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

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Welcome to Truology, where we study Christian theology, philosophy, and apologetics.

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We do critiques on scholars, politics. We look into events in both classical and modern -day issues.

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We do interviews, debates, and much more. Our goal is providing a Christian resource to edify the saints and to engage the community.

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But most of all, we want to glorify the Lord through our hearts, minds, souls, and strength.

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So, stay with us as we open up the Word of God and look into everything pertaining to life and godliness.

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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.

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Welcome back to Truology. Today, I'm joined by Pastor Kendall Lankford, host of the podcast, for a conversation that I think many

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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.

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But what if Jesus' words in Matthew 24 weren't about our future, but instead about their past?

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What if much of what we've been really told to fear has really already been fulfilled?

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Well, in this episode, we're going to talk through Matthew 24, the Olivet Discourse, examine it in light of history,

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Old Testament, and, of course, Jesus' own words. We'll talk about the destruction of Jerusalem in 70

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AD, the difference between partial preterism and other views, and why this really matters for the

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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.

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I'm really excited to get into this conversation because it's really not about—well, it's not just about theology.

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It's about recovering the confidence in Christ's promises and learning to see the future through the lens of victory rather than defeat.

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So, with that being said, I really want to invite my guest here, Pastor Kendall Lankford.

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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.

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Well, hey, Belushi, and thanks for having me on. My name is Kendall. I came to New England, so I live in Massachusetts.

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I came to New England in 2013 and just desire to go to seminary.

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I had some folks in my life who were thinking that that was a good idea. And little by little, the

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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.

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Now we have a total of six children that we have. And, yeah, the

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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.

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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 Whitfield and Edwards and other people have preached this powerful sermon.

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So we're here. We want to see God's kingdom advance. And that's a little bit about me.

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Married to my best friend, have six children, love the Lord of the Rings. That's a side hobby.

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And, yeah, over the years, I grew up, I guess I grew up like many people, dispensational.

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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

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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?

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Why did you start that and, you know, what you're working on now? Yeah, I started the podcast because I felt so tired of just mush -mouthed

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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.

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And I really just, I felt like that people wanted to hear the truth, but there weren't any pastors who were really saying stuff.

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So I was just like, I want a no -nonsense Christian podcast that's a little salty, that tackles tough issues.

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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.

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Most of the episodes are about that. And yeah, it's just, it's supposed to be to cut through some of the, some of the fluff and just get right to the issues.

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So that's why I started the podcast. Awesome. And it is an amazing podcast indeed.

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You know, what's your favorite line? You prod the sheep, beat the wolves. Yeah. I love that.

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

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Me too. I still love that intro song. Yeah, really appreciate you sharing that with us.

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So like I said in that intro there, you know, welcome to Trueology. And, you know, we're going to be talking about Matthew 24 today.

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So I want to begin our discussion with just kind of laying out the landscape of eschatology for my audience here.

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You see, before we can really dive into Matthew 24 and really understand it, we need to lay out that landscape.

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Christians don't always agree on the interpretation of that passage. So if you could,

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Pastor, can you walk us through the main approaches to Matthew 24? Yeah.

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In general, there are four or 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.

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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.

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The amillennial view believes that we're in the millennium right now. The postmillennial view is very similar. Jesus returns after the millennium.

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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.

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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.

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That's the sort of direction of church history on how these views work out.

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But because also, and this needs to be said as well, there's a hermeneutic involved in eschatology.

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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.

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It's also your hermeneutic. Then there's four of those. One is called futurism.

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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.

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It applies to me. It applies to the future. It applies to at some undetermined point in the future.

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That's how a futurist is going to read the text, that this applies to the future at some point.

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Then on the opposite end of the spectrum of that is preterism.

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Preterism has as a base level assumption that the

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Bible is applying to who the original author was speaking to, and that would be the original audience.

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We'll talk more about preterism in a moment. The other two hermeneutical views are historicism, which is mostly faded out of view.

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Not many people are historicists today. It basically says that I'm going to read the Bible in the eschatological passages as being fulfilled sequentially throughout history.

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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.

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It's a spiritual interpretation. As you can imagine, not all passages fit into all of these camps.

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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.

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I'm post -millennial, and I'm a preterist, if that helps with those two sort of views. Yeah, that was excellent, actually.

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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

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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?

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It was for a time, but now we're more realistic in our approach to eschatology through the lens of pre -millennialism.

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Yeah, I think our culture in general is probably the dominant culture when it comes to producing

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Christian content on earth, and probably in all of church history. Our culture is extremely pessimistic when it comes to Christians and Christians being in this country.

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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.

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World War II is something that people like to hang post -millennialism's death on, which is greatly overstated, by the way.

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About 200 years ago in England, a man named John Nelson Darby began reading the text in a very unique and novel way that really hadn't been done in church history.

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We've always had historic pre -mills, but John Nelson Darby was reading the Bible differently.

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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.

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The Bible tells us 365 times, fear not, and yet this view is all about the fear over the world getting continually worse.

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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.

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I think it fits hand in glove in our flesh. It took hold here because of John Nelson Darby and the

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Schofield Bible, and it's sort of become the predominant view in our culture and in our time.

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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.

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Thank you for that. When my eyes were opening to the partial preterists and the postmillennial outlook of the

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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?

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Why do we have such a strong emphasis on Christian schools and Christian businesses and things like that?

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When at the very end, we're just expecting Satan to dominate and conquer the world while we fade into the corners of obscurity.

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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

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Jesus speaks, he's speaking to the audience to which he is actually standing in front of. It has great relevance to that audience than to us in pulling it out of context and coming to the wrong conclusions ultimately.

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I want to ask you this next question. In your own words,

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I guess, what is the biggest weakness with the futurist approach to Matthew 24? That's a huge question.

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I do want to say one thing back to what you were saying earlier.

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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.

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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,

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I was taught this repeatedly in seminary, what does the original author have to say to the original audience?

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And if your view cannot line up with what the original author is saying to the original audience, then your view is wrong.

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And yet, what's so frustrating is that we don't apply that same standard to eschatology, to the end of the

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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.

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Everybody interprets the Bible, at least faithful people like MacArthur or Sproul or any of those guys, they're interpreting the

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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

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Christianity for years, because if you can undermine the efficacy of Jesus' words, and you can say that, well,

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Jesus must have been a false prophet, well, then now He's not divine. Now He can't be a

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Savior. So the ground zero of eschatology I don't even believe is

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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

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Jesus there, and they've said Jesus expected the end of the world in 40 years. It didn't come, therefore

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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

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Jesus from the attack of the liberal, higher critics, and there's some virtue in that, because they don't want to see

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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.

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He meant all of this in the future. So what they're trying to do is they're trying to rescue

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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

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Jesus. They're actually indicting Him further as not saying what He really meant. It's so clear from Matthew 24 that Jesus intended the destruction event that He's talking about in 40 years.

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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

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Jesus was trying to say to His disciples, it's the greatest fulfillment of prophecy in all of history.

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It really is unbelievable, but you have to read the text rightly, and you have to understand what

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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.

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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?

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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

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Lord in the way it was meant to. It's really sad because this simpleton approach to the

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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.

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That's a long word. The soccer mom in the pew can't understand that. Exegesis, what's that?

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Eggs in Jesus? What are we talking about? Breakfast? Those words never dawned on me until way later in my

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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.

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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

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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.

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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?

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Yeah, I'd just say it's so funny if dispensationalism gets the reputation of being the simple view.

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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— honestly, it markets itself as the simple reading of the

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Scripture, but it makes it so complex that only the prophecy shaman and only the pastor who's the eschatology guru can understand it.

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And what it's done is it's made so many people actually just avoid these passages because they're like,

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I'll never be able to understand those. And I grew up very blue -collar.

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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.

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So I want to make the Bible simple. And I don't even care if we use the words hermeneutic and grammatical.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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,

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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.

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We would immediately put ourselves back in their world and their conversation and apply the basic rules of interpretation to that moment.

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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.

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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.

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Sure thing. Yeah, okay. So, Matthew 24 really isn't some passage floating in midair.

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You know, when you open your Bible, it doesn't just fly out from the seams and levitate there. No, Matthew 24 is part of a particular context.

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It comes right after chapters 21 through 23.

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That should be self -evident, where Jesus condemns Israel's leaders. He curses the fig tree.

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He declares judgment on the temple. He says, your house is left to you desolate. The you there is the

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Pharisees. And this sets up the disciples' questions in Matthew 24.

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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

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Olivet Discourse? Yeah, it's invaluable. If someone ever wants to start with Matthew 24,

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I immediately go back to Matthew 21. And we'll just paint with really broad strokes for a moment.

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Jesus enters the city of Jerusalem for the final time in Matthew 21. This is the triumphal entry.

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And what's so fascinating about this is He enters into a city that for a thousand years was supposed to bear fruit for God.

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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

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Gentile world. And yet they became so ethnocentric in their own covenant that they began hating the

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Gentiles and the Samaritans and purposely keeping the gospel away from them. That's why when

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Jesus comes in Matthew 21, it's very interesting that they lay leaves on the ground to welcome

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Him. So the city that was supposed to bear Him fruit only offered Him leaves.

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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

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Gentiles could come and worship God, and they could see this great God that the Jews worship.

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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

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God. So here you have a temple that was supposed to offer fruit for God, and it was totally defiled as well.

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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

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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.

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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,

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Jerusalem is hanging over the landscape. And He says that if I even say to this mountain, be lifted up and thrown into the sea, it will be so.

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What I find so fascinating about that passage is Jesus just walked into the city that offered

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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.

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And we've made that passage about having big faith. If I just pray, maybe

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I'll have more money. If I have faith, it's big enough to move a mountain, right? The mountain is my bank account.

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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.

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Jesus was looking at the city of Jerusalem that He could see where He was standing as He cursed the fig tree.

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And He said, that mountain is going to be lifted up and thrown into the sea. And you know what it was?

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Forty years after Jesus said that, the Romans came in and leveled the mountain where Jerusalem sat.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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That's the Pharisees. That's Matthew 21 -32. He tells another parable about the two tenants.

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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.

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He's going to rent it out to new people who will, what? Bear His fruit.

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Instead of going into a city that offered Him no fruit, Jesus is going to make a new city, a new

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Jerusalem, the church that bears Him much fruit. Chapter 22, as you continue on,

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He tells a parable of a wedding feast. And we love this parable. It's the parable of the wedding feast.

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And at the end, 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.

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Jesus is in Jerusalem talking to the Pharisees, condemning them with three successive parables, and then

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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.

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I'm the king who you have enraged. I'm going to send my armies, and I'm going to destroy your city.

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That's exactly what Jesus is saying in 22. Then they try to trick

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Him up with the coin, and they say, you know, should we pay taxes to Caesar? You tell us.

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And He says, whose image is on the coin? That's another passage where Jesus is talking about condemnation of Jerusalem.

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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.

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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?

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The point is, whose image is on you? Pharisees, Sadducees, the

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Sanhedrin? You're the ones who claim that you're in covenant status with God. Whose image is on you?

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Render to God the things that are God's. Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's. And what happened 40 years later?

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Jesus rendered the Jewish people, rendered the Jewish city, rendered the

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Pharisees over to Caesar, because He was telling them, you don't belong to God.

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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

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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.

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We know this is true because the Pharisees and the Sadducees get angry, and they say, oh, he must be talking about us.

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Chapter 23 is seven woes that Jesus is raining down on top of the

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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,

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Matthew 23 is so incredibly important, because God is in covenant relationship at this point with Judah.

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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.

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We're talking about the covenant of Moses, the Ten Commandments, the 612 laws,

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Exodus, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Numbers, that covenant. That covenant with that temple, with that sacrificial system.

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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.

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And do yourself a favor. Go back and read Leviticus 26, which talks about the blessings if the

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Israelites obeyed the covenant and the curses if they disobey. And then read

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Deuteronomy 28, which does the same thing. Deuteronomy 28 says that if they don't obey the covenant, then

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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.

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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.

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All of these things, brothers and sisters, happened when Rome came in and attacked, sieged, starved, and destroyed

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Jerusalem. So what we have here is Matthew 21, 22, and 23 are all

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Jesus indicting that generation. And Matthew 23 ends with such a stark and sobering lament from Jesus.

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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

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Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar.

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Truly I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.

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Jesus is saying that all the curses of the covenants are going to be poured out on that generation.

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One last thing, and I'm going to quit going and let Boaz, you jump in. I'm rattling off at this point.

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When Jesus says this, he uses the word this. This is a very specific pronoun.

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This and these, that and those, those are what's called pronouns.

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They're demonstrative pronouns. You've got what's called near demonstrative pronouns in Greek and far demonstrative pronouns.

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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.

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But if I want to say something that's far away, I would say that. That thing over there, but this thing right here.

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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.

33:48

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.

33:57

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.

34:10

That's the context. Yeah, amazing. I appreciate that.

34:15

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

34:33

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

34:45

Bible contextually, it just makes it seem like you're doing hermeneutics as just learning how to read correctly.

34:52

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

35:02

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

35:13

Pharisees, their covenant -breaking history. Now he's saying this generation will see these judgments come to pass.

35:20

Why do we cut that away from them and apply it to us? It's so true.

35:26

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.

35:38

For the astute reader, you're like, where did I see that? When God called

35:43

Israel out of Egypt, he said, out of Egypt I called my son. Jesus in Matthew 2 is functioning as the true

35:52

Israel because the other Israels failed. Okay, what happens next? He goes to be baptized just like the

35:58

Israelites went to the Red Sea to be baptized. Guess what happens? The Father is speaking.

36:04

The Holy Spirit is hovering. Jesus is in the water. That's the same thing that happened in the original

36:09

Red Sea crossing. God speaks. Holy Spirit wind blows the waves apart, and the angel of the

36:17

Lord, Jesus, walks the people through the water. So Jesus here, Matthew 3, he's the true

36:23

Israel because the first Israel failed. Where does he go after that? Well, if you look in Exodus, the people, once they cross the

36:30

Red Sea, they go into the wilderness, and eventually they wander for 40 years because they failed.

36:37

They failed the test. 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.

36:46

What does Jesus do? Jesus is in the wilderness for 40 days. And instead of eating the bread like the

36:52

Israelites were tempted with because they complained about it, he didn't eat anything.

36:59

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

37:09

Israel because the original Israel failed. Then John the Baptist shows up, who's the

37:14

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

37:24

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.

37:41

That's Matthew 4 through the whole John the Baptist era. John even says that the axe is already at the root of the tree, which means one more swing of the covenantal axe, the

37:52

Jewish people are going to fall. So you're right. The whole book is building towards this judgment, this climax in Matthew 24.

38:02

To say that Matthew 24 doesn't exist as its own chapter is a great understatement.

38:10

It is the sign that tells you that you've climbed all the way to the top of Mount Everest, and all of Mount Everest is beneath you.

38:19

Yes, absolutely. That greater context of seeing Jesus as the true

38:25

Israel also necessitates that we see Jesus as the true high priest.

38:30

I mean, that just holds the entire Bible together. I mean, for example, in Leviticus 14 where we read that, you know, if there's a plague in the house, the priest comes to check it the first time, gives it some time, goes away, they come back to check it a second time, and if the plague is still in the house, they're to level the building.

38:50

Jesus is the true high priest who came to the temple the first time, saw that there was the plague in the temple, and then he came a second time, and the covenant breakers were still the plague infesting the temple, and therefore he declared that your house will be left to you desolate, fulfilling everything that was typologically disclosed about him in Leviticus 14, which is such an amazing fabric of revelation.

39:21

It gives me joy to come to that conclusion and see it in the text.

39:27

It's not shoehorning. It's simply just reading the Bible the way it was intended to be read.

39:34

Here's another one, and I love that you brought that up because there's so much debate on how many temple cleansings were there.

39:40

Did John get his out of order chronologically? Did Matthew get his out of order chronologically?

39:46

No, there's two, and you point out in Leviticus exactly why. Here's another one. In the

39:52

Exodus when they're being told how to actually do the Passover, one of the things that they're told is that they're to bring the lamb into their home for four days, four days before the lamb is sacrificed.

40:06

Well, if you look in Matthew 21 when Jesus comes into the city of Jerusalem, the lamb is coming into the house, and four days later he's going to be sacrificed.

40:16

So he is the true Passover lamb who is in the house for four days, living with the family before he's sacrificed.

40:24

There's so much that it's astounding. It's beautiful. Yes, you're right.

40:32

There really is a lot. I want to ask you, Pastor, how would you answer people who bring up the objection that this generation is really just talking about a different race of people or the people that will be there at the time of this prophecy coming to pass?

40:53

How would you answer the objection regarding the word generation there?

40:59

Yeah, you have to forgive me. I have very little patience for this because it's completely ignorant.

41:07

But if you want to do it in a scholarly sort of way, you need to study the word genea.

41:14

Genea is the Greek word underneath generation in our English Bible. That's the Greek word that Jesus is using.

41:21

Just do a word study on how Jesus uses genea in the book of Matthew, where he says a wicked and adulterous generation asked for a sign.

41:30

He's not talking about us. He's talking about the Jews who were asking for him right in front of him to give them a sign to show that he was the

41:38

Messiah. He's already said in John 2 that he wasn't going to give that generation a sign because he knew what was in men's hearts.

41:47

So just do a study on this word genea, and you will not find an example in the book of Matthew of Jesus using this word to talk about some ambiguous race of people somewhere in some way.

42:01

The reason they interpret it that way, I know the reason they do it because the text is so clear and obvious what

42:10

Jesus is saying that you have to interject some sort of complexity and some sort of nuance and some sort of redefinition of terms in order to hold on to your view.

42:22

And I think that really is the issue, is that the dispensational who really studies Matthew 24, or the futurist would be a better way to put it, wants so badly to hold on to their view that they have to misinterpret a very clear word.

42:39

This is not an unclear word in the Bible. It's not normally or ordinarily used in a metaphorical way.

42:46

It means generation. And when you realize, and you brought this up earlier about the typology, that the wilderness generation that perished, that were killed and their bodies were buried in the sand and they weren't allowed to enter into the land that God was giving them, when you realize that Matthew is juxtaposing the generation that kills

43:08

Jesus and the generation that died in the wilderness, the word generation now comes alive because he is comparing his generation that he's standing in front of with that generation, and he's saying, you too will likewise perish in 40 years, just like they did.

43:28

And guess what? You're not going to enter into my kingdom. You're not going to enter into my land.

43:34

It's going to be my church. Once all of your dead bodies are buried in the sands of the

43:40

Judean desert, my church is going to enter into my kingdom, and they're going to be in a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

43:48

You're not entering in. I'm taking the kingdom away from you. To try to say that generation means something other than it means is,

43:59

I think, the most foolish and the most— what is the word

44:04

I'm looking for? Just the most ridiculous reading of that word that I could ever imagine. Yeah, so for the person that is just trying to be an honest

44:16

Christian, they're baptized in dispensationalism, in the futurist approach of things.

44:22

It's kind of just— They should get baptized in the triune name. I'm just kidding. Yeah, amen.

44:30

For that person that's just the air they breathe, how would you advise them to avoid modern anxieties like thoughts of nuclear war or the mark of the beast through AI and the world collapse when they're sitting down trying to be an honest

44:48

Christian and just take things for what they are in the text? Yeah, it's hard because the assumptions that we bring to the text are often what we end up reading out of the text.

45:02

People will often use the term worldview is the way in which you view the world.

45:09

It takes a lot of time, and it takes a lot of people like you, people like me who are trying to point to the honest meaning of the text.

45:22

It takes a lot of time of working with someone who's been, as you put it, baptized into this view because, as I said earlier,

45:30

I think this view gratifies our flesh. I think this view stokes fear in us. I think this view causes us to doubt.

45:37

I think this view causes us to be lazy. I think this view causes us not to build, not to work.

45:43

It gives Satan way more authority and power than he actually has. It makes Jesus an impotent king and an impotent savior who can't actually build the kingdom that he promised.

45:53

If we were to really just look at all of the net negatives that this view gives,

46:01

I wonder why we would hang on to it at all, but it just takes time. It's the air we breathe.

46:08

It is the major predominant view of our day, so we have to be patient.

46:15

We have to help them because, in some ways, I think it's a good example of, if you've ever seen the movie

46:22

The Matrix, getting pulled out of the matrix is hard, and it's hard to see that everything that you've learned about these passages has been wrong.

46:31

That's a really, really hard thing. I mean, it's tough to walk through, and then you start having questions of, who can

46:40

I trust? Who can I talk to? Can I even understand the Bible? I mean, there's a moment of being broke when you realize, and the scales fall off of your eyes.

46:51

I think the Holy Spirit has to help with this. I think that there needs to be people like you and I who are helping, putting out podcasts, putting out different Bible teachings that are helping, and by the

47:04

Lord's grace, I think that dispensationalism and futurism is on the decline. I think that this view is not going to last much longer.

47:11

I don't give it more than 100 years, and I think it will be a tombstone in church history.

47:17

But for right now, it is a view that's still pretty prevalent, and I think we have to be patient in how we teach and how we help.

47:26

Yeah, absolutely. How we help is important, and let's get into that a little bit and maybe give some tools to the people that are listening to at least think about when they approach their

47:37

Bible and private devotions. Let's talk about hermeneutical principles for a second.

47:43

You see, when we hear phrases like, you know, the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, many take this as literal references to astronomy.

47:54

But in the Old Testament, you know, this kind of decreation language is covenantal and political, something that we often forget.

48:01

Describing the fall of nations, and there's many examples of this, like in Isaiah 13,

48:08

Ezekiel 32, Joel chapter 2. So, Pastor, let me ask you, how do we, you know, interpret prophetic imagery in Matthew 24 in light of all these other

48:20

Old Testament passages? Well, we haven't even gotten to Matthew 24 1 and 2. I don't even think we've even gotten into Matthew 24, so you're going right for the hardest section of that chapter.

48:35

But when you look at these particular astronomical perturbations, which is what

48:43

R .C. Sproul called them, you have to understand one thing about the apocalyptic genre.

48:52

Up until that verse, let's say verse 29 is where it begins,

48:57

Jesus is talking in very normal conversational language with His disciples.

49:04

So what you have to understand about apocalyptic genre is apocalyptic genre is very imagery -saturated.

49:13

It is very fantastic. It's on a very exaggerated level.

49:23

And also, this is one of the things that I think would really help many people understand these passages, is that the images that the person who's speaking apocalypticly are drawing from is they're drawing from Old Testament imagery that's already came before.

49:43

An example that I like to use to demonstrate what apocalyptic literature is is a song that was written right after 9 -11 happened.

49:52

And it was called Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue. It was by a country music artist called

49:57

Toby Keith. And he just strings together these American apocalyptic images where he says,

50:04

Uncle Sam, put your name at the top of his list, and the Statue of Liberty is shaking her fist, and it feels like the whole wide world is raining down on you, brought to you courtesy of the red, white, and blue.

50:17

And if you lived 500 years ago in France, you would not understand what that means at all.

50:25

You would be like, okay, who is Uncle Sam, and why does he have a list? And why am I on the top of it?

50:31

And who's this Liberty lady, and why is she shaking her fist? And what is this talking about, courtesy of the red, white?

50:39

I mean, you wouldn't understand a single one of these images because the images are so saturated in our

50:46

American time. We know what the Statue of Liberty is. It's a national symbol for us. We know what

50:51

Uncle Sam is, national symbol, red, white, and blue. That's our flag. So all these symbols are very common to us.

50:59

And when I just read that super confusing paragraph that no other society in history would have understood, if you're an

51:06

American, you understood it. You knew that in 9 -11 we were going to go to war with the terrorists and all these apocalyptic images were coming to play because war is getting ready to happen.

51:18

Well, the same thing happens in the Bible. When war is getting ready to happen, when one nation is getting ready to be destroyed, apocalyptic imagery starts showing up.

51:28

And we have to remember that the symbols that are being used are not our symbols that we're supposed to interpret.

51:36

They're their symbols. So we need to understand what the sun being darkened meant to them.

51:43

We need to understand what the moon not giving its light meant to them. I don't need to go outside and every day look for the moon to go dark and not give its light.

51:53

That's not the point. That would be like someone 500 years ago in France trying to figure out who

51:59

Uncle Sam is. That wouldn't be the point. The point is for the first -century reader, what do they think

52:06

Jesus means by this? And when you go back to the Old Testament, you see that in the very beginning,

52:12

Genesis 1, God established the sun and the moon and the stars to be rulers over the heavens.

52:18

So now what's the leadership structure of this new cosmos that God created?

52:23

The heavens and the earth have leaders, and the earth has leaders. Man and woman were made to be rulers over the earth as the sun, the moon, and the stars were meant to be rulers over heaven.

52:34

Then as you get further along, especially in Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Joel and even

52:41

Habakkuk, and you start seeing how when the sun and the moon and the stars start turning their back on man, on empires of man, judgment's getting ready to come.

52:52

Because if you were to take a taxonomy of the leadership structure of the cosmos, the sun never disobeys

52:59

God, the moon never disobeys God, the stars never disobey God, and yet who are the only rulers that God ever set up as His visceroys that turn their back on Him and disobey

53:12

Him and break covenant with Him? It's us. So when the sun refuses to shine its light on us, it's the rulers of heaven rejecting the rulers of earth.

53:21

That's the imagery, and you see it all over. Isaiah 13 and the downfall of Babylon, the sun goes dark, the moon doesn't give its light.

53:31

You can ask yourself the silly question, did the sun stop giving its light when

53:37

Babylon was destroyed by Persia? No. Did the moon turn to actual blood?

53:42

No. Did the stars fall out of the sky? No. Okay, what about the downfall of Greece?

53:48

What about the downfall of Edom? What about the downfall of Assyria? What about the downfall of Judah? Every one of these nations has these symbols.

53:58

For instance, when Egypt is destroyed, God says He's going to ride down from heaven on a swift cloud and destroy the

54:07

Egyptians, and the sun won't give its light. He even says in that passage, I believe it's to the

54:12

Egyptians, that He's going to roll the entire sky up like a scroll. Well, last time

54:17

I checked, the sky is still there. So what is God meaning by these things?

54:23

He's saying that the empires of man have turned their back on Him. They failed in their leadership, and it's gotten so bad that the rulers of heaven have turned their back on you.

54:34

That's the point that the Bible is trying to get at, not that all of these passages apply to a literal, physical stars falling out of the sky.

54:44

That's just an uninformed view of how stars and suns and moons and all of that function in the

54:50

Bible. For instance, we can talk about this forever. Joseph has a dream that the sun, the moon, and the stars are going to bow down to him.

54:58

Do we believe that the actual gaseous ball of the sun is going to come and bow down to Joseph?

55:06

No. Do we think the moon? No. The stars? No. The vision that Joseph has is that his father, his mother, and the 12 tribes of Israel are going to bow down to him because he's going to be elevated as king over Israel, in a sense, by being second -in -command to Pharaoh, and he's going to rescue them from their famine, which is an entirely messianic typology of what

55:30

Jesus is going to be lifted up on a cross like the baker. He's going to be lifted up.

55:37

He's going to be impaled on a stick, but in so doing, he's going to be the one who actually rules over the 12 tribes of Israel, and that's why

55:47

Paul could say in Galatians 6 that the church, if you have faith, you're children of Abraham, and you are a part of the

55:53

Israel of God. So all of these things tie together if we'll just read the Bible the way that the

55:59

Bible writers meant it. Excellent for that, and we're reaching the top of the hour here, so Pastor, I really appreciate your walkthrough there, very comprehensive, and I hope everyone is getting it, but I want to ask you just another question because it seems like after understanding the hermeneutical approach of the audience and the fact that Old Testament references point out decreation language, and it seems like what you're saying is, of course, this is hyperbolic.

56:32

This isn't something that we should take overly and wouldn't literally. Can you just confirm with us any other specific places in the

56:41

New Testament where the apostles themselves understood what Jesus was saying and what the

56:48

Old Testament was referencing as something that was going to happen soon for them? Oh, it's all over.

56:55

Like for instance, the false prophets, the disciples realized that there were going to be false prophets that rise up.

57:02

John talks about that in his epistles. The reference to the earthquake that Jesus prophesied in Matthew 24 is referenced in the book of Acts.

57:11

The worldwide famine is referenced. Paul even says that the gospel is going to be preached to every creature under heaven, which comes right out of Matthew 24.

57:20

Paul even says in Colossians that that happened. I mean, everywhere you look in Matthew 24, the early

57:28

Christians are believing it. And here's a really good example that I think often gets missed. In the very early church, you'll remember in Acts 2, you have

57:37

Pentecost and Acts 3, and then you have all of these people coming to know Jesus. Well, what happens very quickly is all of the

57:46

Christians start selling all of their property and putting the money together in order to have a common purse.

57:54

And Christian people throughout the last couple hundred years have said, hey, look, this is a great example of commune -style living or Christian socialism or whatever silly thoughts that they have.

58:08

It's much more simple than that. Jesus said that the city of Jerusalem was going to be set on fire.

58:13

That's Matthew 22, 14. He says that the kingdom was going to be taken away from them and given to people to bear their fruit.

58:20

That's the end of Matthew 21. He says that, woe to you, Jerusalem, all of the blood guilt that's ever happened is going to be poured out on you in this generation.

58:29

The Christians knew that. And then when you get Matthew 24 where Jesus says that it's going to happen within a single generation,

58:35

Matthew 24, 34, you can kind of understand the point. They knew

58:41

Jesus said the city was going to be destroyed, so why do they need their property anymore? They sold it.

58:47

And then you fast forward to the Roman siege where the Romans come and surround the city of Jerusalem, and who are the only people who survived that great siege?

59:00

It's the Christians. The Christians saw the Roman armies coming and they left.

59:06

And why did they do that? Well, if you look at Matthew 24, this is verse 15.

59:12

So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken by the prophet Daniel standing in the holy place, let the reader understand, then those who are in Judea should flee to the mountains.

59:22

Okay. Well, the Christians did that. They fled to the mountains. But let's go over to our brother

59:28

Luke because our brother Luke is not a Jew, and he writes in a way that is a little bit easier for the

59:33

Gentiles to understand. The Gentiles were saying to themselves, what is this abomination of desolation?

59:39

What does that mean? How do I know if I've seen it? Jesus said when the abomination of desolation happens,

59:44

I'm supposed to get out of Jerusalem. Well, I don't even know what that means. So Luke is our friend here.

59:51

He takes the exact same passage and he interprets it for a Gentile audience.

59:56

So Luke 21 -20. But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then you know that its desolation has come near.

01:00:07

Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and those who are inside the city depart, and let those who are out in the country not enter it.

01:00:15

Then early Christians believed that. There's a man named Eusebius who was a Christian historian. He even said that the

01:00:21

Christians fled the city as soon as Roman armies came, and they're the only ones who survived. Why did they survive?

01:00:28

Because Jesus told them to flee. This has nothing to do with you and I. And if this were the end of the world, then what if I'm not in Judea?

01:00:37

Can I flee then? What if I'm not on a flat roof? It says if you're sitting up on top of your roof, don't even go down to get your coat.

01:00:46

Well, I don't have a flat roof. Does that mean that I miss out? No. This passage is to 1st century

01:00:52

Christians who were supposed to be watching because the downfall of Jerusalem is going to be happening in their lifetime.

01:01:00

Some of them are not even going to taste death until they see it, and Jesus is giving them clues to look out for.

01:01:06

So they spent 40 years trying to witness to their brothers, mothers, sisters, uncles, cousins, to tell them that Christ has come.

01:01:13

Messiah has come. You don't need to keep looking at the temple and the sacrificial system. He's the true temple.

01:01:19

He's the true priest. He's the true sacrifice. Flee from your religion because it's passing away.

01:01:26

Because now in these last days, as Hebrews 1 -2 says, that God has chosen to speak to us through Jesus Christ.

01:01:34

Flee that old temple and run to the true temple, Jesus. So they spent 40 years being on mission, evangelizing their brothers and sisters until the

01:01:44

Roman army came and they fled. And the city was destroyed and they were spared. If Jesus hadn't told them that, they would have lost their life.

01:01:54

That's the undeniable proof that they knew what Jesus meant. And so should we.

01:02:02

Absolutely true. They knew exactly what Christ was referring to, and they acted accordingly.

01:02:08

But for today, what we'll do, Pastor, is we'll stop here since we're at the hour mark there.

01:02:15

And for the audience, we've only just begun to impact Matthew 24 and the post -millennial hope and eschatology.

01:02:23

And there's, of course, so much more that we can get into. So what we'll do is we'll mark this as Part 1.

01:02:28

And next time, when we start again, we'll be doing and continuing in Part 2 with Pastor Linkford as we dive deeper into the imagery of judgment, the parallels with the

01:02:42

Old Testament prophecies, and how all of this really shapes our confidence for the future.

01:02:47

So I want to ask you to stay tuned, and if you can take anything with you today, it's context, context, context.

01:02:55

And that's not an original quote for me, but believe me, it goes a long way applying proper hermeneutics, understanding the original audience's reception of the message of Christ, and then knowing what we should derive from that properly brings us to a good application for today in our lives.

01:03:18

So, Pastor, anything you want to say before we close up Part 1 here? Well, if this is something you're interested in, there's,

01:03:25

I think, 20 individual two -hour -plus episodes that I've done on Matthew 24 that you can check out.

01:03:34

So, what is that? 40 hours of content, if you're interested, where we go even deeper than this.

01:03:40

But there's a lot of material out there. I would recommend Gary DeMar. Not everything that he says

01:03:46

I agree with, but he's got some great stuff on Matthew 24. Ken Gentry has got some great stuff.

01:03:52

So does Doug Wilson. So does Apologia, Jeff Durbin. There's a lot of people out there who have some great resources if you want to dive deeper into this.

01:04:03

The podcast is one of them. Thank you so much for that, Pastor. And to the audience, really appreciate you all hanging in there.

01:04:11

And like I said, if you could take anything with you, it's the context of the message. So I want to thank you again,

01:04:18

Pastor, for tuning in with us, just disclosing all your experience and knowledge here. And the end times could be difficult, but it's not impossible.

01:04:26

So with that being said, everyone, appreciate you tuning in to Trueology. Until next time, keep studying the truth.

01:04:34

Thank you and have a good night. God bless. If there's any fear, threat, or worry, remember that the one that has called you according to His purpose and grace has also promised that all enemies will soon be placed under His feet.

01:05:11

Now, I want you to believe that not because I said it or because it sounds really nice and spiritual, but primarily and wholeheartedly and only and biblically, because it's the truth.