END TIMES & Postmillennialism Ft. Kendall Lankford (PART 1)

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My name is Belushi Prevalon, coming to you from the Boston area. And right now, you are listening to Truology, the study of the truth as it is in Jesus. Welcome back to Truology. Today I'm joined by Pastor Kendall Linkford, host of the podcast for a conversation that I think many Christians desperately need to hear right now.

Because, you see, when people think of the end times, they usually picture doomsday predictions, fear of the world's collapse, and, of course, the rapture coming around any corner. But what if Jesus' words in Matthew 24 weren't about our future but instead about their past?

What if much of what we've been really told to fear has really already been fulfilled? Well, in this episode, we're going to talk through Matthew 24, the Olivet Discourse, examine it in light of history, Old Testament, and, of course, Jesus' own words.

We'll talk about the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the difference between partial preterism and other views, and why this really matters for the Christian life today. And most importantly, we'll be connecting all of this to the postmillennial hope, the idea that Christ's kingdom is advancing now and in history and will not ever retreat.

I'm really excited to get into this conversation because it's really not about—well, it's not just about theology. It's about recovering the confidence in Christ's promises and learning to see the future through the lens of victory rather than defeat.

So with that being said, I really want to invite my guest here, Pastor Kendall Lankford. And as he comes on, Pastor, if you could just introduce yourself to the audience, tell us a little bit about your ministry and the broadcast and, of course, your interest in postmillennial eschatology.

Well, hey, Belushi, and thanks for having me on. My name is Kendall. I came to New England. So I live in Massachusetts. I came to New England in 2013 and just desire to go to seminary. I had some folks in my life who were thinking that that was a good idea.

And little by little, the Lord has kept me in this region. I'm originally from North Carolina. That's where I married my wife. And we had two children that we brought up here. Now we have a total of six children that we have.

And, yeah, the Lord's been gracious to us. We thought we were not going to stay. The Lord kept us in New England, so we're here. We love it. And we want to see Jesus' kingdom grow in this really pivotal part of the country, a part of the country where Whitefield and Edwards and other people have preached this powerful sermon.

So we're here. We want to see God's kingdom advance. And that's a little bit about me. Married to my best friend, have six children, love the Lord of the Rings. That's a side hobby. And, yeah, over the years, I grew up.

I guess I grew up, like many people, dispensational. I didn't even really know what that meant. And little by little, the Lord just brought me to a more optimistic view of the future and what He's going to do in His kingdom.

So that's a little bit about me.

Yes, Pastor. And can you tell us a little more about the podcast as well? Why did you start that and what you're working on now?

The Podcast’s Aim to Cut Through Mush-Mouthed Christianity

Yeah.

I started the podcast because I felt so tired of just mush-mouthed Christianity. I had grown up as a new believer in Elevation Church and then in many other churches kind of like that where the pastors were just so afraid to say the truth.

And I really just felt like people wanted to hear the truth, but there weren't any pastors who were really saying stuff. So I was just like, I want a no-nonsense Christian podcast that's a little salty, that tackles tough issues.

And I've always really felt very like eschatology has been near and dear to my heart. So the podcast is not exclusively about eschatology, but I find my way there a lot. Most of the episodes are about that.

And, yeah, it's supposed to be to cut through some of the fluff and just get right to the issues. So that's why I started the podcast.

Awesome.

And it is an amazing podcast.

Indeed.

What's your favorite line? You prod the sheep, beat the wolves.

Yeah.

I love that. That intro music gets me fired up every single time. If I'm going to the gym, that's what I'll listen to to get started.

Me too. I still love that intro song.

Yeah.

Really appreciate you sharing that with us. So like I said in that intro there, welcome to Truology. And, you know, we're going to be talking about Matthew 24 today. So I want to begin our discussion.

We're just kind of laying out the landscape of eschatology for my audience here. You see, before we can really dive into Matthew 24 and really understand it, we need to lay out that landscape. Christians don't always agree on the interpretation of that passage.

So if you could, Pastor, can you walk us through the main approaches to Matthew 24?

Premillennialism, Amillennialism, and Postmillennialism

Yeah.

In general, there are basically three different camps that people are familiar with, whether it's premillennial and then the dispensational view is sort of a subset of that. Amillennial and postmillennial.

Premillennial is just like the title says that it is. They believe that Jesus is going to come before the millennial reign, that he's going to come and he's going to set that up and there's going to be a thousand years of Christ reigning on earth.

The amillennial view believes that we're in the millennium right now. The postmillennial view is very similar. Jesus returns after the millennium. We're in the millennium now, but the difference between postmillennialism and amillennialism is that there's an optimism about postmillennialism, that Christ is going to have dominion.

He is going to succeed. He is going to bring the world under his dominion. Whereas in amillennialism, and this is painting with pretty broad strokes, it tends to be that the kingdom of God grows, the kingdom of man grows, and eventually the middle gets evaporated and you have a world that's polarized on those ends.

That's the sort of direction of church history on how these views work out. But because also, and this needs to be said as well, there's a hermeneutic involved in eschatology. How do you actually read eschatological passages?

We have to determine those views as well because it's not just your view on the millennium that really decides your eschatology. It's also your hermeneutic. Then there's four of those. One is called futurism.

When I come to an eschatological passage in the Bible, my a priori, my assumption that I'm bringing to the text is that it doesn't apply to the first century audience. It applies to me. It applies to the future.

It applies to at some undetermined point in the future. That's how a futurist is going to read the text, that this applies to the future at some point. Then on the opposite end of the spectrum of that is preterism.

Preterism has as a base level assumption that the Bible is applying to who the original author was speaking to, and that would be the original audience. We'll talk more about preterism in a moment. The other two hermeneutical views are historicism, which is mostly faded out of view.

Not many people are historicists today. It basically says that I'm going to read the Bible and the eschatological passages as being fulfilled sequentially throughout history. That's where we get the historicist view.

Then the final view is idealism, which is basically all the eschatological passages are talking about a spiritual war between good and evil, and good wins, evil loses. It's a spiritual interpretation.

Now, as you can imagine, not all passages fit into all of these camps. There's passages that I believe are still future. There's passages that I believe have a spiritual interpretation. But overall, and over the majority of the text of Scripture, I would be what's called a preterist.

I'm post-millennial, and I'm preterist, if that helps with those two sort of views.

Why Postmillennialism Lost Ground in Modern Evangelicalism

Yeah, that was excellent, actually. I appreciate that. I just want to ask you really quickly, why have people thought that post-millennialism has fallen by the wayside in terms of interpretation, especially post-World War II?

Why do you think people have come to that conclusion that we can no longer be optimistic about the future or that this is completely unbiblical, and it was for a time, but now we're more realistic in our approach to eschatology through the lens of premillennialism?

Yeah, I think our culture in general is probably the dominant culture when it comes to producing Christian content on earth, and probably in all of church history. And our culture is extremely pessimistic when it comes to Christians and Christians being in this country.

I think that when you get to World War II, the seeds of what was happening was already in play long before World War II. World War II is something that people like to hang post-millennialism's death on, which is greatly overstated, by the way.

But about 200 years ago in England, a man named John Nelson Darby began reading the text in a very different way, in a very unique and a very novel way that really hadn't been done in church history. We've always sort of had historic premills, but John Nelson Darby was reading the Bible differently.

And unfortunately, that viewpoint, which we can talk about all you want and go as deep as you want, but that viewpoint really took hold in America, and it really took hold in the kind of pessimism that gratifies our flesh.

The Bible tells us 365 times, fear not. And yet this view is all about the fear over the world getting continually worse. I just think that this view works so well because it really stokes the fires of our flesh so much to be afraid, to doubt, to constantly be on the lookout for some sort of escape so that I don't actually have to do the work that Jesus told me to do.

I just think it fits hand in glove in our flesh. It took hold here because of John Nelson Darby and the Schofield Bible, and it's sort of become the predominant view in our culture and in our time. But in church history, that's just not the case.

It's the minority view, and it's really the newcomer view to the eschatological landscape.

Thank you for that.

And when I was, I guess when my eyes were opening to the partial preterists and the postmillennial outlook of the Bible, one of the things that started dawning on me is that why are we building anything if all of it's just going to burn up?

Why do we have such a strong emphasis on Christian schools and Christian businesses and things like that when at the very end, we're just expecting Satan to dominate and conquer the world while we fade into the corners of obscurity?

I just couldn't reconcile those things, and it pushed me to just study a little more, look for hermeneutical principles that ought to be applied to the text consistently to be able to come to the conclusion that when Jesus speaks, he's speaking to the audience to which he is actually standing in front of, and it has great relevance to that audience rather than to us in pulling it out of context and coming to the wrong conclusions ultimately.

I want to ask you this next question. Why has, in your own words, I guess, what is the biggest weakness with the futurist approach to Matthew 24?

The Futurist Reading of Matthew 24 and the Problem of Misplaced Context

That's a huge question. I do want to say one thing back to what you were saying earlier. Hermeneutics in general is well understood. It's the science of interpretation, and people from all views understand hermeneutics really well until you get to eschatology.

When you get to the doctrine of salvation, when you're talking about the doctrine of man, anthropology, theology, the doctrine of God, all of these, I was taught this repeatedly in seminary. What does the original author have to say to the original audience?

And if your view cannot line up with what the original author is saying to the original audience, then your view is wrong. And yet, what's so frustrating is that we don't apply that same standard to eschatology, to the end of the Bible.

It's like in that moment, the text switches to being automatically about me, my world, my circumstances, and I'm going to read it like it's a code book that I need to decipher, like some sort of Mayan or Egyptian hieroglyphics in order for me to figure out how to interpret my world around me.

Everybody interprets the Bible, at least faithful people like MacArthur or Sproul or any of those guys. They're interpreting the Bible with good hermeneutics, but not everybody brings those good hermeneutics to their eschatology, which we see in Matthew 24 is catastrophic because Matthew 24 is exactly the epicenter of where the liberal, higher-critical scholars have attacked Christianity for years because if you can undermine the efficacy of Jesus' words, and you can say that, well, Jesus must have been a false prophet, well, then now He's not divine.

Now He can't be a Savior. So the ground zero of eschatology I don't even believe is Revelation. I think Revelation is a secondary text that's really trying to unpack what's going on in Matthew 24, but the liberal, higher-critical scholars have attacked Jesus there, and they've said Jesus expected the end of the world in 40 years.

It didn't come, therefore Jesus is a false prophet. What the premillennials and the futurists, those who read the text of these passages as being future, they're trying to rescue Jesus from the attack of the liberal, higher critics, and there's some virtue in that because they don't want to see Jesus be mocked as a false prophet.

So they say, no, no, no, no, Jesus didn't actually intend on the world coming to a cataclysmic end in 40 years. He meant all of this in the future. So what they're trying to do is they're trying to rescue Jesus from the attack, but in so doing, they actually have to make words mean what they don't actually mean so that they're really not rescuing Jesus.

They're actually indicting Him further as not saying what He really meant. It's so clear from Matthew 24 that Jesus intended that the destruction event that He's talking about in 40 years, it's so clear that's what Jesus meant, that the way they have to pretzel themselves to try to save Jesus from the higher critics makes so many more problems of the text when if we just look at it and we see what Jesus was trying to say to His disciples, it's the greatest fulfillment of prophecy in all of history.

It really is unbelievable, but you have to read the text rightly and you have to understand what Jesus was saying to His disciples.

Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more. And I think what you were hinting at also is that one of the weaknesses of this view is that it is not consistent and it applies the wrong context to the wrong people.

And it ultimately leads to practical mishaps and fears like the ones that we've talked about earlier, fearing that the world will end, therefore why build? And it just leads down the wrong road ultimately for Christians and our entire Christian perspective gets off track at the foundations before it can really take off and honor the Lord in the way it was meant to.

It's really sad because this simpleton approach to the Bible, especially in the circles that I grew up as a Christian in, it was the simpler things are the better, therefore you don't need to learn hermeneutics.

That's a long word. The soccer mom in the pew can't understand that. Exegesis, what's that? Eggs in Jesus? Were we talking about breakfast? Those words never dawned on me until way later in my Christian walk.

And I've only been saved for seven years, so maybe like two, three years at this point that I've actually come across these things and really gotten a grasp on them. But how about the people that are still in circles that I came out of that still don't know what hermeneutics is and still don't know that there's a method of interpreting the Bible called the grammatical historical method where we apply the text first to the original audience, try to understand what they would have understood, and then take from that the application we need for our lives today.

A lot of people don't know that, and it is tragic. Pastor, I'd like to ask you, did you want to say something?

Yeah, I'll just say it's so funny. If dispensationalism gets the reputation of being the simple view, when you dig into it, it's convoluted and complicated, and you need all of these different various charts and all of these passages put together in a blender in order to understand what the world is.

Honestly, it markets itself as the simple reading of the Scripture, but it makes it so complex that only the prophecy shaman and only the pastor who's the eschatology guru can understand it. What it's done is it's made so many people actually just avoid these passages because they're like, I'll never be able to understand those.

I grew up very blue-collar. I grew up in a double-wide trailer in North Carolina, and I'm the first guy in my family to ever graduate from high school. I want to make the Bible simple. I don't even care if we use the words hermeneutic and grammatical.

I like those terms, and I learned them in seminary, and I'm thankful for them. But if you just read this as a conversation, we know how conversations work. You don't need a high school diploma to understand how a conversation works.

Someone is talking to someone else, and they're not talking about, generally speaking, things that are happening 2 ,000 years removed from their conversation. That's exactly what's happening in Matthew 24.

Jesus is having a conversation with His disciples talking about their world, and none of us would ever read any other text of any other book in the way that dispensationals read Matthew 24. Like, for instance, if you and I decided to go on a vacation where we were going to explore some hidden caves in the Middle Eastern area, and we found some 2 ,000-year-old pottery shards where Jebediah said to Josephiah, you know, hey, we're having a lot of problems on our farm, and I think this is the end, you and I would not read those 2 ,000-year-old documents and say, I bet they're talking about the end times.

We would just not do that. We would say, huh, 2 ,000 years ago this farmer was having some bad times, and he thought his farm was going to close. We would immediately put ourselves back in their world and their conversation and apply the basic rules of interpretation to that moment.

The fact that we get to Matthew 24 and we automatically assume it's about us is a very strange and very convoluted way of reading that text.

Yeah, absolutely agree with that. So, Pastor, why don't you say we kind of jump into some of the contextual background of Matthew 24 and everything that leads up to it.

Sure thing.

Yeah, okay.

Matthew 21–23 as the Backdrop to the Olivet Discourse

So Matthew 24 really isn't some passage floating in midair. You know, when you open your Bible, it doesn't just fly out from the seams and levitate there. Now, Matthew 24 is part of a particular context.

It comes right after chapters 21 through 23. That should be self-evident, where Jesus condemns Israel's leaders. He curses the fig tree. He declares judgment on the temple. He says, your house is left to you desolate.

The you there is the Pharisees. And this sets up the disciples' questions in Matthew 24 3. So, Pastor, let me ask you, you know, how does the chapters preceding Matthew 24 provide necessary backdrop and understanding to what we have come to know as the Olivet Discourse?

Yeah, it's invaluable. If someone ever wants to start with Matthew 24, I immediately go back to Matthew 21. And we'll just paint with really broad strokes for a moment. Jesus enters the city of Jerusalem for the final time in Matthew 21.

This is the triumphal entry. And what's so fascinating about this is he enters into a city that for 1 ,000 years was supposed to bear fruit for God. That was the point of Jerusalem. They were to bear fruit for God.

They were to be a light so that that light could shine to the Gentile world. And yet they became so ethnocentric in their own covenant that they began hating the Gentiles and the Samaritans and purposely keeping the gospel away from them.

That's why when Jesus comes in Matthew 21, it's very interesting that they lay leaves on the ground to welcome him. So the city that was supposed to bear him fruit only offered him leaves. And then he goes to the temple, the temple that was supposed to be a house of prayer for the Gentiles, a place where the Gentiles could come and worship God and they could see this great God that the Jews worship.

And yet it was filled full of animals that were defecating all over the place, the only place on earth where they could come and worship God. So here you have a temple that was supposed to offer fruit for God, and it was totally defiled as well.

Then you get the next morning, Jesus sees a fig tree and he curses it. He sees a tree with leaves that bears no fruit, and he just entered into a city that offered him leaves but bore no fruit. The similarities there need to arrest our attention to where we say, ah, the fig tree is a parable of Jerusalem.

The fig tree in the Old Testament is a metaphor for Jerusalem. And on Jesus' little morning walk in Matthew 21, as he curses the fig tree, Jerusalem is hanging over the landscape. And he says that if I even say that this mountain be lifted up and thrown into the sea, it will be so.

What I find so fascinating about that passage is Jesus just walked into the city that offered him only leaves. He cursed a tree that offered him only leaves. He looked at the mountain hilltop vista where Jerusalem was sitting, and he said, if I rip that up and throw it into the sea, it will be so.

And we've made that passage about having big faith. If I just pray, maybe I'll have more money. If I have faith, it's big enough to move a mountain, right? The mountain is my bank account. The mountain is my job.

The mountain is my marriage. The mountain is my on and on and on. That's not at all what that means. Jesus was looking at the city of Jerusalem that he could see where he was standing as he cursed the fig tree.

And he said, that mountain is going to be lifted up and thrown into the sea. And you know what it was? Forty years after Jesus said that, the Romans came in and leveled the mountain where Jerusalem sat.

They leveled it. And then they took all of the gold and all of the different precious things that were in the city, and they put them on their boats, and they cast them off into the sea. That's a prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem.

It's a subtle one, but that's a prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem that's building towards Matthew 24. That's establishing the context of Matthew 24. And then you get to the end of Matthew 21 where you get to the parables that Jesus tells them.

He tells them a parable of two sons, and he says that the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going to get into the kingdom before you. That's the Pharisees. That's Matthew 21, 32. He tells another parable about the two tenants.

At the end of that parable, he tells them that he's going to put them to a miserable death, and he's going to rent out the vineyard, which was always a symbol of Jerusalem and Judah. He's going to rent it out to new people who will, what, bear his fruit.

Instead of going into a city that offered him no fruit, Jesus is going to make a new city, a new Jerusalem, the church that bears him much fruit. Chapter 22, as you continue on, he tells a parable of a wedding feast, and we love this parable.

It's the parable of the wedding feast, and at the end, you know, many are called, few are chosen. But we forget right there in the middle that the king was angry, and he sent his troops, and he destroyed those murderers and burned their city to the ground.

Jesus is in Jerusalem talking to the Pharisees, condemning them with three successive parables, and then his sort of conclusion is that you're not bearing fruit, you're not going to get into my kingdom, the tax collectors and prostitutes are going to get in before you, and I'm going to rip the kingdom away from you and give it to a people who bear much fruit, and I'm also going to set your city on fire.

I'm the king who you have enraged. I'm going to send my armies, and I'm going to destroy your city. That's exactly what Jesus is saying in 22. Then they try to trick him up with the coin, and they say, you know, should we pay taxes to Caesar?

You tell us, and he says, whose image is on the coin? That's another passage where Jesus is talking about condemnation of Jerusalem. Well, how so? He seems like he's just talking about taxes. No, because every human life, especially those who are in covenant status with God, have the image of God printed on us.

The Jews were trying to trick Jesus into saying, you know, should we pay taxes or not? Jesus says, well, whose image is on it? The point is whose image is on you, Pharisees, Sadducees, the Sanhedrin? You're the ones who claim that you're in covenant status with God.

Whose image is on you? Render to God the things that are God's. Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's. And what happened 40 years later? Jesus rendered the Jewish people, rendered the Jewish city, rendered the Pharisees over to Caesar because he was telling them, you don't belong to God.

His image is not imprinted on you. I'm going to render you to Caesar. And it's not surprising that right before Pilate, the Pharisees looked at Pilate and said, we have no king but Caesar, because they already belong to Caesar, and Jesus was rendering them over to Caesar via a punishment.

We know this is true because the Pharisees and the Sadducees get angry, and they say, oh, he must be talking about us. Chapter 23 is seven woes that Jesus is raining down on top of the Pharisees, and do me a favor, anybody who's listening to this and you're confused or you don't know what's going on here, Matthew 23 is so incredibly important because God is in covenant relationship at this point with Judah.

A covenant is a relationship that is cut in blood. It has stipulations, and it has blessings if you obey those stipulations and curses if you disobey. We're talking about the covenant of Moses, the Ten Commandments, the 612 laws, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Numbers, that covenant, that covenant with that temple, with that sacrificial system, and what's going on here in Matthew 23 is that Jesus is pouring out the covenant curses on them because they have violated his covenant for years and years and years and years.

Do yourself a favor. Go back and read Leviticus 26, which talks about the blessings if the Israelites obeyed the covenant and the curses if they disobey, and then read Deuteronomy 28, which does the same thing.

Deuteronomy 28 says that if they don't obey the covenant, then God is going to curse them in their city, curse them in their towns, curse them in their beds, curse them in their living rooms, curse them in their fields.

He's going to send armies to attack them. It's going to get so bad that they're going to eat their own children in their despair. All of these things, brothers and sisters, happened when Rome came in and attacked, sieged, starved, and destroyed Jerusalem.

So what we have here is Matthew 21, 22, and 23 are all Jesus indicting that generation. And Matthew 23 ends with such a stark and sobering lament from Jesus. He says in verse 35,. So that on you, Pharisees, Jerusalem, on you may come all the righteous blood that was shed on earth, from the blood of the innocent Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar.

Truly I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation. Jesus is saying that all the curses of the covenants are going to be poured out on that generation. One last thing, and I'm going to quit going and let Boaz, you jump in.

I'm rattling off at this point. When Jesus says this, he uses the word this. This is a very specific pronoun. This and these, that and those, those are what's called pronouns. They're demonstrative pronouns.

You've got what's called near demonstrative pronouns in Greek and far demonstrative pronouns. Let me example this for just a second. If I were to talk about this, I'm talking about something that's right in front of me.

But if I want to say something that's far away, I would say that. That thing over there, but this thing right here. These things in front of me, but those things way over there. I would use a different pronoun if I was talking about something close to me or something far away from me.

Jesus uses the one that's talking about things that are close. He's not saying that generation at some point 2 ,000 years into the future. He's saying this generation that I'm looking at. All of God's wrath is going to be poured out on you, and it's going to happen in a single generation, which is 40 years.

That's the context.

The Whole Book of Matthew Building Toward Judgment

Yeah, amazing. I appreciate that. The way you put it makes it seem like Matthew 24 is really just the climax of something that's been going on throughout the book of Matthew, not just starting in chapter 21, but way before that, even in reaching far back as the Old Testament.

When you put it that way, I don't mean to ridicule anyone, but it just seems like doing hermeneutics and applying the Bible contextually, it just makes it seem like you're doing hermeneutics as just learning how to read correctly.

I really just mean that in the kindest way possible because isn't that what we're supposed to do, read things as they're intended when Jesus says this generation? We're not supposed to assume. He's talking about 21st century people sitting in the pews, but rather the context has been entirely about the Pharisees, their covenant-breaking history.

Now he's saying this generation will see these judgments come to pass. Why do we cut that away from them and apply it to us?

It's so true. Even like, for instance, Matthew 2, 3, and 4, where Jesus is called out of Egypt and Matthew says, out of Egypt I've called my son. For the astute reader, you're like, where did I see that?

Oh, when God called Israel out of Egypt, he said, out of Egypt I called my son. Jesus in Matthew 2 is functioning as the true Israel because the other Israels failed. Okay, what happens next? He goes to be baptized just like the Israelites went to the Red Sea to be baptized.

Guess what happens? The Father is speaking, the Holy Spirit is hovering, Jesus is in the water. That's the same thing that happened in the original Red Sea crossing. God speaks, Holy Spirit wind blows the waves apart, and the angel of the Lord, Jesus, walks the people through the water.

So Jesus here, Matthew 3, he's the true Israel because the first Israel failed. Where does he go after that? Well, if you look in Exodus, the people, once they cross the Red Sea, they go into the wilderness and eventually they wander for 40 years because they failed.

They failed the test. They put, they tempted, or they tested God and put God to the test 10 times, and then they failed and they had to wander in the wilderness for 40 years. What does Jesus do? Jesus is in the wilderness for 40 days.

And instead of eating the bread like the Israelites were tempted with because they complained about it, he didn't eat anything. He was tempted in every way that Israel failed, and yet Jesus succeeded.

What the beginning of Matthew is showing us is that Jesus is true Israel because the original Israel failed. Then John the Baptist shows up, who's the Elijah that is to come. Malachi talks about that in Malachi 4, that he's going to come right before the great and terrible day of the Lord where God comes in the flesh and visits his temple, and he separates the wheat and the chaff, and he sets those who are his enemies on fire, and then he brings to life and refines with his refining fire those who are his.