if a believer once stumbles he is forever excluded from inheritance, not only in Christ's kingdom, which is the millennial kingdom, but in God's kingdom as well? One only needs to ask the question in order to answer it. But we are not left to our own interpretation of the matter, for in the very next verse Paul tells us exactly who the people are that he is talking about: 'Let no man deceive you with empty words: for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience' (Ephesians 5:6).

Who, then, are the 'sons of disobedience'? It would be easy for shallow exposition to suppose that they are genuine sons of God, who are guilty of disobeying the law; but the word that Paul uses for 'disobedience' is the Greek word apeitheia. This word and its cognate verb apeitheō and cognate adjective apeithēs are nowhere in the whole of the New Testament used of true believers. (More of this later.) They are the words used of those who, having heard the gospel, deliberately refuse it (cf. John 3:36 RV; Acts 14:2; 17:5; Romans 2:8; 10:21; 11:30–31; 15:31; Titus 1:16; 3:3). Ephesians 2:2 is an important case in point. Here, Paul again mentions the sons of disobedience. It is the exact same phrase as he uses in 5:6. Here, then, are these sons of disobedience further described:

And you being dead in your trespasses and in your sins, in which you once walked, according to the age of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience. (Ephesians 2:1–2)

These sons of disobedience, in whom the evil prince of the world works, are obviously not believers. It would be outrageous to suggest that they were; and anyway, Paul himself tells us that this was the class of people among whom the Ephesian believers, himself included, used to lead their lives while they were still by nature children of wrath, even as the others; but that was before God had mercy on them, before they were regenerated, raised up and seated together with Christ in the heavenlies (see Ephesians 2:3–6).

Paul, therefore, is not saying, either in Galatians 5:21 or in Ephesians 5:5, that if believers constantly live in sin they will forfeit their inheritance in the millennial kingdom. He is saying, and saying very solemnly, that those who consistently practise sin are not believers at all.

With this, the Apostle John agrees. He says categorically,

My little children, let no man lead you astray: he who practises righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous: he who practises sin is of the devil. In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil ... Whoever does not practise righteousness is not of God, neither he who does not love his brother. (1 John 3:7–10)

These are very solemn Scriptures, and we must not parry their thrust. Many will argue that they have known people who over some years have seemed to live like believers and then have fallen away into prolonged periods of unrighteous living, and they continue so to the day of their death. And they further argue that it is impossible to say they never were believers, since serious and mature Christians who knew them well felt certain that they were true believers.

But of course this kind of argument is not decisive, as we see from the case of Judas Iscariot. All the other apostles felt sure he was a genuine believer; so much so that, when our Lord announced in the upper room that one of them was going to betray him, the eleven apostles were in a quandary to know which of them it was who was going to do this dastardly thing. It is the sad fact that after his three years of living and acting and preaching like an apostle, and being trusted with the little community's bag, Judas behaved in such a way as to show that he never had been a true believer at all (see John 6:70). We must, of course, balance this observation by the case of Peter. He denied the Lord with oaths and curses; and in that moment, if a bystander had asked us whether we thought Peter was a believer or not, it would have been very difficult for us to say for certain. We know it from the way things turned out, and from the lips of Christ himself, that Peter was, and remained all the way through, a true believer who temporarily fell under testing and acted with grave inconsistency. He denied the Lord Jesus, but he was restored and he will most certainly not be excluded from the millennial reign of Christ.

It is not given to any one of us to pronounce the final verdict on whether a person is or is not a true believer; but we must not, in order to maintain the theories of partial rapturism, allow people to think that if they constantly practise sin they will miss the millennial kingdom, but will certainly be in heaven because they are after all true believers.

The place of rewards

With this we come to an important distinction which the New Testament itself makes: namely, the difference between the inheritance that every believer alike shares solely on the ground of faith in Christ, and the differing amount of rewards that individual believers will receive according to their work and suffering for Christ.

We may start here with an Old Testament example to which partial rapturists frequently appeal, the case of Reuben. They point out that, because of his serious lapse, Reuben forfeited his birthright as Jacob's eldest son (see 1 Chronicles 5:1–2). Going by analogy, they suggest that for a present-day believer the birthright is a share in the millennial kingdom, which it is possible for a believer to forfeit. But the analogy is false. The result of Reuben's personal sin was first that the birthright was given to the tribe of Joseph and not to the tribe of Reuben; and second that the privilege of giving birth to the royal line of David passed to the tribe of Judah. But the tribe of Reuben did not forfeit their inheritance in the promised land; they were given inheritance along with all the other tribes (see Joshua 13:8). And the name of Reuben shall stand upon one of the gates of the eternal city (see Revelation 7:5; 21:12).

Now, 1 Corinthians 3:10–15 teaches quite plainly that it is possible for a believer to lose his reward; though, in the very moment of telling us this, Paul adds that the believer whose work is burned up, and who suffers loss, will himself be saved, yet so as through fire—like Lot coming out of Sodom—since salvation is not a reward for work done, but is, as all agree, a gift to faith.

What then is the nature of reward? From the parables that our Lord himself spoke, it becomes clear that, for work well done here in this world, the reward will be to be entrusted with more work and greater administrative responsibility in the age to come. The man who used his five talents well and gained five extra talents was put in charge of many things (see Matthew 25:20–21). The man who used his one pound to gain ten more pounds was given authority over ten whole cities (see Luke 19:17). The reward of the apostles for continuing with Christ in his temptations will be to sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel (see Luke 22:28–30). The man in the parable who used his one pound to gain only five extra pounds was placed over five cities.

Rewards, then, will vary according to the amount of work done; but other factors will enter into the assessment of reward. God's sovereignty has already decided who shall get the two highest rewards of sitting at the right hand or on the left hand of Christ in his kingdom (see Mark 10:40). Christ's generosity and sheer goodness will give to some people greater rewards than they have in strict justice earned (Matthew 19:30–20:16). And it is possible, as we have already seen, that some believers will get no reward at all, and will be given no administrative responsibility. But that does not mean that they will be excluded from inheriting the promised inheritance along with Christ. If they are Christ's, if they have been baptized into Christ, then they are and shall forever remain heirs along with Christ, as Galatians has taught us. The youngest son of Queen Elizabeth II is part of the reigning House of Windsor, even though he has virtually no administrative responsibilities.

There is also another area in which believers will differ, not only in the millennial kingdom but in God's eternal kingdom. In 2 Peter 1:5–11 the apostle reminds us that there will be a difference between a simple entrance into the eternal kingdom and an abundant entrance into that eternal kingdom. All believers will enter the eternal kingdom. Entry there depends solely on 'washing one's robes in the blood of the Lamb' (Revelation 22:14—it is important not to follow the Byzantine text, which here is corrupt and reads, 'Blessed are those who do his commandments, that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city'.) But to have an abundant entrance into the eternal kingdom or, as Peter puts it, 'to have the entrance into the eternal kingdom ministered to us richly', we must give diligence not only to work for the Lord, but to add the Christian virtues to our character. In other words, true spiritual growth will determine whether a believer simply gets into the eternal kingdom, or has an abundant entrance into that kingdom.

We shall all be like Christ when we see him—what there is of us. A little baby is like his father and a grown, mature and developed man is like his father. The difference between them is that the one has grown, and the other has not. Spiritual growth, therefore, is exceedingly important. Whether a believer troubles to grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus or not will have eternal consequences, since our potential for enjoying the blessings and glories of salvation will depend upon the amount of our spiritual growth.

The true doctrines of grace, therefore, do not encourage believers to think that, so long as they have been justified by faith, it is of no great consequence whether they grow in grace or not; whether they work for the Lord or not. They remind us that lax living here will have consequences not only for our position within Christ's millennial reign, but for our potential for enjoyment in God's eternal kingdom.

That said, we ought now to turn to consider the case of those who refuse to do any work whatsoever for the Lord, and also the case of those who, while professing to be servants of Christ, shockingly maltreat their fellow servants. Our Lord envisages such people in the many of the parables he taught on the matter of reward, and conditional kingdom doctrine consistently appeals to those cases.

Let us look at the parable given in Luke 12:35–48:

And the Lord said, Who then is the faithful and wise steward, whom his lord shall set over his household, to give them their portion of food in due season? Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he comes shall find so doing. Of a truth I say unto you, that he will set him over all that he has. But if that servant shall say in his heart, My lord delays his coming; and shall begin to beat the menservants and the maidservants, and to eat and drink, and to be drunken; The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he expects not, and in an hour when he knoweth not, and shall cut him asunder, and appoint his portion with the unbelieving. (Luke 12:42–46)

Conditional kingdom doctrine argues that in this parable the servant envisaged is one and the same man throughout. In verses 43 and 44 he is envisaged as behaving properly, as a true believer ought to behave; but in verses 45 and 46, so it is argued, that very self-same servant is envisaged as behaving in a shocking manner; as a result of which he is unmercifully thrashed and appointed his portion with the unbelieving. Conditional kingdom advocates therefore insist that this man is still a true believer, who, because he has misbehaved, will undergo rigorous and painful discipline along with unbelievers in the outer darkness, and will, if necessary, be hurt by the second death because of his bad behaviour. On the other hand they teach that, being a true believer, he will eventually be released from his discipline and torments and admitted to God's heaven after all.

Their basic exegetical principle is that, if our Lord calls such a man his servant, it means that he is a true believer. The principle is false. Did Christ call Judas an apostle? Luke 6:13–16 says quite explicitly that he did. Does the fact that our Lord called Judas an apostle mean that Judas was a believer? No, for our Lord quite explicitly said that it did not. At John 6:70–71, our Lord says 'Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?' He said that long before Judas betrayed him. For, even when he chose Judas and called him an apostle, he already knew that the man was not a genuine believer. He was, as our Lord later called him, 'the son of perdition' (John 17:12). He always was that, he was never anything else; yet Christ called him an apostle. There is no grade of Christian service higher than that of an apostle. It is false to argue, therefore, that if Christ refers to someone as his servant it necessarily means that that servant is a true believer.

Let us look at Matthew 25:24–30, where in the parable the man is described who refused to do any work whatsoever for his master. What interests us here is what the man said when he was called upon to account for his refusal to work for the master. He explains, 'Lord, I knew that you are a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the earth'. The man is saying, therefore, that the blame for his refusal to work lay with his master and his master's evil character. According to him, his master was a hard man, who always expected to be given something for nothing, and demanded to get something out where he had never put anything in.

Now, when we come to apply it to a real life situation, we must ask ourselves what kind of person is it who would face the Lord Jesus and talk to him as follows: 'Lord, it is your fault that I have not worked for you. You are an unreasonable taskmaster; you always expect something for nothing. You have never given me anything, and you expect me to give you my service. You have never sowed, yet you expect to reap'. How could a believer, who would have to admit that his whole heaven depended on Christ's sacrifice at Calvary, and who would have to admit likewise that he had been given salvation as a gift—how, I say, could such a believer turn round and tell Christ that Christ was always expecting something for nothing? How could a man who would talk like that be a believer in the sacrifice of Christ? How could he be a believer in the free gift of God, which is eternal life?

The fact is that Christ takes people on the basis of their profession. If they take the place of being servants, he calls them servants. That doesn't mean he admits that they are necessarily believers. If one wishes to see an extreme example of what our Lord was talking about in the parable of Luke 12—the steward who beat his fellow servants—one needs only to look to the pre-Reformation churches and to remember those wicked, vicious, godless men, who assumed high office in Christendom and persecuted true children of God, tortured and executed them by the hundreds. Were such men genuine believers who will be excluded from the millennial kingdom because of their misbehaviour, but after a while of purgation allowed into God's eternal heaven?

Before we leave this matter of reward, however, we ought to briefly consider passages in the New Testament which refer, at least in our English version, to the inheritance as a reward. Hebrews 11:24–26 is a case in point. The writer is talking about Moses's great and fundamental decision, which he made when he grew up. Was he going to throw in his lot with the people of God and suffer the inevitable hardship that comes by choosing to stand with God and his people? Or was he going to throw in his lot with the world and enjoy the temporary pleasures of sin along with the riches of Egypt? Moses chose to leave the world and its sinful pleasures, and to throw in his lot with the people of God. That is the decision that the very gospel itself will demand. For instance in Acts 2:40–42, where Peter lays down the conditions for salvation. Those who wish to be saved must 'save themselves from this perverse generation' and stand with the people of God.

When Moses made his basic decision, he made it in light of the recompense of reward (Hebrews 11:26). The Greek word is not the simple misthos, which means a reward or wage; it is misthapodosia, which means a compensation or recompense. Moses had to weigh up the consequences of his choice. He could have chosen Egypt with its pleasures and its sinfulness and rejected the people of God. The result would have been for him what it was for Pharaoh and his people. On the other hand, if he chose God and his people, it would entail constant suffering. But of course there would be the eternal compensation; nothing less than salvation itself and all its potential for glory. That is still true today. Our sufferings with the people of God do not earn us salvation; but the blessings of salvation, with its eternal glory, are marvellous compensation for any sufferings that we have to endure by becoming Christians.

In similar vein, Paul reminds the slaves in the church at Colossae that, as they go about their daily work, they are to work as unto the Lord and not to men. Since slaveowners were often unreasonable and cruel, these servants would have to endure much hardship. They are asked, however, to work from their hearts; not to slack, not to be disobedient, but to work as unto the Lord, and they are assured that from him they will have the recompense of the inheritance (Colossians 3:24). Here the word again is not the simple misthos (reward or wage), but antapodosis, which means 'compensation'. One is reminded of the old hymn that says, 'Oh, how will recompense His smile, the suffering of this little while'.

Finally in this connection, we ought to consider the case of Esau, who is held up in Hebrews 12:16–17 as a solemn warning:

[Be careful] lest there shall be any fornicator, or profane person, like Esau, who for a single meal sold his rights as the firstborn son. For you know that, when afterwards he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected (for he found no place of repentance), although he sought the blessing with tears.

The first thing we must ask ourselves is this: what was the status of the historical Esau in Genesis? Does the Old Testament hold him up as a genuine child of God? Granted that he was of the physical seed of Abraham through Isaac, does that mean he was a member of the true people of God? The answer would appear to be quite plainly, no. In bringing him as a warning before his readers, the writer to the Hebrews is doing again what he did in chapters 3 and 4. He is reminding his readers that it is possible to be physically descended from Abraham; that it is possible to take one's place outwardly among the people of God and all the while not be a genuine child of God.

If one wants an example of a typical descendant of Esau in the New Testament, one can think of Herod. He was an Edomite, or, as the New Testament puts it, an Idumaean; that is, he was a descendant of Esau. Like his famous forefather, who demanded to have his stomach full at once, Herod was not prepared to suffer hardship. He was prepared, indeed, to murder the Messiah himself in order to retain his own position in the political world of his day.

The solemn warnings given in Hebrews introduce us to Scriptures, which advocates of a partial rapture interpret as supporting their special doctrines. We will turn now to a detailed exposition of them.

The import of the warnings in Hebrews 3, 4, 6 and 10 and Matthew 25:1–13.

For if we sin wilfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remains no more a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment and a fierceness of fire, which shall devour the adversaries. Anyone who has set at nought Moses' law dies without compassion on the word of two or three witnesses. Of how much sorer punishment, think you, shall he be judged worthy, who has trodden underfoot the Son of God, and has counted the blood of the covenant, by which he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and has done despite to the Spirit of grace? For we know him who has said, 'Vengeance belongs to me, I will repay.' And again, 'The Lord will judge his people.' It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Hebrews 10:26–31)

The first thing we have to decide is how we are to understand the action of God described in these verses. Is it the loving, fatherly discipline of his children, such as described in Hebrews 12:6, 'For whom the Lord loves he chastens, and scourges every son whom he receives'? Self-evidently not. Obviously, no child of God 'dies without compassion' under the loving discipline of his Father! These verses are talking about the wrath of God which shall consume the adversaries; that is, the enemies of God. The wrath of God that fell on those who rejected the law of Moses was 'without compassion'. Severe as that wrath was, it was as nothing, so these verses warn us, compared with the punishment of those enemies of God who are found guilty of the sins which this passage describes.

And yet it is the opinion of partial rapturists that this compassionless wrath of God will fall on some true believers; to say otherwise is to parry the thrust of God's word, and to encourage believers in lax living. They hold that there are sins which a believer can commit which the blood of Christ cannot cover. For these sins, therefore, the believer will have to endure not the faithful discipline of a loving Father, but the fearful compassionless wrath of a God who takes vengeance on his enemies.

Let us therefore examine the passage in detail, making sure that we do not devalue or underestimate its terms in any way, but carefully give them their full and exact significance.

The man envisaged in 10:29 has, in the first place, 'trodden underfoot the Son of God'. Notice first the phrase, 'trodden underfoot'. It means 'to stamp under the feet'. It implies a deliberate action. Contrast this with the phrase that our Lord uses in Luke 20:18, 'Everyone who falls on that stone shall be broken to pieces'; and with the phrase which Peter uses, 'A stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence; for they stumble at the word, being disobedient' (1 Peter 2:8). Both 'fall on' and 'stumble over' are, to some extent, involuntary actions, and certainly less deliberate than stamping something to the ground. The man envisaged in Hebrews 10:29 then, deliberately and knowingly stamps underfoot the Son of God.

Notice next how our Lord is described. Not here as Jesus, nor even as the Messiah, but as 'the Son of God'. What this man is doing therefore is, knowingly and deliberately, and perhaps with venom, denying the deity of the Lord.

What he does next follows logically from this. 'He counts the blood of the covenant ... an unholy thing.' The word 'counts' implies that this man 'has come to the considered opinion that ...' (cf. the use of the same word in Hebrews 11:11 in the case of Sarah, AV/KJV. The word 'unholy' renders the Greek word koinon, which means 'common'. In short then, this man has come to the considered opinion that the blood of Jesus is common blood. It is not that he has unthinkingly committed certain actions which, if only he stopped to think, he would realize carry serious implications regarding the blood of Christ. He has reached his opinion that the blood of Christ is common, after careful and considered thought. Logically enough, for if the Lord Jesus is not the Son of God but only a mere mortal man, his blood is worth no more than any other man's blood, i.e., it is common. If, then, the blood of the covenant is common blood, the covenant itself is not worth the paper it is written on, and the forgiveness it offers is worthless.

Also, this man has 'done despite unto'—that is, he has deliberately insulted—'the Spirit of grace'. Notice once more how the Holy Spirit is described. Not here the Spirit of truth, or the Spirit of holiness, but the Spirit of grace. These words are part of a letter written to Hebrews, and to understand them rightly we must remember the historical context. The Jewish nation officially denied the deity of the Lord Jesus. Indeed, his claim to be one with the Father was one of the reasons why they crucified him. But on the day of Pentecost the risen Lord sent forth the Holy Spirit, and the message he brought to his murderers was a message of astounding grace. It offered them forgiveness of sins and salvation, not by the works of the law, but simply by faith in the Son of God through the blood which they themselves had shed at Calvary. This man envisaged in Hebrews 10:29 not only denies the deity of the Lord Jesus and holds that his blood is common blood, but he repudiates the offer of salvation by grace. He is content to go back to Judaism and to seek salvation through the keeping of the law, hoping for forgiveness of sins through the offering of Judaism's animal sacrifices.

The question now arises: is this man a true believer? Not, was this man ever a true believer? That is a question to which we will return later. The answer is obvious. A man who deliberately and knowingly denies the deity of the Lord Jesus, who counts his blood as common blood and utterly valueless for the forgiveness of sins, and who rejects the gospel of grace offered to him by the Holy Spirit, cannot in any sense whatsoever be rightly called a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ.

But partial rapturists not only teach that he is a believer, they go further. They hold that, while his sin cannot be covered by the blood and sacrifice of Christ, it can be purged by his own personal sufferings in the millennial purgatory; so that he himself, having been purged by his own sufferings, will enter and enjoy the eternal glory. This teaching is monstrous. How could any man's personal sufferings, however severe, secure for him cleansing and release from the wrath of God, which the blood of Christ could not secure?

So let us now examine Hebrews 10:26, on the basis of which partial rapturists teach that there are sins which a believer can do that the sacrifice of Christ cannot cover. The verse says, 'For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remains no more a sacrifice for sins'. The first thing to decide is what is meant by 'sin wilfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth'. Are we to take it that if a believer does something which he knows to be wrong, then that sin cannot be covered by the blood of Christ and therefore there can be no forgiveness for it—the believer must purge it by suffering for it himself? If this is what it means, we can be certain of one thing. All believers, without exception, have done things which at the time they knew in their heart of hearts to be wrong. And that being so, we shall have to conclude that all believers have done sins which the blood of Christ cannot cover; and that all believers have, therefore, the absolutely certain prospect before them of enduring much sorer punishment than those who defied Moses\' law. Such an interpretation, of course, contradicts head on the explicit assurances given in other Scriptures. Romans 5: 9 assures us that, 'having been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through him'. But if a believer can do sins from which he cannot be justified by the blood of Christ, then the promise of Romans 5:9 becomes nugatory, and all believers must look forward to suffering the wrath of God.

But the truth is that Hebrews 10:26 does not oblige us thus to devalue the promise of Romans 5:9, nor that of 1 Thessalonians 5:9 either. Hebrews 10:26 is using the term 'sin' in the same way as our Lord uses it in John 16:8–9: 'And he [that is, the Holy Spirit], when he has come, will convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: Of sin, because they believe not on me'. The sin in question is the sin of deliberate refusal to believe, in spite of knowing the truth. Listen to our Lord again on this topic. 'The Pharisees ... said to him, Are we also blind? Jesus said to them, If you were blind, you would have no sin: but now you say, We see; therefore your sin remains' (John 9:40–41). Our Lord is not saying that if the Pharisees were spiritually blind they would be sinlessly perfect. He is saying that, if the Pharisees were spiritually blind, they could not be charged with sin for not seeing what they could not see. Since, however, they claimed to have spiritual sight, they must be held responsible for deliberately refusing to believe the Saviour.

Similarly, in John 15:22, 24, our Lord says:

If I had not come and spoken unto them, they would not have had sin: but now they have no excuse for their sin ... If I had not done among them the works which none other did, they would not have had sin: but now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father.

Once more, our Lord is not saying that if he had not come and done his marvellous works, the Pharisees would have been sinlessly perfect. He is saying that if he had not come and done his marvellous works, the Pharisees could not have been held responsible for not believing what they had never heard or seen. But the fact is that he had come, and had done uniquely wonderful works; and the Pharisees, who had seen him and heard him and seen his works, deliberately rejected them and refused to believe him. They had, as our Lord puts it, no excuse for their sin: that is, no excuse for their deliberate refusal to believe in the Lord Jesus. This is what Hebrews 10:26 means by its phrase, 'If we sin wilfully, after that we have received the knowledge of the truth'. It means, 'if, having received the knowledge of the truth, we deliberately refuse to believe'.

Notice now the phrase, 'after we have received the knowledge of the truth'. 'Receiving the knowledge of the truth' is, of course, not the same as receiving the love of the truth and believing the truth. When God by his Spirit has illuminated a man's mind so that the man now knows the truth, if that man then, with his eyes open, deliberately persists in refusing to believe the truth, there is no hope for him: 'his sin remains'.

Contrast this with what Paul says about himself in 1 Timothy 1:13: 'I was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: howbeit I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief'. What can Paul mean by his phrase, 'ignorantly in unbelief'? Paul was an intelligent man, and in one sense knew exactly what he was doing when he persecuted the early church. But then, in a very real sense he was acting in ignorance, for he had not yet been illuminated by the Holy Spirit and therefore he did not in any real sense know the truth. On this ground therefore, he says he obtained mercy. If, of course, he had persisted in deliberate refusal to believe, even after he was illuminated on the Damascus road, he would have thrown away all grounds for mercy.

With this we return to Hebrews 10:26. It is talking about the sin of deliberate refusal to believe after one has received the knowledge of the truth. Or, as Hebrews 10:32 puts it, 'after having been enlightened'. What happens to anyone who commits this sin, and persists in committing it? According to the asv, 'there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sins'. That does not mean that, if a believer persists in sinning, there eventually comes a point when the sacrifice of Christ can no longer secure him forgiveness, even if he repents and confesses his sin. To say it means this would flatly contradict what God himself declares in 1 John 1:9: 'If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness'.

Once more, we must remember that this Epistle was written to Hebrews who had professed to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, but who were now 'forsaking the assembling of themselves together' (Hebrews 10:25). Notice the connection of thought between verses 25 and 26 of chapter 10: 'not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the custom of some is ... For if we sin wilfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth ...'. Why was it so serious that some of these people were forsaking the assembling of themselves together? Because it raised the question: if they are no longer attending the meetings of the Christian church, where are they going? Are they going back to Judaism? If that was so, it would be serious indeed; for they could not go back to Judaism without doing precisely what the man of Hebrews 10:29 is said to do. They would have to deny the deity of the Lord Jesus, with all that that implied. They would have no option: Judaism would force it upon them. If, then, this is what they were actually doing, it was very serious, because they were doing it after having been illuminated by the Holy Spirit; after having received the knowledge of the truth. They could not claim, as Paul did, that they were doing it in ignorance.

And indeed, the writer adds another consideration. Such people who reverted to Judaism would not, of course, claim that they were sinlessly perfect; they would still own that they needed forgiveness of sins from God. But, in going back to Judaism, they would want to feel that they could get forgiveness by reverting to the practice of offering the animal sacrifices prescribed in the Old Testament. But that, says the writer, is now impossible. The sacrifice of Christ has made all the Old Testament sacrifices obsolete; God will not accept those sacrifices any more. Consequently, if anyone rejects the sacrifice of Christ and tries to go back to the Old Testament sacrifices, he must be warned that 'there no longer remains any sacrifice for sins'. The only valid sacrifice is that of our Lord, which he offered once for all. If you reject that, there is now no other valid sacrifice available.

The man therefore, who knowingly repudiates the sacrifice of Christ and reverts to Judaism and its animal sacrifices, has no shield against the wrath of God. He has nothing but a terrifying expectation of suffering the wrath of God. It is not that God would not forgive him, if it were possible; but God himself cannot forgive anyone except on the grounds of a valid sacrifice. If this man rejects the only valid sacrifice that there now is, it is impossible for God to forgive him. For those who put their faith in Christ, the blood of Christ—so Scripture assures us (see 1 John 1:7)—cleanses us from all sin; and it is a very serious thing to deny this Scripture and to say that there are some sins which a believer can do that the blood of Christ cannot cover. The point of Hebrews 10:26 is that the people who are envisaged there are in danger of repudiating the sacrifice of Christ; and, of course, if people repudiate the sacrifice of Christ, there can no longer be any forgiveness at all for anything, not even for the tiniest little sin, let alone the grave ones.

Now to Hebrews 10:29. We earlier showed that the man who does the sins listed there is not a believer, by any stretch of the imagination. The question arises: was he ever a believer? Christian opinion is divided on this issue. Some people hold that the man was once a believer, but has now apostatized; and apostasy, according to them, means to throw away one's faith deliberately, and thus cease to be a believer. Others hold that the man concerned was never a believer.

Now, he obviously had professed to be a believer, for it is said of him that he 'counts the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, a common thing'. Those who hold that he not only professed to be a believer, but once was a genuine believer, appeal to the phrase 'wherewith he was sanctified' to support their view. If he was sanctified, they argue, he must have been a believer, because no one can be sanctified without being a believer.

In the absolute sense of the term that is not strictly true; for in 1 Corinthians 7:14 Paul asserts that 'the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife'. So, here is a clear statement that one can in some sense be sanctified—though not, of course, justified---without being a believer. But there are more important reasons for doubting whether the man envisaged in Hebrews 10:29 was ever a believer. To warn his readers of the dangers they stood in, the writer cites in his chapters 3 and 4 the solemn example of their ancestors who, in the end, proved never to have been believers at all. They had been spared from the wrath of God by the blood of the Passover lamb, and had been delivered from bondage to Pharaoh by the power of God; but when they arrived at the border of Canaan, they point blank refused to go in, and proposed making themselves a new captain and returning to Egypt. What had gone so wrong with them, that they refused to enter the land which they originally professed to be longing for? They had journeyed across the desert ostensibly in order to enter it, but now they refused to enter. What did it signify? The Holy Spirit gives us the answer to our question:

And to whom sware he that they should not enter into his rest, but to them that were disobedient? And we see that they were not able to enter in because of unbelief ... they to whom the good tidings were before preached failed to enter in because of disobedience. (Hebrews 3:18-19; 4:6 RV)

The Holy Spirit, then, uses two words to describe what was wrong with them: disobedience and unbelief. In what sense are we to take these two words in this context? It is surely possible for genuine believers to lapse into unbelief over certain matters and in particular situations; and it is surely true that all believers are sometimes guilty of disobedience in one thing or another. Is this, then, the kind of disobedience and unbelief that the Holy Spirit is speaking of here? Indeed, is he citing what happened to the Israelites in the wilderness in order to warn us, as genuine believers in the Lord Jesus, that, if in certain particulars we give way to unbelief and disobedience, we shall not enter our Lord's millennial kingdom?

No, indeed not. This is not the lesson that the Holy Spirit is teaching here, for this is not the kind of disobedience and unbelief he has in mind. We can say that for certain when we consider how the Greek word here translated disobedient and disobedience is used elsewhere in the New Testament. The Greek word for 'disobedience' in Hebrews 4:6 and 4:11 is apeitheia. Including these two occasions, it occurs seven times in the New Testament (see Romans 11:30, 32; Ephesians 2:2, 5:6; Colossians 3:6; Hebrews 4:6, 11). Its related verb, apeitheō, 'to disobey', occurs in Hebrews 3:18 and 11:31, and fourteen more times in the New Testament, sixteen times in all (see John 3:36; Acts 14:2; 17:5; 19:9; Romans 2:8; 10:21; 11:30--31; 15:31; Hebrews 3:18; 11:31; 1 Peter 2:7–8; 3:1, 20; 4:17). The related adjective, apeithēs, 'disobedient', does not occur in Hebrews; but it occurs in six other places in the New Testament (Luke 1:17; Acts 26:19; Romans 1:30; 2 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:16; 3:3). Twenty-nine occurrences, then, of the noun, verb, and adjective—and not once is any one of them ever used to describe the disobedience of a true believer. Always when these words are used, the disobedient are those who reject God, reject his law, reject his gospel and refuse to believe either him or it.¹

In the light of this massive consistency in the use of these terms throughout the whole of the New Testament, we can be certain that the example of the Israelites who refused to believe the gospel and to enter the promised land is cited by the Holy Spirit, not as a warning against the failures of genuine believers, sad and serious as they are. The warning is far more solemn than that. It is pointing out that it is possible to profess to be a believer, to profess to be on the road of pilgrimage to heaven, and yet all the while to be someone who has never really believed the gospel; and to be someone, therefore, who, when faced with life's ultimate tests, will repudiate the gospel. It is of course possible for genuine believers to act like Peter did, and temporarily deny the Lord; but, as a result of our Lord's praying for him, Peter never lost his faith—when he said he was not a Christian, he was telling a lie, not the truth; and he was eventually restored (see Luke 22:31–32). Through those same intercessions of Christ, all believers will likewise be saved (see Hebrews 7:25).

But the warning of Hebrews chapters 3 and 4 serves to remind us that there can be people like Judas in the professing church. Judas was, to all intents and purposes, a believer, an apostle and treasurer in the group of Christ's closest associates. Presumably he had gone out on the evangelistic missions around Palestine with the rest of the apostles. But his eventual behaviour exposed the fact that, like the Israelites in the wilderness, he had never been a true believer at all (see John 6:70–71).

The Apostle John similarly describes such people in 1 John 2:18–19. He refers to certain false teachers who had taught in the Christian churches but had eventually abandoned apostolic doctrine, and in all probability had abandoned attendance at the Christian churches. John says of them, not that they were true believers who had apostatized, nor that they were true believers who, because of their evil doctrine, could not find forgiveness through the blood of Christ and would have to suffer purgatory during the millennium—but that they never had been believers. 'They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us' (1 John 2:19).

Now, to get back to the case of the unbelieving Israelites in the wilderness. When the nation came to Sinai and God offered them his covenant, they all professed to be willing to obey it; and on profession of obedience they were sprinkled with the blood of the covenant (Exodus 24:1–8). In that sense, they too were 'sanctified by the blood of the covenant'. That does not alter the fact that from Egypt onwards there had been constant ominous signs that they were not true believers—see God's verdict in Numbers 14:11, 22–23, and Psalm 106:7–43. When they came to Canaan's border, what had been true of them all the way along was finally exposed.

It is in a similar sense that we should understand how the phrase 'the blood of the covenant wherewith he was sanctified' in Hebrews 10:29 can be used of the deliberate rejecter of Christ. The man envisaged had professed to be a believer, a disciple, a servant of the Lord Jesus. He had 'stood to' the new covenant. He had stood with the people of God, and in that sense he had been sanctified and had appeared to take sides with the Lord Jesus against the Jewish nation as a whole. But in actual fact he had never been a true believer, and he had eventually reverted to Judaism.

In this connection, it is instructive to notice exactly how the writer to the Hebrews describes his readers. He never once says, as Paul says to his converts at Ephesus, 'you have been saved' (Ephesians 2:8); for that is precisely the point that has been put in question by their recent behaviour. He says that they have been illuminated, and have received the knowledge of the truth. But, of course, one can be illuminated and receive the knowledge of the truth without being saved. On the question whether they have in fact been saved or not, the writer says, 'we are persuaded better things of you, and things that accompany salvation, though we thus speak' (Hebrews 6:9). In other words, he confesses that, in his heart of hearts, he feels sure that there is evidence in their lives that they are really saved, but he is writing as if he were not sure that they are saved—'though we thus speak'. He will take no risks. Only God can see into their hearts and know what the real truth is. For the time being, their behaviour makes it impossible to say for certain that they are saved.

If we had been standing in the high priest's court when Peter denied the Lord with oaths and curses, and somebody had asked us 'Is this man a believer?', what could we have said? We know now that he was a believer. And if we had heard what the Lord Jesus said about him in Luke 22, we could even then have been certain that he was a believer who had temporarily fallen. But if we had not heard what the Lord Jesus said, we might well have replied, 'Well, I always thought he was a believer, and in times past he gave every indication that he was a genuine believer. I think that what has happened is that he has been temporarily overcome by fear and he will eventually recover from it. For the moment his present grossly inconsistent behaviour renders the truth about the matter uncertain; though in my heart of hearts I am persuaded that he is a believer, and that his life in time past has shown clear evidence that he is saved'. In a similar vein, then, the writer to the Hebrews talks about his readers. In his heart of hearts he thinks that they are saved, though their present behaviour is putting the whole thing in doubt, and God alone knows what the truth about them is.

But now the writer tells both them and us the grounds upon which he thinks in his heart of hearts that they are saved:

We are persuaded better things of you, and things that accompany salvation, though we thus speak: For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and the love which you showed toward his name, in that you ministered to the saints, and still do minister. (Hebrews 6:9–10)

We must ponder carefully this assurance that God is not unrighteous to forget their work. What has their work got to do with the question of their salvation? Is not salvation by faith, and not by works? Most certainly it is; but while we are saved by faith, if we are genuinely saved there will be evidence in the way we live and work for the Lord that our profession of salvation is real. The New Testament everywhere demands of believers that they give evidence by their works that they are genuinely saved. And it is not only the world and one's fellow believers who have the right to see that evidence; God himself demands to see from us the evidence, in the shape of our good works, that we are genuine believers.

This very chapter 6 of Hebrews reminds us how Abraham was called upon to give evidence that his faith was genuine by offering up his son Isaac on the altar; and when he had placed Isaac on the altar the angel of the lord called out of heaven and said '... now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me' (Genesis 22:12). Notice the phrase, 'now I know'. It is pointless to protest that God, in his omniscience and foreknowledge, already knew that Abraham's faith was genuine. Of course God in his foreknowledge knew it; but God demanded to know it, not merely by foreknowledge but by actual experience.

If I myself were at this very moment setting out on a journey to the North Pole, I would know in advance that when I get there the weather will be extremely cold; but knowing it in advance is a very different thing from actually experiencing the coldness of the weather when I get there. God himself, then, demands that we supply him with evidence that we are true believers and genuinely saved; and it is a serious thing if the evidence is inconsist­ent or temporarily contradictory.

On the other hand, the writer feels sure in his heart that they are saved because of the evidence of their works, not only in the present but more particularly in the past, when they suffered persecution for Christ's sake and faithfully ministered to the saints (see Hebrews 10:32–34; 6:10). And he feels all the more certain in his heart for, as he says, 'God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love'. God demands that there shall be present evidence from the life of his people that they are the genuine people of God; but God will not forget the evidence of the past, even if the evidence of the present is less than consistent and less than it should be. God remembers past evidence. For him to forget the evidence of the past would be unrighteous, and God is not unrighteous to forget the evidence of the past.

Mr Lang, in his book Firstborn Sons, quotes a poem which uses a number of illustrations and analogies to teach the lesson that, if a believer has lived faithfully all his life and yet at the last moment slips up, God will forget all the evidence from the past, and as a result of the one mistake at the end he will deprive the man of entry into the millennial kingdom. One of the illustrations is that of a magnificent sailing ship that has brought its rich treasure from the far ends of the earth safely through all the storms; but in a moment of carelessness, as the vessel approaches the final harbour, the captain allows it to be driven on the rocks and the boat is lost and all its treasure. The thing is a wreck. So all the careful navigation over the thousands of past miles counts for nothing. The one mistake ruins everything.

Another illustration is that of the virgin waiting for her beloved to return from the wars, loyal to him all through the long years; but then she commits one act of disloyalty and as a result is repudiated by her bridegroom-to-be.

A third illustration is that of the warrior who fights all day long in the thickest of the fight, until late in the day, weary with the battle, he slips and falls and is defeated.

All these illustrations are adduced to warn believers that, however loyally they have lived to the Lord all their days, they have only to make one grievous mistake at the end and God will forget all their past labour of love, all their past loyal works, and disqualify them from entering the kingdom. Such a doctrine may appear to be godly; it is in fact a slander on the character of God and denies what Hebrews 6:10 explicitly says: 'God is not unrighteous to forget your work and the love which you showed [in time past] towards his name'.

Before we leave Hebrews 6 we ought to notice the nature of the sin which is described in verses 4ff, and in particular to pay special attention to what it is that Scripture says it is impossible to do. Some people read these verses as though they said that there are certain things which, if a believer does, it is impossible for God to forgive them, and therefore they will have to suffer for these sins in some millennial purgatory before they may be admitted to God's eternal heaven. Of course, that is not what the verses say. They do not say that if a believer does such and such sins it is impossible for God to forgive him. It says that, if a person commits a certain sin, it is impossible to renew that person again to repentance. God is prepared to forgive anybody who genuinely repents, but he cannot forgive the sin of somebody who refuses to repent of that sin; and the trouble here is that it is impossible to get the person to repent. In fact, it is impossible even for God—I say it very reverently—to get this person to repent.

Why is that? The analogy in Hebrews 6:7–8 makes it clear. Here is a piece of ground: the rain comes down on it and as a result it brings forth herbs and receives the blessing of God. Here is another piece of ground: the rain comes down equally upon it as on the first piece, but the second piece of ground produces thorns and thistles. What can be done about it? Perhaps you will say, 'Give it some more rain'. But that would be useless: the more rain the more thorns and thistles. When we apply the analogy, the lesson is clear. Hebrews 6:4 remarks that these people have partaken of the Holy Spirit. In spite of that, they now fall away—that is, they apostatize. How will you get them to repent? They have experienced the illumination of the Holy Spirit. Through his gracious enlightenment they know the truth, and with their eyes open they have rejected the Holy Spirit and his witness in their hearts. What can God do further to bring them to repentance? God has no greater power at disposal than that of the Holy Spirit. If a man rejects the Holy Spirit's illumination and pleading, no earthquake or suffering, however severe, will be able to do what the Holy Spirit himself could not do. The solemn fact is that, if a man knowingly rejects the Holy Spirit, he is knowingly rejecting God and there is nothing left with which to bring him to repentance.

This is exceedingly solemn. It is in line, of course, with what the Lord Jesus himself said about the sin against the Holy Spirit: there is no forgiveness for it, neither in this age nor in the age which is to come (see Matthew 11:31–32). Faced with these solemn statements, the doctrine of the partial rapture seems to me to be in grievous danger of seriously minimizing the force of God's word, when it suggests that the person envisaged in these verses is a true believer who has fallen into sin so grave that the Holy Spirit himself cannot bring him to repentance in this life. But, never mind, the fires and suffering of a millennial purgatory will be able to do what the Holy Spirit was not able to do, and bring the person to repentance so that he at last ends up in God's eternal heaven.

But reference to the phrase in Hebrews 6:4, that the people concerned 'were once made partakers of the Holy Spirit' before they fell away, brings us to another detail in the partial rapture doctrine: namely, the parable of the five wise and the five foolish virgins (see Matthew 25:1–13). Partial rapturists point out that a literal translation of what the foolish virgins say in Matthew 25:8 is, 'our lamps are going out'. Not, 'are gone out' or 'have gone out'. From that they argue that these foolish virgins must represent true believers who had once possessed the Holy Spirit. Otherwise, they argue, their lamps could not be said to be going out, for they never would have been alight in the first place. So then, the argument goes, the foolish virgins are believers who once possessed the Holy Spirit, whose lamps once burned brightly for God; but they became worldly and careless—'they slumbered and slept', and when the bridegroom came they found themselves unprepared. Their Christian testimony and life began to peter out; they were in the process of losing the Holy Spirit.

This interpretation of the parable rests on certain misconceptions. To start with, if the 'slumbering and sleeping' of the unwise virgins is meant to be a picture of the worldliness of believers, which will eventually disqualify them from entering the millennial kingdom, then it would be important to notice that the five unwise virgins were not the only ones to slumber and sleep. The wise virgins slumbered and slept as well (see Matthew 25:5). The mistake here is to imagine that the slumbering and sleeping of the virgins in the actual storyline of the parable is meant to indicate something bad: something so bad that, if a believer were guilty of it, that believer must be excluded from the marriage supper of the Lamb.

But that is a misconception. In the storyline of the parable, the slumbering and sleeping is not reprehensible. It is natural in light of the long wait, and easily overcome by the midnight call to awake. So the wise virgins slumbered and slept, as did the unwise, but they got into the marriage feast. The difference between them and the unwise virgins was not to be found in the fact that they slumbered and slept, but in the fact that the wise virgins not only had torches that were alight but each one of them had a vessel full of oil to replenish their lamps when they began to burn dry. The unwise virgins, on the other hand, had no such vessels and no such large supply of oil from which to replenish their lamps when they began to go out.

We must ask therefore, what does this feature of the parable point to when we come to apply the parable to people's spiritual experience? Here we meet a second misconception in the partial rapturists' interpretation of it, namely that, if someone has 'partaken of the Holy Spirit', that someone must be a believer. That is not so. It is possible to experience the work of the Holy Spirit, to be illuminated by the Holy Spirit, to receive the knowledge of the truth through the Holy Spirit, and nevertheless and in spite of it to reject the Holy Spirit. The man who reads holy Scripture, which is inspired by the Holy Spirit, and who, by the Holy Spirit's direct operation upon him, comes to understand holy Scripture, is partaking of the Holy Spirit. He has a certain amount of light; enough light indeed to save him if he would accept it. But it does not necessarily mean that the person concerned is a believer and is born again. And it is all too possible for such people eventually to reject the witness of the Holy Spirit and to be lost.

It is to be feared that there have been thousands of people in Christendom, and still are, who have enjoyed the light of the gospel in a way that multitudes in some continents have not, and who imagine that because they know the gospel they are right with God. Nevertheless they will find that, when the door is eventually shut, they are on the wrong side of the door (see Luke 13:22--30). They had some light—they heard the Lord Jesus preaching in their streets—but they were never born again of water and of the Holy Spirit (see John 3:5).

Close examination, then, has shown that the partial rapturists' interpretation of Hebrews 3, 4, 6 and 10 is not only wrong, it seriously devalues these solemn warnings of the word of God.

The meaning of Philippians 3:10–12

Now let us come to another Scripture, much appealed to by partial rapture doctrine. I refer to Philippians 3:10–12; and in particular to the phrase, 'If by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead'. The argument is:

1. That the full Greek translation here would be 'an out-resurrection from among the dead'.

2. That this 'out-resurrection from the dead' is not the resurrection described in 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4; nor is it the general resurrection described in Revelation 20. It is a partial and selective resurrection of believers who have qualified for escape from the sufferings of the great tribulation, and for reigning with Christ during the millennium.

3. It is further argued that attaining to this special selective resurrection depends on one's moral and spiritual state and progress, and that not all believers will qualify.

4. And finally, it is argued that even the great Apostle Paul himself was uncertain whether he would qualify for participation in this partial rapture; and that he expressed his uncertainty by the phraseology that he used, 'If by any means I may attain unto the out-resurrection ... Not that I have already obtained ...'.

We may at once remark that, if there is such a partial resurrection and the great Apostle Paul was uncertain whether he would qualify for it, it would be the height of presumption for any of the rest of us to suppose that we could ever possibly qualify for it.

But to come to more serious points, the thought flow of the passage is as follows. In Philippians 3:10 Paul states his great objective by the general summary phrase, 'That I may know him'. He goes on to list four experiences that are involved in thus knowing him. These four experiences are grouped into two pairs by the sheer logic of their meaning.

The first pair: 'the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings'

We must ask first: what does Paul mean when he says he wants to know the power of Christ's resurrection? Is he saying that he wants one day in the far future to experience a physical resurrection, such as the Lord experienced when he was raised from the dead? In other words, is Paul referring to his own personal, physical and bodily resurrection? Of course not. For if that is what he was referring to, it would be a self-evident truism for him to add, 'not that I have already obtained'. Why should he need to tell the Philippians that he had not yet experienced what it is like to be physically and bodily raised from the dead? And, secondly, if Paul were saying in this verse that he is looking forward to experiencing what it is like to be raised physically from the dead, as the Lord Jesus was, he would not go on immediately to add, 'and the fellowship of his sufferings'; for, once Paul had experienced bodily and physical resurrection from the dead, there would be no more suffering of any kind. He must therefore be talking about experiencing in his own present life in a spiritual sense that same power of God that raised the Lord Jesus from the dead.

And there is immediate confirmation that this is what Paul means from what he says in Ephesians 1:19–2:6, when he prays the same blessing for his converts as for himself:

[that they might know] the exceeding greatness of his power ... according to that working of the strength of his might, which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and made him to sit at his right hand in heavenly places ... [and us too] has he quickened ... and raised up with him, and made us to sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

Paul is saying in Philippians 3 therefore, that the more he knows of the power of the resurrection of Christ in his daily life and service for the Lord, the more he will be equipped to face and share the sufferings of Christ; and 'to fill up that which still remains to be suffered of the afflictions of Christ in his flesh for his body's sake, which is the church' (see Colossians 1:24).

The second pair: 'becoming conformed unto his death; If by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead'

We notice at once the different order in this pair. In the first pair the resurrection came first and the suffering second, but here the death comes first and the resurrection second. There is an inherent logic in the thought flow of this second pair, as there was in the first pair. At whatever level you understand the term 'the resurrection', there can be no resurrection unless there has first been a death. That is why, incidentally, some believers will never experience physical resurrection; because when the Lord Jesus comes they will still be physically alive. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:51, 'We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed'. Those who have not fallen asleep will not need to be woken up out of sleep; those who have not died will not need to be raised from the dead. You cannot be raised from the dead physically if you have never died physically.

To come back, therefore, to Philippians 3:10–11. We see the same logic behind Paul's two phrases: 'being conformed to his death; If by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead'. Whatever way we understand 'the resurrection' here, the principle applies: Paul will not experience this resurrection unless he first dies. At what level, therefore, are we to understand the term 'resurrection'? Is it referring to some physical resurrection, as the partial rapturists maintain: a selective, physical resurrection of the especially godly and qualified believers at the partial rapture? If so, the resurrection being a physical resurrection, the death must be a physical death. However godly you were, you could never partake in the physical resurrection of the partial rapture—if there ever were to be such a thing—unless you had died physically.

On this understanding of these verses, therefore, Paul is saying that he longs to die physically so that he might experience resurrection at the partial rapture. Not enough for him, apparently, to live on and to be changed and taken up to heaven at the partial rapture; his great ambition is to die physically so that he might experience physical resurrection from the dead at that time. And not only so. His ambition is not merely to die physically, but to have a death that is conformed to Christ's death; that is, to be the same in form as the death of Christ. The form of Christ's death, as Paul himself has just remarked in Philippians 2:8, was physical crucifixion. So, if Paul is saying that his ambition is to be physically conformed to the death of Christ, he is saying that he longs to be physically crucified, as Christ was crucified; and we may immediately add that, if that was what Paul's ambition was, then as far as we know he never achieved his ambition, for his death was execution by the sword and not by crucifixion.

This is self-evidently a highly unsatisfactory way to interpret Paul's language here. In chapter 2 he has just exhorted his fellow-believers to cultivate the mind and attitude of the Lord Jesus, who humbled himself and became obedient unto death, that is, the death of the cross. Paul is certainly not exhorting his fellow-believers to make it their ambition to be physically crucified; he is talking of something far more important. He is talking of the cultivation of the mind and attitude of Christ, not in one once-for-all experience of physical crucifixion, but, in a constantly maintained attitude in the thousand and one situations of daily life, to maintain in daily practice what is legally true in God's sight of every believer:

I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me. (Galatians 2:20)

It is as we are daily conformed to his death in that sense, that we come progress­ively to experience his resurrection, and grow ever nearer to that complete conformity with Christ that will take place when the Lord comes; when we shall be perfectly like him, for we shall see him as he is (see 1 John 3:2).

Some crucial Scriptures and themes

So far then we have dealt with the major theological positions underlying the doctrines of partial rapturism, and have been shown how they conflict with the basic principles of the gospel. Now let us turn to a number of individual passages that are often urged in additional support for the basic principles of partial rapturism.

Romans 8:17

Partial rapturism makes much of the statement in Romans 8:16–17:

The Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified with him.

It argues that here there are two kinds of heirship, each with its distinctive conditions. To be an 'heir of God', one simply has to be a child of God; and one becomes a child of God by being born again; and one is born again simply through repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus, and not by works of merit of any sort. But to become a joint-heir with Christ, partial rapturism says that it is not enough to be a child of God. In addition, one has to qualify by suffering with Christ in order that one may be glorified with him.

The first thing to be noticed about this interpretation is its implication that the 'being glorified with Christ' of Romans 8:17 is different from the being glorified of Romans 8:30. The glorification of verse 30 is promised to every believer, on the same grounds and with the same assurance as their calling and their justification. If this glorification can be shown to be conditional on works of merit, then we can have no certainty that justification does not also depend on our works of merit. But then, what is this glorification of verse 30? The previous verse has already told us. It is the glory of being 'conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren'. Every believer then, on the same grounds as he has been justified, will be glorified, in the sense of being conformed to the image of God's Son. Every believer will be one of the 'many brethren'; all of them like Christ, but Christ himself being preeminent because he is the firstborn.

Partial rapturism then has to say, as we have already remarked, that this immense and incalculable glory of being conformed to Christ\'s image is something different from the being glorified with Christ of verse 17. But what authority has partial rapturism for so saying? The partial rapturists will answer that their authority is this: verse 17 is talking about being joint-heirs with Christ in his millennial kingdom, and not with our being justified and being conformed to the image of Christ. But again we must ask, where does verse 17 say this? The argument of the verse is that believers are heirs of God, and because that is so they are joint-heirs of God along with Christ. Is not Christ the supreme heir of God? Who after all is it that will give the worldwide millennial inheritance to Christ? Psalm 2:7–8 gives us the answer:

The lord said unto me, Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me [that is, of God the Father], and I will give thee the nations for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.

It is because Christ is the supreme heir of God that we, when we become heirs of God, become joint-heirs with Christ.

Next, we may notice the implication of the 'if' clause: 'if we suffer with him we shall also be glorified with him'. Partial rapturism supposes that it is possible for true believers to refuse to suffer with Christ; and that, if they do so, they will miss the millennial kingdom, but they will still inherit salvation. But this is a very doubtful interpretation. Let us consider the comparable phrase, 'If we deny him, he will deny us' (2 Timothy 2:12):

Every one therefore who shall confess me before men, him will I also confess before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven. (Matthew 10:32–33).

If our Lord denies someone before his Father, this will obviously be a far more serious thing for that person than merely being excluded from the millennial kingdom, and then eventually being allowed to enter heaven at last. It will mean Christ's denying that that someone is one of his people, one of his sheep. It will mean that they will be rejected and hear the dread words, 'I never knew you: depart from me' (Matthew 7:23). And again, 'I know you not whence you are ... I tell you, I know not whence you are; depart from me' (Luke 13:25, 27). It is unthinkable that at the beginning of the millennium, Christ will pronounce in the hearing of the Father the awful words of denial against someone—'I never knew you, and I know not whence you are; depart from me'—and then subsequently, at the end of the millennium, revoke that denial and confess before the Father that he did after all know this someone, and that this someone was in fact one of his sheep whom he had known all the way along.

And incidentally, while we are on this topic, we may revert for a moment to the parable of the Five Wise and the Five Foolish Virgins. The Lord's final verdict on the five foolish virgins is, 'Verily I say unto you, I know you not' (Matthew 25:12). How is it then possible for the partial rapturists to say that the foolish virgins represent true believers who, in spite of their misbehaviour, genuinely are the Lord's?

2 Timothy 2:19 asserts, 'Howbeit the firm foundation of God stands, having this seal, The Lord knows them that are his'. And our Lord himself confirms, 'I know my own, and my own know me' (John 10:14). If, after that unequivocal assertion, the Lord at any time were to deny that he knew someone who is one of his sheep, then the Lord himself would be guilty of denying his own statement. And if the Lord can say of any of his own 'I do not know you', then the 'firm foundation' of God would no longer stand. It would be completely overthrown.

In light of these solemn words, we must remember that at one stage in his career Peter did in fact deny the Lord before men. Does that mean, therefore, that he will eventually be denied by Christ? No, of course not. We do not minimize the seriousness of his denial; and it would be true to say that if he had continued in that denial all his life, then he would have shown himself to be an unbeliever and would have been denied by Christ before the Father. But as it was, his denial was a temporary inconsistency from which, solemn though it was, he was restored, and Christ will of course confess him before the Father. Peter was never anything else after his conversion than one of Christ's sheep. Christ always knew him, and knew him by name. At no point in all the proceedings would Christ have ever said of Peter, 'I never knew him'. Nor will he say it of any true believer; even though at times we all act inconsistently, and by implication, if not outright, on occasion may deny knowing the Lord.

When it comes to suffering with Christ, the same thing applies. To escape suffering, if a person refuses to trust Christ he or she is lost. If a person continues throughout their whole life to refuse to believe Christ in order to escape suffering, he or she is clearly an unbeliever. A person who says 'I am a believer', but who constantly, permanently and of set policy refuses to suffer with Christ, will meet James's trenchant demand: 'You show me your faith without works'—that is, if you can (see James 2:18). Of course, you cannot; the thing is impossible. It is easy for those of us who live in countries where Christians are not persecuted for their faith to talk like this. What would any of us do if we were faced, like many of our fellow believers in other countries, with the choice of either denying Christ or of being shot? Many of us, I fancy, might well on occasion break down and act inconsistently, like Peter did. But who of us would dare to say that if anybody in those circumstances denied Christ, and continued to deny Christ for the rest of their life, it would not really matter all that much—all that would happen is that the person concerned would miss the millennial kingdom, and that their salvation would never be in doubt?

2 Thessalonians 1:4–5

So that we ourselves glory in you in the churches of God for your patience and faith in all your persecutions and tribulations that ye endure; Which is a manifest token of the righteous judgment of God; that ye may be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which ye also suffer.

Here Paul speaks of God counting believers worthy of the kingdom of God, on the grounds of their suffering for it. Partial rapturists say that this clearly implies that, if believers refuse to suffer for the kingdom of God, they will not be counted worthy of it, and therefore they will miss it. But this is not true. Second Thessalonians 1:10 says that, when the Lord Jesus comes, 'he will be glorified in all his saints, and marvelled at in all them that believed'. Notice the phrase. It explicitly includes all believers, and not merely those believers who have suffered; as distinct from those believers—if there are any—who have never suffered anything for Christ's sake.

Once more, the only safe way to understand this passage is to examine the whole context. Paul is talking of the persecutions and the afflictions which the believers have suffered as a result of their believing the gospel: 'because our testimony to you was believed' (2 Thessalonians 1:10, see also 2 Thessalonians 1:4). And he remarks that he glories in them throughout the churches of God for their endurance and faith in spite of these persecutions. In other words, their endurance under persecution shows that they do have real faith, that they are genuine believers.

If we may diverge for a moment, this is the point of our Lord's remarks in the parable of the Sower (Luke 8:13, 15). Our Lord explains that those who in time of testing fall away do so because they have no root. They never did have. Admittedly they originally received the word with joy and for a while believed; but their belief was merely superficial. They were like the people of John 2:23–25 and 8:30–44 who professed to believe, but many of them at least were never anything other than children of the devil. According to our Lord's parable, the mark of genuine believers is that, having heard the word, they hold it fast and bring forth fruit with endurance. And if we may diverge yet again, that gives significance to Paul's assurance in Romans 5:1–3, that every believer who has been justified by faith may know on God's authority that tribulation will produce endurance.

To get back to our passage in 2 Thessalonians 1, Paul not only glories in the Thessalonians because their endurance of tribulation shows that they were true believers, but he also rejoices in the fact that the endurance of persecution for the sake of the kingdom of God would justify God at the coming of the Lord Jesus. When the Lord Jesus comes, God will turn the tables on those who afflict true believers (2 Thessalonians 1:6): he will afflict them and grant rest to the true believers; that is, relief and cessation of affliction. But in so doing, God will be concerned with his public reputation before the universe. How will it be seen to be a just thing, for him to award eternal punishment to the persecutors and to all that know not God and obey not the gospel of the Lord Jesus (see 2 Thessalonians 1:8–9); and to grant to others relief from suffering, enjoyment of the kingdom and glorification along with Christ, simply on the ground that these others have claimed to believe in the Lord Jesus?

It could not in fact be seen to be a just thing, if all the evidence the world could be given was the claim of these other people that they were believers in the Lord Jesus. For it to be seen to be a just thing, their claim must be supported by outward evidence that they were in fact true believers; and that evidence—that manifest token of the righteous judgment of God—will be the fact that they have demonstrated the reality of their faith in Christ by being prepared to suffer with Christ. And it is in that sense that God will be shown to be righteous in counting them worthy of the kingdom.

Let us take a humble illustration. Here is a boy whose parents have bought him a very expensive bicycle, but after a while the boy treats the bicycle shamefully. The tyres are not pumped up, the wheels are never oiled, and he dumps it at the back of the milk lorry and the milk lorry runs over it. People will say that the boy was not worthy of the bicycle—and what will they mean in saying that? They will not mean that the boy was not worthy of receiving the bicycle, and therefore was never given the bicycle. They will mean that, though he was given the bicycle free and for nothing, his subsequent treatment of it showed that he was not worthy of it.

The analogy falls short, of course, because the boy was given the bicycle before he proved himself unworthy of it, and the question at stake in 2 Thessalonians 1 is the future kingdom of Christ into which believers have not yet entered. But the principle of the thing remains the same. As we earlier saw from Galatians 3, that future kingdom is given to believers as a gift on the grounds of faith and on the same terms as justification; but God requires believers to show themselves worthy of it by their behaviour now, even before they enter into that future kingdom.

This is very similar to our Lord's parable of the Sheep and the Goats (see Matthew 25:31–46). Those who are sent away into eternal punishment—and notice it is into eternal punishment, and not into a temporary loss of the millennial kingdom only—are sent there because they did not visit Christ in prison or clothe him when he was naked. That is to say, they did not minister in this way to Christ's brethren. But that does not mean that whether people are saved or lost, whether they go to heaven or to the lake of fire, depends on their good works, or their lack of good works. Their failure to minister to Christ's brethren, and thus their failure to minister to Christ, was but the external evidence of their heart attitude towards Christ. And it will be on the grounds of that heart attitude towards Christ, as evidenced by their evil treatment of Christ's brethren, that they will be consigned to eternal punishment. Similarly, with the righteous; and here let us notice the award that is given to them. It is not simply the award of the temporary glory of reigning with Christ during the millennium. As distinct from the goats, the sheep escape eternal punishment; and once more they do so, not on the ground of their works. Their works are cited because they are the evidence of their heart attitude to the Messiah. This is consistent with what Scripture teaches everywhere, that man's eternal destiny depends on whether he believes in Christ or not (John 3:18); but for his belief to be counted genuine it must be evidenced by his works.

The Overcomer The theme of the overcomer is to be found in many places in the New Testament. Most of them in the writings of John; though we must not forget the passage in Romans 8:37, which assures all believers that 'in all these things we are more than [overcomers] through him that loved us'. It is the view of partial rapturists nonetheless that not all believers are overcomers, but only some of them. This has a far-reaching implication, which partial rapturism does not hesitate to spell out. For instance, in Revelation 2:11 our Lord promises the overcomer that he or she shall not be hurt by the second death. Partial rapturism says that, while those believers who are overcomers will not be hurt by the second death, all other believers who are not overcomers will be in danger of being hurt by the second death.

This involves them in a serious contradiction within their own theological system. The second death is the lake of fire, and by definition it is an eternal punishment. It is an eternal death, and stands over against eternal life. Now, partial rapturism teaches that every believer has eternal life, and cannot forfeit eternal life, even though they may misbehave and miss the millennial kingdom. Nevertheless, they assert that some believers will be hurt by the second death, which as we have seen is an eternal death. The only way they can get out of this contradiction is to suggest that for some people the eternal death will not be an eternal death but only a temporary experience.

Partial rapturism not only contradicts its own basic theological axioms; it also contradicts Scripture itself. John declares, with all the authority of an inspired apostle, that 'whatsoever is begotten of God overcomes the world ...' (1 John 5:4). It is the very nature of the life that is begotten by God that it overcomes the world. If a man or woman is indeed born of God, then the life of God within that person has this characteristic and essential quality: it overcomes the world. Partial rapturism holds that every believer has been thus born of God; but it declares that some believers do not overcome, born of God though they are, and therefore will be hurt by the second death.

Moreover, John tells us that there is a sense in which every believer has already overcome the world: '... and this is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith'. In other words, at his conversion, at the moment of believing in the Son of God, the believer overcame the world. And in the next verse John raises the question: 'And who is he that overcomes the world, but he that believes that Jesus is the Son of God?' (1 John 5:5). Here John deals with the question of a believer's present and continuing overcoming of the world, and reveals that the secret of this continuing overcoming of the world is to be found in the believer's constant faith that Jesus is the Son of God. And then in Revelation, after describing the blessedness of the eternal city, John says:

He who overcomes shall inherit these things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son. But the fearful, and unbelieving, and abominable, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death. (Revelation 21:7–8)

From this it is apparent that John knows of only two classes: those who overcome, and those who do not overcome. Those who overcome inherit God's eternal heaven, know God as their God, and themselves as his sons. If one is not an overcomer, his part is in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone. Obviously, the person who does not overcome is not a believer. This concurs with what John has already said in 1 John 5.

What then are we to make of our Lord's promises to the overcomer in the seven letters to the seven churches? Is it not natural to suppose that here the term 'overcomer' implies overcoming the evil practices and attitudes that our Lord has denounced in his statements of the churches? Yes, it certainly is natural to understand the term so. Well, then, does that imply that all believers consistently and without exception over­come these sins and weaknesses that our Lord denounces? No, of course not. John himself would be the first to admit that believers can and do sin from time to time (1 John 2:1). But then John insists that true believers will confess their sins and will thus find forgiveness. The person who does not confess his sins, and persists constantly in sinning, and has no intention of repenting of it—that person, says John, is not a believer at all, but is of the devil (1 John 3:8–10). John would say similarly about the overcomer in the letters to the seven churches. From time to time, even true believers suffer temporary defeats as Peter did, whose experience we have already quoted at length. But a true believer will eventually confess his sin and be restored, and gain the victory where formerly he was defeated. The person who never overcomes and continues to practise the things which displease the Lord, and does not listen to his command to repent and do the first works but continues in sinning—this person is not a believer at all.

Here again then, partial rapturism shows its true colours by teaching that you can be a believer and yet not be an overcomer; and that in the end it will not really matter, for such a person will merely miss the temporary glories of the millennial kingdom. The eternal glories are secure, even for the one who does not overcome.

Luke 12:45–46

The verse in question reads,

But if that servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming; and shall begin to beat the menservants and the maidservants, and to eat and drink, and to be drunken; The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he expecteth not, and in an hour when he knoweth not, and shall cut him asunder, and appoint his portion with the unfaithful.

Partial rapturism likes to lay emphasis on the phrase 'that servant', and to argue that 'that servant' is the same person as the faithful and wise steward to whom our Lord makes reference in Luke 12:42, and of whom he says, 'Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing. Of a truth I say unto you, that he will set over all that he has' (Luke 12:43–44). The argument is that the term 'that servant' must refer to the same person all the way through. 'That servant' therefore has a choice. He can either act as a faithful steward and be rewarded with a high position in the millennial kingdom; or he can choose to behave unworthily and be thrashed to pieces when the Lord comes and assigned his portion with the unfaithful in the outer darkness, while our Lord's faithful servants will enjoy the glories of the millennial kingdom.

The interpretation is false on at least two counts:

1. The interpretation confuses the storyline of the parable with the interpretation. In the parable certainly one man only, or rather one office only, is in view. It is that of the chief steward set over the whole household of some rich and influential noble. In the parable, the man who occupies that office can be either faithful or unfaithful. But when it comes to the interpretation, we cannot think that our Lord meant the parable to refer to only one man, the bearer of one particular office in the church, the office of chief-steward. Who would such a man be, who at any one time has been appointed by the Lord to be the chief steward of the church? There is no such office; there is no such man. We must not confuse the storyline of the parable with the situation in real life that the parable is meant to refer to. The parable of the chief steward is meant to be a lesson to every servant of Christ in the church, however humble their position.

2. Because the faithful and wise chief steward in Luke 12:42–43 of the parable represents a believer, it is false to argue that the wicked chief steward luke 12:45­–46 must also be a believer, simply because he is referred to by the same term 'that servant'. Let us take an example from real life of the highest possible office in the church. Peter was a faithful apostle; Judas was a wicked apostle. It is manifestly false to argue that, because the office was the same, and because the apostle in the first instance was a believer, the apostle in the second instance must likewise be a believer. Judas held the same office as Peter, but he was not a believer. Moreover, in the parable the evil chief steward is given his portion with the ...

But here we must break off, because the translation of the next Greek word is disputed. The Greek word in question is apistos. Some translations, and noticeably the RV, render the word in Luke 12:46 'unfaithful', because, I suspect, they wish it thus to contrast with the word 'faithful' in Luke 12:42. But the fact is that the Greek word apistos in every other place in the New Testament does not mean 'unfaithful', but 'faithless'; that is, 'unbelieving' (except in Acts 26:8, where it is used in the neuter and means 'incredible'). It is, for instance, the word used in Revelation 21:8 that we recently had occasion to quote: 'But the fearful and unbelieving ... their portion shall be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone; which is the second death'. Apistos in Luke 12:46 therefore means what it means everywhere else in the New Testament: people who are faithless, without any faith; that is, unbelievers.

And of course, according to the parable, the reason why this evil chief steward was given his portion with the unbelievers was that he was one himself; or rather that he represents people who, while they profess to be servants of God, are in fact unbelievers. In real life, a man who would deliberately take advantage of the fact that the Lord was not about to return at once—or so he thought, and who would proceed to beat his fellow-servants and to indulge in debauchery, would not be recognizable as a believer at all. If we wanted to find examples in real life of what the parable was talking about, the quickest route to take would be to remember the persecution, beatings, tortures and executions of true believers by eminent archbishops, bishops, prelates and priests of Christendom. What believer could propose to himself that the delay in the Lord's coming gave him a splendid opportunity for persecuting his fellow-believers, without forfeiting every shred of evidence that he was a true believer at all?

Colossians 1:12

The phrase in question here is:

Giving thanks unto the Father, who has made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.

Partial rapturism interprets the phrase 'the inheritance of the saints in light' to mean the glories of the millennial kingdom, and holds that not all believers will partake of the glories of the millennial kingdom. It interprets the earlier phrase, 'who has made us meet to be partakers', to mean 'he has qualified us to be partakers', in the same sense as an athlete who did well enough in the initial heats might be said to be qualified to take part in the main race; but qualifying to take part in the main race would not mean winning a prize in that race. In other words, partial rapturism holds that, in saying that the Father has made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light, Paul is saying no more than this: that our initial salvation has put us in the running, so to speak, and given us the possibility of winning a share in the millennial kingdom if we do well enough in the race, and qualify for that share by our work and suffering for the Lord.

Once more the interpretation is false, as will be seen immediately when we read Colossians 1:12 in connection with its immediate context in Colossians 1:13, which explains how the Father has made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light. He has done it by 'delivering us out of the power of darkness'. And if believers have been delivered out of the power of darkness, it follows that they are already in the light. The inherit­ance of the saints in light is not something that we shall only begin to enjoy during the millennium. It is our present, as well as our future and eternal, inheritance.

The second thing the Father has done to make us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light is this: according to Colossians 1:13 he has already 'translated us into the kingdom of the Son of his love'. We are already, therefore, in the Son's kingdom now, and it is the Father who has placed us there. There are, after all, only two kingdoms, and everybody is in either the one or the other. The one kingdom is the power of darkness; the other kingdom is the kingdom of God's Son. Every believer by definition is in the kingdom of God's Son already; and if they are in the kingdom of God's Son now, how shall they be excluded from the kingdom of God's Son in the millennium?

The question once more raises fundamental issues, for verse 13 tells us on what grounds and by what means we have been delivered from the kingdom of darkness and translated into the kingdom of God's Son. The means is this: 'In [him] we have our redemption [that is, our deliverance], the forgiveness of our sins (see Ephesians 1:7). That is how we escape from the power of darkness. That is how we were qualified to enter the kingdom of God's Son. And if it is the blood of Christ that has qualified us to enter the kingdom of God's Son now, how can we, if we are true believers, be excluded from the kingdom of God's Son during the millennium, without denying the value of the redeeming blood that brought us into that kingdom in the first place?

Does 'the kingdom of God' refer to the millennial kingdom?

This might now be an appropriate time to comment on the contention that in the New Testament the phrase 'the kingdom of God\' mostly refers to the millennial kingdom. It does not in 1 Corinthians 4:20, nor in Romans 14:17. On both these occasions the term refers to God's present rule of his people. Indeed, the term 'kingdom' is best translated in English by the phrase 'the kingly rule' of God. Similarly in Matthew 6:33, the exhortation 'seek you first his kingdom' is not talking about the millennium. It is talking about our attitude to life in the here and now, and in particular about our attitude to material goods like food and clothes. It is exhorting us to seek first the kingly rule of God in our lives, and his righteousness; that is, the practical righteousness of character that is formed in those who put God's rule first in life's daily duties. Moreover, John 3 is clear witness that those who are born from above do both see and enter the kingdom of God now.

There is, of course, a form of the kingdom of God that believers do not enter now, and will not enter until the Lord comes. First Corinthians 15:50 explains, 'flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God', and Paul in 2 Timothy 4:18 talks of being saved 'unto his heavenly kingdom', which obviously refers to the future. But to say that the term 'kingdom of God' in the New Testament mostly refers to the millennial king­dom, and not even to the eternal kingdom, gives us an ill proportioned picture of its usage.

Here is not the place to go into detailed discussion over whether or not the phrase 'the kingdom of heaven' in Matthew is the equivalent of the phrase 'the kingdom of God'. Multitudes of expositors hold that it is the equivalent, but here we must leave that question in abeyance. We can, however, notice the obvious fact that in all the parables of Matthew 13, the kingdom of heaven is a present reality. The term does not refer to the millennium, except in such cases as in the parable of the Wheat and the Tares, which states that at the Lord's coming the tares are bundled together and burned, and the wheat is gathered into the granary: 'Then the righteous shall shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father' (Matthew 13:43). And here we may notice that, like the passage in Colossians which we have just studied, Matthew indicates that the righteous who are in the kingdom now will be in the kingdom then.

Concluding observations

It remains for us to notice that not all partial rapturists agree on what the order of events in the future is to be. Some hold, for instance, that the partial rapture takes place at the first resurrection of Revelation 20:4–6. This means that believers who have suffered with Christ and have been true overcomers—in the partial rapturists' sense of the term—will take part in the first resurrection and reign with Christ during the millennium. But Revelation 20:5 says that the 'rest of the dead are not raised until the thousand years are finished', and if partial rapturism is true, the 'rest of the dead' must here include true believers who have not suffered with Christ, but on the contrary have behaved unworthily. But if such believers are not raised until after the millennium, how shall we square this fact with what our Lord's parables of reward teach? According to partial rapturism, the wicked and slothful servant in the parable of the Talents (see Matthew 25:14–30) represents a true, but unworthy, believer. But in the parable, this wicked servant is reviewed along with, and at the same time as, the faithful servants. And indeed, the wicked servant's talent is taken away and given to the man who had ten talents. But in real life, how could anything like that take place if all believers who are wicked servants are not raised at the first resurrection, but only at the end of the millennium?

Or are we to think that all true believers, whether they have been good or wicked, are caught up to meet the Lord in the air, will stand before the judgment seat of Christ, and then those who are wicked are dismissed from the presence of the Lord into the outer darkness for the period of the millennium? But how could that be? First John 3:2 assures us that when true believers see the Lord they will be like him; 'for [they] shall see him even as he is'. The sight of the Lord himself will perform that great transformation. Shall believers who are already conformed to the image of Christ be dismissed into the outer darkness and suffer what partial rapturists refer to as 'temporary' pangs of the second death, or even the pains of a temporary purgatory?

It would be unprofitable to proceed with questions like this. The fact is that the wicked servant of that parable cannot represent a true believer. A man who could turn round and tell the Lord Jesus that he is a tyrant who is always expecting something for nothing could not possibly be a true believer, who would in the same breath admit that he owed everything to the master who gave his life for him at Calvary.

But let us leave it to those who hold partial rapturism to explain the apparent contradictions in the varying versions of their doctrine. Meanwhile let me say again very sincerely, and with, I trust, the love of God in my heart and on my tongue, that the people I have met who hold the partial rapture doctrine have, all of them, been sincere and devoted servants of God. Their doctrine seems to me to be seriously wrong, in that it undermines the very fundamentals of the gospel. But they themselves do not see it so. They would be the last people on earth to knowingly dishonour the Saviour or to undermine the fundamentals of the gospel. I deny their special doctrines, but honour their Christian character. I applaud their desire to practise holiness and to inculcate it in others, and I love them in the Lord.

Yours sincerely,

¹ See David Gooding, An Unshakeable Kingdom, Chapter 5, for a fuller discussion.