Brief Doctrinal Statement
Biblical Framework Ministries rests upon the Bible’s own view of itself rather than imposing upon it pagan notions of language, sense experience, and logic. The biblical text insists that God created man and nature in such a way that He is revealed everywhere and always to every person. It denies the ancient and enduring pagan notion of spontaneous generation of order from chaos. In the Bible alone, therefore, lies the only rationale for the way we all inevitably use language, sensory data, and logic to ascertain truth, including scientific truth.
The Bible uniquely and repeatedly speaks of a post-creation rebellion against God that has led to discord in both natural and human history. Natural and human evil is thus an abnormality of existence—not an essential component of existence. Only here emerges a comprehensive explanation for the universal experience of our deep sense of alienation from God and the abnormality of present existence. The many failed attempts of man to live out individual and corporate fantasies of an “OK” world are unflatteringly exposed for the illusions they are.
The Bible is the product of a unique nation that possessed two characteristics shared with no other nation or religion. While treaties and business contracts were common everywhere, only Israel had contracts with God. Important implications follow. First, the transcendent Creator has come down to man’s level to bargain, argue, and commit Himself to a defined, historically observable behavior. Second, a literal hermeneutic of interpreting related biblical texts is established. And third, the meaning of such texts must be conserved for the duration of the contracts. Old Testament terminology, therefore, retains its meaning when cited in the New Testament.
Israel also uniquely possessed a multi-millennial-long series of prophets whom God used to administer contract sanctions and historic predictions. Such a line of diverse personalities who spoke and wrote a self-consistent series of documents cannot be found in any pagan tradition. With this foundation in a two-millennia-long historical demonstration of the rationality and purposefulness of history, the Bible alone provides us useable knowledge about the march of time and our place in it. The biblical authors report God’s progressive revelation of history’s ultimate goal—when good and evil and life and death will be eternally separated, never to mix again. Unlike the pagan imagination that wrongly diagnoses the situation and therefore devises fallacious schemes of individual, societal, and global self-improvement, the Bible testifies to the only real solution of the ultimate problem—the ethical reconciliation of man with God. Only after that is achieved can there be corporate eternal joy in the very Presence of God.
Central to this biblical view of history in which God comes down to man is the Incarnation—the unique Person of Jesus Christ who as God the Son incarnate demonstrated “normal” human existence in obedience to God the Father by relying upon God the Holy Spirit’s empowerment. In contrast to pagan hero-leaders, the Lord Jesus perfectly manifested grace and truth as He met every test we commonly experience, and successfully completed the necessary atonement for humanity’s rebellion against God on the Cross. Although temporarily rejected as the Messiah by Israel, Jesus is now gathering those who believe on Him from every people group on earth in order to complete the church, which is His Body for the next stage of history.
Quite the opposite of pagan imaginations of the future, therefore, we place our faith and hope upon Jesus Christ as the historically resurrected and ascended Leader of the new humanity from whom alone we receive the eternal life that He came to bring. In Him the final stage of history has already begun and cannot be stopped by any power. All men everywhere must confront Jesus Christ in faith as Savior or in unbelief as Judge regarding their eternal destiny. He will physically return to the planet and to His special nation Israel to usher in a competent, ethically incorruptible global governance, supernatural environmental transformation, comprehensive world peace, and real economic prosperity.