104. Title: How The Prophets Prove Postmillennialism | A Practical Postmillennialism Series.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 104, How the Prophets Prove Postmillennialism.

Introduction and the Case Against Eschatological Defeatism

Introduction.

Now, if you're joining us for the first time, I just wanna say thank you so much for being here. Make sure if you like this content to like it, share it, subscribe, and hit the bell icon on the subscribe button so that you never miss new content as it comes out.

But I wanna welcome you here if you're new or if you've been joining us for a long time, because today we're gonna continue our series on a practical postmillennialism. And the goal of this series has been very simple.

I wanna show you how postmillennialism is the right view. And I wanna show you that in three stages. The first stage that we covered was how there are wrong views. The first thing I wanted to cover, and the goal of this series was to do three things.

The first thing I wanted to show is how historic premillennialism, dispensationalism, and amillennialism are deficient views in eschatology. And they don't actually motivate the church of God to take godly action in the world.

And they don't actually inspire us to get involved and to see Jesus have victory over every square inch of the cosmos, as Kuyper would say. Instead, it's been my contention that those views have sown a kind of rank defeatism in the ranks of the Christian church, a putrid sort of pessimism that has caused us to disengage and to avoid culture.

And depending on the view, it's given us varying degrees of antipathy towards the mission of God. From intentional abandonment of the world and culture to paralyzed immobility. And along with the other spiritual canker sores that we talked about, it's left the church plagued with hopelessness and abandoning her Christ-commissioned role to bring the gospel to the nations and to help the nations learn obedience to Jesus, Matthew 28, 19.

Now, instead of discipling the West, which is our great commission, and not just the West, the whole world, all the nations, but instead of doing that, we've been discipled by the West. Instead of teaching the nations how to obey Jesus, which is our commission, we've allowed them to teach us how to obey them and how to walk in the counsel of the wicked, Psalm 1, 1.

Instead of spreading Jesus's victory far and wide, we've become addicted to defeat. And we need to repent of that. The church of Jesus needs to repent for our inactivity, our hopelessness, and our sitting around waiting for a rapture to happen instead of doing what Jesus said.

Instead of taking the gospel to the nations. Why are we so concerned with a rapture when we won't even obey him there? It's a strong question, but it's important to answer. We need to repent. We need to repent of all of this sort of eschatological defeatism.

And I believe that's where much of where Christianity is failing today and where they need to repent is in dumping that defeatism that got us here. Because if we don't get rid of the defeatism that got us here, we're never gonna actually get out of here and the issues that we're having in society.

I believe that if you think we lose down here, you're not gonna build down here. If you think that the world is nothing more than a sinking ship, then you're not gonna invest in it, you're not gonna work in it, you're not gonna attempt to take dominion over it.

Why would you build buildings that are gonna last for centuries if you think that we're gonna be zapped out of here in a moment? As dispensationalism has taken over the church, you stopped seeing great cathedrals being built so that now churches are meeting in warehouses.

Is there any wonder why that's happening? Why would we build great stone cathedrals when Jesus is getting ready in a moment to take us out? Why would we work to bring the gospel to every single people group?

Why would we translate the Bible into every single language if the church is on the precipice of being vaporized? Why would we work to bring a cure to cancer? Why would we solve world hunger? Why would we bring peace to war-torn nations if the kingdom is just a spiritual phenomenon that is carried along in the hearts of men who believe the gospel, who are getting ready to be raptured out of here?

It would be more prudent to arrange deck chairs on the sinking Titanic than to get involved in this world, which is how we ended up here. As Christians have pulled out of the world, the world has lost its view of Jesus because we pulled out, all of the Holy Spirit and dwelt people pulled out of the world, and because of that, our influence in the world has waned.

And because our influence in the world waned, sinners do what sinners do and look at the world around you. That's how we got here. As Christians stopped trying to teach the nations how to obey, well, they happily disobeyed.

They happily did everything under the sun to grieve God. And now you don't even know what a man and a woman is. I lay that right at the feet of the church who has been inactive and silent and cowardly for far too long.

That's how we ended up here. And it's plain and clear to me that if we have that wrong sort of view of the end times, we're not going to live rightly in our time. That's why we're doing this, because these matters are gravely important.

We need to see the wrong views and we need to repent to the wrong views so that we can understand the right view and then get back to discipling the nations. So that's the second section, is what is the right view?

And as we've been arguing, the correct view of eschatology is post-millennialism. It's not a perfect view. There is no perfect view, but it's the best view. It's the one that I think is the most accurate, the most biblical.

It represents all of the texts in the scriptures. That's post-millennialism. Now, we've been doing this for a couple of weeks now in this section. I think this is the fifth installment in section two.

And we started in Genesis. We began where God begins and we showed how God designed the world to be filled with worshipers. The end for which God created the world is that the whole world will be filled with worshipers.

So why do we believe as Christians that the end has changed? Why do we believe that God started the story with a world that is filled with worshipers and now he's going to end the story with a world filled with defeat and brokenness and a rapture and all of this?

Where did we get all of that defeatism from? Because it's not how God designed the world. He designed the world for Adam and Eve to be fruitful and to multiply and to spread his dominion to the ends of the earth, which means before God is finished with the old world, unless he changes his plan, the entire planet is gonna come under the banner of him.

And now because of Jesus, that means the Christian church. That doesn't mean that some of the world is going to come under her auspices before Jesus returns. It doesn't even mean that most of the world.

It means that if God stays consistent with his plan, the church of Jesus Christ is gonna fill the world and everyone is gonna be a part of it. That means Islam, Mormonism, Buddhism, Shintoism, secular Judaism, atheism, and every other toxic ism is going to fade out of memory of human history.

It is gonna be a footnote in a history book before the Lord is finished because God is going to accomplish his purposes. God is going to receive worship from those who worship him in spirit and in truth, John 4, 24.

And since God designed the world to be filled with this kind of spirit and truth worship, Genesis 1, 28, I believe that God is going to fill the world with the songs and the hymns and the Lord's table and the Christian worship.

He's gonna fill the world with Christians. And we know that that's the Lord's eventual plan because of the book of Genesis. We know that's his eventual plan because that was his actual plan that he set about in motion.

He didn't lay out a roadmap to failure. He didn't give Adam and Eve a 10-step guide on how to ruin everything. He designed them not to bumble along in ruin, but to fill the world with their offspring who were fruitful, multiplying, and taking dominion over everything.

We have to remember that is how God created the world. And even after humans sinned, God didn't discard that vision. He didn't give up on that plan. He didn't throw in the wastebasket and say, all right, we're starting a new story.

We're starting a new story where I'm gonna save a few people and then everything else is gonna crash in a cataclysmic defeat. That's not what God did. He didn't give up on his plan. From God's perspective, nothing changed.

Do we really believe that God wrote down Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 not aware of the fact that sin was gonna enter the world? Like, yes, I wanna create a world that's filled with worshipers. Oh, oh no, look what happened.

They sinned. Oh, now I'm gonna change my plan. No, God knew from the entire outset that sin was gonna enter the world. And he still wrote that he intended to fill that same world with worshipers. That's why he reiterated those promises to Noah.

After Adam sinned and all his generation sinned and sin filled the earth, sin filled the earth, God reiterated the promises to Noah and said, you're gonna be fruitful, you're gonna multiply, you're gonna spread out to the ends of the earth and I'm gonna fill the world with worshipers through your offspring.

God swore after the Tower of Babel, after another great defeat in the human project, that's the second one, by the way, after that, he swore against his own life that he was gonna do these things to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

You don't swear against your own life unless you're serious. In the ancient world, when you did that, and I guess today it would be the same thing, if you swear against your own life, you're saying, kill me if these things don't happen.

God is literally saying, I'm willing to die if these things are not gonna come to pass. And he also shows the fact that he was willing to die so that they would come to pass. He told them that eventually, and this is to Judah now, that the Shiloh figure is gonna come and he's gonna bring the entire world under the conformity of God.

He's not just gonna save a lukewarm, wishy-washy people. No, he's going to save the world and then he's going to bring that world under conformity to him. He's gonna make them obedient. He's gonna make them love him in spirit and in truth, and he's gonna make them like Adam and Eve were in the garden, but except this time, multiplied all over the world.

The seed of Abraham that was promised to Abraham, the Shiloh that was promised to Judah is none other than Jesus Christ. We've seen that. And Jesus Christ is going to go back and he is going to redo and reinvigorate and accomplish everything that God has promised because God never promises something that he doesn't intend on accomplishing.

Abraham just wasn't good enough to accomplish the promises that were given to him. Neither was Isaac or Jacob or Judah or Noah or Adam, but Jesus is, and he will accomplish what God promised. That's what the book of Genesis is all about.

These unmistakable global worldwide promises where God's gonna have victory on earth. His dominion is gonna extend over all the nations. His worldwide blessing is gonna be poured out on his covenant people, but it's not gonna be through men that those promises come about.

It's gonna be through the man, Jesus, that those promises come about. That's the book of Genesis. Now, we don't get outside of the book of Genesis and God gets angry and throws away the script. No, he continues working out those things.

So we see in the rest of the story of Israel, how this is affirmed in that. He's gonna bring about his blessings upon his covenant people. He's gonna do all that. We saw that through the rest of the story of Israel.

For instance, we saw how Israel, who's a type of Adam, failed to bring about the things that God promised. She's like Adam, she failed. She failed over and over and over again. She was formed in the dusty parts of Egypt, like Adam was formed out of the dust.

She was removed from those dusty parts and she was placed in a garden land, kind of like the Garden of Eden, which is a land flowing with milk and honey. That's the land of Canaan. And while she was in that land, God promised to live with her and to dwell with her, just like he promised to Adam.

And then she failed to crush the serpent's head. The serpent people, the Canaanites, the ones who worshiped the serpent, were there in the land. And she was supposed to discard them and eject them, like Adam was supposed to discard and eject the serpent.

And instead of that, she bowed down and worshiped the very thing that Adam fell down and obeyed and worshiped. And she fell into sin and ruin. Like Adam, she fell into slavery and she fell into debauchery and idolatry, which we see in the period of the judges.

And instead of spreading God's dominion on earth, like she was supposed to, she fell into slavery, exile, and defeat. And we see that in the era of the kings. Now, all of this failure came despite having a righteous law to guide her, a glorious sacrificial system to atone for her, and the most incredible collection of hymns called the Psalms that the world has ever known.

And as we saw a couple of weeks ago, those hymns not only magnify and extol the glory of God and how God saves and all, of course they do, but they also magnify his victory. The Psalms talk about how God is going to reinvigorate the promises made to Adam, Abraham, and Judah, that how he's going to reign over the entire earth.

The Psalms say that, and they actually call us to sing that. They call us to sing how he's going to crush all of his enemies on earth, how he's going to bless his covenant people all over the earth, how he's going to fill the world with worshipers.

The Psalms is like a post-millennial handbook. And to the degree that a church will sing the Psalms will be to the degree that a church will have a masculine and glorious victorious vision. If you abandon the Psalms for the 711 songs of today, where Jesus is my boyfriend, you're going to have an overly feministic view of the world where you're going to be scared and frail, and you're not going to see that Jesus has the victory.

The Psalms don't talk like that. And I think that the Christian church ought to sing the Psalms, but that's an entirely different episode. Now, despite all of these blessings that God has poured out upon his people, she failed just like Adam.

She collapsed into syncretism, idolatry, and ruin, and she was eventually cast out of the garden, just like Adam, when she was deported and exiled to the east, to the eastern lands of Babylon. Now, it's during that final period of time where she's exiled and where she's living in Babylon, and even when she returns to the promised land and rebuilds the temple, it's during that period of time that God sends these men named the prophets, where God graciously sent the prophets to bring three essential messages to his wayward people.

The first message that God brings is that he's indicting them for their wicked hostilities against him and their covenant-breaking behavior. That's the main thrust of what the prophets are talking about.

So whether you're reading Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, if you're reading Habakkuk or Nahum, or if you're reading Zephaniah or Amos or Jonah, any of that, the main thrust of the message is that the people have sinned and that they need to be punished for it.

Second thing that God talks about in the prophets is he's going to judge them severely because they're so far gone that they don't repent. Half of the minor prophets exist before the exile and the other half exist after the exile.

Those that exist before the exile talk about the northern 10 tribes, how God is gonna issue them a certificate of divorce and totally destroy them under the hand of Assyria. And they're gonna be wiped out.

I mean, there's no other way to say it. They're divorced by God, disowned by God, and destroyed by God. That's what happens to the northern 10 tribes. And it's because of their sin and their idolatry.

In the case of Judah, which is the southern two tribes of Judah and Benjamin, God is going to allow them to be devastated. He's gonna allow their city to be burned and sacked to the ground by Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon.

And they're gonna be in chains, marched the 700 miles or so from Jerusalem to Babylon, and they're going to live there for 70 years in exile until they return. But when they return, they never gain back their national sovereignty.

They don't gain back their national sovereignty throughout the entire period of time until Jesus comes. And even then, they say to Jesus and to Pilate, we have no king but Caesar. They were ruled by various foreign powers like Babylon, Persia, Media, Greece, and Rome.

They never gained their national sovereignty because God had moved on from that. He didn't move on from having a king sitting on the throne of David. He moved on from having their king sit on the throne of David because he was gonna send a true and better king, namely Jesus.

According to the prophets, all of this tragedy could have been avoided if they would have just repented. But because they didn't repent, all the curses of the covenant that are listed in Deuteronomy 28 were poured out on them.

That's why Jesus says in Matthew 23 that all of these covenant woes are coming on this generation. That's why he says in Matthew 24 that all of this is gonna happen in that generation. It's because they refused to repent.

It's because they turned on the one that God was sending, the true Adam, true Noah, true Abraham, true king, that was gonna reinvigorate all of this. That's Jesus. They turned on him and they murdered him in the first century.

And because of that, they inherited the wrath of God and the covenant curses that came along with it. Now, that's sort of the period of the prophets. Now, that's the first two things that they share. They share that you need to repent and because you're not gonna repent, you're going to be brought into covenant woe.

The third aspect of what the prophets talk about, and it really is the minority of what the prophets communicated, but they also reserve some of their material in their preaching and in their writing for the future.

Many people, when they think about the prophets, they think about these are the future-oriented books. Well, the minority of that is actually future-oriented material. Most of it is looking back to the law of God and saying, you failed here, you failed here, you failed here, you're gonna be punished.

About 10%, maybe a little more of the prophets is forward-looking material. And the prophets are going to look forward. They're going to look past the sin and failure of Israel. They're gonna look past the idolatry and rebellion of Judah and they're gonna look past to a time when all of these promises come true.

Remember, they know the promises that was given to Adam and to Noah and to Abraham and to Isaac and Jacob. They know all of the promises that we've talked about so far, they know them. And instead of saying that God is gonna give up on them and he's just gonna choose to come and save a few people and then zap us out of here, they say, no, no, no, God is going to reinvigorate and restore all those old promises through his son.

He doesn't give up on his plan. The prophets actually demonstrate that he's gonna complete it, that he's gonna complete it with his own son, the son of God who's gonna come and he's gonna deal with the treachery and idolatry of his people.

He's gonna punish them severely for their misdeeds and for the ways that they've bowed the knee to every idol. He's not gonna let any of the guilty go unpunished, Exodus 34, six through seven. But that doesn't mean that God is going to ignore the things that he has spoken from the very beginning.

That's why the prophets look forward to a man, the anointed one, Habakkuk 3 .13, who's gonna bring about everything Yahweh said was going to happen. Since Israel couldn't do that, they weren't the true son of Adam who's gonna reverse the curse.

Since they were not the true seed of Abraham who was gonna bless every family on earth and all the nations, and since the Judeans could not be the Shiloh, the faithful Shiloh of God who was gonna make the nations obedient to Yahweh, well, the prophets look beyond them, beyond Israel and Judah and Adam to the true servant of the Lord, Isaiah 53, who's gonna take all the promises of God and fulfill them himself.

According to the prophets, he will make the world overflow with worshipers like Adam should have. He's gonna bless every family on earth that was promised to Abraham. He's gonna bless all the nations on earth that was promised to Jacob.

He's going to transform the world into lovers of God instead of haters of God, which was promised to Judah. Today, having already covered all of that and then also looked at Isaiah last week, we're gonna look at the rest of the prophets and what they say.

And they're gonna tell us that the Messiah is going to bring in five things. And in these five things, every aspect of the curse that happened all the way back in the Garden of Eden is going to be healed.

Within these five things, everything is gonna be put back into Eden. It's incredible. The first thing we're gonna see is that Jesus is gonna restore peace and righteousness on earth by overturning the sin of Adam.

So he's gonna forgive his people of their sins. And by doing that, he's gonna bring them into his peace. Number two, he's gonna rule over the nations as was commanded to Adam. He's gonna bring God's dominion back to the earth.

That's the second thing. The third thing is he's gonna spread God's kingdom to all the nations. He's not just gonna save a few people. He's gonna save all the nations. He's gonna bring his dominion, his fruitful, multiplying kingdom to everywhere.

That's number three. Number four, he's gonna spread the wisdom and the knowledge of God, lifting the curse that has plagued the man's soul. And he's gonna allow men and women to be resurrected out of the throes of sin and to love God and to worship God in spirit and in truth.

So not only is God gonna save a world and leave them in their sin, he's going to actually teach them the knowledge of God so that they love him and worship him correctly. Now, those first four things are talking about spiritual realities.

He's gonna save people. He's gonna spread his kingdom all over earth and he's gonna make those people love him. Those are spiritual truths. The prophets also get into the fact that God is going to heal the physical manifestations of the curse as well.

He's gonna heal sicknesses and diseases. He's gonna extend life because you remember that life was limited to 120 years. He's going to extend that and make people live longer. He's going to heal diseases.

He's gonna bring peace on earth. He's gonna eliminate war. He's gonna do things in his kingdom that you and I normally don't think that he is going to do. And he's gonna do that and throughout the entire reign until he has brought peace all over the world.

And he's gonna deal with his final enemy, which is death. 1 Corinthians 15, 26. Now, as we will see, Jesus is gonna succeed where Adam failed. He's gonna succeed where everyone else failed and he's going to bring about these promises.

The question that you and I have to wrestle with today is do we believe it? Do we believe that Jesus is going to accomplish what God said or is he going to disregard what God said and avoid doing everything?

My view, and I think the only view that makes sense is that God is going to restore everything that was lost in Adam through Jesus Christ. And he's gonna do that in Jesus's kingdom, not in a future millennium.

So to that end, let us begin. Let's start with part one. Jesus will bring God's peace and righteousness to his people. Now, as we said before, when the Messiah comes, he will make good on all of God's promises to his people.

Even though Adam and Eve unleashed sin and misery upon the earth and filled it to the brim with people who hate God, who love war, who love violence and oppression and iniquity, God's plan to deal with it is going to begin by sending his son.

The cleanup project on aisle five, the way that God is going to do what God has said is first and foremost, he's going to send his son. He would come and that son would come to crush and defeat the serpent as promised given in Genesis 3 .15.

And he would come to set us free from our chains and our curses so that we could finally and forever live for him. That's Galatians 5 .1. This was not plan B. This was plan A from the very beginning. God created a world where he knew that Adam and Eve were gonna fall into sin so that he could send his one and only son to save them from their sin and to do what he has promised.

Now, according to the prophets, if this coming messianic figure is going to make all things new, if he's gonna reinvigorate the promises of God and if he's gonna extend Yahweh's dominion from sea to shining sea, well, the first thing that he has to do is he has to deal with the one who's sitting on the throne currently back in those days, and that was Satan.

He would have to crush Satan and kick him off of the throne, which is Hebrews 2 .14. Now, when Jesus does this through his death, burial, and resurrection, he also deals a death blow to our sinful nature as 1 Peter 2 .24.

Jeremiah, who's one of the prophets, and that's what we're talking about today, he tells us how the Messiah is going to remove our transgressions and he's gonna remove our sin so that we will know God.

That's the point I'm trying to get at is that in order for Jesus to reinvigorate this entire project and to do what God has called him to do, he has to deal with Satan, which he did on the cross, and he has to save us from our sins.

So the first part of his plan is salvation. Chapter 31, verse 34 of Jeremiah says it like this. No longer will they teach their neighbor or say to one another, know the Lord, because they will all know me.

From the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord, for I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more. Jeremiah 31, 34. Now, here we have the most fascinating passage, and I don't want you to miss what the wailing prophet is saying.

He is saying that Jesus came to save sinners. Yes, and amen. Everybody believes that. I don't care if you're dispensational, amillennial, premillennial, whatever. You believe that Jesus came to save sinners or you're not a Christian.

So don't miss that, that's there. But also don't miss what this wailing prophet is saying. He's saying at some point in time, not an imaginary period, not a pretend make-believe era, but an actual epic of time that is going to happen on this earth when everybody knows the Lord.

Did you see what he said? He said no one's gonna have to tell their neighbor to know the Lord anymore because they're all gonna know me. He's talking about a time when every single person on earth knows the Lord.

He's looking forward to a day when everyone from the very least among the ranks of men all the way up to the highest echelons and the upper crows to the most sophisticated and significant human societies, they're all going to know the Lord because God is gonna bring them into his covenant people.

He's going to bring everyone on earth at some point in the future into his kingdom through the ordinary means of grace, through preaching the word, through regeneration and justification, through worship services, the Lord's table, baptism, making disciples of the nations, teaching them how to obey Jesus, Matthew 28, 19.

All of this is a fulfillment of Genesis 49 .10. Let me repeat that. The redemption that's purchased by Jesus on the cross is gonna spread so entirely through the earth, according to Jeremiah, that everyone is going to know him.

This, among many other reasons that we have shared, clearly demonstrates to us what God's intention is. His intention is not to save a remnant. By the end of it, he's gonna save the whole world. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, I believe that at some point he's gonna save the entire world.

And I believe that because he said that in Jeremiah 31 .34. I don't believe that because I'm addicted to optimism and I need to have hopium in order to get through my day. I was perfectly disgruntled as a dispensational beforehand and I lived in that sort of defeatism.

I don't believe that anymore because it's not biblical. I don't believe that because Jesus clearly shows that he's gonna save everyone. The whole world is going to know him. You don't even have to tell your neighbor who's a Palestinian refugee and you're not gonna have to tell your former Hindu coworker because they're already gonna know the Lord at some point.

His kingdom is going to spread so far and wide that it includes everyone, which tells me that our disposition and our posture cannot be defeatism. Why would we expect to lose down here if Jesus is saying that everyone is eventually gonna know me?

We should instead anticipate a growing kingdom, planting churches that are gonna be successful. We should anticipate that it's gonna take hard work and effort over long periods of time, but eventually it's gonna succeed down here.

Why can a guy like John MacArthur with a very serious, and I love John MacArthur, but he's wrong here. How can he look right at the camera and say, we lose down here? Has he even read Jeremiah 31, 34?

How can you say that we lose down here when everyone knows Jesus? That's the exact opposite of defeat. That's a story of victory. Again, I'm not attacking MacArthur, but he's wrong. He's dead wrong on this topic.

We are going to succeed. Human history is the story of God filling the world with worshipers, and it's happened for the last 2 ,000 years. He started with 12, and now there's two point something billion.

Do we really believe that he has had 2 ,000 years of success that he's just gonna have come collapsing down in defeat before the job is finished? When you hire someone, maybe you're a business owner, and you hire someone to come do a job, would you celebrate that man if he did 35 of the job and then said, that's enough, and then he leaves and he wipes his hands of it and he expects you to give him a paycheck?

Maybe he built 35 of a wall and he said, that's good. That's a great wall. That's exactly what you wanted. No, it's not. Why would Jesus or why would God write a story of about 35 of the world's population coming to him and then end there, especially when he promised that the entire world is going to know him?

It doesn't make any sense. So number one, the church cannot have an attitude of defeatism when you read Jeremiah 31, 34. It just, it's impossible. Now in the same way, we also can't have an attitude of passivity and indifference.

The only way that everyone on earth is going to know God is if everyone on earth has heard the gospel. Because the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. That's what causes people to repent of their sin and to believe in him when they hear the gospel.

So the only way that that's going to happen is if the church repents of her silence, her lethargy and her cowardice, and she marches the gospel in all the world as the apostles did in the book of Acts and turned the world upside down.

If we want to do that today, if we want to see the world turned upside down, we've got to stop worrying about the world's opinions of us. We have to stop trying to make them see us as winsome. And we have to just actually start doing what Jesus said, taking the gospel to the nations.

That's how we do it. And that's how we will see everyone on earth know the Lord. Will that happen in our generation? I don't think so. There's a lot that has to happen before everyone on earth knows God.

But can that advance in our generation?

Absolutely.

Can that kingdom move forward in our generation?

Absolutely.

Can you be a part of seeing that happen?

Absolutely.

But we've got to repent of our defeatist mentality. We've got to repent of our apathy. We've got to repent of our seclusionary tendencies or isolationist tendencies. And we've got to actually preach the gospel.