End Times Made Easy

In Matthew 16, Jesus chastised the Pharisees who could interpret the appearance of the sky but failed to interpret the signs of the time in which they lived. Who are the Pharisees of our day?

This strong hold of sort of whiteness and white identity and pristineness is really part of what keeps us from making progress.

We need to do better. The Church, rich in theological scholarship, has lingered in academic sanctuaries and ivory towers, failing to translate its lofty doctrines into a tangible and practical cultural apologetic.

At the Worldview Youth Academy, we bridge this critical gap. Here, theological depth is not an end in itself but a means to engage with contemporary cultural issues for the glory of God and the expansion of his kingdom.

Our mission is to cultivate thinkers who can articulate and apply Christian truths within contemporary societal challenges. So embrace this call to worship God with all your heart, all your soul and with all your mind.

We will do better as this next generation tears down the idols of our modern culture and works to build a brighter future toward Christendom. 2 .0.

Non-rocker boaters must stop! I don't want to rock the boat, I want to sink it!

Are you going to bark all day, little doggy, or are you going to bite?

We're being delusional.

Delusional? Delusional's okay in your worldview. I'm an animal. You don't chastise chickens for being delusional. You don't chastise pigs for being delusional. So you calling me delusional using your worldview is perfectly okay.

It doesn't really hurt. She hung up on me!

What? What?

Desperate times call for faithful men and not for careful men. The careful men come later and write the biographies of the faithful men lauding them for their courage.

Go into all the world and make disciples. Not go into the world and make buddies. Not to make brosives. Don't go into the world and make homies. Disciples.

I got a bit of a jiggle neck. That's a joke, pastor.

When we have the real message of truth, we cannot let somebody say they're speaking truth when they're not.

He lived there two whole years at his own expense and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance. That's Acts 28, 30 -31.

What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Apologia Radio. End times made easy. Excited about this episode? It's just you and I today. Very excited about this episode, important stuff. This is Apologia Radio.

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I don't deserve it, certainly don't deserve it, but I'm thankful. And so, we're going to jump into the episode today. I wanted to talk today about eschatology and the reason why is not only, as you all know, is this something near and dear to my heart and something that I think is vitally important to get right.

There's something that Pastor James used to say many, many years ago, and that was, theology matters, because it does. What we think about God, what we teach about God, what we say about God matters a lot.

It transforms everything. And I have said, not only does theology matter, but eschatology matters, and that is, eschatology is, it comes from two words, eschatos, logos, and we're talking about the study of last things.

It matters a great deal because your view, your perspective of the future is going to be transformative in terms of your own personal life, how you view the future, how you work and labor for the kingdom of God in this world, or you don't, how you view your children, your grandchildren, the investments you put in them.

Eschatology matters a lot, and just to give you one punch on that, just so you can think, what does it mean by that, you know, there's been a number of times, you can bring quotes here ad infinitum, ad nauseum, of Christian leaders talking about the world in such a way that it is just this throwaway that we lose down here.

That is something that Dr. John MacArthur, whom I love and genuinely respect, probably responsible for my true conversion to Christ, Dr. MacArthur is, bringing me the truth about the gospel. So I love the man, and he is just a giant of the faith, better man, better pastor than I'll ever be, and I genuinely mean that.

But he has a perspective that we lose down here. The church loses down here, and you have people who have said things like, why bother polishing brass on a sinking ship? Like, why rearrange furniture in a burning house?

Like, what's the point? Because the church loses down here. The kingdom of God is, you know, is not something that's going to be victorious in this stage of church history. We need the second coming to come back.

We need the rapture to happen. We need all that stuff to take place. And other than that, we're just going to get beat down as the church. And, you know, if you think that way, you'll live that way. If you think that way, you'll plan that way.

If you think that way, you'll build that way. I mean, if we truly believe that the ultimate thing, the ultimate thing, is to escape from this physical world, this sin-cursed world, to get to this better, higher spiritual story out there.

Like, if that's really the goal, if the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven is something that really has to do with going there, out there, then we'll live like that's true. And by the way, welcome to Gnosticism.

Gnostics believed in a portrait of the world like that. Like, this is this sin-cursed world that's been sullied by sin. God would never sully himself with a physical cosmos. And so the incarnation taking on flesh is not something that took place.

The Gnostics would decry that. Like, how could you even say that God would sully himself with a physical form of physical flesh, you know? And so they had this higher spiritual story out there that that was really what you wanted to attain to, get out there.

And so if we think like that, if we think that this world's just a throwaway, the best thing to do is just to leave behind our underwear and shoes and get taken out of this place. Then again, we'll live like that's true.

That will affect how we live in the world as the church. It affects how we view cultural decay and darkness in the world around us. I mean, honestly, if you tell the team, I guarantee you we are going to lose this game, then they'll probably play like that's true, right?

Like, if we say there's no way we're winning this game, it's impossible to win, we are destined to fail in this game, then the team's going to play like that's true. But, you know, if we believe what Scripture teaches about the future, and I hope to give you some examples of that today, if we agree with what Scripture says about the kingdom of God really being something that God brings to this world to bless this world, this life, this world, then it's going to change how we actually face darkness and decay in the world.

If we believe that we are the salt and we are the light and we believe that it's the meek who shall inherit the earth, if we believe that Christ is ruling and reigning now and that the earth will be covered with the knowledge of God like the waters cover the sea, then we're going to approach things in a very different manner.

So, eschatology matters, and I want to just say as a caveat, this is important, I recognize completely that even right now listening to this program, there are brothers and sisters in Christ that are solid believers in Jesus, solid, godly brothers and sisters in Christ who don't agree on the issue of eschatology, and what I'm going to say to that is that that's okay, we can have unity in the midst of diversity on this issue, we can hash these things out and have rigorous debates on them, lovingly and with unity, but what's really cool about this question of eschatology, and I truly, I delight in this, what's great about this question of eschatology is that what you do have in the midst of diversity in eschatological positions, whether it's a dispensational pre-mill, a historic pre-mill, a mill or post-mill, what you do have even in the midst of those differences is you have this unity of the faith in terms of the future, and that is that Jesus is coming back to judge the living and the dead, there will be a full and final resurrection of the dead, that there is going to be a final judgment and a complete and total restoration of all things, and we're unified on that, and so while some of this discussion is important, it impacts a lot, it impacts how we read the Bible even, these become lenses through which we read the Bible, traditions that will actually cause us to miss things that are right there in the text, while it's vitally important, the great thing is that the Christian church is unified, has been unified throughout her history on the issue of the end ultimately, and that there is going to be a doing away finally of death, and that there will be total and complete victory in one way or another at the end, but it's getting to that place that is the part of dispute amongst Christians, we agree, we're unified on the essential element of the end, the second coming, final judgment, resurrection, we're unified there, and the church always has been, but it's getting to that point that is the portion of dispute, this is where the debate takes place, and I want to say that this is a vitally important subject, it's important, but it shouldn't divide us as Christians, I'll give you one good example, I have a great, great friend, a man that I truly honor and respect so much, his name is Pastor Brian Gunter, and he's a pastor of a church in Louisiana, and we've worked together closely, we've served Christ together on mission together closely, Bill of Equal Protection of Louisiana, the historic bill in Louisiana that not only went to hearing for abolition, but it made it past the hearing onto the floor, first time in the history of Roe versus Wade that that took place, so it was historic, everybody was talking about it, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, it was all over the news, we had major political players contacting us privately trying to get us to kill the bill and not do it because they were terrified of it, but that was me working alongside Pastor Brian Gunter and just a handful of other Christians and pastors, I mean, literally a handful, to get that bill into place, well, Pastor Brian and I, we are so, so, so close in practical application of so much of the kingdom of God and so many of the important parts and elements of the gospel, we are so close, but also at the moment, because I think he's becoming a post-millennialist, if you're watching this, Brian, it's coming, but at the moment, he is more of a classical pre-millennialist and he, but at the same time, he acknowledges so much of what is core to post-millennialism, he's like, well, that's just true, but the point I'm making there is, look, he's classical pre-millennial, I'm post-millennial and we still love Jesus and serve God together in tremendous ways and I respect and honor him as a brother, so my point in saying that is you're going to hear me saying today, maybe some things that bother you are ruffle feathers in terms of if I say I think this isn't true or this contradicts the text, I don't want you to see that as me saying, as a minister of the gospel and as a fellow believer, that somehow I think that you are less or that there's something high and better and mighty about post-millennialism or that I'm looking down at you.

There are far better men of God than me that hold to different eschatological positions. That doesn't mean that they're right because they're a better man of God. The question is, what does the text say?

Now, this is also an important subject to talk about right now in particular because we've come into this place in waves. It happens over and over and over again and what I mean by the waves is that there's been moments even in my own short life, I'm 46 years old, in my life where I've witnessed these cycles where there's an intensity of conflict in the world, maybe there's wars breaking out in the Middle East, there's all these different social woes and collapses, financial collapses.

You can even bring us back, and I was just reminded of this today by Dr. James White. We were having lunch together here at the studio. I was just reminded of Y2K, and boy, do I remember that. Man, I remember at that time I was a hardcore dispensation premillennialist and I was reading all the books on Y2K.

I remember I was newly married and my wife and I were doing some minor preparations just in case things fell apart with Y2K and there's all this talk about the turn of the century and Christ's return.

I was heavy into Hal Lindsey at the time and Tim LaHaye and all those guys and really eschatology and end times and rapture was something I talked about every single day. But my point is that I've seen this cycle, and you have as well, I'm sure, where things get super intense in the world, there's a lot of trouble, a lot of difficulty, maybe some disease, maybe some famine, maybe some wars, and everybody always thinks that that's their moment.

This is my moment where I'm going to witness the rapture and the end. And I want to just say, you can do a short study of church history and see that we've been here again and again and again and again and again.

It is not new to think that this is the moment, here's where it's all going to end. That's happened over and over and over again in history without question. Nineteenth century was filled with that. You look at the genesis of a number of American-born cults that are now global.

You can talk about, of course, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mormonism with Joseph Smith, Jr. You could talk about the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. Some of these cults were born in the 19th century because there was this fervor at the time of end times.

And, of course, you have the Schofield Reference Bible. You've got all the things with Darby and the introduction of this really new, this eschatological novum, this perspective of a seven-year tribulation and rapture.

That's new in church history. And that's 19th century stuff. And so we've been here before. And now what do you see right now? You're probably seeing it now. You look at the decay all around us with gender bending, with the destruction of the human family and the profanation of marriage in our culture.

You look at the collapse of our financial system, this insane debt, the funny money we have, the immorality all around us. You look at the fact that we've been invaded in the United States of America over the last couple of years.

You look at just the moral decay all around us and even the danger all around us. I mean, boy, we could talk for days about the difficulties we're having in this country. I just was talking to my wife the other day about the sad, sad stories, the tragic, evil things that have happened.

You know, with the girl we talked about recently, Jocelyn in Texas, this 12-year-old girl that was going to a convenience store, and then she gets kidnapped by a number of illegal immigrants, and they terrorize this girl and abuse this girl and sexually assaulted this girl for two hours.

And I'm sorry to say this, but I mean, this is the kind of thing that people see and go, we must be at the end. And then they strangled her and threw her into water. And that's not the only story coming out right now.

There's a number of examples of, you know, just a suburban mom, five kids, going out for her normal jog around her neighborhood and her being sexually assaulted and murdered just going out for her jog.

You look at things like this that are happening, the gang violence, the evil, the destruction, the burning of cities, and people see this and they say this must be the end. Or you look at the conflict right now between the United States of America and Russia, and you look at what's going on over in Israel right now, and you've got the issue with Iran and China and North Korea, and everybody sort of looks at that and says, well, that must mean that we're on the verge of World War III and it's the time of the end and this is where it all goes away and this is where Jesus is going to return.

And I want to say, look, you know, just pull this up on the screen. I didn't even pull any particular video, but just as an example, if you look at my screen right now, I just put rapture imminent.

Why did I correct that?

Spelled it wrong. But you can just, I mean, this will take, you can go down a rabbit hole for days with this one. And rapture is imminent. Is the rapture near? An urgent message for believers. The hour is late.

Rapture imminent. Rapture imminent. I can tarry no longer. I'm at the door. It's imminent. Do you sense it? Rapture is imminent. Jesus is coming. This is for you. Rapture is imminent. Let's see here. Oh, there's us.

And hold fast. Jesus is coming. Rapture imminent.

Dream.

The rapture is near. Jesus' return is imminent. And we are extremely close. Visions of imminent rapture. Invasion of the USA. I mean, we can go, look, you can go down a rabbit hole, truly, and just, it's never ending.

And what I want to say to that is, as you look at these videos here, these are like, you know, 42 minutes ago, a month ago, a week ago, eight days ago, some of these videos, same thing was happening 20 years ago.

Same thing was happening 10 years ago. Imminent. Any moment. It's happening any second now. And you would see the same thing happening with like 88 reasons Jesus is returning in 1988. That was a best-selling book.

A best-selling book. 88 reasons Jesus is returning in 1988. And then fail. Faceplant. No, you're wrong. And we just keep going through this cycle. And now you've even got many, many preachers, pastors, even good pastors, who are really taking advantage of the opportunity to say, hey, look, all of this chaos happening around us, it means that this is it.

Like this may be the thing that leads to the Gog and Magog situation and all that stuff. And really what ends up happening is newspaper exegesis, something you've heard us say a lot. And what that means is that we are taking the news of our current circumstances and what's happening all around us, and we're reading the Bible through our newspapers.

Well, this stuff is happening around us. Let me go running to the Bible to see if I can find some way to fit this into the Bible story. And I want to say that's not how we're supposed to be living as Christians or reading the Bible by taking our current circumstances and simply just like smacking that down on top of the text and seeing if I can read that through that lens.

No, the Bible has a redemptive story and an eschatology that predates you and I and our circumstances. Now that story is behind us and it's fixed. It's objective, right? God put that down. He gave that revelation and it's a coherent revelation.

It's a coherent story because it's one author and it's God and he's the perfect author and he's the perfect storyteller. And so what we should be doing is going to the story itself saying, what does that say?

Irrespective of my circumstances and what's happening around me, I don't want to read this stuff into there. I want to say, what does this say? And I'll just say briefly, and then get right into this, that my own personal journey in the area of eschatology when I wasn't raised in a Christian church and so I really had no knowledge at all.

And so the first Bible study that I went to was actually watching a movie.

At a youth group.

And that movie was some old, terribly done Christian film on the rapture. And so that was my first Bible study. It was on End Times. It was on the rapture. And so that's what I thought was true. I didn't know to question it.

I didn't know to say, you know, what have Christians taught historically on this? And is this consistent? Is this a new view? I didn't know any of that. I just saw like, hey, I'm a professing Christian now.

This is a Christian church. They're telling me that this is the skinny on this. This is what's happening. I've got to believe this. And so when I went to Bible college, Bible college I went to was dispensational premillennial and studied all that.

I was a fiend when it came to eschatology. You can ask my wife. We were young and dating and then married. It's like that's what I love to talk about. And, and for me, the transformation occurred because I started reading things in scripture that seemed to really contradict what I thought about the future.

And it started to really challenge me that I'm reading things that are just not making sense with what I believe. And so I'll skip a lot of the points of the story, but I decided to go ahead and read the book of revelation.

Maybe not the best choice in terms of trying to get to the answer of this, but I did. I read the book of revelation. I committed to read it once a day, every day for 30 days. And I remember by day four, I'm reading through and I closed it.

And I thought to myself, something's not jiving like this. This is not making sense with what I believe, because some of the stuff that's said in here is not being spoken to me. It's being spoken to them.

And it seems like he's talking to them. And, and I started really saying, Lord, I'm just going to commit to letting the text speak and not reading what I was taught into this. And so I started reading the great tribulation passages and started saying, wait a second, like he's talking to them and he's making promises to them and he's guaranteeing them.

And before you all die, all these things. And so I'm going, oh man, I'm really struggling here. It looks like this stuff is, is something that should have already happened or Jesus is a false prophet because these are pretty straightforward, direct prophecies to them.

And thankfully, as I began to study this more and more, I realized that what I was seeing is something that Christians have seen from the very beginning. I mean, you can see Christians saying these things throughout church history.

And I started to discover the perspective that I had believed was, was the eschatological novum, the new thing in history. And it wasn't something in church history that you found Christians teaching or talking about.

I actually believed this new view. And so it was refreshing to finally just go to the text and say, what does it actually say? And it began to be very transformative in my life. And much of what you see seen through Apologia Church and Apologia Studios, there's a, there's a root that grows that tree.

So if there's any fruit coming from Apologia Church, in terms of cultural engagement and evangelism and those sorts of things, there's some theological things inside of us that grew this and produce the.

Fruit.

And one of those things that's inside of us as a church is our teaching on the end and eschatology and the kingdom of Christ and the authority of Christ in the world and the victory of the Messiah in the world.

And so, so much of what we do in terms of our labor and our work and our ministry comes from this, this core theological perspective of the victory of the Messiah in history. And so it matters and it matters a lot.

And so I'm just going to take you on a smattering today of verses on end times and talk about, talk about end times made easy today. But I wanted to just show you in terms of consequences. And I know, look, I wanted to just say, to be fair, we've got to be fair here.

I want to be just with my brothers and sisters. I don't want to malign people. I don't want to paint a portrait of Christians that is not in fact true. I want to say at the outset of playing this video, at the outset, okay, that this is like falling off a cliff, the other direction in terms of like how eschatology matters and bad eschatology leads to some weird things.

This is falling off the cliff. There are solid Christians who disagree with me on eschatology, who do not fall off the cliff like this. So I want to say that ahead of time, I am not putting dispensational pre-millennial brothers and sisters into the same room as this guy.

All right.

I know there's a difference, but I do want to say eschatology matters. It matters a lot and people can get weird. And I could play videos for days on this.

Okay.

I'm sure most of you already know that even if you're dispensational pre-millennial or you disagree with my perspective on eschatology, I think, you know, like, yeah, there's some weird stuff out there.

But here is the third Eagle, Eagle, Eagle, the third Eagle of the apocalypse. The title of the video, if you want to see the whole thing is the Antichrist arrives gangnam style.

All right, here we go.

This is, this is wild guys. And I think we can all laugh at this.

All right.

Listen, don't defend yourself right now. I'm not challenging you. We can all laugh at this. And now I put this up on my page and people are like, this is like a spoof,.

Right?

This is not real. And the answer is no, this, this dude is definitely real. And so just get yourselves ready.

So now let's look at the other big viral hit of the summer on YouTube. And that is call me maybe. And there are four very significant phrases in this song. The first one is, hey, I just met you. This is crazy, but here's my number.

Call me maybe. Let's look at those four phrases separately and see how God is revealing to us the name of the Antichrist. Hey, I just met you. Now the I in this case refers to the Antichrist and just meeting you means that he is revealing himself.

This is the Antichrist's entrance into the End Times. And this is crazy. That's the seven years of tribulation. Remember back in Daniel chapter number 4, King Nebuchadnezzar goes crazy or insane for seven times.

He lives among the beasts and eats grass. The beasts that he lives among are the two beasts of the Revelation, the Antichrist and the False Prophet. Those are the seven years of insanity and this is when the Antichrist is going to reveal himself during those seven years.

But here's my number. And of course, I think it should be obvious to you what the Antichrist's number is. His number is 666. And he is not talking here about a telephone number. He is talking here about his number of the beast which he is going to give to every one of us.

That's what he means when he says, here's my number. And the last phrase is really the most interesting. So call me maybe. Now he is not saying call me on the telephone. What the Antichrist is saying here is, my name is maybe.

Call me maybe. Now what's interesting is that Nostradamus also called the Antichrist Mabus. Is there a connection between Mabus and maybe? So these two words for the Antichrist,.

Okay, wild stuff, right? Wild stuff. And again, I know this is falling off the cliff into some weird stuff, but it just does demonstrate that eschatology matters because what would help this man is a biblical eschatology.

And probably a lot of other things could be used to help this man as well. And yeah, he definitely needs a lot of help. But that's, I think, just an opportunity to point out that eschatology does matter.

Things can get really weird, and so we have to try to conform ourselves to Scripture and let Scripture tell the story. And so to start, I want to just do this. We could do a number of ways. You could start in the Old Testament, which I think is vitally, vitally, vitally, vitally important to do.

I think a lot of where people fall off a cliff into weird cuckoo lands of end-time stuff is not only do they just proof text from the Bibles, they get in some crazy texts or God is speaking an apocalyptic language, and they go to that and they proof text from there and they try to read their current circumstances into that.

And so people just sort of like run around the Bible proof texting, irrespective of the context and all of that. And so they fail in that way. But I think many times Christians today will fail in the area of eschatology and having a proper biblically ordered eschatology, a meaningful, coherent, biblical eschatology, because they don't understand the Old Testament.

They spend the majority of their time in the New Testament, which isn't bad. I mean, it's all the Word of God. But they don't really, when they're reading something quoted in the New Testament, they don't go back to the Old Testament to see, okay, well, why is that being quoted and what's the context?

Like when Peter is quoting from Joel 2 at Pentecost and he quotes Joel 2, how many of you have actually gone back to read Joel 2 to see where was he quoting from? Why was he quoting that? How does that make any sense with where Peter was in time then?

Why does that matter then? And who is being spoken to? And what are those threats being made in Joel 2? What are those threats?

Who are they for?

Because you'll see people today quoting from Joel 2 as though it applied to us, but Peter's quoting it then and says, this is that which was spoken of by Joel the prophet, and he quotes from Joel. And so I think the problem is we're not actually allowing the revelation of God and God's redemptive story and his eschatology that he's laid out for us, we're not letting it actually speak in full.

We're proof texting random verses and saying, well, here's the man of sin, and there's going to be wars and rumors of wars and famines and pestilence and plagues, and then we're reading our current circumstances and going, well, that's speaking to us, when in reality we should be saying, no, let's go back and say what was the story that was anticipated to be fulfilled in Jesus' day, and why is everybody freaking out?

Because Jesus has now come, the Messiah has come, and there's all this talk about the kingdom of God throughout the gospels, and that's what Paul is left with in Acts chapter 28, 30 through 31, is he's proclaiming the kingdom of God.

What is all of that? Why is that meaningful to them? Why was it such a big deal, and why does it matter so much to call Jesus king of kings and Lord of lords? There's a story here. And so I think one of the ways we'll do this, because again, you can start in the Old Testament and just let that run, but I want to just show you the inspired apostle sort of summarizing eschatology in a short passage.

So I think this is one of the best ways to do this, because if our eschatology doesn't fit what Paul summarizes in 1 Corinthians 15, then I think we have a problem. And there's a way to tell if your eschatology fits.

I mean, you could basically take what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, I've said this often, and just write it down, get a white sheet of paper and timeline it and say, does my eschatology fit into this?

Yes or no? And I think that will do a lot to help us to see where do we need correction in our eschatology? So in 1 Corinthians 15, famous passage, I love 1 Corinthians 15, it starts off in verse one.