The Mileses

Paul and Olena Miles with Grace Abroad Ministries

Hermeneutics

The Time I was in a Jewish Prison Gang

Our friends at Dispensational Publishing House have recently posted my testimony about why I am a dispensationalist. It’s a short story that follows my journey from church to apostasy to war to prison to conversion to seminary to today. I glossed over some details for the sake of brevity in that article, but today, I am going to zoom in on my prison story a bit.

I was a notorious vegetable smuggler in a Jewish prison gang! In a federal prison, no less. Sounds pretty tough, right? I assure you it is not.[Read More]

Satan: The Worst Dispensationalist Ever

If you handle God’s Words like the Devil does, then you are probably doing something very wrong.

The Bible has much to say about Satan; in fact, theologians have derived an entire doctrine of Satanology, which is a subcategory of the doctrine of demonology, which itself is a subcategory of the doctrine of angelology. Of all that the information that the Bible gives us regarding Satan, there are only a few instances where the Bible gives us the actual words of Satan himself. Interestingly, The first book of the Bible that God gave to us in written form was Job, which begins with a couple of conversations between God and Satan. Job was entirely unaware of these conversations throughout his trouble, so it should be no surprise that today we are also ignorant of most of Satan’s words and deeds.[Read More]

Galilean Aramaic: Not as stupid as it sounds

People often assume that John and Peter were a couple of uneducated rednecks. Part of the reason is that they were fisherman. Today, rednecks like to fish, therefore Peter was a redneck… We should be careful in projecting modern American culture onto Peter, though. The skills that it would take to navigate the water with ancient technology may have taken more skill than we give him credit for. But, then again, the Bible does say Peter cursed and cursing is a skill that modern seafarers master without peer, sooo…[Read More]

Spiritualizers, Revisionists, and Ezekiel’s Temple

The most popular approach Ezekiel’s temple throughout Church history has been to spiritualize the text and make the temple represent the Church. The cause of this approach is an early influence of Origen from the Alexandrian school of thought. While the Second Council of Constantinople properly declared Origen a heretic, the Church failed to address his approach to Scriptures, such that elements of his hermeneutics would remain for centuries to come. Pavel Ivanovich Savvaitov, a 19th century professor at Vologda Spiritual Seminary, critiques Origen’s hermeneutic circle:[Read More]