Sunday School: Distinctives Series. Postmillennialism (Part 1)

The Meaning of Eschatology and the Church’s Distinctives

Welcome back to the Shepherd's Church podcast. Just like our Lord's Day sermon, we hope that this Sunday School message blesses you and strengthens you in your faith. So, however many weeks ago when we began this Sunday School series on distinctives, the point that we tried to make is that every church has distinctives, whether they know it or not, and your distinctives tell you a whole lot about what you value and who you are, and your distinctives are gonna drive how you actually engage in mission, ministry, and everything else.

So, we've been going through those things like regulative principle of worship, covenant theology, reform theology, exegetical preaching, to show who we are and what drives us to mission. Now, fittingly, we're gonna end with eschatology, but I would be surprised if we get through it all today.

I'm gonna try my best to be succinct, but I also value any time that you have questions being able to ask. So, we together will dictate how long, there we go. We got it?

Good.

All right, we together will dictate how long this topic takes. So, I can talk about it for a while, but I am gonna try to be succinct and sort of summative in this and not go too in-depth. Now, what is eschatology?

Eschatology comes from two Greek words, eschatos and logos. Logos means words and eschatos means last or end. So, it's basically, if you were to say a very literal definition of it, it's words about the last things or a how do you think about the end times.

That's how we get there. Now, there are four different hermeneutical positions on the end times. What do I mean by that? I mean, when you read the Bible, the hermeneutical position is how do I interpret this text?

What's my method for interpreting every text in the Bible? There's four methods that get us to eschatological positions. The first method is called futurism. You've probably heard of this, especially with dispensationalism and premillennialism.

Futurism is an assumption that every passage or the majority of the passages in the Bible have a future fulfillment and not a past fulfillment or a present fulfillment. You come to the Bible saying, what does this passage mean to me and to my time?

And that basically gets us to a futurist interpretation. It's to say that Jesus and the apostles were not speaking to their audience and their time, but they were speaking about things that were gonna happen thousands of years into the future.

So that's where we get futurism. If you're a futurist, the only way that you can read the Bible is through a premillennial lens because Jesus is not gonna return until after, or he's not gonna, yeah, anyway.

We can get into that in a little bit. Futurisms are premillennialists. The second hermeneutical position is called historicism. Anybody heard of historicism before? Okay, it's sort of a dead view. Two people have heard of it.

It's not completely dead, but it is mostly dead. Kind of like money by them. Anyway, historicism says that the book of Revelation specifically is organized in such a way that it talks about all of church history in sequential order.

So the first church in Revelation represents the early church. The second church in Revelation chapter two represents the next generation of churches and on down through history to where they would say that we are in the Laodicean period, which is the last church.

It's the seventh church. And we're in that watered down church age where Jesus is gonna spew us out of his mouth like vomit. That's what they say, that Revelation is organized according to this timetable.

And like I said, it's mostly a dead view. It doesn't really show up very much today. There were some post-millennial historicists which were the Puritans, but that view of post-millennialism is no longer around.

The third view, any questions on that, by the way?

What's that? Do they view the seven churches as a metaphor?

Yes, yes, as a metaphor for all of church history. Yeah, yes, sir. Yeah, I mean, it's not monolithic. Yeah, it was definitely a more popular view, 1500s to 1700s. Any others? Okay, the third hermeneutical view is called idealism.

Idealism basically says that every text, whether it's future, present, or any of that, is less important than what the spiritual application of that text is, because every text can be interpreted most effectively through a spiritual lens.

For instance, if you read it this way, the book of Revelation is not about things that happened in the past, and it's not about things that are gonna happen necessarily in the future, but it's about the ongoing struggle between good and evil.

So when we read it, all of these passages have a spiritual application for us today, and they apply to everyone in all church history, because we're always battling with evil as Christians. So that's an idealist perspective.

If you're idealist, you tend to be amillennial, but that's not always the case. There are postmillennial types who are also idealist. Martin Selbretti would be the example that I'm familiar with. Any questions on that?

All right, the final one is preterism. Preterism is the one that I hold to, not as a full preterist, but as a partial preterist, or a mostly preterist, from my standpoint. Preterism comes from the Latin word preter, which means past.

So what I think, and I'll be arguing somewhat today for that, but maybe more so for postmillennialism, preterism says that the original authorial intent of eschatology passages, or end times passages, was to the original audience.

So when we get to Matthew 24 and Jesus says, you're gonna be seeing false prophets and wars and rumors of wars, and when we get to Revelation and we see things like dragons and beasts and false prophets, my assumption is that those things applied in the first century because the original author was writing to an original audience.

Now, my assumption is generally that, but exegesis, as we've talked about before, needs to study things very carefully to find out if that assumption is true. And there should be, I would think, good contextual reasons why we would abandon original authorial meaning in order to go to a futurism or an idealism.

There should be reasons in the text to do that because, think about it this way, Jesus in Matthew 20, I'm just gonna sketch a little bit of a history real quick. Jesus in Matthew 21 looks right at the Jews and says the kingdom's gonna be taken away from you and it's gonna be given to another people.

So that made them big mad, right? Then you get to Matthew 22 and Jesus says to the Jews, I'm gonna burn your city down. He tells it through a parable, but he says your city's gonna get burned down. Then he tells them that they're gonna be rendered over to Caesar, which is another big mad moment.

Then Matthew 23, he calls down seven curses upon that generation. He says I'm gonna leave your house desolate. I'm gonna leave it empty. And all of God's wrath that's been stored up since Abel, which is a lot of wrath, is gonna be poured out on that generation.

That's Matthew 23, 46, I think, the very end of Matthew 23 or 38. Now, he's talking directly to them this entire time. The disciples are noticeably in angst. They're like, Jesus, the temple's gonna be destroyed?

The nation's gonna be ended? The covenant that God had made with Moses where we were gonna be his chosen people, that's gonna come to an end? And they ask him three questions. When is this gonna happen?

What's gonna be the signs that this is gonna happen? And is this concerning the end of the age? Those are their three questions. Futurists assume that Jesus looks at them and says, your questions aren't really important to me.

Instead, let me talk to you about things that are gonna happen in the 21st century, things like Klaus Schwab or the World Economic Forum or UN. That's what's really important. It would be like he would be listening and watching them dealing with all of this anxiety and saying, simmer down.

I need to tell you about something that's really important. That would be unloving. Jesus doesn't answer questions in such a trite and flippant way. So my assumption is when Jesus is speaking, he's speaking to that generation about things that are gonna happen to them that has application for us, right?

And this is just good hermeneutics. This is how we interpret every other passage of scripture and our dispensational brothers, premillennialist, amillennialist as well. We all understand that hermeneutics, the right way to interpret the Bible is to understand what the original author said to the original audience.

All I'm asking us to do is to apply that same principle to our eschatology and be consistent. So those are the four hermeneutical views in eschatology. Everything's gonna happen in the future. Everything is happening throughout church history.

Everything is spiritual, and everything happened in the past, or most things happened in the past. What questions do you have just based on those four views? All right. Clarity is good. We're right on point.

Good, good, good.

The Three Millennial Views and Christ’s Present Reign

Well, I don't know who's heard it or not, but this is good. Okay, the next part of eschatology is your millennial position. Where do you view Jesus returning? So is Jesus gonna return before he sets up his kingdom?

That's premillennialism, pre meaning before. Is he going to return after he set up his kingdom, post, that's postmillennialism, or is he going to return at the end of his kingdom, which is amillennialism, but there's a little bit of a nuance there and a difference.

So that's your millennial views, pre, post, or ah. Those are really the three. I hold to a postmillennial view, because when I see Jesus ascending into heaven, making war with the dragon and casting him down to earth, and then as the victorious king sitting down on his throne to rule, that sounds like he's reigning in his kingdom now.

Like he's not sitting on his throne as a non-reigning king. You don't do that. When a king sits down on his throne, he's reigning. When a king stands up from his throne, except for bathroom breaks and things like that, he's going to war.

So when Jesus sits down on his throne to reign, he's reigning. We are in the reign of Christ now. If you're a premillennialist, you have to believe that we are not in the reign of Christ. Now, you can't believe that we're in the reign of Christ now if we're waiting on Jesus to return in order to set up his reign.

Premillennialist will typically say that Jesus is gonna return and have his reign on earth in a physical throne in Jerusalem, which we reject. We would say that he's already reigning now on his throne and that his reign has effect on the earth, that as Jesus reigns in heaven, it's going to have an effect upon the earth.

That's what makes us postmillennialist. Amillennialist are a little harder to pin down because it's like a spectrum with amillennialist. They believe Jesus is reigning on his throne now, but overwhelmingly they believe that he's reigning over a spiritual kingdom that has very little effect on earth.

If you're what we would call a radical two kingdoms amillennialist, you believe that those two kingdoms are almost completely opposed. The spiritual kingdom is here, the earthly kingdom is here, and they don't really touch.

Or if they do, they touch barely. Some amillennialist, you would call them optimistic amillennialist, believe that his reign in heaven has effect on earth, and then depending on how much effect they believe that it has is the spectrum.

I believe that his kingdom will have maximal effect on earth, so that's what differentiates me from, one of the reasons it differentiates me from amillennialist.

Yes, yeah.

Yeah, and some would say, Ken, that, well, that was a spiritual act. He cast out demons from the soul so that people could be Christians, but the naivete that comes in that position is that if you're a Christian, it won't have a physical impact on your material reality, and I believe that it will.

I think so. I think in millennial and younger generations, a recognition of Gnosticism in the church today is becoming clear, and I think, so I think Radical Two Kingdoms has a Gnostic bend to it, that the spiritual is more important than the physical.

That's why they separate these things out so harshly or so strongly. I think that a lot of younger people, especially in Adam's generation, Belushi's generation, they're returning to churches like the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and liturgical reform churches.

They're leaving megachurches to return to these kinds of churches.

Why?

Because there's something happening in Christianity right now where young people are saying that the shallow wrapping paper Christianity that I grew up with is not enough, it's not deep enough, it's just scratching the surface.

I want something that's returning back to something deep and meaningful, something that invokes all my senses. So you'll go to churches where sight, sound, smell, taste, all of these senses are being evoked in a very deep and liturgical way.

People are returning back to that because the hollow Gnosticism of modern evangelicalism is waning. So I think it's a larger sort of waning that's happening that's having an effect downstream on the radical two kingdoms.

Yes, ma 'am.

There is a kingdom.

Or already has.

So does, is kingdom different than heaven?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, and well, and this is where we have to demythologize our theology a little bit. Because of the Middle Ages, we have a view of heaven as the final resting place for Christians. And that's not true.

The true story of redemption is that God is reuniting heaven and earth back together again so that in eternal state, in eternity, we live with God on earth, in a perfected earth with him forever. So when the last bell tolls and eternity begins, heaven and earth now are inseparable from one another.

And we will be living in a physical and spiritual reality with God forever in perfection. So if, so some would say, heaven is the final resting place. When we die, we go to heaven, that's the end. That's not true.

And the question is whether the kingdom of God is here now and, or is it future? I believe that the kingdom of God is here now. And I think that the kingdom of God is God's way of knitting together heaven and earth back together again.

So in the Old Testament, there was only one point on earth where heaven and earth touched. Where was that? Sinai was the first part of it. Well, yeah, Eden was heaven and earth totally overlapped. That's what we're working back towards, yes.

The temple, right? In the Holy of Holies. In the Holy of Holies was where God dwelled with humanity and heaven and earth perfectly overlapped, which is why it was so dangerous for the high priest to actually enter into it because he was a sinner.

So that lasted sort of all throughout the Old Testament. There were moments where the temple was destroyed and all those things. But when Jesus came and he said that he had come to tabernacle among us, why do I say that?

Well, when it says in John 1 14 that Jesus came and dwelt among us, the word there for dwelt is tabernacled. It's skene in Greek. So Jesus is saying, I have come to set up God's presence on earth. So everywhere Jesus walked in the gospels, he was the Holy of Holies, walking, talking, moving around.

He was the presence of God perfectly manifested on earth in a way that humans could interact with. You had a temple in Jerusalem, which was virtually empty. The Ark of the Covenant had already been destroyed in the Old Testament.

So they didn't have the Ark of the Covenant, they didn't have the mercy seat and the spirit of God never came back and inhabited the Holy of Holies as it had in Solomon's temple. So Jesus, when he comes, he is the walking, talking presence of God on earth.

And then he promises that he's going to turn us into little temples. When the spirit comes inside of us, we are now the same thing that the Holy of Holies was in the Old Testament. We are the little room where the spirit of God comes and makes his dwelling place.

So now you get to the first century, there's 12 people. That's 12 places that earth and heaven are now connected, as opposed to just one. Then you have the 70 disciples. Then you have 500 eyewitnesses to Jesus's resurrection.

Then you have 3 ,000 people getting saved at Pentecost. So now what? There's 3 ,700 something places on earth where heaven and earth are now knit back together again. How many Christians are on the earth today?

We don't know exact numbers, but about two and a half billions, what the numbers say. So if you think about this from a knitting perspective, there's two pieces of cloth and we're trying to knit them back together again.

There was one stitch that was holding the whole thing together throughout the Old Testament. Now there's 2 .5 billion stitches. As more people become saved, as God continues to do his work on earth and God continues to heal things that were broken, the world and heaven are gonna be coming increasingly more connected.

That doesn't mean that the earth is going to somehow blend into eternal state one day. We do believe Jesus has to return and to crush the final enemy, which is death, and to set up the eternal kingdom where he heals everything perfectly.

We believe in that. But in the meantime, we can't ignore the fact that God is healing things now. He's not just going to wait to heal everything all at once. He's healing things now and he's healing things through his church.

So long answer to a short question. Is that helpful? Any followups?

All right.

So I think that's why the Lord tells us to pray, your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. What is the kingdom of God like in heaven? Is it just in a little corner?

A little spot, you know?

No, it's fully here, you know? Just like it's fully here, he's gonna eventually bring it fully here, you know?

Right.

Even driving up to get, one of my great pleasures as a Christian is to talk and study about eschatology, especially post-middle.

Why?

Because it shows our God being a victorious God. He's gonna bring about his kingdom on this earth many years hence, but eventually it'll happen.

Right, amen. Amen. I had something I was gonna say to that point, Ron, but I can't remember it now.

Yes, sir. So the view that heaven is like this ethereal, kind of like spiritual distinction from the actual, even like a more redeemed earth, is that a middle-aged thing or a medieval thing?

I think so, and it's the same place where you get views of Satan in red jumpsuits and angels floating around on clouds, and some of that stuff crept into Christianity through medieval thinking, so. Derek, do you have a question?

Postmillennial Optimism and the Earth Filled With God’s Glory

So with that, being that we believe that the kingdom of God has come, Jesus says this, that the kingdom of God is here. Like Ken just said, if he's casting out demons, the kingdom of God has come. So the question then is, can we substantiate the fact that Jesus is reigning now, and that by his reign, he is making the world better?

So post-millennialism has an optimistic view of how human history is going to trend. Because think about it, if Jesus is reigning now, and if he is going to return after his kingdom has fully come, the question is, what kind of a kingdom is that going to be just before he returns?

If Jesus is going to return just before an epic collapse, well, that doesn't make sense with the way that Jesus does anything. But if we believe that he's going to be successful, that he is going to win the world, we have to be able to prove that from scripture.

It's a nice thought, and it does make a better story. I don't know if you've ever watched the movie Manchester by the Sea. I watched it because I know some of the town landmarks and stuff, because when I was at Gordon-Conwell, Manchester by the Sea is just a couple towns over from South Hamilton.

So I watched it thinking, oh, cool, I might see some of the buildings that I know. It was an absolutely terrible movie. From the moment that it began, it was depressing. And then it ended even more depressed than it began.

And by the end of it, you would imagine if someone were suicidal, you would never tell them to watch that movie. That might be the final straw that pushed them over the edge. It's just a terrible movie.

We don't like stories like that. You ever watch the movie Don't Look Up? It's the liberal, woke, the world is ending by climate catastrophe movie.

And it actually does.

It ends with the whole world being blown up. And there's no salvation. There's no redemption. So we like stories because we are made by storytelling God of stories that have this epic collapse, but then this triumph, this climax where good wins.

Well, post-millennialism is just saying that the same God who made stories like this will actually win. He will defeat evil on Earth. So we have to be able to prove that from scripture. Now, oh good, we just got through the introduction.

It's only 9 .35. We have 10 minutes left. The telos for the world. What does telos mean? Telos is a Greek word which means the end, the purpose. The end goal is, I think, Habakkuk 2 .14. Habakkuk 2 .14 says this.

For the Earth, that's Earth. That's not a metaphor for heaven. For the Earth will be filled, future tense, at some point in the future. For the Earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

So if you're scientific-minded, you can get in a boat and you can go out at any point, whether you're in the harbor or whether you're in the middle of the ocean, and you can drop a bucket down and you can pull it back up and test it.

It's water. So as the water covers the sea, meaning only but water covering the sea, is the same way that the glory of the Lord is gonna fill the Earth. Will God's glory, the question we have to ask ourself is, will God's glory actually fill the whole world as water fills the sea?

And if we believe that, if we actually take that passage seriously, I think the only position left for you is post-millennialism. Any questions on that before we, I don't know that we're gonna be able to get into the next part.

Habakkuk 2 .14. I will, if you're interested, all my verses that I'm gonna be citing, I'll bring next week and give you a printout if that'd be helpful. Any other questions?

Well, yeah, I believe that too, just like after.

Yeah, the only question is that I would ask them is where is that in the context of Habakkuk 2? So it would make sense to me if God was going to make the whole Earth filled with his glories as water covers the sea after the tribulation, after the Antichrist, after the mark of the beast, after Armageddon, after, and he was gonna do that as the final end time thing.

If he was gonna do that, why does none of the passages that I'm gonna be quoting have anything at all to do with that? Here's the problem that dispensationalist, thank you for asking that question, it's a good one.

The problem that dispensationalist have is that they will take a bunch of verses out of all different places in the Bible and they will construct their theology like a jigsaw puzzle, like with an assumption in mind.

We don't do that. We don't go to the Bible and rip all of these passages completely out of their context and then try to assemble a view that doesn't actually support the context from which it was given.

So for instance, they will say something like this. Matthew 24 says that when Jesus returns, the sun will be turned dark. Therefore, Jesus has not returned because the sun has not been turned dark, the moon's not been turned to blood.

Then, if you know some passages in the Old Testament, you'll say, but God did this when he destroyed Babylon. It says in Isaiah 13 that the sun will be turned dark, the moon will turn to blood and the stars will fall from the sky.

When Babylon was destroyed, Babylon was destroyed in history. The sun did not turn dark and the stars didn't fall out of the sky. We still live in a habitable universe. The whole universe itself wasn't ripped apart when this event happened.

So therefore, could it be that this passage in context is saying something other than the physical sun, moon and stars? And you get no response and they will say something like, well, what about this?

And the goalposts continually move. My point is we have to understand each passage in its context and in its genre. This passage in its context doesn't allow for what they say. Good luck convincing them.

Yeah, and how much momentum or headway did I actually gain in that?

Yeah.

I hope. I did that, by the way, because I want to remember what the arguments are against my position. So I did that as a just training exercise for me to try to, and if the Lord would allow me to convince someone, you know, that would be great.

But the arguments are weak. There's an assumption that they have that the world's getting worse. And that's what drives premillennialism and even some ways amillennialism is that the enemy has been very crafty in convincing you and I that the world must get worse, that evil must increase.

And if you think about it, how much of your Christian life have you heard sermons towards that end, that evil's getting worse, that the world's getting more terrible, that we are just a remnant people who are meant to cloister together until the end when we're raptured out of here.

That's been the messaging that we've grown up in. Now, the question that I've been asking myself over the last 10 years is, is that message true? And if it's not, how do we actually recover a biblical vision for eschatology?

And it takes time. It took, my first book that I ever read was Left Behind in Iraq. Not the first book I ever read, excuse me, the first Christian book I ever read was Left Behind. The first 12 Christian books I ever read was the Left Behind series.

The view is so addictive to our carnal flesh that it's really hard to separate from. And when you tell people, Matt and I were talking about this last night, if you tell people that Jesus wins and that the world is going to get better under his reign and under his kingdom, they look at you and they say, are you even a Christian?

Because why? They've attached their view of pessimism with their own faith. My question is, does God ever call Christians to doubt, to be fearful, to expect doom? Like these don't sound like Christian virtues to me.

Especially under the reign of our King, should we expect that Jesus of all people loses? And gosh, I wanna get into the next section, but I probably should just use this as a cliffhanger. Wait, there's more.

But, no, no, no, that's okay. I'll give a teaser for it and we'll talk about this more next week. I believe that God created a post-millennial world. So we'll get into that next week. But when God created the world, good, and then he made it humans and called them very good, he gave them a commission.

That commission was to be fruitful and multiply and to fill the entire earth full of people who worship God. If you have a planet that sustains, I don't know, 20 billion people, I think that our earth can sustain more people than we currently have.

I don't know the number. All of Earth's population right now can fit into a eight by eight bedroom in Texas, apparently, if you build correctly. So 20 billion, let's say. If you have a earth that's full of 20 billion people and every single one of them worship God, and every single one of them are working to cultivate garden spaces, and every single one of them are serving God heartily every day, working to the glory of God, the earth is teeming with life.

You'd have a post-millennial world.

You'd have a post-native world.

Then you'd have a post-Arabic world.

He's working with plants, he's working with fields and he's working with animals. Then he's building his own world.

Or does he fail just like Adam failed? He stopped short of completing the vision. My, the Genesis 128's what convinced me of post-millennialism, by the way. God created a world, called it very good, and Jesus, as the true and better Adam, will accomplish it.

So we'll end there, and we'll talk more about it next week.

Prayer, Application, and a Hopeful Christian Outlook

Let's pray.

Lord, thank you so much for your kindness to us and your love for us as your people. And Lord, help us just through studying about post-millennialism, Lord, for us not to think that this is an esoteric, eschatological position, but Lord, let us see over and over again how applicable and how relatable this concept is, how it actually has a massive impact and effect into our life.

Lord, when we expect the world to get worse, we'll have less children, because why would we have children in a world that's so evil? When we expect the world to get increasingly more evil, we will naturally hide, and we will naturally do our Christian life in our churches, and we will almost like double agents, be quiet at our jobs, quiet in our communities, because nobody wants to be persecuted, at least not willingly.

Lord, help us to recognize that you are in control, that you are reigning, and that because of your reign, you will bring the glory of God to the ends of the earth, as you promised in Habakkuk. And because of that, now our suffering and our persecution and all of the roadblocks that we hit along the way have actual meaning and purpose, because we're laboring in a kingdom that will win.

We're laboring in a world that will be conformed to the will of Christ. Our suffering and our labor now has meaning, as you say in 1 Corinthians 15, that what we do in the Lord is never done in vain. It's not done in vain because you win.

It's not done in vain because you will not lose. Lord, help us as Christians to not only be optimistic about your power to save our soul, but also optimistic about your power to transform the world. Lord, we ask these things in Jesus' holy name.

Amen.

Amen.

Let's get some coffee, and then we'll together march into Zion.