Systematic Theology (part 14)

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Good morning. Well, we have come to the end of our systematic theology summer school in more ways than one, because today we're going to be talking about eschatology.
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And eschatology, of course, means the study of the end times.
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It's the end. It seems like an appropriate topic for the last topic, right? It's the end. Now, famously,
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Rome is a city that was founded on seven hills, right?
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You've probably heard of the seven hills of Rome. You might also have heard, because it is a city with an inferiority complex the size of itself, that there are the seven hills of Worcester.
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Can anybody name the seven hills of Worcester? If you can, I will give you, like, so many gold stars.
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I couldn't. I can't even name them. But anyway, there are, in fact, supposedly, anyway, seven hills of Worcester.
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I think they're really stretching it with, like, two out of the seven. They're basically small mounds.
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But anyway, there are seven hills. And there's going to be a lot of hills today in this lesson, but I'm only willing to die on one of them, okay?
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So, that's going to be kind of the theme of today, because eschatology is, like angelology, the last topic that I taught.
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It's a chapter of doctrines that is, let's say, lighter on details, lighter on details given in the scripture.
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And as a result, there are a lot of gray area in which to debate.
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Martin Lloyd -Jones, one of my absolute favorites, when he was introducing his sermons on the book of Revelation, he said this.
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He said, I shall be very—I wish I could do this in Welsh—I shall be very pleased if, by the end of this series, you feel less certain than you were at the beginning.
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I shall feel that I have achieved my objective, because if there is one subject about which dogmatism should be entirely excluded, it is this.
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I thought that was really enlightening. All right, if you have been in my
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New Members class, and looking out here I know a bunch of you who have, I often in the
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New Members class talk about doctrinal triage. Doctrinal triage. Has anybody heard of doctrinal triage or remember it?
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No? We're a bit light on the crowd this morning as well. So doctrinal triage is—it's number one there in your handout.
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It's a way, a framework in which to try to talk about and understand the importance, the relative importance of certain doctrines.
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We've actually been discussing it a little bit here in this class. Andrew was making the distinction a couple weeks ago when we were talking about dogma versus doctrine.
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Right? Does anybody remember what dogma was versus doctrine, what the difference? Right. So dogmas are facts, sort of just truth, and doctrines are more of a system of way of thinking about those facts.
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Right? Here I'm going to just say doctrinal triage is various levels of doctrine, but one of them is kind of dogmas.
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Right? So number one is the dogma one. First, the first level of doctrinal triage would be—or what
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I want you to put there on your line is—fundamentals of the faith. Okay? Fundamentals of the faith.
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These are the doctrines or dogmas. These are the ones that separate believer from unbeliever,
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Christian from heretic. Okay? These are the absolutes, the non -negotiables, the hill on which to die.
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All right? First level doctrines. To deny these is to live in a spiritual fantasy land and not in a real world.
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Second level doctrinal triage—anybody know? Anybody got a guess about what second level doctrinal triage would be?
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If the first is the fundamentals of the faith, second level would be denominational differences.
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That's what you can put there on the line. Denominational differences.
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These are the things that divide Presbyterians from Baptists. Right?
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Lutherans from Presbyterians or from Episcopalians or so on.
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Okay? Things that, if you disagree on them, you probably shouldn't be members of the same local church body, because they have a lot to do with how you have organized yourselves for worship and what you believe are the right—in terms of ordinances and so on.
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Okay? Now, you're all still believers, if you disagree on second -degree issues.
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And in fact, there are many—a great many things in which you can still partner and team up and work together for the gospel and for the kingdom of God.
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You can speak at each other's conferences, for example. Okay?
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And then, finally, we've got third -degree doctrines. So, if first is the fundamentals of the faith and second would be denominational differences, what do you think the third level is?
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Eschatology. Correct. Correct. But more generally, what's the third level?
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Third level would be preferences. Third level would be—or we'll just call it this way.
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What you can put on there on the line is, we can agree to disagree. Right?
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Even within the same church body, there can be a mix of difference of opinion on a third -degree doctrine, but you should be able to be part of the same local church.
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And, as Janet just said, when you take my new members class, eschatology is my favorite example of a third -degree doctrine.
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Right? In which we can have differing opinions, even within this church, even within BBC, and still be a united church body.
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So, here's my plan for today. I'm going to do this in reverse order. I'm going to deal with what I think are the tertiary, third -level doctrines of eschatology first.
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Then I'll very briefly talk about the secondary, if there are any. And then, finally, I'm going to conclude with the first level, the dogma, the hill to die on.
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All right? Make sense? Okay. So, here we go. Now, and I also think that it's very interesting that of the three authors that Andrew and I use the most for this course—Berkhoff, of course, our primary text, but also
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Nielsen, who wrote the book for the teens, and James Montgomery Boyce—that two of them follow this exact same outline.
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They deal with the tertiary stuff first, and then they get to the fundamentals. Only Berkhoff has a different treatment.
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Berkhoff splits it into personal eschatology, or individual eschatology, and then general eschatology.
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I want to put it another way. He deals with the things that are to happen to you personally at the end times, and then there's the things that are going to happen to the heavens and the earth and all of creation.
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But I'm going to get to most of what Berkhoff says about those, but I'm just going to kind of redistribute them into this other outline.
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Okay? All right. So, here we go. First part. Who can read Revelation? Could someone please read—I know you can all read—would someone please—who can read?
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Would someone please read Revelation chapter 20, verses 1 through 4?
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All right. So, there you go. This is the thousand -year reign of Christ, which we all popularly know as the millennium, or the millennial kingdom.
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Now, interestingly, this is the one place in Scripture in which the millennium is described in terms like this, in terms of a thousand years, and very specifically in terms of a reign of Christ.
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There's plenty of places in which we hear about the Messiah ruling, the Messiah having a kingdom, and so on and so forth, but Revelation 20 is it in terms of ruling for a thousand years with all other believers.
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And couched as it is, these few verses of Revelation 20, within a very symbolic book, okay,
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Satan is not literally a dragon or an ancient serpent. He is an angel, as we dealt with already.
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The gates of heaven are probably not literal pearls, but rather something just so pearl -like that that's the best word
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John could come up with when he was describing it. Jesus' feet, back in Revelation 1, are not literally burnish bronze.
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Okay, so there's plenty of symbol—undisputed symbolism within Revelation.
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The churches had to wrestle with whether or not everything in Revelation, or what is literal and what is figurative.
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If the duration of 1 ,000 years here in the millennium, is that a literal number or a figurative number, and just all that it involves.
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And the various viewpoints that we're going to play millennial bingo here, all deal with the varying—basically from the hermeneutical principle of how literal you want to take
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Revelation. And on that sliding scale of how literal you want to do, you're going to land somewhere within these four broad viewpoints that I'm going to label, okay?
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But I want you to really—something else I really want you to take away from this, is please understand that even within these four, there is a spectrum of belief on the minute details, okay?
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So, we're going to fill in the blanks as we go through millennial bingo. And so, let me tell you that we're—by the way, there's another alternate vocab word for this,
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Kiliasm. That is how you pronounce it, Kiliasm, although it's spelled with a C -H, okay?
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And that just means that it's a belief in the coming of a millennial reign of Christ, all right?
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If you actually believe in a millennium happening, then you believe in Kiliasm.
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It's kind of a more old theological term, but you might see it in textbooks. Most of the time now, people just say millennialism.
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Okay. All right. So, number one is dispensational premillennialism.
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I'm going to stumble over that word a thousand times this morning. Sorry. Dispensational premillennialism.
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Broadly speaking, this is the viewpoint that takes Revelation the most literally, okay?
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This is the most literal side of the spectrum. It is futurist.
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Futurist simply just means that they look at Revelation and this idea about the millennium, and they say the millennium is coming in the future.
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Futurist, okay? It hasn't happened yet or isn't happening now. It's in the future. Is that what the pre in premillennial means?
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No. What does the pre mean? Do you know? Oh, close, but no.
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It's not. But it is about something coming before the millennium. Or maybe someone. Nope.
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Nope. Not the rapture. Steve? The return of Christ. This means that Jesus will come before the millennium, which is sort of like, well, duh, how can he have a millennium?
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But you'll find out later why that is maybe not true. So the idea is that the second coming is before the millennium, so it's premillennial, okay?
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Premillennium. All right. But very specifically, just to be as technical as possible here, it means that Jesus will, when
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I say the second coming, Jesus will bodily return to the earth before the millennium, okay?
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And you'll understand the distinction when we get to some later ones. The millennium is a literal thousand -year reign on this earth, right?
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And a new heaven and a new earth are not created until after it's over. So the millennium in dispensational premillennialism, the millennial kingdom happens on this earth, in this creation.
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And yes, we mentioned it, there is a rapture. And a rapture is when all of those who are alive at the time of the beginning, well, let me just say, because there's even varying viewpoints on the rapture, we'll just go with all those who are alive when the rapture happens are just sort of instantly transported to heaven, gathered up in the clouds with Christ.
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And taken out of the world. But the thing is, is that different DP beliefs, multiple flavors within it, there's possibility that you believe that the rapture occurs before the
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Great Tribulation of seven years. Some of them, there's mid -tribulational rapture folks, where you're headed at the three and a half year mark.
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And then there's others who think that the rapture happens at the end of the seven years. So like I said, you got lots of varying viewpoints within here.
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Probably the most famous pop culture thing about dispensational premillennialism is
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Left Behind, right? The whole Left Behind series books, which if you're of my generation, it's almost like you kind of grew up with them.
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They were, they got real big and popular right as we were coming of age. And so like, yes,
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Steve. See, there's a few of us.
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We will all report to Steve's office for repentance and penance later. By the way, this is wild to me.
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Technically, in theologian speak, the rapture is the secret rapture, since Jesus hasn't appeared yet when it occurs.
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Although, how you call it a secret when all the believers suddenly, I don't know, but they call it a secret rapture.
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It's hardly going to be a secret if they're right. And by the way, the seven, also within dispensational premillennialism, widely taught is the notion that the seven churches in Revelation 1 to 2 represent seven what?
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Anybody know? Ages. Okay, not dispensate. I was hoping somebody would say dispensations.
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They would, and I would be like, no, you're wrong. Seven ages within one dispensation, the church age dispensation.
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So it's like seven subdivision, like dispensational, big on dividing things. Seven, eight, that each church in, of the letters represents a different time period within the church age.
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And we are currently in the Laodicea part, the not good one.
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Okay. Let's talk about,
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I haven't filled in all the blanks yet on dispensational premillennialism. You're going to have to bounce around this table as we go.
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But now let me tell you about historic premillennialism. Okay. Historic premillennialism is also futurist.
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The millennium is coming. Not a surprise. And as you can guess on the sliding scale of things, they are literal, but maybe not as literal with Revelation and Daniel as the dispensational premillennialists are.
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Some of the numbers might be symbolic. It's kind of what they are willing to concede.
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Maybe the tribulation isn't an exact seven years. Maybe they don't, you know, maybe it's not exactly three and a half years that the
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Antichrist reigns, all this kind of stuff. Right. And maybe even there are some who even say that the thousand is not a literal number, but rather symbolic of fullness of time.
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One of the more interesting flavors, I think, of historic premillennialism, and this is the one that goes way back, like the, the reason it's called historic is because even some early church fathers seem to be teaching a form of this, that they have this notion of the present earth lasting for 6 ,000 years, corresponding to the six days of creation.
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They're kind of latching on to the thousand years as a day, as a day is a thousand years thing from first Peter. And so they think that that will happen.
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And at the seventh day, the rest day would be the 1 ,000 years of the millennial kingdom.
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Okay. But they are still very literal about the idea of Jesus reigning on the current earth for some period of time, at least, whether it's an actual thousand years or symbolic thousand years, that Christ will reign a visible kingdom of God, answering in full the prayer, thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.
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Okay. Now, historic premillennialists do not believe in a secret rapture.
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Okay. Does that mean there's no rapture? Not exactly.
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They still sort of are like, well, what First Thessalonians is describing is just simply how, as I've already filled in there for you, the idea that all the
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Christians who are alive at the time of the second coming of Christ will be gathered up at the last day.
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Right. So it is still describing sort of what's going to happen at the instant that Jesus returns to us. But yeah.
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Right. Right. Correct. Yes. There won't be like some kind of like mass death of all the
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Christians right at the second coming kind of thing. Right. So it's almost like, you know, in, as the last judgment is getting underway, all those who are alive in Christ are cut up.
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All those who are dead in Christ are resurrected and almost, and then set aside as the sheep, and then everyone else is set to the other side as the goats.
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Right. In that picture from Matthew. Historic premillennials also do not have any special role for ethnic
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Israel. Okay. So when, and what that means is that like in Revelation 7, if you're familiar with that,
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I know I'm kind of broad brushing it here, and I'm not going to go through all of Revelation with you today.
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But if you know, in Revelation 7, there's this passage where God commands the angels to go out and seal on their foreheads, 144 ,000 different Jews.
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Okay. Divided equally amongst the 12 tribes of Israel. But the dispensational premillennials are like, yep, that is actual ethnic
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Jewish people from those actual tribes. God, even though we've lost track of who's part of most of 10 of those 12 tribes of Israel, God knows who those people are, and they're all going to get specifically elect chosen or whatever, which is kind of odd, because dispensationalists are usually not all folks who believe in election.
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But anyway, and so, you know, but for historic premillennialists, it's just simply symbolic of the fullness of the children of Abraham, the spiritual children of Abraham.
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Okay. All right. And that, so that's that one. All right. Amillennialism.
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Anybody know what the prefix ah means in this context? No. Right. So amillennialism means no millennium.
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No millennium. Although that's not really fair, because they would probably say that they just believe that there is an ongoing millennium.
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Okay, so they're not futurist. They are, like, ongoing might be the best thing to fill in there.
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Revelation for them describes spiritual realities and not literal events. Spiritual realities that the
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Church of God is undergoing even today, and will continue to undergo. So, for example, the imprisoning of Satan that Mark just read for us in Revelation 20.
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Okay. They think that that is representative of, any guesses? If it's happening right now, what do you think that means?
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Yeah, that he's restrained, at least, right? That he's restrained by Christ's work on the cross, right?
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That his penal substitution and our declared justification, there are people Satan can't touch.
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There are things he can't do, even though he wants to, right? He cannot prevail against the
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Church. He's just, he's restrained and bound and just trapped and doomed.
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Lo, his doom is sure, as the Luther wrote in the hymn. The millennium for them is representative of the
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Church age, all right? And it will just simply last for as long as the Church age is lasting, in which, and the reason that it's still a kingdom is because they say, well, look, the kingdom of God is spreading across the globe right now.
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In Old Testament times, it was extremely limited to this tiny little sliver of land right on the east coast of the
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Mediterranean Sea. And now it's exploding across the whole globe, where we are, where what is, it is coming to pass of every tribe and tongue and nation having some folks called out of it and saved, right?
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Not maybe completely come to pass yet, but is coming to pass is the idea.
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So it's representative of the Church age. God, Jesus is ruling over his kingdom.
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We are his, we the Church are his earthly kingdom. And so Revelation, actually, so for Amalekites, they believe that they have a good handle on the book of Revelation because they think they can explain the weird sort of like repeats or loops that seem to happen within the narrative of Revelation as, look, it's just describing these same realities from different camera angles.
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One good example of this is Revelation 19 and Revelation 20, both describe
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Jesus destroying all of his enemies. And if you're not Amillennial, you have to deal with that and say like, well, how on earth could he destroy all his enemies and then destroy all his enemies again?
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Didn't he destroy them all the first time, right? Who got, who escaped or whatever. And for premillennialists, both dispensational and historic, that's explained by the notion of there's a, when
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Christ comes before the millennium, he destroys all of the enemies who are alive at that time and then sets up his millennial kingdom.
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But then at the end of his millennial kingdom, there is another revolt, right? And that second, because Satan gets out of his imprisonment and there's one last revolt and there's one last put down of Christ's enemies at the end of the millennium.
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But for Amillennialists, they just say, look, that's just looking at, it's describing the same reality from different angles.
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Christ is defeating his enemies now. He is at work in doing that and will continue to do that all through the church age.
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Okay. All right. And then lastly, number four, post -millennial. Post -millennialism.
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Post -millennials are preterists. So they get the pre -suffix, even though they're post.
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Following? Good. Great. It essentially means that the millennium has already happened or maybe some post -millennials are also in the amillennial camp of it's happening now.
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Okay. They believe that the growing of the kingdom of God cannot be stopped.
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Okay. Cannot be stopped. They kind of have that in common with the amillennials, but they take it a little bit further and they say that eventually it's going to grow and grow and grow and grow and eventually usher in a golden age, right?
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They're the most optimistic of all of these viewpoints. They hold strongly that God cannot be frustrated.
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God's will will be done. He cannot be stopped. Eventually God will win and he's going to win even here on this earth and this creation, not just by wiping it all out and starting new.
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And so for post -millennialists, most of revelation other than the millennial kingdom ones are speaking of events that led up to and include the fall of Jerusalem in 70
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AD. So all the apocalyptic destruction and, and terror and everything else, the tribulation that's being described is all describing what the
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Romans did to the Jews in 70 AD and in, and in the lead up to that. Okay.
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And just the destruction of ethnic Israel at that point, they ask, and it's a valid point.
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Why would John write a prophecy book addressed to specific people living in that time, right?
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Revelation is, it's a, it's not just a general book. It is a letter.
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It's a circular letter meant to go to seven different churches, but it was to seven churches, right?
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And he's like, why would they would say, why would John write a specific letter to specific people?
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If not to warn those specific people about events that were going to happen in their lifetime, right?
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So that's the argument for the post -millennials. Okay. And by the way, all the other folks, depending on where you fall within the spectrum of them, usually grab at least one or two things out of Revelation and say, yeah, that's describing what happened in 70
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AD. So, you know, post -millennials just sort of throw it all under that bucket.
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Okay. So for amillennials and for, for the dispensationalists, what happened in 70
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AD is that was the end of a dispensation. That was the end of Israel's dispensation completely, the
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Old Testament dispensation, and now the church age has truly begun, although there's sort of an overlap because most of them also time the beginning of the church age with, in the beginning of that dispensation with Pentecost.
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For historic premillennialists and amillennialists, what happened is simply the end of ethnic Israel, right?
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And, and their, the end of their role in history and God's, you know, now, now it is spiritual
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Israel only is within God's economy. Okay.
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All right. Did I cover all the holes? Anybody missing one that they want me to ask?
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Yes, Vadim. Oh, sure. Well, so for dispensational, what
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I was trying to get at was rapture. That's what I want you to put in. So secret rapture for the dispensational premillennialists.
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For the post -millennialists, what if, what's happening? It's kind of like nothing because, because we've already gotten to the golden age, right?
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So it just, nothing really happens. It just, you just keep on, just, yes, yes, we'll get to the, that, that's, that's in the, that's in the, the, the level one stuff.
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Okay. Now, here's the thing. As I said to you at the beginning from my Martyn Lloyd -Jones quote, my, what
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I am happiest about is I don't have to tell you which one is right. Okay.
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I don't have to tell you because these are tertiary. And the good news is I promise we'll all eventually find out which one of these is right.
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Right. And in fact, I'm going to leave room for the possibility that actually none of them are right. And there's some fifth option that we've not even really figured out that is the true truth.
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Okay. But we will find out. And when we think about level two doctrinal stuff and about differences between denominations, you know, look, as I researched each of these views and I tried to give them their fair shake in what
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I presented here today, what I noticed to my sadness is a whole lot of reductionism going on.
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Okay. A whole lot of reductionism. And if you're not familiar with that term, it's very similar to what happens in modern political discourse.
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Okay. This guy is on the right. And so he must believe in everything that the opponents of those who are on the right accuse the right of believing.
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They reduce him to some caricature of a right winger. And, you know, and the same thing, if you want to, you could do reductionism on the left wing and reduce folks to a caricature of a left winger or whatever else.
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And so, and the same things happening here with eschatology, where they, where, you know, they kind of reduce each other.
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They argue and bicker over this stuff and they reduce each other to caricatures of dispensational premillennialists or amillennialists or whatever.
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And I find that so unfair because there are so much nuance even within each of these viewpoints.
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So it's really hard to label someone as one of these things. And also, because it's tertiary, there's just no reason to condemn any man or woman for sincerely holding to any of these either.
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And you know what? I'll give you a little peek behind the curtain here. As I was doing this,
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I thought about writing, I actually wrote down, I captured, it's in my notes, but I scratched it out, names of various teachers and theologians who hold to each one of these.
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And you know what? I said, no, I'm not going to tell you. And you know why? Because I think that just gives you an easy way out.
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I mean, it allows you to, you'll hear a name that you like, and you'll say, oh, I like that guy. And you'll latch on and say, that's the one that I must, that one must be right because I, I like that guy.
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Right? And I think a lot of that happens today when it comes to our viewpoints on eschatology.
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And here's the other thing. It's also very true that many of these teachers who I wrote down, they've changed their minds over time, and I wasn't even really sure if I could be fair in saying them as a good example for any of these.
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Right? They've added more nuance to their personal position, or even some of them, I think, radically moved from one viewpoint to another over their lifetime.
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And you might find one writing in which they said one thing and another book in which they said something else. So while it might be true that in the
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American church, certain, I even have to say American, because it's different overseas and different churches, certain denominations might notably adhere to one viewpoint or another, and maybe more frequently or more strongly.
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I really, I just, I'm not gonna, in good conscience, get reductionist on you. So we're just not gonna do this.
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All right? Fair. We're not gonna talk about denominational differences here. I'll leave that maybe to your own research, but I also just want to encourage you not to push away any particular teacher just over their eschatology.
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Okay? All right. So let's get to, with my last few minutes of time, the fundamentals, the tier one stuff, the hills to die on.
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Okay? Number four, are there or are there not fundamental dogmas about eschatology on which we cannot compromise?
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What do you think? Yes, there are. There are.
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Okay? There are. Here's one. You will die someday. Okay. Welcome to personal eschatology.
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Okay? Unless you make it to the end time, unless you are alive at the second coming of Christ, you will die someday.
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The wages of sin is death. Okay? So eschatology number five can be divided into personal and general eschatology.
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So let's talk a little bit more about personal eschatology. You will die someday, as I already said, right?
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Have you ever thought about why Christians die? Okay, sure.
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I mean, that's the reason. We're all human, and so we're all condemned. But if Christ redeemed us, if we've been justified, if we've been freed from the penalty of sin, why do we die?
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Janet? Sure.
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Yep. Couldn't God have done something about that, though? Yes, Gary.
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Okay. Yes. Very good. Yes. That is true. He's given us eternal life, so we do live forever.
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Berkhoff gets into this. He says, you know, and also, by the way, certainly we could be taken to heaven without it.
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We could even do the, we're still in our earthly bodies, so we're going to have sickness and suffer and get old and whatnot.
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But then why go through the actual death process? Why not just be like, we all each get raptured on our own personal rapture, like Elijah, right?
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At the time of death, just so we don't have to actually go through the death thing. Well, Berkhoff says, you know, we're kind of forced to come to the conclusion that it is for our, because Romans 8 tells us this, it's for our good.
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It's for our sanctification. Death is a chastisement. The very thought of death, he says, or bereavements through death, the feeling that sickness and suffering is a harbinger of death.
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Just the consciousness of the approach of death. As Mike says, you will die someday, right?
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All have a very beneficial effect on the people of God because they serve to humble the proud, to mortify carnality, to check worldliness, and to foster spiritual mindedness.
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So the truth is that the thought of death is meant to be, or can be, and should be even a help to believers, that we should not see it as a threat necessarily, right?
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But rather for our growth. Yes. Yeah. There's a get out of death free card.
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Right, exactly. Right.
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Right. Because then they would, simply, they'd be looking for the easy out from death and not really believing for the reasons you ought to believe.
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Okay. Number two on the personal eschatology is your soul is immortal, as Gary said.
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Okay. Your soul is immortal. Special revelation here is beyond doubt.
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I'm not even going to get into it, right? Christ himself teaches it on numerous occasions. Probably the most famous,
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Matthew 22, when she talks about how he's the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and he's the God of the living and not of the dead, right?
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Right now, they were living now at the time that he was teaching. Even though they weren't resurrected yet bodily, they were still living.
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Okay. Their soul is immortal and your soul is immortal. Also, personally, for you,
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I have good news. There is no intermediate state for you. There is no intermediate state.
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To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. Or as Jesus told the man on the cross, today, you will be with me in paradise.
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Okay. Not today, you will be with me in some holding tank. Today, you will be with me in some floaty, ethereal kind of subconsciousness until later.
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Okay. No. The Westminster Catechism, the Second Helvetic Confession, right?
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They're both very clear on this. They actually specifically state there is no intermediate state.
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Although, interestingly, if you look at number seven on your handout, this is one of the first places that the church went off the rails, historically, was this idea about the intermediate state.
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And the reason for this is that it kind of happened in the second and third generations, right?
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So, 100 to 200 AD time frame. They got spooked, so to speak,
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Burkhoff says, by the delay of the return of Christ. Okay. At first, everyone assumed that Christ was going to come back any minute now.
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Okay. And that's been true of Christianity all throughout history, but they really thought it was going to happen any minute now.
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That there was no way it was going to take more than a generation or two for Christ's return.
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And so, the longer it went without him returning, the more they kind of got spooked by it, and they got nervous about the idea of trying to protect the significance of both individual judgment at death and general judgment after the resurrection.
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And so, they started to talk about this idea of a subterranean Hades, where they got a measure of what was to come, and then after the resurrection, the fullness of what was to come.
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And as soon as you hear the word Hades, you should obviously pick up on the idea that Greek philosophy was creeping in, right, into church teaching.
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And it's no surprise, if you know the historical stuff about the Church Fathers, that it's the
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Alexandrian school of a thought that is leading the way here. And as you can also imagine, once you posit any kind of intermediate state, it's a pretty easy, slippery slope from here to purgatory.
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Right? Can somebody kind of sum up purgatory for me, the Roman Catholic teaching on purgatory?
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Steve? Right. It's the intermediate state in which you go in order to have any unconfessed sin purged from you.
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You're basically paying penance for some amount of time until you're finally worthy enough to enter heaven.
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Who gets to go straight to heaven? Who gets to skip purgatory? Yeah, just saints.
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That's it. An excess of merit, as they say.
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Yes, that's right. I will never forget one of the most memorable things to me about this is
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I remember when John Paul II was on his deathbed. And he, they're putting out, you know, the
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Church is putting out statements routinely about his his condition and whatnot, and encouraging the faithful of the
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Roman Catholic Church to be praying for him and everything. And at one point, they put out a statement purportedly from him himself.
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I don't know if he actually said this or not, but where he said, please pray for me that I might enter into heaven.
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I thought, he's the Pope. I remember I talked to my Roman Catholic co -workers at that time, and I said, if your
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Pope doesn't even know if he's going to make it into heaven, what hope do you have that your
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Pope needs prayers to get in? Thankfully, Christ, with the true gospel, it's done.
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And so the real biggest problem with anything about a doctrine of intermediate state, of course, is that it diminishes, degrades, denigrates, insults the work of Christ.
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It basically says it wasn't enough, didn't quite do it all. When Christ said, it is finished, he was, you know, a little off on how right he was.
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I mean, that's what that basically is saying. The other error of intermediate state is, which got popular even into the
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Enlightenment period, is the notion of soul sleep, which is just that you are just asleep until the resurrection, and you don't even notice time passing.
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And this comes from the fact that Paul euphemistically, on several occasions in the New Testament, talks about death as sleep.
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But he's just being gentle about what he's saying. All right. And then lastly, personally, you will be resurrected, okay, because the last enemy is death, and it will be defeated for all.
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And a physical resurrection is going to happen in order to restore us to our intended, designed -for state.
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Again, God will not be frustrated. He built us to be body, soul, spirit.
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We are going to be body, soul, spirit. He's not going to lose out to Satan and sin on this score.
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All right. And the physical resurrection is that. And once resurrected, you will undergo either eternal punishment in the lake of fire, or enjoy eternal life in the new heaven and the new earth.
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So when we get to, and that's number eight. So when we get to now general eschatology in number nine, we're going to rush through these last few, the last couple of minutes.
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What is the clearest, most important true statement we can make about the future of the world?
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We've said it a bunch already today. God wins. Oh, I like that.
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That's even, that's even shorter and clearer than what I put. What I wrote is, Jesus is coming back.
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Okay, that is the non -negotiable. Jesus is coming back. God wins.
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And Jesus is coming back to judge the living and the dead. The Bible so clearly teaches us,
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Birkhoff says, to look forward to a final judgment as the decisive answer of God to the problem of evil and the puzzles of temporary success of the wicked.
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Satan is going to be defeated. All right. And Revelation tells us he and the demons are going to be cast into the lake of fire.
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And what else is cast into the lake of fire? Have you ever noticed? Yeah. Death and hell are cast into the lake of fire.
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So where I say they're number 11, the physical place that we call hell today does not survive the end times.
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It is cast into the lake of fire itself, the place. So truly, again, to be most technically correct, the final eternal state of the wicked is the lake of fire.
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It's not hell. Hell is the thing today, which is still a place of torment, but the lake of fire is the final place, the lake of fire that's been prepared originally for Satan and his demons since they were the ones to rebel first.
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And it's a place that is capable of torturing not just humans, but also angels.
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All right. So it's an extremely common deception that Satan and his demons will rule in hell for all eternity.
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They're not ruling there now. They're not even there now. As I mentioned in the angelology course, in fact, they will be tortured in the lake of fire for eternity.
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They will be undergoing the same and just worst punishments, certainly not ruling.
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Whereas on the flip side, on the good news, the old earth is utterly destroyed and replaced by an entirely new creation.
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Okay. And that is the new heaven and the new earth. And they are a singular place.
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Okay. It's not like multiple places. It's just a one title for one singular place, one new universe.
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Revelation even sort of describes easy transit between the two. Okay. So, and it's not a renovation of the old creation.
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It's not extreme makeover universe edition. All right. It's a totally new thing.
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And the joy of living in this new creation will be perfect and full. It will be a rewarding, satisfying, happy life in perfect communion with the angels, the saints, and most importantly,
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Jesus. That's the eschatological hill to die on.
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Okay. All right. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, I thank you so much, Lord, for this look into our certain future.
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And Lord, even though good men and women have thought about this for a long time and studied it, and the details, of course, are hazy for us as we have not seen the end completely.
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We know that Jesus is coming back. We know that those whom are your sheep will be saved and preserved and brought into eternal life, full and rewarding joy.
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And we know that those who do not repent will be sent away into the darkness and utter torment of the lake of fire.
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Father, we pray, Lord, that you would turn hearts even today to repent from their sins and to trust
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Jesus as their savior, to escape such a terrible fate, to recognize the great promises that are ours in Christ Jesus.