Victim's Rights and Prophecy Wars

Gary discusses two new books now available from American Vision, Gary’s North’s Victim’s Rights and Gary DeMar’s newest book Prophecy Wars.

The position defended by Christian Reconstruction affirms the continuing validity of Old Testament civil laws, including especially the law’s negative sanctions, in the New Testament era. Because of this, Christian Reconstruction has been dismissed as a deviant theology, especially by dispensationalists. The Reconstructionists’ position on the law is frequently described by its critics as being overly harsh. This accusation—that our position is judicially harsh—rests on a specific though unstated view of the God of the Old Covenant, namely, that God’s required civil law system in the Old Testament era was itself judicially harsh, but fortunately for us, Jesus has abolished it, or at least drastically softened its harsh aspects. Jesus, in other words, is meek and mild, but His Father in heaven is mean and harsh. Fortunately for us, we are assured, Jesus has persuaded His Father to change His mind about the penalties of the law. God the Father insisted on civil justice; fortunately for us, Jesus insists only on love. “No creed but the Bible, no law but love!” has been the battle cry of fundamentalist antinomians throughout the twentieth century.

Victim’s Rights

Victim’s Rights is a detailed study of Exodus 21 and 22: the case laws. It identifies the fundamental principle of biblical civil justice: the obligation of civil government to defend the interests of the victims of crime, and the obligation of the criminal, not the State, to pay restitution.

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While I was a student at Reformed Theological Seminary, the light came on. The RTS librarian had put out some books to sell that came from his personal library. My eyes focused on a faded red hardback with “Matthew XXIV” stamped on the spine. It was J. Marcellus Kik’s brief commentary on Matthew’s version of the Olivet Discourse. In the Preface to the second edition, Kik wrote:

The first edition of this work was published in 1948 and it is indeed gratifying that the demand for it has necessitated a second edition. The particular interpretation represented in this book found slow acceptance but in recent years approval has multiplied, especially with the decline of the dispensational position.

In time, I learned that Kik’s interpretive approach was not new or unique to him. His little book forever changed the way I studied the Bible because it used the Bible to interpret the Bible, the very methodology I was learning in my seminary classes. Kik expressed in his first edition how I felt after reading his verse-by-verse exposition of Matthew 24:

It is with a thrill that one suddenly discovers the key which unlocks the meaning of a difficult portion of Scripture. Matthew Twenty-four is difficult to understand. It is made more difficult by commentaries which speak of “double meanings,” “prophetic perspectives,” and “partial and complete fulfillments.”

Prophecy Wars

There is a long history of skeptics turning to Bible prophecy to claim that Jesus was wrong about the timing of His coming at “the end of the age” (Matt. 24:3) and the signs associated with it. Noted atheist Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) is one of them and Bart Ehrman is a modern example. It’s obvious that neither Russell or Ehrman are aware of or are ignoring the mountain of scholarship that was available to them that showed that the prophecy given by Jesus was fulfilled in great detail just as He said it would be before the generation of His day passed away.

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Gary discusses two new books now available from American Vision, Gary’s North’s Victim’s Rights and Gary DeMar’s newest book Prophecy Wars. These two have more in common than might be apparent to many, but both are essentially apologetic works about controversial topics about the Bible.

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American Vision’s mission is to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation—from Genesis to Revelation. American Vision (AV) has been at the heart of worldview study since 1978, providing resources to exhort Christian families and individuals to live by a Biblically based worldview. Visit www.AmericanVision.org for more information, content and resources