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A look at the four views of Revelation and millennial positions.
So I'm going to start with where all the conflict is, and then I'm going to back off of that for a while and then come back. Revelation 20, verses 4 through 6, says, Then I saw thrones, and they sat on them, and judgment was given to them.
And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their witness of Jesus and because of the word of God, and who also had not worshipped the beast or his image, and had not received the mark on their forehead and on their hand.
And they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is the one who has a part in the first resurrection.
Over these the second death has no authority. But they will be priests of God and of Christ, and will reign with him for a thousand years. That last line in particular is where divergent eschatological views have come from, all around this word millennium.
So there's four main orthodox views, quasi-orthodox views, of eschatology or end times, and then there's one that has been widely banished as being heretical. I'm going to give lip service to it and talk about where it gets close to where I am.
So I have to be careful, right? There are a lot of good teachings in this false doctrine that I hold to, but the key is where do you jump off the bus? More on that later. Look, I got you interested already.
Is this guy a heretic? No, no. But there's some confusing stuff. We have to start here. When we talk about eschatology, we have to deal with Revelation. Everybody knows that. But I will say for two of the camps that are on there, Revelation is tremendously less important than four other camps.
I happen to find myself in one of those camps too. So there are four main ideas of Revelation. Have you guys all read it? It's maybe been a while, but you've read it. And I know when most people read Revelation, they're cruising along, they're reading through chapters one through four, and they're reading about the churches that were in Asia Minor, and they're going, okay, this makes sense.
The language is pretty symbolic, but there's good things going on. There's bad things. Everybody wants to be like the church at Philadelphia, right? That's like the postmodernist dream is to be persecuted and stand strong, right?
Like the church of Philadelphia. And then it gets kind of wild. You know, after chapter four, then people start going, what does this mean? What in the world does it mean? So I'm going to posit something to you that's tilting you maybe to my viewpoint, but that's my prerogative.
And I'll tell you, what if the reason that we get so lost in Revelation is because we really don't understand the Old Testament very well? And I think that is largely what has happened in America, is that an interpretation has come about that only exists because we don't really understand the signs and symbols of the Old Testament.
And so what is very incomprehensible to us, because we lack the language, was highly comprehensible to the people that the letter was written to. John wanted his audience to know what he was talking about.
He was not writing in a cipher that his audience would not be able to understand. He was writing in language that they would know. So I've tilted the scale, and we'll back off again. The four views of Revelation, and they largely, one of them is dependent on when the thing was written.
Okay? Actually, two of them are, right? There is the dominant view in America, highly dominant, and that is the futurist view of Revelation, and that is this. The letter breaks to completely future events beginning in chapter four.
After the churches are dispensed with, everything from that point on fast-forwards into the future as much as thousands of years later, okay? So the future in Revelation is going to be Babylon, which represents a global empire, and Antichrist, which is never said in Revelation, but that would be the beast.
And then there's martyrs around the throne, and what this represents is something that will happen before the end of time. The idea is that John wrote this letter late, like post-AD 90, which means that it would be outside of the range of what another interpretation posits.
I will tell you that the evidence for a late writing is weak, very weak. It is largely based on one sentence from a writing of Polycarp that basically intimates that maybe John was there when Domitius' thing was going on.
But the Greek is actually unclear. What he's actually talking about in context is unclear, and that would put Revelation fully 30-plus years later than any other book of the New Testament, so like a different era entirely.
But dispensational premillennialism completely falls apart without a futurist reading of Revelation. There is no way to hold to it. So it's critical to them, and so they'll be dogmatic about it, right?
Late writing, very important. Futurist means, look, I don't want to be tongue-in-cheek, but the reality is the only thing that their original audience could have gotten from the letter of Revelation with a futurist view is that God's going to win in the end.
That's the only thing of value to John's audience if the late writing is correct and it's a futurist view, because the rest of the book doesn't pertain to them other than this is what God will do. We don't know when he'll do it, but he will do it.
And it's often talked about as the key that unlocks the book of Daniel, but the difference is that Daniel actually gives a chronological timeline for when everything is going to happen in his letter. So when he writes encouragement to the Israelites in captivity, they are counting the years for Daniel's prophecies to come true, and they do.
That's where the 70 weeks come from, all right? So futurist view. You guys probably all know that one. Most people have never heard of this next one. It is called the historicist view, and this one was widely held through the Middle Ages and the reason why was you could see a growth of Christianity.
A lot of post-millennial people believed in a historicist view. This is basically that the idea is revelation is a view of the church that is progressing from age to age, okay? So there are successive Babylons and beasts and land beasts, water beasts, all of that.
There are successive martyrs. The chapters often indicate different ages in history. Interestingly, that view is very hard to find now. Very few people hold to it. The reason why is because time's gone by, and it gets really strained and hard to hold on to that.
It's very allegorical, and I don't mean that in the, like, nasty way, like, oh, they don't believe the Bible. What I mean is that it was trying to chart out what was going on over a long period of time.
What's funny about this is that dispensationalists, while uniformly holding to a futurist view of revelation, will also often adopt a historicist view of revelation for the first four chapters. And what they'll do is that they'll say every one of the seven churches is actually an age of the world.
I'm going to reserve further comment on that, okay? Then there is the third. This is the idealist interpretation. Pretty common. Pretty common among Reformed people. Very common. I would say of Amill people and Postmill people, this is a very commonly held view in the Reformed tradition, and I would say probably also in the mainline tradition, if they ever even think about this stuff anymore.
The idealist is basically that revelation is a set of symbolic interpretations. It is symbols that are timeless, and that they capitulate battle after battle between good and evil throughout time. So they might have, they pertain to a particular time, but they keep happening again and again.
This is basically the way God works in the world, and it's the way evil works. Beasts are raised up. God's people are slaughtered, remnant, come back, get help from the Lord, are heard by the Lord, and it happens over and over again.
So lots of types, typology, and what it can do is it maps over kingdoms and churches. So it's one of those things where when you read the newspaper and you say, oh, this kind of looks like revelation, that would fit in well with an idealist view, which says, yeah, this keeps happening.
Like is Putin a beast? Could be, right? Is our president a beast? Could be. It just keeps going on and on again because there's all kinds of beasts that raise up and they make war on the church over and over again.
So that's the idealist view. The fourth one is called the preterist view. The preterist view is the view that revelation is the story of the end of the old covenant age and the beginning of the church.
The preterist view holds that most of revelation was completed and fulfilled in the first century, and that revelation is largely a story of a trial against apostate Israel with the remnant being saved.
That Babylon is actually Israel, and that beasts are figures like Rome and Nero, and that even Jerusalem itself can be one of the beasts. And what happens is that revelation in the preterist view, it ends in the church militant and the church triumphant.
And they look at chapters 19 through the end with this lens is that there's an interspersing of there's the church militant, which is the church right now at war against this present darkness, and then the church triumphant, which is the final destination of all of the church and the saints.
So what will often happen with a preterist thing is you'll get a criticism that's largely like the futurist criticism. The futurist criticism would be like, well, why did he tell those guys that? If he was writing to us, why didn't he just write to us and address it to the future church?
Because he addressed it to seven churches. The argument against preterists can be, well, okay, so it was all fulfilled. What's the point of reading it? The argument that comes back is, what is the point of, you know, documenting all the fulfilled Christological prophecies in the New Testament?
It already happened. Well, it builds faith in Christians to know that God has prophets and prophecies are fulfilled. Also, a lot of preterist readings of revelation will also see it as idealist afterwards.
So the idea is this, revelation is specifically about the end of Israel, and it matches over the Olivet Discourse, which is longest in Matthew 24, that those two are similar things that are happening.
They are different authors writing about the same thing, and then once that happens, it is useful for Christians to be able to look back and say, oh, Christ did implement the new covenant. He did put on trial those who are apostate, and then what goes forward from that is the way the world just keeps operating.
There's going to keep being these types and symbols that happen over and over, and the church is going to continue to survive. All right, so that's 11 minutes, and that is the four views of revelation.
I will just tell you because I need to, what did you get? Yeah, so idealists and historicists are not dependent on a date, okay? So late authorship or early authorship doesn't matter between those two.
Partial preterism depends on a date before 70 AD. If it was written after, the late date makes preterism impossible. That can't be what revelation is about with a late authorship. So the stakes are high between those two positions, right?
The issue is nobody can look at you with a straight face and tell you with 100 certainty when revelation was written. I would tell you that the way we date scriptures and look at times, I personally think it's a pretty big stretch to put a late date on it, and there's various reasons for that, but not the least of them is that the canon of scripture closes and seems to have closed before the covenant age ends, which is why so much of the New Testament is talking about not being fooled and going back into the temple sacrifice system.
More on that very soon. Yeah, very good, and a good miss there I didn't get. So I'm a preterist, but I'm not the heretic type of preterist. Now here's a brief note on this, and I won't talk about that anymore.
A preterist basically believes, like the heretical form of preterist believes, we are in the end state. Essentially, it's all happened. All of scripture has been fulfilled as prophesied, and it's over.
So they obviously take a preterist view of revelation, but they also take a preterist view of everything, okay? They are a named heresy, I think it's in 1 Timothy, okay? Preterism is named, people trying to stir up the people of God by saying, you missed the day of the Lord, okay?
And Paul rebukes them for that. Just because preterism holds a lot of prophecies being fulfilled, the question is where do you jump off the bus? The orthodox confession, or the orthodox statement about eschatology is this, is that Christ comes back bodily, and he rules the saints from, he's gonna have a judgment throne, okay?
He's gonna judge the living and the dead, everyone is gonna resurrect the dead to damnation and hell, the saints to glorified bodies after the judgment. That's what has to be in place. Christ does not have to rule bodily for a time before the judgment, that's premill stuff, okay?
So, I'm not gonna, I'm hopeful, I gotta do this. I don't wanna spend a huge amount of time on dispensational premillennialism. The reason I don't want to is because it is so dominant in America, but it is waning, okay?
But most of you guys probably grew up where this is the only thing you ever heard, all right? And I will just tell you, that should make you angry, because that is frankly lazy from pastors, very lazy.
Even if I believed historic, or dispensational premillennialism down to my toes, as many pastors do, to not teach of the other views is disrespectful, lazy, and completely ahistorical. Because this is, no matter who's gonna tell you, dispensational premillennialism is an advent of the last 200 years.
It did not exist before that, I don't care what they say, it did not exist before that. Historic premillennialism has lasted for a long time, it's been around, but they are not the same thing. They are similar, but they're not the same thing.
So here it is, dispensational premillennialism. It is defined by these things. There has to be a rapture, all right? And this is where it is always different from historic premillennialism. And a rapture is this, right?
At some point, there is going to be a time when every person who has faith in Jesus Christ disappears, all right? You will be beamed up, and you will be gone from the earth. And the scriptural evidence for that comes from a verse in Thessalonians, and it comes from a...do I throw the darts, Corey?
I have to. It comes from a horrendous misreading of the Olivet Discourse, horrendous. It's some of the worst textual crimes I've ever seen, okay? It is horrible. If the Olivet Discourse means what we've been taught it meant from dispensationalists, that made no sense at all to the apostles.
The apostles asked Jesus a question, and he stonewalled them and did not answer their question. And that's just...that's the long and short of it. But there has to be a rapture. The church disappears.
There is a reason for that. The reason for that is because the dispensationalist definitionally sees two different people of God. There is the church, and there are ethnic Jews. And the reason the rapture has to happen is because God has a separate plan for both of those groups, okay?
So the church has to leave so that God can deal with his other chosen people. And I'm not using that sarcastically, all right? This is why a rapture exists in dispensational premillennialism. I don't have a huge amount of problems with the eschatology of dispensationalism.
I have a huge amount of problems with their lens of Scripture. But that is what defines it, because then it kind of meshes back with historic premillennialism. The rapture is really important, okay? That's what defines it, and you have to understand the reason for it, okay?
That's why it's there. It's really kind of inconvenient for them, because it's really hard to get there scripturally, right? Like a bunch of Christians disappearing off the earth. Because a cursory reading of the Bible will tell you that Genesis and Revelation are bookends.
And that's not only because of their placement, it's because in Genesis the world is created, it's good, and then it is tangled up in a curse. And what happens is the rest of the Bible is showing the curse growing in the Old Testament.
Jesus comes to reverse the curse, usher in the kingdom of God, and then Revelation ends with the curse being wiped clean, and we end with a tree of life, streams of water in the garden, okay? So the Bible ends where it begins, with a greater creation.
Now, the issue is, the problem with a rapture is not how, frankly, crazy it is to think about. I don't know. We all grew up in this, right? But you think about what happens in the world if every Christian just disappears.
And then you have to think, do we ever see anything remotely like that in Scripture? And so this is why I talk about the Genesis and Revelation thing, is that God is working in supernatural ways, to be sure, but He's also working in natural ways, but that seems like a huge departure from what the story is, right?
The story is that God keeps a remnant, that God keeps growing His people, that He is providing for His people. He provides for them in Goshen when they're in slavery. He provides for them when they're in the wilderness.
And He keeps doing that time and time again. It is strange to think that He's going to beam them out. That is the difference, but now I'm going to be able to save some time later, because historic premillennialism has a lot in common, but way different reasons, okay?
So there's a rapture, there's a tribulation, seven years. They get that from Daniel. We are in what's called the parentheses right now, okay? So there are 70 weeks in Daniel, 69 weeks, everybody agrees that that ended with Christ's ascension, that's the end of the 69th week.
We're waiting in dispensational thought, we're waiting on the 70th week. All the rest of them were consecutive, but we're now 2 ,000 years and counting, still in the parentheses. And a problem with dispensationalism is it often sees the church as a parentheses, right?
We're waiting for the real good guys to get saved, okay? We're just in the way. That's probably too snarky. So after the seven-year tribulation, where there's going to be an Antichrist, he's going to be a world leader, okay?
And he's going to terrorize and kill every person who professes faith in Christ, doesn't take a mark. You guys have heard all that, you've probably read Left Behind, and he is going to... We make fun of Left Behind, but Left Behind is a faithful representation of dispensational premillennialism, all right?
It really doesn't take a lot of leaps. That is basically the idea, okay? After the seven-year tribulation, then Jesus is going to come down from the clouds, and then he is going to set up an earthly reign.
He's going to reign from a kingdom in Jerusalem for 1 ,000 years on earth, all right? And then after that, at the end of the 1 ,000 years, there's going to be one final apostasy where Satan is released for a time, a la the end of Revelation.
He's let out of the pit, he stirs up people to make war with Christ, Christ destroys them with the sword out of his mouth, Armageddon, blood up to the bridles, all of that. And then when they are destroyed, he will set up his judgment throne, and he will judge the living and the dead, all right?
So what dispensational premillennialism will do is it will say that they have a literal interpretation of Revelation. You've probably heard that a million times. It's a literal interpretation. And I will tell you this, again, trying to show kindness towards my dispensational brothers, I truly do see them as brothers, all right?
But you can't take Revelation literally. You can't. Try to read it and take it literally. You can't. You're basically, at best, picking which parts you're taking literally, all right? Because if you take it literally, then John went into space and saw a gigantic woman giving birth to a baby, and a big dragon came in space, all right?
And then a temple came down, and the temple is the size of the southeast of the United States, and it reaches up past the moon, if we're taking it literally, okay? So the question, it's not, you can't use that, that's lazy argumentation.
No one is taking Revelation literally. The question is, what parts are you taking literally, and how are you reading the literature, all right? So I've done a pod on dispensationalism, and there's seven periods of time, so I'm not going to go over that now.
Dispensationalism is really kind of characterized by watching the news to see that the end times are coming, the Red Heifers are being bred, look at the wars going on all the time, Russia's a real army up now, they're Gog and Magog, right?
That comes from a strange interpretation of a word, Rosh, in Hebrew that's in the book of Esther, which basically just meant red, and because it kind of sounds like Russian, people think that that is Gog and Magog, because Gog and Magog idea comes out of Esther, and really guys, that's the level of thought you're dealing with there.
It's because it sounds like Russia, Rosh, the word means red, okay? That's where we got that from, it is so, so, so dominant that most of you guys probably grew up, and the only question that could be allowed about eschatology was, does the rapture happen before the tribulation, in the middle of the tribulation, or at the end of tribulation, and dispensationalism is characterized by fundamentalism, and what I mean by that is fundamentalists, they will put this in core doctrine and divide you from the church.
It is on the statement of faith for many different denominations. It is very, very popular among Southern Baptists, and it's very, very, very popular among Charismatic churches, okay? Very popular. Charismatic, you can see why, because it has kind of like flights of fancy that kind of lend themselves to some of the excesses there, but it is so dominant that if you question dispensational premillennialism, it will make people very angry.
I've done it. It'll make people very, very angry. It is held to very tightly. These guys will get in fights about pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib, and throw you out of the church. There'll be church splits over mid-trib versus pre-trib.
When I was in college and I was trying to learn about eschatology, there was a site called Pre-Trib Rapture, it was a dispensational site, and it was just throwing haymakers at people who were mid or post-trib.
Looking back on that now, I think, man, early internet was weird. It was like a GeoCities page. Baked into the cake of dispensational pre-tribulationism is that all of the promises to Israel in the Old Testament are ethnic, the church is different, Israel is and always were God's chosen people.
Strange and also, like, I was surprised to hear, I'd never heard it before, John MacArthur probably is the most prominent serious dispensationalist premillennialist. He has a lot of credit, especially among the Reformed people, for good reason.
The man had high character, great teacher of the gospel, you know, my son's middle name is MacArthur because I thought John, you know, John really led the pack in a really tough situation, opened his church in 2020.
I love John MacArthur. However, John MacArthur taught this doctrine, and that is that, and it's a feature, that in the millennial reign, in the thousand years, that there will be temple rebuilt in Jerusalem and there will be animal sacrifices in the temple.
John MacArthur taught that, right? Dispensational premillennialists hold that there will be a rebuilt temple to sacrifice animals. That's where the red heifers are coming from, all right? It's not fringe.
So, one other question that will save me some time on the next section is the question, who is in the millennium? Who's there? So Jesus comes back, he's ruling on earth, who's there? And here's the answer, resurrected Old Testament saints, some dispensationalists will say that, some historic premillennialists.
There's not differences here. There's lots of different positions on this, okay? But dispensationalist premillennialists will definitely say people who made it through the tribulation will be there, but they will be in ordinary bodies, okay?
You got that. They'll still be having kids and stuff, but there will also be people that are in glorified bodies who are in the thousand year reign who will not have kids and are immutably perfect. They will not sin ever again.
Those who were dead who were not in Christ are still dead. They don't live during this time, okay? So we got a blending. You got people with glorified bodies, and you got people who are ordinary human beings who are still having babies and stuff.
And during this thousand year reign, presumably the apostatizing would come from some of these babies from people who still have natural bodies, because the glorified bodies people are immortal, all right?
And they'll never die, but the ordinary body people will still die. There is a reason for this. It actually does help with some verses in the Old Testament that talk about the kingdom of Christ having people dying, right?
And that there won't be wars anymore, but there will be people who are kind of not in Christ that are coming to see God's law. Premillennialists have problems with that. This is one way to solve it, is that there are mortal people who are not immutably sinless at this point.
There would be cultural Christians during the thousand year reign of Christ. The rule of Christ will be so dominant that people will go along with his law for a thousand years, but they will be mortal, all right?
That is who's there. And then Great White Throne, most dispensationalists will hold the two judgment seats, one to judge your salvation, and then what they'll call a bema seat to weigh out your works as a Christian and see where you land.
I definitively do not hold to that. I hold to one judgment, and that is where Christians are judged according to their works, but their works are in Christ, and then we are rewarded based on, you know, basically the parable of the sower.
All right, historic premillennialism. Huge difference, and it's really the only huge difference, is that there is no rapture. The reason there's no rapture in historic premillennialism is because there is no need to separate between the church and ethnic Israel.
They basically make an exegetical argument from Scripture that there is a bodily reign of Christ for a thousand years on earth. That largely comes from the text that I read you out of Revelation 20. That text is hugely important for these two positions, hugely.
Almost primarily. In fact, I asked a proponent of historic premillennialism who is a very smart whippersnapper in our church, and I said, do you possibly ever arrive at your eschatology without Revelation 20?
And the answer was, no, no way, all right? So fundamental. There is no way to be a premillennialist without Revelation 20, okay? And I will say that is not true of the other two positions. Not true at all, okay?
That's not necessarily a weakness, it's just a thing. Historically, premillennialism is called Kiliasm, which just means a thousand years. A lot of dispensationalists really want history, and so they'll say that, hey, we were always this.
They were not. Rapture is an innovation, and that's what is defining dispensationalism. So historic premillennialism will have no rapture, the church goes on, there will be a tribulation, all right, a great tribulation, and then there will be a glorious appearing of Christ that sets up his earthly 1 ,000-year reign.
This is where it gets a little different. Now, what I told you about who's there in the temple and all that, that's pretty monolithic in dispensational premillennialism. That's widely held. They believe that.
When you start talking about historic premillennialism, it gets much more dispersed than that. There's a lot of different viewpoints within the 1 ,000 years. Some will argue that all saints living and dead at the appearing receive glorified bodies.
Others, so some people believe in this 1 ,000-year reign that every person there has a glorified body, okay? Then some people hold to what I explained before, that there are some people who are in normal bodies having kids and other people that have glorified bodies.
Corey asked a very good question, which is, so they get glorified bodies without being judged because the judgment has not happened at the 1 ,000-year reign. So I guess it's kind of like a payday loan, all right?
You got that, and then it'll be good for it later at the judgment. That's a little tongue-in-cheek, but that is a problem that you have. It is more rare in the historic premillennialism camp to have a memorial temple sacrificial system, so some do believe in that.
Some do believe there will be a temple set up for people to make animal sacrifices, but not all, okay? And I would say this. Historic premillennialism is not outside of covenantal theology, and it's definitely not locked into a futurist view of revelation.
In fact, most historic premillennialists will not have a futurist view of revelation. They are more likely to have an idealist view. And I would say at this time, a historic premillennialist probably, I don't want to percent, it would be super dominant that they would have an idealistic view of revelation, and if you remember that, that this keeps happening over and over again, symbols that mean something over and over.
All right. So those two are similar, but there are profound differences. The one, the difference that's easy to see on the chart is that historic premill does not believe in a rapture, okay? But the more important difference is that historic premillennialism is not at odds with covenant theology, and what that means is that historic premillennialists do not definitionally see this separation where there's ethnic Israel with these promises and the church with these promises.
In fact, a huge number of historic premillennialists will hold to reform doctrine. And I will just tell you, to affirm our statement of beliefs here, you have to be a covenant theologian. It is part of our confession.
It's also part of the Westminster. It is reformed dogma, okay? Does that mean you have to believe covenant theology to be a Christian? Absolutely not. Does it mean you have to believe covenant theology to be a mature Christian?
Absolutely not. But if you want to be an elder at a reformed church, you have to believe covenant theology. The problem is that with dispensational stuff, the differences get too profound. And I would say this, you can definitely be a historic premillennialist and be an elder at this church because the differences are minor and that's how we hold eschatology, all right?
At the end of the day, if you have separate people, you're going to make a much different interpretation of a lot of scripture. All right, so here we go. Here's where we switch the pages. Most of you guys, for most of your life, probably never heard of these, okay?
The first one that is the dominant reformed position really has horrible branding, like just awful, all right? It's kind of like being cessationist with a ton. It's like it's ceased, right? Like nobody wants to talk about things ending or ceasing.
Just like amillennialism, it means no thousand, no thousand years. That's what it means. Bad branding, okay? But here's where amillennialism comes in. First of all, they have a very simple chart. Here's a chart of amillennialism.
Jesus died on the cross, ascended, the church exists, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. There'll be some big battle at some point, a great apostasy where it's kind of over, the church age over, Jesus comes and rules on the great white throne and ushers in the final state.
That is the amillennialist chart. And some will say, amillennial and postmillennial will say a lot of times, it's already but not yet. This is where it can be confusing. It needs to be handled carefully.
New heavens and new earth, you'll hear that a lot. Amill and postmill people will sometimes say we are in the new heavens and new earth, already but not yet. New heavens and new earth initiated but not consummated, okay?
It kind of, look, that's why I try to steer clear of that language most of the time because it's unclear and it requires a lot of unpacking, which usually when I'm teaching in Mark or Ecclesiastes, it's not time for that.
All right, so here's the deal with amillennialism. They say that the millennium, the thousand years, if you remember, from Revelation 20 is not literal. Why would they say that? And this is a point, this is a huge point of contention, okay?
There has to be a thousand years, Revelation said it, okay? They will say, well, a thousand is not used literally like really anywhere in Scripture. And that is true. 2 Peter 3, 8, do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord, one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day.
So how is Peter using a thousand years there as a long time? It's a long time. Ecclesiastes 6, 6, even if the other man lives 1 ,000 years twice and does not see good things, do not all go to the same place.
Psalm 90, 4, for a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it passes by or as a watch in the night. So, does an amillennialist have an argument that the 1 ,000 years described in Revelation 20 is figurative for a long time?
Yes. You just heard that, right? So are they insane, throw the Bible in the dumpster, we don't care about what the Scripture actually says, we're making figurative, no, they're not, that is a ridiculous way to characterize.
Is there a basis to believe in a book with a huge amount of symbolism that a thousand years is used as symbolism for a very long time? And we would say in good faith, yeah. There's reason to believe that, okay?
So here's what happens, right? Old Covenant comes first and then Satan is bound after the resurrection of Christ. This is the problem for amill and postmill people. I mean, Revelation says that Satan is bound up, right, and then he's going to be unleashed after a thousand years to deceive the nations again.
Now, you're going to tell me, Rice, you're going to tell me that these guys, they look at Revelation and they think the thousand years is figurative and they think Satan is bound right now? Have you looked outside?
Have you heard the news? Come on, man, that's too much. They're just picking whatever they want to. Well, here's the issue, right? Here's what the New Testament says, Acts 2, 32 through 35. Jesus God raised up again to which we are all witnesses.
Therefore, having been exalted to the right hand of God and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you both see and hear. For David did not ascend into heavens, but he himself says, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I put your enemies as a footstool for your feet.
Now, I'm going to build something here, okay? So Jesus talked to, this is the evangelistic message in Jerusalem, right, where the sermon goes on, and what Peter is doing is he is equating Jesus with the right hand of God from Psalm 110 that's quoted over and over in the New Testament, and he says, the Lord is raised up and he is sitting at the right hand until he puts the enemies as a footstool for your feet.
Psalm 110 that he is quoting says that he will reign amongst his enemies, amongst his enemies. First Corinthians 15, 25, he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. Now, the dispensationalist will look at that and say, he is reigning spiritually, okay?
Can you make that argument from the New Testament? And I ask that, can you make the argument that Jesus' reign after his ascension is merely spiritual? The last thing he told his disciples is, all authority on heaven and earth has been given to me, okay?
Daniel 7, I kept looking at night visions and behold, with the clouds of heaven, one like a son of man was coming and he came up to the ancient of days and came near before him. And to him was given dominion, glory, and a kingdom that all the peoples, nations, and men of every tongue might serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which will not be taken away, and his kingdom is one which will not be destroyed. All authority has been given to me. So we have to ask, Jesus said, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth, has the kingdom come?
Has the kingdom of Christ come? Is it merely spiritual or is it everywhere? Matthew 12, 28 says, if I cast out demons by the spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. So let me ask, did Jesus cast out demons in his earthly ministry?
The answer is yes. So the kingdom of God has come upon them. And then that builds to the crescendo, right? What about Satan? Does it look like Satan is bound? Just honestly, does it look like Satan is bound in America to not deceive the nations?
That's a tough pill to swallow, right? It's a tough pill. Here's what scripture says, Matthew 12, 29, the next verse, so let me read them together. If I cast out demons by the spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.
Or how can anyone enter the strong man's house and carry off his property unless he first binds the strong man and then he will plunder the house? So what's Jesus talking about there? He says that if you don't bind the strong man, you can't go take his stuff, right?
Because the strong man will kill you if you try. You don't want to break into somebody's house that's much more ferocious than you and not have him neutralized. So what Jesus is saying is he has bound the strong man, which everybody agrees is Satan in this passage.
He has bound the strong man so that he could take his people, okay? His people. Ephesians 2 tells us that we were all dead in our trespasses following the power of the prince of the air. So the lost person in their dead estate is in allegiance to Satan.
You don't think you are, but you are. God sees you before you're elect as being in allegiance to Satan. So what has to happen? If you're going to be taken from Satan, the strong man, Satan has to be bound up so you can take his stuff.
And that's what Jesus did at his resurrection, is he bound the strong man so he could take all his stuff. All of the nations of the world. Now look, there are people, there will be Amalekites in heaven.
We know that. But it's talking a lot about scale, right? How many Amalekites will there be in heaven? Would you be surprised if there's less than a hundred? This is a people group that had thousands of people.
They were very, very wicked. There are lots of people groups before the gospel went out that very few, very, very few had knowledge of God or faith in God. After Jesus ascends, what we see is an explosion of things being taken from the strong man's house, right?
What was a small, regional, ethnically-centered faith becomes a global juggernaut, okay? John 12, 31, judgment is upon this world. Now the ruler of this world will be cast out. Now judgment is upon the world.
What is Jesus talking about? The cross. That's the judgment on the world. Because to those who are going to be plundered from the strong man, the judgment is that Jesus has taken them from him. He's bound them up, and he's taken their sin and changed their estate.
This is really important. Remember back in Revelation 20, okay, I'm going to read it again, this last part. So here's what he says. They came to life, everyone who did not take the mark on their forehead, right?
They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection. So what is the first resurrection?
We just said it, right? The people who did not take the mark. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is the one who has a part in the first resurrection. Over these, the second death has no authority.
So then we have to ask, what is the second resurrection? Because if there's a first, there has to be a second, okay? Back to amillennialism, all right? Here's the idea. The first resurrection is spiritual, and the second resurrection is physical.
This is what took me out of premillennialism, okay? John 5, 25. Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.
He goes on, verse 28. Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming in which all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and will come forth. Those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment.
Look at the bifurcation. An hour is coming, and now is. What's going to happen? The dead will hear the voice, and they will live. First resurrection. And then what's going to happen? An hour is coming when those who are dead and in the tombs will come forth.
Those who did good to life, those who did evil to judgment. We can clearly see that, and all the eschatologists would come to this point, right, and they would say, that's the judgment resurrection, right?
Where he's going to raise up everyone, the good, to eternal life with a glorified body. Most of us agree with that. The wicked to judgment so they can get their bodies and be cast into the lake of fire, right?
So, the issue is, how do you have all these resurrections? Because really, in some way, you could almost see the rapture as being a type of resurrection too, right? Like, you leave this mortal coil, you're out of here, and then you're something else.
So there's one. And then when Jesus comes back, the people who died during the tribulation come back. There's two, okay? And then when the great apostasy happens, a third resurrection, okay? Scripture only speaks of two, and having two bodily resurrections also sounds very strange, right?
Because 1 Corinthians 15 talks about his resurrection being the first fruits, the first fruits. Now, has there been any more of that fruit? No, right? People are not bodily raising from the dead since the resurrection, okay?
So what is the fruit right now? The first fruit is Jesus did the whole thing, right? Glorified body, bodily resurrection. He didn't need a spiritual resurrection because he's God. But do you know, he did descend and ascend, okay?
He went to the depths and to the heights, and he was judged as righteous because his active and passive obedience. So here's the wrap-up of Amillennialism. I know it goes down a trail, but the question that...
Here's the thing. If you can get past 1 ,000 years being not literally 1 ,000 years, I think that's a relatively easy hurdle to get by. Like, wouldn't you, in good faith, think, is it possible, if not likely, that 1 ,000 years just means a long time in Revelation 20?
It's possible, if not likely. The hard thing is, is Satan bound? And we look. Was there an outpouring of the gospel to the whole world after Christ resurrected and ascended? We don't have to guess. Scripture tells us it was.
Romans says that the gospel had gone out to the whole world, okay? It's not bound anymore in the tribal thing. And then the question is, with premillennialism, it has some weird... Did you hear it when I said both of them, right?
Like, glorified bodies living amongst mortal bodies without a judgment. Glorified bodies. And we have to say, there's been a resurrection there. What kind of resurrection is that? It's a physical one.
When Jesus talks about the resurrection, and this is where it all comes from, right? It all comes from that thing, the ones who did not follow the beast. The ones who did not follow the beast. All right, I'm going to go ham on the preterism at the end because I've stated it.
All right, good deal. Postmillennialism is a sister of amillennialism. It's not very different. In fact, they're going to read... Postmill and amill are going to read a lot of the same text and come to the same conclusions.
The only difference, the only difference, structurally, is that in Postmill, we're in the church age. And the idea in Postmill is that the church is going to continue to grow in the number of the disciples, right?
And that eventually, the wheat field is not going to be like more tares than wheat. That there's going to be more wheat. Postmill is going to look at scripture talking about the kingdom of God growing like a mustard seed, like it starting as a small stone not cut by human hands and growing into a mountain, like it being leaven running through the loaf.
When you put leaven in a loaf, it doesn't happen instantly, right? It's a slow growth. So the idea of postmillennialism is that there's going to be a slow growth in the influence of the church in the effectiveness of accomplishing the Great Commission.
And then at some point, there will be an apostasy, okay? And then during that apostasy, that is going to usher in the judgment. And that's the only difference, is what happens in the church age. Automill and Postmill have the same timeline, okay?
The Postmill believes that the church is going to grow in that mission. There's several reasons why. There is one, well, I'll get to it later. Ask of me and I will surely give the nations as your inheritance and the ends of the earth as your possession.
That's a Postmill-type verse. Psalm 22, 27, all the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will worship before you. Could that be in heaven? Yes, but it seems like it's talking about on the earth.
Matthew 13, 33, he spoke another parable to them, the kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three seda of flour until it was all leavened. Slow growth. Now, definitionally, pre-millennial eschatologies have the kingdom of Christ coming like that, right?
Boom! You're wandering around, and then Christ comes back to earth and crushes his enemies with the iron scepter. Does it really even matter what the church... I'm not being tongue-in-cheek here. Like, in that eschatology, the church is there, and the church is doing good work, the church is evangelizing the lost, but the church has really nothing to do with the powerful kingdom of Christ.
He's going to come physically and establish it. Aumil holds that the church is in this constant, eternal battle with the enemies of Christ. That's pretty easy to believe, right? Yeah, constant, eternal battle, and that at some point, that number is going to be used up, right?
Where all of the elect are fulfilled, and Christ is going to come and judge the living and the dead. Postmill is a sister of that that says the church is going to grow in effectiveness, the nations are going to flock to watch, to see God's law administered.
There is an offshoot of postmillennialism. We don't want to be cowards, right? So I'll name names. This is a Moscow kind of Doug Wilson thing. There's a deal going on here where postmillennialism can become functional dispensationalism, and I'm going to tell you how it happens, all right?
So here's how it happens. I wrote down there, golden age, question mark. Not all, so some postmillennialists, and this is especially the middle-age guys, like in the Middle Ages, they believed that what was going to happen is that the church was going to hit a point, and then there was going to be a 1 ,000-year golden age.
And that kind of hopes to reconcile a problem that's not really apparent with this literal 1 ,000 years. That is kind of out there now, all right? You're not going to, that's not mainstream postmillennialism, but I will tell you what is mainstream postmillennialism now because of the huge influence of Doug Wilson, right?
Look, I benefited tremendously from Doug Wilson's teaching on eschatology. He opened a lot of doors for me, but I will tell you, here's what he says. The golden age of the postmillennial kingdom is going to be ushered in when all Israel is saved, from Romans 11.
So here we go. We've done all this trouble. We've done all this stuff to try to, like, the church, the church, the church. Amil believes that. And then what's going on is that the height of the church is going to be achieved when ethnic Israel completely comes back in.
And you can see how this actually doesn't have conflict with dispensationalism. It actually turns the conflict with dispensationalism into, like, kind of a parlor talk with some slightly disagreeing things.
They still want the exact same thing, right? And I will tell you, one of the issues that you run into is this that diminishes evangelism of Jews, right? Like, why would you evangelize them? They're going to come in anyway.
In fact, you'll start to hear it, like, on a lot of Daily Wire stuff. Like, it's actually pretty insulting to try to evangelize them because our faith came from them, right? I don't mind saying, that's bunk, guys.
It's bunk, okay? The church is God's plan for the Great Commission. Eschatology, look, if you're asking me, like, there's a lot of things, like, divisive issues in the church. Like, if you're asking me, like, am I right on credo baptism versus Presbyterian idea of pedo baptism?
Here's what I tell you. I'm, like, 55 sure I'm right. When it comes to things like doctrines of grace, right? All, you know, predestination, all that. I would say, you know, I'm, like, 90 sure I'm right.
When it comes to eschatology, I'm a postmillennialist. If you ask me, how sure are you that you're right on postmill versus dispensational premill? I would say, I am 100 sure. That seems crazy to me, all right?
Could I be wrong? Yeah, but I don't think I'm wrong at all on that one. If you're asking me between postmill and aumill, how sure are you that you're right about postmill versus aumill? I'll tell you, I am 50 .37 sure that I'm right.
If there's a line between postmill and aumill, like, I'm kind of swerving around on it. But you can see that, like, they don't have wildly different arguments. They're very similar. And is the church going to grow is a question that's going to be very difficult to answer because those questions get spiritual.
And aumill does have this thing. Is the church going to win? Yeah, they absolutely believe the church is going to win. And they think that Christ is going to come back. What I believe is that the Great Commission wins, okay?
That's why I am a postmill, ultimately. And I'll tell you how I got there. The reason I'm a postmill is because it is not hope. I'll tell you. Okay, Kelsey's not going to get me. I got a little aside here.
I'm running up to an hour, so I'll do a little aside. We can't, look, eschatology is important. That's why we're talking about it. But you can't elevate it to such a level of importance that you start to think, well, that's why I do it because I'm postmill and I'm hopeful.
Look, you can't immunitize the eschaton. And there are two eschatologies up there that try to do that, that try to make it happen by your own power now. That is dispensationalist premillennialism and postmillennialism.
And that makes me nervous about the position. And it became cool to be postmillennial, right? That makes me nervous about the position. But it is a historic orthodox position. I will tell you this. There are verses in Isaiah that talk about the suffering servant.
I never really understood them that well. And I think a postmill framework gives a lot of good interpretive power to talking about Christ as coming and not bruising the wick, okay? That idea of his kingdom coming in slowly and not violently.
Those are the kind of verses that make me more postmill. The kind of verses that do talk about that Jesus is reigning amidst his enemies right now, coinciding with his kingdom growing like leaven through a loaf.
Those are the kind of verses that make me postmill. And so I would tell you, I'm not a postmill because of hope and cope. I'm not a postmill because I think the golden age is coming in from Jews. I'm not a postmill because Doug Wilson in Apology had told me to be.
I am postmill because to me, that makes the best sense to me of a lot of Jesus's parables about the nature of the kingdom of God when reconciled with the Great Commission. And that's where I stand. And I stand there hesitantly because my disagreements with my Amill brothers are very slight.
And even my disagreements with my historic pre-Mill brothers, like they're kind of funny and I'll kind of be like, oh, that's kind of weird, you know? He'll tell me some stuff and I'm like, oh, okay.
So like, how'd you get there? You know, and Amill, we're just not going to have that talk. Like, we're that close. It's not going to be that way. So I think that's it. I know, like, deeply unsatisfying.
You could probably do two to three hours on each one of them. I will never do that on dispensational pre-millennialism. Never. I think we've all probably heard enough of that. So yeah, I think that's a good place to stop and I can take some burning questions if there are any.