152. Rethinking the Rapture

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Because it's clear that the Bible talks about this. It's clear that at a moment, we're all just gonna vanish without a trace like the

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Heaven's Gate cult. We're gonna leave behind a neatly folded pile of clothing with unoccupied dentures and eyeglasses and pacemakers and breast implants and any other plastic surgery enhancement that Peter won't let through the pearly gates.

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And they're all just gonna fly up to heaven like Iron Man to meet the Lord in the air. It's so clear.

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That's just what the Bible teaches. How do you not believe that, Kendall? It's really not that clear, actually.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 152,

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Rethinking the Rapture. Well, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast.

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For the last several months, we've been breaking down Matthew 24 verse by verse, laying the groundwork before we step into the book of Revelation.

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Now, if you're new to joining us here, you might ask why the series is on Revelation. Why aren't you in Revelation? Well, it's because Matthew 24 is a key.

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It is pivotal to understanding biblical prophecy. If we can prove that everything that is in Matthew 24 has already happened in the past, well, then we're well on our way to proving that all of Revelation has already been fulfilled.

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And today, we're gonna tackle another passage in Matthew 24, in fact, probably one of the biggest passages in Matthew 24, and which has resulted in one of the biggest myths about eschatology, which is the rapture.

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Now, before we dive in, I wanna give just a quick update on some things that have been going on in the podcast and in our world.

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Number one, the merch store is live at www .prodthesheep .com.

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Go there, check it out, and just like Pedro says, all your wildest dreams will come true. That's update number one.

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Update number two, for our Defenders and Prod Squad level memberships.

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Our new after -hours show, which is called For What It's Worth, is gonna begin this week.

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In that show, which may not be every single week, but we're gonna try to do it every single week. In that show,

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I'm gonna have a special guest on the show with me, whose name really needs no introduction, but he is the one, the only,

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Zander Graham Langford. He is a budding eschatology scholar. He's one of the coolest 12 -year -old production assistants that free money can buy, and he's gonna join me to discuss the first ever failed end -time prediction in church history, which goes all the way back to 68 or 69

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AD. So, if that were not enough, then we're also gonna look at a comment that happened on this channel that said that Trump is most definitely the

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Antichrist, which is crazy. We're gonna look at that. We're gonna have fun together. Hope you join us.

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If you wanna get access to that show, you have to be a Defenders or a ProdSquad -level member.

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It's a members -only show. It's there to help support the channel, for you to spend some extra time with us, to have fun, to laugh.

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It's gonna be great, so join us for that. Now, with that, let's get into today's episode, because for decades,

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Christians have been taught to believe that in one day, sometime in the future, in the twinkling of an eye, believers are gonna vanish like Captain Spock in his starship transporter.

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Their clothes are gonna be left behind. Planes are gonna come falling out of the sky. Chaos is gonna be erupting in a confused world.

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It's gonna be left in total chaos and panic. But is that actually what the Bible teaches? Is that what it says?

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Well, today, we're gonna tear this doctrine apart, piece by piece, and we're gonna do so from Matthew 24 this week.

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In a couple of weeks, we're gonna do a second part to this episode. We're gonna be looking at 1 Thessalonians 4, which is one of the flagship verses for the dispensational argument.

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And it's my hope that today and a couple weeks from now when we do that episode, that you're gonna see that this is not a biblical doctrine, that beyond a shadow of a doubt, the rapture is a made -up, foolish doctrine that does not comport with biblical theology.

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So with that, I wanna read our passage in Matthew 24, and I wanna look at the history of the dispensational movement for a moment, and then we will jump into some good, rock -hard exegesis.

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Here's our passage. But of that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven nor the

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Son, but the Father alone. For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah.

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For as in those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark.

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And they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away. So will be the coming of the

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Son of Man. Then there will be two men in the field. One will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding at the mill.

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One will be taken and one will be left. Matthew 24, 36 through 41.

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And that leads us to part one. You've been left behind. At the zenith of my choral career, circa the late 1990s,

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I was chosen out of my high school class to perform a solo in front of my entire

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Christian high school. And it was from a well -known rendition of a 1970s song by a group named

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DC Talk. And the song was, I Wish We'd All Been Ready, which is absolutely a dispensational anthem.

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Now, apparently the talent pool was a little shallow that year, or I was simply the overzealous poster boy that they needed to warn the world of the imminent rapture.

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Either way, I was given the unenviable task of alerting my fellow Christian school students, many of whom

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I guess could be called tares in the wheat patch, to repent urgently before they meet their eschatological doom.

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Now, the moment arrived, and with all of the vocal prowess of Peter Brady, I stepped forward to the microphone.

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Heart pounding, voice trembling, and somehow I quivered out the following warning by song. ♪

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There's no time to change your mind ♪ ♪ The sun has come and you've been left behind ♪ ♪

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I wish we'd all been ready ♪

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That's how it went. Now, if you don't recognize this cheesy song and its reference, consider yourself blessed and highly favored among men.

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You can find it on YouTube, but it is cheesy. But if you have recognized it, you don't need to see it again.

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I want you to take a moment to remember how cringey it actually was, but also how the ubiquity of the dispensational doctrine was everywhere in the 1990s.

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I mean, by far, the largest Christian band on earth in the 1990s and early 2000s was

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DC Talk. Their Jesus Freak album went multiple platinum. And here you have this wildly popular band with a massive platform who now every single member of that band has gone on to incredible solo careers, mostly

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Toby Mac, you probably know him, a massive amount of sales. Here you have this band performing a heavenly teleportation anthem about the rapture, which looks like, sounds like something that you would see in Stargate SG -1.

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People being left behind to face the future of guns and bombs and total global war, it was crazy.

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And nobody batted an eye at it. Everybody was just like, yeah, I wish they'd all been ready. Now, it's that kind of panic porn that dispensationalists produce.

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That's what they produce in their movies. If you remember Kurt Cameron in the Left Behind series, he's now a post -millennial, so it's all okay.

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But this song, the plays that you would see at church where everybody is like writhing and screaming and just all of it is this sort of panic porn media that they've produced in order to cause people to fear and to cause people to, instead of wanting to go through the tribulation to convert because it's some sort of a pain escapism.

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This view, however, contradicts numerous passages in the Old Testament that describe not the world getting worse and worse and worse and devolving into nuclear warfare, but it describes under the authority of Jesus that peace is gonna come to the earth.

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People are eventually gonna beat their swords into plowshares and their weapons of war are gonna become utensils of production,

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Isaiah 2 .4. How Jesus' kingdom is gonna spread until the entire world is filled with his peace,

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Isaiah 9 .7. How lambs are no longer gonna be killed by wolves at some point in the future under the reign of Jesus, Isaiah 11 .6,

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and how the people of earth are never, ever gonna learn the art of war again, Isaiah 2 .4.

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These passages that I just referenced are not talking about the eternal state when heaven ensues.

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They're talking about a time when humans are still growing old, humans are still dying, but the world has been enveloped with the peace of Christ.

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They are speaking about what's gonna happen in the here and now in this world and this life under the reign of King Jesus.

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But sadly, dispensationalism continues to pump and fuel this kind of pessimism that has destroyed the church.

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It's made Christians expect disaster. It's caused us to practice fear over hope, to adopt a loser mentality instead of one of victory, and it caused

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God's people to long for escaping the world instead of working in the world to build it and redeem it for the glory of God.

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And if you're wondering why I attacked this heresy with so much vigor, if you wonder why, oh,

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Kendall, why are you being so mean to the Dispys? It's because dispensationalism is not just a quirky eschatological belief that I disagree with.

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I don't talk about the Baptist. I disagree with the Baptist on baptism. I disagree with the

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Pentecostals on cessationism. I disagree with a lot of people on a lot of doctrines, but this doctrine is unique.

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It is a cancer upon the church. It is a poison that is seeped into her veins, and it has robbed the church of its vigor, of its life, of its joy, of its hope for far too long.

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And I have made it my life goal to see this doctrine purged from the ranks of Christendom because it is heresy, it is destructive, and it has no place among the people of God.

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And the reason I feel so strongly about this is because for years, this fear -laced fantasy of being raptured into the sky while sinners are staggering around in disbelief has been peddled like it's undeniable truth.

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And many people will talk to you, if you deny the rapture, they'll say, are you even a Christian? If you deny the rapture, can the spirit of God be in you?

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If you deny the rapture, you're some kind of idiot because it's clear that the Bible talks about this.

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It's clear that at a moment, we're all just gonna vanish without a trace like the Heaven's Gate cult.

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We're gonna leave behind a neatly folded pile of clothing with unoccupied dentures and eyeglasses and pacemakers and breast implants and any other plastic surgery enhancement that Peter won't let through the pearly gates.

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And they're all just gonna fly up to heaven like Iron Man to meet the Lord in the air. It's so clear.

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That's just what the Bible teaches. How do you not believe that, Kendall? It's really not that clear, actually.

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But they go even further. They say, of course, after the church is removed from the world, the spirit of God is removed from the world.

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And when that happens, chaos is gonna ensue. Pilots are gonna be evaporated mid -flight causing commercial airliners to spiral down like bombs to the earth.

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Unmanned cars are gonna careen over mountain vistas. Panicked crowds are gonna wander the streets searching for missing loved ones and fondling through the raptured people's pockets looking for loose change.

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Riots are gonna break out in the streets like the summer of 22. And just before the world rips itself apart, a handsome

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European antichrist is gonna step onto the world stage with a convenient lie to explain it all away.

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And then he, according to dispensationalism, is gonna bring about world peace.

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He is gonna end world hunger. He is gonna make the deserts bloom like gardens. And he is gonna be the one to end all war.

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Basically, all of the glorious promises in Isaiah about what Jesus is gonna do, they think that the antichrist is gonna do, which seems a little satanic if you ask me.

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But amid all of the mudslinging, anxiety -laden panic that they sling like ice in Albuquerque, many end up terrified, enraged, and always ready to escape.

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Always with their backs packed, never ready to get out their shovel and work. And for years, I believed this kind of garbage.

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That is, until I stopped drinking from the septic tank of Big Eva's publishing wing and actually started reading the

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Bible for myself, which is absolutely amazing because when you read the Bible for yourself and you stop listening to all the prophecy shamans and the end times prognosticators, then actually so much freedom and clarity actually comes into your life.

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What a simple thing if we would just read the Bible. So today, we're gonna be rethinking the rapture.

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We're gonna be actually reading the Bible and what it says. We're gonna be examining one of the sacred red heifers of modern -day dispensationalism, and we're gonna be determining whether or not that doctrine is biblical.

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And to do that, we're not gonna be looking through the lens of Tim LaHaye or Hal Lindsey or any other of the latest doomsday bestsellers, but we're gonna be looking through the lens of the

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Bible and seeing and seeking to discover what it actually says. Does the

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Bible predict a moment where billions of Christians are vanishing out of the blue?

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Or is this doctrine nothing more than a clever little lie inserted by the enemy to cause the church of Jesus Christ to operate from a posture of slothfulness and defeat?

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Is the rapture a heavenly dispensational wonkavator where an eccentric curly -haired messiah calls us up out of Earth's chocolate factory?

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Or have we completely misunderstood what the Bible is teaching? Now, before we can answer that question,

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I do wanna clarify for a moment what I actually believe. I don't want you to have to wait to the end to get to what

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I believe. So here it is. If you're a dispensational and you're watching this, here's what I believe. According to Scripture, Jesus will not return to rapture the church out of here.

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He will not evacuate his people and abandon the world that he bought and paid for with his own blood,

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Acts 20, 28, in order to leave it to defeat. He's not gonna be a derelict king who surrenders his dominion to a usurping antichrist.

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As the true and better Adam, 1 Corinthians 15, 45, he will not allow this world to spiral into the same kind of ruin that Adam did.

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He's the true and better Adam. He's gonna redeem it. He's gonna restore it. He's gonna subdue all things under his feet, 1

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Corinthians 15, 25. He's gonna subdue everything under his reign, Psalm 22, eight through 11. His kingdom is not a failing enterprise, but a growing mustard seed,

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Matthew 13, 31 through 32. It's a molecule of leaven that's gonna work its way through the entire lump,

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Matthew 13, 33. And it's a stone that's gonna grow into an entire mountain that's gonna fill the earth,

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Daniel 2, 35 and 44 through 45. Jesus is going to return, but he's not gonna return during a collapse.

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He's gonna return at the consummation of history, not to salvage a defeated church, but to receive a faithful church,

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Ephesians 5, 27, and Revelations 19, seven through nine. He will return after his kingdom has spread to the very ends of the earth,

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Psalm 2, eight. He's gonna return when his glory is declared among the nations, Isaiah 66, 18 through 19.

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When all peoples, all tribes, all tongues, all nations confess him as Lord, Philippians 2, 10 through 11.

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He will return when all of his enemies have been put under his feet, for he must reign until that great work is accomplished, 1

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Corinthians 15, 25 through 26. He will reign until every family on earth is brought under and into the blessings of God through the gospel of Jesus Christ, Genesis 12, three.

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He will return when the knowledge of the glory of the Lord covers the earth as the waters cover the sea, Habakkuk 2, 14 and Isaiah 11, nine.

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And he will return when the nations bring their obedience to him and their tribute to him, Genesis 49, 10 and Revelation 21, 24 through 26.

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And not a moment sooner. At his coming, the final resurrection will take place as both the righteous and the wicked will be raised for judgment.

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John 5, 28 through 29, Acts 24, 15, Revelation 20, 12 through 13. The living and the dead will stand before him, 2

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Timothy 4, one. Some are gonna be cast into the lake of fire where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth, Matthew 25, 41.

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And while others are gonna enter into his eternal kingdom, reigning with Christ forever in the new heavens and the new earth,

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Revelation 21, one through three. The meek are gonna inherit the earth, Matthew 5, five. The nations are gonna walk in his light,

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Revelation 21, 24. And for the increase of his government, there will finally be no end,

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Isaiah 9, seven. Christ is not coming to abandon his dominion.

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He's coming to bring it to its conclusion, to its glorious fulfillment. Victory belongs to Christ.

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All of that is true. And all of that is still in our future. But again, what is not in our future is a kind of peyote -infused theology disaster that dispensationalists have been selling to us and peddling to us for the last hundred years.

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The most popular end time fantasies peddled from pulpits and from publishing houses and from seminaries is nothing more than fictional fear -mongering masquerading as biblical prophecy.

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These kinds of books are great for sales. If you wanna be a Christian millionaire, then write a book predicting the end of the world and then fall out of the public eye when your prophecies don't come true.

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These kind of books are great for sales, but they're awful for the soul. They've catapulted men like Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, Hal Lindsey and others into the multi -million dollar status, at the same time impoverishing millions upon millions of souls in the process.

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As they got rich, the church of Jesus Christ became poor. And as we've seen on this show for the last 16 weeks, so much of what they've said that's supposedly gonna happen in the future has already happened in the past.

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We've proven it. We've shown it line by line. We've brought the biblical receipts. We have documented it with the

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Bible, with eyewitness testimony from the first century. And to be honest, I believe that we've put out the most comprehensive view of Matthew 24 that exists anywhere on the internet.

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For weeks now, we've been working our way through Matthew 24 and what we have found is that every single one of the events that the prognosticators say that's in the future is in the past.

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The wars and rumors of wars, the rise of false messiahs, the famines, the earthquakes, the tribulations, the signs in the heaven, the abomination of desolation, the regular tribulation, the great tribulation, and even the so -called second coming.

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In Matthew 24, all of these events have already happened in the first 40 years of church history, which brings us to today's passage about the rapture.

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Matthew 24, 36 through 41. Dispensationalists love this passage. They cling to this passage.

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They throw it around like a teenage King Arthur wielding Excalibur. To them, it's proof positive that at any moment, believers could be snatched away from the earth.

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You could be watching this show and my headphones fall to the ground because we are just upon the precipice of a rapture, leaving the world behind, leaving them to be bewildered and wondering what happened.

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Was it aliens? Was it UFOs? Was it

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Bigfoot? Or was it God? Today, we need to figure out what

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Jesus was really saying. We have to set the record straight so that we can get rid of all of this foolishness that has infiltrated the church.

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And before we actually dive into an exegete in Matthew 24's text,

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I want us to look at some history. And then we're gonna open up our Bibles and then we're gonna prove this doctrine is false once and for all.

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But first, let us go to part two, the abomination of a dispensation, the rise of a heresy.

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Now for nearly two millennium, the church of Jesus Christ marched forward one battle at a time, one beachhead at a time with a singular undisputed vision of what history was going to be.

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They believed that Christ was reigning now. His kingdom is advancing today. And he would return once the entire world had heard the gospel.

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This was not a matter of debate. From the early church fathers to the medieval theologians to the

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Eastern Orthodox to the Roman Catholicism and later the reformers, the doctrine was clear that Christ's return was a singular, final and triumphant conclusion to a successful campaign led by the church to invade all the nations on earth.

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The notion of a secret rapture where the church is failing, a fragmented second coming and a postponed kingdom was not only absent from the church, but it would have been recognized as a totally alien and foolish doctrine.

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It would have contradicted scripture, church tradition and every major theological authority that has been speaking for the last 18 centuries.

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If I were to tell you that dispensationalism is an aberration of church history, what

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I mean by that is that it does not exist in the first 1 ,800 years of the church.

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It was invented in the 19th century. To suggest otherwise is to engage in historical revisionism, the kind that would have left good old

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Augustine scratching his bald North African head. It would have left Augustine rolling his Aristotelian eyes back in the back of his head.

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And it would have left Calvin writing a thousand page treatise so weighty that it would have sunk a ship in Lake Geneva.

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And yet here we are in the 21st century with millions of Christians believing that this is the only doctrine that's ever existed in the church.

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This is the unified doctrine of church history. This idea of an eschatological rapture, which is cockamamie.

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This is a doctrine that did not exist for 1 ,800 years, almost two millennium.

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It's a doctrine that's conjured up out of thin air by a man who is disqualified from even being in ministry.

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Let me explain to you what I mean. Where did this eschatological foolishness come from?

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Where did this eschatological ayahuasca come from? Well, it didn't come from scripture.

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It didn't come from the church fathers. It didn't come from the reformers. No, this theological hallucinogen was brewed up by one man, a 19th century sectarian whose name barely even registers outside of the halls of dispensational circles.

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And yet his influence has been massive. The man's name

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I'm talking about was John Nelson Darby. And what he unleashed upon the world was the 19th century equivalent to what

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Anthony Fauci unleashed in the 2020s. Oops, sorry, I said it. Except Darby's little mind virus was way more influential than the

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Wu Flu. And it lasted a lot longer than the Fauci Ouchie and done a measurable more damage than anything

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Senor Antonio ever concocted. For a moment, I want us to consider the history of this man and another man who have been influential in bringing this to the surface.

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So number one, let's start with John Nelson Darby. John Nelson Darby lived between the years of 1800 and 1882.

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He was a man at war with the church if you know much about his history. He departed from the

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Anglican communion not in a noble kind of way. No, he broke, not like the reformers who were striving for purity.

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No, he revolted against the church because he could not submit to his authority. He was a hothead, he was arrogant, and he was an anti -establishment sort of guy in a church that Jesus established.

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Now, unlike Luther or Calvin, who were trying to fight to recover the ancient faith,

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Darby was actually working to reject the ancient faith. His rebellion wasn't about reformation, it was about revolution.

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Now, Darby was born into a privileged home. He was educated at Westminster and at Trinity College in Dublin.

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He was ordained as an Anglican priest, but from the moment that he began his priesthood, which was brief, he started having problems.

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Early in his ministry, he displayed a growing distaste for structure and hierarchy, which

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I'm not arguing that the Anglican church is perfect, but that kind of attitude is certainly sinful.

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He saw their structure as barriers to theological convictions.

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His first conflict with the Church of England erupted over its role in the state. Darby believed that the church should be holy and totally separate from the political entanglements of the world, a critique that on the surface made him sound like that he was righteous, but it honestly just masked or unmasked his deep hostility towards institutional authority.

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The breaking point came when the Church of Ireland, which is a part of the Anglican communion, introduced reforms to loosen the requirements for conversion for Catholic folks who were coming into the

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Protestant world. Darby, who was ministering among the Catholic population in Ireland, was outraged, and instead of working to reform the church from within, he saw the reforms as compromise, and his reaction revealed something more than just doctrinal purity about him as a man.

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It revealed his contempt for ecclesiastical governance. Rather than engage with the system and seek to change it from within, he abandoned it altogether and left to establish his own work with no one actually to ordain him, so he self -ordained himself.

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In 1827, he broke with the Anglican church, but he didn't leave quietly. He declared the entire structure of denominational

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Christianity corrupt beyond repair, and he began preaching a radical ecclesiology, that the visible, organized church of Christ was going to be a failure on earth.

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That was a unique and novel view that Darby introduced, because all of church history said the church is gonna continue on.

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The church is gonna bring the gospel to all the nations. That's why missions has been such a powerful force on earth, because we believe as Christians that we're gonna take over the world.

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We believe that the gospel is gonna cover the world like the water covers the sea. That's why we send out missionaries, because we believe we're going to inhabit the nations with the gospel.

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We actually are gonna disciple them. We are gonna baptize them. We are gonna teach them how to obey

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God. Darby said, no, the church, it loses down here.

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To Darby, denominations were not branches of Jesus's kingdom, but they were obstacles to true faith.

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He dismissed ordained pastors as unnecessary. He dismissed the creeds and the catechisms as man -made contrivances that hindered the spirit of God, but his rebellion against the church led him to rebellion against Christian theology in general.

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Darby began to, in his basement, recast Christian dogma through his own mangled lens, inventing an entirely new theological system called dispensationalism.

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His system divided history into these fragmented dispensations, each governed by different divine principles that looks more like open theism than classical theism, where God changes his way of doing things from one century to the next, or from one epoch or dispensation to the next.

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Central to his system was the idea that the church was not

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God's original plan, but it was a parenthesis in his work with Israel, because Israel rejected

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Christ. The church, Darby taught, was a temporary anomaly that would soon be removed from the earth through a secret rapture so that God could finish his work with Israel.

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The church was God's plan B, not his plan all along. The doctrine, the secret rapture, was

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Darby's invention to solve the problem that his theology had created. It was to cover the holes in his stupid system.

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But the patch became its centerpiece, despite its total absence from all of church history, despite no theologian for 1800 years talking about a secret vaporization moment.

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Darby spread this idea through his writings, through his travels, particularly in America, where it became fertile soil among the revivalistic movements.

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In the same way that plants often grow best when you throw cow poop on top of them,

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American dispensationalism grew with the feces, mentally speaking, of John Nelson Darby.

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And his legacy is not one of a tremendous accomplishment. No, it's a legacy of a confused church, of a fearful church, and a defeated church.

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His ecclesiology taught Christians to despise the historic church, to despise the pastorate, and to despise denominations, and his eschatology taught them to expect defeat at every turn.

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And his theology, the rapture, has produced a culture of evangelical chicken littles who are always looking at the sky, wondering when they're gonna be zapped out of here.

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If Darby were a general, and he were giving a pep talk to the troops, he would encourage them to be cowards, to run away, to hide in their foxholes, and to lose the war on purpose, because that is our purpose.

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And the generations that have been downstream of Darby's puzzling thinking have done just that.

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They've followed the playbook, they've abandoned culture, they've acted like thoroughgoing losers, and is it any wonder that the church in the 21st century has experienced such great losses, because they've been asleep at the wheel.

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Now, the antidote to this, of course, is the Bible. And knowing what the

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Bible really says, but before we completely eviscerate this doctrine of the secret rapture from the text, we need to look at one more guy.

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Now, if you thought John Nelson Darby was unqualified for ministry, if his sort of sinful, arrogant attitude and his complete reinvention of theology were enough to get him canceled, the next guy, who

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I would argue maybe was even more influential in the American world, this guy is worse.

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And that man is C .I. Schofield. Cyrus Ingersoll Schofield, who lived from 1843 to 1921, was one of the most influential figures in spreading dispensationalism and making it the majority view in American evangelicalism.

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And, by the way, if it's the majority view in American evangelicalism, it's probably going to be the majority view in the world, because all the publishing houses are here.

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We're the ones that are printing the books. We're the ones that are writing the books. We're the ones that are marketing the books. We're the ones that are shipping those books to other countries.

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So is it any wonder that because the virus started here, we were patient zero, and it then spread to the entire world?

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But despite that accomplishment, I guess, of spreading bad theology to all the world,

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C .I. Schofield's life was marked by deception, by fraud, and by moral failure.

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And I don't say that lightly. To understand why his teachings are so dangerous, we really have to first understand the man behind the mask.

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So let's do that. Schofield was a lawyer. Not a bad thing, but he was not a good lawyer.

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He was a lawyer who gained his reputation as a con man and as a fraud.

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He was convicted, actually, of forging signatures, and he served time in jail for financial crimes.

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His life, instead of being filled with righteousness and filled with holy service to the

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Lord Jesus Christ, his life was filled with deception and manipulation. This man abandoned his wife and his children, and he left them in poverty so that he could go and become a preacher.

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Like, what kind of a man abandons his family and abandons his wife and his children to become a preacher?

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The Bible says that that man is worse than an unbeliever. So this man who has been so influential in dispensationalism is worse than a pagan because of the way he treated his family.

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What a shameful and disgusting man, and I have no qualms saying it. Despite his public image of piety, he lived a life of dishonesty.

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He was known as a drunk, and he was marred by financial scams his whole life.

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That's your guy. That's the guy who influenced dispensationalism more than anything.

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He's not a righteous pastor like Calvin. He's not a firebrand for the Lord like Luther. He is a dirty, rotten, financial frauding man who is unqualified to even touch the

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Lord's pulpit. That wicked man rose to prominence in Christian circles, not again through deep theological study or faithfulness to the historic doctrine of the church, and certainly not by living a life of holiness.

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He ascended the heights of Christendom through deception. He licked his finger, and he saw which way the wind was blowing, and through clever marketing tricks and the gullibility of an undiscerning congregation of people, he foisted upon the church

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Darby's theology, hiding it in the actual footnotes of the

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Bible. Schofield's greatest weapon was not his sermons and not his arguments, because he was not really that good at those.

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His greatest weapon was his pen. In 1909, he published the wildly popular

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Schofield Reference Bible, which became the primary tool for spreading dispensational fodder abroad.

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Unlike his predecessor, John Nelson Darby, who at least argued for dispensationalism through his debates and his writings and everything else,

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Schofield inserted the theology directly into the pages of the scripture and passed it off as if it was matter of fact, ipso facto, true.

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His footnotes taught readers to interpret the Bible through a dispensational lens, and he turned biblical prophecy into a timeline of doom and defeat.

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It became a wild bestseller. It was the Bible that you could buy at every Christian bookstore.

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I had one of these when I was a kid, a Schofield King James Reference Bible. And the readers who read his footnotes absorbed his ideas as if they were a part of the biblical canon itself, mistaking his flawed interpretations for actual divine truth.

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And through his literary sleight of hand, Schofield implanted dispensationalism into the soul of American Christianity.

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And then not long after that, seminaries, particularly Dallas Theological Seminary, became centers for this teaching, producing untold amounts of pastors more familiar with the end time charts than with historic creeds of Christendom.

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These pastors, along with Christian publishing companies, spread Schofield and Darby's pessimistic view of history, and they convinced a century of Christians that the church was doomed to lose.

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The world was inevitably spiraling out of control and into chaos, and a sudden rapture was our only hope, kind of like Wonka's golden ticket, and like the

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Oompa Loompa saying, I don't like the look of it. Well, now as a result, this doctrine has been catastrophic.

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Instead of hope and mission and the church filling the world with God's people, now the church has been filled with fear and retreat.

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Instead of fighting for the kingdom of God on earth, many Christians have been taught to daydream and to fantasize about leaving it.

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The doctrine has neutered the church, making it a cultural eunuch, castrating it, making it afraid and impotent, and that's not just strong language, it's true.

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Schofield's teachings have endured, not because they were true, but because they were well -marketed and they seem to fit well within the

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American psyche, which is always expecting calamities from our news cycles that are constantly selling us violence and mayhem and tragedy on a daily basis.

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We are the kind of people who crave that kind of message, and Schofield's legacy is a church that believed him, that traded in the victory of Christ for escapism, panic, and doom, and it all began with a man whose life was marred by sin, a woman hater, a child hater, a man whose hatred for his own family and kin and his love of deception and self -interest should have disqualified him from doing anything for the kingdom of God, much less publishing his gangrenous ideas as notes for the actual

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Bible. And like I said before, the way to beat this kind of heresy is to simply open up our

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Bibles and not look at his notes or anybody else's notes, but to look at the Bible and say, what does the

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Bible say? What does God say? And with that, I want us now to transition to the text.

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I wanna read it one more time, and I want us to understand what it means so that we can dive into it and end this doctrine once and for all.

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I intend today, not just to mock dispensationalism, but I intend to give it the

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Mike Tyson knockout, and we're gonna do that from Matthew 24, 36 through 41.

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This is what the text says. But of that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven nor the

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Son, but the Father alone. For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah.

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For as in those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking and marrying and given in marriage until the day that Noah entered the ark.

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And they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away.

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So will the coming of the Son of Man be. Then there will be two men in the field. One will be taken, and one will be left.

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Two women will be grinding at the mill. One will be taken, and one will be left. Matthew 24, 36 through 41.

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And that leads us to part three. Jesus was not a dispy downer.

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Now, the dispensationalists claim that Matthew 24, 36 through 41 supports a secret rapture.

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One's gonna be taken, one's gonna be left. That's what they say, but it's actually a gross misreading of the text.

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And it's imposed upon the text as an a priori assumption that occurs in their fanciful minds, but not actually what the text says.

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It's just simply wrong. It's a theological hallucination at best. It's a doctrine that's so foreign to Matthew 24 that it's laughable.

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It survives only by either sheer stupidity or sheer ignorance. For decades, prophecy -obsessed eschatology shamans have said this, that one's gonna be taken and one's gonna be left.

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There's no time to change your mind. The sun has come, and you've been left behind. But once you get past the pop eschatology fairy tales, and you actually look at the ones in this text who are left behind, and the ones who were actually taken away, what you realize is, is that it's the church that's left behind, not the pagans.

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And it's the pagans, not the church, who were swept away. That's the most hilarious part about this passage is that if you think that this is a rapture passage, then you have major problems because it's the church in this passage that's left behind, and it's the pagans that are swept away.

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And I've never heard a dispensationalist talk about a rapture of the wicked. They're the ones that say that the church is the one that's taken out of the world, but that's not what this passage says.

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In this passage, it's the rebels who are taken out of the world, not the church.

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Now, to prove that, because I'm not just gonna assert it, to prove that, I wanna look at a couple of different arguments from the text.

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Number one, Jesus does not switch subjects. The entire rapture dispensational framework hangs upon a false premise, a false assumption that Matthew 24, 36 makes a dramatic shift in Jesus' teaching.

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Now, most dispensationalists make that switch earlier, but there are some who say, no, no, no, no, no, no.

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Matthew 24, one through 35 is talking about the downfall of Jerusalem, which

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I would agree with, it is. But they say here in this passage, in verse 36, now

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Jesus is gonna switch to talking about the end of the world. According to some dispensationalists, Jesus has been speaking about the destruction of Jerusalem and all of those previous verses, but now when he gets to the phrase, but of that day and of that hour, no one knows, he's pivoting to discuss his second coming at the end of the world.

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Now, of course, this is nothing but pure fantasy. There is no subject change in this passage.

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There is no Jesus talking to former people and then clearly switching to latter day people.

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It's just not there. The day and the hour refer to the same overarching events that Jesus has been describing all along, the destruction of Jerusalem in that generation.

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For instance, let me give you an example of this. If I told you that a massive blizzard was gonna be coming to New England this weekend, which may happen,

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I don't know, but if I gave you all the evidence of that, all the signs to be looking for in the clouds, then you would know that I was not referring to a end of time catastrophe, but a near term event that was gonna happen in our lifetime.

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And if I were to take a little bit of showmanship and panache and I said, of the day and the hour that this event will happen, no one knows.

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Well, you would not intuitively say, look, he switched. He was talking about the snow and now he's talking about the end of the world.

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I guess now he's talking about the end of human history. You would have not done that. You would have rightly said, well, the snow is coming and he doesn't know if it's gonna be on a

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Tuesday or a Wednesday. He doesn't know if it's actually gonna start at five o 'clock a .m. or six o 'clock p .m.

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That's what we would have intuited from that statement. We would have connected it back to the snowstorm, just like the

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Jews of the first century connected the day and the hour back to the disaster that Jesus was predicting. You would not insert thousands of years into my words and they wouldn't have either because they were not morons.

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In the same way, the dumbest and stupidest possible thing that we could do in verse 36 is to assume that Jesus has abandoned everything that he just said to leapfrog his way to the end of the world.

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It just doesn't exist. There's no ambiguity in the text. Jesus is continuing a linear line of thought that has started in Matthew 24, 1 or even back in Matthew 23, 36 and he is not leapfrogging to the end of the world.

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He's talking about a temple that's gonna be raised to the ground and that the entire Old Covenant system, an

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Old Covenant world was going to be destroyed right in there before their very eyes and he's adding a crucial detail.

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He said while the signs are gonna be visible, while the judgment is gonna be imminent, the exact moment that it was going to happen, he was gonna leave it hidden.

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He was gonna let it remain hidden, which is exactly the same pattern of biblical prophecy of judgment that we see in the

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Old Testament. Jesus is giving signs that are gonna lead up to it. You have to have wisdom in order to see it, but he keeps the precise moment that the collapse is going to happen quiet and a little bit of a mystery.

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The prophets do this as well. They repeatedly warn of the day of the Lord, of the day of the Lord, of the day of the Lord against Israel and against other nations.

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And yet God leaves the exact date a mystery because many, and this is what

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God does, many who rebel against him will take his kindness and his waiting as weakness.

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They'll say, ah, the day of the Lord's not coming. Ah, the judgment on Jerusalem's not coming because Jesus didn't give the exact day and the exact hour, he allowed them to hang themself with the noose of their own making.

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They doubted him and they doubted him and they doubted him until destruction came. To foolishly claim that Jesus doesn't know when this event is going to happen is to be first and foremost, completely illiterate of the text.

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And I think it's also akin to blasphemy. What do I mean? Well, Jesus is the second person of the

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Trinity. He's God in the flesh, he's omniscient. He is not saying that I don't know when this is going to happen,

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I have no clue. It's some kind of crap shoot. It could happen now, it could happen 2000 years from now.

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I don't know the day of the hour, no one knows. That's not what Jesus is saying. That's not what the text has said.

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He's not saying that I don't know the millennium or whatever 10 ,000 years might be.

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He's not saying, I don't know this big grand number so that who knows when it could, that's not what he's saying.

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He says that he is not going to tell them the day or the hour that it's going to happen.

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He has just said in the verse right before this, we're in verse 36, in verse 34, which if you're doing your math is only two verses before this.

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He just said that all these things are going to happen within a single generation. So when he says the day or the hour, it is not known by him or by the angels in heaven.

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He's saying that it's going to be 40 years, but I'm not going to tell you if it's going to happen on a

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Thursday in 68 AD, or if it's going to happen on a Friday in 67. That is not

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Jesus saying, I don't know when I'm going to return, who knows. That's him leaving mystery in the passage so that those who hate him will not attach their faith to an exact number, which is what dispensationalists do.

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He's going to return in 1988. He's going to return in 2004. He's going to return in 2025.

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Jesus doesn't give an exact date so that all the fools who would believe the number instead of him would fall blindly into judgment.

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That's a far cry from Jesus not knowing when he's going to return. The text tells us he knows when he's going to return.

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He says it'll be one generation. The language of divine judgment in this passage is unmistakable.

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The timing is unmistakable. The suddenness of the events are unmistakable. And the fact that Jesus says he's not going to tell them the day or the hour means that he's going to leave the wicked off guard, that he was going to catch the wicked in their schemes, just like the generation in the days of Noah.

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They didn't know the exact time that the flood was going to begin. The inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah did not expect the fire to come down on them from heaven.

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The Jews in Jeremiah's time didn't expect Babylon to breach their walls. And the unbelieving Jews of the first century did not expect

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Rome to trample their city to dust, but it happened. And Jesus made the time period clear while leaving some aspects of it a mystery.

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Now, we need to consider what I think is the most powerful argument against the rapture in this passage.

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Because if this argument is true, and it absolutely is, then the rapture cannot exist in this passage.

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And there is a growing minority of dispensational types who now recognize what

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I'm getting ready to tell you, and they have completely abandoned this passage as being a rapture passage.

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I would say the majority of people still think this is a rapture passage. There'll be people who say to you, well, of the day and the hour, no one knows.

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One will be in the field, one will be taken, one will be left, one woman will be grinding at the mill, because women do that now.

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And one's going to be taken and one's going to be left. There are people, many people, the majority of people who still think this is a rapture passage.

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But I am telling you, if you get the point that I'm getting ready to share with you, it's over.

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It cannot exist. And that point is made in the phrase that Jesus says, as in the days of Noah.

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Jesus follows up his former statement with one of the clearest analogies that he could have given in all of the scriptures, the days of Noah.

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And yet, dispensationalists continue to invert this meaning to mean a rapture. It's amazing.

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The analogy is so simple and it's so direct that it can only be misunderstood by wild blindness.

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Let me explain what I mean. If Matthew 24, or 36 through 41 is about a rapture, then we have some serious theological problems, because Jesus says that it's going to be just like the days of Noah.

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So if it's a rapture, it's gonna be a rapture that's just like the days of Noah. Well, what were the days of Noah like?

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We should ask that question. Let me ask it a different way. Who were the ones who were taken away in the days of Noah?

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Who were the ones who were left in the days of Noah? It's important questions. Genesis 7, 23 explicitly states that the wicked were the ones who were swept away by the flood, not the righteous.

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So that this is a rapture, then it's the wicked who were swept away by it, not the good

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Christian people. So while Noah and his family, the righteous remnant were left behind, preserved in the ark, the pagans who refused to heed

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God's warning were the ones who were taken away. The pattern is unmistakable.

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And it shows up kind of all over the Bible. So this is just one example. The flood was not a rapture, but a sweeping judgment.

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And again, this is part of a consistent biblical theme where being taken away signifies judgment and being left behind signifies preservation.

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For instance, in Jeremiah 52, during the Babylonian exile, it was the wicked who were carried away into captivity while the remnant was left behind.

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In 2 Kings 17, it was Assyria who came in over through the Northern kingdom. And it was the covenant breakers who were taken away.

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And it was the few that were left behind who were preserved by God. Jesus reinforces this idea in the parable of the weeds and the wheat and the tares,

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Matthew 13, 30, where he says for his servants to gather up the weeds, to bind them into bundles and to set them on fire, which shows that they are being removed.

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But he told his servants to gather his wheat into his barn, showing that they were being left behind for a purpose.

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Luke's parallel passage in Luke 17, 26 -37 adds a little bit more clarity to this.

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Along with Noah, Jesus and Luke uses the example of Lot and Sodom. The wicked inhabitants of Sodom were swept away by the destruction event while Lot and his family were left behind.

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They were spared from the fire. The disciples ask, where, Lord? And what are they asking?

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They're asking Jesus to tell them, where are they gonna be swept away to? And Jesus says, in Luke, where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather,

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Luke 17, 37. The imagery, albeit grim, shows that those who are taken away are not the righteous church who is being raptured up to heaven, but it's the rebels who are devoured in complete covenantal destruction.

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The point could not be more clear and it completely dismantles the dispensational heresy.

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And it disallows Matthew 24 or Luke or any other of these passages in the Olivet Discourse from being among one of their proof texts.

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Because they say that this passage is talking about the rapture, that it's just gonna be like the days of Noah, right?

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The church is gonna be raptured. It can't happen. Because Noah, representing the church, was left behind and the wicked, representing the pagans and the rebels and the lawbreakers were the ones who were swept away.

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The rapture doesn't work in Matthew 24 because it's not talking about a rapture of the righteous, it's talking about a destruction of the wicked.

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Now, just for fun, if this verse is about a rapture, which we've already disproven, but if it were about a rapture that happens in our lifetime that you and I were gonna see, then why would

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Jesus use an analogy of a man working in the field and a woman grinding her wheat into flour at a millstone?

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Why would Jesus do that? If the dispensationals are right and he really does switch, he says, you know what?

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I'm done talking to this century. I'm gonna talk now to the 21st century. Then why didn't

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Jesus say something like, there's gonna be two men in a factory. One is gonna disappear right out of thin air while the other one is left making computer chips.

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Or two women are gonna be cooking in their state -of -the -art ovens. One is gonna float up to heaven like a vapor and one is gonna be left with a boiling pot of water.

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Why didn't he say that? Why did he mention that two men are gonna be working in the fields? And why did he mention that two women are gonna be grinding in a wheat meal?

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Those aren't common jobs in the modern world if we just so happen to know this. It actually seems like he's speaking to a people where the vast majority of men worked in the fields and where the vast majority, if not all of the women in the town had to go to the local millstone to grind their wheat into flour.

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He's using an analogy that applies to the vast majority of the people in his day, but not in our day, because it was about his day.

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This passage bears all the markings of an ancient text that delivered to ancient people concerning an ancient event.

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Not something that's concerning us in the modern world. Dispensationalists misapply the word taken to mean ripped up to heaven because they fail to understand the

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Hebrew pattern of judgment. In the Hebrew scriptures, to be taken away from the land was to be removed from God's blessing because the blessing was attached to the land.

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Under his covenant protection, his people would be safe and secure and left behind in the land.

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And it would be the wicked who were ripped out and removed. Jesus' teaching fits perfectly into the prophetic expectation that the righteous are left behind and the wicked are removed.

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And it fits perfectly into the post -millennial hermeneutic of victory and expansion.

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The wicked are the ones that Jesus is gonna remove. The righteous are the ones who are gonna be given dominion and inheritance on the earth.

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Noah stayed behind, left behind, to repopulate the world. Lot remained to repopulate his region.

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The remnant of Israel remained to rebuild the nation of Israel after the exile.

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The church through Jesus Christ remains to fill the world full of the glory of God as the water covers the sea,

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Habakkuk 2 .14. Again, if we are thinking in biblical categories, then we should not want to be raptured.

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We should wanna be left behind because it's the righteous who are left behind to do God's work. And it's the wicked who refuse to do

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God's work who are taken away. And that leads us to part four, tying up a few loose ends.

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Now we've now come to the moment where we drive the final stake through the heart of this eschatological zombie.

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The dispensational rapture is a theological fabrication, as we've proven.

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It is a doctrine completely invented in the minds of people who didn't deserve to even be in ministry in the 19th century.

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And instead of coming out of scripture, instead of being exegetical, it is eisegetical.

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It is imposed upon the clear teaching of scripture. It is superimposed by their own anxieties of the state of the world and not the state of what the

01:00:08

Bible actually says. But there's a few more loose ends that we need to tie up before we conclude today.

01:00:14

And the first one is dispensationalist, big fat Greek problem. If you want to be taken, you're asking for destruction.

01:00:24

We just talked about this. You are begging to be swept away in judgment. You are not raptured into paradise.

01:00:29

You were removed in wrath. That's what the theology of the Bible actually says.

01:00:35

But it's also what the linguistic evidence points to as well. For instance, the Greek word for taken is paralambanatai.

01:00:43

I think I'm pronouncing that right, paralambanatai. And it's the same term used when

01:00:49

Pilate took Jesus and handed him over to execution. Jesus was taken and handed over to destruction,

01:00:57

John 19, 16. This is not a word for salvation. It is not a word for being spared.

01:01:04

It's a word of being handed over to destruction, seized for a moment of wrath, which is exactly what

01:01:10

Jesus was undergoing. Now, the second word here, the word left, afiemi, means to be spared and to remain safe.

01:01:20

The ones who are left behind are the ones who are safe. And the ones who are taken are the ones who are going into destruction.

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In Tim LaHaye's world, the guy who wrote the Left Behind series, which by the way, was the first Christian books I ever read.

01:01:35

Thankfully, I started on such a low level that by God's grace, I could improve upon such a thing.

01:01:41

But in his world, it's the ones who were taken who were blessed and the ones who were left behind who were cursed.

01:01:48

That's not what the language of the Greek says. That's not what the theology of the prophets say. That's just not what

01:01:53

Jesus says in the parable of the wheat and the tares or anywhere else. It is a total fabrication.

01:01:59

And these men should have known better. They should have known better. That's the first loose end that I wanna tie up that we haven't covered so far is the

01:02:07

Greek language disallows it. The word means that devoted to destruction, and they were.

01:02:13

The Jews of the first century were devoted to destruction. They were the ones who were taken away. The church was left behind.

01:02:19

That's the first thing. The second is the great escaped mindset is a lie.

01:02:24

And we've covered this a little bit already. But dispensationalism, where it's done the most damage is it's turned the church into a people who are waiting for an escape instead of working towards victory.

01:02:34

It's convinced Christians that history belongs to the Antichrist instead of the real Christ. It has neutered the church's mission.

01:02:42

It's convinced an entire generation to sit down on their tails and wait for someone to rescue them.

01:02:48

And instead of laboring in this kingdom that Jesus has called us to labor in, we've buried our talents in the sand.

01:02:55

And I think this generation will be the one that has to endure the beating when the master returns.

01:03:02

The irony of all of this is that while they accuse us of not reading the

01:03:08

Bible literally, they have missed the literal truth that's in the Bible. Instead of laboring in the kingdom, they're the ones who refuse to fight.

01:03:17

They're the ones who act like the church is going to lose. They're the ones who have abandoned hope for panic.

01:03:26

Brothers and sisters, that's not the gospel. The reason why the Bible says fear not 365 times, apart from it being a coincidence of how many days there are in the year, is that we are a people who like to fear.

01:03:42

We are a people who are prone to fear. We are a people who are given over to our anxieties and our fears.

01:03:50

Dispensationalism doesn't call us to abandon our fears. It calls us to live in them. It causes us to sit in them, to expect them.

01:03:59

And it monetizes people who write about them. Again, that's not the gospel.

01:04:06

That's not biblical eschatology. That's a theology for quitters. And I'm sorry,

01:04:12

Jesus just doesn't talk that way. That's the second thing. The third thing is, it's time for us to wake up.

01:04:20

Jesus isn't coming back to rescue a defeated church. I am telling you, unpack your suitcase.

01:04:29

Stop waiting for Jesus to zap you out of here. He is returning when we finish the job.

01:04:36

The church is not an intermission in a Jewish world filled with Jewish history.

01:04:42

We are the Israel of God. The church is the Israel of God. We were the ones that were grafted into this great people that's past, present, and future, from the

01:04:51

Old Testament all the way to the very end. We are children of Abraham because of faith in Jesus Christ.

01:04:56

And because of that, we are the main event. We're not the sideshow until the

01:05:03

Jews can get back on the stage and take history to its conclusion. We are the main event.

01:05:09

We're the ones that are gonna advance and march ever onward. And the gates of hell aren't gonna stand against us.

01:05:14

We're the ones that are gonna see the gates fall as we march onward. Shout on, pray on, we're gaining ground.

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Glory, hallelujah. We're not the ones who are meant to escape history. We're the ones who are meant to write it.

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We're the ones who are called to disciple all the nations, to bring every thought captive under Christ, to push back the darkness, to build, to conquer, to expand

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Jesus's domain until the entire world is filled with his glory. So my question in all of that is what are you doing about that?

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Are you waiting to be raptured? Or are you fighting for the kingdom of God?

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Are you burying your talents in the sand? Or will Jesus find you working? These are such important questions because I honestly, let me just say it this way.

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Two terms of Obama and one term of Joe Biden is evidence to me that the church has not done its job.

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Do you know they used to refuse to inaugurate a president if inauguration day fell on Sunday?

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It's actually happened where the president would not be inaugurated because it's the Lord's day. That was a president of the

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United States who was so immersed in a Christian culture that he refused to be inaugurated until Monday.

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The reason the world of our world, America, is in such dire straits, the reason that there are lime -haired lesbians, the reason that there's so much confusion, the reason why there's so many mothers murdering their children, the reason why sexual deviancy is on the rise, the reason why all of these things are occurring at the level that they're occurring is not because the world is just so bad.

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Yes, of course they are. The reason though is that the church 100 years ago that was fully invested in being the salt and light of the world left.

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They threw a middle finger to culture and they said, we're gonna wait on our rapture. And guess what?

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While we let them to their own devices, it rotted. I mean, what do we think?

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I've used this example many times. Let's say that I wanna cook a steak and I decide the best thing that I could do is leave it out on the counter for a week and then

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I'll come back and see what happens. It turns green and rancid and maybe it's filled with maggots and worms.

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Like, it stinks, it rots. That's what it does when it's not under the power of refrigeration or the power of salt, which is a preservative.

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My point is this. Why do we as Christians get to complain about the world and say, oh, look how bad it is when we refuse to engage it, when we refuse to be salt and light, when we refuse to actually bring the gospel to them and help them?

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The world is as it is because of us. Stop pointing your fingers at the trannies.

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Stop pointing your fingers at the doddering politicians who don't know their head from a hole in the ground.

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Stop pointing your fingers at Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and George Soros and all of these other wicked people.

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Of course they're wicked. But where are you? Did you engage?

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Did you get involved? Did you start businesses? Did you get involved in politics?

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Did you do anything whatsoever to make sure that this world didn't go that route? And if not, repent.

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Because we're going to be here until we obey what Jesus said.

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We're gonna be here until the whole world has heard the gospel. The whole world has come under the glorious gospel of Jesus.

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His obedience fills the earth. We're gonna be here until all the promises of God have been made true.

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So we may as well get to work. And that leads us to our conclusion. Conclusion.

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Jesus is going to return one day, but he's not gonna return to vaporize his church in some

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Darby -inspired sci -fi escape plan. He is gonna return. And he is gonna judge the living and the dead.

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He is going to consummate his reign. He is going to establish his final and full victory and his full kingdom over the earth.

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But there will not be a secret rapture. There will not be some great Houdini -style vanishing act.

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There's not gonna be a pause in redemptive history where the forces of darkness get to play king of the hill for seven years while the saints sit in the clouds twiddling their thumbs.

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That is theological stupidity. It is theological cowardice. It is a lie that has neutered the church for generations.

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And it is not from the mouth of Christ. When Christ returns, it will be to usher in eternity.

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He will not bring war. He's gonna bring his perfect peace. He will not rescue us from the clenches of defeat, but he will perfectly usher us into his full and perfect victory.

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That is the future that we are looking forward to. And that means we have a lot of work to do before we get there.

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Today, we are a generation that has been presented with an incredible opportunity to repent of the sins of our forefathers and our foremothers and to begin to build, to build churches, to litter this country with churches that one day men and women will fill to the brim, to build marriages, to build families, to build legacies, to build

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Christian businesses, to build godly stores of wealth, to build Christian politicians that will run for president and run for governor and run for city select board and all of that, to build cities that bow the knee to Jesus Christ, to build counties that call upon the name of our

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Lord, to bring commonwealths under the Lordship of Christ so that they're no longer filled with sanctuary cities for trannies like one of our cities in Massachusetts just announced that Worcester, Massachusetts is gonna be a sanctuary city for trannies.

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No, under the Lordship of Christ and under the work of his church, now we're not gonna create sanctuary cities for sin, but we're gonna create sacred geographies that are filled with the presence of the glory of God, that are underneath the banner of the

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Lordship of Jesus Christ. The church, that's her job. The church's job is to equip the saints for the work of ministry.

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Where's the ministry? In your home, in your town, in your country, in your job.

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The church is the body of Christ. The church is his bride on earth.

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It is his weapon of war and we don't use nuclear weapons and AK -47s. We use prayer and fasting and the reading of scripture, the fruits of the spirit in order to wage war against hell so that all the gates of hell fall down.

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So the question that I'm gonna ask you is what are you doing with your time?

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What are you doing with your life? Are you waiting to be beamed up like a

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Star Trek Extra? Are you burying your head and your talents in the sand because you think that this world is beyond hope?

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Or are you using every second that you have been given by God, every moment that you've gotten left, every breath in your lungs, from the moment you wake up in the morning until the moment you go to sleep, are you using it in your world, in your place, in your job, in your family, in your life to build his kingdom where you live and where you work and where you play?

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Brothers and sisters, do not wait for permission. Stop waiting for a sign.

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The call of God has been issued 2000 years ago. The trumpet was blown then.

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The mission is clear. Go into all the world and make disciples of all the nations.

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Crush the works of the enemy. Crush the works of darkness wherever they still tarry.

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Take every thought captive to the glory of Christ. Advance his kingdom until every knee on earth bows and every tongue on earth confesses that Jesus Christ is

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Lord. Are you in? Are you gonna be a part of that mission? Are you gonna stand before the Lord of glory and him say to you, well done, my good and faithful servant?

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Or are you gonna get the beating of the servant that because he was afraid, buried his talents in the sand and did nothing for the

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King of glory? Don't cling to eschatologies of surrender. Cling to hope.

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Because as for me and my house, we are gonna serve the Lord. We are gonna refuse to surrender.

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We are gonna refuse to retreat. We are gonna refuse to let a little lie that has robbed the church of its power and its glory continue under our watch.

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The victory is now. The only question left is whether you and I are gonna be the generation that lives in the victory of Christ or we sit sidelined in the despair and defeat, waiting for an evacuation that will not come.

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Brothers and sisters, it's my prayer that you and I would get involved, that we would build, that we would fight, that we would feast, that we would laugh, that we would push the kingdom forward, making disciples, changing our cities, changing our families, changing our culture, refusing to sit still because we have work to do and we have more winning to do.

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If you wanna support this channel and the work that we're doing to advance the call of Christ, then check out the new merch store at www .prodthesheep

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.com because literally I view every single item that we put on that store as a bullet fired in the battle that I've just been talking about.

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I want you to go check it out, pick out something bold, something that lets the Lord know and lets the world know that you're not afraid, you're not a disbey downer and help me reach more people.

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But do it yourself, start new things, build new things, tell people about Christ, disciple your neighbor, let's do it.

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If all of us work as hard as we can possibly work for as long as we have on earth, don't we believe that the world would be transformed by such a work?

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It starts with your relationship with God. Spend time with him, get to know him, love him, worship him, and then remember that all of your life is under the

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Lordship of Christ. So take that worship, take that love, take that passion, take that devotion and then bring it to the world who needs the gospel now more than ever.

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So with that, let us end our time today. There is no rapture, but there's work to do.

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And until next time, God richly bless you and we'll see you again on the broadcast. Now get out of here.