105. Interview with Martin Selbrede (How the Bible PROVES Postmillennialism PART 1)

Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf.

This is episode 105, my interview with Martin Selbretti, part one.

Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf.

My name is Kendall and this is a very special episode today where we're talking to Martin Selbretti, who is the vice

president of the Calcedon Foundation, senior researcher for the organization's

ongoing work of Christian scholarship.

He's written numerous articles, essays, position papers for faith, for all life, Calcedon

Report, the Journal of Christian Reconstructionism, and I'm probably missing some, but that's what the Google told me.

Beyond your professional life, brother, I know that doesn't encapsulate all of you.

Who is Martin Selbretti?

Well, I'm just a Christian who takes seriously the whole Word of God, the whole counsel of God, and I

think every single iota of it, every jot and tittle is important, and I don't plan to

soft pedal any of it.

I think all of it needs to be pedaled to the metal.

So that's my view, is that we don't apply the whole Word of God, and I think we're called to do that, and I think Paul makes it

clear the only reason that he's guiltless of the blood of any man is because he has not failed or shunned to proclaim unto

them the whole counsel of God.

I think when you dig into the whole counsel of God, you find the truth, and I think that truth is laced throughout the entire

Scripture from Genesis to Revelation, and so that's kind of the mission, because

too many people have a truncated Bible.

You know, look, honey, we shrunk the Bible problem prevails in our culture, in evangelical

churches, and so snipping away at the relevance of the Scriptures means that you substitute

something else, and that's usually the counsel of man, and man's Word is always

provisional and is not infallible, and in fact it tends to be in rebellion against God's Word,

and so therefore it's big business to decline to take God's lead, God's commands, set them aside.

They're not for us.

We can make our own rules, and I think that's the essence of Genesis 3 .5.

So the Chalcedon Foundation, as we call it, that's kind of like our

starting point.

Genesis 3 .5 explains pretty much everything that's wrong with today's world.

Everyone wants to be a god and determine good and evil for themselves, and God's in the business of actually

reversing that entire transaction that took place in the Garden of Eden.

Yeah, that's so good.

I already know that we're going to be friends.

Just by the way you used honey, I shrunk the kids as a reference.

That was awesome.

Brother, I've been in a series right now called A Practical Postmillennialism, and our audience has been kind of walking through what does

postmillennialism mean, and to try to make that practical and try to make that helpful for everyone, we started

off in the first part of this by just kind of defining what the wrong views are, like

historic premillennialism, dispensationalism, amillennialism, and while we have a lot in common with amillennialism in some

ways, we did differentiate how they get this wrong, especially when it comes to the kingdom

coming on earth as it is in heaven, I think is a major deficiency in their view.

But I'm excited to have you on today because you're a Bible guy.

You're a Bible scholar, and I just want to sit back and have us hear the biblical case for

postmillennialism.

There's some other things I want to ask as well, but I think we should start there.

What is postmillennialism, and how is it the biblical view?

Well, it's really the position that the curse was to be reversed in time and history, that

does not remain for the eternal state for everything to be settled and rectified,

but rather the work of the Messiah was to lead justice to victory, which is the way it's put in Matthew 12 20.

He shall lead justice to victory, and that victory is here in time and in history,

not pie in the sky by and by, rather that the government of Christ is forever

expanding, which is kind of explicitly stated in Isaiah 9 7, of the increase of his government and of peace, there

shall be no end.

So you have this perpetually increasing peace and government of Christ that's penetrating the world like the

leaven, until at last by the power of it shall all be leavened.

That's the picture that Jesus himself paints in Matthew 13, that this leaven

apparently lost, it says, in three whole measures a meal, by the power of it leavens the entire thing.

Everything is completely penetrated, transformed, the point of leaven is to transform.

So we're talking about the transformation of the world, but by tools that the word regards as foolishness, the gospel,

right, the preaching of the gospel, and yet it's the power of God unto salvation, and so we're saying that the Holy Spirit

is competent to convert the entire world.

He was sent to convert the world, to convict the world of sin and unrighteousness, and our view is that the Holy Spirit is able

to do this, and was sent to do this, and in fact Jesus, when people say, well Jesus has to come back, Jesus had a different attitude.

He says it's expedient for me to go and him to come, because he's got a big job to do.

He's got the worst job of all.

He has to dwell inside sinful, filthy people whose hearts are corrupt, and convert them, and

lead them into all truth.

So there's a mission of the Holy Spirit going on here, and so it's really a doctrine of the Holy Spirit and his work in the world.

He's being poured out upon all flesh, and that process has not yet been exhausted.

It's not exhausted until the Holy Spirit has been poured out upon all flesh, as Joel predicted, and Peter appeals to the same

thing in Acts 2, and that process must continue until it has no more, no one

else to pour on.

So you get to the point where the new covenant, as Jeremiah puts it, no man need tell his neighbor, saying, know the Lord,

for they shall all know the Lord, from the least to the greatest, and upon their hearts the law of God is written,

law on their hearts, law on their minds.

So the new covenant speaks about the law of God and the extent of the gospel transformation of this

world.

So when people say, no, no, no, this is not the time for these things to happen, they invert it.

They say, Jesus needs to return, and I think this is a mistake.

This is an insult to the Holy Spirit for openers.

When we say, down here we lose, which a famous pastor has already asserted the same thing, post -millennialist

says, no, down here we win, and we're supposed to win.

We're more than conquerors, in fact, is the phrasing used in Scripture.

Hardly less than conquerors.

That's not going to cut the mustard.

So we need to move forward without apology and with confidence.

It does not matter what you see.

You see, that's the problem.

Post -millennialism, obviously, is a doctrine that says we walk by faith because you're

not going to see it.

We're in the middle of the stream, and that stream is, you can't tell and see the end of it except if you're

in faith.

Scripture teaches that this is going to end in a victory.

So if you look around you, you will get, like Peter, you look at the storm and the winds, you're going to start to sink.

But if you actually look at Christ and what he said he's going to do, he says, if I be lifted up out of the earth, I will draw all men unto myself.

Then that promise, you cling to it, you cleave to it, and you walk according to it, and you have faith that no matter what man

does, what God does supersedes it.

And God has set in motion something very, very powerful here in the world.

And for us to discount it and say, no, the Holy Spirit's not going to cut it, we're going to have to yank it out and start all over again.

In fact, that's the whole point of the dispensationalist system, is to pull the Holy Spirit out as a failed experiment, just to grab

a few brands from the fire, as they say, quoting Zechariah 3.

So yeah, we need to rethink this.

Post -Modernism is really an eschatology of hope, that in this world, the work of Christ

continues until it has its full effect.

And that full effect is described in Scripture over and over again, in the Old Testament and the New.

Behold, all the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdom of our Lord and his Christ.

And that's in Revelation 11, 15.

It's blatantly obvious that this is the end game that we're heading toward.

And we'll get into some more details how this plays out in Isaiah 19 and other locations in Scripture that

target and describe exactly what's coming down the pike.

Now, I can't tell you if it's next week or next century, but I know for certainty it's coming.

And the Post -Modernist therefore has faith that the promises of God have not run out, that they're still rich and full

and in process of fulfillment, regardless of what we see.

It does not matter what we see.

You know, Abraham did not stagger at the promises of God, did not consider his own body

though dead, as the Scripture says.

He did not take into account the things he could see and feel and touch and measure.

He went by what God said, and that superseded and trumped everything that you could see, measure, and feel, right?

And so our opinions aren't relevant.

What's relevant is what God's Word says.

I don't care what the newspaper says.

Newscaper says things are going to hell in a handbasket.

I imagine they are because we've departed from Christ.

Does that mean that's the end game?

No, it means God's going to do what He's done all the time.

He starts a new work wherever He needs to do it.

You know, light might come into Africa before it comes into America.

God is of the mind to do exactly that.

In fact, that's what happens in Isaiah 19.

And it happens, lo, we turn to the Gentiles, Paul said.

There was a sudden transition.

You know, we're not going to spend any time with folks who don't want the gospel.

And there's a reason for that, because it's described as a process that is predicted.

In Isaiah 19, among other places.

So just to clarify, just as we get started, the postmillennial hope starts with God

creating a good world that falls into sin, and He's not going to finish with this world until

He has fully redeemed it in Christ.

Is that a fair summary of.

Everything you said?

Yes.

And I should preface this to say, when we talk about the world, we're talking about the world of living men,

living creatures, right?

Too many times people, you see, the Hebrew view is once you leave the world, you're not part of the world anymore, right?

You're in the world, some other place, but you're not here.

And you might be in Abraham's bosom.

You might be on the cross, the chasm from there as the rich man found himself.

But nonetheless, you're not in this world anymore.

So we're saying in this current world where people live

and and it's a slow long centuries after century process by the Holy Spirit

being poured out on all flesh.

And that's the victory.

It means that the gospel, the great commission will succeed.

That's the point of postmillenialism.

It's not a fool's errand.

It's not a hopeless thing to do.

It's not just kicking against the goads.

It's not pointless.

And it's consistent with Scripture too.

We're not told to say, do this until you don't think you're getting any result.

In the Hebrew understanding of the notion of a world, it's the world of the living.

So when we talk about the world, we're not talking about every single human being that ever lived.

We're talking about those who are living on the face of the world at the time, at the end of history and what their

destination is going to be, what their destiny is.

So that's important distinction to make, because if you don't make that distinction, you can end up in heretical

areas, which we don't want to do.

I mean, there's a reason why it's a faith once delivered to the saints, and we don't want to compromise it in any way, shape, or form.

But neither do we want to bend it to match our expectations.

What we need to do is bend our expectations to match the Word of God.

And that's why we use the example of Abraham, who staggered not at the promises of God and did not consider his own body though

dead.

And Sarah, 90 years old, et cetera, these things were non -issues to him.

They should be non -issues to us.

Because when you start to say, well, look at this problem and that problem and these issues, and how will we ever solve that?

You're just telling me that there are problems here that God is not capable of solving?

I hate to tell you this, but those are exactly where God operates, in the sphere of the impossible.

That's why He's God, and we're not.

And if He says He's going to conquer all these things, it's to our lack of credit that we disagree with Him or disbelieve.

And that's what it is, disbelief.

It's much easier to believe in, say, a premillennial notion that things are going worse to worse, because what happens?

We're off the hook, right?

It's actually a counsel of irresponsibility.

It's despair, but it's also irresponsible.

I'm off the hook.

Down here we lose, so we don't expect to win, so we don't even position ourselves to win, right?

Because, boy, that would not be presumptuous of God sending everything into the furnace, and why would we want to pull anything out of it?

God wants to burn it all to the ground.

But He doesn't.

He came to redeem it.

He doesn't come to condemn the world, but through Him the world might be saved.

We read this in John 3, right after the famous 3 .16, come these assertions about Christ being the Savior of the

world.

And we need to take these terms seriously.

And it's going to be the world that's going to be saved, maybe not the world that we're seeing right now in the year 2024,

but ultimately the world will be saved.

And those who die in their sins stay in their sins, and they have eternal judgment

that they've richly earned, and which they didn't have any grace from God to supervene.

But that's the problem.

You need to understand that this has to be a scriptural idea.

Do not be looking at world events, because that is a distraction from

Scripture.

As Manuel said, the newspaper does not have a prerogative to question and correct Scripture, but the Scripture has

the prerogative to correct what the newspaper says.

Besides which, now we've realized a lot of newspapers are lying in the first place about a lot of things, because they have agendas.

And perhaps one of the agendas is to derail Christian activity, because if Christians are serious about the Great Commission,

then they're going to be teaching all things whatsoever Christ has commanded.

And that conflicts with the agendas of the humanists, who have a different idea of what should be commanded of you

and me, as opposed to what Christ commands us to do.

And besides which, Christ is actually here to release us, and liberate us, and free us, and proclaim liberty throughout

the land.

And that's kind of what's going on, is that there's a release from the curse that's going to be occurring over time.

And Post -Modernism takes that seriously and says, it's the work of the Gospel and the Holy Spirit transforming the

world that causes lifespans to increase, that causes the changes that are apparently there in

effect in Isaiah 11, in nature.

And so those things are on target.

You can spiritualize them away, but then at that point, what are you left with?

Well, I guess you're left with only the Scriptures you are willing to grapple with and accept.

And that, of course, it's a smorgasbord approach.

I will believe what I choose to believe.

It does not mean thy will be done, it means our will be done.

And I think this conflicts with Scripture so resoundingly that God is simply going to overrule it.

Let me ask you this on top of what you just said, because that's a really good point.

But I almost have more frustration for the translation committees

who brought some of these ideas into English.

For instance, we were doing a Bible study last night, and we were on the book of Zephaniah, and I pointed out that

the word earth in the book of Zephaniah, I think it's Zephaniah 1 or 2, I can't remember, but the word

earth there doesn't mean the globe that we consider like this heliocentric thing that's

glowing in tow with the sun, it means the land.

And Zephaniah is prophesying that all of the people of the land who have been

covenantally unfaithful to God are going to perish, not every human being on earth, as the dispensationalists say.

Revelation 1 has this poor translation in English where it's all the

tribes of the land, not all the people on earth.

Oikamene is used in Jesus' Olivet Discourse.

You've got these words that come into English just as world, with no explanation, and

I almost feel like that probably has hindered so many people from understanding a biblical concept of what.

These passages mean.

Yeah, that's an issue, because Retz in Hebrew and the words gi in Greek, et cetera,

cosmos, oikamene, sometimes the context tells you, sometimes the scripture

itself will say it, you know, if it talks about the isle shall wait for his law in Isaiah 42, this is

indicative of something bigger than Israel, right?

It's indicative that the far off parts of the world across the Atlantic Ocean, say, are in view,

but all those verses are very positive about what's going to happen with the Messiah, that he's got a worldwide

dominion that he exerts, and then he rules from the heavens to set it in

order, a right, according to his purpose.

Now, here's the flip side of that.

You can go down the wrong direction and actually take verses that do apply to the world and say, well, that's just Israel

saying, and so we don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so we need to be contextually shrewd

and say, well, how does, what is the surrounding context?

Is it indicative that it's a covenantal lawsuit against Israel?

Because there are covenantal lawsuits against other nations, Philistia, Tyre, Babylon, riddling the

scripture, so sometimes it's not just Israel that's in the view, but most of the time, those are pre

-AD scenarios that scripture is pointing out, and we need to take

that historically in context, and this is the problem, is that most people are workmen ashamed.

They don't like to think so, but we're told to be a workman approved, not ashamed, which means that we need to study to show

ourselves, right?

And one thing that we fall down on is study of scripture, and that's why eschatology, which is

probably the last thing people ought to study, the more complex things, tends to be the very first thing, and I call that looking through the

wrong end of the telescope, right?

At that point, if you do your eschatology first, then it can completely mutilate every other doctrine because it has

to then align with the eschatology because that's the end game, so I think it's important.

That's a great analogy.

Yeah, so we're told this, that there's coming a time when people will not endure sound doctrine.

What this tells me is that sound doctrine is something to be endured.

It takes some effort and work and mental capacity to do it.

Now, God expects us to do this because in Hebrews 5 11 and following, it says, for the amount of time that you've been studying, you

should be teachers now, and that was about a three -year period, arguably, in that passage, so after three years, you should be able to

teach scripture competently, but nowadays, we have what I call the perpetual kindergarten instead, where people are

continually being reverted back to the kindergarten and repeating it over and over every Sunday in church.

They're going to feed the lambs, but they never feed the sheep, so consequently, the pastor's pretty much going to have his way

when he wants to talk about eschatology because no one's been trained, at least in his church, to do anything other unless they decide to go rogue

and read books, and they might read a bit dispensational books.

They might read personal books.

Either way, they can be a thorn in the pastor's side because all of a sudden, we have people studying.

Now, in the early America, in the 1600s, sermons were

between four to six hours in length, and any pastor who said something amiss, someone would shoot up in the

pews and say, that's not correct, and he'll quote the scripture back to the pastor, so the pastors were always on red alert from their

own flock, and that was what they wanted.

They wanted a flock that was competent, not that it was moronic and had to

have baby talk all the time.

They were serious Christians.

They were trying to carve a whole civilization out of a wilderness and die in the process, many of them, so they took their faith

seriously.

They needed a world -changing, transforming faith, and they wanted the truth.

They didn't want a little bit of it.

If the pastor decided to walk out after an hour, they thought they were being cheated of God's word, and today, in 22 minutes, it's

the most you can sit on the cushion of a pew before you say, oh man, I got butthurt.

I'm going to get out of here.

Pastors are too long -winded, and of course, with some of the message quality, you have to wonder, was there anything lost by

leaving early, because we're not teaching the whole counsel of God.

We teach what keeps the money flowing into the coffers, and I think this is a catastrophe, and God's going to hold

pastors accountable for it.

They were charged with a sacred deposit, like Timothy received, and they were

supposed to protect it and propagate it, and not supposed to smooth talk their flock

with soothing words, and I think that's a problem, and post -millennialism is not welcome, because it talks about a responsibility

regarding the Great Commission that you are to go into in the entire world, and the entire world is, in God's eye, is the

object of our missionary efforts, and a mission starts at home, and it starts in the school,

and that is not the public school, but the Christian school, so all of a sudden, if you're post -millennialist, you find the post -millennialists are going to start yanking

their kids out of public schools.

Why?

Because they're not going to turn their children over Molech.

They believe that that position is inconsistent with Scripture, so post -millennialism is not just an

eschatology.

It also ends up affecting everything, because everything then becomes ordered around what?

The kingdom of God.

It says, seek ye first the kingdom of God.

It doesn't mean look in the skies for Jesus to come back, but to seek his kingdom and his righteousness, which is the word justice,

here, now, and implement it, and implement it by walking according to his ways, and that becomes a light

unto others.

You know, people will see the city on a hill, but most Christians are willing just to be

a damp spot on a pew, and I think that's.

A problem.

It's a catastrophe.

Let's differentiate those views.

You've got, like, let's not even talk about amillennialism for a second, because that's an entirely different breed,

but post -millennialism, pre -millennialism, look at the same passages and say, yes, that's going to happen on this

earth.

The question is when.

Why would you say that pre -millennialism, and let's just be fair in historic pre

-millennialism and maybe, you know, that group, but why would you say that that's wrong?

They've got the timing wrong, and that these things must occur on the.

Pre -second advent of Christ.

I think the reason that it's in error is because they put too much

stock in the power of the flesh.

They believe that the only way to contain man's sin is for Jesus to be here in person, that he

must rule in the flesh.

He must be sitting on that throne.

This is exactly where we get a problem in Scripture, the idea that this is even countenanced in the Bible.

I would say it's impossible, and I'll give you why.

First off, we have to acknowledge that the Bible is not a source of confusion.

God is not the author of confusion, so the Bible can't be a source of it, because he authored it.

We read the following things about the Messiah in Zechariah 6, 12, and

13.

It says, he shall build the temple of the Lord.

Even he shall build the temple of the Lord, and he shall be a priest upon his throne,

right?

Now, here's what's interesting.

He's a priest on his throne, and this is actually what Psalm 110 says also, right?

You know, he's a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek, so he's a priest when he's on the throne, so he's a king and a priest simultaneously.

Then you flip over to Hebrews 8, verses 4 and 5, where it reads that if he were on earth, he would not be a priest,

you see?

The second you put Jesus on earth, his priesthood is gone, because Scripture cannot be broken.

So he's not a priest on the earth, therefore he can't be a king on the earth, so putting him on earth de -kings him, de -thrones him,

de -priests him, and that's why his throne and his priesthood is exercised in heaven.

As long as he's in heaven, these things are not, the Scripture is not broken.

He maintains his kingship from there, the right hand of all power and authority, and his priesthood is exercised from there, where he can

present his blood as a sacrifice in the holy tabernacle in heaven.

So Scripture says no, if he were on earth, he wouldn't be a priest, and Zechariah says if he's not a priest, he's not a

king.

So their idea is the king has to come back, they said the second he shows up, he's not a king anymore, it's over, it's all over, he's dead in

the water.

So the doctrine has not thought through the Scriptures on these points.

I can understand why they say, why they would want the Lord back, heck, the disciples wanted him back right away too.

He said, no, I'm going away for a long time.

But I understand the heart of it, but they don't understand that Jesus sent another, because he says it's expedient for me

to go.

I need to go so that the Holy Spirit can do his work.

And his work is not just provisional, it's not just partial, it's not just a temporary stop gap, it's not just some

scaffold on the building before we blow the building apart, it's to rebuild the entire structure completely from

top to bottom.

And so the Holy Spirit is competent to do these things, he's omnipotent.

And that's why I think you have a defective view of the Trinity when you abandon, say, a post -millennial view of the power of the

Holy Ghost.

That's the one thing I think the Charismatics have absolutely right, they do not,

they're not in the position, or how we put that, they don't fear or despair that the

power of God through the Holy Spirit is inadequate for anything.

In fact, even Spurgeon made the comment, he says, the Holy Spirit would never suffer the imprecation to rest on his holy name that he was unable to

convert the world.

That's a powerful statement by Spurgeon.

Spurgeon kind of flipped between pre -mill and post -mill in his sermons.

He did some sermons on some of the Psalms, like Psalm 67, I think, and some others, where he outright says the entire world will be

converted before Christ returns.

Other times he talks like a pre -mill.

So he flip -flopped all the time, because he saw both sides, and he kind of, I'll call it as I see him, I guess I'm inconsistent, but

this verse seems to teach this, right?

When you get, say, listening to Calvin on the Psalms, comes off very post -mill.

Calvin in other places, he sounds very a -mill.

So the scholars used to be that way.

They say, well, today, I'm going to exposit the scripture the way that God's illuminating my thought on this.

So the upside is the Holy Spirit is competent to do this, and he was sent to do

these critical things, and for us to say it's not possible is to say the Holy Spirit is not omnipotent.

At that point, your trinity is shut, shuttered, right, and made of no effect.

You have basically insulted the Holy Ghost, which comes certainly short of blaspheming him, but boy, what a

horrible thing to do is say he's wimpy.

I don't hold to a wimpy Holy Spirit.

I hold to an omnipotent one who's going to conquer the entire world for Christ, regardless of what's resistance to him,

because we're talking about irresistible grace.

That's the point.

I suppose an Arminian would have a problem with this.

He'd say, well, of course grace can be resisted, and we can tell God to knock it off and beat it

and cast him out, but that's not the way it's actually going to work.

In reality, God is omnipotent, and none can stay his hand and say, what doest thou?

The Arminian says, we can always say, what are you doing?

Knock it off, and he has no choice but to stop, but the reality is nobody can tell God, what doest thou, and tell him to

stop what he's doing, and what he's doing is what he told us in advance, all the way from, say, Genesis

12, 3, right, that through his seed, Abraham's seed, the whole world would be blessed.

All the families of the world would be blessed.

That hasn't happened yet.

Now the preamble says it'll happen when Christ comes back, but let's even assume that was true.

Let's assume that Hebrews 8, 4, and 5 wasn't in Scripture and saying when he comes down.

Let's assume that Jesus is king, but the Scripture also says the following in Isaiah 2, 4, it says,

and a nation shall not raise up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war evermore.

What is taught in Isaiah 2, 4 is the permanent cessation of war.

Peace that never ends is, and we get the same idea in Psalm

72, I think it's verse 7, of the abundance of peace, the abundance of peace shall endure

until the moon be no more.

See, so again, these notions of perpetual peace and a war that does not ever happen.

So the cessation of war is taught in Scripture.

It's also in Micah 5, for that matter.

So we have this notion of no more war evermore.

But what does a premillennialist millennium end with?

He said, Jesus rules over the world.

For a thousand years, we had this peace, but then there's the greatest rebellion of all time.

We have this massive attack of Satan or Russell.

So these people had peace for a thousand years of Jesus, the world's best government ever, because it was Jesus himself

handling everything by himself, being the bureaucrat and the chief bottle washer, etc.

And now everyone rebels against Jesus, essentially.

And it's a massive war.

They gather themselves for the battle, it says, the Ptolemy.

That was war.

I know people have said, no, that's not really a real war.

Yeah, it's a war.

They're going to try to surround the camp of the saints at the investiture and knock it down, an act of

hatred, if you will.

So the millennium ends in a horrible war, it's an attempted war, just as they're

about to attack, fire comes down from heaven and destroys everyone.

So you have an incineration effect.

And so history, even under Christ, fails.

And the serious dispensationalists will say so.

Yeah, every dispensation fails, even the millennium fails.

So they have a doctrine of failure for all these consecutive periods of time.

Yeah, and the whole scenario.

So even if I had Jesus as king, you'd only be king

for exactly a thousand years, then his kingship is shot, because why?

No one, these people are not rebelling, they're rebelling against him.

They're trying to kill him.

They reject his kingship.

And so if he's not king over their hearts, he's not king at all, because that's the only kind of king he really is in that

sense.

So all those who he ruled so well and blessed with, they attack him, according to this model.

Now, I don't believe in the model, but the model requires this, that the millennium ends with a catastrophic war and

incineration of many millions and billions of people.

And that's apart from everything that they have already talked about in their alleged great tribulation on the world, which I don't accept that

either.

I think it's not biblical and not a proper understanding of those passages.

But here, on their own principle, they agree that the millennium of peace, that they say it's so important we have peace.

But why is it not perpetual?

Because the scripture says it doesn't end in a war.

There shall be no more war evermore.

Evermore is pretty clear to me.

And that Hebrew word is postposited at the end of that verse for emphasis.

So there's no confusion.

And it's also repeated the same doctrine elsewhere in scripture.

That's why he's the prince of peace.

And so for the prince of peace to end history with a war does not make any sense.

It's senseless, and it conflicts with scripture.

So I say he can't rule from Jerusalem on a throne, because he's not a priest.

But even if he could, he's not a fulfillment of any of these scriptures about the millennium, because

the millennium does not end with a war.

Because Isaiah 2 .4 says it's impossible that this should end with a war.

So when you say, well, there's a progressive revelation, you say, oh yeah, so God's correcting earlier mistakes that Isaiah made

over here with John on the island?

Nope.

There were no mistakes the entire time.

But you've assembled the scriptures to create the impression that there's a mistake that you need to fix up there at Dallas Theological Seminary with your

doctrines that I think, I surely believe, are maybe well intended, but are

erroneous.

You might be trying to do justice to this verse, sorry, this verse or that verse, but we need to take the whole counsel of God

into effect.

So for us to say these key verses about the blessing of all mankind and peace

that is total in extent and persistence, no more war evermore,

there are no weapons anymore at that point.

They've all been beaten into swords, plowshares, and pruning hooks, agricultural weapons, agricultural

tools for tending the garden of God.

Boy, what a difference.

No one's going to, they don't even conceive it.

They shall not even learn war anymore.

So how is Satan able to deceive all the nations in the four corners of the earth and they cover over the breadth of the earth?

This teaches in Revelation 20, seven to nine.

That, if that is at the end of the millennium that you guys have predicted, then Isaiah 2, four is wrong.

I mean, simply wrong.

There's not even discussion over it.

I know one dispensation tried to say, well, it wasn't really war because there were no shots fired.

It was just an attempt.

It said, but they weren't shot even to learn war anymore.

It's not just that maybe they didn't fire the first shot because Jesus incinerated them before they could, their intent,

right?

Murder in the heart was already there to kill Jesus.

Again, you know, he was bad enough.

He was crucified by the hand of man.

Now they're going to attack him with the biggest army ever assembled.

And this is your picture of God's kingdom.

See, I don't, that is not God's kingdom.

That's man's kingdom run rampant, but it's certainly not God's kingdom.

And it's not going to happen the way the premilionaires believe it.

Their sincerity in believing it.

I credit them for say, the Bible says this, therefore I'm going to believe it.

But the interpretation is faulty.

It's not the scripture that's at fault.

It's the interpretation.

And so many times the interpretation can lead us astray and make horrible political decisions, right?

We might say, well, A, B, or C, therefore we need to do such and so.

But if you're wrong about the interpretation of the scripture, then you've rested other decisions on a false

application of say, prophecy.

I think that's a, so you compound the error.

Whenever you get scripture wrong, which was intended to be a healing thing that aligns and straightens everything that's crooked,

you make things more crooked.

And I think premilionism essentially worsens the situation when it comes into play and affects

and influences our minds and our hearts to go in a certain direction and say, great commission is really going to be a fool's

errand.

We will not be able to teach all the nations whatsoever Christ has commanded because they won't accept it until Jesus returns

and fire and brimstone, et cetera, slaughtering hundreds of thousands.

So it's a sad picture that we have.

And it's usually because revelation, which should be more carefully studied than it is, has been, I think, grossly misinterpreted

in many respects.

Whether you seek it as belonging to the 70 AD era, as many do, or believe it extends over the entire

inter -advent period, as I do, either way, it does not lend itself to the idea

that the end is a catastrophe, that eschatology is, has a pessimistic outlook.

Rather, it's got a positive outlook.

Promises made to Abraham are yay and amen in Christ, and they're not going to be any backs

peddling on any of it.

Now, the timing might not suit us, but that's our problem, right?

We have to be like the pilgrims in America who are willing to be stepping stones to the next generation.

If we're not willing to be that, then God simply has to bypass us and let our bones bleach in the desert like those

Israelites who came through the Red Sea, but only two of that generation actually passed over the River Jordan,

Caleb and Joshua, the rest were unfit because they listened to all the

negative press about the, you know, actually it was called an evil report brought up against the land of Canaan by the ten

spies.

Only two spies were faithful, the other ten magnified and exaggerated the problems of doing things God's way, and lo and

behold, everyone believed the negative report, and what happens?

They get to wander for 40 years, and so Christians will wander for their equivalent 40 years if we continue to these negative reports

about what the kingdom of God will achieve and accomplish, and I believe it's laid out clearly in scripture.

What simply happens is that we mentally take in that scripture, and then we reroute it.

We position it in a certain place in a chart, and then that puts it away, so we don't

have to worry about it.

See, I remember I said the more irresponsible we can become today, the more attractive that's going to be.

Itching ears means we're kind of attracted to an idea, and that's why Spurgeon says the idea that

Jesus is not going to convert the world chimes in with our sluggishness, our slothfulness, right?

Yeah.

Our indolence, and so Spurgeon's right.

It's human nature to want to sit on a push and not do things, and the post -millennialist is counseling responsibility for

your family, for your community, for your nation, and that

we all have to cast our crowns before Christ, and the sooner you do it, the sooner you stop kicking against the

goads, and the easier it is, because the way the transgressors is hard.

That's why the nations are in such a mess today.

They transgress, and so God is not mocked what you will reap what you sow, and we continue to sow

rebellion and disobedience against God, and we also sow faithlessness, I believe, because of our

approach to eschatology.

So we would be better off teaching everything else but eschatology rather than teaching a bad eschatology that

essentially derails and disempowers the church in terms of its mission.

Then it has a different idea of its mission.

It's just that shrunken mission, truncated view of the gospel, and that's not going to be world -changing, right?

Right.

God's going to use someone else who sees it as world -changing.

He's going to use one man to reach India, and he's going to use this guy to reach China, etc., etc.,

if that's what it takes, but it's going to be the faithful men who do it, and if we're not faithful to

God's scripture, and worse yet, we bend it in order to justify our faithlessness, right?

That happened in Haggai, right?

They said, oh, it's not time to build the temple of the Lord, right?

But we have sealed houses.

We have houses with wonderful ceilings, and then God calls them and says, you refused to build my temple, my

house.

The timbers, foundation timbers, are sitting there rotting in the rain, but you took care of all your own personal houses.

My house is rotting, and that's how it is today.

We're taking care of our own personal houses, but we're saying it's not the time to build God's kingdom.

He's going to have to do it himself when he comes back.

That's false.

It is a dangerous falsehood, because when it encourages the enemy, and it also

discourages us, so it's a double whammy.

I will tell you this much.

There's no doubt in my mind that every single victory that Satan ever has won has all been won by forfeit,

Christian forfeiture.

He doesn't win anything in a fair fight.

He doesn't choose to have a fair fight.

He chooses to tell us, why bother?

Isn't it easier just to let God do everything?

This is my world, after all, he'll say.

Read it right there in Scripture.

I offered all these kingdoms to Jesus, didn't I?

So they were mine.

So don't try to steal from me.

Thou shalt not steal.

So we get all this nonsense imposed on the figure of Satan, and it's all used to justify Christian

inaction.

And I think God cannot use bumps on the log, and with pew warmers, you

have to bypass them for men who are serious, and women who are serious about Scripture.

I'm not going to leave the women out, because they have a better part to play, too.

And so the family is the basic unit, governmental unit in Scripture, and so that's why the very first promise to Abraham

is that all the families of the earth will be blessed, right?

And all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.

So we have this totality of a vision of the future that is very hard to accept

considering how things look today.

But that's the point.

God can overrule all of this.

God can renew.

Things were much worse in the previous eras of history, and God pulled them back out of the septic tank.

And that's his business.

We have a myopic view of our current history, and we fail to really understand the struggles.

Of other times.

And that's called, by the way, chronological snobbery.

That's what it is.

Absolutely.

I love how you used Isaiah 2 there, and you said that the timing actually really does

matter, because it's not just that we get our participation trophy for

believing that these things are going to happen on earth.

The timing actually matters, because you nullify the Father's promises, you nullify the priesthood of Christ,

and you nullify the effect and the power of the Holy Spirit.

For what?

To amplify that we have greater power of the flesh to circumvent the promises,

the reign, and the ministry of the Spirit of God?

It puts us actually up and above the Trinity, just even with that simple argument, which I thought was very profound.

I think that's why it's important to understand all the ins and outs of Scripture.

And the early Americans, since they're insisting on five and six -hour sermons on

hard benches in un -air -conditioned churches, I think their character was a bit

more profound and sound than ours is today.

You get the picture, right?

We were reading last night in Zephaniah,.

In chapter 1, and God rebuking Judah for complacency.

I told our group last night, I said, I really think Zephaniah—because we're going through all the minor prophets, and we're going through them in

chronological order in this Bible study that we're doing.

I said, Zephaniah really feels like our time right now.

There's this complacency, there's this, well, God's neither going to do good nor ill, which is also Zephaniah 1,

that He's not even noticing us anymore.

And we're sitting on our laurels, and we're not pressing forward.

The Bible says the gates of hell don't advance on us.

They fall down when we advance.

So if we don't advance, they don't fall down.

And I think that's a lazy, smuggled Christianity that has captivated the West.

And I pray to the Lord that we repent from it.

I think repentance is called for, but most people don't want to consider that they are in a position where they need to repent of it.

We've learned from Donald Trump to double down on our activities.

And I think that's going to be the bigger mistake, because it's not just you who will suffer, but it's also your children.

You know, your children are asking for bread, and you're giving them a rock, and you're asking for fish, you're giving them a serpent.

In essence, we're doing this educationally, we're doing this spiritually.

We're giving them a world that we say we probably shouldn't have brought you into it, because the devil's going to have a tribulation start at any moment.

So these views just are self -fulfilling prophecies, in effect.

They make you ineffective.

And I think that's part of their purpose.

You know, it was unthinkable.

It was Carl Bogut that said in 1813 that pre -Millenniumism was an astonishing aberration, that I was

surprised it was still around.

Well, it grew again.

It grew again because there were attacks on Scripture from many quarters that was attacked through

Darwinianism.

So the authority of Scripture in Genesis was already under attack.

The postmodern textual critics questioned whether Moses actually wrote any of the books of Moses, and

so they started to put this huge gap between the books and their preputed authors, so we don't have a divine

revelation anymore, we have a very human one.

And then finally, dispensationalism said, well, we're not even supposed to win the battle.

So those three things are quite a nasty troika that kind of

programs us to defeatism.

Yeah.

And the worst of it, I think, is this, is that now a new term has been coined,

triumphalist.

The worst thing you can be in some people's minds is a triumphalist.

If you talk about the victory of Christ, you're a triumphalist.

That's horrible.

It's the most awful thing that Christ would be triumphant over things.

And they also believe that we're talking about doing this in our own strength.

No, no, no, no, no.

There's nothing could be further than the truth.

The Spirit of God is the thing driving this forward.

We are just part of the process that God has chosen, and in fact, it's even supposed to be a foolish thing, right?

The foolishness of the gospel is all we have.

You know, we have spiritual weapons, but God says they're mighty to the tearing down of strongholds.

But they certainly are not physical weapons.

And so I usually joke, I said, we use pea shooters when we should use the bazookas of the word.

People take me literally, says this man's calling for men, Christians to use bazookas on their neighbors.

No, well, spiritual bazooka, yeah, which is to say the word of God, which un

-debraded, in other words, not added anything to it.

Don't dilute it with anything.

Many times we dilute the word of God or put some sugar in it to swallow it.

It doesn't need that.

It's best to take in whole and pure and full intensity, full dosage, because

that's transforms souls, hearts, minds.

And when heart is transformed, it then acts upon the new convictions.

You see, if you have strong convictions and you have strong actions, but if you have weak convictions, you have a weak hundred bit in faith

as Warfield would put it.

And that's where we're faced at.

People are more inclined to believe their eyes than their scriptures.

And because they want to at least pay lip service to scriptures, they then look at the scriptures and say, what does it take for me to bend the scripture

to justify what I see with my eyes, rather than what's it going to take for me to take the scriptural

passages and apply them to what I see with my eyes to transform that into something what God describes as supposed to be the end game.

So two different missions, two different kinds of messages are out there.

Either we lose or we win out here.

Obviously, it's not going to be, or it's a draw, as Amalaeus might argue.

But nonetheless, it's the postmortem position that Christ wins.

And Christ wins through us, but not because we're competent, but in fact, we're far from it.

But just a little bit of faithfulness goes a long way.

It doesn't take a lot of leaven to leaven the whole lump.

It takes us being serious and sincere in our faith.

And that's why someone who's faithful in little things, it's going to be given him power and authority over big

things, larger things.

So this whole idea that we need to have this massive top -down thing is incorrect.

Post -millennialism, if anything, is a grassroots thing.

It talks about starting at the small and moving up slowly.

That's why I love post -millennialism, by the way, is pre -millennialism really puts

the focus on Jesus needs to do this by himself.

And then even in their view, his kingdom collapses in the end, which is just utterly preposterous

to me.

But God, instead of snapping his fingers—because he could have done that, like

the Marvel movies, he could have been Thanos and converted everyone he wanted to convert and damned everyone he wanted to damn, and that'd be

over.

He could have done that, and yet he doesn't.

Because I think God is writing a story where he is going to get

maximal glory.

And what better way to do that than take creatures who were previously objects of his wrath, to

turn them into objects of his mercy, and for them still to be pretty

boneheaded at times, and yet through those people, through the fools that

are the foolish people of the world, the ones that everybody looks at and is like, those people?

To win the world with them.

It'd be like a coach taking a group of the

most non -skilled basketball players ever and winning the NBA championship, but even infinitely better than that.

And I think that's why God's doing it that way, to magnify his own glory.

Israel itself was an underdog, right?

They were told, it's not because you were a great nation.

I think you weren't.

You were the hindmost part.

But God can lift you up, right?

And that is our position, too.

Post -Modernism says God can lift the world out of this situation, but it requires Christians to be at least

responsible.

And responsible for the things that they need to be.

If they're responsible for their children, that already is a huge thing, because that's the heritage of the Lord, and that's the next generation,

right?

And so that's why Psalm 22 ends the way it does.

He says, you know, he'll say to a people not yet born, he has done this.

So God already has the next generation in his eye, even though they haven't been born yet.

But part of that is that wonderful, that concludes a passage that includes the things that he's the governor among the nations, and all the nations shall be

ruled by him and all the families.

And I think there's a very, very powerful passage there in the tail end of Psalm 22.

In the middle of it, it talks about the crucifixion.

So these are the things that happen as a result of the crucifixion.

There's a transformation that occurs.

It's the central point of history, and it divides history between before and after.

And the after is a slow process.

And it's described, I think, very well in the imagery of Ezekiel 47.

There's a damp spot on the wall of the temple, right?

And it then starts, and so Ezekiel is told to follow it.

He follows it for a thousand cubits, and it's a stream that's about ankle deep, follows it for another

thousand cubits.

Now it's a stream that's knee deep, say, and then hip deep.

And finally, it's a river that he can't be crossed, and he's drowning like this.

And so as he's drowning, the angel pulls him out and says, son of man, have you seen this?

Yeah, I saw it.

I was drowning in it.

And so that's the kind of what the Holy Spirit is.

We have this process by which it's just a little leak, a damp spot on the wall.

It turns into a stream, into a brook, into a river, into a massive flood that cannot be

thwarted.

And this is on the other side of it, it's a tree of life giving its fruit in its season.

So this imagery is about the growth of the kingdom of God through history.

It doesn't start, boom, Jesus is here, it's here.

That is an erroneous position.

I don't know why John MacArthur has said, this air is tense here, and so when thy kingdom

come, it's an explosive showing up all of a sudden without any warning, and there, boom, he's here.

No, it is a stream that's virtually hard to notice, just a damp spot on the wall

dripping down, right, and then forms the stream.

And then nothing's adding to the stream.

It's growing by itself, self -production of the stream into a wider and larger, stronger current.

And we're in the middle of the current.

We're in the middle of the kingdom of God as it's growing.

I think we're probably somewhere in the ankle -deep area, maybe close to knee -deep, but that's about it.

But it's going to go up to here until the whole world is consumed in part of that process of that

fantastic river.

And what happens, it says, eventually it pours into the Dead Sea and everything in it lives.

So there's miraculous components to this.

This is a picture of a miraculous transformation of the world where things that could never possibly happen, like

the fish is on the Dead Sea, but they'll cast their nets from all the way

to Elangium, etc., etc., give the two poles and positions on the shore.

There's nothing worthwhile there today, because it's so loaded with salt, it's worthless, but they're going to be

fishing and getting great fish out of it.

Best fishing in the world is in the Dead Sea.

Who knew?

But under Christ, that happens, right?

And so that happens as a process.

It's a historical process of the small becoming big.

About the mustard seed growing into a tree so large that every bird under heaven lodges in it.

That's an important verse.

It doesn't say every kind of birds.

It's every bird under the heavens lodges in it.

This is a picture taken from Ezekiel 17.

Jesus is not just inventing things out of the air like this.

He's appealing to a previous passage about a tender sign that's plucked, planted in the high mountain

eminent, and it grows so large that all the birds in heaven dwell at its branches.

You see, this all ties together.

The scripture is fairly coherent and consistent if you actually take a close look at it.

Romans 11 is actually, I believe, is a riff, as they call it, on Isaiah 19, the prediction of the conversion of the

Gentiles before the conversion of Israel.

So there's some powerful things happening in scripture if we would do the necessary study or have the necessary resources.

But guess what?

This whole message is a message of increased responsibility for Christians, and that's a hard sell when everyone

is lazy, slothful.

That's the very word used, by the way, twice in the book of Hebrews about being slothful in hearing when you're

supposed to be a teacher by now.

Instead, you're still needing to go back to the stoichea, the ABCs.

You're getting a doctorate in alphabet.

Whoa, that's great.

That's how Christians are.

They're getting a doctorate in alphabet, but they're not going to assemble sentences and paragraphs and chapters and

books and libraries at that rate because they're just studying the alphabet over and over again.

Well, that doesn't cut it.

They need to do the other.

They need to move forward, and they cannot be slothful in hearing.

That word nuthroi only occurs twice in the book of Hebrews, and it's a culpable action.

You know, slothfulness, laziness is a sin.

Thou wicked and slothful servant, we hear in Matthew 25.

It's a moral problem.

It's not just an intellectual problem.

Ah, it's just hard.

I don't find it fun to read or easy to read.

You can read.

You just don't want to read, and so God wants you to read.

He prepared an inscripturated revelation for us, and he also gave us 21 centuries of sanctified scholarship.

Why we pick out the paperbacks that are designed to feather some author's nest with

something that tickles our ears, I don't get it.

You know, we should be reading books.

I think the best books were not written in this century anyway, certainly not in the 20th century.

Most of the best books were written probably in the 1600s, 1700s maybe, and

each century after the Reformation, I think, has gotten thinner and thinner on good scholars.

They were there, but we had a great heritage, and we squandered it

academically, and academically in the sense of taking the Word of God and applying it to every thought, you know, taking all thought captive to the beings

of Christ.

Some people are going to say that's a misuse of that passage.

I think they like to see that made good.

I've seen attempts to make that claim good, but natural fact, we are called to do that.

We're called to take every thought captive to the beings of Christ, because any thought that's not is actually a rebellious thought,

and I don't see how God's going to use rebellious thought except as an example of what happens, right?

That's what happens in 1 Corinthians 10.

All these things happen to Israel as in samples unto us of what not to do.

Don't do these things.

Don't murmur in the wilderness when God's trying to take care of you, because it ticks him off.

You know, ingratitude is one of the worst things, and for him to send the gift of the Holy Spirit to convert the world, and for us to not want it,

to say, take him back, get rid of the Holy Spirit.

He needs to go.

He's an impediment to the revelation of the man of sin, and things need

to get back on track, and the church has to be taken out of the way so that Israel can get back on their

prophetic trajectory.

All this stuff is a terrible theology, and it also affects political events, and

it chimes in, as Spurgeon says, with our laziness, because it allows us

to justify laziness, and I think this is a catastrophe of large proportions, and that's because God's program

is not going to be achieved, but it won't be achieved through us.

We'll be part of the problem and not the solution.

Maybe our children will be part of the solution, right?

Just as Israel's children were part of the solution when they entered Canaan, and nonetheless, their parents

all died in the wilderness.

I don't want my children to be in that boat.

I don't think your audience wants to have that happen either.

I think that's the attraction of Post -Modernism.

The other problem, of course, is that people say, well, look at all these verses that oppose Post -Modernism.

I challenge anyone to actually make good on that.

It happens all the time.

People say, well, the X verse, and I respond.

I give them the...

The world's going from bad to worse.

That's one I hear all the time.

Yeah, and so that's a point that, and even by that comment, by the

way, they're out walking by sight.

They didn't establish that from Scripture, right?

They're talking about something that in like 2 Timothy 3, 17 said that those individual

men go from bad to worse.

There's not a trend that they give rise, they bear babies that are worse than they are.

It's only that the worst babies that ever were born were those that were ended up being adults at the time of the flood

because every thought of their heart was continually wicked, right?

I don't know if we're necessarily that bad, but nonetheless, we got to reset, do over, and that do over, we're not going to be

wiped out by a flood again.

But yeah, that actually is a contemporaneous statement related to the generation that Paul was dealing

with, and he was dealing with people who were contending against him.

And he makes an interesting point when he compares them to the magicians, Janice and Jambres that withstood Moses.

He said, but they shall not prevail.

In other words, their agendas are flawed to the ground.

It'll flop.

They're not going to get anywhere with their attempts to defy God.

So they might go from bad to worse, but in doing so, they become culturally ineffective.

They actually destroy the very thing they're trying to achieve, which is a humanistic tower of Babel.

All towers of Babel are doomed because they are built on what?

The sand.

And being built on the sand, they have no root in themselves, and they fall away.

We're supposed to be building on the rock, and only things that are on the rock will grow.

In fact, there's a verse in Matthew 15, 13, whatsoever thing the Lord hath not planted shall be ridded up.

I consider that as paradigmatic, which means you can take that to the bank.

It's always true.

If the Lord didn't plant something, if it's in defiance of God, it'll be ridded up.

And so it's on borrowed time.

It's there, and it's being used as an example for us of what happens when people defy God.

And its folly will be manifest to everybody because God's going to triumph over them.

And we have to be faithful in believing it.

And it also is paradigmatic for the post -millennial view, because why would a farmer root

up things that don't belong in the ground?

He's not going to leave the ground abandoned.

He's rooting those things out so that he can plant the things that he wants, so he can fill his garden full of his things.

So even indirectly, that verse really means that he's going to fill the world with worshipers, which is what we've

been saying over and over and over again through the series.

I know that certainly the amillennial believers believe that the parable of the wheat and the

tares is indicative that wicked and righteous people will coexist all the way up to the end of time,

that there's been no change in the relative proportions of good and bad.

And I think this mistakes what's actually going on in that verse.

And so this kind of speaks to your point.

The reason that we don't tear up any of the tares, the angels are forbidden from removing them,

is just because you will tear up or uproot wheat.

Now people have tried to explain all sorts of agricultural reasons for it, but they're not actually dealing with the text, what it says.

It says you will literally be tearing up wheat.

And I'll give an example.

Tira was Abraham's dad.

Tira was a tare.

He was a weed, a weed, and he deserved to be torn up.

Had the angels removed Tira, Abraham would not have been born.

Why?

Because Abraham was in his loins, right?

You read Hebrews 7, it says, Levi was in the loins of Abraham and paid tithes to Melchizedek.

So there's a whole bunch of generations hiding in our loins, if you will, and they are present.

So the warning is, if you actually tear up the tares, you're going to actually be uprooting future generations of wheat that are going to be

born to this tare, just like Tira had Abraham, Abram, and then Abraham, as God renamed

him, as his son.

So you end up getting regenerate offspring from unregenerate parents.

The other thing you have happening is that certain lines

genetically die out, right?

We read in Psalm 109 about the wicked, that the posterity of the wicked shall be blotted out, and the generation to come, their name shall be

obliterated.

So here you have, so the tears will either be self -terminating, because Psalm 109 and

Psalm 37 apply to their destiny, or they have elect offspring.

And if you have that, and so in other words, the parable looks at the world as throughout all time.

If there's a protensive temporal component to it from beginning to end, and as you look at it, actually as toward the

end, it becomes more and more wheat and less tares, because either the tares are dying out, or they're giving elect offspring.

This was a process that continues until they cannot continue anymore, because everyone's elect by the end.

So God's election is basically electing more, more, more every generation.

This is God's doing.

Only God controls election, because it's part of his counsel, interior counsel.

And he has every century done that.

Yeah, so every century he's electing, has elected more, and he did it before time started, of course.

But each generation is more and more elect, and that's why he said, don't tear up the weeds,

the tares out of the ground, because they will actually tear up wheat.

And that's because wheat is in the generations to come.

And by an algorithmic requirement, that means that the final generations, if you don't stop this process, will all be wheat.

There won't be any tares left to encumber the ground.

And I think that's a powerful verse that actually understood as to the very staunch

reason.

The one command given in that scripture is do not do that because you will tear up wheat.

And if we take this seriously, we should say that's exactly what it means.

And so what happens is that my opponents will say, well, we shouldn't take it literally.

We should mess with it.

We should bend it to our amillennial negativism.

And I say, go to town.

But I said, you're not being faithful to the scripture then.

By your own admission, you are trying to find an alternate way to the prima

facie meaning of the text, especially since it's consistent with other passages in scripture.

So that's the point, is that you go through every single passage that's alleged to be negative against post -Modernism, you'll find that there's

a very strong answer in response to it and say, oh, I didn't even consider that possibility that it meant this

or that and the other.

This includes the book of Revelation, by the way.

Lots of people say, well, obviously, there's horrible things coming in the future.

Whether you read it as an idealist, like I myself, or a historicist, as some do, or as a

preterist, there are plenty of alternatives to the futurist idea that is talking about a series of

catastrophes in the future that will just destroy most of the world, burn it up,

and throw some nasty locusts at us while he's at it.

So yeah, that's an important point to take.

We might discuss it in another chat.

But yeah, all the things that are alleged to be anti -victory can be shown to be pro

-victory.

Yeah, maybe that could be fodder for our next talk, is just looking at a

couple more of these passages.

Also, I think so much of this hinges, and we can get into this next time as well, so much of this

discussion hinges on whether Jesus is reigning now or not.

You've got Daniel 7, where Jesus is said to go up to the Ancient of Days,

and he receives a kingdom that will never end.

You've got Isaiah 9.

You've got Jesus in John 12 saying similar things, that I'm going to be enthroned,

basically, as I'm lifted up.

You've got him before Caiaphas saying Daniel 7.

You've got him in 1 Corinthians 15 saying, or through Paul, he must reign until he has put all of his

enemies under his feet, Psalm 110.

So you've got this idea that Jesus is reigning now, but most of the eschatological views can't hold that consistently,

because if he's reigning now, he's failing.

If we lose down here, then he's a failed ruler.

And that just indicts Jesus, not just as priest, but as king.

Yeah, he has a shrinking dominion.

I thought of the increase of his government and a peace, there should be no end.

It continues to grow larger, not smaller.

In fact, that's the point of the spoils that he has earned as a result of the crucifixion according to

Isaiah 53, right?

He shall see the travail of his soul and be glad.

He'll be rewarded.

And that reward is laid out also in Psalm 2 for that matter.

Ask of me and I shall give you the nations as your inheritance.

And so whatsoever the Lord has given him, you shall not lose, right, in John 10.

So there's all sorts of things that fit together that speak about the victory of Christ over all things.

We talk about a victorious Christ, victorious over sin, but also victorious over the world.

And he brings the world in his train to bow the knee to him,

right?

So the idea that in every knee shall bow, every tongue confess.

In fact, it's interesting, that citation, everyone remembers it's from Philippians 2.

But it's a quotation from a very passage in Isaiah 45, verses 22 to 23, where God says,

commands the world, be saved all the ends of the world, for I am Lord and there's none else.

So the word's gone out from my mouth, it shall not return to me until that every knee shall bow and every tongue shall

swear.

So you see, there's a command for the entire world to be saved, be saved all the ends of the earth.

So it's a command for the universal salvation of the world.

And then he says, and I swear by myself that it'll happen.

So God annexes an oath in his own name.

An oath is a self -malediction.

He said, may I be laid aside as a false idol if this doesn't happen.

So God's commanding the world to be saved.

And then he asserts an oath that it will be saved, completely saved, not any exceptions to the rule.

Now, again, this is the world, the living world, the world of living men.

Men who die in their sins, that's like a tree falls down and step away forever.

But for the living world, every single person shall, everything that hath breath shall

praise God.

And by the way, that's very important.

People say, well, you know, God can force the wicked to praise him.

He said, no, he can't.

Pay attention to what happens when the demons try to say, you're the Christ.

And Jesus said, I do not accept praise from unclean lips that he forbade,

that says, you don't mean it.

You mean it in resentment.

So God does not accept feigned praise, false praise.

And so there's no way in God's green earth that wicked people praising God being forced

against their will to say something about Jesus is the kingdom.

The kingdom is the entire known living world praising God and the curse being lifted to a large extent

to the point that there's only one enemy left to destroy, death itself.

And this is asserted right there in 1 Corinthians 15, which you alluded to already.

That's a key verse.

The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

And then we have those predictions of things that Isaiah 24, 25, 26, about the

lifting of the veil that's cast over the face of all the nations and then death itself being swallowed up in

victory.

So it's a victory motif.

And so the swallowing up of death and victory is the completed final piece of victory.

So we have a bunch of victories up until that point and boom, the victory over death itself.

So every enemy being laid and destroyed by Jesus over time, so that he only has friends

left here, those he calls his brothers and sisters and his children.

And that's what we pray every week.

Hopefully every church prays this.

I know they don't, but we pray this every week in our church.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth.

As it is in heaven.

And we believe that.

Amen.

Amen to that.

That's so critical.

We so unthinkingly pray that and we don't really mean what it says.

We don't really expect God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

I always comment, I said, that's actually, there's no mystery as to what God's will on heaven is.

Calvin pointed it out when he talked about this passage, Matthew 6, 10.

He says this right there in the Psalms.

He says that the flaming messengers are in heaven doing his

word continually and is obeying his word continually.

So that's what it is.

Continual obedience to his word is what the angels do in heaven.

And that's what it's going to be like on earth.

Everyone continually doing only God's word and not their own, but doing, seeking God's will.

And the blessings that flow from this are stupendous.

I mean, if someone dies at 800, a hundred years old, it's considered that they're, they're babe.

Boy, that was a short, you know, they barely were around.

And other aspects of nature itself, instead of being red in tooth and claw, is at peace itself, right?

The lions, now you're having a vegetarian diet, et cetera, et cetera.

No one hurting or destroying in all the holy mountain.

This is Isaiah 11 verses six through nine.

It's an amazing passage and it follows the description of the Messiah and all the things that he does.

By the way, when we get that first description of the Messiah in Isaiah 11, opening verses, he's

talking about the spirit of him and he mentions the spirit seven times.

So the basic position is that Isaiah 11 depicts the results

of the Messiah as being imbued with the Holy Spirit and him sending that Holy Spirit into the world.

All these transformations of nature and of man himself are just extraordinary.

And so much so that people don't have a hard time believing it.

They say, well, maybe it's not really talking about nature, but then it says that the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the

earth as the waters cover the sea.

I don't see any dry spots in the ocean, right?

I believe we're going to have a total conquest of the entire world, the God's kingdom, which

therefore he is truly King, acknowledged consciously by his

creatures, by his image bearers.

And that will show forth his glory in a way that had not hitherto been known except prior to

the fall.

And so at that point, when death is destroyed, then we enter the final state.

But prior to that point, everything is moving in this direction to prepare us for the destruction of the last enemy,

death, right?

Yeah, I thought about it.

I think that's important to realize that.

We're on a course, not downhill, but uphill.

And because it's uphill, it's an uphill climb.

It's difficult for us.

It requires responsibility and effort on our part, labor.

We're laboring for the kingdom, but our labor for the kingdom is never in vain.

We're promised this voice and our work shall follow us, we're told.

So there's reason to not hope but to labor with a good confidence

in him who has called us.

Amen.

I've thought about it, like nothing that Adam failed to do, Christ will not fulfill.

So what was Adam called to do?

He was called to fill the world with worshipers.

Check, Jesus is going to do that.

What else was he called to do?

Be fruitful and multiply and bring dominion to the earth.

He was put in a garden with the command to make the entire world a garden.

I think before it's over, Christ will have the world.

I don't think there'll be any deserts left.

I don't think that there'll be any places that aren't garden -like under the rule of.

Christ.

Yeah.

The desert shall blossom as the crocus, right?

We're told this repeatedly in scripture.

And that fact, water, of course, will be flowing out of the desert.

We only had bits and pieces of this happening in the Old Testament, but it now is predicted to be worldwide

so that all the areas that are ravaged by desert will become fertile and come under the

dominion of man operating under the Holy Spirit and obeying God's law and applying it,

and therefore enjoying the.

Blessings that will pursue you when you obey God's law.

Amen.

We've got to run today because we've got to honor your time.

Brother, I'm telling you, I could sit here for 10 hours talking about this stuff.

This is so much fun.

I'm so thankful for your knowledge of scripture, the way you're quoting verses.

They're not surface -level things you believe.

These are things you've thought about for years and digested and meditated upon.

I'm so thankful for you, and I'm so encouraged.

Truth be told, I wasn't having the best day.

I wasn't having a bad day, but now I'm invigorated.

I want to go preach and run and sing and little calves let out to

the pasture, as Malachi says, when the Son of Righteousness comes.

Brother, thank you for encouraging us.

I can't wait.

We'll have to do this part, too, because we've got more to talk about, if that's good with you.

That's good with me.

All right.

Well, God bless you, brother.

Thank you, everyone, for listening to the podcast.

Thank you so much for watching another episode of the podcast.

It is my joy to be able to bring really great guests and really great content to you each and

every single week.

We believe in the victory of Christ.

We believe that that's not just some gimmick or some slogan.

We believe that Jesus is going to win the world.

He's going to fill the world with worshipers, and that might not happen very quickly.

That might take a very long time, but all of us have a part to play, and all of us

can find our place somewhere in the kingdom of Christ.

I want to send a special thanks to Martin for a great interview.

Check out part two of this interview, which will be coming out later this week.

And until then, God richly bless you.

We'll see you again next time on the podcast.