150. The Final Trumpet

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Dispensationalists have to argue in order for their system to work that Jesus is not reigning now, that he's not on his throne now, that he has not received his kingdom now, and that that doctrine, that little matrix -like system that they have concocted dishonors the king that sits on his throne now.

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And I pray to God that they repent because that sort of blasphemy is inexcusable. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf.

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This is episode 150, The Great Trumpet Blast. Well, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast.

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My name is Kendall, and we are back for another episode in our Revelation series where we began with the

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Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24. And we're doing that because the

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Olivet Discourse in Matthew's Gospel is sort of like the qualifying marathon that you would run before you ever think about suiting up for the

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Boston or for the New York City marathon. This is a passage where we can cut our teeth on it, and we can learn pivotal aspects of eschatology and prepare ourselves for the rigor that we are going to be facing in the book of Revelation, which is soon to begin, actually.

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We're getting really close to the end of Matthew 24, just a couple more episodes left. Revelation, as we've said many times, is the pinnacle of New Testament eschatology.

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So as we prepare to face that eschatological equivalent of Mount Everest, we have been getting our footing.

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We've been practicing with theological Sherpas on the Olivet Discourse. Now, just in case it's not been clear so far,

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I am what you would call a post -millennialist. I believe that Jesus is going to win the world to himself.

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I believe that little by little over time, the true and better Adam is going to fill the world with worshipers like Adam was supposed to do in Genesis 128.

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I believe that Jesus is going to make every family on earth come underneath the fountainhead of his covenant blessings,

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Genesis 12 .3. I believe that he's going to make the nations obedient to him in fulfillment of Genesis 49 .10.

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I believe that he's going to spread his dominion far and wide from sea to shining sea, from the river to the ends of the earth, as Psalm 72 .8

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proclaims. I believe that he's going to bring peace to the nations.

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That he's going to establish rule so comprehensively over the world that war is going to be no more, as Zechariah 9 .10

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foretells. I believe that like the stone in Nebuchadnezzar's dream, his kingdom began as something small and humble and unassuming, like a mustard seed that was sown down into the ground.

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But as Daniel 2 .35 declares, it's going to grow. And it's going to grow until it fulfills its purpose and it fills the entire earth.

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The same vision is reaffirmed in Daniel 7 .14 where the son of man is given dominion over all people, all nations, all languages, a kingdom that will not pass away, a reign that will not be destroyed and will never end.

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His government, as Isaiah 9 .7 tells us, will continually increase until its peace knows no end.

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This means that the trajectory of world history is not towards destruction, but restoration.

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Not towards defeat, but towards victory. Not towards collapse, but towards building up.

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The zeal of the Lord of hosts will accomplish this. This is why Jesus taught us to pray, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,

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Matthew 6 .10. Jesus didn't pray this prayer and teach us to pray this prayer out of futility, as if the world was never going to bend its knee to his will.

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He told us to pray this because he intends on heaven and earth being reunited together again.

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He intends on the earth looking like heaven at some point in the future. He intends for this prayer not to be a wimpy, whiny cry for something that we don't believe is going to happen, but a battle cry for the advancement of the gospel to the ends of the earth.

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And Jesus himself guaranteed his fulfillment. Isaiah 2 .2 -4 speaks of the latter days when all of the nations are going to flow to the mountain of the

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Lord and they're going to eagerly learn his ways and walk in his paths, which is exactly what the

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Great Commission says. A globe filled with disciples, nations beating their swords into plowshares, war being unlearned, and the law of God going forth from Zion to bring peace unto all peoples.

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How does that happen? Through disciples making disciples, making disciples to the ends of the earth.

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In Matthew 28, 18 -20, Jesus declares that all authority in heaven and on earth now belongs to him, not will belong to him, not could belong to him, not will belong to him someday, but does belong to him in full right now.

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And in that power and in that authority, he has sent forth his church, telling them to baptize the nations, telling them to teach the nations, and telling them to teach the nations not some minimalistic, mere

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Christendom sort of vocabulary, but to teach the nations how to obey everything

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Jesus has commanded. He's talking about a world that is, the future of it is a world that obeys

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Christ, that falls underneath his lordship. This is not a failure mission. This is a world -conquering mission.

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He is with us as we do it, as he promised, and he'll be with us as we do this until the very end of the age, until the task is completed.

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That is why Jeremiah 31, 34 says of the future that you're going to look at your neighbor and say, know the

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Lord, and they're already going to know the Lord from the least to the very greatest. The whole world is going to be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the water covers the seas,

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Habakkuk 2, 14. This is why John 3, 16 does not limit the scope of Jesus' love to just a few people, but he says, for God so loved the world.

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Why? Because God eventually is going to redeem the world. That's why 1 John 2, 2 tells us that Jesus is the propitiation, not just for our sins, but for the sins of the entire world.

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The redemption Christ has purchased is global in scale and total in its effect.

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The process of its application is ongoing, and it will keep going until it's finished.

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The glory of the Lord is going to cover the earth. That's total. That is complete.

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That is a world without rebellion. That is a world with no more resistance. That is a world that is totally submitted to Christ.

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That's a world where the scepter will not depart from Judah nor the ruler staff from between his feet until all the peoples on earth bring him tribute and render to him their obedience.

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Genesis 49, 10. Before Jesus returns, he's not going to come back to a bruised and a beaten bride.

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He's not going to come back to a world that's fractured, divided, war torn and broken. But he's going to come back to a world that is submitted to him.

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John 17, 23 says that it will be a world that is united around him.

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Psalm 22, 27 through 28 tells us that all the ends of the earth are going to remember and turn to the

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Lord. That's not speculation. These verses that I just quoted you are promises, promises that the world is going to turn to him.

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The world is going to worship before him. The world is going to obey him. The world is going to submit to him. The world is going to love him.

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These verses are reasons why that I don't believe in doom and gloom. These are reasons why

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I have great hope, great reason to believe that the evil in this world has an expiration date.

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The darkness is passing away. The true light is already shining. The kingdom is growing and its increase will no no end.

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And it's really difficult for us to see it. It's like grass growing. You don't notice it, but it's happening.

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If you think about the fact that in 80, 30, there was 120 believers and in 1950, there was only 800 million from 1950 until 2020.

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We went from 800 million people who call Jesus Lord to 2 .5

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billion. Did you did you hear what I just said? In 70 years, we've went from 800 million to 2 .5.

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That is a 3X multiplication of the church in just 70 years.

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And yet, the enemy has been so clever in convincing all of us that we are losing.

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That we are not gaining. That we are just moments away from a rapture because the world couldn't possibly get any worse than it is right now.

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The wildfires in California. The Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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The World Economic Forum. The Trilateral Council. I've even heard ones now that Trump is the

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Antichrist. And before that, it was Biden. And before that, it was Obama. And before that, it was

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Bush. And on and on and on it goes. And yet, all

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Jesus' kingdom does, it just keeps on winning and winning and winning. While it seems like everybody misses it.

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But, before all of this happens. Before this gospel goes to the ends of the earth.

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Before all of this is fully realized, which is what post -millennialism is. Most of New Testament eschatology is focused on a critical moment in redemptive history that had to take place before this glorious kingdom advanced.

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Now, I just said earlier, I'm a post -millennialist. I believe that the kingdom is advancing. The kingdom is coming.

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I believe that Jesus' church is going to advance to the ends of the earth. I believe that. But before we get there, the

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New Testament actually has to show us why that's going to happen. And the reason why that's going to happen is because Jesus perfectly, totally ended the

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Old Covenant world. He brought the final judgment on the Old Covenant world. Just as the birth of the

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New Covenant, the post -millennial world that I've been talking about, is rising. So that Jesus is doing two things in the

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New Testament, eschatologically speaking. He is putting to death the Old Covenant world, and he is rising out of the ashes of that Old Covenant world, a new covenant kingdom that will take over the world.

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Jesus came and he dismantled the Mosaic system so that the kingdom of Christ could come on earth and fill the earth.

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Not with the sacrificial system. Not with the Levitical priesthood. Not with the temple cult that was still standing in Jerusalem.

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No, he came to destroy that Old Covenant system, which was not an incidental, accidental event in history, but a necessary prerequisite to inaugurate the beginning of his worldwide kingdom expansion.

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That is why Jesus speaks so forcefully about the end of the age in Matthew 24 3, because he's not talking about the end of the world.

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He's not talking about the end of human history. He's talking about the severance of the types and shadows.

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The end of that Old Covenant system where he is going to put that away so that he could bring about his new covenant kingdom.

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Just like the exile of Israel marked the beginning of a new redemptive phase, the downfall of Jerusalem marked the final irreversible transition away from the

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Mosaic era to the age of the Messiah. This is why so much

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New Testament eschatology is not like the dispensational's claim about distant future events, but about imminent first century collapse of Jerusalem, the center of the

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Old Covenant world. Instead of the New Testament talking about the end, it mostly talks about the beginning.

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The beginning of what? The end of the Jewish age in the beginning of the church.

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That is the most prescient, the most important eschatological event that the

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New Testament writers considered right in front of them. It was future to them, but it's not future to us.

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It was things that were still in their future. But not in our future.

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Now we live under the reign of Jesus Christ. Now we live in his kingdom. But the

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New Testament writers were looking forward to a day when that kingdom would come in full. So what

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I would tell you is that the majority of eschatological passages that are in the

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Bible, the majority of them are future for the first century audience, but they're not future for us.

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They're future for them. They're future for the apostles, for the first century church, but not for us.

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That is exactly why Jesus says, truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.

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Why? Because he was inaugurating a kingdom, as Daniel 7 says, that will win all people, that will win all languages, and that will never end.

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The term generation, as we've described many times before, genea, never refers to a far future group, but it always refers to a people who are living at that time.

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The phrase is used consistently throughout the Gospels to refer to Christ's contemporaries. Jesus says, to what shall

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I compare this generation, Matthew 11, 16. He's talking about that generation. He says in Matthew 12, 39, an evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign.

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That's that generation right in front of him. He says in Matthew 12, 41 through 42, the men of Nineveh will stand up with this generation at the judgment.

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That's generation right in front of him. Matthew 12, 45, that is the way it will also be with this evil generation.

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Matthew 16, 4, an evil and adulterous generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given to it. Matthew 23, 36, truly

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I say, all these things will come upon this generation. There's simply no instance in the book of Matthew or in the

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New Testament in which the word this generation, the phrase this generation, means anything other than the people who are living at that time.

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The idea that it refers to some distant end time generation is pure eisegesis.

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It's reading into the text something that's not there because you're coming to the text with your own ideas and you're forcing them into the text like a round peg in a square hole.

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When Jesus says this generation will not pass away until all these things take place, he meant it.

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He's unmistakably referring to the people standing in front of him. That generation won't pass away until all of Matthew 24 has happened.

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And I believe the majority, the overwhelming majority of New Testament passages that deal with eschatology are not dealing about things that are future to us, but they're dealing about this.

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That generation would not pass away until the end of the old covenant order was completed and the rise of the

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New Testament church was inaugurated. That is what New Testament eschatology is overwhelmingly about.

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Not events that are in our future, but events that are in the near term future for the men who wrote the

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New Testament, the men who spoke the New Testament, the audience who heard the original declaration of the

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New Testament. They were thinking that these events were in their future, but we should not be thinking that most of those events are in ours.

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Why do I say this? Because as we've seen so far, many, many, many, many times,

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I would even argue most of the passages in the New Testament are near term future fulfillments that were finished in the first century.

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We've seen it over and over in Matthew 24. We've seen that they're talking about the collapse of Judah as a covenant people, that they're talking about the end of the old temple, the end of the sacrificial system, the end of the priesthood.

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We've seen that. And that's where I come to kind of my point in sharing why I'm a post -Megonielist, because I am looking forward to a grand and victorious future as Jesus continues to reign.

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But I want to acknowledge that a significant contingency of eschatological passages in the

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New Testament are not about that future glorious king.

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There are passages, there are things in the future, but most of it, most of it is talking about things that are going to occur in the first century.

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And you have to think like a Jew here. Don't think like a 21st century Christian where your life is the most important thing under the sun.

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Every generation thinks that way because we're egocentric people. We think our life is more important than anyone else's.

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But if you think about it just logically for a second, the most important event that happens in the

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Bible until the church, until Jesus offers salvation, is that the temple that God set up during the time of Moses, that era is over.

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I mean, from Exodus to Malachi, the majority of the

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Old Testament is a temple -centric era. It's a sacrificial -centric era.

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It's a priesthood -centric era. It's feast and clean and unclean and ceremonial laws and civic laws.

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And you've got this Old Testament system that pervades the vast majority of the

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Bible. The Old Testament is 75 % of the entire Bible, and the

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Mosaic system is about 90 % of that. So you're looking at somewhere around 65 or 70 % of the entire

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Bible is the Mosaic covenant. And when Jesus comes along and says that it's ending, that it's time is finished, that it's passing away, you are listening to, from Jesus' perspective and from the perspective of the apostles who are listening to this, you are listening to the most consequential thing that had happened in redemptive history up until that point.

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So it makes sense why the people living in that day considered it such a magnificent event and why they wrote about it so much and why the majority of the eschatological passages in the

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New Testament are talking about that. Again, the vast majority of eschatological passages,

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I believe, and I think I've proven so far, occur within the first century, just like the ones that we've been looking at so far.

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For example, we looked at this one last week. Isaiah 13 .10 describes the fall of Babylon, and it uses celestial imagery of collapse.

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So what we're saying here is Isaiah 13 .10, just like Matthew 24, is a passage that was in the future of one people, but not in the future of all people.

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When Isaiah gave this message, he was talking about the fall of a nation called Babylon that was currently in power, and it did fall.

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Historically, it was destroyed by the Persians, and Isaiah 13 .10 was fulfilled then.

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This is what Isaiah 13 .10 says. The stars of heaven and their constellations will not flash their light.

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The sun will be dark when it rises, and the moon will not shed its light, Isaiah 13 .10.

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Clearly, Babylon, when it fell, actually in history, it did not involve actual astronomical breakdowns in the heaven.

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But rather, what we've been talking about here is that the language of this heavenly visionary language represents a political and spiritual downfall of a great and powerful empire in human history.

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God uses apocalyptic language, which is spiritual symbols, heavenly symbols, to describe things that are happening on earth.

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That's the genre. The same holds true for Matthew 24. When Jesus talks about the sun and the moon and the stars, he's doing the exact same thing.

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Now, to be clear, I'm arguing here for most of the

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New Testament has already occurred, eschatologically speaking. I believe all of Matthew 24 already happened.

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I believe all of Revelation 1 through 20 already happened. And I believe

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Revelation 21 and 22 have not been finished yet, but they've been inaugurated already. So I'm arguing for a massive amount of eschatological passages in the

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New Testament to have already been fulfilled. But I want to be clear. I am not a full preterist. I don't believe that the final resurrection has happened.

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I don't believe that the final consummation of Christ's reign occurred in AD 70. To be clear,

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I believe that there's still things that are in our future, but I don't think that's the purpose of Matthew 24.

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I don't think that's the purpose of the book of Revelation. I think they are written to people who are getting ready to experience massive amounts of persecution, death, famine, disease, and all sorts of things.

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And Jesus and John are writing to them to encourage them to hold fast because that system, the

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Jewish system, is collapsing and the church is rising. It was a method.

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It was a way of encouraging them to hold fast. That's why Revelation says over and over and over, he who endures to the end will be saved.

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He who conquers will be saved. That's why it talks in these ways. Understanding this point is crucial because full preterists, or sometimes they're called hyper preterists, claim that all the prophecies, including the final resurrection and the second coming, were fulfilled in the first century.

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Now, we did talk about this last week, the second coming, and I clarified that this is not the physical bodily end of human history coming of Jesus.

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But full preterism believes that all of it's already happened. And I think that that's a grave error.

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Scripture teaches us that Christ's kingdom will grow and it will expand over time, Daniel 235,

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Isaiah 9 -7, that the final enemy that's going to be destroyed is death, 1 Corinthians 15 -26.

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And that enemy is going to be destroyed by Jesus when he comes back personally because he must reign until he's put all of his enemies under his feet.

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And the final enemy is death. And he himself will deal with death. That was not finished in AD 70.

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Death is still around. Death is still here. Death still reigns in the world.

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My grandma still died. Your pet cat, Muffy, still dies.

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We know that death is still an enemy. We're not going to solve that. Technology is not going to solve that.

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Cancer research is not going to solve that. That much is going to be gained in the world because of the church advancing technology, and it already has happened in the last 2 ,000 years.

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Now, the world is more fruitful. More people can live on the earth. More people can have food.

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More people can have shelter. The world has been lifted out of poverty because of the church.

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The world has been educated by the church. The world has been healed at hospitals because the church invented them.

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The church is going to have massive gains by the power of the Holy Spirit in submission to Christ.

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But the final enemy, death, will not be conquered by anyone save Christ. He will come back.

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He will defeat death. He will usher in the eternal state. He is what we are waiting on after we have taken the gospel to the ends of the earth.

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That's the partial preterist position, which is the one that I hold. That posits that the overwhelming majority of New Testament eschatological texts have already happened, and they refer to the judgment on apostate

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Israel and the inauguration of the first century church. But there are still things that remain in our future, including the final resurrection of the dead, 1

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Corinthians 15, the final visible return of Jesus Christ, Acts 1 -11, and the complete renewal of the entire creation,

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Romans 8, 19 -22. Therefore, when I say that Matthew 24 and the book of Revelation are already fulfilled,

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I'm referring to their first century fulfillment of the collapse of the

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Jews and the rise of the old covenant. And I am arguing that they don't have to do with the final coming of Jesus Christ at the end of human history.

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You may disagree with me on that, but that has been my aim to set out and to prove that.

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And now we're 13 episodes in. So with that introduction, if you're new here,

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I do want to say thank you. I want to say thank you for being here. And oh my goodness, talk about hard switches here.

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We have had, I think in the last 28 days, over 550 new subscribers on an eschatology channel, on a post -millennial partial preterist channel that's talking about first century events.

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Like if you're going to read a book on how to grow your subscribers on YouTube, this is not what they would tell you to do.

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And yet, by God's grace, 550 new subscribers have come. So welcome to every single one of you here.

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Welcome. We're glad you're here. But if you're confused on what we're talking about and you're like,

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I don't know where to start, then start at our first episode in this series. Go back and watch.

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Because what we've done is we've walked through Matthew 24 verse by verse, and we've talked about what has already happened.

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And we've proved that Jesus in Matthew 24 is talking about things that are going to happen in the first century.

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We've talked about earthquakes and famines and false messiahs and the abomination of desolation.

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We've talked about the great tribulation, the little tribulation. We've talked about a lot. 13 episodes so far, over 20 hours of content that is there for you to take advantage of.

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And if you like it and it's helpful for you, share it with others. Send it to other people. Do a

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Bible study on this topic with some friends. I'm putting this content out to help Christians understand biblical eschatology.

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So if you're new, don't skip those episodes. Go back and watch them. They will be very helpful to you.

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So with that, let us get into today's episode. And we need to begin with the

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Bible. We don't want to begin with our opinions. We want to begin with the Bible. And today our passage is

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Matthew 24 verse 31. And this is what the text says.

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And he will send forth his angels with a great trumpet, and they will gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of the sky to the other,

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Matthew 24, 31. Now, let's jump into part one, an eschatological

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Rosetta Stone. Now, as one of the engineering divisions of Napoleon Bonaparte's army was preparing for another

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Egyptian building to be demolished, one of his lieutenants inadvertently stumbled upon one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in the modern era, the

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Rosetta Stone. Perhaps you've heard of it. It was built right into the wall of an Egyptian house. And moments before this building was torn to the ground, they found this massive stone text that had inscriptions on it written in three different languages that would basically unlock the entire

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Egyptian hieroglyphic system from that day forward. Before that, the language of the

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Egyptians was an esoteric, pictorial -based language that was written on pottery shards and written on the side of ancient buildings that no one could make head or tails of.

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And yet after that, the entire world of ancient Egyptology opened up like never before because the key to the text had been found.

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Now, if you'll bring this metaphor over into the world of the Bible, the apocalyptic genre is very much like those

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Egyptian hieroglyphics. It's confusing. It's pictorial. The genre is well -known for its confusing images, its words, its signs, and its symbols, which many people don't understand, and they obfuscate in many various ways.

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It's been a source of confusion among the scholarly and the tinfoil hat -wearing novice community forever who come up with one theory after another after another attempting to crack the proverbial code when the

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Rosetta Stone has been right there all along. Thankfully, we don't have to look into the future.

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We don't have to look into the present. We need to look into the past to figure out how to interpret these events, and we've already been given the

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Rosetta Stone, as it were, on how to interpret these events because they're in the Bible.

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Instead of looking at geopolitical events or reading Reddit subthreads about the rise of Khazarian Luciferians and ancient

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Freemasons and the Illuminati ruling the world and all of that stuff, we need to just open up our Bible because the

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Bible is the key to understanding the apocalyptic genre. The Rosetta Stone's right there in the pages of the

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Old Testament. See, unlike many genres of the Bible, apocalyptic is entirely dependent upon the past to show us what it means for the present.

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It borrows language and images and symbols that come right out of the Old Testament Scriptures that were previously recorded by the prophets.

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And because of that, the key to understanding the prophecies of eschatology are given to us not in our world, not in events happening 2 ,000 years disconnected from the authors of Scripture, but in the

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Old Testament Scriptures themselves. The authors that wrote those passages alluded to certain things that other writers used and looked back on and used them as symbols.

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So if we're going to understand eschatology, we have to understand Old Testament prophecies.

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And today, I want to look at a very interesting, very poignant example of this.

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I want to look at a passage that is widely misunderstood, that is very difficult in English to understand, that is very difficult for us as 21st century

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Christians to understand. And when we talk about it with all of its angels and all of its rapture sort of theology,

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I want to look at you and say like Inigo Montoya said, I don't think you know what that means. You keep using that word, but I don't think you know what it means.

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Today, we're going to look at that passage and we're going to try to understand exactly what it means in its apocalyptic genre.

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And to do that, the first thing that we need to do is we need to understand what the apocalyptic genre is.

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So with that, part two, Honky Tonk Apocalyptics.

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Now, one of the distinguishing features of the apocalyptic genre is that it communicates urgent news and essential truth to present tense audiences using ancient signs and symbols and characters and figures and things that you would find in the heavens.

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The writer who has an urgent message to share with his contemporary audience would ratchet up the intensity of his message by reaching back into the annals of the past, resurrecting the familiar images of their national identity, stories and characters from their shared collective history and their experiences, the

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Jewish people, and that he would employ them in the story world of his apocalyptic vision, which is, by the way, a mouthful.

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So in order to drive this point home, I'm going to use a country music example to prove my point.

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I've used this before, but I don't think I've used it on the broadcast. So here we go. 9 -11 is one of those events that's burned and seared into the conscience of the

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American people. And at that time, one of the songs that captured the heart of the

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American people that united us together, that caused us to want to fight, that caused us to want to go stick it to the terrorists, a song that I played over and over and over when

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I was in the military was a song by a man named Toby Keith called Courtesy of the

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Red, White, and Blue. And that song, Toby Keith masterfully employs the

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American version of apocalyptic genre. He uses images. He uses things in our national identity that threaten the destruction of the terrorists and who had weaponized their planes against our people.

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And he does it in this apocalyptic and very masterful way. This is what he says.

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Hey, Uncle Sam, put your name at the top of his list. And the Statue of Liberty started shaking her fist.

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And the eagle will fly. Man, it's going to be hell. When you hear Mother Freedom start ringing her bell, and it feels like the whole wide world is raining down on you.

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Brought to you courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue, Toby Keith. Now, if you were living in the year 40

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B .C. or in the year 4000 A .D., none of that would make the least bit sense to you.

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You'd be like, who is Mother Freedom? Who is Uncle Sam? But what

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Toby Keith is saying to you and I, because we live in America, we live in the 21st century, we understand what these images mean, then we know that Uncle Sam is not an angry uncle who's really shaking his fist.

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We know that he's not making a kill list like Hillary Clinton. Toby Keith is not describing a vengeful statue named

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Liberty who's shaking her fist in some kind of robotic fury. He's not claiming that there's a woman known as Mother Freedom.

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And he's not saying that she's the ringer of strange bells. He's not claiming that some inconspicuous, flapping object that is colored in red, white, and blue paint, or something like that, is fighting in the actual battles.

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And he's not claiming, certainly, that this red, white, and blue flying object is raining down bullets on top of the citizens of the world.

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All of that is apocalyptic imagery. Toby Keith is borrowing from our standard canon of American iconography, and he's using these well -known images in our world and bringing them to life in visionary and warlike ways to prove the point.

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What is it? He's proving the point that America will not stand for this terrorist attack and we're going to fight.

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That's the literal wooden meaning underneath it. And why is he doing it like this?

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Well, because the apocalyptic genre powerfully communicates the message of vengeance and the message of doom, and it does so in a way that inspires you, that rivets you, that captivates your attention.

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When you sing that song, hey, Uncle Sam, put your name at the top of his list, it's vivid, it's patriotic, it's talking about troop recruitment, it's talking about going to war, it's talking about us reclaiming our liberty as a people, it's talking about national freedom, it's inspiring us to anger for the right reasons because our freedom was put in jeopardy, and it's calling us as a people to unite and be unified in the administering of ferocious justice upon our enemies, all of which is represented by a red, white, and blue flag that's flying overhead as a symbol of our national pride and our identity.

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We, the people, are represented by this flag and we, the people, went to war with the terrorists raining munitions down on top of their

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Taliban -y heads, and all of the vision of this Toby Keith country music song is apocalyptic, but it means something actual to us because they're our images, they're our characters, they're our history, they're our symbols.

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We understand them easily because they're our national images. The same is true for the first century disciples.

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They don't understand our images just like we often don't understand theirs. Their images look different than ours.

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The symbols Jesus used for them would have been meaningful to them just like Uncle Sammy and Auntie Liberty would be meaningful to us.

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And I think the reason that we have so much trouble understanding what these things mean is, and I'm sorry if this is rude,

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I'm not trying to be rude, but I think it's because we're lazy. I think it's because we don't actually dive in and study what those images mean to the first century people, and we just basically say, well,

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I'm going to comport, I'm going to pour into this text my situation, my circumstance, my meaning, my ideas, my, my, my, my, my, and oh, my, my, how badly we misinterpret it when we do that.

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Today, if we have any hope of understanding passages like Matthew 24 or Revelation 1 through 22, if we have any hope of understanding passages like this, we can't bring to the text our world, our images, our categories, our presuppositions.

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We have to do the hard work of looking past our anachronistic noses in order to understand their images, their symbols, their meaning, so that the passage will come to life, so that the passage will break open in all of its honky -tonk glory.

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So to that end, what we have to do today is we have to work through verse 31, bit by bit, word by word, phrase by phrase, and we need to see what

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Jesus is actually talking about. And then once we're finished, once we've seen it, then we're going to rejoice, we're going to fight, we're going to build our lives upon the foundation of Christ, and we're going to build his kingdom in this earth as it is in heaven.

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So to that end, let's get to verse 31, and it begins this way, and I'm not going to read the whole verse, but it begins this way.

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Verse 31, and he. That's how it begins, and that's where we need to begin with.

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Part three, who is he? Now before we get into the meaning of the angels and the gathering of the elect from the four winds and all of that, we need to settle the fundamental but critical question of this passage, who is he in Matthew 24, 31?

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Who is the one who's sending forth the angels with the great trumpet? Who is the one who's issuing the command?

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Well, if you ask a dispensationalist, they will tell you this is Jesus in the distant future, that he's finally getting around to doing something with his kingdom after letting the world burn to the ground for a couple of millennia.

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According to them, he's been doing the equivalent of twiddling his thumbs up in heaven, waiting for the

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Antichrist to finally come, waiting for him to tear down everything, waiting for the Jews to rebuild a third temple which is dedicated to their

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Zionistic blasphemy, because apparently Jesus' once and for all sacrifice wasn't good enough, and all before Jesus finally gears up in their view for an end time evacuation plan where he zaps out a bunch of Gentile church goers, getting them beamed up to the mothership while Israel gets left behind to be decimated and destroyed.

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What a compelling vision that is. But if instead of that, we actually look at what the

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Bible says and we let it speak for itself, we see a very different picture that emerges.

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The he in Matthew 24, 31 is indeed Jesus Christ, the son of God, the son of man, enthroned as king over his blood -bought kingdom.

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Yes, but unlike the dispensational fantasy, this isn't

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Jesus in the future, but this is Jesus issuing his commands for the first century church.

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This is the direct fulfillment of Daniel 7, 13 -14 where the son of man goes up to the

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Ancient of Days to receive all dominion, all authority, all power in a kingdom that will never end.

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Daniel says this, I kept looking in the night visions, behold, with the clouds of heaven, one like the son of man was coming and he came up to the

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Ancient of Days and was presented before him and to him was given dominion, honor, and a kingdom so that all the peoples, nations, and populations of all languages might serve him.

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His dominion is an everlasting dominion which will not pass away and his kingdom is one which will not be destroyed.

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Daniel 7, 13 -14. Did you notice what this is saying?

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Daniel's not saying that the son of man comes down to the earth like he's hitchhiking from heaven to Tel Aviv.

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He's not doing a celestial ollie while he's surfboarding on a cloud. He's coming up to the

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Ancient of Days. This is about the ascension of Jesus, not about Jesus' return and rapture.

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Jesus isn't coming to take over a political throne in Jerusalem. Oh, and by the way,

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I heard so many dispensationalists talking about now that Trump has moved the embassy to Jerusalem, now

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Jesus is gonna come and he's gonna set up his, no, this is Jesus going up, being ascended into heaven where he is installed as king now over the nations.

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Think about this. Jesus goes up to heaven to sit at the right hand of God on heaven's throne.

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Why would he ever leave and come back down here to a subpar city like Jerusalem?

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Why would he go up and receive, as Daniel says, universal dominion, authority, and power, which is far grander, far more glorious than coming back down here to rule from the grotto of Jerusalem?

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Now, I'm not making fun of Jerusalem necessarily, but compared to heaven's throne room, every city on earth is a dumpster.

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Every city on earth is a ghetto. It didn't make no sense why

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Jesus would do that. He ascended into heaven. Acts chapter one proves Daniel chapter seven.

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Jesus rose up in the clouds, just like Daniel seven says, and he rose to sit at the right hand of the

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Father. Revelation says this as well, that the child that was born died and rose and he went to heaven and he defeated

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Satan there. He cast Satan out of heaven and down to the earth and he sat down on his throne to rule with a rod of iron.

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He's ruling over a kingdom that no one can snatch away from him and no one can overtake him.

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The New Testament repeatedly affirms that Jesus was enthroned in the first century and he's been reigning ever since.

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Look at a few passages. All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth, Matthew 28, 18.

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He's not saying that he's waiting for authority. All authority is his because why? He's the king.

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Look at Hebrews one. When he made purification of sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high.

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Hebrews one, three. Jesus is not sitting down on the throne and waiting to reign.

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Like when a king sits down on his throne, he's sitting down to reign. This would be like somebody walking into the throne room who is going to be king one day, but he's not king today and he sits down on the king's throne.

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Everybody's gonna be confused in heaven saying, what is he doing? He sat down on the throne. Is he reigning now?

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No, no. The dispensationals have taught us that he's not gonna reign for another 2000 years. It doesn't make any sense of what

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Jesus is saying or what Hebrews is saying. First Corinthians 15, 25 through 26.

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For he must reign until he has put all of his enemies under his feet and the last enemy that will be abolished is death.

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Jesus is not waiting to reign. He's not waiting to receive his kingdom in some remote corner of the distant future.

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He's not postponing his rule in some later dispensation that C .I. Schofield or Darby talks about.

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He is reigning now. The New Testament says he's reigning now and it leaves no room for some weak sideline

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Messiah who's waiting in heaven twiddling his thumbs for his grand moment to come. Dispensationalists have to argue in order for their system to work that Jesus is not reigning now, that he's not on his throne now, that he has not received his kingdom now and that that doctrine, that little matrix -like system that they have concocted dishonors the king that sits on his throne now and I pray to God that they repent because that sort of blasphemy is inexcusable.

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Jesus is reigning. He's the king. He's the one who's on the throne and what do reigning kings do?

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They issue forth commands that they expect will be obeyed. They don't put up with anyone saying that, oh, you're not really the king.

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You will lose your head for that. I appeal to my dispensational brothers who say that Jesus is not reigning to look at what the passage says, to look at what the

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New Testament says and to understand that your king is the king of kings, the

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Lord of lords. He reigns now. Stop mocking his reign with your idiotic theology.

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Kings, when they sit down on their throne to rule, they rule and they issue forth their commands.

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It's one of the things that they do. They send out their emissaries. They dispatch their messengers. They send their heralds out to carry out their decrees, to announce to all of their empire what their plans are for the future.

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Today, we do that with White House news briefings. We do that with posts on X.

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And we do that with press conferences and all sorts of other things. But in those days, a king who would sit on a throne would literally dispatch his most trusted, loyal servants to go out and herald his message to all of the public and he would tell them what he wanted them to publicize.

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That is precisely what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 24, 31. He is not talking about a future event.

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He's talking like an ancient king who's ruling over an ancient empire would grab his trusted advisors and send them out to publicize his message.

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In Matthew 24, 31, with the old covenant order obliterated in AD 70, Jesus has now assumed control of the world.

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And what does he do? He sends forth his ambassadors, his royal messengers to go out into the world and to declare his victory, calling people to cease in their rebellion and to join his ever expanding kingdom that's gonna unite the entire world around him.

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That collection of messengers are meant to go heralding a message that will gather the elect into the new covenant kingdom from all four corners of the earth so that every tribe, every tongue, every nation is going to eventually bow down to Jesus instead of bowing in a

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Jerusalem temple 1 Peter 2, 5. So now that we know that this is

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Jesus and now that we know that the timing of these things are in the first century, now I need to prove to you what this passage means when it talks about angels.

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The passage continues this way. And he will send forth his angels,

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Matthew 24, 31. And now with that. Part four, the meaning of angels.

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If you ask a dispensationalist, they will tell you that these things are literal, that heavenly angels flapping their wings down from the skies like cosmic air traffic controllers are preparing for a final roundup of souls before Jesus returns to incinerate the earth.

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They imagine an army of celestial beings zipping around, helping Jesus vacuum up Christians in some grand mid -air evacuation plan since apparently

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Christ's redemptive plan all along was to get us out of this world as quickly as possible before it all blows up.

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It's as if he spent his entire ministry telling his followers to establish his kingdom on earth, to build his kingdom here and now, only to turn around 2 ,000 years later and say, ha ha ha,

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I'm just kidding. Come on up, baby. But as usual, this interpretation is nothing more than theological tomfoolery driven by an utter failure to read the

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Bible rightly. The first and the most obvious problem with the dispensational view is that it doesn't even purport with what the actual

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Greek word means. If your theology cannot be substantiated in the grammar, then your theology is wrong.

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The word for angel here is angelos. Angelos doesn't always mean angelic being.

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It actually more accurately means messenger. Now, it can undoubtedly refer to supernatural divine beings.

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No one is going to deny that fact. But it can also just as quickly refer to the human messengers that were appointed by God to deliver a message.

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This means that if we want to understand whether it's talking about a divine angelic being or if it's talking about a human ordinary messenger, then we need to understand the context of the

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Bible. We need to understand what the passage is saying, and there's so many examples that I can show you.

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For instance, if we look in the Greek Old Testament, which is called the Septuagint, it's the

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Old Testament translation that's commonly used by the apostles. We find the word angelos, which

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Matthew 24, 31 is translating angel. I don't agree with that translation. But we find that word repeatedly used in the

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Old Testament for human messengers. For instance, in 1

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Samuel 11, 3, the elders of Jabesh send Angoloi, which are human messengers, to seek for help.

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In 2 Samuel 2, 5, David sends Angoloi, human messengers, to comfort

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Jabesh Gilead. These are clearly not celestial beings. David is not gathering together a bunch of angels to go comfort

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Jabesh. That's not what he's doing. He's sending humans, human messengers. The same thing is true in Malachi 2, 7, where priests are called the

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Angoloi of the Lord, the angels of the Lord, because why? They are acting like and acting out as his messengers on the earth.

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So, just with these three examples alone, you can start to see how

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Matthew 24, 31 does not require a supernatural interpretation in order for it to be true.

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It could be divine angelic beings, but it also could be human messengers, because the word itself does not necessitate such a morphologically strict lemma, which is just normal speak for the range and meaning of the word doesn't necessitate that it has to be an angel.

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Now, furthermore, Jesus' apostles were called Angoloi. His apostles were called Angoloi. They were the messengers that were spreading the gospel.

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They were the ones who were going out and gathering the elect from the lost sheep of Israel. They were the ones who were executing his kingdom expansion.

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They were the ones who were doing this in the lead up to Jerusalem's fall. In Matthew 24, Jesus describes an event that immediately follows the temple's destruction, and these are the messengers that he's employing.

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They're not celestial beings who are executing a supernatural collection of believers from the earth.

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If that was, we would expect that it would be emphasized in the text, yet nothing in this passage suggests a shift from human to supernatural beings.

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Instead, the narrative, the entire narrative so far, has been about what's gonna happen on the earth, and especially what's gonna happen in Judah, in Jerusalem, in its fall, in its judgment.

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The Angoloi in this passage are the messengers, and best understood as Christ's earthly messengers, his apostles, and his evangelists, and his disciples who are spreading the gospel and gathering the elect into his kingdom in the first century and beyond.

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Again, if the context determines the meaning of the word Angelos, then blindly assuming that Angelos here must mean angel is not exegesis, it's ignorance.

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This interpretation aligns perfectly with how the early church functioned in the aftermath of AD 70.

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The apostles and the disciples who were functioning as the new covenant Angoloi were spreading the gospel all over the

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Roman world. They were gathering the elect from every corner of the Oikamene, Revelation 5 -9.

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And this missionary expansion, that, by the way, has been going on for the last 2 ,000 years, was the result of Jesus' new covenant kingdom being inaugurated on this third rock from the sun.

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But just in case someone who's watching as a dispensational and their dispensational panties are slightly in a wad over what

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I just said, let me give you a few more examples to prove my point. Because Jesus calls

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John the Baptist an Angeloi. He says that John the Baptist is an

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Angelos in Matthew 11 -10. Quoting Malachi, he says this, Behold, I send my messenger, Angelos, ahead of you, who will prepare the way before you.

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Matthew 11 -10. Now, last time I checked, John the Baptist wasn't a fat baby cherub floating around on a

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Charmin cloud in a golden cladded diaper. Nor did he ascend from the clouds with a harp in his hands to call the

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Pharisees to repentance. He was a human prophet. He was a flesh and blood herald of the kingdom.

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He was a messenger of God. He was an Angelos. The same word

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Angelos, which is the singular form of it, is used in Luke 9 -52 where Jesus sends his human messengers ahead of him to prepare a place for him.

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James 2 -25 calls the Israelite spies that infiltrated Jericho Angeloi. That's the plural version of it.

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They're the angels. They're the messengers. Do we really believe that Rahab was hiding some winged beings in her attic?

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No. That's basic exegesis that we're doing here. We're looking at the context and we're determining what the word means in its proper setting.

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And yet, dispensationalists who could not hit eschatological sand if they fell off Jerusalem's finest camel managed to miss this entirely.

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They never stop to consider what the word actually means in its context, just like we've just done. They don't bother to ask how

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Jesus and the apostles are consistently using it elsewhere in Matthew and other scriptures to refer to human messengers.

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They simply slap their B -rated Hollywood end -time fantasy over the passage and call it a day.

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Now, let me give you some more examples because I really want to prove this.

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I want to knock this out of the park. I don't want you to think that I'm just cherry -picking a few verses.

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This is a well -established point. Revelation 2 and 3 talks about angelos in the seven churches.

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Those are human pastors. They're not angels. When Jacob was preparing to meet Esau, he sent angeloi, he sent messengers.

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He didn't send cherubim, seraphim, or angelic beings. And that's Genesis 32 .3.

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When Moses needed to communicate with Edom's king, he sent human angeloi, Numbers 20 .14. When Gideon summoned the tribes of Israel, he sent human angeloi,

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Judges 6 .35 and Judges 7 .24. When Jephthah negotiated with the Ammonites, he sent human angeloi,

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Judges 11 .12 through 14. When Saul was preparing for battle, when David sent word to his allies, when the kings were conducting diplomacy, they all were sending angeloi, human messengers, human runners, heralds, and envoys to declare a message.

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The point could not be more clear. Angeloi is always used when there is a message that is needing to be communicated, whether that's a divine being with a message or whether that's a human being with a message.

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When Jesus sends humans with a message, they're called angeloi. When God sends angels like Gabriel and Michael with a message, they're called angeloi.

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What we do not have in this passage or in any biblical passage is a precedent for a divine being coming without a message with the goal of zapping humans out of the earth in an apocalyptic blaze of glory called angeloi.

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If they're called angeloi, they have a message. If they're called angeloi, they're an envoy.

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They're an ambassador. If they don't have a message, they're not angeloi. There's other words for divine beings who don't have messages.

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So when Jesus in Matthew 24 -31 declares that he will send out his angeloi to gather his elect, we don't have to guess at what he's meaning.

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We don't have to conjure up some sort of weird fantasy with cherubs conducting a cosmic scavenger hunt.

01:00:54

We simply have to read the Bible. And what do we see? We see immediately in the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem, the old covenant world was lying in ruins

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The smoke was still rising from the city. The vultures were still swarming. The temple was gone.

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Sacrificial system was abolished. The Jewish world that had rejected its Messiah had been judged in the most catastrophic and unimaginable way.

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And what does Jesus do next? After he defeats his enemies, he commissions his messengers, his angeloi, to go out into the ends of the world declaring to people that Christ has come.

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And this, by the way, is what happened all throughout the first 40 years. Before the destruction of Jerusalem, he called his apostles to be angeloi, to execute his judgment, to proclaim his mission.

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And that began in Judah as his apostles lit that country on fire with the gospel.

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It even says that they turned the entire world upside down with the gospel. They went out and declared that Jesus was the long -awaited

01:01:53

Davidic king, the God -man. And by declaring this message, they forced every Jew in the Roman Empire into an eschatological crisis.

01:02:01

They were sent out to the lost sheep of the house of Israel first. Then they were sent out to the Jews in the diaspora, proclaiming that the kingdom, the long -awaited kingdom, had arrived, and that the days of the old covenant, the days of the old system, were numbered.

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And those Jews that received that message and believed in the

01:02:23

Lord Jesus Christ were given life, and they would reign with Jesus forever along with us.

01:02:28

But those who rejected that message were marked out for destruction.

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Jesus told his apostles this. He said, Whatever city or village you enter, inquire who is worthy in it, and stay at his house until you leave.

01:02:43

Matthew 10, 11. If their message was received by the household, the messengers, the ongoloi, they stayed there, and they discipled them in the faith.

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But if their message was rejected, they were to shake the dust off of their feet and leave just like Jesus commanded them.

01:03:00

For instance, he said this. Whoever does not receive you nor listen to your words as you leave that house or the city, shake the dust off your feet.

01:03:08

Truly I say to you, you will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that city.

01:03:15

Matthew 10, 14 through 15. Have we forgotten what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah?

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In a moment, in an instant, God rained down fire balls from heaven that completely decimated and turned that city into a heaping pit of salt.

01:03:35

And Jesus is saying that the cities of Judah that reject his gospel are going to face more severe judgment than them.

01:03:47

This was an act of covenantal indictment. The shaking off of the dust of one's sandals was a prophetic sign that the cities that they were leaving were being abandoned to destruction.

01:04:01

The apostles, the early disciples, they were acting as Jesus' angeloi.

01:04:07

And that became a testimony against Israel, against Judah, that the presence of these angeloi among their synagogues and their preaching and all their miracles and all of that were heaping burning coals on top of the apostate

01:04:23

Jews. Romans 12, 20. How did Israel respond to the preaching of this gospel?

01:04:31

How did they respond to Jesus' angeloi? They didn't repent and they didn't weep and they didn't welcome their

01:04:38

Messiah. They raged. They persecuted these angelic messengers.

01:04:43

They hunted them down in their cities. They beat them in their synagogues. They dragged them before the courts.

01:04:49

They falsely accused them. They fired them from their jobs. They cast them out of society.

01:04:55

They robbed them of their possessions. They stoned them to death out of their hatred and their malice.

01:05:00

Acts 7, 58. Why? Because these messengers, these angeloi of Jesus' kingdom were sent out as messengers of both salvation for those who would believe in Jesus and judgment against those who would reject

01:05:15

Him. Jesus Himself foretold that this mission would divide

01:05:21

Israel and it would lead to its destruction. He said this, Do you think that I came to bring peace on earth?

01:05:26

I didn't come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to turn a man against his father and a daughter against her mother and a daughter -in -law against her mother -in -law and a person's enemies will be the members of his household.

01:05:39

Matthew 10, 34 through 36. This is not hyperbolic fantasy.

01:05:45

These words were fulfilled in the first century as the Israelites tore themselves apart over the gospel.

01:05:54

Many Jews believed and yet members of their own household clung to the old.

01:06:00

They rejected Jesus and they became rabid in their opposition to His angeloi, to His messengers.

01:06:07

Their hatred for the gospel reached its zenith in the Jewish -Roman war of AD 66 through 70 when

01:06:14

Israel's rejection of Christ led to their total fiery annihilation.

01:06:22

And what did Jesus do in response? He vindicated His messengers. He cast apostate

01:06:27

Israel into their final condemnation, which is why Jesus says in Matthew 13, 39 through 41 that the

01:06:35

Son of Man was going to send out His messengers, His angeloi, to gather the righteous and execute judgment on the wicked at the end of the age.

01:06:45

What age? The end of the human age? No, the end of the

01:06:50

Jewish age. The apostles, the evangelists, and the early church fathers went from town to town as angelois, declaring the gospel, establishing

01:07:02

Jesus' kingdom while Israel, who was blind and raging like a rabid dog full of hatred, was crushed under the full weight and fury of God's covenantal wrath.

01:07:14

Therefore, the word angeloi in Matthew 24, 31 is almost certainly not supernatural beings who are executing a futuristic end times rescue operation.

01:07:28

These are the apostles. These are the first century preachers. These are the heralds of Christ's kingdom, those who

01:07:36

He actually sent out all throughout Judah and the Roman world to proclaim the gospel.

01:07:42

And they're the ones who gathered together a new covenant kingdom and a new covenant people. They're the ones who preached the gospel in Jerusalem when 3 ,000 people came in.

01:07:52

They're the ones who preached the gospel in Ephesus and in Philippi and in Macedonia and in Rome and in Spain and in India and all over the world as they were being faithful heralds of Christ.

01:08:07

The dispensational version of this passage isn't just wrong. It's an embarrassment.

01:08:14

It ignores the Greek. It disregards the Old Testament echoes and allusions.

01:08:20

And it turns Jesus' mission into a helicopter rescue mission that's the equivalent of Saigon when that's not what the

01:08:28

Bible describes. The Bible makes it overwhelmingly clear. But they don't listen.

01:08:37

And while I think we've been overwhelmingly clear so far there are a few more loose ends that I want to get to so that I can completely say that we have decimated this view.

01:08:48

And so with that I want us to go to part five. What about the gathering of the elect?

01:08:56

In Matthew 24, 31 Jesus turns from the destruction of the apostate Jews to the fate of his elect moving forward.

01:09:04

This is the great gathering. The end gathering of the faithful. The moment when the people of God and those who've endured and those who've suffered and those who've bled under Jewish and Roman persecution would be gathered together in a newly inaugurated kingdom.

01:09:23

This is the moment when the redeemed are gathered while the wicked are scattered.

01:09:29

And this is precisely where the dispensationals fall face first in the theological cow patty that they created for themselves.

01:09:38

When they see the word gather and immediately assume that this must be the rapture they imagine that Christians are being sucked into the sky like helium balloons at a county fair.

01:09:50

They imagine a time when piles of clothing are left behind along with dentures and surgical implants and people getting transported into the heavens.

01:10:01

They assume that angels and celestial transport teams are flying around snatching believers up literally right out of their pants and that they're leaving the wicked on earth to fend for themselves.

01:10:13

They see the trumpets and they think that this must be the moment where the world ends. I mean, the trumpets are blowing, right?

01:10:20

Jesus never said any of that. That is something that they've pieced together with their peyote hermeneutic.

01:10:28

The phrase, the gathering of the elect is not a random phrase.

01:10:34

It's not a phrase. It's talking about a rapture. It's a actual phrase from the

01:10:40

Old Testament. Remember, we talked about this earlier that if we're going to understand apocalyptic genre, we need to understand the

01:10:45

Old Testament. The gathering of the elect is an Old Testament phrase. And in order to understand what it means in Jesus's words, we need to understand what it means there, particularly

01:10:57

Isaiah 1112 and also Joel chapter 2, for instance. In Joel 2, this phrase, the gathering of the elect is so integral to what

01:11:08

Jesus is saying in Matthew 24 that Jesus quotes nearly all of this section in Joel 2. Joel 2 describes the judgment that's going to be coming upon Judah.

01:11:16

It represents the devastation of an invading army. Read Joel 2.

01:11:22

He's talking about the Romans. It describes the mourning of the people, the bloodshed, and the apocalyptic collapse of the heavens.

01:11:29

And then the sound of the trumpet blast and the elect are gathered and they're brought into covenantal restoration as the wicked are cuddled.

01:11:38

Joel 2 is about two things happening at the same time. It's about judgment that's coming on apostate

01:11:44

Judah and the ingathering of the faithful church under Jesus. And Peter says that Joel chapter 2 was fulfilled in the first century at Pentecost.

01:11:55

So if Joel 2 is fulfilled at Pentecost and this two -fold destruction and restoration plan is in Joel 2, then the first century is what we're talking about where Judah's going to be destroyed just like Joel 2 says and the people of God are going to start speaking in tongues in the first century.

01:12:16

They're going to have visions. They're going to dream dreams. We're going to see an outpouring of the spirit of God upon the church which is exactly what happened.

01:12:26

The first century church had an outpouring of the Holy Spirit to demonstrate Joel 2's fulfillment and the

01:12:32

Jews came under the kind of destruction that Joel 2 is describing. Why do we need to punt

01:12:38

Joel 2 into the future when every aspect of it already happened and the gathering of the elect that it describes happened?

01:12:48

What about Isaiah 11 -12? Isaiah 11 -12 promises that God will gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.

01:12:58

That's a direct quote from Isaiah 11 -2 that he will gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.

01:13:06

This is almost exactly what Jesus is saying in Matthew 24. It's almost a quote and it's a direct fulfillment of an

01:13:14

Old Testament prophecy about God restoring his people. Catch this.

01:13:21

He's going to gather his people from the four corners of the earth.

01:13:27

This is restoration language not removal language.

01:13:33

God is promising to the true and the faithful Israelites which by the way are those who belong to Jesus who has made them into the

01:13:43

Israel of God. That promise is to them that he's going to gather them into a kingdom not snatch them out of the world.

01:13:51

That is why when Isaiah 43 -5 -6 and Deuteronomy 30 -4 say these same things where God is calling his people back to himself.

01:14:00

He's not calling them up into the sky. If Jesus were describing a so -called dispensational rapture we would expect language like that in the

01:14:11

Old Testament that was talking about ascension instead of in -gathering. The emphasis on gathering passages is always about the regathering and the restoration of God's people not the escaping of God's people from the world.

01:14:34

All of this is covenant language. It's not rapture language. Jesus is echoing passages like Deuteronomy 30 -4 where God promises that he's going to gather his people back after an act of decisive judgment.

01:14:50

You remember Deuteronomy 30 is after Deuteronomy 28. Deuteronomy 28 is the description of what it's going to look like when

01:14:57

God pours out his woes upon his people who rebel against him and who run away from him.

01:15:04

Remember Matthew 23 Jesus is quoting Deuteronomy 28 and he's saying hey you first century

01:15:10

Jews you are doomed. You are done. But God's not finished because in Deuteronomy 30 he says that he's going to regather his people from the four corners of the world and make them into an end time gathered people.

01:15:29

Far from this passage describing an end time evacuation

01:15:35

Jesus is pointing to a worldwide expansion of the gospel here on planet earth where his elect are drawn from all the nations under heaven.

01:15:48

This distinction is crucial. If the gathering of the elect were the physical removal of God's people from the earth then the

01:15:56

Old Testament prophets should have and could have and would have described it that way.

01:16:01

But they don't. Isaiah 66 19 through 20 speaks of God sending out his messengers his angeloi to the nations to bring back his people into his kingdom not to beam them up Scotty.

01:16:15

Ezekiel 34 12 through 13 portrays God as a shepherd gathering his sheep back into the safety of the sheep fold not yanking them up violently into the air.

01:16:28

The entire biblical pattern of gathering is one of restoration reconstitution and redemption and expansion of the kingdom not rocket propelled escapism.

01:16:43

The only time that the wicked are taken away physically in judgment is in the flood and in passages like Matthew 13 30 where Jesus explicitly says that the tares are removed first before the wheat before the wheat's gathered into the barns.

01:17:00

That's the exact opposite of what the dispensationals teach. They teach that the wheat are removed first and the tares are left.

01:17:07

That's not what Jesus says. Jesus says the tares are going to be removed and the wheat is going to be spared. If Matthew 24 31 was a rapture event and again we're going to get into this more next week then

01:17:18

Jesus would have warned his disciples that they were the ones in danger of being removed not the other way around.

01:17:25

But instead Jesus is talking about the gathering of a kingdom.

01:17:30

He's talking about kingdom inclusion. He's not talking about cosmic exit. Nowhere in this passage does

01:17:36

Jesus describe believers being removed from the earth. If Jesus were teaching a rapture he would have used language consistent with bodily removal like he did in the parable of the sheep and the goats where the wicked are visibly separated from the righteous.

01:17:51

But instead Matthew 24 31 uses Old Testament language that all point to regathering bringing back the scattered not zapping them up to heaven.

01:18:04

Consider Ezekiel 34 11 through 13 where God promises to search for my sheep and gather them.

01:18:12

And he does this after judgment. This is restoration not escape.

01:18:18

The same truth is here in Matthew 24. Jesus is bringing his people into the blessing of his reign and not pulling them off the battlefield when the fight got tough.

01:18:32

The idea of the rapture is this idea of a sudden retreat of the church of a sudden running away when times get hard.

01:18:46

This idea exists only in the dispensationalist warped imagination not in scripture.

01:18:54

In fact, if Matthew 24 31 were describing a rapture it would completely contradict

01:19:01

Jesus's own teachings elsewhere. In John 17 15 Jesus explicitly prays

01:19:07

I do not ask that you take them out of the world but to keep them from the evil one.

01:19:13

John 17 15. Why would Jesus pray that his followers would remain on earth only to later reverse course and say,

01:19:20

I want to take them out now. If the dispensational rapture were true

01:19:25

John 17 would be a lie. Scripture does not contradict itself like that.

01:19:32

Scripture has no contradictions. Jesus's goal is not to send in a few angelic special forces to extract a remnant people.

01:19:43

Jesus's view is ground and pound land war until he and his church have taken over everything.

01:19:51

He leaves his people here in the world so that they will conquer it not to run away from it like children from a ghastly shadow or like King Arthur in the

01:20:02

Monty Python RUN AWAY! Jesus is not describing yellow bellied cowards who are just praying for a moment to get out of the battle.

01:20:14

Jesus is leaving us here so that we will fight and so that we will build and so that we will worship and so that we will pray and so that we will see his kingdom come on earth as it came in heaven.

01:20:25

The goal of Christianity is not to escape the world it's for God to redeem it.

01:20:34

Paul talks about this in his letter to the Thessalonians by the mid 50's there was a group of false teachers who had infiltrated the

01:20:42

Thessalonian church and they were spreading the false claim that Jesus had already returned that the kingdom had already fully arrived and that anyone who died before that moment had somehow missed out on the resurrection bus.

01:20:58

And Paul in his typical Pauline way utterly dismantles that kind of nonsense in 2

01:21:05

Thessalonians 2 and he warns the church not to be deceived by those who claim that the day of the

01:21:11

Lord has already come. But in 1 Thessalonians 4 Paul offers deep reassurances to those who are grieving over their fallen brothers and sisters that they've not missed it.

01:21:19

He reminds them that Christ will gather all of his saints into his kingdom regardless of when they lived and when they died.

01:21:26

Those who perished before the final and total collapse of Jerusalem will not be abandoned.

01:21:32

Those who died before the temple was destroyed will actually come into a true and greater temple. Those who died before the sacrificial system was over will be covered by the true and better sacrifice.

01:21:43

They're not going to be left out. Even though they died in the middle of this awkward 40 year period where the temple is still standing and the new covenant is rising, they would be raised up, they would be glorified, they would be blessed under the eternal reign of Christ.

01:21:57

That is what Jesus is talking about. That is what Jesus is teaching in Matthew 24 31. The gathering of the elect has already been inaugurated.

01:22:10

The fact is that Jesus reigns now. His kingdom is advancing now and the dispensationalists with all of their prophecy charts and their fiction novels and their hiding away in their little foxholes are running out of places to hide because real biblical exegesis is exposing them now.

01:22:33

With that, we need to consider part six.

01:22:40

The four winds and the ends of the sky. The whole statement that Jesus gave in verse 31 is as follows, and now we're finally ready to take all of it at once.

01:22:51

Here's what he says. And he will send forth his angels, his messengers with a great trumpet and they will gather together his elect from the four winds and from one end of the sky to the other.

01:23:05

Matthew 24 31. When Jesus says that his elect will be gathered from the four winds from one end of the sky to the other, he is not hoping that you're going to look up at the sky but instead he's hoping that you will actually look down at your

01:23:23

Bibles. Why? Because this is powerful loaded language that's drenched in the prophetic vocabulary of the

01:23:32

Old Testament and it's brimming with theological weight, veracity and pointing to events in redemptive history.

01:23:40

It's not about a rapture. These are statements about dominion.

01:23:47

These are statements about declarations that Christ's kingdom, that his enthronement is going to stretch across the earth and gather every single one of his people from every nation and every tongue and every place under the sky.

01:24:03

And yet as expected our dispensationalist brothers and they are brothers in the

01:24:10

Lord and we make fun of them like we would a younger brother who doesn't know his head from a hole in the ground but at least they're consistent.

01:24:21

And that is worthy of praise. I can praise the dispensationalist for consistently doing something which is consistently getting their hermeneutic wrong.

01:24:29

Consistency is good but when they see the words like gathering and four winds and from the ends of the sky to the other again they immediately assume the wrong thing.

01:24:42

They assume that this must be about a rapture which we've kind of disproven in this episode but like I've mentioned before we're going to eviscerate it next week so stay tuned for that it'll be fun.

01:24:56

But when they hear these words their imagination runs wild with visions of people vanishing mid conversation, cars swerving off the highways and planes plummeting from the sky as Christian pilots are sucked into the heavens leaving those aluminum floating bombs to descend to the earth in a catastrophic spectacle.

01:25:19

They see Jesus' language about the end of the sky and they take it with a kind of wooden literalism as someone who doesn't understand language but Jesus never said that, didn't speak like that, didn't mean that.

01:25:34

What he is describing in this passage about the four winds of the earth and from one end of the sky to the other he's describing in apocalyptic language the great commission.

01:25:46

He's saying that the great commission is going to unfold in real space and time.

01:25:53

And it's going to be this covenantal transition from the Old Testament shadows to the full -bodied reality of the new covenant kingdom where disciples are going to be made of the whole earth.

01:26:05

What he declares in Matthew 24 -31 is nothing less than the unstoppable expansion of his rule and a rule that reaches the entire world and a rule that gathers all people under the canopy of his kingdom and a rule that signals the final and total break from the old covenant order and a rule that will bring all the nations into obedience to him.

01:26:29

This passage is not about escape. The four winds, the ends of the sky to the other is not about escape.

01:26:35

It's about conquest. For instance, the four winds, that's not a random detail.

01:26:42

They appear over and over again in the Old Testament. Remember, in order to understand apocalyptic literature, we've got to go back to the source and not look forward to the skies.

01:26:54

If we go back into the Old Testament and we look what the four winds are actually talking about, we will see that they're a symbol of God's sovereignty over history, his judgment on the wicked and his gathering together of the righteous.

01:27:08

The phrase four winds carries a kind of universal significance and it represents the totality of God's power on planet

01:27:19

Earth. For instance, in Daniel chapter 7, 2, the prophet sees the four winds of heaven stirring up the great sea.

01:27:27

And if you know something about Daniel 7, you know that Daniel 7 is a vision about world empires that are coming, which tells us that God is purposefully stirring up the chaotic waters to bring forth empires, the biggest and baddest of which would be the

01:27:44

Roman Empire, who he's going to rise up out of the waters in order to decimate his apostate people.

01:27:51

The winds in this passage aren't random hurricane -like gusts, but they're the invisible hand of God, his divine providence, his setting history into motion where he is going to bring his people to destruction for their covenant crimes.

01:28:09

God is showing us in this passage that he's the one who's in control and nations rise and fall at his bid and not by our human strength or power.

01:28:21

He can cause an empire to stand or he can cause an empire to crumble by his own will.

01:28:29

That's what the four winds represent in Daniel 7, the sovereignty and the power of God.

01:28:35

He rises nations and he crushes enemies at his will. In Jeremiah 49 -36,

01:28:42

God says that he will bring the four winds of the earth against Elam. He's going to scatter them to every corner of the earth as an act of divine judgment from one end of the earth to the other.

01:28:53

You see the point the winds here in this case are agents of God's divine wrath.

01:28:59

They're the ones that are driving out the rebellious and they're leaving them homeless. In Zechariah 2 -6, the four winds represent the scattering of God's people, but also the gathering that's going to follow.

01:29:11

The Lord is telling his people to flee from Babylon because he's dispersed them to the four winds and now he's going to call his people back when the exile is over and restoration is coming.

01:29:24

Ezekiel 37 -9 is a passage that's looming heavy in the mind of Jesus in Matthew 24 -31.

01:29:34

Here in this passage, the four winds are bringing life. They're breathing into this valley of dry bones where Israel and Judah are being reunited together and they're being resurrected by the power of this one who's breathing life, which is

01:29:53

Jesus. The imagery of all of this is unmistakable.

01:29:59

Where there's death, God with his four winds breathes life. Where there's scattering,

01:30:06

God brings gathering. Where there was separation, God brings restoration.

01:30:12

And in every single one of these Old Testament passages, his four winds are blowing in those ways.

01:30:22

This is not an end times, end of human history thing. This is the four winds of God are for his salvation of his people and for the decimation of his enemies.

01:30:34

It's the very same four winds that Jesus is talking about in Matthew 24 -31. You can either open up your

01:30:39

Bible and you can see what Jesus is quoting and see what he's doing or you can grab your dispensational binoculars and keep staring at the sky.

01:30:46

I'm going to choose to read my Bible. That's the first one. What about the second phrase in this passage? From one end of the sky all the way to the other.

01:30:54

Well, surely this is talking about the end of the world, right? Well, like Colonel Sanders says in Waterboy, Mama's wrong again.

01:31:04

Again, dispensationalists trip over themselves like a kid who's had their shoelaces tied without them noticing it in gym class.

01:31:15

Jesus is not doing theological Jenga here. He's consistently and faithfully drawing from the prophetic revelation of God in the

01:31:25

Old Testament that was given by the Holy Spirit that was given to the people of those times who were looking forward to the fulfillment of that in the kingdom of Jesus.

01:31:34

He is using Old Testament words to talk about first century things. For instance, the phrase from one end of the sky to the other is a

01:31:43

Hebrew hyperbole. It's a shorthand for totality.

01:31:49

It's a way of saying that God's reach is limitless. When he says from one end of the sky to the other, he's saying all of it, all of it.

01:31:58

He's saying that his sovereignty is boundless, that his kingdom is uncontainable. It's kind of like when my three -year -old daughter used to say when she would tell me that she loved me,

01:32:08

I love you 7083. I'm like, okay.

01:32:14

But in her mind, 7083 was the biggest number that she could conceive of in her little mind.

01:32:21

Well, in the same way, the Hebrew writers, when they say from one end of the sky to the other, they're using the biggest and the most expansive analogy of what they knew the world to be from one end of the sky to the other.

01:32:35

When you look at the horizon and the land disappears and the sky begins, that's what they're talking about.

01:32:43

When Deuteronomy 30, verse 4 uses this as an explicit example, that's what they're talking about.

01:32:51

In that passage, God promises that even if his people are scattered to the very ends of heaven, he says, he will gather them back.

01:33:02

He will gather them back from the ends of the heavens, from one end of the heavens to the next.

01:33:08

This is what Jesus has on his mind when he's talking. It's not an Old Testament prophecy about the rapture, that from one end of the heaven to the other, they're going to be zapped out.

01:33:18

It's not what he's talking about. This is a promise of future covenantal restoration for the people of God after they go through a dramatic event of judgment for the rebels who broke covenant.

01:33:35

Jesus undoubtedly had this passage on his mind since he quoted

01:33:41

Deuteronomy 28 and Matthew 23. He's speaking to his disciples that there's hope.

01:33:47

Even though the Jews broke covenant, even though they're going to be destroyed, I'm going to bring and regather a people from one end of the heavens to the next to be my people.

01:33:57

He's giving them hope. He's not saying, hey guys, things are going to be really bad in the next 40 years for you, but one day

01:34:07

I'm going to come and zap everybody out of here. Isn't that interesting? Well, I think with them facing the death of their

01:34:16

Savior, I think with them facing future beheadings, future murders, future exile, future imprisonment, and future martyrdom,

01:34:26

I don't think a rapture would have comforted them. I think they would have probably been more confused than anything and they would have wondered, why is

01:34:35

Jesus telling us this? I rest my case.

01:34:41

No, wait, I'm not going to rest my case. Let's continue. There's more. Isaiah 43, 6 tells us the same thing.

01:34:46

I will say to the north, give them up and to the south, do not hold them back. Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth.

01:34:56

Isaiah 43, 6. I want you to notice the global nature of this promise. The people of God are not confined to a single location.

01:35:04

They're not gathered in one geographical little territory. The gathering is not about removing believers from the earth and sending them up into the clouds.

01:35:11

It's about bringing them into Jesus' reign and his kingdom from all over the earth.

01:35:17

And why does he say, from one end of the sky to the other, instead of just from one end of the earth to the other?

01:35:22

He could have done that. But, first, as we've talked about this whole episode, apocalyptic language uses heavenly symbols to talk about things that are happening on the earth.

01:35:31

He says he's going to gather his people from one end of the sky to the other because it's apocalyptic language.

01:35:38

That's the first thing. He's using heavenly symbols to talk about earthly things. If you miss that, then you will grab your dispensational binoculars and you'll stare at the sky ad infinitum while the rest of us go on living our lives and building for the kingdom of Jesus.

01:35:53

That's the first thing. The second reason he says it is because the gathering is cosmic in its scope.

01:36:00

He's not talking about, just like Isaiah's not talking about, a small little pitiful remnant of Jews who were brought into a

01:36:09

Jewish kingdom that just ekes along like it did for the first thousand years of its existence.

01:36:16

That was a type, that was a shadow, of something greater and grander and more glorious. This passage is about the entire created order from one end of the sky to the other being brought under the lordship and the dominion of Jesus.

01:36:33

That's why Romans 8 says that all of creation is yearning for what we have now.

01:36:38

They're looking at our salvation and saying, they're saying, I want that. The palm trees are saying, I want that redemption.

01:36:44

The mountains are saying, I want that redemption. The sun, the moon, and the stars are saying, I want that redemption because God is going to bring total, global, cosmic redemption.

01:36:55

That's why he doesn't say that he's just going to save a few people and then zap them out of here.

01:37:01

He's going to redeem everything that was broken. Everywhere the curse is, he's going to redeem. That's why Psalm 2 says that I will surely tell of the decree of the lord.

01:37:10

He said to me, you are my son. Today I have begotten you. Ask of me and I will surely give you the nations as your inheritance and the very ends of the earth as your possession.

01:37:20

Psalm 2, 7 through 8. In other words, just as the sun moves from one end of the sky to the other, so too does the ruling of Christ spread across the entire world and not just among people.

01:37:34

He's going to redeem people. He's going to redeem deserts. He's going to redeem valleys. He's going to redeem oceans.

01:37:40

He's going to redeem it all. His kingdom is going to conquer and take over everything.

01:37:48

And despite all of this, the dispensationalists persist in their defeatism.

01:37:54

They read Matthew 24 31 and they refuse to see the covenantal and biblical context. They ignore the

01:38:00

Old Testament background. They disregard the prophetic imagery and instead they turn this passage into yet another sensationalized end time dud assuming that Jesus was outlining a heavenly extraction rather than a worldwide dominion.

01:38:14

They see a rapture. Jesus sees a kingdom. They see an escape. Jesus sees a gathering.

01:38:19

They see an evacuation. Jesus sees a conquest. The four winds of God are blowing not to blow us out of here but to gather us in a kingdom that will advance and that will take over the world.

01:38:32

And dispensationalists with all of their left behind malarkey are the ones who are being left behind because the kingdom advances no matter what.

01:38:46

That's part six. But before we end, we need to talk about one more thing and that is part seven

01:38:56

The Great Trumpet Blast. The Trumpet Blast of Matthew 24 31 is not a bugle call of retreat.

01:39:06

It is not given like an army that is about to be destroyed that is going to run away from the fight so that they can save their lives.

01:39:13

The Trumpet Blast is given like an army not that's getting ready to be destroyed but it's getting ready to be deployed.

01:39:22

It is the trumpet that shakes kingdoms. It's the blast that seals the fate of the apostates and it's the horn blow that sends forth the heralds of Jesus' unshakeable kingdom to the world.

01:39:37

The trumpet is the sound of the final covenant transition. The death nail of the old world and the triumphant inauguration of the new.

01:39:49

Yet again, despite the biblical evidence, dispensationalists stand there with their fingers in their ear pretending they can't hear the faint trumpet singing from two thousand years ago inaugurating this glorious kingdom in which we now live.

01:40:06

And they insist that this trumpet must be some future signal some alarm bell some ear splitting note that rings out all over the sky just before we're zapped out of our socks and burst into the clouds.

01:40:21

They have taken a war trumpet. They've taken a kingdom trumpet. They've taken a judgment trumpet and they've reduced it down to a toy that a toddler would play that represents some cosmic disappearing act that they're all looking forward to.

01:40:38

I mean, think about it. The Bible says that the cowards won't enter the kingdom of God and yet that's what they celebrate.

01:40:45

They celebrate a cowardly church that won't fight, that hides like an ostrich until Jesus raptures them out of here.

01:40:53

That's so foolish. They're imagining the saints abandoning the fight at the very end of the battle when

01:41:00

Jesus is blowing a trumpet to declare the beginning of the war. Jesus declared the beginning of the war 2 ,000 years ago.

01:41:07

He's not blowing the trumpet at the end of the battle to what? Celebrate our defeat? You don't blow a trumpet in the ancient world and I don't believe in the modern world.

01:41:18

You don't blow a trumpet if you're losing. You don't blow a trumpet if you're declaring defeat.

01:41:24

You throw up a white flag but you don't blow the trumpet. The trumpet is a declaration of war.

01:41:30

I mean, from the very first pages of scripture, the trumpet is an instrument that's never once used to signify a defeat.

01:41:40

Let me repeat that. There is no example in scripture of any trumpet being blasted to call soldiers out of the battle to run away like sissies.

01:41:52

It has never been used as a soundtrack for defeat, as an anthem of evacuation.

01:41:59

It is always the sound of God's presence, God's power, and God's judgment on his enemies.

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For instance, when Yahweh descended upon Mount Sinai in Exodus 19, 16, the trumpet roared like thunder as God established his covenant with Israel.

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The people trembled in fear because they knew God was on the move. The trumpet blasted because God was advancing not retreating.

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When Joshua and his men marched around Jericho in Joshua 6, they didn't blow the trumpet and then run away.

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Can you imagine? They blow the trumpet and then they sprint to the hills. No. They blew the trumpet.

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They sounded it as a war cry and the walls of the city came tumbling down and they advanced.

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The trumpet was blown just before they advanced as an unmistakable sign that God was delivering the land into their hands.

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When God commanded Israel to sound the trumpet in Zion in Joel 2, it wasn't to warn of an escape, but it was to announce the day of the

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Lord had come when he was going to march forward in fury against his enemies who just so happened to be the first century

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Jews. Every single time the trumpet is sounded in Scripture, it's a call to arms.

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It's a call to judgment. It's a battle cry. It's a call for dominion. It's a call for war.

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It's a call for victory. It's a call to advance. It's never simply never a call to leave the battlefield, a call to retreat from the war.

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It is always a call to enter into the war. Now, some are going to argue that Paul's mention of the last trumpet in 1

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Corinthians 15, 52 and in 1 Thessalonians 4, 16 proves a future rapture, a grand escape from the world.

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The trumpet is blasted and all the soldiers run away. That's what they're going to say.

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But again, this misunderstands how trumpets function in biblical prophecy. Trumpets are not in time sound effects for a loser church that gives up in defeat.

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They are covenant signs that there's a transition maybe of covenant eras, that there's an advancing that's going to happen.

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There's inauguration of a new group of soldiers that's getting ready to move forward, that that's going to happen.

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It just doesn't signal defeat. We'll get into those two passages specifically more next week.

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For now, I'll give you some more examples that we'll talk about briefly. Nehemiah 4, 20, the trumpet was sounded as a rallying cry, not as a retreat.

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Amos 3, 6, it signified imminent judgment was coming, not retreat. Zechariah 9, 14 announced

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God's victory, not his retreat. When Jesus sounds the trumpet in Matthew 24, 31, he's not describing a future horn blast so that people can run away from the world and be raptured out of here.

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That's just not what he's doing. The dispensational objection assumes that there is only one kind of final trumpet in scripture, and it's a retreat horn, and that's not what the

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Bible says. Throughout history, throughout the Bible, trumpets have marked all kinds of covenant moments, and they're not retreat.

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In Mount Sinai, the trumpet was blown, and it marked the giving of the law, new covenant. At Jericho, the trumpet in Joshua 6, 20 declared victory over God's enemies.

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In Joel 2, the trumpet signified the day of the Lord upon Judah, not retreat.

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And so, when Jesus declares in Matthew 24, 31 that the great trumpet will sound, he is announcing the final and total judgment upon the old covenant world.

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The last trumpet blast that's going to fade out that old covenant system and the sound of that trumpet signaled the death of the temple, the ballad that ended the old sacrifices, the dirge that collapsed the old priesthood, and the revelry that marked the beginning of his new kingdom.

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A new people, a new covenant, a warrior class of humans who will advance and the gates of hell will not stand against them, and they will never pass away.

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That is not a trumpet of defeat. That's not a signal of escape.

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It is a trumpet that announces a new conquest under a new Joshua that is going to take not just Judah, but the entire world.

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This is not a trumpet that removes the righteous from the world. It's a trumpet that removes the wicked from their covenant standing.

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This is not a trumpet that leaves the world into the hands of the devil. It's a trumpet that declares once and for all the supremacy and the rule of Jesus Christ.

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For 40 years, from 8030 to 8070, the apostles blew the trumpet of the gospel in their preaching, and they warned that judgment was coming, that the judgment coming of Jesus was near, that the old covenant was decaying, that Jerusalem was soon going to be left in ruins.

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And then in 8070, the final blast of this great trumpet was heard as the armies of Rome laid siege and razed the city, burning it to the ground, crumbling the temple.

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The old covenant order died, and out of its ashes, the new covenant kingdom come. That is what the trumpet is about.

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And dispensationalists want to keep pretending that the old covenant world is still standing, and that a new temple is going to be built so that it can be destroyed again.

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But the reality is this. The trumpet has already sounded.

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The old covenant world is already gone. The new covenant kingdom has come. The New Testament leaves no room for a postponed kingdom, for an asterisk period, for a pause.

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Acts 2 33 through 36 declares that Jesus is already exalted at the right hand of God.

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He's already ruling his king. Hebrews 2 .8 affirms that all of these things have already been placed underneath his feet, even though we don't see the fullness of it yet.

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And 1 Corinthians 15 .25 says that he must reign until all of his enemies are put up under his feet.

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If dispensationalists are correct, then Jesus is not reigning now, and the New Testament lied to us.

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But Paul says the opposite. Paul says that Jesus is reigning now, and he'll continue to reign until every enemy is defeated.

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The only one left that he will defeat himself is death when he comes back physically and bodily in the flesh.

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Until then, the elect are being gathered from the four corners of the earth. The judgment is falling upon the wicked.

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The king of kings is reigning, and his kingdom is coming in. And what does that mean for us?

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It means nothing less than we are living in his kingdom now. We're living under his kingship now.

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And for 2 ,000 years, this kingdom has been advancing. And it means that Christ is already enthroned.

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It means that we don't live in fear. It means that we're not waiting for an escape. It means that we're not cowards.

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We're not yellow -bellied. It means we live in victory. It means that we march forward. It means that we live in the triumph of the gospel until every knee on earth bows to our

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Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. The dispensationalists can keep looking at the sky, waiting for their heavenly forklift.

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They can keep sitting in their bunkers. They can keep flipping through their prophecy charts. They can keep waiting for a trumpet blast that's already been blown.

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But for the rest of us, we go to war. We march forward. We proclaim the gospel.

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We conquer the nations. We tear down every wall, every stronghood, every faucet, every lofty thing that is raised up against the knowledge of Christ because the trumpet of God has sounded.

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The kingdom has come. The battle belongs to the Lord, and His dominion will never end.

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And that leads us to our conclusion. As we close,

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I want to remind you that the apocalyptic genre takes old images of the past. And the author of those passages applies them to his present tense and to the people who were alive when he was writing.

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And he discusses near -term important events that are going to happen in his future, not in ours.

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In Matthew 24, Jesus plunders the pages of the Old Testament, grabbing pregnant images and metaphors to speak volumes of information to His disciples in just a few words and phrases.

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As you've seen in this episode, we have barely scratched the surface of what could have been shared as it relates to verse 31 of Matthew 24, but it's my hope that you've caught a glimpse of what this verse truly means.

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And with that, I want you to leave here today attacking this life with joy and with righteousness.

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I want you to spit in the face of the devils. I want you to defy the world and its idols. I want you to put to death the misdeeds of the flesh, and I want you to get yourself to work.

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I want you to become so excellent at your job that your CEO praises God for you and prays that nothing happens to you because of how productive you are.

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I want to see you and your wife have so many babies that the mayor of your town is trembling in his or her liberal boots.

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I want you to participate so fully, so joyfully, so righteously in your churches that the gates of hell fall down in your town and in my town and in all the towns, and I want us to think, really think, about this grand and glorious future.

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Whether it comes in a hundred years or in ten thousand, I want you and I to be the kind of people who do today what will ensure that will happen tomorrow.

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I want you and I to labor in such a way that his kingdom actually will come in our slice of earth as it is in heaven.

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Brothers and sisters, don't be a dispy downer. Don't waste the precious seconds that you have left on earth feeling melancholy and defeated.

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Get yourself up, praise your God, make your Savior known, and until next time,

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God richly bless you in that work, and I'll see you again next time on the podcast. Get out of here.