101. How James White Became A Postmillennialist (Our Interview)

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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the broadcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 101, an interview with Dr.

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James White. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the broadcast.

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Very special episode where we're gonna be interviewing Dr. James White. Now, I just met

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Dr. James White, but I've been following his ministry for a long time, watching various different things, from King James only -ism to his more recent turn or change to post -millennialism.

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There's lots that, there's almost an endless reservoir of material that Dr.

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White has talked about. I've seen debates, I've seen all kinds of stuff. So I am super thankful to have him on the show, and I could go any number of directions on how to introduce

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Dr. White, but I'm gonna let him tell us who he is and what he's most passionate about, what he's working on.

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So I'll give the floor to you, Dr. White. Oh, I don't like talking about myself. Anybody can look me up at aomin .org.

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I'm one of the pastors of Apology at Church. Been running

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Alpha Omega Ministries for over 40 years now. I've been married for almost 42 years, two kids, five grandkids so far.

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And right now, I'm sitting in our, I think it's absolutely unique.

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I've never heard of anybody else that has anything like this. I'm sitting where the bed would normally be in a 35 -foot -long fifth -wheel

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RV. The bed's obviously not here. We tore that out and have built a two -camera, 4K studio with lights, and I've got an

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ATEM over here, and the whole nine yards. Just finished doing an hour -long dividing line broadcast on numerous topics related to scriptural sufficiency and telling people how tomorrow morning

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I'm gonna be on the Alley Best Ducky Show with Trent Horn, talking about Roman Catholicism for a couple hours.

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I've got two debates with Trent Horn at the end of the week in Houston. Five debates on this trip, 35 days on the road, which is way too long, but it was the only way to work all the schedules and get everything together.

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And so, yeah, I'm on the road and doing other programs while we're doing it, because if you've got the studio, you might as well use it.

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So I'm the encore to Alley Best Ducky. Is that what you're telling me? Well, if you wanna look at it that way, but yeah,

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I think I've got four or five programs that I'm doing for folks while I'm traveling, because once I do the dividing line, the cameras are set up, everything's operating.

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And for some reason here in the Dallas -Fort Worth area, I have a 5G ultra wide connection on my little modem back there.

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I got 572 megabits download on it when I tested the speed. It's like, wow, really?

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Okay, so might as well use it while you got it. Well, your mobile studio is putting my in -house studio to shame, brother.

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Like, that's incredible. I'm gonna have to get you over here to show me what to do. Well, hey, it's Rich. Rich Pierce put all this together.

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Rich and I are the only two employees of Alphanomic Ministries and have been for probably 25, 30 years now.

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And he designed all this stuff and put it all together and then had to teach dummy me how to run it.

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And so when I'm on the road, but I actually am doing the dividing line on my own.

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I'm controlling the cameras and the feeds and it can get a little, I can get lost once in a while, but so far it hasn't been too bad.

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But yeah, it's a great way to do things. And I honestly don't do too much of this when

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I'm home because I have to go into the office and set stuff up at the office and do stuff like that.

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It's just easier this way. So let's do it. That is awesome. I'm super thankful that in all of the shows that you decided to say yes to, you said yes to this one.

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So I wanna jump right in brother, just to get us going. Now, one of the fun things that I saw that you were a part of is

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I saw a sermon that you delivered on why you had come to a post -millennial view.

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And I certainly wanna hear more about that story in just a moment, but just for anybody who's first time listening to this, they haven't been following with the series so far.

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What is a basic view? What does it mean that you're post -millennial? Maybe sketch that out a simple way to understand that.

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Well, I was raised as a independent fundamentalist Baptist. And so my dad was a minister and he went to Moody Bible Institute and very, very convinced of dispensational premillennialism.

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And so the first books on eschatology he bought me were things to come by Jade White Pentecost and things like that.

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And I remember as a junior in high school during a lock -in at the

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Southern Baptist Church that we were members of, using my tritium light on my, the tritium glow on the dial of a digital watch to light the little pages of a

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New Testament in Matthew chapter 24, like at midnight, explaining to my friends at this lock -in what the olive tree was and how the olive tree had bloomed in 1948.

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And so a generation is 40 years. This would have been 1980.

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So about eight years down the road is that's what we can expect and that kind of stuff.

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So that's really all I knew until I went to Bible college and one of my professors,

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Dr. D .C. Martin, what a godly man he was, what an influence on my life.

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D .C. Martin was an amillennialist. And I knew that made the pastor of my church very uneasy and he preached against him more than once from the pulpit, but I loved

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Dr. Martin and he taught me a lot of stuff, challenged me in a lot of areas.

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And basically I had become involved in apologetics.

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And so I knew the importance of a consistent hermeneutic and I became uncomfortable with the hermeneutics that I was using to support my views of eschatology.

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And I also had come to understand that eschatology, at least in our circles, produced a whole lot more heat than it did light.

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And I've seen churches that split over pre -trib, mid -trib distinctions and heard sermons where the slightest little difference, that person's going to hell, obviously doesn't know

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Jesus and all the rest of this kind of stuff. And I just got to the point where I said, I'm just uncomfortable identifying as anything.

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And I can warn, by the way, I'll warn you and your audience about something right now.

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If you want to see the most disapproving look on the face of someone that you never want to see a disapproving look on,

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Dr. John MacArthur, here's how you do it. When he asks you your eschatology, say you're a pan -millennialist, it'll all pan out in the end because I did that at the

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Christian Booksellers Association meeting in 95 or 96, I forget when it was now.

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And yeah, I'll never forget that look, that was bad. It was not something you want to go through more than once in life.

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It's the same look I got from D .A. Carson when I asked for a selfie. Oh, okay, oh yeah, no, no, no, no, no, wrong move.

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I could have told you that one. Now see, I'd take a selfie with you, but I'm not D .A. Carson. But anyway,

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I'm just much nicer than D .A. Carson. So a long time

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I call myself a pan -millennialist because I didn't want to study eschatology and there was nobody pushing me to do it.

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And then I listened to a tape series from Dr. Nichols out of Trinity in New Jersey. And he went through the this age and the age to come passages and said, that's amillennialism.

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So I'm like, hey, sounds good to me. And so for a long time, I called myself an amillennialist. You're safe as an amillennialist.

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You're not really making any major claims. It's the simplest of all the views.

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And so, but I'll be honest with you. I tried to read some books on amillennialism as an amillennialist and I was just bored to tears.

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And so I just, when people say, well, you like Sproul have been each one of the different views, maybe, but I was not passionate about amillennialism like that.

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So in 2018, me and my wife moved to Apologia Church and all the elders at Apologia are post -millennial.

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And all they asked of me was, do you believe that Christ will ultimately be victorious in this world?

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And I already did believe that, just the how wasn't all that clear.

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And Jeff was preaching through Matthew 24 for a very long time.

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I mean, wow. I did not know that you could preach through Matthew 24 for the millennium.

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And so, well, it's true. At least we joke about it today.

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And we were joking about it at the time. It was pretty amazing, but it was very, very, very thorough and answered a lot of my questions.

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And basically what happened for me was I wasn't trying to just get on board with everybody else.

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What happened was COVID in 2020. And really a lot of folks, not just me, were forced to make their eschatology functional rather than just theoretical.

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Yeah. And I had been raised where eschatology was this fun topic out here.

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I mean, I remember my senior year in high school taking the California Achievement Test and I was already done.

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I was class valedictorian and I never got to be in high school and all that stuff. And you could read a book once you had turned your test in.

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And I was reading Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey. Okay. You know, the red one with the, yeah, everybody remember that one.

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Well, if you're as old as I am, you remember that one. And it was just something that you could look at out there, but I never ever heard anyone preach a sermon that connected eschatology to the

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Trinity, to God's purposes in creation, anything like that at all.

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There was never a pan -canonical view from Genesis to Revelation into eternity.

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No, eschatology was just out there in the boonies someplace. And if you studied it, great. If not, the world wasn't gonna come to an end.

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What happens as we are literally, apologia, we don't claim to be prophets or anything like that but we never closed down.

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You know, there were churches that closed down for three weeks, four weeks, whatever, and then reopened. And, you know, people have done entire movies about people reopening their churches.

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We never closed. We had people coming from California, Oregon, Washington, and well into 2022, we still had people showing up that would partake the

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Lord's supper with us with tears in their eyes because they hadn't for all that time because their church wasn't doing it.

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And so, you know, we took a stand and had to start thinking through the relationship of church and state and what are

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God's purposes for the church? And what is the final end of all these things? And of course, in the midst of all these things and years earlier,

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I'll tell you right now, you're too young to know this, but - You're very kind. There are,

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I'm sorry? I said, you're very kind. Well, you just, you don't have quite enough gray in the beard.

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If I'm wrong, please inform me. But there are three things that really cause a person to mature.

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The first is marriage. The second is your children because every child is a massive black hole of selfishness that just sucks the selfishness right out of you because you've got to take care of this squirming diapered thing.

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And for me, the biggest thing that just all of a sudden changes how you view everything is grandchildren.

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When your babies have babies, all of a sudden the circle of life starts echoing in your ears and you start realizing you're something, you're something a whole lot bigger than you've ever seen before.

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And you start thinking about the future and the past. That's also when I started wanting to know who my ancestors were and things like that.

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But especially, and Doug Wilson has said this more than once. One of the reasons that people hold the eschatologies that they do is they never, ever, ever think about their great -grandchildren.

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What are they gonna believe? Am I doing anything to build a foundation for them?

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And I didn't. I mean, as a premillennialist, dispensational premillennialist,

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I was just hoping that the Lord would hold off until I could get married. That was, please,

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Lord, please, not yet. I wasn't thinking about kids. I wasn't thinking about grandchildren.

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I wasn't thinking about great -grandchildren. I wasn't thinking about how I could do anything to help them build the kingdom of Christ.

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Never even crossed my mind. That wasn't a part of anything. So hearing that kind of stuff regularly, and of course,

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I've had a lot of interaction with Doug. Actually, I'm the person that Doug has debated more than anyone else.

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Most people don't know that. But we have done more debates, both written and in person, than he's debated anyone else.

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And the fact that we are dear friends in the midst of that is a whole nother subject that we could go into at some point, because I have two friends that drive my friends crazy,

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Doug Wilson and Michael Brown. And I've debated

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Michael Brown and I've debated him. I'm the second most often debated person with him.

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There's a rabbi he's debated more often than me. So the point being we don't put our differences under the rug, we debate them.

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And we do so in a brotherly fashion and that drives some people absolutely crazy. Anyway, Doug emphasized, there are two questions that Doug asked, and I think this was really important in me starting to realize

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I needed to make a stand on this issue. One was, we never make plans for our great grandchildren and we should, it's right and proper to do so.

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And the other was, what if we are still in the early church? Now I've been teaching church history.

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I started, excuse me, 1990. I was a scholar in residence at Grand Canyon University.

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And the first class I taught was church history. But I never even thought about it because you teach church history and you teach early church history and then you teach medieval and reformation and modern and just sort of how we do it.

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But obviously someone in the 500s would have looked back and not viewed them as themselves as being in the early church any longer.

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They figure it's almost over. Every generation has that kind of thinking going on.

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And I knew that, but I had never had it thrown at me in that way. What if we are still in the early church?

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What if there's still, what if God has a lot of stuff yet to do? What if he has a lot more people to bring in?

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Because there always is that's, narrow is the way, few idea.

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Over against your descendants shall be like the sand of the sea and the stars of the sky. How do you put this stuff together?

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And I don't claim, even as a freshly minted post -millennialist to have answers to every question that can be asked.

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That's one of the things that, excuse the cough, I've been fighting something for weeks.

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That's one of the things that I wanna emphasize is, one of the things that put me off about eschatology as a whole was you get lost in the weeds.

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There are so many rabbit trails you can chase. And what did

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Zechariah mean here? And does that connect over to Daniel over here? And is that found in the 13th chapter of the book of Revelation?

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And you're just, you're all over the place. And the fact of the matter is, good men have come up with a lot of answers to a lot of these questions.

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But what eventually got me was instead of starting down here in the weeds with all the micro details, what

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I realized was when you look at Psalm 2 and Psalm 110, we like to say at Apologia that Psalm 110 is

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God's favorite Bible verse because it's quoted most often in the New Testament, which it is. Genesis 15, six would be next.

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You look at those passages and then you look at Isaiah 42 and then you see the fulfillment passages in the

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New Testament. You read 1 Corinthians 15, Matthew 28.

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And we were up at, was it Man Camp? I forget where.

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We were up in the woods somewhere as a group. And I was just,

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I was translating these passages and really trying to work through them.

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And what attracted me and eventually caused me to take this position, the post -millennialism that I hold to is not a post -millennialism that tries to dive down into the weeds and answer every little chronological question that can be asked.

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The beauty of it to me is that it starts up here in the

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Trinity. It is, ask me and I will give you the nations as your inheritance.

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It's the father speaking to the son. And the son then sends his people out in his authority.

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All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore in light of my authority and make disciples of all nations.

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And what I saw is that post -millennialism is the only eschatology that flows from Trinitarian theology.

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It is the father, the son, and the spirit. It's, you know, next week

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I'm doing a debate in Tennessee on the extent of the atonement.

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I'm defending particular redemption. And my primary argument, if anybody has heard me speak on the subject, is called

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Trinitarian harmony in the gospel. It is the fact that the father elects a people, the son dies in their place, substitutionary atonement, and the spirit then makes application of what the son has accomplished in time in bringing those individuals to spiritual life.

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And there's nothing wasted. The son's not trying to save people that the father hasn't elected to save.

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The spirit's not vainly trying to save people for whom no provision has been made or anything like that.

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There is perfect harmony in the redemptive work that Christ has accomplished on the cross of Calvary.

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It's the same thing here. You have the eternal purpose of the triune

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God being worked out. And that is going to result in the nations flowing to Jerusalem to worship the one true

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God. And so, I'm not sure if you've seen it, but when the

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Christian nationalism stuff came out, when Cannon published that book, which

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I have some issues with, and the author certainly doesn't like me, but -

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The Case for Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolfe. Yeah, Stephen Wolfe does not like me. He's said lots of, and I've returned the favor in a few tweets myself, but Wolfe is not a post -millennialist.

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He's a Thomist. And so, one of the real problems that I have with his perspective, and this is key, when the

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Christian nationalism stuff started, Doug and I did two sweater vest dialogues. One, we talked about Wolfe's book, and one, we talked about his book,

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Christendom 2 .0. And, sorry,

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I've been, like I said, really fighting this for a while. In both of those,

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I strongly emphasized, and I think

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Doug agreed with me. If there is not, because he did agree with me that this is what's going to happen, there is going to be a grand sweeping movement of the

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Spirit of God that is going to result in massive numbers of people truly coming to faith in Jesus Christ and submitting themselves to Him.

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That's what you see being promised, and your offspring shall be as the sand of the sea, and nations coming, and the knowledge of the

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Lord will cover the earth as the seas cover the oceans, and so on and so forth. And the only way

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I can see, biblically, for there to be a quote -unquote

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Christendom, that's, as a Baptist, that's just not a term that I'm overly comfortable with, but the idea of a worldwide submission to the

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Lordship of Christ, a recognition of the goodness of God's law, an application of these things, recognition of humanity creating the image of God, and all these types of things, is if that work of the

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Spirit takes place first. If it doesn't happen that way, it cannot be forced.

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If you try to force this without the Spirit changing hearts and minds, you have

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Christendom 1 .0, you have what's called sacralism, you have a confusion of the sphere sovereignty of church and family and state, and you have nominal

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Christianity. And there are a lot of people going, hey, nominal's better than what we've got now, and I'm like, they all lead to the same place.

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And that's not what I see in scripture. We had nominal Christianity, and yes, it provided cultural cohesion, but it also provided feudalism and the

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Inquisition and all sorts of other things along with it that I don't see as a fulfillment of the biblical promises in scripture.

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And so I very strongly love the consistency of post -millennialism with Trinitarian theology.

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They go hand in hand. That's the beauty that's very attractive to me. At the same time,

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I think that in application, as we think about what's going on in the world and the challenges that are facing the church with transhumanism and this absolutely satanic form of humanism, secularism,

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I'm sorry, that dehumanizes man and turns him into an animal, we have to have a sound foundation upon which to stand and to build toward the future, because a nation such as ours that is so confused now as to what a boy and a girl is cannot long stand.

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It's gonna fall. And when it does, someone's gonna have to build out of the ashes.

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And how long that's gonna take, I don't know. But my grandchildren and my great -grandchildren need to have firm foundations that nothing can move.

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And that's what I wanna try to provide for them. And post -millennialism gives me that forward -looking hope, because the eschatology

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I was raised with did not even countenance the possibility of such a thing.

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And my optimistic amillennial friends are sort of borrowing some of our capital to be overly optimistic within that concept.

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But hey, more power to them. I've never divided over eschatology, and I have no intentions of starting now, that's for sure.

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Yeah, amen. You mentioned a second ago, and I'll certainly pray for you with your sickness and stuff, brother, because I know you've got a lot of interviews to come.

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Yeah, two hours on the Alley Best Duckie show in the morning, yeah. I will pray as soon as we get off.

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I'll be praying for you, brother. But you mentioned Psalm 2 and Psalm 110, and you also mentioned just the

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Trinitarian, how it flows out of that. What are some distinctions between the way that, I mean, because everybody's going to try to interpret the text in some way.

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So with your premillennialist or amillennialist versus postmillennialism, can you maybe take one of those texts and just show a distinction on how they handle that?

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Well, when you have, basically, most amillennialists, when they look at kiss the sun lest he be angry, they view this in a spiritual fashion.

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So it's only in the spiritual realm. It does not have any connection necessarily, especially when you get into two kingdom theology, the

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Escondido version and stuff like that. And I did a dividing line.

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Maybe if I just don't talk so loudly, I won't go so. The microphone's right there. Why am I yelling? I don't understand.

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I did a dividing line with Dr. Joe Boot, Joseph Boot.

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If you've seen his book, the. Mission of God.

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Thank you. Starts with an M. The Mission of God. I had him on the dividing line to talk about two kingdom theology, and he gave a rather full critique of that perspective.

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But fundamentally, the difference is going to be when you talk about the authority that Christ says he has in heaven and earth, is he exercising that authority in any other realm other than the spiritual realm?

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So you almost end up with a form of dualism in the sense of exercising spiritual authority, but it doesn't end up having any direct contact in the physical realm, in the realm of history.

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So what is the kingdom of Christ? What does it look like? How is it built?

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Is it built solely within the fellowship of the church? What's the relationship between the church and the kingdom?

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These are all really vitally important issues. And Joe's other book that came out early last year,

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Ruler of Kings, that wasn't the original title. That's why I have a hard time with the titles. He had sent it to me.

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I'm one of his fellows in the Ezra Institute. I don't do almost anything for him because I'm too busy, but I appreciate the honor.

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He had sent it to me. And in fact, it's interesting. I asked him after I read it because it just blew me away.

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I thought it was so good. Have you seen it yet? Yeah, I have it. Oh, good. Notice I didn't say, have you read it yet?

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I've learned a long time ago not to make that mistake. I also have read it. Good.

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I read it early, early on. And that was like probably early 21 when things were getting really hairy with all the vaccines and everything that was going on.

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And I have a dear, dear friend. And I asked Joe, I said, could

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I send him the PDF because I think he would really, really want to read this. And so he allowed me to do it.

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And my friend's name's John Cooper, who is the lead singer of Skillet. And it just blew him away.

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And you may notice that once the book was published, there was an endorsement from John on it. That's how that came to be, as I was the miscreant that resulted in that.

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But it really helped John as well. What a lot of people don't know is John was post -millennial years ago.

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20 years ago, he was a post -millennialist. And if you listen back to the earliest

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Skillet music, there's a bunch of post -millennial songs in it. And he said, I stopped writing because no one understood what in the world

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I was talking about. And I'm like, oh, okay. But on their last album,

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I don't know if you've heard it, but they have a song called Dominion, which is about as post -millennial a theme as you could possibly have.

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And the last song on the album, he wrote for Joe Boutini called

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White Horse. And that one's dedicated to me and Joe. So that was pretty exciting.

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So there've been a lot of people who were adopting this perspective long before I finally got on the bandwagon.

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But so fundamentally the applications, when you look at 1

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Corinthians chapter 15 and the last enemy to be defeated is death, you can talk about that and you can limit it to a spiritual realm.

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Or you can talk about resurrection and life here on earth and you can make much broader applications.

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So amillennialism makes a lot of the same claims. It's just primarily limited to the spiritual realm and not to a fulfillment in history and time, which would involve the expansion of the kingdom of Christ and the putting every enemy under his feet.

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What is that? What is putting an enemy under his feet look like? And this was, and I mentioned this in the sermon, of course, you said you listened to it.

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When you're talking about enemies to Christ, I'm professor of church history at Grace Bible Theological Seminary.

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And so I have at least some knowledge of the broad spectrum of church history.

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And I can't think of any movement, institution, anything that is more fully and in its very essence anti -Christian than today's secularism.

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You can think about the papacy. You can think about various movements that have arisen over the centuries.

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But secularism is the fundamental denial of everything that Jesus said was good. It, by its very essence, destroys, if there's anything that's true, honest, just, pure, lovely, redefines all of that and eliminates the need for redemption, purpose in human life, everything.

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Secularism is the greatest enemy I could ever imagine. And when you ask yourself the question, how will that enemy be put under Christ's feet?

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Well, you can just say spiritually, it's put under Christ's feet when someone converts.

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And so it's pretty much a personal thing that you reject the claims of secularism.

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I mean, the monstrosities of progressivism that we have today where they try to be secularists and Christians at the same time, give you an idea of how foolish that is.

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But the post -millennialist says, yes, that part is true.

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But to demonstrate the authority of Christ and to glorify the triune

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God, secularism as a system must be put under his feet.

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And that's not just done privately with each conversion and maybe in a small number of people.

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It must be defeated and it will be defeated. Right. It reminds me, one of the verses that really convinced me of post -millennialism, and I think this one probably was the one that got me, was

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Genesis 128, where God blessed them and said them to be fruitful and multiply and spread out to the ends of the earth.

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And the question is, what are they spreading? They're not spreading secularism. They're spreading people who love

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God and who worship him to the ends of the earth. And either you have to believe that God gave up on that plan and he has no intention of accomplishing it, or he's gonna accomplish it in the true and better Adam, Jesus Christ.

38:21

And if he's going to do that, then secularism and pluralism and every other deadly -ism will bow the knee to Jesus at some point.

38:32

Yeah, it has to happen and it happens to the glory of God. And it happens through the work of the

38:40

Spirit, renewing hearts and minds, not through the imposition.

38:46

In fact, it's funny. When I was a pre -millennialist,

38:51

I didn't have any problem at all with Christ being victorious through the external imposition of his power by wiping people out.

39:03

The blood up to the ritals at Armageddon, I actually visited

39:09

Megiddo. I've gotten to go to Israel only once. And it was a life -changing experience, it really was.

39:18

And so we stood up on the mountain looking down into the

39:23

Valley of Megiddo. And I couldn't help but think of all the gory sermons

39:30

I had heard of the blood flowing up to the bridles of the horses.

39:35

But it never struck me that it was odd that I was okay with Christ's rulership being established not by changing hearts and minds, but by killing all his enemies.

39:53

I mean, he deals with his enemies, but the best way to deal with his enemies is by changing them into followers and worshipers.

40:04

But there you go. There was the rather unusual perspective that I had never been challenged to think on.

40:14

And so when people come up to me now that I've made this public statement and they wanna get into the weeds and they wanna go, so as a post -millennialist how do you match up Daniel four with Zechariah 13 and Zephaniah two?

40:32

And I just go, I don't know. Didn't even, never even thought of it. I haven't given it a second thought. Here's my question for you.

40:40

Does your eschatology flow from the Trinity? That's why

40:45

I believe it. And it's the first time honestly in my life that I love eschatology and that I see how foolish

40:58

I was most of my adult life to not recognize how important it is to have a functional eschatology that fits with and works with the rest of your theology.

41:13

It all goes together. It's not just over here. You got your theology over here and it never showed the two meet.

41:20

When it flows from everything you're teaching about father, son, spirit, election, redemption, atonement, self -glorification of the

41:32

Trinity, all this stuff put together as Doug likes to say, man, being a post -millennialist is fun.

41:41

Puts it in that way. And it's true. And it's a joyous thing. My pre -millennialism was not a joyous thing.

41:53

It really wasn't. I mean, I have friends who are still pre -millennialists. I get it.

41:58

And they'll say, oh, we have joy in the midst of tribulation and so on and so forth.

42:04

Okay, fine. But I just don't see how it flows naturally from a recognition that Christ is saving his people.

42:18

And he's doing it exactly as father, son, spirit in eternity past decreed that it would take place to the glory of the triune

42:26

God and to the formation of the kingdom of Christ where we someday will see the fullness of all that he has done and we have eternity to worship him for what he's accomplished.

42:45

Yeah, that's so good. Man, there's so much I could just jump in on and ask.

42:51

I love how you said that it integrated your theology and it made, in some ways, it invigorated through that process.

42:59

And that sort of came together in the COVID era in 2019. Tell me, what are some practical ways that post -millennialism has invigorated you and has even maybe changed the way that you view ministry or the way that you are working?

43:16

Maybe help us understand that. Because more than anything, I want this to be practical for our listeners. Well, a lot of that does go back to the fact that I was at a

43:31

Reformed Baptist church for 29 1⁄2 years. And the amazing thing is, as an elder there, not for all 29 1⁄2 years, but for most of that, my fellow elder there would identify himself as a post -millennialist, but he never used the language.

43:50

And I was never 100 % certain. I sort of figured he was an amillennialist, but he would actually say, no, I'm actually a post -millennialist, which is sort of hilarious when you think about it, being someplace that long.

44:03

But when I went to Apologia, Apologia is the home church of End Abortion Now. And our church is deeply involved in evangelizing

44:16

Mormons, in doing street ministry. We've got people outside abortion clinics multiple times a week, every week, even in the summer in Phoenix, which is very, very difficult.

44:32

And so this is a church that is young and energetic and incredibly active.

44:42

And that's really great for me. And that was energizing in and of itself, but it's seeing the consistency of the foundation in theology.

44:56

And it's also a church that we have often preached on.

45:03

Well, during COVID, for example, Jeff preached very prophetically to the governing authorities as to what the limitations of their authority are and the fact that they had to recognize that they will be judged by the son and that the son says certain things about what it means to love neighbor and to honor the image of God.

45:36

And I didn't hear a whole lot of non post -millennialists making that kind of argumentation and making that kind of stand.

45:47

And after I preached that sermon that you listened to, a dear, dear friend of mine overseas at a church that up until COVID, I had been visiting in Europe pretty much every year.

46:07

He listened to the sermon and he said to me privately, he said, well, now

46:16

I'm gonna have to think this stuff through. He had been putting it off. He had felt the pressure because there in Europe, they were under more pressure than we were in the

46:27

United States. And I sort of gave him permission by my sermon to finally work through these things.

46:36

He became a post -millennialist and has been very active in promoting a vigorous prophetic

46:50

Christian witness to the very, very secular government under which they live, which could have consequences, really, really could have consequences for him and for his church.

47:07

So there's a price to be paid because the Puritan post -millennialists and those who went before us, they weren't looking for fulfillment of these things in their life.

47:22

They were looking down the road. They were laying foundations and we have to do the same thing.

47:29

And so when I see some young bucks come along once in a while to grab onto this, and then they start getting the idea, hey,

47:36

I think I can bring this about now. It's like, whoa, whoa there, tiger.

47:43

This is something that God does in his time, not in your time.

47:49

And what this should do is produce long -term consistency on our part, not short -term flame out on our part.

48:03

And I am pretty certain if I live another 10 years or so,

48:10

I'm gonna see a lot of people who did not have the substance within them going off into other directions and looking for new things and not any longer having the views that they had in the past.

48:33

And just write that one down and 10 years from now, you'll probably be able to put a whole list of names under that particular heading because once you get to my age, you've seen a lot of stuff come and go.

48:46

And what lasts is what is deeply and consistently biblical.

48:54

Right. Yeah, as I thought about these things myself, I think knowing that we're probably, we've got a long way to go.

49:03

Like I'm in John 17 in our church right now where I'm preaching through the high priestly prayer. And we've been preaching through John for three years.

49:11

We're in the high priestly prayer now. And just seeing how Jesus said to his church or to his disciples, and he said to those who hear their message as well.

49:21

So the whole church, past, present, and future will be perfected in unity. And I look around at the lack of unity there is really in Christianity and in the church.

49:32

And I think to myself, man, we've got a long way to go just from even that perspective of Jesus having his prayer be accomplished.

49:39

And if anybody's gonna have their prayer accomplished, I would think it would be Christ. So even from that perspective, the timeframe doesn't pressure me like maybe it did when

49:50

I first became a post -millennialist. And as I started settling down, there's a cage stage for Calvinism.

49:57

I don't know what you'd wanna call it for post -millennialism, but it exists, it's real. Yeah, I think cage stage is a good term.

50:03

But to be honest with you, at my age, I skipped it. I really did. I didn't have to go through that.

50:11

I had been at Jeff and Luke and Zach, my fellow elders, apology, they were posties all along.

50:17

And so I didn't really have that kind of, woo -hoo, let's go convert everybody type thing.

50:23

And also because of my position, because the Dividing Line, a global audience, we've sort of invented

50:30

Christian webcasting. Because of that, without my even trying,

50:39

I have introduced all sorts of people to post -millennialism.

50:45

Just the very fact that I adopted the position. And of course, I'm not the first one. R .C.

50:51

Sproul did the exact same thing. He went from, he wasn't dispy, but he was historic pre -millennial, and then he was all millennial, and then he became post -millennial at the end of his life.

51:01

So I'm not the first one that's done it, but because of sort of the nature of my ministry and the nature of the fact that the

51:08

Dividing Line is always a teaching program, and we go into depth on just all sorts of stuff, that sort of kicked open the door for a lot of folks.

51:17

And so I've already been accused of, spreading post -millennialism and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

51:25

And I'm just like, I'm sorry. I know

51:30

Tim Bushong had me on Eschatology Matters to talk about my conversion and stuff like that.

51:37

But I haven't been, you contacted me, I didn't contact, hey, could I be on and talk about, I'll answer the questions when people ask, but I try to be just as balanced on this as anything else.

51:53

And the fact that it's blowing out of the Trinity, it shows just there's a balance there and a beauty and a depth to the doctrine.

52:00

Yeah, very much so, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I would just say to people who are, there are people who are really into eschatology.

52:12

I would just simply say, make sure your eschatology receives the same level of weight that equally important elements of theology such as atonement and the doctrine of revelation.

52:35

Wow, let me throw a real monkey wrench into things. It's funny to me that a lot of guys, even post -millennialists who will talk about how much they know about eschatology, there's another realm of eschatology, end times things, judgment, the nature of punishment that a lot of people have never even thought of.

53:04

They've never, as an apologist, I have had to deal with universalism.

53:15

And I'll tell you right now, one of the hardest subjects that you can debate is the conditionalism, annihilationism movement.

53:29

I would, I'll be honest with you, I would rather be a conditionalist or annihilationist because it removes so many objections.

53:40

I don't like to think about someone undergoing eternal punishment, but I just can't, not because I can't,

53:49

I know what their arguments are. I've read fudge. I know how they interpret eternal death and stuff like that.

53:55

And most people I know cannot give an answer to that stuff, even good post -millennialists because they're never faced with those people.

54:04

I just can't embrace it because theologically it fundamentally undercuts the necessity, need and impact of the atonement.

54:20

And it also, I don't believe, don't need to get into all this, but very quickly,

54:27

I don't believe that there are devils running around in the fire with pitchforks, stabbing people and stuff like that.

54:33

I don't think God has to extend any power whatsoever to bring punishment upon those who are eternally separated from Him.

54:42

Think about it. If you're made in the image of God and you are now, the restraint is removed from you.

54:51

You hate God. And there's nothing left around you.

54:57

You're not gonna see other people. It's outer darkness. There's not, you're not gonna be partying in hell. You're gonna be alone.

55:03

And you can't hurt anyone else. You can't hurt anything that's made in the image of God. You can't hurt

55:09

His creation. It's just you. And if you're consumed with hatred of God and you're made in the image of God, there's only one thing left for you to attack, self -destruction.

55:22

I can't even, I don't even wanna think about what that would be like, just the aloneness of it.

55:31

But if that's not true, then there's, you know, everybody assumes once you go to hell, you stop sinning.

55:42

And I just go, what, you become sanctified by going to the flames of fire? Has anyone really thought this through?

55:52

Like I said, I would like to be wrong about that, but I've just not been shown how I am.

55:57

And so that's a whole other realm of eschatology that we can focus in on one part.

56:03

Oh, this is really fun. This part, there's a whole army of people over here ready for argument.

56:08

So we haven't even engaged them. And so finding balance in all of that.

56:17

You know, I always keep in mind, I'm an apologist. And that means

56:23

I have to be very careful about balance. I've seen lots of apologists just fly off into the weeds and get lost and abandon the faith and everything else.

56:34

But at the same time, I think there's something really good about recognizing that if I'm going to take a position,

56:41

I need to know who denies that and what their arguments are. And a lot of people in church just don't do that.

56:47

We live in sort of an echo chamber. We don't know what else is out there. And so we very confidently take positions that we couldn't really defend if we had to because we just haven't really thought that stuff through.

57:03

And so I hope that my apologetic background and activity helps provide somewhat of a balance and make me a little less willing to make wild statements that might get shot down if I expose myself to people who could engage in that.

57:23

Yeah, going back just for a second to the timeline perspective. One of the things that I think is another aspect of eschatology that folks don't, maybe they don't think about it, but how it actually plays into our sanctification, not positionally, but progressively, and also how we lead a family.

57:46

One of the main things that really was critical to me is my kids are gonna raise my grandkids.

57:54

And if I don't disciple my children, and we're Westminster 1646,

58:00

I know you guys are 1689, but both of those are incredible documents. Why don't we take those and teach our children?

58:09

And it doesn't have to be the catechism, it can be something else, but I was really, I wasn't worried about taking over politics.

58:15

I wasn't worried about any of that. How do I inculcate these truths into my children so that they pass the baton onto the next generation?

58:23

And honestly, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. If every Christian would just do that, would marry well, would have really healthy families where discipleship is happening, they would be plugged into a local church that's faithful.

58:39

If we would just do that, God'll handle all the rest of it. Well, I definitely think that's one of the means of grace.

58:47

And when I married, I wasn't in a relationship with a reformed church.

58:55

And it was a few years after I got married that we came to understand.

59:01

It's not that we were anti -reformed, but we didn't have the vocabulary really to express it. But anyway, when

59:09

I look back on raising of our kids, first of all, I wish I had had so many more. And we didn't, we only had two and could have had more, but didn't.

59:20

And yet with those two, they will definitely testify that I, despite not having that long -term view as yet, because even once we became reformed, that was soteriologically reformed, not the rest that goes along with being reformed.

59:43

That came along later. I certainly did very much educate them in the

59:51

Christian worldview. And once we started going to PRBC, Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church, their

01:00:00

Sunday school teachers, the catechism, everything else definitely reinforced all of that, which

01:00:06

I'm very thankful for. They're very thankful for that. And my daughter, especially, she's homeschooling five kids.

01:00:15

She has her own webcast that is very popular. I was, a number of years ago,

01:00:22

I was in Ireland. I think it was 2017. I was in Ireland and I just asked a roomful of Anglicans, if you can believe that, in Ireland.

01:00:33

I said, you know, my daughter has a webcast called Sheologians, anybody heard of it? And about a third of the people in there put their hands up.

01:00:40

They're actually, they knew of, I was in Zambia teaching at African Christian University with Voddie Balcombe.

01:00:48

And some of his students were interviewing me and I started talking about my family. So, you know, like my daughter, Summer, she has a podcast, wait a minute,

01:00:56

Summer Yeager, you're Summer's dad? And I'm like, yeah, I like now being known as Summer's dad.

01:01:03

So I did something right there in communicating those things. And, you know, my grandkids are being catechized in that way and being taught to do that in the future with their children and things like that.

01:01:21

So, yeah, that's one of the greatest ways of building the kingdom, of swinging the sledgehammer at the gates of Hades.

01:01:31

You don't have to be chasing Joe Biden around. He doesn't know what day it is anyways, but far more, he doesn't, come on, let's be honest.

01:01:40

You're right, you're right. His own department of justice said, we can't charge this guy. He's just a nice little old man who doesn't know where he is.

01:01:48

It's just like, wow, America's greatest day is it's great. Anyway, doing that at home and passing that on, that's the greatest thing that we can do.

01:02:02

And yet that's so often what's skipped. And what is it?

01:02:08

How many young Christian people today have seen it and they see it around them and have been taught that the greatest thing they can do is to seek out a godly husband or wife, have a godly family, raise them in the fear and admonition of the

01:02:29

Lord. You know, that unfortunately was not what

01:02:35

I was taught as a young person, but wish

01:02:40

I had been. I'd have more grandkids now if I had. I was sitting over coffee with a pastor this morning and it just became apparent that one story after another, and both of us had them, of guys who, or gals who didn't marry in biblical ways.

01:03:02

And now because of that, they're pulled away from the church. They have a very nominal faith, if any at all.

01:03:09

I've just, we've seen it over and over and over again. It's so important. I'm so glad you're bringing it up. Yeah, the world's view of self -fulfillment rather than the

01:03:22

Christian understanding of creatures made in the image of God finding their fullest expression and their fullest fulfillment in service.

01:03:37

It's just an indication of how much secularism has invaded the church and how so much of our preaching doesn't challenge it.

01:03:50

Our people come into that service having been six days under the pressure cooker of secular mechanisms of thought.

01:04:01

And we don't have a whole lot of time to counteract that, but we need to do the best we can.

01:04:07

Yeah, that's a good way to just ask the last question and just put a bow on what we're talking about.

01:04:15

What would you say to a young Christian family, and I don't mean just post -millennial from that perspective,

01:04:23

I mean like this full -orbed theology, this integrated way of thinking, we live in a very, very ungodly time, a time where our country is crashing.

01:04:36

What would you say to encourage them? Because I really do think post -millennialism and I think good eschatology brings hope, but what would you say to encourage them on being faithful where they're at and what would you say?

01:04:51

Two weeks from now, I'm gonna be teaching an intensive course at the seminary on Baptist history.

01:05:02

And part of my preparation, I've been doing a fair amount of reading in Tom Nettles' three -volume series,

01:05:11

The Baptist, that's my textbook for the class. I've been stunned by the things that great men of God went through in the past.

01:05:26

There was one Baptist leader in England in the early years, when you

01:05:34

Presbyterians were still drowning us, by the way, just for the fun of it. You're forgiven. We love you now.

01:05:43

Better late than never. See, the body's coming together. All of our

01:05:49

Baptist and Presbyterian arguments will be over once that unity is established and everybody's a

01:05:57

Baptist. But anyway, as I keep telling Doug and he doesn't get it, but this one individual of 14 children that were born to him, 11 died in infancy.

01:06:19

And I knew just as a historian that there were periods of time where most women would have to have 10 live births to get one child through to adulthood.

01:06:32

That's how much infant mortality there was, disease, plague. And many of these men were married to more than one woman because so many women died in childbirth.

01:06:45

A man would be on his third wife, it wasn't because he was unfaithful, it was because previous had died.

01:06:52

And the things that they went through, the struggles, the persecutions, the imprisonments, the disease,

01:07:03

I often would just stop and just go, if I experienced what he experienced,

01:07:15

I could easily see myself using that as an excuse to stop using the gifts that God's given me, view myself as a martyr and wallow in my self -pity.

01:07:34

Many of these men were post -millennialists from Puritan background and they endured hardship.

01:07:45

And I get it on Twitter all the time. I will say something on Twitter, I know it's called

01:07:51

X, but I'm gonna keep calling it Twitter just because that's what it should be. I will say something about the inevitable demise of any culture that gives puberty blockers to eight -year -olds and about the depth of the depravity and the evil and the twistedness, the satanic nature of such thing.

01:08:20

Oh, wow, I thought you were a post -millennialist. I just wanna go,

01:08:28

I am, which is why I remain utterly confident that this kind of rebellion is going to be crushed under the feet of the

01:08:36

Savior, but it might not be during my lifetime. And in fact, it probably won't be, but it will be according to the promises of Scripture.

01:08:47

And so the encouragement is not an encouragement that says you're not gonna experience.

01:08:55

I mean, if our economy collapses and it could tomorrow, I think all it takes is one atomic bomb, one mushroom cloud.

01:09:06

Look what happened at 9 -11, look what happened to the economy after that. A couple of planes crashed in the buildings and the economy almost went flat.

01:09:15

We're only three times more in debt now than we were then too. No kidding. When it all comes apart, there's gonna be starvation.

01:09:24

So many of our, we're sitting here with electricity and 4K cameras and it all goes bye -bye.

01:09:32

And the question is, who's gonna remain faithful in the midst of that?

01:09:38

Now there are believers living in the world with one 100th of what you and I have.

01:09:47

And they're probably gonna be the ones to show us how to do it. But that contentment and that continued service is very much encouraged by looking down the corridors of time, seeing the promises of God and going, they're gonna be fulfilled.

01:10:05

And you can look back, you can look back at prophecy, 700 years between Isaiah and Christ.

01:10:19

He's gonna fulfill his promises for us too. There's your encouragement. Amen. Amen. Brother, I can't tell you how thankful I am for you to have come on and for you to share your heart and share just your story, your background.

01:10:33

And I love how you talked about the integration of theology because honestly, that's why

01:10:39

I do it. I told my Sunday school class last week that I'm not an eschatology, not actually love the doctrine of the knowledge of God most because it's most helpful for my soul and helps me sleep at night knowing he's sovereign and he has a sayity and all these things.

01:10:53

But I've been teaching a lot on eschatology because it's so avoided. I'm so glad you talked about that integration because it's so important.

01:11:00

It really does invigorate our entire theology, right? It does, most definitely.

01:11:06

I'm glad that was helpful. Absolutely. How can we as a audience be praying for you?

01:11:12

I know we gotta pray for your voice that it will hold up tomorrow during your interview. What else are you doing?

01:11:18

Well, five debates on this trip and two with Trent Horn.

01:11:24

He's the best Catholic Answers has. One with Jason Breda, a former

01:11:30

Calvinist on the atonement. One with Leighton Flowers on John six. Just need patience for that one.

01:11:38

And the last one is against what might be called the King of the Unitarians, Dale Tuggy at the end of the trip.

01:11:49

Four of those are at First Lutheran in Houston. Okay. Pastor McClanahan there loves debates.

01:11:56

And so he's done a lot of work to put all these debates together for me. And I wanna do a good job for him, obviously.

01:12:03

But then again, I'm teaching the seminary. I'm speaking at the conference. I'm speaking to various churches along the way.

01:12:11

Way, way over committed. And my health just, aside from the cough,

01:12:19

I've got a few other little things going on that could really sideline me if they were to go sideways.

01:12:28

So yeah, I just need strength and healing and health. And of course

01:12:33

I'm driving all of these this way. So I'm going down the freeway. I'm 51 feet long, 13 three tall, and I'm doing 70 miles per hour in a 17 ,000 pound vehicle.

01:12:46

And so I get to play tag with the truckers all the time and it's lots of fun.

01:12:53

So I need traveling mercies and I travel alone. And so, can't fall asleep at the wheel, things like that.

01:13:03

So just basic stuff along those lines. And stuff breaks, you drag something to sink like down the road and it gets, especially in New Mexico, gets bounced around like I don't know what.

01:13:16

It's amazing that everything just doesn't fall apart. And when I get where I'm going, there's nothing but two wheels left behind me.

01:13:23

So make sure the unit keeps working. Last trip I was on, I lost my fridge. That's no fun.

01:13:29

That's not overly helpful as far as providing food and things like that.

01:13:35

So just basic stuff like that. I need to get through this because I've only got like six weeks till next trip and hopefully a major debate in Louisiana.

01:13:47

And I don't know how long we're gonna get to do what I'm doing.

01:13:54

There are forces that want us locked up in 15 minute cities, also called concentration camps.

01:14:03

And so I'm sort of like, I've got this thing. I wanna try to get as much accomplished in the time that I've got.

01:14:13

I don't know how long that is. And so I just wanna be faithful and leave behind a body of work that will bless my grandchildren and my great -grandchildren.

01:14:27

I would like to live long enough to see some great -grandchildren. That would be my oldest granddaughter,

01:14:33

Cadence is 14. So I've got a good shot. Kelly and I got married.

01:14:41

I was 19, she was 18. And that's almost unheard of anymore. And I'm like, no, you poor people, you're getting married at 31.

01:14:53

You'll be lucky if you see a grandchild, let alone ever see a great -grandchild. I know we're at the end, but we could talk about that even at some point, the depopulation agenda and how

01:15:06

Christianity and a true faithful biblical view loves children.

01:15:13

So we don't have time to get into that tonight. Apologia, we have two ladies at Apologia that are on number 11.

01:15:22

And so anybody who listens to the background of Jeff's sermons or my sermons will hear lots of children.

01:15:32

It's a family integrated church. And so they're in the service with us. And it only took me about three weeks to get used to it.

01:15:38

I don't even hear it anymore. But man, coming from a Reformed Baptist church that had a nursery, where as you got close to lunchtime, it was so quiet in there, you could hear stomachs grumbling.

01:15:51

So you knew you were getting close to the end of the sermon. When you start hearing everybody's stomachs grumbling, you could not hear anyone's stomachs grumbling at Apologia for love and money because of all of our kids.

01:16:03

And so yeah, that's beautiful. That is wonderful. But anyway, so yeah, those are the things

01:16:09

I've got going on. And I would definitely appreciate the prayers of God's people along those lines. Yeah, if you don't mind,

01:16:15

I'd like to pray for you now, just a felt tug on my heart that I would like to before we close, if that's okay.

01:16:22

Don't mind if I cough during it. No, I won't at all. Lord, thank you so much for our brother,

01:16:28

Dr. James White. Lord, thank you for his longstanding ministry and faithfulness. And God, I just, I pray for the things that he asked for prayer for.

01:16:35

Lord, especially, I pray that you would keep his voice over the next couple of weeks, that you would keep his mind sharp, that you would help him boldly declare the majesties of Christ and integrated theology that makes much of God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

01:16:51

Lord, would you help him to be wise in how he ministers? Lord, would you help the gospel that he declares?

01:16:59

Lord, would you make it such that so many people hear it? Lord, would you raise dead people to life through his ministry?

01:17:05

And Lord, would you help them to get plugged in the faithful churches? God, we ask your blessing on this man, on his health, on his family, and on his traveling.

01:17:13

Lord, in Jesus' name, amen. Amen, thank you, brother. Hey, God bless you, brother. Thank you.

01:17:19

Thank you so much for watching another episode of the podcast. It is our joy to bring good gospel content to you, the listener.

01:17:27

We want to have excellent men on this show, like Dr. James White, who point us in the direction of biblical faithfulness.

01:17:34

So to that end, thank you so much for supporting this channel. Thank you for supporting this show, and we'll see you again next time on the podcast.