Chapter 25
Keep the Book, test the notes, and meet the God the notes made small
Same kitchen. Same table. The Bible sits between us, cover soft as a glove, corners rounded from thirty years of Sunday mornings.
Ray has read the chapters. All of them. He took his time, and he looked up the page numbers I gave him, because that is who Ray is.1 He has been quiet for a while. He turns the Bible a half inch with one finger, the way you shift something you are not quite ready to pick up.
"So what do I do with it?"
That is the only question he has left. This chapter is my answer to him. And to you.
Twenty-four chapters ago, Ray set a challenge. Don't tell me what people say about Dake. Open his own Bible and show me, in his own words. Then open the Scriptures and show me those. I'll listen to that.
I took that challenge because it was right. It also happened to be the standard Dake set for himself. So we used his measure. We quoted his pages before we said anything about them. We printed photographs when a page was in dispute. We labeled every edition, because the text of his notes has changed across printings and that matters.2
I believe the challenge has been met. That is not bravado. It is a claim you can check. The whole reason this book's apparatus exists is to let you do exactly that. Every quotation carries a locator. The disputed page is photographed and transcribed in full.3
But meeting a challenge is not the same thing as answering a person. Ray's second question is harder than his first. The first asked what is true. This one asks what he is supposed to do Monday morning, with a Bible he loves and a Sunday school class at nine.
Maybe you are not Ray. Maybe you picked up this book because you heard about a page in the back of Acts and wanted to know if it was real. It is. Maybe you are a pastor whose best deacon teaches from these notes every week. Maybe you are twenty-two, and this Bible was a graduation gift from a grandmother you loved.
Either way, the question lands the same. There is a book in your house, and you know something about it now that you did not know before.
I want to say why this question is hard before I try to answer it. If I rush past that, I will sound like someone who has never loved a book.
It is hard, first, because a Bible is never really just a book. It is the chair you were sitting in when your father died. It is the margin where you wrote a date, a name, and the word "answered." Ray's grandfather wrote in this one. His mother wrote in it. Ray wrote in it. Three hands, one volume. You do not put that on a scale alongside a publishing decision.
It is hard, second, because the doctrine of God is not a classroom subject. I have used the word "doctrine" a great deal in these pages, and I know how cold it can sound. But your doctrine of God is just your description of the One you talk to at three in the morning. Is He here, or is He somewhere else? Does He know what tomorrow's scan will show? Can He actually do something about it? Will He be the same God next year that He was at that altar in 1979? Those are not seminary questions. Those are hospital questions.
It is hard, third, because you may have taught these notes yourself. Not carelessly. You taught them because you trusted the man on the cover, and because the notes sat on the same page as the Word of God, in the same ink, under the same binding. That is a real reason. It is also, as we saw, exactly how a note borrows authority it was never given.4
And it is hard, fourth, because nobody likes being told they were wrong about something they loved. I don't. You don't. If this book has felt at any point like a man enjoying himself at your expense, then I have failed at the one thing I most wanted to get right.
So here is what hangs on your answer. Your worship hangs on it, because you cannot fully worship a God you have been trained to picture smaller than He is. Your prayer hangs on it, because prayer takes its shape from who you think is listening. And other people hang on it, because if you teach, then whatever you settle here travels into a room full of people who trust you.
None of that calls for panic. It calls for one honest afternoon.
Why This Chapter Argues Nothing
Every other chapter in this book ends by answering the strongest objections a Dake supporter would raise. This one does not. That is on purpose. The arguments are finished. They are linked all through this page, and Chapter 24 gathers the whole case for Dake and answers it in one place. A conclusion that keeps arguing never lands. If you want to argue, go argue with the chapters. This one is for what comes after.
Let me put the whole book on one page. Not to rehash it, but to hand it back in a shape you can carry.
We started with the man and his method. Dake's life was told from the record, including the parts his admirers usually skip. The 1936 federal case was told from the newspapers, with restraint, and with the boundary stated in the open: a man's sin does not refute his doctrine, and his doctrine is weighed by Scripture alone.5 Then came the engine behind everything. Dake held that Scripture must be taken literally wherever it is at all possible, and that a figure of speech does not count unless the text announces it. Press that rule hard enough and it starts manufacturing doctrine. And then the key that unlocked everything else: he kept the church's words and changed what they mean.6
The center of the book was his doctrine of God. Chapter 6 laid out his Godhead from his own pages: three separate and distinct persons, each with His own personal body, soul, and spirit. Chapter 7 gave the Bible's answer: one God in three persons, with the creeds that guard the mystery. Then the attributes, one by one. A God with a body. A God who is somewhere instead of everywhere. A God who learns. A God who cannot. A God who changes. Then his Christ, and his Spirit.7
Part III followed the system out into the world it builds. Change who God is, and everything else rearranges. So there was an age before Adam, complete with a civilization and a ruler, built on one disputed verb and one English word. There was a material heaven where the eternal state runs on the present order forever. There was healing tied to law, so that the sick are examined for what they failed to supply. There was prayer run by conditions, where no defeat is possible and every unanswered prayer becomes your fault. And there was a very crowded sky, with a ranked spirit behind nearly every human trouble.8
Along the way, each chapter conceded what was right before it corrected what was not. That mattered to me. Dake was right that the resurrection is bodily, that the new earth is real, that God still heals, that the devil is not a metaphor. The corrections I brought landed on the machinery he built around those truths, not on the hope underneath them.
Part IV was the part I dreaded writing. In printings before 1988, under Acts 17:26, the Dake Bible carried a note listing thirty reasons for the segregation of the races. Chapter 20 photographed it and quoted it at length. Appendix B transcribes every word. Chapter 21 answered it from the very verse the note sat under. And Chapter 22 told what happened next: the note was removed, in stages, and no printing ever said it had been there.9
Part V traced where the teaching traveled, gathered the strongest defenses of Dake and answered them, and arrived here.10
That is the book. Every claim in it is tied to a page you can go check.
Five Things This Book Never Said
1. That the gifts of the Spirit have ceased. I believe they have not, and I have said so from the first chapter.
2. That Pentecostal and charismatic believers are heretics. The Trinity your denomination confesses is the historic one. It is not Dake's.
3. That conditional security is heresy. It is ordinary Arminian doctrine, held by millions of orthodox Christians, and it was never part of this case.
4. That Dake was insincere, or that the people who love his Bible are foolish. I have said the opposite many times, and I meant it every time.
5. That you have to throw your Bible away. Keep reading.
Now the part I most want you to take with you when you close this book. It is not really about Dake. It is about every study Bible you will ever own, the good ones included.
A study Bible puts two kinds of writing on the same page. One is Scripture. The other is one person's opinion about Scripture. They sit in the same ink, on the same paper, under the same cover. Only one of them is God-breathed.11 The most useful habit you can build is the habit of seeing the line between them.
Here are four steps. They take a few minutes. They work on any note, in any edition, from any publisher.
Four Steps for Testing Any Note
1. Read the Scripture first, by itself. Cover the note with your hand if you have to. Ask what the passage says before anyone tells you what it says.
2. Ask what the note means by its key words. Not whether the words sound right. What they mean on this author's pages.
3. Check the note against the passage's own context, and then against the whole Bible. Two or three plain passages, or set it down.
4. Remember that a note has an author. It is commentary. Commentary can be wise, and commentary can be wrong. Either way, it is not Scripture.
Let me work those steps once, on something harmless, so you can see how fast they go.
There is a famous study note on Matthew 19:24, where Jesus says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. The note says the "eye of the needle" was a small gate in the wall of Jerusalem. A camel could squeeze through, the explanation goes, but only on its knees and with its load stripped off. Preachers have loved that note for generations. I have preached it myself.
Step one. Read the passage by itself.
Then Jesus said to His disciples, "Assuredly, I say to you that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." When His disciples heard it, they were greatly astonished, saying, "Who then can be saved?" But Jesus looked at them and said to them, "With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible."
(Matthew 19:23–26, NKJV)12
Step two. What does the note mean by its key words? It means that "impossible" is really just "difficult." It means the camel gets through. That is the whole claim.
Step three. Check it against the context. Watch the disciples react. They are "greatly astonished," and they ask, "Who then can be saved?" Nobody asks that after hearing something is merely hard. They ask it after hearing something cannot be done. Then look at how Jesus answers. He does not say the load comes off. He says this is impossible with men, and with God all things are possible. The passage explains itself. The note reads against it.
Step four. Remember the note has an author. No ancient source describes a gate like that.13 Somebody suggested it, somebody printed it, and it traveled. It is not a lie or a conspiracy. It is one person's guess, set in type beside the words of Christ, where it started to look like part of them.
Four steps, one harmless note, and a saying of Jesus handed back at full strength.
Now let me press on step two, because it is the step that does the heavy lifting. It is also the one almost everybody skips. Steps one, three, and four are habits of attention. Step two is a habit of asking harder questions, and it feels rude at first.
Here is why it matters. A note can be built entirely out of words you already believe. That is what made the notes in this Bible so hard to catch. Nobody underlines a sentence that says "God is not omnipresent." The sentence says He is omnipresent. The work gets done in the definition three pages later, where the word is quietly given a new job.14
So step two comes down to one plain question, asked out loud: what does this author mean by that word? Not what does it usually mean. Not what it means in your hymnal. What does it mean here, on his pages, in his own definition? If you cannot find his definition, you have not yet earned the right to agree with his sentence.
That question is what Chapter 5 was for, and it is the most portable thing this book has to give you. It works on a study note. It works on a podcast. It works on a conference speaker who says all the right words and leaves you vaguely uneasy without knowing why.
Now notice something about step three. It is not mine. It is his.
If we want to prove a church doctrine, get plain passages on the subject and do not base the proof on historical events which literally happened and which were never recorded to teach such doctrines. Always get two or three plain Scriptures to prove a doctrine, or forget it. Finis Jennings Dake, God's Plan for Man, p. 4415
Read that last line one more time. Always get two or three plain Scriptures to prove a doctrine, or forget it. That is a good rule. And it is his rule. This book has done nothing to his notes that his own standard does not require of every note ever written. Chapter 4 shows where his method went wrong. This sentence shows where it was right.16
Take that sentence with you. Then use it on the pages it was printed in.
Now the decision. I have three options to lay out, and I am not going to pretend one of them is obviously right for everybody. This is your Bible and your conscience. I am a guest at your table.
The first option is to keep it and test it. Nothing on the sacred page ever changed. The Scripture in the center column of a Dake Bible is the King James text, and in the newer editions the New King James. That was never the problem. If you keep the volume, keep it with a new habit: the Scripture is the text, the notes are commentary that you now know needs testing. Underline the verses. Question the margins. That is not disrespect. That is what Chapter 5 taught you to do.
The Column That Never Changed
Here is something worth resting on. Through every printing, every revision, and every quiet edit, one thing on the page stayed exactly where it was. The notes moved. The verses did not. When Chapter 22 sets two copies of the same Bible side by side, opened to the same verse, look at what is identical in both photographs. God has made from one blood every nation of men. Whatever else was added or taken away around it, that sentence sat there the whole time, holding still, waiting to be read.
The second option is to keep the volume and retire the notes. Some people find that middle ground hard to live in. They cannot read the column without reading the margin, and every note now raises a question they cannot put down. If that is you, there is nothing wrong with setting this Bible on the reference shelf and teaching from a clean text. You are not burning anything. You are choosing what lies open in front of you at six in the morning.
The third option is to replace it. Get a plain Bible in a translation you trust, and pick up a commentary from a publisher whose doctrinal standards you can look up and read for yourself. I am naming categories, not brands. This book does not send you shopping, and Appendix F stays with sources rather than sales pitches. Ask your pastor. That is part of what he is for.
And now the thing I most want to say in this whole section. If this Bible was your grandfather's, it is still your grandfather's.
Nothing in these pages asks you to stop loving it. The pencil in the margins is still his hand. The date he wrote beside Psalm 91 is still the week your grandmother came home from the hospital. That is family. Family is not doctrine. A person can be dear to God and wrong about a note. So can you. So can I.
Keep the book on the shelf where the light hits it. Just do not let any person's handwriting outrank the living Word of God.
There is one reader I have been thinking about since page one of this book. She has taught from these notes for thirty years.
If that is you, I want to say four things. And I want to say them slowly.
First, what you are feeling is grief. Call it by the right name. Something you trusted turned out to be less than you thought it was. That is a loss, and losses get grieved, not managed. Give it a week. Give it a month. There is no deadline.
Second, you do not need to feel ashamed. You did not write these notes. They were handed to you by people who were handed them by people who trusted the name on the cover. Most of that chain trusted in good faith. Reading a note and believing it is not a sin. That is what notes are for. If there was a failure, it belongs mostly to those who had the training to check and never did.
Third, you are not required to defend what you taught. This is the trap, and I have watched good people walk right into it. A teacher finds a problem, feels exposed, and then defends the thing harder than ever, because admitting it feels like admitting that thirty years were wasted. They were not wasted. You taught Scripture in every one of those classes, and Scripture does not come back empty.17
Fourth, something is possible now that was not possible last month. You can walk into that room and show your class the rarest thing in the church: a teacher who checked, found something wrong, and said so out loud. They will remember that longer than any lesson you ever gave on the seven seals.
Dake described that kind of person himself, and he described her well.
Dake's Words: The Reader He Asked For
A person under the control of the Holy Spirit will be gentle, humble, honest, and open minded to truth. He will be eager to accept as truth what is shown him to be plainly written in the Word of God. He will not be stubborn to hold on to personal ideas or to prove that he is right in total disregard of what the Bible says. He will be ready and willing to accept new truth and to walk in the light as he receives it (1 John 1:7). Finis Jennings Dake, God's Plan for Man, p. 9718
I agree with every word of that. And I am asking of you exactly what he asked of his readers: an open mind, a readiness to accept what is plainly written, and no stubbornness about being right.
Now put the argument down. We are done with it.
What follows is not a case. It is a confession. I would rather you read it slowly than agree with it quickly.
Every chapter in Part II took something away from a picture of God you may have carried for years. I did not enjoy doing that. Taking things away is only worth doing if something larger is underneath. And something larger is. So here, one at a time, are the five great words this book has been fighting for. Not the arguments about them. The God behind them.
He is one. Not one team. Not one committee that has never lost a vote. One.
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.
(Deuteronomy 6:4–5, NKJV)
Israel has said that sentence every morning and every evening for three thousand years. Jesus quoted it and called it the first commandment of all.19 And once you actually hear it, the relief is enormous.
You do not have three loyalties. You do not need to wonder which Person of the Godhead is most pleased with you today, or whether one of them had to be talked into it by the others. There is one God. He has given Himself to you whole, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, without splitting His own being into thirds.
The love that met you at the cross was not a negotiation between separate beings who happened to agree. It was one God, saving you. Rest there.
He is here. Not informed about here. Not sending a representative. Here.
Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the morning, And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Even there Your hand shall lead me, And Your right hand shall hold me.
(Psalm 139:7–10, NKJV)
David tried the whole map. Up, down, east with the sunrise, out to the edge of the sea. He could not find a single place outside of God. Jeremiah says it as a question God asks about Himself: "Do I not fill heaven and earth?"20
That means there is no waiting room He is not already in. No grave He stands at a distance from. No deployment, no prison cell, no hospital ward, no far country that puts your child beyond His reach while He is somewhere else attending to you.
When you pray at three in the morning, you are not sending a message across a distance. You are speaking out loud to Someone already in the room.
He knows. Not most things. All things, including the end from the beginning.
Remember the former things of old, For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me, Declaring the end from the beginning, And from ancient times things that are not yet done, Saying, "My counsel shall stand, And I will do all My pleasure."
(Isaiah 46:9–10, NKJV)
That is God's own test of deity, and He staked His name on passing it. He named Cyrus before Cyrus was born. He named Josiah three centuries early. He knew how many times Peter would deny Him, and He knew the hour the rooster would settle the count.21
Bring that home to whatever you are afraid of tonight. He knew about the diagnosis before the scan existed. He knows the road your child is driving. He knows where it turns. There is not a word on your tongue that reaches Him as news.
That is not cold. That is the only ground the promise of Romans 8:28 has ever stood on. A God who has to wait and see cannot promise that all things work together for good, because He does not yet know what all things are.
He can. Nothing is too hard for Him.
Ah, Lord GOD! Behold, You have made the heavens and the earth by Your great power and outstretched arm. There is nothing too hard for You. ... Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh. Is there anything too hard for Me?
(Jeremiah 32:17, 27, NKJV)
Jeremiah prayed the first half. God answered with the second and turned it into a question. That is His way of daring the prophet to name an exception. Jeremiah could not. Neither can you.
So pray like that. In Scripture the question is never whether God is able. The only question is whether He is willing. The leper had it exactly right: "Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean." And Jesus reached out His hand and said, "I am willing."22
Your prayers were never stuck at a counter, waiting for you to meet some condition well enough to release a law. You have been talking to a Father, not operating a machine.
He does not change.
For I am the LORD, I do not change; Therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob.
(Malachi 3:6, NKJV)
Look at the second half of that verse. His unchangeableness is the reason Israel is still standing. It is not a cold fact filed under theology. It is why a faithless people were not destroyed.
The Father of lights has no variation, no shadow of turning. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.23 So the God who met you at that altar in 1979 is not a slightly different God today. He has not revised His opinion of you. He cannot be outwaited, worn down, or talked out of a promise. And He will not be a different Father when you are eighty than He was when you were eighteen.
That is the anchor. Take hold of it.
Same Words, Same Meanings
In every chapter of this book, a teal box like this one has set one of the church's great words beside Dake's meaning for it and shown you the swap. This last one does the opposite. Here are the same great words, with the meanings the church has always given them. Nothing is taken away.
One God. One divine Being in three Persons. Not three separate Gods who agree.
Almighty. Able to do all things that agree with His own nature. No creature's will puts a cap on Him.
Everywhere present. Personally and wholly present in every place, filling heaven and earth.
All-knowing. Knowing all things, including every free choice, and the end from the beginning.
Unchanging. Unchanging in being, character, purpose, and promise, while dealing freely and truly with a changing world.
Look at what this book never asked you to give up. Not one word on that list. Every term you have sung, prayed, and taught for decades is still yours and still true. The whole labor of twenty-five chapters was not to take any of them away from you. It was to give them their meanings back.
That is the God of Scripture, and it is the God of the historic creeds.24 The words are yours to keep. So is He.
I said this chapter would end with someone other than me. It will. But first, two more pages from the man himself.
Deep in the course, opening a lesson on a doctrine he knew Christians had fought over for centuries, Dake wrote this to his readers:
The whole Christian world is more or less divided on the subject and for that reason every thinking Christian should search the Scriptures and be open-minded to every statement in the Bible which throws any light on the subject. We invite the reader to lay aside prejudice and preconceived ideas on one side or the other, and for the sake of truth, to investigate earnestly and honestly the following facts gathered from an examination of over 25,000 separate statements in Scripture. Finis Jennings Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Thirty-Four, p. 62525
He was writing about sanctification, not about his own notes. I want to be fair about that. But the invitation is his, and it is a good one. Lay aside prejudice. Investigate earnestly and honestly. This book took him up on that invitation and pointed it at his own pages.
I do not think he would have objected to the method. I think he would have argued hard about the findings, and that was his right. Chapter 24 gives his strongest defenders the floor to do exactly that.
And here is his last word in this book. It comes from the preface he wrote for the second edition of Revelation Expounded in 1950, years before the Annotated Reference Bible went to press:
To enable the reader to see for himself what the Bible says, over six thousand references are given—at least two or three to prove each point. Let the Scriptures themselves be the final word of authority on any question. If the reader has intelligence enough to understand what is written, he has intelligence enough to believe what is written and that is all that is necessary. Finis Jennings Dake, Revelation Expounded, preface to the second edition26
Let the Scriptures themselves be the final word of authority on any question.
Yes. On every question. Including his own. That sentence is the whole argument of this book, written by the man this book examines, printed years before the notes we have been reading were set in type. I am asking you to take him at his word.
Ray closed the Bible after a while. He set his hand flat on the cover, the way you rest it on a friend's shoulder, and said he thought he would keep it. He said he would start his January class by reading Acts 17:11 out loud.
These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so.
(Acts 17:11, NKJV)
That is the best answer anyone has given me. It is better than mine.
So keep the Book. Test the notes. Hold on to the great words, and hold on to what they mean. Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.27
The last word is not mine, and it is not Dake's.
Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, And to present you faultless Before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, To God our Savior, Who alone is wise, Be glory and majesty, Dominion and power, Both now and forever. Amen.
(Jude 24–25, NKJV)
↑ 1. Ray is a composite figure, introduced with that qualification in Chapter 1, where his challenge is quoted in full and where the method of this book is set out as the answer to it. He is drawn from a type I have met many times in Assemblies of God and independent charismatic congregations: the long-serving adult Sunday-school teacher who inherited a Dake Bible and has defended it, usually by quoting a sentence with the word "Trinity" in it.
↑ 2. On the edition problem and the labeling convention used throughout this book, see Chapter 22 and the edition-by-edition table in Appendix C. In brief: printings before 1988 are the baseline for what Dake himself taught; printings from 1988 onward are evidence of what his publishers changed after his death in 1987.
↑ 3. The photographs and the complete verbatim transcription of the disputed page are in Appendix B. The full list of sources used in this book, with the libraries in which each resides, is in Appendix F.
↑ 4. On how marginal annotation acquires the authority of the page it is printed on, and travels from the margin into the pulpit without a citation, see Chapter 23.
↑ 5. Chapter 2 (the life and the labor); Chapter 3 (the 1936 federal case, told from the newspaper record, with the supporting documents listed in Appendix A). The boundary stated there governs this book throughout: a man's failures do not refute his doctrine, and his doctrine is never excused by his labors.
↑ 6. Chapter 4 (the hyperliteral rule and its machinery); Chapter 5 (the same-words tactic as a system, with the reader's toolkit for testing any teacher's terms). The gathered reference table of Dake's redefinitions is Appendix D.
↑ 7. Chapter 6 (the documentation, in his own words, with the flagship note quoted at length and the edition labeled); Chapter 7 (the biblical and creedal answer); then Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, and Chapter 12 on the attributes, with Chapter 13 and Chapter 14 on his Christ and his Spirit. A doctrine-by-doctrine comparison with the historic faith is set out in Appendix E.
↑ 8. Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18, and Chapter 19.
↑ 9. Finis Jennings Dake, Dake's Annotated Reference Bible, N.T. p. 159, note on Acts 17:26, in printings before 1988; the edition is established by the presence of the note itself, which later printings removed. The page is photographed and transcribed in Appendix B, documented in Chapter 20, answered from Scripture in Chapter 21, and its removal is traced in Chapter 22.
↑ 10. Chapter 23 (where the teaching traveled, documented exhibit by exhibit) and Chapter 24 (the cumulative case for Dake, stated at full strength and answered).
↑ 11. 2 Timothy 3:16–17. The NKJV renders the key term "given by inspiration of God"; the underlying Greek adjective is theopneustos, literally "God-breathed," which is why I have used that phrase in the body text.
↑ 12. Scripture in this book is quoted from the New King James Version unless otherwise noted, since the Dake Bible is now published in both King James and New King James texts and the reader is likely to hold one of them. Scripture quoted inside Dake's own material is his King James text and is reproduced exactly as he printed it.
↑ 13. I name no modern authority for this because none was in hand at drafting, and this book does not manufacture citations. The claim stands or falls on the passage itself, which is where the reader should test it: Matthew 19:25–26 supplies both the disciples' understanding of the saying and our Lord's own restatement of it. Readers who wish to pursue the history of the "needle gate" identification will find it discussed in most standard commentaries on Matthew.
↑ 14. This is the pattern documented across Part II, and it is why Appendix D exists: a table of the terms with Dake's own definitions printed beside the historic ones, so the swap can be seen in a single column rather than reconstructed from twenty chapters. The term "omnipresent" is used here only as the clearest illustration of the mechanism; the documentation and the answer belong to Chapter 9.
↑ 15. Finis Jennings Dake, God's Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, 1949; 1977 printing), 44, rule 14 of his numbered rules of interpretation (page per the embedded running heads in the resident file; the quotation falls between the head reading "44" and the head reading "45").
↑ 16. The numbered rules of interpretation are examined as a system in Chapter 4, which owns that material, including the governing sentence at God's Plan for Man, 782. My point here is narrower and is meant kindly: rule 14 is a sound evidentiary standard, and it is the standard this book has applied to his own notes.
↑ 17. Isaiah 55:11.
↑ 18. Dake, God's Plan for Man, 97 (page per the embedded running head in the resident file). The same passage appears, in substantially identical wording, in Finis J. Dake, Bible Truths Unmasked (Atlanta: Bible Research Foundation, 1950), 18–19, where the printed page break falls in the middle of the second sentence. I quote it here as an affirmation, not as an exhibit against him. Full context, since this book owes the reader that on every quotation it uses: the sentence immediately before this passage reads, "When a person becomes contentious over doctrines not plainly stated in Scripture, and that are contrary to Scripture, he is a victim of demon possession and demon teaching." I would not write that sentence, and I do not endorse it. It does not change the sense of the lines quoted above, which describe a real and admirable posture and which I have quoted approvingly. But the reader should be told what sits on the page just above them, so that no one can say the quotation was lifted clean out of a harder paragraph.
↑ 19. Mark 12:29–30. On the Hebrew word for "one" in Deuteronomy 6:4 (echad, "one, a unity"), on the person-and-being distinction the creeds use to hold every text together, and on the Athanasian Creed's flat refusal of "three Gods," see Chapter 7. See also 1 Corinthians 8:6.
↑ 20. Jeremiah 23:23–24. Compare Solomon at the dedication of the temple, 1 Kings 8:27: "heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain You." The full treatment of omnipresence, and of Dake's redefinition of the word, is in Chapter 9.
↑ 21. Isaiah 44:28–45:1 (Cyrus named); 1 Kings 13:2 (Josiah named); Matthew 26:34 (the denials and the rooster). Compare Psalm 139:4 and 1 John 3:20. God's own challenge to the idols, that they should foretell what is to come, is at Isaiah 41:21–23; the whole argument is developed in Chapter 10.
↑ 22. Matthew 8:2–3. Compare Luke 1:37 and Ephesians 3:20. On the difference between God's sovereign choice not to override a creature's will, which orthodox Arminians and Calvinists both confess, and the claim that God's power is naturally limited by that will, see Chapter 11. On the conditions-and-laws machinery of prayer built on top of that claim, see Chapter 18.
↑ 23. James 1:17; Hebrews 13:8. Compare Numbers 23:19, 1 Samuel 15:29, and Hebrews 6:17–18. The doctrine is carefully sized in Chapter 12: unchanging in being, character, purpose, and promise, which is not the same thing as a frozen or unresponsive God.
↑ 24. The creedal wording behind the first line is the Athanasian Creed, traditional English text: "we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance," and, a few lines later, "not three Gods, but one God." It is quoted at length, with its scriptural ground, in Chapter 7. Definitions of the remaining four terms follow standard Protestant confessional usage and are set out with their proof texts in Appendix E.
↑ 25. Dake, God's Plan for Man, Lesson Thirty-Four ("The Truth About Sanctification and Justification"), 625. The lesson-opening page carries no running head in this printing; the page number is fixed by the following page, whose head reads "626." The sentence that follows the quotation in the original introduces his numbered facts on sanctification, and his colon is replaced here with a period.
↑ 26. Finis Jennings Dake, Revelation Expounded, or Eternal Mysteries Simplified (Atlanta: Bible Research Foundation, 1950), preface to the second edition, unnumbered front matter, closing over the signature "Finis Jennings Dake." The em dash in the quotation is his. Revelation Expounded is an early work and precedes the Annotated Reference Bible by more than a decade; the Study Bible's own printing history is treated in Chapter 22 and Appendix C.
↑ 27. 2 Timothy 2:15.