Objection: The Church Was Built upon the Foundation of the Apostles and Prophets (Ephesians 3:20). The Foundation Has Been Laid, So There Are No More Apostles or Prophets.
I can see why people get confused on this one. In the Early Church, apostles and prophets laid down doctrine. Now that the New Testament has been written, apostles and prophets no longer need to lay down doctrine for the entire Church. That foundation never needs to be laid again. There will never be more Apostles of the Lamb or Scripture-writing apostles or “foundational” apostles and prophets.
However, the objector misses it by assuming that those are the ONLY kinds of apostles and prophets. Ephesians 4 proves that the ministry offices of apostle and prophet in general must continue today, even though they are not the original “foundational” ones.
Ephesians 4:11-13:
And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and
teachers;
For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ:
Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ:
For how long are apostles and prophets given? Until we are all in the unity of the faith and knowledge of the Son of God, until we are perfect, until we have the stature of the fullness of Christ. That clearly won’t happen until Jesus comes back.
Does anyone dispute that God still commissions evangelists, pastors and teachers today? Apostles and prophets are on the same list, so they must be commissioned today as well. No proper Bible interpretation would arbitrarily split this list down the middle. These five offices stand or fall together.
Many other people in the Bible are referred to as apostles other than the Twelve and Paul. Thus, there is a special “closed” class of Apostles of the Lamb whose names are on the twelve foundations of the New Jerusalem.
Revelation 21:14:
And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.
However, one need not be in that select group to be an apostle. Paul was an apostle, but even he was never one of the Twelve Apostles of the Lamb.
The objector makes the false assumption that apostles must be one of the original Apostles of the Lamb or one of the Scripture-writing apostles, but Paul names other apostles who never wrote any Scripture! Therefore, you can be an apostle without being one of the Twelve Apostles of the Lamb or one of the Scripture-writing apostles. So there can still be such apostles today.
Given that there ARE apostles today, we should still expect them to do the “signs of an apostle” (2 Corinthians 12:12) today.
Now what about prophets? Agabus was called a prophet, but there were other prophets. Paul talked about two or three prophets speaking in a church service (1 Corinthians 14:29), so there had to be at least two or three more of them out there (to say the least)! There needed to be at least two more in Antioch (Acts 13:1) among the “prophets and teachers,” where there was a list of named ones. However, we do not read that any of these (other than Saul/Paul) ever wrote Scripture. Therefore, it is entirely reasonable that you could also be a prophet today without being a “foundational” or “Scripture-writing” prophet.
Some teach that any apostles or prophets today must be the false apostles and false prophets that the Bible warns will be around in the last days, and that their signs and wonders must be the lying signs and wonders we’re warned about. But the presence of false ministers doesn’t preclude the existence of real ones!
2 Peter 2:1:
But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall also be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring up on themselves swift destruction.
Peter said that there will also be false teachers! Yet the very people who says that there are no more apostles or prophets don’t say that there are no more teachers or that any teacher out there must be one of the evil end-time false teachers. If we can’t say that about one ministry office, we shouldn’t say it about any of the others.
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