In the last five issues of "Voices From His
Excellent Glory", we have traced historically my study of "That's Truth"
which is now in booklet form. The study concerns the so-called lost tribes of Israel,
which are thirteen and not ten. When they migrated westward through the Caucasian
mountains, they became knows as Caucasians, which includes the Scandinavians, Western
Europe and the English Isles, etc. "Webster's New World Dictionary - Caucasian, the
white race". The thirteen colonies are an accumulation of these peoples. The Puritans
came to the "Great Wilderness" to propagate the "LORD Jesus Christ."
In this issue of things that I ponder, we are going to
secular and church history to se if it tells us the origin of the so-called rapture and
why. Jesus said in Matthew chapter seven, and verse fifteen, "Beware of false
prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening
wolves." And second Peter, chapter two and verse one says, "But there were FALSE
PROPHETS also among the people, even as there shall be FALSE TEACHERS among you, who
privily shall bring in damnable heresies."
From the time I was a year old, I was raised under the
teaching of the rapture, and believed it because I thought my elders had studied and knew
what they were teaching. When I began to hear rumors that the rapture teaching might be in
error, I wanted to know what history had to say about it.
There has been a lot of hype about the rapture. Late
Great Planet Earth has sold 30,000,000 copies plus, Left Behind series, Book 1, over
7,000,000 copies, Book 2, over 3,000,000 copies. But what is the truth?
During the late sixties, Derek and Lydia Prince stayed
with us while he held a week of meetings in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles,
California. Looking through my library, he found a book of Mormon and some other books
that he told us we should not have in our house, including a Scofield Bible.
Not long after this an article fell into my hands, The
Life of Cyrus I Scofield. The Scofield Bible is a King James Version but the footnotes
propagate the rapture theory and are the standard for the Pentecostal and Baptist
denominations.
Who was Cyrus Ingerson Scofield? He was born, August 19,
1843 and died July 24, 1921. He was married to Leontine Cerre, and they were married on
September 21, 1866. They had two daughters and lived in Atchison, Kansas. He became a
federal judge in Kansas City and was the second federal judge to be impeached, for fraud.
He deserted his wife and daughters and never supported them. She became the librarian for
Atchison, Kansas in 1883 until she retired in 1917 and died in 1936. The Topeka Kansas
newspaper published an article about Scofield on August 27, 1881, and called him a shyster
and scalawag.
Scofield returned to Saint Louis, Missouri, where his
sister, Emeline Papin lived and was involved in several forgeries and non-payment of loans
and served six months in the Saint Louis jail. He had somehow become a follower of J.N.
Darby, who was one of the first to teach about a rapture, and while in jail, began writing
the footnotes to what was to become the Scofield Reference Bible. The Oxford University
Press published the first edition of the Scofield Reference Bible, that has propagated the
rapture theory, on January 15, 1909.
Who was John Nelson Darby? He was an English lawyer and
theologian, a prolific writer who picked up the teaching of Edward Irvin, a Scottish
minister, that apparently had in his congregation, a Scottish lass named Margaret
McDonald. And supposedly, while in a trance, has a vision of the graves opening and the
people going up towards heaven where Jesus was standing on a cloud. This gave credence to
the rapture theory that he had received from the writings of Dr. Samuel Roffey Maitland, a
British lawyer and Bible scholar, who became a librarian to the archbishop of Canterbury
and it is believed that he discovered there, a copy of the writings of a Spanish Jesuit
priest, Francisco Ribera, who published a commentary in 1590 on Revelation for the Papacy,
showing that Revelation was a FUTURIS SYSTEM and that Jesus would come and take the
Christians to heaven for seven years during which time the anti-christ would rule the
world and at the end of the seven year period, Jesus would return with the saints.
This is the history of the so-called rapture of the
church teaching and none of the fathers of the Reformation EVER believed this heresy.
Why did the Papacy authorize this Jesuit Priest to write
such a demonic document?? We will answer this question in the next issue of Voices From
His Excellent Glory.
See other "Notebook"
articles.
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to November/December 2004 Voices