163. THE FAILED "SECOND COMINGS" (PART 1)

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There is a sickness in the modern church, and it's spreading faster than we want to admit.

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And it's not found in our doctrine, although there's plenty of areas where that is true. But many do still preach the truth.

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And it's not always found in our practice, because many still sing the Psalms and catechize their children and hold fast to biblical worship.

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But the rot is deeper than all of that. It goes down into the soil of Christendom.

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It's down into the systemic level. And it's the cult of celebrity. We've watched as men after men after man has experienced great falls.

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And the fallout has happened again and again. Men with sharp theology and sterling reputations who built platforms that are larger, unfortunately, than their character could carry.

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And now another name has fallen, Josh Bice of G3 Ministries, a man who preached accountability from the pulpit and yet was secretly operating anonymous accounts to slander fellow believers in private, a man who denied the allegations and then lied about it and has now stepped down in disgrace.

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But let's be honest for a moment. Josh Bice is not alone. I mean, just in recent years, we think of men like Steve Lawson, James McDonald, Mark Driscoll.

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There are others. The list continues to grow. And not all of them have the same sense, but they were all called in the same kind of system, a machine that feeds upon fame and a ministry model that worships platform instead of righteousness, a pedestal culture that turns shepherds into showmen and eventually into statistics.

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And I want to be crystal clear that this show is not going to be a part of that.

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I don't care about my image. I don't care about my brand. I don't care about any of that stuff. I don't care to build a castle with my name on it.

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I'm here to preach the kingdom that already has a king. You see, the podcast exists for one reason and one reason only, so that people would know

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God, so that they would understand optimistic, joyful eschatology, so they would live with joy and they would serve

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Jesus with courage. That's what we need right now. We need a brave church right now that is steel spined, that is scripture fed, that is spirit filled because we're in a war.

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We don't need more celebrity showmans. We need people with steel spined who are willing to say the truth.

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And every word that I speak either about the end times or about culture is meant to arm you for that war.

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I don't care about winning fans. I want to build up your faith. I'm not here to stoke controversy, but I'm here to equip the church to build the next

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Christendom. That's why I want this show to have longevity. And starting today,

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I'm going to make a few changes just to insulate this show and protect this show from this celebrity culture that I see happening all around me.

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From now on, all of my content is free. There will be no paywalls.

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There's going to be no VIP access. There's going to be none of that. If I'm going to talk about the

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King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, then I want the content that I make to reflect his generosity.

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The gospel is free so that anything I produce is going to be free as well. It's not going to be hidden behind a paywall, and it's not going to be something that you can only get access to if you are a paying member.

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I've tried that. I didn't really feel perfectly right about it, but that's what everybody seems to be doing.

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I thought it'd be a fun way to encourage memberships, but I'm done. I'm not doing that because I think that the gospel is free, should always be free, and everything that I produce should be free for the building up of the church.

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That's one way that I want to protect this channel from getting caught up in that. Also, I've never done this, but I am going to comment on it.

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I'm not going to sell you backstage passes like some concert like G3 was doing or like many others have done where you pay money for greater access to them.

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You pay money to have meals with them. I'm not going to peddle my name or the truth like it's a product.

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Now, because I'm not going to do those things, you may be asking, well, is there any reason or any point for me having subscribers to this channel?

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Well, I'm not going to eliminate that feature, but I am going to change it. The work that I'm doing still needs support.

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I have platforms like Adobe that I'm using to license the music for this show.

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I have subscription software for editing, for producing. I have equipment. I have lights.

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I have this microphone. I have the soundboard. I have things that are going to cost money, but I'm going to minimize that down as low as I possibly can just so that I can pay the bills.

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That's it. Outreach takes resources and the bills aren't going to pay themselves. So if you want to help, if you want to help fund the work of this, well, praise

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God, but you're not doing it to buy more access to me. You're not doing it to buy perks from me.

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You're not doing it because you want more of me. You're doing it because you want to see this mission go forward and succeed.

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You want to see post -millennial eschatology convert, convince, encourage people.

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You're not helping a man. You're helping a mission. You're helping us reach more souls, disciple more men and women, raise up a fearless church for the days ahead, which is actually what we need.

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So if you're giving, you're giving to a message, not a man. And one more thing

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I do want to ask you right now for is your prayers. Please pray for me.

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Pray that I would not fall in love with the platform, that I would never chase clicks more than I'm chasing after Christ, and that I would never compromise in the way that we're seeing these men compromise, that I would never compromise the truth in order to keep an audience or shrink back from speaking boldly because I'm afraid of losing approval, that I would always be faithful and then

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I will walk humbly before my God. And then I would serve Jesus all my days with wisdom and with holiness and with courage.

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And then I would never besmirch the name of Christ like these men do with their secret platforming sins, because the fall of one man should wake us up to the warning that could occur to all men if we're not careful.

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I really hope that we can be a part of burying this kind of celebrity

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Christianity and resurrecting a biblical faithful model of what it looks like for teachers to teach and shepherds to shepherds.

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And with that, I want to say thank you so much for praying. Thank you so much for standing with me.

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Thank you so much for supporting this show. And with that, let us now jump into today's episode.

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God bless you. Hello, everyone.

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And welcome back to the broadcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 163,

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The Failed Second Comings, part one. Well, hello again, everybody.

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If you are new to this show or even if you've been riding shotgun for a while, this series that we're on in Revelation has been tackling some of the most explosive and misunderstood text in all of scripture, especially those concerning eschatology.

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And our central claim in this series has been clear and unapologetic that the vast majority of so -called end time prophecies and passages in the

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Bible are not aimed at our future, but we're aimed at their present.

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For instance, Matthew 21 through 24, we went through that. We noticed that all of it is fulfilled. The book of Revelation, we know that or at least we've seen so far that all of it has at least been inaugurated and the vast majority of it has been fulfilled.

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Revelation is a letter to first century people who are facing a very first century kind of judgment.

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And today we press even further into that truth as we open up Revelation chapter one verses seven through eight.

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We examine what the Bible really means when it says that Jesus is coming. But before we scale those heights, we need to anchor ourselves with a very brief recap of where we've been.

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We're in Revelation chapter one, and it all began with the wrecking ball to modern eschatological assumptions that we began in episode one, where we tore down the notion that Revelation is this cryptic horror story that's meant to spook modern believers and get you trembling in your eschatological boots.

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It's not about beast and barcodes. It's about Jesus. It's about his judgment on apostate Israel.

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The smoke that's rising out of that book is rising out of the Jerusalem temple that he said was going to fall, that it was going to be torn apart brick by brick.

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And in the ashes of that temple came a new covenant age that would be ruled under his reign.

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And in that sense, Revelation is not a dystopian fantasy. It is the coronation of King Jesus.

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So we proved that in episode one. In episode two, we followed that golden thread of kingship from Eden to Zion, from Adam's fall to Jesus's triumph.

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And we showed that the Bible itself is not a collage of disconnected doctrines, but it is a throne centric narrative.

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And Revelation is its dramatic crescendo. It's the hallelujah chorus and handles

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Messiah. Jesus is not up in heaven today campaigning for the crown.

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He's already crowned. His kingdom isn't waiting. It's working. And he's been on the throne for 2000 years.

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And we showed how Revelation proves that. In episode three, we targeted common lies, nine of them, in fact, that cause people to see the book of Revelation as a future oriented instead of a first century oriented book.

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Lies that soon mean someday the lie that John was being vague or he was confused or he was being emotionally manipulative.

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We dragged each one of those nine lies into the light and we showed it text by text, line by line, how

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John was not saying that. But what he was saying is that these events are going to happen soon, quickly, and the time is near.

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In that way, Revelation is not a puzzle. It is not a thing that you're supposed to decode.

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It's a prophecy about things that have already happened. The time was near back then.

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The temple was collapsing back then and the king came back then.

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Then in episode four, we saw what so many people have missed. This book begins not with dread, but the book actually begins with the light.

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It doesn't begin with plagues and trumpet blast and barcodes and any of that. It begins actually with blessing.

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We see that the entire book of Revelation in that episode four, we saw how the entire book of Revelation is structured by seven benedictory blessings, seven pillars of joy for a church under fire.

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And what we saw is that this book actually promises that you will be blessed if you read it, not that you will be confused if you read it.

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That's such a wonderful thing to cling to and to hold on to because the book itself promises you'll be blessed if you read it, if you read it rightly.

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Episode five, we unveiled the glory of Christ, who is the faithful witness. He's the firstborn from the dead.

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And we saw how that there was this Trinitarian greeting formula where God, the Father, God, the

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Son, and God, the Holy Spirit are working to bring about the truths that they wanted to communicate to the first century church about present realities that they were going to be going through.

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And the crescendo of that episode showed once again that Jesus is not in heaven twiddling his thumbs or playing on his heavenly

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Nintendo Switch. He's actually ruling. He's actually reigning. He has a people and his people have become a kingdom and they have become a kingdom of priest and a holy nation.

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And we saw that all of those things work together underneath his rule. In episode six, we entered back into the first century world and we saw believers who were worshiping underground while Jerusalem was crumbling and Rome was thundering.

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And we saw that, that Jesus was announcing his kingship to those beleaguered saints who were suffering in the greatest persecution that you can imagine.

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And that Jesus was writing the book of Revelation to encourage them in their suffering and in their tribulations and in their martyrdom and in their brokenness.

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And Christ was encouraging them by letting them know that he's king, that he's going to take care of them.

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That he is going to deal with the apostate Jews. He is going to tear down their temple.

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He is going to tear down the sacrificial system. He is going to rebuild it with his own body. And with that body, the church, he's actually going to rule the world again.

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Revelation is not a maze. It's a mandate. It's not a riddle. It's meant to reveal. It's meant to unveil.

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It's that's what the word apocalypse even means is to unveil the truth that had been hidden for a long time.

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But now it's clear because of the coming of Christ. What is that? When the old covenant, the truth was concealed in the sacrificial system and in the temple and in the priest and in the feast and all of that.

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And now because of Jesus, that truth that was concealed has been revealed so that the book itself is talking about Christendom, his kingdom, his kingdom, putting down his enemies and his kingdom rising to win the world.

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That's what the book is all about, which brings us to today's text, which is so -called the second coming of Christ in Revelation chapter one, verse seven and eight.

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And true to form, I'm going to show you in today's episode that what many call the second coming that they think is the second coming in the future has actually already happened in the past.

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And before there's anyone here who's not used to this before you grab your pitchfork and you flood my email with concerns,

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I want you to hear me carefully here. I'm not saying that Jesus is never going to return.

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I believe that Jesus is going to return. I believe in the final bodily visible return of Christ where he gives us resurrection bodies.

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I believe that he's going to raise the dead. He's going to judge the nations. He's going to usher his people into everlasting glory.

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I believe in all of that. But when the Bible speaks in Revelation one of the coming of Jesus on the clouds, we need to stop and ask, well, what does that mean?

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And is that talking about a future coming or is that talking about a past judgment coming? Who is being promised the coming of Christ here?

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Because when we do that, we'll see that there's two comings. There's well, actually there's three.

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There's this first coming, which is the incarnation. There's his future bodily coming at the end of human history.

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And then there's another kind of coming, a judgment coming that mirrors

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God's judgment comings in the past. And when we see that, we see that Jesus has already returned.

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The second coming has already happened. I'm not talking about the future coming again, but the real true second coming has already occurred.

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But before we get into all of the exegetical proofs for how these things happen in the century that Jesus really did return in judgment,

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I want to take a very different kind of journey today. And even next week, as we try to answer the question that has plagued the church over the last 150 years, why do evangelicals get the end of the world wrong?

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Why do they get the second coming wrong? Because if we do not answer that question correctly, then we're going to be doomed to repeat their errors.

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And I want to answer that question in two ways. This week, I want to talk about why evangelicals get the second coming wrong.

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And the next week in part two, I want to talk about where we have gotten that wrong in history.

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And then two weeks from now, so in our third episode on this passage, I want to talk about why this passage proves that Jesus returned in the first century.

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I want to prove why it happened, how it happened, and I want to go into great depth. But before we do that, we're going to take a couple of weeks to talk about why the church has gotten this verse wrong and where the church has gotten this verse wrong.

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And with that, let's read our passage. Behold, he is coming with the clouds and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him and all the tribes of the earth will mourn over him.

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So it is to be. Amen. I am the alpha and the omega, says the

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Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come the Almighty, Revelation one, seven through eight.

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And that takes us to part one, a brief view of the second coming.

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Now, if futurism were a skyscraper, then Revelation one, seven would be its load bearing beam.

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Remove it and the whole structure collapses for the modern evangelical. This verse is supposed to prove that Christ will come again at some point in the future in bodily form, descending from the sky and global visibility so that everyone can see it all at the same time all over the world.

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But that is not what the text says. And it's certainly not what the text means.

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What I want to show you today conclusively is that Revelation one, seven through eight does not describe a future global physical second coming of Christ.

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Again, I'm going to go into more detail about this in the weeks ahead. But I need to before we get started, just anchor us in the truth that this describes a first century reality, a covenant judgment that is coming against Judah, not first century or not 21st century

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America. Once that's clear, the futurist model doesn't just wobble. It actually collapses.

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So let me go through this in a couple of different proofs. Number one, the book begins with time sensitive language.

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Revelation opens with a timestamp that most readers ignore entirely. Verse one says the revelation of Jesus Christ to show his bond servants the things which must soon take place.

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The Greek here in Taka means soon. It means quickly. It means shortly. It doesn't mean 2000 years.

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And then verse three doubles down on this. It says for the time is near. So just in case there was a first century person, let's call him

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Zebediah. And he was reading this book and he goes, huh, I wonder if soon means 2000 years. And then he gets to verse three.

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No, it means the time is near. And he's like, oh, okay. He would have had no questions because the one to Mike Tyson punch of the apostle

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John would not have allowed him to get there. And then, then let's just imagine he was really a dunderhead and he really thought that all of this stuff was about 2000 years into the future.

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Then he gets to the end of the book, revelation 22, six and revelation 22, 10. And John says, or God says to John, do not sell up the words of this book for the time is near.

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And he says, oh my goodness. The beginning of the book and the end of the book are about things that are near, near to who?

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Near to me. And there's no way that a first century reader would have walked away saying this must be about 21st century

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America. Eureka, I've got it. They would have never, they would have never thought that way.

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They would have never inserted a multi millennia hopscotch gap into the text.

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It just wouldn't have happened. In other words, revelation begins and ends by telling us that this is not about the future, at least not ours.

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The prophecies are in the future for them. They're immediate for them. The events that they described were eminent for the first century people, not us.

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And that leads us to our second reason. Number two, coming on the clouds is judgment language.

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The phrase coming on the clouds does not originate with Christian prophecy in the new Testament.

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And it certainly is not a prophecy of something that's going to happen long into the future. This language of coming on the clouds is old.

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It's language that shows up in the old Testament, which means that if John's quoting about cloud comings and it shows up in the old

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Testament and he's quoting those old Testament passages, we need to understand what those old Testament passages mean.

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If John is using an old Testament symbol to prove a new Testament reality, we need to know what the old

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Testament symbol meant. Well, when John quotes coming in the clouds, he's quoting

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Isaiah 19 one, where God comes against the nation of Egypt.

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This is what it says. Behold, the Lord is riding on a swift cloud and is about to come to Egypt.

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The idols of Egypt will tremble. Now, in addition to that, Jesus also uses the exact same language in Matthew 24, 30, connecting his coming on the clouds with destruction of Jerusalem.

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And in Mark 14, 62, Jesus himself tells the Pharisee or the, or the, uh, the

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Sadducee Caiaphas, who was a part of the Sanhedrin. He tells him, you will see the son of man coming with the clouds of heaven.

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Not your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren. Not future generations, but you

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Caiaphas, you living in the first century, you are going to see this coming. And they did when the temple was burned to the ground, just like the old covenant language of judgment implies.

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Jesus borrowed Isaiah 19 to say that the temple is going to be destroyed. John borrows John or Isaiah 19 in Revelation chapter one, not to talk about a future moment where Jesus surfs down from heaven on a big title, wavy cloud.

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No, this is not about a future event. This is about what this event signifies.

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And whenever cloud language shows up where God is riding on a cloud, and we have more examples of this, we'll talk about them in a couple of weeks.

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Whenever this example shows them in the old Testament, it's judgment language. God is coming in judgment against a people and against a nation and against a country, against a rebellious group of people.

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That's exactly what John is talking about. He's talking about Jesus is going to be coming against the first century

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Jews. Why? They murdered him and they murdered his bride. So he's going to be coming to vindicate his people.

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That's what the passage means. Not a future second coming for us. Number three, every eye will see him means those who pierced him.

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Verse seven says, every eye is going to see him. Even those who pierced him. This is not about you and I, because we didn't pierce him.

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This is not about everybody on earth watching something on a satellite or a smartphone. It's about the covenant act of vengeance of God against the ones who pierced his one and only son.

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Look, it says the ones who see him are the ones who pierced him. Who's that?

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Well, that's first century Israel. Acts two 23 makes it clear. Acts three 13 through 15 makes it clear.

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Zechariah 12, 10 makes it clear that the identity of the piercer is the first century

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Jews. The ones who betrayed and murdered and executed their Messiah. And this passage says that they, the one who's left holding the smoking gun are going to see him coming again.

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Not us. Not in our modern world.

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They were being warned of a terrifying majesty. They were being warned in Matthew 23, that the covenant curses were, were gathering like storm clouds upon the horizon.

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And they were about to be under the torrent of God's wrath. Not us.

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That's number three. Number four, the tribes of the earth is really translated as the tribes of the land.

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Futurists love this phrase. All the tribes of the earth are going to mourn over him because why?

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It sounds global. It sounds like the entire planet earth is glued to the same video feed.

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And I've even heard dispensationalists or futurists say this could have never been possible prior to the invention of the television.

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Now that we have the television, now we have the right technology to live stream this event into every home on earth, because apparently at some point in the future, no one on earth is going to be sleeping.

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It could be two o 'clock in the morning in Bangladesh and they're glued to their little television screen. It could be four o 'clock.

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I don't know what the time zone. So forgive me. It could be four o 'clock in France. It could be eight o 'clock in New York. It could be one o 'clock

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PM and people all are off work on their lunch break and whatever else. And everybody on earth at the same time is watching the same video feed.

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That's ridiculous. That's not what this is talking about. I mean, when you realize that the

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Greek text actually is there and it's not just English words and you realize that underneath the word world, which is suspect anyway, because English doesn't do a good job of translating

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Greek words for world, because there's actually three Greek words for world. There's cosmos, which does mean the spherical planet.

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Then there's, then there's oikomene, which means the Roman world. It's a kind of it's a kind of cultural world.

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And then you have gay or Gaia, which means the actual earth that you can reach down and grab with your hands when you realize that the

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Greek word for underneath world in its passage is Gaia land, not spherical globe.

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And that the word tribes is not a description of 21st century peoples who are variously assorted in their in their in their nations, where some are in communist nation, some are in socialist nation, some are in monarchy, some are in democracies.

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No, the word tribes is a type of government that applied to the

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Jews. They were the only country in the ancient world who was organized by tribal allotments.

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And in that sense, the judgment is not global. The judgment is on that specific piece of earth

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Gaia that was occupied by the people who were organized by tribal allotments, the

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Jews, and they were the ones who killed and pierced their Messiah. So the coming is to them.

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It's not the United Nations gasping in horror at the coming of Christ.

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It's not the it's not modern people hiding underneath Subarus. This is old covenant

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Israel mourning the fall of her temple, mourning the loss of her nation, mourning the judgment that she's undergoing because she killed her

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God and king. And if you doubt that read Zechariah 12, 10 through 14, which is directly quoted here, they will look upon me whom they have pierced and they will mourn every family by itself.

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That's the mourning of a people who are under the covenant curses for killing their

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Lord and God. That's the fourth evidence that this is first century, not future. The fifth evidence is that the

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Lord himself guarantees this reading by saying this in I am the alpha and the

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Omega, the one who is and who was and who is to come the almighty. In other words, you can take this passage to the bank.

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The God who transcends time and space has tethered this prophecy to a specific time, the first century fall of Jerusalem.

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And because he is eternal, he's omnipotent, he's omniscient, and he is omnipresent.

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We're not guessing here what he means. We are reading the words that are on the page and we're seeing the judgment that he's revealed.

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And we noticed that it is entirely Jerusalem centric and it's already happened.

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This doesn't describe a future return of Christ to the earth. It was described as a past return of Christ against Judah.

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The second coming then has already happened. It's happened in judgment. It's happened in the clouds.

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It's happened in the collapse of the old covenant world. This doesn't mean that Christ is not going to come again. I've already talked about that.

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He will. He's going to gloriously and finally and fully and bodily come again.

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But that's not what Revelation 1 -7 is talking about. Revelation 1 -7 is talking about AD 70 when

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Rome surrounded the city of Jerusalem and the temple fell and the tribes mourned and the judge of heaven kept his word and destroyed the old covenant rebels.

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And when you see that, and again, we're going to go into way more detail about this in the weeks ahead, but when you see that this second coming must be first century, and then you turn and you look at what evangelicalism has believed about this passage for the last 2000 years, well, you're left with two unavoidable questions.

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Why do so many Christians get this wrong? Why? And then the next question is why is there so much history of wrong that has permeated the church?

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That's where we're going to talk about today. That's where we're going to dive in today is why has the church gotten this so wrong?

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And we're going to talk about 10 reasons for that. And that leads us to part two, why false predictions exist.

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Reason one, bad theology called futurism. False predictions don't grow in a vacuum.

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They grow in a greenhouse of bad theology and no theological framework has been more effective at cultivating confusion than futurism.

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Maybe you could call it confuturism. Futurism isn't just an interpretive misstep.

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It's a comprehensive worldview that warps the entire narrative of redemptive history into its own silly machinations.

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It imagines that God has two peoples with two distinct plans, national

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Israel on the one hand and the church on the other. And the church in that sense is in an asterix period where we exist for a season because Israel rejected

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God, but God's going to come back to Israel, right? Well, once you live by that premise and buy that premise, the rest of scripture gets hijacked and perverted prophetic passages that meant that were meant for them become threats for us and passages that were really about us.

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The Israel of God now get applied to them. Near time warnings to first century rebels get projected into 21st century headlines, and it just gets all messed up.

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And then modern day Israel becomes like the seedbed of God's salvation for the world. And wait a minute, wasn't that the church?

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And in that way, it's not that the text is unclear. What it is is that people are wearing the wrong glasses.

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Think about it like this. If you put on sunglasses with blue lenses, which I don't know why you would do such a thing, but let's say you did, then everything that you see is going to have a blue tent, even the things that aren't really blue at all.

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That's what futurism does to eschatology. The theology is there and it's clear, but they're wearing a theological lens on top of it that stains every passage that they're viewing, which makes it look like soon looks like someday.

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And this generation becomes some generation at some point in a future era. Coming on the clouds means coming through the atmosphere at some point in the future.

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Nothing is actually allowed to mean what it clearly means because the system won't permit it.

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And that's the real issue. The system is in charge. The text is not. Futurism trains people to reinterpret time sensitive warnings as time insensitive metaphors.

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It turns Jerusalem's imminent judgment into an indefinite dread for the modern church, and it separates

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Christ from his kingdom, the church from Israel and the reader from reality. But the word of God is not silent on these things, and it doesn't hint at these things.

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It declares that revelation begins and ends in the first century.

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It says the time is near. The Olivet discourse puts the crosshair squarely on a single 40 year time period when it says this generation and Jesus himself even tells the

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Sanhedrin, you're going to see the son of man coming in the clouds. You don't need a dispensation or futuristic timeline.

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You just need the text. And the text says it has already happened.

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The only reason people still don't see it is because they don't want to, because they're wearing their futuristic glasses.

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And those glasses are filtering out the obvious what the text is actually saying that what

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Jesus said would come quickly doesn't actually come quickly because they're wearing the wrong glasses.

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And if we want to stop that plague of false predictions, then we have to call it out.

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We have to smash the system that they've created so that they can begin to see the text as it really is.

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That's reason number one why many people have gotten the end times and especially the second coming wrong.

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Now we're going to go to reason to fear based emotionalism.

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Now, if futurism gave the church the wrong glasses, then emotionalism has given it a twitching eyelid.

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Even when the text is clear, fear clouds the heart and fear cells and panic produces revenue.

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I mean, let's not pretend otherwise. Panic is marketable. We see it all over the news and all over the internet.

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Crisis builds platform. Controversy builds clicks. The fastest way to sell a book in our modern

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American context, the fastest way to get a million views or to pack a pew is to whisper.

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The end is near. If you want to become a millionaire as a Christian, just write a book about how the end is near, how

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Russia is Gog and Magog, and you can go on and on and on about blood moons and everything else.

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If you want to be a Christian millionaire like Tim LaHaye, like the guy who wrote the great planet earth, how

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Lindsay or like the blood moon guy, whatever his name is. If you want to be a Christian millionaire, just write crazy books about how the end is going to happen tomorrow or the next day and all that.

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And then, you know, make videos with with ominous music playing in the background. Fear is the currency of this kind of false prophetic movement.

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And the business is unfortunately booming. For instance,

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Y2K did not crash civilization, but it did launch a bunch of prophetic ministries into the millionaire status.

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Blood moons rose and set without a single peep in the midnight sky, and yet not without book royalties.

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COVID -19 wasn't a prelude to the rapture. We know that. But it was the pretext for more eschatological fiction parading around as fact.

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I mean, turn on the so -called Christian media ecosystem and you'll see it.

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Countdown clocks, trembling voices, red circled maps, one YouTube video after another, after another of some guy with a pocket protector and the glasses and the and talking about how the end is nigh and we're getting ready to we're all getting ready to be raptured out of here.

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And because of Israel and because of this and because of that and because of this news headline, all of it is just telling us to wake up.

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Because fear is not a fruit of the spirit, brother and sister. It's a byproduct of theological immaturity.

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For instance, 2 Timothy 1 7 says, God has not given us a spirit of fear, but a power of love and of a sound mind.

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That verse is not a motivational poster. It's a rebuke against anybody who would peddle in fear.

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A sound mind doesn't spin in circles, chasing signs and chasing portents in the sky.

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A sound mind is grounded in the prophetic certainty of what Christ already said and what

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Christ already did when he warned us of all of these things. When he said, you will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed.

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Matthew 24 6. That command was given to the first century church who was going to be tempted to panic after seeing

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Rome destabilized and seeing seeing the Pharisees chasing them down and killing their loved ones.

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They were going to be tempted to despair. And yet Jesus is telling them don't because these are signs at the end of the old covenant world is coming.

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And yet this very verse is one that modern Christian prophecy charlatans are weaponizing and using and turning it into a business model to promote their panic porn.

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Fear has become a kind of reverse virtue in the evangelical world.

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The more anxious that you are, the more serious that you seem to be, the more calm and the more hopeful and the more biblically grounded you are, you're labeled as naive.

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How could you not be afraid at a time like this? You must not be hoping in the rapture. And all that brings into question, are you really a

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Christian? If you tremble at headlines and you see antichrist in every election, suddenly you're called awake, which is a kind of eschatological

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Gnosticism. Like there was this hidden knowledge that was existing for 2000 years.

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And now after all that time, we're the special little snowflake generation that gets to wake up to what's really been going on all along.

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But when you think about that, that's nonsense. The true church of Jesus Christ doesn't walk by the light of panic.

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She walks by the light of the word. She lives by the promises of God. The true prophet doesn't shout about mystery blood moons.

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He preaches about the finished blood of Jesus who's enthroned and who's reigning. So why do these false predictions proliferate and exist?

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Well, it's because fear keeps people buying the next book. Fear keeps people subscribed to the next episode.

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Fear is what we see in the secular world. They use to market to you by the shampoo or your hair's not going to be shiny.

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Wear this particular cologne or women aren't going to like you. Wear this dress or you're not going to be attractive.

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Like every single marketing campaign that secular people do is laden with fear.

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And the church has adopted that model and said, if you don't believe this, maybe you're not going to be ready.

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Maybe you're going to be left behind. Maybe you're going to be here when the Antichrist is here. And you're going to go through all this suffering and pain and torment.

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So you got to believe this stuff. That's not how we market the gospel.

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That's not how we preach. We don't preach fear. We preach hope. We don't preach panic.

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We preach faith in Christ that he will reconcile to himself a world that has fallen because he is good.

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He's the true and better Adam. But again, the reason that this stuff sells is because fear sells in our culture and panic sells in our culture.

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And we've got to stop. That's reason number two. Reason three, psychological comfort.

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Now, for some false prophecy is not about fear, but it is about control, which is a kind of aspect that's downstream of fear.

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The illusion of certainty is more comforting than the call to faith. Living by sight instead of by faith is what many are prone to do.

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The itch to know when becomes more important than obeying now.

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And that's precisely what false timelines are trying to accomplish and why they're so attractive, because the timeline is a kind of drug.

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It gives people the illusion of mastery over the future of knowledge over the future.

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If you can just decode the signs, if I can just crack the code, then I will know how to prepare and then

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I won't be left unawares. But that preparation isn't about holiness and certainly not walking by faith.

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It's about psychological safety. It's not about faithful living. It's about avoiding surprise because surprise scares us.

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And, you know, that's living in that kind of fear is not piety. It's self -protection.

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It's dressed up in religious garbs, but it's still self -protection. That's what it is. That's why people who get duped by false date setters don't stop.

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They double down. That's why after 88 reasons why the rapture will be in 1988, which is a book that actually came out, this is why when that book failed, people were still lining up to buy 89 reasons why the rapture happened in 1989.

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After Harold Camping's 1994 prediction failed, he circled back in 2011 and again, people sold their homes, people drained their retirement accounts, and they waited on rooftops for a

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Christ who never came. Why? Because he already came. Because the timeline feels safe.

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Because the calendar becomes a coping mechanism. People trust it over what the scriptures actually teach.

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But Jesus destroys this idol in a single sentence. Not the angels, not the apostles, and certainly not even your favorite

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YouTuber know the time or the hour. This is why Jesus said, Lord, is it when he said to his disciples, is it at this time that you are restoring the kingdom to Israel?

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And Jesus answered and said, it's not for you to know the times or the epics, Acts 1 -7.

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In other words, stop asking and start working. But false systems thrive on false certainty.

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They offer you a fake eschatological GPS that makes people feel in the know instead of in their faith.

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It makes them cling to charts instead of worship. It makes them refresh their newsfeeds, looking for the next clue so that they can, you know, power up the bunker.

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It's all about grasping for control when our faith actually demands that we trust.

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The tragedy is that the one thing that the futurists fear most, which is missing the second coming, is an inevitable reality because it's already happened.

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They really have missed the second coming because they've been watching the stars instead of the book.

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Because they've been watching for the wrong thing. They've missed the right thing. They wanted a calendar, but Jesus gave them a cross.

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And he gave him a scripture. That's reason number three. Reason number four, spiritual immaturity.

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If fear drives some and control drives others, then immaturity is the engine underneath all of this.

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False end time predictions don't just appeal to the anxious and to the overmedicated. They appeal to the spiritually underdeveloped.

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Let me be blunt for a second. Many Christians today want entertainment instead of edification.

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They don't want theology. They want thrills. They want dragons and earthquakes, not doctrine and creeds.

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They're more familiar with fictional novels about the end times than they are with the Nicene Creed or the

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Westminster Confession. And when given the choice between the wild -eyed prophet on YouTube and the seasoned elder with a

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Bible in his hand, faithfully serving them in the local church, well, they often choose the former. They chase the one who stirs the blood, not the one who guards the soul.

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It's not the church. It's not that the church is too dumb to understand good eschatology. Far too many people are just, frankly, infants, babies in Christ.

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We have a literacy problem in the church. If you don't believe me, go to Ligonier and type in the state of theology.

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Every year, I think it is, they put out this state of theology. There are people who call themselves evangelical

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Christians who believe that Jesus is a created being. We have people who don't know the elemental doctrines, the elementary doctrines of the faith, because we've fed them for a generation eschatological and theological

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Kool -Aid. Instead of having them chew upon the meat of covenant theology, upon the meat of doctrine,

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Hebrews 5 hits this point hard. This is what it says. Though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God.

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The people weren't stupid. They were just stunted. They preferred milk instead of meat.

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And the same is true for people today. Because for 50 to 100 years, we've given them theological fluff because we said, well, you know, people just can't handle deep truth.

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So we've given them that. We've told them that. And now we have an entire generation of eschatologicals who have not been discipled.

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And because of that, we have a generation of immature Christians who obsess over signs in the skies instead of what the scriptures say.

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They scan the headlines like they're horoscopes. They're tossed around by every wind of doctrine and wave that comes and hits them, especially if it comes to some kind of eschatological end times countdown.

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And when somebody finally tells them that revelation is about Jesus, becoming king, not about jets or beast or biochips, they roll their eyes and then they ask you, have you heard about what's going on with Israel?

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Have you heard that the priests are now, they have the red heifer and they're getting ready to slaughter the red heifer.

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Have you not heard? And you're like, no, brother, because I already have heard.

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I heard from the scripture, not from the headline. The spiritual immaturity that is rampant in the church today needs to be fixed by discipleship because spiritual maturity doesn't actually flinch at global crises or chaos.

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It doesn't chase after novelty. It opens up the scriptures and it plants its feet and it builds.

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It's time for the church to grow up. Ephesians 4, 14 calls the church to no longer be tossed here and there by waves and carried away by every wind of doctrine.

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That's not a suggestion. It's a command. The church has to graduate from speculative hysteria and return to biblical sobriety.

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The end times are not supposed to make us manic. They're supposed to make us mature so that we will be mature and complete and lacking in nothing.

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The church will never escape false predictions if we don't outgrow them.

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And that's reason number four. Reason number five, cultural despair. One of the most seductive reasons for false second coming predictions is that people confuse the decline of their culture with the end of the world.

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This is especially true in the West. Most evangelicals see drag queen story hours and debt ceilings continuing to rise and the declining church in America and in our attendance and assume that the end times countdown has already begun.

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Every Supreme Court ruling feels like the opening of one of the seven seals. Every war in Israel becomes a new end times bulletin post and every whisper of a global chaos or catastrophe is treated like a trumpet blast, maybe even number six.

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But here's the problem. They're interpreting current events using first century prophecies that were already fulfilled in the first century.

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When Jesus said, you will hear of wars and rumors of wars, Matthew 24, six, he wasn't giving a timeless warning about war in general.

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He was giving a specific contextual sign to a particular generation. The people living at that time were living under the

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Pax Romana, which was a time of unprecedented Roman peace. There was no war during the

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Pax Romana. And it was a hundred years of peace. And yet Jesus prophesied that that peace was going to end and it was going to end within 40 years.

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And it did. Wars and civil unrest began breaking out like the

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Jewish revolts in the 60s AD or like the Roman civil wars in the 60s as well. And it was an unmistakable alarm bell.

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The peace of Rome is over. Wars and rumors of wars are coming. They would have seen this as a sign for their time, not our time.

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It would have meant the end of their world, not our world. It would have been the end of the old covenant world.

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We see this same pattern in prophecies like Isaiah 9 or Zechariah 9, where in both the rise of the

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Messiah's kingdom is going to be marked by a temporary increase in war as the old world order crumbles, but it's going to be followed by the decrease of war, the increase of peace.

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And what we see is that the final state of the earth is peace. In other words, wars increase as the kingdom breaks in, but they don't signal the end of the world.

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They signal only the beginning of a new covenant world. And over time, Christ's kingdom is going to dismantle and defeat war itself.

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That's why it says, for unto us a child is born and unto us a son is given and the government shall be upon his shoulders.

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And of the increase of his peace, there will be no end. Because of this baby boy who began a new world, a new covenant world, eventually peace will become so pronounced that there is no more war.

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That's why obsessing over today's global tensions is such a waste of time.

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And it's in fact, covenantal amnesia. Christians forget that the wars

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Jesus predicted already happened and they're a sign of the in -breaking of the kingdom of God.

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They forget that the signs he gave were already fulfilled in a single generation. I tell you the truth, all these things are going to happen in a single generation,

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Matthew 24, 34. They've already happened just as he promised. And they, like us, forget that the ultimate direction of Jesus's kingdom is not chaos.

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It's not going to end in calamity. It's conquest. It's not despair. It's dominion.

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That's what his kingdom is about. So when futurists see cultural collapse, they assume that Christ is coming to rescue us out of it.

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But the real true way to view these passages is that actually Christ is coming not to rescue us, but to receive a faithful church who's finished the mission of God.

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He's not coming home, coming back to rescue us from the mission.

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He's going to leave us here to do the mission because he's not going to retreat.

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He's reigning. And his kingdom is not going to end in a mushroom cloud. It's going to end in the shalom of God being spread out to the ends of the earth.

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It's going to end as the nations beat their swords into plowshares and the knowledge of the glory of the Lord covers the earth as the water covers the sea.

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That's the direction that the world is heading in. Not chaos, calamity, and doom.

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That's reason number five. Reason number six, ecclesiological cowardice.

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Not every false prediction is a con. It's important to say that some are just cop -outs.

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False eschatology doesn't always come from charlatans and hucksters and grifters.

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It often comes from pulpits of well -meaning, sincere pastors. And while some of these predictions are built on well -meaning service to God, they're quite literally built upon delusions.

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And many of them are born out of a kind of cowardice that maybe is imperceivable to the man who's peddling it.

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An entire generation of Christians have unwittingly used the second coming of Christ as an excuse to abandon the mission of Christ.

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Listen to that again. An entire generation of Christians have unwittingly used the second coming of Christ as an excuse to abandon the mission of Christ.

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Instead of advancing his kingdom, they're just counting down and waiting to be zapped out of here.

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As my daughter put it, the theological vacuum out of here, gone.

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It isn't just doctrinal drift at that point. It's unwitting, but it's strategic failure.

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It's a mutiny of sorts. It's a retreat from responsibility that's disguised as a kind of piety and faithfulness.

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And the result of that is that the church that claims Jesus is king lives like he's in exile.

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A church that talks about glory, and yet they act like survival is the goal.

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That we're the imposters in the world. That it's the secularists who own the world. That it's Satan who owns the world.

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That it's his demons that own the world, not us. We're just the redheaded stepchild that gets sent into the corner to live out her days.

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And as long as we're quiet, we won't get smacked in the face. That's what we act like. If we just hide away in our churches, that the world won't notice us and they won't persecute us.

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That's poppycock. Christ did not give his bride rapture orders.

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He gave her marching orders. The great commission doesn't say, now hunker down until I return.

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It says go. Make disciples of all the nations and teach those nations how to obey.

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Matthew 28, 19 through 20. This is not the language of a dying era.

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This is not, hey, go hide in your corner. It's a manifesto of soldiers who serve a victorious king.

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From the very beginning, the mandate was clear. Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it. Genesis 1, 28.

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That's the purpose for which humanity was created. And the only reason that purpose was postponed is because we needed a true and better Adam to grab it and take it and rule it.

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And because of that, Christ is the one who will be fruitful. He is the one who will multiply.

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And he is the one who will fill the earth with his people. And he will rule over it.

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And he will subdue it. Psalm 110 declares that Christ already, right now, for 2000 years, reigns.

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And he's going to continue to reign. And so every one of his enemies is underneath his feet. I mean, that's second

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Adam language. He's the one who's going to rule the world and subdue it. He's the one who's going to be fruitful and multiply. That's what it says in Psalm 110.

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Isaiah 9, 7 proclaims that of the increase of his government, there will no end. And yet, and yet, futurism tells the church, don't engage because the evacuation is imminent.

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Don't disciple people. Who has time for that? Evangelize, evangelize, evangelize, evangelize. And how do you evangelize if you're not going to disciple them?

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Well, you dress the bride of Christ up like a whore. You give light shows and rock concerts in order to attract the carnal mind of the pagan.

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So you woo them with carnality. And then you don't actually ever switch the lid to discipleship because we don't have time for that.

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We just have to evangelize, evangelize, evangelize. And we evangelize by making the church carnal. And guess what's been done with that?

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That hasn't worked. It's made the church actually carnal. Who would have thought?

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You act carnal, you peddle carnality, and you become carnal. Who would have thought? This mentality silences faithful pastoral shepherding.

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It pacifies fathers into just kind of raising the next generation of carnal creatures.

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It anesthetizes an entire congregation that thinks that faithfulness means hiding in the hills while waiting for their helicopter ride out of here.

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This isn't harmless. It's confusion. It's insubordination to what

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Jesus actually said. And it's a refusal to believe who Jesus actually is. Worst of all, it feels spiritual.

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I'll say it like this. If hell could come up with a brilliant plan that would make

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Christians think that a particular view is spiritual while actually making them impotent, this would be the one.

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Because it wraps cowardice in the robes of piety and it says this is what it means to be

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Christian. Why would you start Christian schools if Jesus is returning? What a waste of money.

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Just evangelize them with rock concerts and everything else and watered down messages. Why would you reform unjust laws and try to build a glorious God -honoring civilization?

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Why would you rebuild broken cities if the rapture is going to happen tomorrow? What a waste of time. You see how this works?

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And yet obedience is never optional. Just because hardships are coming close.

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I mean, think about the parable of the talents. It's the one who buried his talent because of hardships.

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That's the one who's beaten and his coin is taken away from him. The product of futurism is that.

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They're the one who buried their talents in the sand waiting for the master to return because he's a hard man.

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And when he returns, they get the beating. It's the ones who are working, who are laboring, who are exercising their gifts for the glory of God.

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Those are the ones who are going to be rewarded. The post -millennial vision is the only one that restores what cowardice has surrendered.

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It insists rightly that Christ is reigning now and that means something to my life and what

01:00:41

I do with my life. And that our work actually isn't wasted because it participates in Jesus's conquest.

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False predictions endure because they excuse disobedience as piety. But the

01:00:54

King of kings and the Lord of lords has already been crowned. He does have a good plan for your life and it's for you to participate in the good deeds that he predestined for you to participate in before the foundations of the world.

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And one of those good deeds is not hiding like an ostrich or sticking your head in your shell like a tortoise.

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He commanded us to participate with him in his dominion. So we must therefore conquer.

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That's reason number six. Reason seven, historical amnesia.

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False predictions persist not because the church is uninformed but because she refuses to remember.

01:01:35

The problem isn't lack of access to the truth either. It's a willful disregard for finding the truth and discovering the past.

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It is an amnesia that infects the minds and blinds the eyes to the long humiliating history of failed predictions.

01:01:54

And until that memory is restored, the pattern is going to continue with a new claim, a new date, a new round of delusions.

01:02:02

And then once again, silence, regrouping, rebranding, and then making the new claim.

01:02:09

Not retraction, not repentance, just forgetfulness dressed in a kind of fresh urgency.

01:02:15

And this is terrible because if you actually study church history, there are thousands of failed predictions, thousands of them all over the last 2000 years that would maybe make someone question, hey, have we got revelation wrong?

01:02:36

I mean, my theory is that it happened in the first century and I have so much evidence to prove it.

01:02:43

The futurist theory is that it's going to happen at some point in the future. And their evidence is over a thousand failed predictions.

01:02:51

Like at some point, when do you stop? These failed predictions span centuries, all of it.

01:02:58

The cycle is the same. You have a bold prediction, a gullible audience, a failed result, and then a clean escape.

01:03:06

The real scandal is that not just that these predictions are made, it's that we don't ever hold these people accountable.

01:03:16

Prophets who get it wrong should be marked as false prophets. And the fact that they are given second chances and even bigger platforms after it, and more book deals is ridiculous.

01:03:29

Churches that once preached, Christ is going to return in our lifetime should not exist. They should be shut down.

01:03:37

Because the word of God is not vague on this point. Deuteronomy 18 .22

01:03:43

tells us, when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the

01:03:54

Lord has not spoken. And then it goes on to say that you kill that one. The biblical response is not to rebrand the heretic.

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It's to reject them. It's to execute them. The church's failure to remember these things is not just a minor oversight.

01:04:11

It's a direct violation of prophetic mandate. The New Covenant community is supposed to be the anchor and an authority of truth on earth.

01:04:20

We're supposed to be shaped by remembrance. We're supposed to be guarded by discernment, not this willy -nilly lackadaisical approach to prophecy.

01:04:29

When we forget the past, we're destined to repeat it. And when we hand the microphone to one charlatan after another, just so that they can scratch the itching ears of evangelicalism, we're wrong.

01:04:44

Now, we're going to spend an entire episode on this topic alone next week, and I'm going to go through 2 ,000 years of the dumpster.

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I'm going to go through 2 ,000 years of the landfill of false predictions, and we're going to look through the wreckage.

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And what we're going to find is that none of them are true. If they were a baseball player, they'd be

01:05:04

O for a thousand. And baseball players who are O for a thousand don't get contracts.

01:05:10

They don't get platforms. They don't get to swing the bat in the major leagues because they're terrible.

01:05:19

I mean, three out of 10 would have even been great. But zero out of a thousand? Come on.

01:05:26

But for now this week, I just want you to see it. That the cycle has repeated itself over and over and over again throughout church history.

01:05:33

That cycle was sustained by people forgetting. And then false predictions endure because the church has a memory problem.

01:05:42

And until she regains her historical spine and gets a little covenantal discernment, she's going to keep running in circles, crying wolf, crying out that the sky is falling, and continuing to lose credibility and missing the real reason that we are here, which is the mission of God.

01:06:00

That's reason number seven. Reason eight, monetary and platform incentives.

01:06:06

False predictions don't just survive, they sell. And in today's evangelical industrial complex, nothing sells faster than fear dressed up as prophecy.

01:06:18

Books fly off the shelf. Conferences fill stadiums. YouTube channels explode overnight because of this very thing.

01:06:25

And while the faithful are preparing their families for what they believe is the final trumpet, someone else is cashing in on the eschatological cow.

01:06:34

Their royalties are building up their brand and they're planning the next release. Prophetic speculation has become a business model.

01:06:42

And thankfully, thankfully to the Lord, this is dying. This was at its heyday in the early 2000s.

01:06:48

But thankfully, this is declining quite a bit. But the market generally rewards exaggeration.

01:06:56

Fag forecast generate intrigue. Headlines like 10 signs that the Antichrist is alive today are what sells.

01:07:04

Or why this war could be the final Armageddon. All that's pure gold if you're trying to build a platform, if you're trying to build an audience, if you're trying to go viral.

01:07:14

And the algorithm rewards that kind of stupidity. And you don't need integrity. All you just need is a mic and volume.

01:07:20

False prophecy becomes a genre and fear becomes a subscription service.

01:07:25

But it's not just about money. It's about the platform. It's about false predictions offering people the chance to play profit without the cost of accuracy.

01:07:34

They provide instant relevance in a culture addicted to doom and gloom. And as long as you speak with confidence and a few verses slightly out of context and you flash them enough charts, well, somebody's going to listen to it.

01:07:46

And once the prediction fails, well, you just say you miscalculated a little.

01:07:52

You rebrand. You say no one's perfect. You say no one knows the time or the hour. We're trying again.

01:07:57

We're releasing a new video. It would be laughable if it weren't so stupid and blasphemous.

01:08:07

It's taking the prophetic office and turning it into a manipulative force. One mistake and you should be done.

01:08:14

But in today's evangelical subculture, one mistake makes you just relatable. Makes people say, well, you know, they're human.

01:08:23

Well, if they're claiming to speak for the Lord and they speak falsely, well, they should be executed. That's what the

01:08:28

Bible says. I believe the Bible. I don't care if people think I'm crazy. Bible says you execute a false prophet.

01:08:35

That's what we should be doing. Well, I guarantee you, we'd have a whole lot more integrity and a whole lot less false prophecy if we actually followed the

01:08:44

Bible in that way. But we don't. We're weak -kneed and soft.

01:08:51

Because our current moment doesn't punish error. It platforms them. Crowdfunds them.

01:08:57

It outsources them. It builds them up. But I want to be clear. Christ didn't shed his blood so that you and I could build an email less than a platform.

01:09:06

He didn't rise from the dead so that we could market ourselves as some kind of brand.

01:09:12

He didn't give us permission to do that. He certainly didn't give us the book of Revelation so that we could peddle panic to his people, so that we could keep his people, his bride, constantly confused and frustrated and shaking in her boots.

01:09:28

If eschatology builds your brand and not his kingdom, it's wrong. And it's wicked.

01:09:35

False predictions endure because there's a market for them. And as long as the church keeps rewarding the merchants of mayhem, they're going to keep doing it.

01:09:43

Market's going to continue to remain open for it. But the word of God is never for sale.

01:09:50

That's what we said in the introduction to this video. It's never for sale. And the second coming is not a product that we need to peddle.

01:09:56

It is about the throne of Jesus Christ and him ruling over the world. And that is a message that we give to the church to encourage them not to get them to fork over views and to forfeit the mission.

01:10:09

That's evidence number eight. Reason number nine, demonic distraction.

01:10:16

If the enemy cannot make the church evil, he will try to make her ill effective.

01:10:22

The demonic goal has always been the same. Redirect, deceive, and distract.

01:10:29

And few distractions have been more potent than the false end time speculations of futurism.

01:10:36

The church was meant to be a sword wielding, gospel proclaiming, kingdom advancing army.

01:10:43

He is the king over all the kings of the earth, and he has made us into a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Who could stop us, right?

01:10:51

Well, false prophecy has convinced so many in the church to trade in her armor for telescopes to instead of building the kingdom to start scanning the skies instead of waging war against real evil.

01:11:09

Well, instead, we spend our time unraveling the latest conspiracy threads on subreddits and waiting for global collapse that's never actually going to come.

01:11:19

And that's not a neutral error. It's a strategic demonic distraction upon the church.

01:11:25

That's why I've said over and over and over again that dispensationalism was not invented by Darby, but demons because it distracts the church.

01:11:33

It's a spiritual misdirection plan orchestrated by the principalities and the powers that still linger in rebellion against Christ's rule.

01:11:42

Yet Christ disarmed them, but it doesn't mean that their whispers don't actually influence movements and churches and theological systems.

01:11:50

Their playbook is simple. If the truth cannot be denied, then they'll distort it.

01:11:56

If the church can't be silenced, then we'll sideline her. And that kind of view is working.

01:12:04

Instead of destroying strongholds, many Christians spend a lot of their time speculating about when the end of the world is going to happen.

01:12:11

Instead of taking thought or taking every thought captive by the word of Christ, they allow their imaginations to run wild with the beast and theories of red heifers and blood moons and Antichrist and everything else.

01:12:24

Instead of standing firm in this evil day that we live in, they're fleeing from the battle that Christ has already won, and they're burying their heads in the sand, as we said before, like ostriches.

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Paul didn't tell us to do this. Jesus didn't tell us to do this. Paul, in particular, called us to engage.

01:12:41

He says this, the weapons of our warfare are not the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.

01:12:51

2 Corinthians 10, 4. He says in Ephesians, put on the full armor of God, resist in the evil day,

01:12:57

Ephesians 6, 11 through 13. Our mission is not just to survive until Jesus rescues us.

01:13:03

It's to stand. It's to fight. It's to demolish the lies and to disciple the nations and to pull them, as Jude says, out of the fire and into the church.

01:13:15

The demonic strategy is to keep Jesus' bride ever distracted while the real battle goes unwaged.

01:13:26

And if eschatology becomes a tool for that distraction, well, so be it. If it fills people's heads with fantasies instead of truth, so be it.

01:13:35

And then it's not just misinformed, it's dangerous. The obsession with false futures and false second comings has made the church blind to our present responsibility.

01:13:49

And while demons don't need to destroy the church, they can't because they can't beat her. Jesus is going to build a church.

01:13:54

The gates of hell can't stand against it. So the demons cannot actually win. But while they know that, they'll gladly watch her sit down and believe a bunch of lies that make her impotent and illegitimate.

01:14:08

False predictions endure because they divert the army of God away from the front lines and into the prophetic fog.

01:14:18

These things are authored by demons, and we have willingly forfeited our authority and believed those lies.

01:14:27

And it's time to put away the smoke and mirrors and to take back up the sword of truth.

01:14:33

That's reason number nine. Reason number 10 is the lack of confidence in Christ's present reign.

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At the root of every false prediction, beneath the speculation, beneath the fear, beneath the failed timelines, lies a deeper sin, which is the sin of unbelief.

01:14:53

Not in the second coming, but in the first enthronement. The church doesn't keep getting the future wrong because she misunderstands revelation.

01:15:02

She keeps getting the future wrong because she doesn't really believe the present.

01:15:08

She doesn't believe that Christ is reigning now, that he's on his throne now.

01:15:15

Futurism insists that Jesus is off stage. He's waiting for his cue.

01:15:21

He's seated in heaven, but not yet on his throne. It teaches that his kingdom hasn't yet started, that his victory has been postponed, and that the world must spiral into chaos before he can earn the opportunity to reign.

01:15:40

And yet scripture teaches us precisely the opposite of that. Jesus has already been crowned with many crowns.

01:15:48

He's already seated on his throne. His kingdom has already come. His kingdom is already advancing.

01:15:54

And for 2000 years, it has been advancing. Why do we think that Jesus, the king of all kings, is going to preside over a catastrophe?

01:16:06

Why do we believe that like Adam, he's going to let the world fail? That's a good question. Why do we think that the world must get worse and must actually end up totally abandoning

01:16:19

God under the reign of Jesus? Because if we believe that, then we believe he's no better than Adam.

01:16:24

Adam let the world slip away, and so did Jesus. And if you believe that, I don't believe that.

01:16:30

I believe that he must reign until all of his enemies are put under his feet. I believe that he must reign until the glory of God covers the world as the water covers the sea.

01:16:37

I believe that he must reign until his kingdom, like leaven, has leavened the entire lump, like the little stone that fills the world and becomes a mighty mountain.

01:16:45

I believe that all the nations are going to bow down and worship him as the true Shiloh, Genesis 49 .10.

01:16:51

I believe that his government is going to increase until it knows no end. Isaiah 9 .6. I believe that he is going to turn the weapons of war into plowshares.

01:16:59

Zechariah 9 .9. I believe that because the Bible says that. I don't look at my surroundings and say, gosh, the world looks like it's getting bad.

01:17:07

Gosh, America looks like it's going downhill. Gosh, the glory days are over. Maybe that means the end. No, I don't look at it like that.

01:17:14

I look at what the Bible says and let the Bible tell me what I'm supposed to believe, not what my surroundings tell me

01:17:20

I'm supposed to believe. Psalm 110 .1 doesn't describe a future moment where Jesus becomes king.

01:17:31

It describes it as happening right now. Jesus has said in Psalm 110, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.

01:17:40

That's already happening now. The New Testament tells us that Psalm 110 .1

01:17:46

is happening now. For instance, 1 Corinthians 15 .25, when it says that he must reign until he's put all of his enemies under his feet, it's quoting

01:17:53

David. It's quoting Psalm 110. That means that this verse is applied to Jesus now.

01:18:01

It's not saying that he's going to reign after that or that he's going to reign later than that. It's saying that he's going to reign now and until then.

01:18:09

That's why Isaiah 9 .7 says of the increase of his government and of his peace, there will be no end because the

01:18:16

Bible doesn't treat Jesus's kingdom as a roadmap to escapism. It talks about it as starting small and expanding.

01:18:27

It doesn't talk about it like we have to all hide together in a bomb shelter. It talks about a throne room that is bursting out into the world and it's going to capture every square inch of creation.

01:18:40

Again, futurism blinds people to that glory. It convinces them that we're losing when we're actually advancing.

01:18:47

It convinces them and it convinces faithful pastors to say we lose down here.

01:18:53

No, we don't. This view trains Christians to retreat when we should be rebuilding and advancing.

01:19:02

It persuades them to long for Christ losing instead of Christ's victory.

01:19:10

And the result of that is a church with her eyes on the clouds and her heart in a meat grinder instead of her being soldiers and advancing and building and bringing the glory of God to the earth.

01:19:24

Post -millennialism is the only view that speaks about these things with clarity. A clarity that cowardice has far too often clouded.

01:19:34

Christ is not absent. He's active. He's reigning now through his word, through his spirit and through his church.

01:19:41

The gospel is going out. The kingdom is growing. The mountain of the Lord is rising.

01:19:47

And the final enemy death will be defeated after all other enemies have been subdued.

01:19:52

We are not watching the collapse of Christendom. We are watching the birth pangs of dominion.

01:19:59

And because of that, false predictions need to die. They need to die a thousand deaths.

01:20:06

They need to be tied around a millstone and thrown in the middle of the sea. And the only reason they endure is because the church has lost sight of how powerful her true and better Adam David -like

01:20:18

King is. But once you see him, once you see who he truly is, once you see him enthroned and you see him as victorious and you see him as reigning, when you see that, everything must change because you can't hold on to a view of Christ as infinite, glorious King and a world that plunges into defeat.

01:20:37

You can't hold both. You have to choose. And if you have to choose one or the other, are you going to choose an impotent, weak

01:20:43

Christ who loses the world? Are you going to choose a victorious and kingly Christ who wins the world?

01:20:48

One of those views gives glory to Jesus. One of those views does not. We have to examine what we believe.

01:20:59

And I hope today as we've examined why false prophecies exist, that will actually give people the courage not to believe them anymore and not to fall for their excuses anymore so that we can move forward into a better way.

01:21:17

Now, next week, we're going to look at examples throughout church history. We're going to look at examples of how this has failed.

01:21:24

We're going to look at the church, some of her most embarrassing moments that led to great acts of ruin.

01:21:33

We're going to look at failed predictions in the first thousand years, the next 500 years. And then we're going to look at every century after that, the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st century.

01:21:43

We're going to look at all kinds of failed predictions and we're going to see just how bad they are. And I hope that by doing this, we will show once and for all that this system does not work.

01:21:52

But in the meantime, we've provided 10 reasons why failed predictions still exist.

01:22:00

And I pray that if you're watching this and you've believed that the second coming is still future, that the world is going to collapse and ruin.

01:22:09

If you've believed that lie, I pray that the 10 reasons that we just shared will show you that that's not true, that Christ really is

01:22:16

King, that Christ really does reign. And with that, I want us to go to our conclusion.

01:22:27

So what have we seen today? Well, we've surveyed the wreckage. The wreckage of false assumptions and fear -filled fantasies.

01:22:35

We've exposed the theological termites of futurism, the emotionalism, the cowardice and the control that have hollowed out modern evangelicalism and left her with a noodle like spine.

01:22:48

We've shown that Revelation 1, 7 through 8 doesn't describe the distant, delayed, dramatic descent from the sky, but it actually describes the present tense judgment that thundered in the first century against the

01:23:02

Jews and has been thundering ever since in the advance of Jesus's kingdom through his royal bride, the church.

01:23:08

The text says, these things which must soon take place and they did. Jesus did come on the clouds.

01:23:15

He was seen by those who pierced him. All the tribes of the land did mourn. And that grand symbol of the old covenant world did collapse, did fall, did crumble in judgment because Christ came.

01:23:28

Not as a distant deliverer, but as a reigning king who dismantled the obsolete system of types and shadows and brought about the new covenant world.

01:23:38

That's not conjecture. That's redemptive history. That's scripture. That's fulfilled prophecy.

01:23:44

That's just what it is. And that reality leaves no more room for the speculative, stupid timelines and pop prophecy panic chicanery.

01:23:56

It rebukes the rapture rocket mentality and it exposes the suitcase theology and it silences the sky staring bunker dwelling, headline scanning delusions of all the escapist that forgot to actually be involved in the mission of God.

01:24:12

We're not waiting to be whisked away. We are called to win. So we need to stop living like orphans that are living on borrowed time and we need to start waiting.

01:24:25

We need to stop waiting for the king to show up and instead embrace the fact that he's already enthroned.

01:24:32

You're not trapped in enemy territory. You're standing on conquered ground.

01:24:37

Jesus owns the world. He owns every square inch of it. He owns Washington. He owns Moscow. He owns

01:24:43

Tehran. He owns North Korea. He purchased it with his blood. He crushed the enemies under his feet.

01:24:49

He's crushing the enemies under his feet and he's raised the old covenant world to the ground and he's raised up the new covenant world that is continuing to echo his dominion.

01:25:00

So what? What now? What are we supposed to do? We're supposed to build. We're supposed to work.

01:25:05

We're supposed to labor. We're supposed to get married. We're supposed to have children. We're supposed to raise up those children in the fear and admonition of the

01:25:12

Lord. We're supposed to take those children and equip them for marriage so that they can do the same thing. We're supposed to be fruitful and multiply and share the gospel and plant churches and build

01:25:21

Christian schools and academies. We're supposed to take our faith into our work and bring the dominion of Christ there.

01:25:28

We're supposed to do what Pete Hexeth did yesterday or two days ago when you're watching this and we're supposed to have prayer services in the

01:25:36

Pentagon. We're supposed to bring all of Christ into all of life so that the entire world will come under his dominion.

01:25:43

We have a command for dominion, not for desecration. So brothers and sisters, look at your life and look at where Christ is not, his dominion has not yet come.

01:25:55

Look at the inner parts of your life in your heart and your soul and say, where is Christ not reigning right now?

01:26:02

And then bring his reign there. Pray that God would bring his reign there. Repent of where you fall short and surrender in areas that belong to your king and start with you.

01:26:13

And then once you have mastery over that, which is going to take a lifetime, but once you are starting to move and work in that, then men, lead your families, lead your wife.

01:26:24

And once you've led your wife, lead your families. And once you're leading your families, then become an officer in the church, an elder or a deacon, or become a leader in your job and bring

01:26:32

Christ there. But don't do nothing. Do something. In the movie,

01:26:41

Alice in Wonderland, the rabbit says, don't just do something, stand there.

01:26:47

Obviously what he meant was, is don't just stand there, do something. I would say the same to all of us.

01:26:54

Do not stand where God has placed you doing nothing. Do something. Find ways that you can labor to see

01:27:01

Christ's kingdom reign. And in your life, advance the ball forward. Even if it's just an inch.

01:27:08

Sometimes an inch is enough to cross over into a touchdown. So do something.

01:27:15

Set your life apart for Christ and do something and do it to the glory of Christ. And then at the end of our life, when we hand it off to the next generation, we hand it off to them better than we found it.

01:27:27

And we hope and pray that they take it now further than we could ever take it. That's what it means to be in Jesus's kingdom.

01:27:35

We're not losers. We're kingdom advancers. So go and do that this week and in every week.