Sunday, October 24, 2021 PM

Alright, well we're going to go ahead and get started. We have just about finished up Daniel chapter 6 on Sunday mornings, and we'll be, as the Lord provides, starting Daniel chapter 7 before the end of this year and then moving forward.

Why Eschatology Is a Difficult but Necessary Study

And we're going to hit a lot of different passages in Daniel 7, and as I preach through those and give an explanation of the text, I fully anticipate a lot of eyebrows going askance in my direction because we're going to be dealing with the doctrine of the end times, last things, eschatology, etc., etc.

Earlier on in my pastoral ministry, I vowed to avoid all things eschatological because I didn't want to get fired. Because feelings run high, as they should, when we love Jesus and have a hope about how He wins and our blessed hope in Christ and our victory and the fullness of our salvation.

Every time we sing certain hymns, those passions are kindled. And it's unfortunate that one of the definitions of the millennium is that it refers to the 1 ,000 years of peace that Christians love to fight about.

But there's no avoiding talking about the hope and the prophecies of the Bible, there's no avoiding it. Earlier on, the first thing I did when I was a pastor was I began preaching through Genesis and Matthew and I figured I was safe.

Beginning of the Old Testament, beginning of the New Testament, I shouldn't hit anything too controversial there, and I ended up bouncing off of one landmine to the other with some very patient, loving folks.

The Olivet Discourse and Reading Scripture by Scripture

So, what I thought we would do on Sunday nights is give opportunity for questions about Daniel as we move through chapters 7 -12. Also to give some context. I am fully convinced that when Jesus sat with His disciples on the Mount of Olives across the Kidron Valley looking at the temple, at the Temple Gate, and at Jerusalem, that He was sharing with them in a pastoral way things that they and their generation needed to know, and hence things that we need to also apply, particularly to our lives.

At the end of Daniel, Daniel is instructed by the Lord to seal up the prophecy because the time was not at hand. He was to seal it up because it was not close at hand. When Jesus sits with His disciples, He unseals what's there and begins to say, okay, so you remember what Daniel said, so here's how you are to think.

My goal for our Sunday night series moving forward is to take a look at what is called the Olivet Discourse, which you can read for yourself, and I encourage you to please do that. Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21 have parallel materials.

You'll see that when you read the Gospels. Hey, I read that parable here in Luke, and I read that parable in Mark, and I think Matthew had the very same parable, or hey, this miracle is in all three Gospels.

You see that when you read through the, and then sometimes you'll even find the same stories and parables and things in John. In Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21, we all have very similar material packaged together, and also attending in Luke 17, Matthew 25, and so on, but I want to take a look at those areas of Scripture, primarily because I think it's the clearest place for us to look.

If you ever have something given to you in triplicate, or three different accounts, or three different vantage points on the same scenery, you are given a lot of advantage in understanding it, whereas we may read a verse here or there in various parts of the Bible, and we don't quite know what to make of it, or here is a vision in Ezekiel, or here is a saying from Zechariah, or whatever.

We may struggle with that. I think we all do, but here we have three different Gospels rendering to us the words of Christ, and that gives us, I think, added clarity, because I think our goal should be, and I think we can all agree about this, that whatever Jesus is talking about in his prophecies and hopes about what is to come as he speaks to his disciples, that we must interpret the Scriptures according to the Scriptures.

We know that the Bible is true. We know that everything there is accurate. We know that God's promises come true. And so we are to read the Scriptures according to the Scriptures, and the Scriptures should be our primary interpreter, and I think that's the goal.

Where We Learn Eschatology and Why Broad Reading Matters

So I have a handout I thought we would look at together, and this may involve some honest reflection at the moment. But we have to think about where have we gained most of our familiarity with the doctrine of last things.

I remember growing up, there was a series of books being published, one after another, the Left Behind series, and I read some of those and gave up because there were just so many of them, I'll never catch up, and so on.

And that was like the only familiarity that I had, and I didn't really hear much more than that. But where do you find, or view, or hear in times teaching most? Where do you believe you have learned the most eschatology?

Eschatology is just a fancy word, it means the study of last things. So you see the handout there, and then you see the answers in each line. Some people do a lot of reading, some people do watching, some people do listening, some learn better by singing, or in conversation.

Some people like to hitch their wagon to a particular teacher and say, yeah, you figure it out, I'm done with this. So some honest reflection, which one did you circle the hardest, anybody? Bible study?

Well, that's the Sunday school answer. Story is so compelling, right? Story is just so compelling, to see a story and character development and to watch a crisis unfold and the solution and so on, it's a very compelling kind of teaching material.

Anybody else? Conversations, yeah. Sure, yeah, conversations and have some, hashing it out or having things reinforced, you know, and having a kind of a nomenclature, favorite sayings and so on, right, yeah.

I don't know if you know this, but about, you know, 25 of the internet is about the doctrine of last things and, no, I'm just kidding, a lot of material out there, let's just say, and every search is too abundant to plow through, so a lot of things out there.

I have, like, the favorite teachers on the subject down at the bottom, just a, and you have to fill in the blank one because obviously I don't have room on the paper to list all of the experts that have made a living off of the prognostications and so on, and the study materials or the books and so on, so anybody have a circle or a fill in the blank?

Sermons? A specialty? Okay. I was seeing David Jeremiah lately. Oh yeah, David Jeremiah, that was a name that got mentioned a lot at my previous church, absolutely. I had the founder of the church who had started the thing let me know when he was attending near his final years that David Jeremiah was his pastor, so that was encouraging.

All right, I guess that's enough for the name dropping. All right, well, I want to say that when we look at the different places that we maybe absorb information, either information that we see as solidifying what we already believe or perhaps challenging what we believe, we, of course, all agree that the standard is the Word of God, and if we want to do anything, we want to learn more about what God has to say to increase in our knowledge and understanding of the goodness of God and His Word because that's what we trust.

And so, even if we don't agree with one another's conclusions in reading the text and looking at the different passages, we will grow in our understanding of the Word and I think grow in our appreciation of God's power and His goodness and His desire for us to have our hope completely settled upon Jesus Christ as our Savior and as our Sovereign.

I will say that the wider we cast our net in this study, the wider we cast our net in the scriptures, the more abundant and healthy our catch is going to be. If we only cast our net in our thinking about what is the hope that we have and what is the meaning of these promises, if we only cast our net into very small selections of the scripture, we're going to bring back a very slim catch.

We're not going to have as a healthy view of what God has for us. If we narrow our sampling, the weirder and unhealthier it can get. Just ask the Seventh-day Adventists, ask the Jehovah's Witnesses. So, our reading of the scripture should be as broad as it can be and that's why we're all still growing and still humbling ourselves to the teaching of the Word.

My thought on the matter is this, that Jesus Christ is the master interpreter. If our beginning thoughts on last things sit at the feet of Jesus, I believe that our concluding thoughts on last things, though more expansive, will have not left the childlike humble posture where we began.

So, I don't think that we have to stray from the feet of Jesus and just listening to him and trusting him as we go. At the very, very least, even if you totally disagree with me, you'll understand why I say the things I say when I'm going through Daniel, and the eyebrow elevation will not be as extreme.

There he goes again. All right, so, a fun little thing here. We've got three quotes. I don't know if you've had time to familiarize yourself with the quotes down here at the bottom of the handout. I'll read them for you so we have time to do that.

We've got three names to try to match to three different quotes. And this is just, you know, shooting in the dark, I'm sure, but we'll try to figure out who said what. So, the three names are Tim LaHaye, John Hagee, and Jan Markle.

Or is it Jan Markell? Is she French? I don't know. The first quote is this, what terrible wars, both foreign and domestic, what pestilences, famines, and quaking of the earth has history recorded? The next quote, for now we see that nation arises against nation, earthquakes overwhelm countless cities, pestilence we endure without interruption.

It is true that we do not behold signs in the sun and moon and stars, but that these are not far off we may infer from the changes in the atmosphere. And the third quote, present world conditions are so similar to those the Bible prophesied for the last days, they, meaning Christians, conclude that a takeover of our culture by the forces of evil is inevitable, so they do nothing to resist it.

Anybody want to take any stabs at who said what? This is the fun part. Say it again? CAB. CAB spells cab. All right, that's good. Okay. All right, so Haley has put her guess out there. Who else would like to?

Who knows, right? Changes in the atmosphere of, yeah, big time stuff. Be concerned about that. Any guesses at all? Yeah, it's all gonna pan out in the end. Yeah, pan millenials. I'll tell you, Tim LaHaye did say number C, so Haley got it right, got it right, yeah.

So Tim LaHaye helped with the left behind series. And even though he helped with that, he does express a little bit of concern about if there's a lot of hand wringing and then Christian's kind of like, well, the engine light is on, better let go of the wheel mentality.

That's not exactly what Jesus calls us to do, but to be faithful. So, now I've absolutely tricked you on the other two. The first quote is by Tertullian, who lived in the 200s. Tertullian was the church father, and he gave us the word trinity.

He was the first one to explicitly write carefully against the sin of abortion. And so he's a notable church father. So in the 200s, this was what he was writing, the 200s. And yes, I did trick you on B as well.

It wasn't Jen Markle or John Hagee. It was, I wanna say, did I get it right, yeah, Pope Gregory. Pope Gregory in the 500s, Bishop of Rome. In the 500s, this is what he said. The more you read church history, the more you'll become familiar with the thoughts and concerns, the prayers, and the desires of believing Christians in every generation as they looked about the world and they saw all of these things over and over again.

Corruption, they saw warfare, they saw death, disease. They saw nations, empires utterly collapse, economies completely dry up. They were subject to terrible storms, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions. They were subject to great disasters time and again.

And every generation of Christians that were writers produced comments like this. And every last one of these believers, who were true believers, put their hopes squarely on Jesus Christ. They're desiring for him to set all things right.

And this, of course, is a true and biblical hope. That we go around the world and we see all these things that are terrible and wrong and go in the wrong direction and so on. We're certainly not the first generation to see that, to experience that.

The abominations of our culture have been around for thousands of years. The Bible is full of passages that decry the abominations that we are concerned about today. Because they've been around for all that time.

So, we need to recognize our solidarity with our Christian brothers and sisters who have gone on before us, that our hope is the same as their hope. That Jesus is going to come back and he's going to set all things right.

This is what John, what he says. There's always been, there's always gonna be, but he has overcome the world. Yeah, be of good cheer. I have overcome the world. That's for me, that's a peaceful. Yes. You say in Jesus.

Absolutely. So we can, so Jesus knew what we were going to go through and so he gives us comfort and encouragement. Something else I'd like to just cover really quickly is that concerning the understanding of last things or eschatology or so on, sometimes it's unhelpful to bring to the forward all the technical terms that are used in debates.

Because they move us away, to some degree, away from the information that's in the text, in the stories that Jesus tells, in the pictures that he crafts, in the exhortations that the apostles give to the churches.

And when we go to the technical terms and go to the debates, we move away from the natural readings of the text. And that can be detrimental to our fellowship, to our conversation with one another. And yet these words still exist.

But I would like to point out all of the unity that true believers have in however they are convinced about the end times in the Bible. And I want to do that by simply pointing out where everything ends up, okay?

So concerning the doctrine of revelation, how do we know what we know? At the last look, where do we end up according to the Bible? Well, there's going to be a fullness of knowledge and understanding and wisdom.

Right? Yeah, hallelujah. What about the doctrine of God? Well, at the last, we see that God's nature and character and his works will all coalesce in eternal brilliance, right? We'll see everything come to pass that God has desired to come to pass.

What about the doctrines of creation and the doctrine of God's providence? Well, at the end, last thing we see is that the new creation is going to succeed in God's original design. Okay, and that's what all Christians believe.

What about the doctrine of man? We see that a new race of humanity, born again in Christ, will overcome in him. And that's what all Christians believe. And no matter the details of how we get there, that's what all true Christians believe.

What about the doctrine of sin? Well, that Christ's judgment and the resurrection will end sin and death and the curse. Right? And we all agree about that. And what about the doctrine of the incarnation?

Well, Jesus Christ, the God of very God and man of very man, is forever our mediator. He will always be at the right hand of the throne for us. What about the doctrine of salvation? Well, justified, sanctified, and glorified, we will be saved from the very presence of sin forever.

What about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit? Well, we will forever rejoice in fellowship with God through the effulgence of the Spirit. And then what about the doctrine of the church? Well, that the full innumerable number of the redeemed will be gathered and raised.

All right? So we all agree on those things. And that's why there is a range of understanding of the details, but there's agreement about how it all turns out. And that's why there's a fellowship in unity in Christ as we move forward.

Millennial Views and Broader Ways of Reading Prophecy

So when we begin to think about how this all shapes together, usually people begin to identify themselves by millennialism. Which millennial are you? And I talked with Brian Barcelo about this to some degree, and he pointed out that because I'm Generation X and was born before 1984, I'm pre-millennial, and my kids born so recently, they're post-millennial.

No, that's not what that means. Yeah, exactly. But actually, yeah, the passage in Revelation 20 verses 2 through 7, the thousand years of peace that Christians love to fight about. And so people begin to identify themselves by this, and these are way, way less helpful.

And so we'll move from the less helpful to the more helpful in a moment. But you've heard of pre-millennialism, and the historic pre-millennialism refers to the hopes of many Christians from the times of Polycarp and Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, the early, early church fathers, and what they anticipated in terms of Christ fulfilling his promises.

And to make it short, the idea is that Christ's return launches his kingdom, which will last on earth for exactly 1 ,000 years. In other words, he's going to return, and he'll launch a 1 ,000-year kingdom.

And that's what historic pre-millennials believe in, just being very brief. And then there's dispensational pre-millennialism, which says that Christ's returns launch his Jewish kingdom, which will last on earth for 1 ,000 years.

So it's a qualified Jewish kingdom, not just a kingdom. And amillennialism says that Christ reigns now over his people through his spiritual kingdom. The 1 ,000 years is a symbol of the perfect amount of time after which he returns.

The awe on millennialism means, oh, no, no, not that kind of millennialism. And then post-millennialism states that Christ reigns now, incrementally advancing his kingdom until, by his spirit and word, he conquers the world with the gospel, and he returns.

I've also developed funny definitions for each one, so bear with me. The caricature for historic pre-millennialists is this, stop confusing us with dispensationalists, would be their definition. Dispensational pre-millennialism, there's the Antichrist.

Wait, no, there's the Antichrist. Wait, no, there's the Antichrist. Amillennialism, the caricature is, we hate Jews, and we hate the Bible, but mostly Jews. We also hate our name. And then post-millennialism, everything is awesome, it'll be made awesome by man's efforts.

We're a bunch of liberals. Those are the caricatures, usually brought out in the arguments of Christians against each other, and they accuse each other of all sorts of things which aren't true. So let's not do that.

Preterist, Historicist, Futurist, and Spiritualist Approaches to Prophecy

More helpful definitions. More helpful definitions. The millennial part of it is not as important as how we read the whole Bible, rather than how we handle one passage in the Bible. Remember how wide you cast your net is important.

It's not about one passage in the Bible, it's about all the passages in the Bible and us doing our best to understand them. So more helpful definitions have to do with our reading. So instead of millennial views, how do we read?

One way is to read it as a preterist who interprets most prophecy as already fulfilled, not all of it, but most as fulfilled before the end of the first century, and very concerned with how God kept his promises to the original audiences.

Historicists interpret much prophecy as already fulfilled in the last 20 centuries. You're going to read this a lot about the Reformers. If you read Reformers and Puritans, sometimes they will have a lot of this as they see the goings on in Revelation and so on being fulfilled by the Roman Catholic Church and the Pope being the Antichrist and so on.

It's called a historicist, seeing things fulfilled throughout history. Futurists will interpret most prophecy as yet to be fulfilled. Almost all of it is yet to be fulfilled. It hasn't come to pass yet, and very concerned with how God will keep his promises probably in the near future.

And this is the one that is most in fashion today. And also a spiritualist interpretation interprets all prophecy as having transcendent spiritual lessons to be applied afresh to every generation of believers, and the timing of God's fulfillment is secondary.

So some comments on these four ways of reading. All prophecy in the Bible, even the ones that have been obviously all fulfilled, and we agree about that, has spiritual application to our lives. Okay, so did God keep his promise to David to give him a son?

That's fulfilled prophecy, right? Does that mean it's useless for us? No, it's the Word of God. So there's hope there, there's lessons there, there's application there. So if a prophecy is already fulfilled, then we have, you know, okay, well, that doesn't mean it's useless.

It means that there's all sorts of things that God wants to teach us through that. There are prophecies yet to be fulfilled. We all agree about that. Not everything has been accomplished yet, and we have a future hope.

It is bright, and it is good. And there are things that have been already fulfilled in history. They have come to pass, and we see that God's Word is true and are fortified in that time and time again.

So in some ways, we have to keep all four of those things in mind, no matter where we are in the text, as we are reading through. So I hope that that's been somewhat helpful. And in Matthew chapter 24, and Luke 21, and Mark 13, we have, see, next week, we have our fifth Sunday.

So we always have our flock groups on the fifth Sunday, so we're not going to be meeting then. And then November 7th, we will have our normal Sunday evening Bible study time, followed by a fellowship of the new deacons, a new deacon fellowship.

So we'll meet in here, and then we'll have a fellowship in here as well. On the 14th, we're scheduled to have our Thanksgiving dinner, so that will be another gap in our schedule. And then after that, the next week, I'm going to be gone, because it'll be vacation.

I'll be down in Ada, and bless God for hunting season. And so the following Sunday night that we can get together on this study will be the 28th of November. And then by then, the choir will probably be going in full swing, and a whole bunch of you will be gone.

But it will be on YouTube if you want to follow along with the study. So what I'm pointing out to you is that we're going to have some gaps. We're going to have some spaces in between our times together.

My encouragement to you is to just be as familiar as you can be with the Bible. Be familiar as you can with the text. So Matthew chapter 24 and of course 25 goes with it. And then Mark 13, Luke 21, but don't forget about Luke 17.

Okay, so Luke 17 has a lot of the same material as Matthew 24. And so Luke 17 goes along with Luke 21. My encouragement to you is to be in the Word. Read the text. Read it for yourself. Familiarize yourself with what Jesus has to say and how he shepherds his disciples, so that we can be ready for our next few lessons, which will be simply reading through the text, and observing what is there, and trying to make an account for it.

So that's the plan. Any questions before we close with doxology? Are we in the last days?

I think they started in the first century, did they not?

Ah, see Dwight's already ready to jump all the way. All the way. Yeah, so thank you, Dwight. What now? It's a blessing to sit next to Dwight. Yes, Jill knows that firsthand for many, many decades. Yes, that's good.

That's good. All right. Well, let's go ahead and close by singing the doxology together.