14. PreConference 1 | Sam Frost | The Dangers of Full Preterism

Open Air Theology

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March 1, 2024

Recorded at the Open Air Theology Conference 2024

15. PreConference | Jeremiah Nortier | The Dangers of Full Preterism

00:05: Everything is ordained. What a lovely song, thank you. That was, a lot of these conferences don't have worship.
00:15: And what's the point of going to a conference if there's no worship? There's no, I'm gonna take this off.
00:21: I'm not real big on name tags. You know you are. So, yeah, and I've got that. So, I was asked to talk about this, this full preterism stuff.
00:33: And I wanted to tackle two things in it. The first is how
00:38: I got in it. How will somebody out of Bible College in the late 1980s fall into something that I look at now as heretical, and in fact dangerous.
00:57: I've seen lives destroyed. I've seen families destroyed. Several of my friends have become agnostic, and several, some prominent, are now atheists, just outright atheists.
01:09: And Jeremiah knows who some of those are. These are friends of mine. Full preterist, we went to conferences and all of that together.
01:18: So I thought I would give a little bit of my story, how I got involved in it, and then how
01:24: I got out of it, and the dangers that are in it, and what to look for.
01:29: Because we're out there, and we would talk about, at the conferences, and these conferences went all the way from Vermont.
01:37: I spoke at over 25 conferences, and they went all the way from Arizona, Minnesota, St.
01:45: Paul, Minneapolis, Vermont, Ohio, several in Indiana, several in Florida, Alabama, Missouri, so we were all over the place.
01:59: And from 2004 to roughly around 2009, there were about three or four of these a year.
02:08: And Don Preston, and you'll hear me mention his name a lot, because he single -handedly is the most prolific author.
02:15: He's probably got about 20 or so books out now. And he cranks about one or two out a year.
02:23: They're just getting to be cut and pasted now. It's like a Jack Van Emby or a Hal Lindsey book.
02:28: Once you've read three Hal Lindsey books, you've read them all. They just kind of keep staying up with the headlines or whatever.
02:36: And Don is doing the same, but he's the most prolific author that's out there, hands down, and certainly the most popular and well -known that is out there as far as the leading voice of full preterism.
02:49: And I was right there with him. He published my book, Exegetical Essays, on the
02:55: Resurrection. That was in 2010. And it was late 2010, early 2011, that the
03:03: Lord, I guess, brought me out of it. And that was an agonizing time, and I'll go into some of the details there.
03:11: Because Don and I were planning on how to, we weren't interested in evangelizing so much of the world.
03:17: It was the church we were after. So at our conferences, us, Dave Curtis, me,
03:23: Mike Sullivan, Don Preston, and Ed Stephens, and back in the day, John Anderson, there'd be
03:29: Larry Siegel, Jack Scott, John Noe. We would get together,
03:38: Tim Martin, and strategize how to infiltrate churches, because that was our audience.
03:46: We already had a foothold in the door there. The world is not interested on our debates about where did
03:55: Cain get his wife from. That's not something they're interested in. But I've already got your attention if you believe in the story of Genesis, and then we can go in, and I can, my foot's already in the door.
04:07: So our interest, and our evangelist interest, was in the churches, to infiltrate the churches.
04:12: Because many full preterists still went to churches, because there's no full preterist churches. At the time, there were only a few.
04:20: Max King was one, but then he got drummed out of the Church of Christ. You can't get kicked out of the Church of Christ for heresy.
04:29: So, so, yeah, that's like being kicked out of the Disciples of Christ. But you have everything going on there.
04:38: What could possibly? So, you,
04:43: Don Preston did, but he stepped down, Jack Scott took that one over, and that one is in Ardmore, and I don't think it's running anymore.
04:50: And then there was Dave Curtis, Grand Bible Church, and that's in Virginia. And I spoke at a couple of his conferences, got to know
04:57: Dave pretty well. He's the one that says that we continue to sin in heaven. Yeah, it's bizarre.
05:09: So, William Bell has a church, that I'm hearing more recently in Arkansas, there's a couple that are cropping up, but you can count them on your hands or toes, almost.
05:19: There's not a bunch of them. There's a reason for that. How I got into it.
05:29: Well, I grew up, I've been in church all my life, and I love everything about church, and churches, and pews, and everything.
05:36: The smells, you notice every church has its own smell and odor to it, when you walk into a church, like, oh, that's a church, that's a church smell.
05:44: This is how I got into it. This idea right here, that's how, it's preterite.
05:52: That's the gateway drug. So, when you're a dispensationalist, I grew up dispensational, and I'm 50,
05:58: I'll be 57 in May. So that dates me, I was born in 67, and can name all of my
06:06: Sunday school teachers from the earliest that I can possibly remember growing up in Foursquare Church, that big of a name.
06:13: That Sunday school teachers, I still remember the faces of these lovely people that said that Jesus loves me, and they would sing these songs to me, and they made such an impression that never went away.
06:27: Sunday school teachers to children is one of the most important things, amen.
06:32: Because that just, I was like, I wanna be like these people. They're so nice, and they love me, and Jesus loves me, and it's just,
06:41: I never went away. I love the church. So, but it's dispensational.
06:47: You figure back in the 70s, and then 1973, 74, Orson Welles narrates
06:52: The Great Plague, Great Planet Earth, Hal Lindsey. And then the movie comes out, they show the movie at our church.
06:59: So I'm, what, six years in watching this, and that's it. The world is ending, and that's it.
07:06: When you're six years old and seeing those images, on that, and it's amazing, if you've never seen the movie,
07:11: I highly, highly recommend you see this movie. I think it's 1974,
07:17: Late Great Planet Earth, because it really just puts it out there, and it's got all of the warfare imagery, and all of the scriptures, and everything's coming together.
07:25: You got Orson Welles, he's narrating it, and it just, it was a very well -made
07:31: Hollywood production documentary, and it's the end of the world, that's it.
07:37: That's what the Bible says, and then your pastor's saying the same thing. So it's dispensationalism,
07:43: I grew up with that, Schofield reference Bible, the whole nine yards. Then you go to Bible college, and then you're introduced to the rest of Christianity, and church history, and guys like Melanchthon, and Calvin, and Augustine, and Irenaeus, and all that other stuff.
08:01: And you're open to these ideas of amillennialism and postmillennialism. You thought that your view growing up was what the church taught, and then you go to college, and you realize, oh, the churches teach different doctrines, they have a whole different array.
08:17: And eschatology is a, it's like autism, it's a wide spectrum, it's a big, giant, huge, wide spectrum.
08:26: It depends on where you land at. And full plethorism is right in that.
08:33: So I had a few professors, and they introduced me to a book.
08:40: First of it was Reformed Doctrine of Predestination by Lorraine Bettner, and I read that book. I'm very young, and I read that book and thought, boy, that's a,
08:49: I always heard bad things about Calvinists, that this book is just chock full of scriptures, it's just really what that book is.
08:56: And if you don't have that book, you should get it, you can get it for free. Lorraine Bettner never sold any of his books, he gave them away.
09:01: And he was a teacher of systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary. He also wrote a book called
09:08: The Millennium. And that book I read, and it was unlike anything, and it really jarred my thinking, and it was at that time, somebody handed me a book by David Chilton called
09:20: Paradise Restored. And the cover of that was just awesome, and look, it's nice color, and just drew me in, and I thought, boy, this is an interesting book.
09:34: And I'm going to class in Revelation at the time, and our instructor's using George Ladd's commentary on Revelation.
09:41: So I'm reading David Chilton's imaginative and very well -written, lively interpretation of Revelation, and I'm reading scholarly, boring
09:52: George Ladd's work on the commentary of Revelation, and the artwork is just Revelation commentary.
09:59: Paradise Restored, fruits are coming off the top. I'm like, yeah, this one, and I have a real,
10:05: I've got one of those minds that I can image, I image things in my mind very clearly.
10:14: So that caught my attention, started reading it, and it started making sense, because you're in Bible college, and you're starting to hear about people named
10:22: Josephus, and Suetonius, and Tacitus, and you're starting to read the first century stuff. And I had the luxury of having two professors that took me under their wings, and saw something in me,
10:33: I guess, and mentored me, and really got into that in 70 AD, and I assume, for a good part of this, that I'm speaking to an audience that knows some of this stuff, so I don't have to go into details and all of that.
10:48: And that's just basic preterism. Well, you start studying
10:56: Greek, you start getting into the textual apparatus, the critical apparatus, and you start learning about textual criticism, and this, that, and the other.
11:08: Going a little bit further, and there's some problems of interpretation that go on. Some of you standing here,
11:14: Jesus says you will not finish going through the cities of Israel until the Son of Man comes.
11:20: And you read somebody like D .A. Carson, he says this is the most notoriously difficult, this is the most notorious verse in the entire
11:28: New Testament, unquote. And you read a William Barclay, Matthew 10, 23, he says this verse has spilled 1 ,000 bottles of ink.
11:41: Why can't these scholars figure this stuff out? I mean, you go to school for this, right? And then you continue to read it, and then you read it in Greek, and yeah, it's eminent.
11:51: There's no doubt about it. There's no doubt about it. That verse, that verse, Matthew 10, 23, that one's the one.
12:01: That launched 1 ,000. So, now I believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, the
12:09: Chicago Statement of Faith, Westminster Confession. The Bible is the Word of God written. I hope
12:14: I don't offend anybody here, but I love Gordon Clark and his philosophy and what he has to say about Scripture. One of the books, best books on Scriptural inerrancy is a book called
12:22: God's Hammer by Gordon Clark. It's just, he just tears up textual criticism like there's no tomorrow.
12:31: But this verse asserts that Jesus, so according to Schweitzer, is a failed prophet because obviously he didn't come.
12:43: Right? It just didn't happen. That's pretty standard today.
12:50: That goes back into the 19th century. That's your higher critical schools. So, the 19th century becomes this brewing ground.
12:59: German higher criticism. Apocalyptics is really starting to kick in. You're getting all these eschatologies.
13:05: You're getting dispensationalism. 19th century, that's a reaction to this criticism that's going on.
13:10: What do you do with Jesus saying, the time is at hand, the kingdom of God is at hand. Some of you standing here will not taste death.
13:18: This generation, you will not finish going through the cities of Israel and it didn't happen.
13:27: Jesus is a failed prophet, which is a direct assault on the inerrancy of scripture, is it not?
13:33: If Jesus is a failed prophet, I'll see you guys later.
13:39: I'm out of here, I'm done. I've got better things to do. What's the point?
13:49: If he's not a failed prophet, Amen. Instead, he made the offer.
13:56: It was imminent. Could have happened right then, but the
14:03: Jews, they didn't receive it, and so they postponed. That's the answer.
14:10: That's the solution. And so, God introduced a mystery period of the church that the prophets or no one else knew about, and that is where Paul comes in, and then the church will be raptured out, and then the kingdom is at hand message will come back again, and this time they won't reject it, and it'll set about the seven years tribulation, and then that'll be the last days, and then resurrection of the dead.
14:36: Well, no. Now, I grew up with that.
14:45: I grew up with that, but as a biblical scholar, that doesn't, that just doesn't work, and a lot of dispensationalists have left or modified.
14:56: They try to, they realize that the early Scofield, Darby kind of stuff was, just doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't work.
15:07: Okay, Jesus is not a failed prophet. Dispensationalism doesn't work. 70
15:15: AD, that's what he's referring to, and his promises are not fulfilled literally, but they're fulfilled spiritually.
15:26: They're fulfilled, and this was our favorite word, fulfilled covenantly, because there's a lot of wealth of covenant information, covenant theology, and it doesn't have anything to do with substance, changing your substance.
15:44: It has everything to do with your stance, not your substance, your stance, your standing. Forensic, it's legal.
15:53: It's spiritual. It's something the spirit does. You can't see it, not with our eyes, anyway, and okay, there's a lot of wealth of literature there about spirituality.
16:06: We're spiritually raised from the dead. In Christ, you've been seated with Christ.
16:12: Well, not, you have a position, but spiritually, okay, yeah.
16:19: You've been made alive with Christ. Yeah, there's a lot of language there. You can read that in Calvin.
16:25: You can read that in a lot of theology, Francis Church, and then you go and you read
16:31: John Owen. We call these the four Johns, John Owen, John Gill, John Brown, and John Lightfoot, Lightfoot being the earliest, so Lightfoot starts studying in the
16:43: Reformation. This is 17th century, just a couple hundred years out of the
16:51: Reformation, and everyone's running around because they're trying to translate into the original languages, so you have to know
16:57: Hebrew, so now they're looking for rabbis, like Luther's looking for a rabbi teaching Hebrew so he can bring the
17:02: Hebrew into the German tongue, and not that he was the first to do that, but anyway.
17:14: You know, these Hebrews, they've got a whole library of material and stuff over here we're starting to discover, and they've got the
17:21: Talmud and the Mishnah, and they've got lexicons, and they've got all kinds of stuff, and so Reformers, Evangelicals, John Lightfoot being one of the first, began to delve into that material and began to bring it over and say, you know what, a lot of this stuff in the
17:33: Talmud makes a lot of sense in the New Testament. Sounds like Paul, who's a
17:39: Pharisee, and so slowly is introduced the ideas, which rightly so, this
17:47: New Testament background of Jewish first century second temple Judaism, which is pretty stable today in any university or seminary you go to now, but back then it wasn't, it was brand new.
18:01: One of the things that Lightfoot does is he really, with a vengeance, interprets
18:07: New Testament passages as referring to one of the most important events in Jewish life, and you see it on almost every page in much of the literature of the
18:17: Talmud. They celebrate even a holiday, it's not a holiday, it's a memorial day, of 70
18:23: AD, and not a lot of Christians know a lot about 70 AD. I can tell you growing up in the 70s in a four square gospel church,
18:31: I had never really even heard of 70 AD or the significance of it at all. And when you start reading about 70
18:40: AD and then you start reading Josephus, you're like, my goodness, this is horrible. This is a horrible, horrible war.
18:51: And it went on in the same generation that Jesus, and he even says, not one stone.
19:02: Abomination of desolation. The emperor Titus proclaimed himself as God.
19:10: Yeah. This is not the future. This is the past.
19:17: And John Lightfoot brings that into covenant structure. He also brings it into Romans chapter eight.
19:24: And I love John Lightfoot. He was one of the Westminster divines. He presided over the Westminster confessional, the drafting of it.
19:33: He's one of the greats. But in Romans chapter eight, where it's talking about our present sufferance, that's not our present sufferance.
19:50: That's first century, Paul's present sufferance. Stop reading their mail. Stop putting yourself in their.
19:59: Now, some of you may agree with that, but do you see how you can get, here it comes.
20:06: Because when he starts talking about, and we shall be alive, and the dead shall be raised.
20:13: He's not talking about you. Paul's talking about himself. The resurrection is in the first century.
20:21: Once you go down that line, it's very easy to continue down it. Unless you think
20:28: Paul's wrong. Did Paul think the resurrection was gonna happen in his generation? Be careful how you answer that.
20:37: That's a huge debate right now in academia. Gigantic. These are people that don't believe in the
20:45: Bible, but they're trying to read the text anyway. So that's the most people I hang out with. A lot of my colleagues don't believe in the
20:52: Bible. They're interested in what it's saying. They're trying to get at what it's saying. They believe in Paul.
20:58: There was a guy named Paul who wrote what he wrote. So I can say our present sufferance,
21:04: Jewish, are not worthy to compare with the glory that will be revealed in us. You say, well, right there.
21:11: See, that didn't happen in 70 AD. Well, is the Holy Spirit in you? Who is the glory of God? Do you see?
21:19: Stop looking with the eyes of your flesh. See where this goes? Why does glory have to be, all of a sudden you're physically changed?
21:33: The creation waits with eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. Now, the creation there refers to what creation?
21:43: I have created you to be a nation. That's referring to Israel. And it's waiting who are the sons of God to be revealed?
21:52: Is it the ones that are fighting for the Jerusalem temple and that are giving their lives over to Yahweh and Yahweh will rescue
21:59: Jerusalem and make it the center of the earth and exonerate the true people of God? Or those who flee the
22:08: Jerusalem temple and follow Jesus who says that this temple is not the temple of God, but the temple above is.
22:14: And when the temple is destroyed in 70 AD, who are the sons of God?
22:21: Which one did God pick? That's all that that's referring to, that's it. No rapture, no earth -wide tumult.
22:33: It's a local war that happened to a covenant people that were disowned of their covenant.
22:41: Now you go and you look at Witsius, like Herman Witsius and others, and Lightfoot and Brown and John Gill, and I know
22:49: I'm picking on John Gill. So Gill talks about the end of the
22:54: Jewish, they would use the word, the end of the Jewish economy. The end of the
23:00: Jewish age when their covenantal order came to an end. Oh, that's not end of the world, like Hal Lindsey said.
23:12: That's the end of the age, the covenant age. That covenant age, the new covenant age came in and the destruction of the temple was a coming of God that visibly, historically displayed,
23:27: I'm done with this. I have a new covenant. You know, that makes sense.
23:34: In Revelation, the great city there where our
23:40: Lord was crucified, that's not the Roman Catholic Church.
23:47: How could John be prophesying the Roman Catholic Church? That was Jerusalem, that's apostate
23:53: Jerusalem. That's Babylon, the whore. Heck, you find the descriptions of it in Ezekiel all over the place.
24:01: It matches it and you go down the line and down the line and you find a lot of Reformed folks, folks that I know, that began to teach that basically what
24:09: I call this. These are the 95 percenters. 95 % of the
24:15: Bible's fulfilled in 70 AD. Well, as a budding scholar in the 90s, it's not that difficult to find the rest of the 5%.
24:31: My only disagreements is that my creeds, the Westminster or the
24:36: London Baptist or the Helvetic or whichever ones, Nicene, whichever one you pick, they all look forward to a future.
24:43: But, you know, those are man -made, right? The Westminster Confession states that creeds have and may err.
24:53: And in light of current scholarship, these man -made, fallible creeds have error.
25:00: I can get around that one. Now, what's the big one? Well, there's two of them.
25:10: And our brother Jeremiah's gonna talk about one of them. That one's the big one. What do you do with that?
25:18: And then the other one is the 1 ,000 years. What do you do with that? These are the two
25:25: Achilles heels. But when you got that going on, 95 % of the
25:32: Bible's fulfilled. And you're speaking, much like my dispensationalism kicks in with my preterism, and it's an end of an age.
25:42: So I already start, I understand that. Yeah, it's an end of an age. Not the end of the world, it's the end of the covenant age.
25:51: And I've got plenty of reformers, dead guys that are saying that in the 17th and 18th and 19th century.
25:59: So just bring that on over, build that. Resurrection is, but Paul says we're made alive through regeneration.
26:12: How do you deal with that? Well, in the 19th century, there was guys named J. Stuart Russell and Milton Terry.
26:19: And Milton Terry basically borrowed heavily off J. Stuart Russell. And J. Stuart Russell wrote a book called
26:24: The Parasite. And he's a 95%. He even had a rapture. There was a rapture in 70
26:29: AD. Literally, people just disappeared. Not a lot of people followed
26:36: J. Stuart Russell and his work. And it fell out of print, basically.
26:43: It was Ed Stephens who contacted Baker Book House to reprint that book, the black book, called
26:51: The Parasite. And I still have that book, and that's been reprinted over and over again. And then people like R .C.
26:59: Sproul, they put it in their book, The Last Days According to Jesus, so they're giving sort of a prominence to it. But that was my, that was the book that, when you read that book, all you gotta do is get around this.
27:11: But J. Stuart Russell said that the thousand years is still in our future. It still goes off into the end.
27:18: So he was not willing to let go of that in the future. And then Milton Terry that follows him, he's quoting heavily in biblical hermeneutics, he's just quoting
27:27: J. Stuart Russell using his work. He brings him up, he says the same thing.
27:33: Now who's Russell building off? Russell's building his work off of John Brown, John Gill, John Lightfoot, and John Owen.
27:41: For these men, 2 Peter 3 is fulfilled in 70 AD, to a large extent.
27:49: Now when you give up Romans chapter eight, you've given up all of Matthew 24.
27:55: It's like chess. You have given me most of Revelation, 70
28:06: AD. And now you're gonna give me 2 Peter chapter three, that's 70
28:11: AD. What else do I need? The only thing I gotta get around is this. And it's not that hard to do when you start reading the literature on spiritual resurrection.
28:24: Spiritual resurrection, yeah, why would we want a fleshly resurrection when the flesh profits nothing?
28:30: It's the spirit. And Jesus brought in the dispensation of the spirit because the dispensation of death, 2
28:38: Corinthians chapter four, or chapter three, which is called by Paul the old covenant, the administration of death, the old covenant, the law, okay?
28:51: The old covenant law that brought nothing but death. And Jesus died as a
28:58: Jew to end that age and bring in the age of salvation and the filling of the
29:05: Holy Spirit and regeneration and a new covenant of life. So again, it has nothing to do any more than justification by faith has anything to do with changing my biological body.
29:18: But it has everything to do with changing, we would say this a lot, Don Preston and I would say this a lot.
29:26: It's not about, oh, do you want me to use another one? You see there, I thought
29:32: I had another one. So it's, oh yeah, wow, that's a good question. So it's not about substance.
29:44: It's about stance. It's your stance. Now stasis, those of you who know
29:50: Greek, so stasis is standing, subsistence, if you will.
29:56: So your stasis, your standing. So it's about your standing, what God declares you. God declares you as alive, made alive in Christ.
30:03: That's resurrection, made alive in Christ. Well, in order to be in Christ, I've got to leave the old man in Adam.
30:10: I've got to leave the corporate identity, the corporate identification that I have of my life in Adam, and I've got to leave that and die to that and come into my corporate identity, into the body and life of the new covenant of Christ.
30:29: That's Max King, and it sounds really great. And he's drawing off a great deal of theologians like Herman Ritterboss and J .A
30:41: .T. Robinson and several others. In his book, if you get any book on full
30:50: Preterists is Max King's Crossing the Parasite of Christ. It's a 900 -page tour divorce written in 1988, and it is hands down the best.
31:04: It's Don Preston's view, essentially. It's my view, my book that Don still sells and publishes, I've asked him not to, but he still does.
31:10: It shows the type of class of person you're dealing with. Could you imagine if you left some
31:20: KKK group and you became a born -again Christian and now you're anti -KKK, but you wrote a book when you were
31:27: KKK and the KKK are still publishing that book, and you're just like, please don't. I don't, that's not me anymore.
31:32: Please stop doing it. That's how I feel. But Don publishes it anyway, and it sells, because I still get people that even help me say, hey, it's a great book on acid.
31:43: I don't endorse that anymore. Now the last guy, so Don publishes his own material, right?
31:55: J. Don publishing, but he enlisted two authors, me, I left, and Alan Bondar, who became an atheist.
32:02: So his track record on bringing in other authors is not very good, and I know he'll hear this.
32:09: Which I wanted to. Hi, Don. But it has everything to do with this stance or changes.
32:18: So why can't a bodily resurrection be in 70 AD, as our brother Jeremiah will talk about?
32:24: Well, because we still excavate bones and stuff, right? There was no resurrection.
32:30: We still got mummies. If there was a bodily resurrection, as the church fathers believed in, and as our confessions state, self -same body, the
32:38: Westminster Confession states, very clear as to what it means. It doesn't matter if you were eaten by cannibals.
32:45: It doesn't matter if your body has, for 1 ,000 years, died and rotted next to the roots of a tree that rooted into your body, and it scattered the molecules, and the molecules were then digested into the tree, and then someone comes along and eats the apple, and they're eating part of it.
33:01: That's not an obstacle to God. Paul's answer to that, and our brother will get to that, but when they ask, how are the dead raised?
33:08: Why are the body buried at sea, that's scattered among the sea? There's no body there to be raised.
33:16: God's going to, fool! That's Paul's response. Afro! That's about the heaviest response a
33:24: Jew can give. That's the word that a fool says in their heart, there is no God. That's that word.
33:31: How dare you ask that kind of question? If God said he's going to raise the dead, I'll get my
33:37: Jewish thing going on here, my Jewish friends. But if God said he's going to raise the dead, it is the dead that he will raise.
33:44: There is no obstacle to God. Do you not know that God created the sun, the moon, and the stars, and the beasts, and the flesh of fish, and the flesh of chickens, and the flesh of animals, and he's created the stars, and the moon, and the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and he created the sun, and then he quotes
34:00: Genesis 2 .7, and out of dirt, he made a man? And you're telling me he can't raise the dead?
34:08: Please. Brothers, I speak to you a mystery. But that's not an objection to the argument.
34:20: But in that understanding of the resurrection of the dead, that clearly did not happen in 70
34:26: AD. So everything has to become covenantalized, and or spiritualized.
34:33: And having looked over again, I don't want to spoil who I blame for being here,
34:39: Jeremiah. Jeremiah kept me in this, because I was going to leave. And because I just, you know, the arguments have been met.
34:48: You know, it's like these guys. But then he said, you know, some pastors, some friends were doing, starting a church, friends of his.
34:55: And I heard that kind of hurt, because I've had friends of mine. And it's very tough.
35:02: I lost a lot of friends. And, you know, they were coming to these full -predators churches, and I'm like, man.
35:09: Is this, is it growing? This can't be growing. Well, it is. And I thought, well, you know,
35:16: I don't, I've debated Holder Neubauer, I've debated William Bale, I've debated Michael Miano, I've debated
35:22: Don Preston. You know, I've debated these guys.
35:28: I've written the work, it's on my blog. The work has been out there. There's been numerous ex -full -predators that have come out and have written books.
35:36: I mean, you know, I'm really just done with this. And Jeremiah, he turned my mind, and I never saw it that way before.
35:42: He said, no, no, Dr. Frost, you need to stay in it to expose it for what it is, so that when churches who have never heard of it see it in their midst, they can say, hey, you're full -predators, we need to deal with you.
35:54: Elders? Elders? I thought, oh, that's brilliant. I never even thought about that.
36:00: And then he said, I want everyone to hear about full -predatorism, so they see it when it's coming. Because that's the problem, you don't see it when it's coming.
36:08: And when you get into it, now I was talking, Brother Jeff, I was talking with you, where, yeah, it's attractive, isn't it?
36:17: Very attractive. Witness one Gary DeMar. Now, I felt,
36:24: I said, when I opened this up, you got five more minutes, five minutes, whatever.
36:33: What am I at? You have, actually, 13 more minutes, if you want. 13 more minutes?
36:41: Do they count 13 as a minute, or is it like an elevator in a hotel, you skip that, or? We do. We do.
36:47: We do an hour, but we started out with singing. Okay, so. Okay, 13 minutes.
36:59: Where was I at? Gary DeMar. Yes, Gary DeMar. Who endorsed my book, why
37:07: I live full -predatorism, on the back of it, and that's the old printing, that Gentry's still printing.
37:13: Even though Gary wrote me and said, take that off your book, I no longer endorse your book, and then American Vision dropped it, and they no longer sell it anymore.
37:22: And so, that hurt. I was like, man, Gary, what's going on? And Gary wouldn't, you know,
37:31: James White was a part of this, Gary wouldn't condemn hyper -predatorism as heresy. Look, if you're a
37:37: PCA or Reformed Baptist, and part of your joining the membership is ascribing to the thing, you can't be a member of a group.
37:44: You can't! It goes directly against what you're saying.
37:50: And so, just this friendly, oh yeah, they're all, it's just another eschatology, it's not! Another eschatology.
37:59: Because of what we were doing, that Gary's going down that road. It's very clear that he is.
38:05: He says that he is, closer than I am to him, personally,
38:14: Gary, what are you doing? Gary doesn't care. He's, that was bittersweet, because on one hand, it was like, yeah, that's how
38:26: I got into it. Just that you could follow, and I've been following and reading Gary since 1989, 90 and stuff, when he was putting stuff out with Dominion Press, out of Tyler, Texas.
38:37: So, you could just watch it. And then he spoke, the first time
38:44: I met Gary was at a Full Predators conference. I was speaking, and he was speaking. And we thought that was just great.
38:49: You know, Gary DeMar is speaking at our little Full Predators conferences. This is great. It's an endorsement.
38:56: He's not condemning us. That gets our foot just a little bit more into the church.
39:02: We're legitimate. And then I got my MAR from Whitfield Theological Seminary, and got my two years
39:10: Hebrew from Reform Theological Seminary, and I was a Full Predator, so naturally, Don Preston's wanting to, hey, see,
39:16: Reform. He's got a degree, and he's a Full Predatorist. It's legitimate.
39:26: Because we were looking for big names. We just couldn't find them. But Gary has just afforded us that, or them, that.
39:34: And they know it. And he just recently spoke at Dave Curtis's in May.
39:41: He just spoke at one of their conferences. He didn't have a problem with it. He's never been at it from the other side that I've been on it.
39:47: Lots of destroyed people's, I could tell you stories. There's a lot of drinking at these
39:56: Full Predators conferences. Now, I'm in Tennessee, so I'm using that word with stress.
40:04: There's a lot of drinking that went on at these Full Predators conferences. The Tennesseans know what drinking's all about, and that's the kind of drinking
40:12: I'm talking about. I don't touch the stuff. The destroyed lives, the families.
40:22: There's five of my friends that are now atheists. When you meet these, realize you're, and then you've lost friends.
40:41: You don't understand that these were people that were close, but they're so committed to this. Paul calls it gangrene.
40:49: Now, look, we all have air, and I can deal with acne. Gangrene spreads, though.
40:56: Amputation's the only cure for that one. That's why I think Paul uses that, gangrene. There's no cure for gangrene.
41:04: It just needs to be locked, because it spreads and damages everything that it touches.
41:12: That's Full Predator. It spreads, and it damages everything that it touches.
41:20: Okay, so if everything's fulfilled, this is what got me out.
41:26: In 70 AD, we spent so much time on 70 AD and Josephus, everything's 70
41:33: AD, and that's great, but then I'm doing my systematics and everything, and say, well, you know, and Dr.
41:41: Talbot is really hammering me, saying, you know, you guys have to account for 2 ,000 years, too. You can't just say, near me doesn't mean 2 ,000 years.
41:49: What have we been doing? What's God been doing for 2 ,000 years? He who descended was the very one who ascended higher in order to fill the whole universe.
41:58: That's the covenantal universe. It was he who gave some apostles, some of prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers.
42:05: Why? This is an inventive purpose, in order to prepare God's people for works of service.
42:13: Why? So that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach the unity of the faith, think covenantally here, and in the knowledge of the
42:25: Son, and become perfect, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ, and then we will no longer be infants tossed back between Jew and Gentile struggles that were going on in the first century, the transition generation, that generation, blown here and there by every wind and teaching of doctrine.
42:46: From him, the whole body joined and held together by the supporting ligament grows and builds itself up as each part does at work, and that was fulfilled in 87.
42:55: Okay, then, here comes the next, you can see the next question. If that's already happened and we are the covenantally standing, declared by God, new covenant man, which has nothing to do with our biological errors or our failures to interpret the
43:10: Bible perfectly, or this, that, and the other, it has everything to do with the perfection that is granted to you by faith in what
43:17: Jesus Christ has done. And once you're in Christ, you're perfect. Why do you need pastors then?
43:26: Well, you don't. And so a lot of full -fledged, as you will attest, don't go to church.
43:33: And some of them are anti -church, directly. Let's throw another one in there.
43:40: I gave a lecture, my last lecture that I gave was in Arizona, Warwick Finley's outfit, and I gave a lecture there on progressive sanctification.
43:52: Progressive sanctification begins when you believe in the Lord and is carried all the way out until you're glorified, right?
43:59: Raised from the dead. That's the end result. A progressive sanctification until you're sanctified and glorified.
44:07: Well, if that's already happened because of your stance in Christ, then we gotta get rid, not only of the church, but we gotta get rid of this doctrine too.
44:19: So this is gone and this is gone. And Don Preston gets rid of the body of Jesus of Nazareth, said that it was, it dispersed and disappeared at his ascension and he was absorbed back into the
44:35: Godhead as Logos, the son of God. So he no longer has human nature, instead he retains,
44:42: I'll quote him, he retains the Logos of God, son of God eternal, retains the memory of human nature when he was in the flesh, human nature.
44:56: Wow! So now we're affecting this, Christology. And I can go down the list.
45:06: Why are we doing all that? Because we are so certain on this. Timing determines nature.
45:13: Timing determines everything. The timing of all prophecy fulfilled was 70
45:19: AD and that end point you can't go beyond. So the what now questions, these questions here, this is what's tearing full preterism internally up.
45:29: I saw this coming in 2009. Jason Bradfield and I saw a few others. And then you get this group called
45:35: Israel Only. Israel Only is growing within their midst. Basically the whole Bible was written for, to, by Israel.
45:43: It's fulfilled, it's done, put it away. Get on with your lives. This church stuff that you've got going on here, of which none of you agree on anyway, it was for them.
45:58: That's why we're so confused about it because it's not for us. You can see where that agnosticism is just gonna kick in.
46:09: No, these are not believers. These people that I went to the conference and stuff, they were never believers. This was a pure intellectual thing that was going on with us.
46:18: We had rationalized the Bible away and explained everything away all for this right here.
46:28: And I thank goodness for my upbringing and my devotional background because I went into a charismatic
46:36: Pentecostal background, Four Square Gospel Church. And I love, I still hang with a lot of those guys because the enthusiasm, the presence of tyranny.
46:45: We're not known, we're the frozen chosen. We're not known. We're not known for enthusiasm.
46:53: But I like enthusiasm. And in the back of my neck, the spirit of the Lord was not right, just not right.
47:02: And he had a couple of men, Dr. Talbot, may he rest in peace, was one of them. It's not right, something's not right.
47:12: But I had built my whole reputation. 2002, sold thousands of books, tapes,
47:18: CDs. And I was wrong because it's at what, here, and I'll leave you with this.
47:29: It was at what point, I can understand pre -millennial, post -millennial, Baptist, adult
47:35: Baptist, that's inter -family debate kind of stuff, and it's serious stuff.
47:41: It's not to be swept under the rug, but it's very serious debate in our family. But at what point, whittling away this stuff, was
47:49: I going to continue to call myself a member of the historic Christian faith when I was whittling away everything that defined it?
47:57: See, I'm no longer Christian, not in the historic sense. And I didn't, that didn't sit well with me.
48:05: And we worked on this, we really tried, Jason Bradfield and I tried really to get this, to bridge the gap between full preterism and church history in the church, and bring it and pull it together to where you could really create this dynamic of what fulfilled eschatology meant.
48:22: And it actually would enhance the life of the church. It would glorify the church.
48:28: It would make the church even look more glorious than what people already say that it is.
48:34: If they just understood fulfilled eschatology, but in the end, it's gangrene.
48:40: It ends up, what you think you're doing good is not good. It's the evil that you don't want to do. That's what you find yourself doing.
48:47: And it's destructive to the church. And I witnessed it and watched it. And I thank God by his grace that I was able to get out of it.