John MacArthur's View of Eschatology / End Times

Moore's Corner Church

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Hello, and thank you for watching. I've titled this video, John MacArthur's View of Eschatology or the

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End Times. And the reason why I wanted to record this is, number one, because of this clip. John MacArthur takes one of the most complicated subjects in all of the

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Bible and he lays it out so clearly in about six or seven minutes.

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So after this clip, even if you've never studied the subject, you'll have a pretty good understanding of how things are going to go and what the book of Revelation is all about.

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So I wanted to do the video for that reason. And then the second reason, this is also my view of the

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End Times. So I pretty much hold to the exact same position. There might be a few little differences, but I pretty much hold to the exact same position as John MacArthur.

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So this is known as the pre -Trib, pre -Millennial view of End Times Bible prophecy.

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So I'll play the clip. John MacArthur is going to go through the positions.

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He's also addressing the other viewpoints and he's talking also, talking about the question, why the early

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Protestant reformers didn't share this view of pre -Mill and pre -Trib.

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And of course, that's partly due to the fact that they were Catholic, right? The reformers were originally

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Roman Catholic. Then they broke away from Rome, but unfortunately they still retained a lot of Catholic doctrine, such as amillennialism and infant baptism.

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But let's listen to what John MacArthur has to say. Watch. If you go back and in church history, there are basically three views.

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There is what we call the pre -Millennial view. That is that you believe that the

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Bible teaches that Jesus is going to return. He's going to rapture the church, and then

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He's going to come back in judgment on the earth during a time of tribulation. At the end of that time,

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He will return to establish His kingdom on earth for a thousand years. So we believe that Christ will come before the millennial kingdom.

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Millennium just means a thousand. And in Revelation 20, we are told He will reign for a thousand years about a half a dozen times.

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So that is the standard, most common understanding of the future.

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And if you follow the book of Revelation, it makes sense. You have the church on earth in chapters 2 and 3.

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All of a sudden, you see the saints in heaven in chapters 4 and 5. And then in chapter 6 through 18, all hell breaks loose in the world in the time of tribulation as judgment falls.

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At the end of that period of seven years, in Revelation 19, Christ returns and judges the ungodly.

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And then in chapter 20, He sets up His thousand -year millennial reign on the earth, and He reigns for a thousand years in righteousness and peace on the earth.

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At the end of that time, the entire universe goes out of existence, and He creates the new heaven and the new earth, the eternal state.

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That's the chronology of the book of Revelation. But through the years of theology and discussion, that has not been what everybody believed.

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And part of it was there's a certain progress to the development of theology. So there have been a couple of other alternatives.

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One other alternative is that there's no real millennium, that the thousand years doesn't really mean a thousand years, and the

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Lord is not going to come back and set up His kingdom on earth. The millennium is just kind of a spiritual idea.

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These people are called amillennialists, the alpha privative means they reject the millennium.

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So they would say that whatever is going on in Revelation 20, it doesn't mean a thousand years, and it doesn't mean a kingdom on earth, because there's not going to be a kingdom on earth any different than the current kingdom, which is the church in the world.

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And then there is the postmillennial view, and that is that Christ comes after the millennium.

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And there were many of the Puritans who held to that view. There were some who were with every view.

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But the postmillennial view says this, and this is a hard sell. The postmillennial view says things are going to get increasingly better in the world, and the church is going to flourish and grow and not only be a spiritual entity in the world, but the church is going to take over all the institutions of the culture.

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You hear people who are postmillennial talk about culture war. So they're sort of trapped with, on the one hand, a desire to preach the gospel so people are converted, and on the other hand, a desire to take over the institutions of man in order that they can bring about the kingdom and then hand it to Christ when he returns.

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There are people who believe that. That is a very difficult thing to believe, that the world is going to get better and better and better when the

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Bible says it's going to get, what? Worse and worse and worse. That's a very difficult thing to hold to.

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In fact, most postmillennialists faded away after World War I and World War II.

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World War II, 71 million people were killed. And that is the darkest era of human history, and it was in a relatively modern time, and the world hasn't improved since then.

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But in the era of the reformers and the Puritans, the clarity of those doctrines was not developed, and I'll tell you why.

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When the church emerged out of a thousand years of Roman Catholicism in the

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Reformation, it had to reestablish every doctrine.

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They had counsels on the nature of Christ, the deity of Christ, the nature of God, the nature of salvation, the authority of Scripture.

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They were recovering from the apostate Roman system the true understanding of Scripture.

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And the early reformers didn't get all the way to the end of capturing, recapturing, reaffirming the full range of biblical doctrine.

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So you have someone like Martin Luther, who God used to recapture the doctrine of justification by faith, and you have

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John Calvin, the Lord used to clarify the essence of the doctrine of salvation in the possible understanding.

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But they didn't get to eschatology. In fact, John Calvin wrote a commentary on every book of the

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Bible but Revelation. They fought so many battles on the foundations, it took time in the recovery process to clarify and crystallize eschatology.

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But now that you have the clarity of eschatology, and you have a simple, straightforward interpretation of the book of Revelation, the chronology of Revelation is clear.

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The church is on the earth in chapters 2 and 3, letters to the churches on earth.

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The church appears in heaven in 4 and 5, which would indicate a rapture. In chapters 6 through 18, you have the judgments that come in the time of tribulation.

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After that, the Lord comes, destroys the ungodly, establishes millennial kingdom in Revelation 20, and then in chapter 21 and 22, you have the new heaven and the new earth.

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That's the simple chronology of Revelation. And it's not difficult.

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In fact, it starts with a blessing. Blessed is the one who reads and understands this book.

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It's not complicated. In fact, to be a successful amillennialist, you have to say that this doesn't mean what it says.

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And to be a successful postmillennialist, you'd have to say this doesn't mean what it says.

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But we're far enough along in the development of theology in the church that we can't claim that we've been so busy battling other aspects of theology, we didn't get around to eschatology.

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We're there now, and I think what the Bible teaches is clear. Okay, so I took that clip from the

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Doctrinal Watchdog channel. It was titled, Why the Reformers Got Eschatology Wrong, Postmillennialism vs.

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Pre -Mill Dispensationalism. And I just want to take a moment to talk about the difference between the historic premillennial view and the dispensational view of premillennialism.

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Because a lot of people in the comment section of the original video were saying, well, hey, John MacArthur, he's talking about the dispensational view of premill.

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First of all, ignore all of the people who say that these teachings were all created in the 1800s by this guy named

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John Nelson Darby. That is simply not true. John MacArthur, you saw it in the video, he's quoting from Revelation.

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He's not quoting John Nelson Darby. Darby is the one who systematized the theology known as dispensationalism.

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But the idea that he created these teachings is simply false. There were premillennialists in the early church before Rome took over.

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And there were people who made statements on the record. You can find these statements online.

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There were people in the early church who said things that were in line with the pre -tribulational view as well.

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But John MacArthur is laying out what people would call the premillennial dispensational viewpoint.

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And he does that for several reasons. Now, I'll just speak for myself, but you find in Acts 1, the apostles were clearly expecting this.

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In Acts 1, the apostles ask Jesus, they say, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?

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What is that? The idea that the kingdom would be restored to Israel, that is considered the dispensational view of premill.

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So if it was good enough for the apostles, it's good enough for me. And notice Jesus didn't correct them.

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In the book of Revelation, you also have the 144 ,000, which is 12 ,000 sealed from each of the 12 tribes of Israel.

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So if you look at Bible prophecy, it's mainly concerning Israel. Daniel's prophecy of the 70 weeks, that's for Israel and the city of Jerusalem.

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When Jesus comes back, he comes back in Zechariah 14 to Jerusalem, his feet stand on the

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Mount of Olives. So when the kingdom is established, Jesus rules and reigns from Jerusalem.

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My friends, this is the premillennial dispensational view. Now the Gentiles, the church, we get to share in that.

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We share in the promises, but this is what MacArthur is teaching. It's what

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I believe. It's what the majority of American evangelicals believe, and it has nothing to do with John Nelson Darby.

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It is simply the conclusion you come to when you read the Bible and interpret it literally.

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So I hope this video was helpful. I will say that in fairness, John MacArthur has identified as a leaky dispensationalist, meaning he doesn't agree with a lot of dispensational ideas.

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And I would agree salvation has always been by grace through faith.

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Uh, there's some dispensationalists who teach that in the old Testament, they were saved by keeping the commandments.

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That is not true. Uh, there's one people of God, not to the proper understanding is, you know, one people, one olive tree,

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Romans 11, right? The Jews were broken off. We are grafted in, but then the

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Bible indicates they will be grafted in again. So there is a future for Israel, but a lot of modern dispensationalists admittedly do go way too far with some of that stuff, but that's another subject for another day.

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Hopefully this is easy to understand. This is what the Bible teaches. If you take a literal interpretation of scripture, but if you have any questions about the end times, go ahead and leave them in the comment section below.