Apologetics Session 23 - Eschatology - Part 2

Yeah, I've got a head cold, so I'm going to apologize at the outset of this that my voice is probably going to get raspy at times, it'll get raspy at times, it is not

COVID for all of you who might be afraid, I wouldn't be here if it was, I did test, but I do have a head cold that seems to want to hang around for a while, so I'll do the best

I can. So, last week we had a,

I don't want to call it a marathon because it wasn't really a long running thing, it was more a sprint through Revelation, yeah, it was more like Top Gun when

Maverick goes by the tower, it was more like that. So we were able to go through all 22 chapters of the book of Revelation in very high level summary form.

As those of you who were here, I actually joined the church at the tail end, or started coming to the church at the tail end of a pastor's study of Revelation, and as I understand it, that went on for what, like nine months?

Probably. Yeah, something like nine months, so that was a far more detailed and in -depth study.

What I went through was essentially just an outline of Revelation. The reason why

I did that as the first session was basically so that we had a foundation for what we were going to talk about next, which is the three millennial views and then some of the sub -views of the rapture underneath that.

Now, all of that said, this still will be a very high level review of those.

I'm going to go through, I think it's six different views and talk about them.

One of them is heretical, the other five are, I'll just call them orthodox, although they do differ.

They're not something that we should essentially be dividing over, it's something that we can hold those differences and debate them as much as we want.

Revelation is apocalyptic language, it is confusing at times, and so that's why there's a lot of these different interpretations.

But there's certain things that we hold to be true, and so we'll talk about those.

But just by way of review, we talked about Revelation being broken into a set of categories.

Revelation is the revelation of Jesus Christ to John, and he actually sees

Jesus in heaven. There's a whole bunch of, there's the seven spirits and the four living creatures, and you've got the 24 thrones, and then there's the letters to the churches, and we talked about the topology, typology of those churches right there.

They were both real, literal churches, and both warnings and calls for repentance that were given to them in their letters fit the historical, cultural context of those churches.

But they were also types of churches, types of churches that we see today, and some of those messages were for churches at all times.

Then we get into a lot of the end times stuff, where you have the seven seals, that's the scroll of the lamb, we talked about how

Roman scrolls were rolled up and sealed seven times. These were the seven seals, no one was worthy to read the scroll of the lamb, which was essentially the title deed to the earth, if you will, but then

John was told not to cry because Jesus was there and was worthy to read the scroll.

Then we went through the seven seals, we went through the seven trumpet judgments, there were the seven bowls of wrath, the fall of Babylon, the final victory, marriage to the

Lamb, new heavens, new earth, new Jerusalem, and then the final part of Revelation, which has a blessing.

Revelation is a book that begins and ends with a blessing, and the final call to come. So that's kind of where we left off, and I had some nifty graphics for the seals, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the trumpets, the bowls, and we talked about how things progressively just got worse and worse, whereas with the trumpets you had a third of the sea, with the bowls you had the entire sea, and so forth.

And this is kind of important, the parallels between the trumpets and the bowls is going to play into some of the other views that we're going to talk about, but we had kind of what each of those were, and then the structure of Revelation.

That brought us into the three primary millennial views.

So we talked about the millennial kingdom, Jesus ruling and reigning for a thousand years on earth, and the major distinctions between them centered around the millennial kingdom and its positioning with Christ's coming.

So there's premillennialism, which has

Jesus' first coming, his second coming, the thousand year earthly reign, and the final judgment.

Postmillennialism believes that there was Jesus' first coming, that at some point, either now or at some point in the future, there's going to be this thousand year earthly reign.

Then there's going to be Jesus' second coming and the final judgment. And then you have amillennialism.

Amillennialism has Jesus' first coming, and then the millennial kingdom is a figurative thousand years.

It is, yeah, you're right, it's spiritualized. It is saints or believers reigning in heaven with God right now.

So when you die, you go to reign in heaven with God in this figurative thousand year millennial kingdom until at some point

Jesus comes for the second time, and then there's the final judgment. Can I ask you, oh yeah, you can go into detail and I'll be sure.

Yeah, I'm going to go into more detail with some of the other views, yeah. But maybe, just to let you have a drink here too.

Sure, go for it. We just have a little break. The thousand year reign in the postmillennial view is not with a physical

Lord Jesus reigning, it's what is church ushering in the kingdom, where his church would be establishing his rule on the earth.

Yes, so in some of the postmillennial views, and we're going to actually, the first view

I'm going to go into is a postmillennial view. I'm going to start with postmillennialism, then go to premillennialism, and then amillennialism.

So yes, with the postmillennialism, and the first one I'm going to go through is preterism, it talks about the church ushering in essentially a theocratic state.

But before we do that, here's a different view of the end times views.

The one thing, again, that I ended with was that to be an orthodox view, you have to believe that Christ will return bodily in the future, that there is a future kingdom, and that there is a bodily resurrection of the saints, and that we will live and dwell with him forever.

There are heretical views that don't hold to this, and we'll talk about one of them. I just wanted to have one heretical view just for contrast sake.

So now we're actually going to go in to specific end time views. So these specific end time views are essentially branches or variants of the three millennial views, and then there's also a focus in some of them around the timing of the rapture, which we'll talk about first.

So all of the views, with the exception of the hyper -preterist view, which I'll also cover, are orthodox.

So all the views are orthodox. It's fine to hold to whichever one you want. I have my own views.

I hold my view very loosely. I'm open to my mind being changed on it. Hyper -preterism, however, is a heretical view, and we'll talk about why in a minute.

So, again, to reiterate, we shouldn't divide over. If I'm a preterist, and Rich here is a pre -trib, pre -millennialist, that's okay.

We can debate that, but we shouldn't divide over it. I'm a pre -trib, pre -millennialist.

I thought you might be. That hat, by the way, is the most popular view. So we're going to first talk about post -millennial preterism.

So post -millennial preterists hold that the Tribulation actually happened a long time ago.

The view here is that the Tribulation happened before 70 AD. 70

AD is when the Temple was destroyed by Rome. It also holds that Satan is currently bound.

And the justification for Satan being currently bound, I have a hard time believing Satan's bound when you look around at the world.

But the belief is that Satan was able to stop the

Gospel from going forward, and that he must be bound now because the Gospel is moving forward. I'm going to strongman, not strawman, but strongman each of these arguments.

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about the detractions. I might mention one or two sort of weaknesses in these arguments, but I'm not going to spend a ton of time because we could literally, quite literally spend months on each of these views, just going into all of the detail and rationale and weaknesses and so forth.

Again, this is a 100 -level class, not a 400 -level class. So we will do this.

And then if you guys are interested, we could come back to this later on and do deep dives into each of these views if you guys are super interested in that.

But it holds that Satan is currently bound because the Gospel is spread around the world, and it isn't only the

Jews who can know God. Preterists believe that the millennium is either happening now or will happen soon.

And it's not necessarily a literal thousand years. Some believe it is a literal thousand years that's going to start at some point soon, and some believe that it's a figurative thousand years.

But preterists are very, it's a very sort of optimistic view in that they believe that the world is going to get better and better, and that the world will ultimately be one for Christ prior to Christ's second coming.

That eventually we will usher in a Christian government and rule, or a theocratic government.

I don't know about you, but I'm not seeing much of that happening when

I look at our current government. So it is a very optimistic view. I actually like preterism because of its optimism.

One of the, personally, having, and I'll talk about some prominent preterists, but I watch a lot of apologists, both podcast apologists, man on the street, like street preacher preterists, street preacher apologists.

And some of them are preterists. And one of the things that I really love about preterism is, because it has this optimistic view that the world has to get better and better, and that eventually the world has to be one for Christ, it is a very evangelistic view, right?

They feel like it's our duty. We are now trying to usher in this

Christian government. They're very involved in politics.

They're very involved in trying to overturn abortion laws, for example. They're very involved in trying to push legislation and push the legislators to pass legislation that is ushering virtuous things in.

And so it's a very optimistic view. They also do a lot of street preaching.

They do a lot of standing outside abortion clinics and debating people. They do a lot of debates.

They do a lot of that stuff because their view is very optimistic. It is very, you know, it's, you know, we are here to win the world for Christ.

Now this is very, this is going to be very, there's going to be a big contrast between that and say pre -millennialism, specifically pre -trib pre -millennialism, because it's the opposite.

It's a very pessimistic view, and we'll talk more about that in a bit. But this is one of the things I really love about preterism, is the fact that it has, you know, the people that hold to it have this sort of view that's very evangelistic, which

I think we all should have, regardless of our eschatological view. So preterists view that everything up to Revelation 20 verse 6 has happened already, and that beyond chapter 20 verse 6 is future.

So Revelation 20, 6 and 7, I'll read it. Revelation 20, 6 and 7 said,

Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection. Over such, the second death has no power.

But they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.

That's already happened, right? Up to that point, that's already happened. Here's verse 7, the defeat of Satan.

And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison. So that's the point at which

Revelation becomes future, in the preterist's view. So everything up to that. Now just to recap what has happened up to verse, chapter 20.

We've had the seals. We've had the trumpets. We've had the bowls.

We've had mountains being moved. We've had islands being moved. We've had stars falling out of the sky.

We've had the sun being blackened. We've had the moon turn to blood. We've had all of the, we've had everything in the sea die.

We've had everything in the fresh water die. We've had all of this stuff happening, right, up to chapter 20.

But in the preterist's view, this has already happened. The way this is routinely justified is by viewing

Revelation as apocalyptic language, right? So when it uses terms like the world, it doesn't actually mean the world, right?

What it means is Israel, Israel, and not the entire world. Apocalyptic language is essentially poetic hyperbole.

For those of you who are not English majors, I'm not an English major either, but for those of you who are not English majors, an example of this would be when

David said his bed was swimming with tears in Psalm 6 -6. So Psalm 6 -6 says, I am weary with moaning.

Every night I flood my bed with tears. I drench my couch with my weeping, right? Did David really weep so much that he actually flooded?

No, this is a poetic hyperbole. And so the preterist takes the view that Revelation is like that, right?

That these things are not necessarily literal, but they are apocalyptic and poetic in nature.

So preterists view also Revelation 6 -18, which is, again, the seals, the trumpets, and the bowls, as a retelling of the same event, right?

So, and this is why it's important to understand some of the justification they have for that is, if you actually look at the similarities between some of these judgments, not all of them, they don't line up exactly, but some of them line up where in the trumpets, you had a third of the freshwater and a third of the sea.

You had a third of the sun, you know, the stars and the moon. And then in the bowls, you had the entire sea and the entire, you know, rivers and springs, and the sun was blackened and the stars fell out of the sky, right?

So you had sort of like it's proportions that got worse and worse. Now they don't line up exactly, but some of them do line up similarly.

So in the preterist view, they don't think that these things were actually separate events that happened consecutively, but rather a retelling of the same event.

It was just a different way of telling the story, right? And preterists will often quote

Josephus too, to try and justify their interpretation of Revelation.

So in Revelation 6 .14, it says, the sky vanished like a scroll that is being rolled up and every mountain and island was removed from its place, right?

Every mountain and island was removed from its place. I don't think so. Have we seen something like that?

So in Revelation 6 .14, when it talks about the mountains being removed, a preterist will quote

Josephus talking about the Roman workmen who would go ahead of the armies and flatten the roads, right?

They would level the roads so that the Roman armies could come through and, you know, the soldiers could walk through and attack.

So again, this is taking, when it says the world, right?

The mountains and the world, it's talking about just Israel, right? And when it's talking about the mountains being removed, they're saying, oh, well, that's the protection being removed from Israel by the

Roman workmen flattening out the, you know, the land so that the armies could come through.

So it's actually removing their protection. So in Revelation 6 .15

and 17, it says, then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful and everyone slave and free hid themselves in caves among the rocks and the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, fall on us, hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne and from the wrath of the lamb for the great day of wrath has come and who can stand, right?

So this is, you know, the great kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and this is all the people, right? Hiding themselves from God's wrath.

Well, the preterists take the view, right? In Revelation 6 .15 through 17, when it talks about the people hiding in the caves, right?

They equate the kings of the earth as the leaders in Israel. And they will quote

Josephus talking about people hiding in caves underground from the Roman troops, right?

So, you know, again, they're taking the tribulation and basically overlaying it with Rome, you know, leading up to the destruction of the temple in 17.

I don't want to make this real drawn out because I realize we could spend forever.

So I think probably just about everybody in this room could look at Revelation and say, this is the purpose of what's going on in Revelation.

It's God's judgment on a Christ -rejecting world. What would the preterist view of Revelation be?

That was God's judgment on Israel. Just Israel. So every time it says, for those who dwell in the earth, it doesn't mean for those who dwell on the earth.

The earth, the world, it's Israel. Hey, Matt, one glaring inconsistency

I can see with preterism is they're interpreting events in 70 AD from a book that was written in 95

AD. Yeah. We're going to get to that. We're going to get to that. Also, Matt, one thing. Are they also aligning what

Jesus said in terms of at the end times that instead of going? We're going to get to that too.

Oh, okay. I've got it lined up. Again, I'm strong manning as best

I can arguments that I may or may not agree with. But doing a great job. I'm trying. I'm trying.

So in Revelation 9, 14, it says, saying to the sixth angel who had the trumpet, release the four angels who are bound at the great river

Euphrates, right? It talks about drying up the river Euphrates, right? Well, Revelation 9, 14, when it talks about the angels, they'll quote

Josephus, 6 .5 .3 of the Jewish wars. And also they quote

Tacitus, who actually might have gotten it from Josephus. But the quote there refers to these visions of angelic armies around 70

AD. And for the part about the river Euphrates, they'll say that the river Euphrates touches

Syria, which happens to be where four Roman legions were kept,

I'm drawing a reference to the four angels as the four Roman legions, right? Because remember, the four angels had 200 million, you know, mounted troops and stuff, right?

We talked about that when we were going through Revelations last week. Revelation, I always do that. I add an S to it.

Does anybody else do that? I do that all the time. So this is a bit of a stretch, to say the least.

But this is how they're trying to tie these things together and correlate them. Now we get to Revelation 19, 11 through 16.

It says, Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse, and the one sitting on it is called

Faithful and True. And in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems.

And he has a name written that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe, dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is the

Word of God. So we're talking about Jesus here, right? And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses, right?

From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron.

He will tread the winepresses of fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written,

King of Kings, Lord of Lords. So, Revelations 19, 11 through 16, the rider on the white horse is clearly

Jesus, right? No other way to interpret that, the Word of God, right? The preterists would view this as already having happened, right?

They would not consider this the actual second coming of Jesus, though. It is more Jesus's judgment on Israel in 70

AD. This is a pretty weak point, but this is kind of how they view it.

And in Revelation 13, when it's, and this is where it really gets off the rails.

Revelation 13, we're talking about the first beast, right? Actually, it's not with the first beast, it's with the second beast that they have a problem.

But the first beast, they believe, so the first beast is the Antichrist, right? They believe that the first beast was actually

Nero. And you know how the mark of the beast is said to be 666? Well, if, in Hebrew, they would represent numbers with Hebrew letters.

And if you actually take the Hebrew version of Nero Caesar, Neron Caesar, and you represent that in Hebrew, the translation to numbers equals 666.

So, it's an interesting thing, but. So, the beast persecutes, in Revelation, it talks about the beast persecuting for 42 months of major persecution.

And Nero did persecute for about 42 months. And did things like dipping

Christians in tar and setting them on fire. Terrible dude. But one failing of the

Preterist view is that they often skip over passages that don't kind of like line up. Although, we're probably all guilty of that when it comes to trying to defend a particular view.

But the second beast is really where the Preterists have a problem. Because the second beast, which is the prophet, right?

The beast's prophet. Remember, he comes and he makes everyone worship the first beast. And he creates the idol to the first beast.

And he makes the idol talk and kills those who don't worship the beast. And there's really no clear correspondence to this anywhere in Preterist commentaries.

And he makes fire come down from heaven. Yeah, that's the other thing. That didn't happen either. Right. So I said earlier also the whole

Satan being bound thing is kind of difficult to imagine, given what we see in the world.

Although again, just like last week, I will warn you not to try and make too close of an alignment between world events and revelation.

I'm not saying that it's not the case. I'm just saying like lots of people make predictions and have made predictions that have not come true.

Around the coming of Christ. So Matt, do you remember when we went on our retreat back in May?

Something like that? May, June? Yeah. And Pastor Jeff gave us the

Preterist postmill view because of the optimism that you had talked about.

And it wasn't based upon the power of the church in a sense that we are going to buy our power.

But Pastor Jeff's point is God is sovereign and God can do whatever he wants. And there may be a great revival before all of this stuff happens.

And he was trying to encourage us to say, hey, if the Preterists are going out and sharing their faith like this, if the

Preterists are getting involved in their culture and going and doing this, he said, we need to be doing it.

Yeah. You know, we don't have a pessimistic view. We have a God -centered view and he can do whatever he wants.

Absolutely. And again, I really do love that about the Preterist view because it really sort of forces them to take that on.

And we'll talk about premillennialism soon and how it kind of leads people into sort of an almost apathetic despair around evangelism.

So Revelation 20, verse 4, it says, Then I saw thrones and seated on them were those whom the authority to judge was committed.

Also, I saw souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God and those who had not worshipped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands.

They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. So Revelation 20, verse 4, there are two resurrections and the

Preterists view the first resurrection as a spiritual resurrection and the second resurrection as a physical resurrection.

So even though it's clearly referring to two resurrections, they have to make the first one non -physical.

So one of the strengths of, I think this is the next slide, one of the strengths of the

Preterists is all the passages that reflect that the end is soon, right? So this is Revelation 1 .1, Revelation 1 .3,

Revelation 20, verse 6, Revelation 22, verse 10, and the Olivet Discourse.

So it talks about, you know, Matthew 24, 34, Matthew 16, 28, where it says things like this generation, you can see it up here,

I hope you can see it up here, it says this generation will not pass away until all these things take place, right?

There are some of those who are standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom, right?

You will not finish going through the cities of Israel until the Son of Man comes. So it talks about Jesus' return being soon, right?

So all of this sort of soon language is, you know, this is probably one of the stronger things, you know, for the

Preterists view. But the criticisms, and again, I'm not going to straw man too much, but the criticisms of Preterism is that it stretches symbolism to a breaking point, it also downgrades

Revelation from being a world -affecting thing, right, a worldwide thing, to being just something about Israel, at least up until, you know, the things that happened in the past.

It seems to have two comings of Christ, the 70 AD one where the Temple was destroyed and then the second coming which is going to be in the future.

And also, and this was the point, I can't remember which one of you made it, I think it was

Rich, or maybe it was Ivan, this is the point where the writing of Revelation, right, for it had to happen before 70

AD, right? So 70 AD, the destruction of the Temple, so you would have to date

Revelation to somewhere around 65 AD, right?

But some of the problems with this are, you know, the timing with Nero, right?

And also, the scholarly sort of consensus is that Revelation was most likely written in the 90s

AD, right? So rather than, you know, like, so let's say AD 95 versus AD 65, so that's like a 30 -year span, and you have that sort of pivotal point there at 70

AD where the Temple was destroyed, so it forces a very early dating of Revelation that most don't believe what was actually true.

There are, however, some, well one other thing, the early church fathers,

Preterism is a more recent view. So it's not, Preterism wasn't something that the early church fathers held to, it's something that came along later.

I don't know off the top of my head, I think it was, I think it was the, I could be wrong on this, so I hesitate to quote it, but I think it was around the 1600s, but I could be wrong on that,

I'll have to go back and look that up. But it was later than the early church fathers. The early church fathers in the first few centuries were not

Preterists. Although, it is probably the most up -and -coming view.

So while pre -millennialism is the most popular view, and pre -Trib, pre -millennialism being the most popular branch of that,

Preterism is probably one that's gaining more steam recently, for whatever that's worth.

And there are some very prominent Preterists that I know I respect, and I know many of you respect as well, so there's

R .C. Sproul, who's a Preterist, Doug Wilson's a Preterist, James White's a

Preterist, Jeff Durbin's a Preterist, James White and Jeff Durbin are part of Apologia Ministries.

I got turned on to them because they do a lot of street preaching, they do a lot of going outside of Mormon tabernacles, and debating

Mormons, going to Jehovah's Witness halls and debating with them, going to abortion clinics and debating people there, and just street evangelism, generally speaking.

Again, evidence of the evangelistic nature of their particular viewpoint.

So, and R .C. Sproul, I mean, I don't need to say much about R .C. Sproul, but R .C.

Sproul was a Preterist as well. So that's

Preterism in a nutshell. Again, we could spend ages going through all this stuff, but I'm going to stop it there and go through some other views.

So now this gets us, naturally, to the first heretical view, which is a highly hyper -Preterism, which

I'll bring up here. Hyper -Preterism is something that is heretical and we should divide over.

So this is the one exception to the other views that I'm going to talk about tonight, but it holds that everything in the

Bible has already been fulfilled. Everything in the Bible has already been fulfilled. The second coming has already happened, we're now living in the eternal kingdom, there is no literal resurrection, there is no eternal life, there, that we are in the new heavens and earth.

I don't know how anyone could hold this view, but I'm just telling you what it is. It denies central tenets of Christianity, right?

It rejects the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and I don't really want to spend a ton of time on it.

I just wanted to bring it up and talk about what, how it differs from Preterism.

It's called hyper -Preterism. It should be called something else because Preterism itself is, I may not agree with it, but it at least is orthodox to the point of not being heretical.

But hyper -Preterism is, I guess the reason they call it that is because it extends

Preterism to everything after Revelation 20, verse 6 as well. But I don't know how anyone could look around and say we're in the new heavens and earth and that everything's already happened.

Satan and sin are not supposed to be here. Right. All right. So that gets us into the premillennial views.

I'm going to talk about a few of them and I'm going to talk about a few sub -categories that talk about the timing of the rapture.

So I'm going to talk about pre -tribulation, mid -tribulation, post -tribulation, and pre -wrath.

But first, this is the premillennial dispensational view. So I first have to talk about what dispensationalism is.

So this premillennialism is the most popular view. There are some different views around the rapture, as I said.

But it's also probably the easiest, at least for me, it's the easiest one to grasp when reading

Revelation. Right. Because it reads Revelation as future. And so for me, it allows you to take things more literally.

And I always say if the word says something, I shouldn't have to allegorize it to make sense of it.

I shouldn't have to say, you know, I shouldn't need a decoder to basically figure out what's what.

It takes Revelation pretty much chronologically. It does, it does. So it is apocalyptic language, no doubt.

But it can be taken more literally than in some other views. But to just talk about dispensationalism versus its alternative, which is covenant theology.

The covenantal view is a view that there was a covenant of works and a covenant of grace.

Some of them have a covenant of redemption, but we'll just talk about the two there. So essentially, covenant theology holds that in the covenant of grace, the new covenant,

Israel is replaced by the church. So whenever the Bible and the

New Testament is talking about Israel, it's actually talking about the church. And so all of this sort of language in Revelation, remember we talked about the 144 ,000, right?

144 ,000 Jews, 12 ,000 from each of the 12 tribes, right, were saved, right?

They couldn't be harmed. They won innumerable multitudes of people to Christ, right?

It talks about them in Revelation. Well, covenant theology would say that that's spiritual

Israel for the church. To which I say, if I'm one of the 144 ,000, which tribe do

I belong to, right? So I have a problem with, yeah, exactly. I have a problem with kind of allegorizing that.

I think I heard a reference on one of the videos I was watching where it said, you know, when it was talking about the temple and it talked about a spoon and the depth of the bowl of the spoon and the length of the handle that a covenant theology would allegorize that to say, you know, the depth of the spoon is the depth of God's grace and the length of the handles.

And I'm like, maybe it's just talking about the depth of the spoon and the length of the handle, right? So sometimes you can just read things literally and say, it's just talking about what it's actually talking about.

So when it says 144 ,000 ethnic Jews, 12 from each of the 12 tribes, it just means 144 ,000 ethnic

Jews, 12 ,000 from each of the 12 tribes. Yeah, there's a few things about interpreting Revelation in particular that you've got to hang on to, which is, if it's saying something in a literal language, okay, we would, common sense says take it literally.

If the Apostle John, for instance, is saying, well, he had appearance of hair, like what, of like cotton wool.

Right. And his appearance was like burnished bronze. Right. Well, he's using language like, like, or as, like he's doing the best he can to describe it in a, in his own, in his own, the way his mind can, can make sense of it.

Yeah. Right. But if he's not using that kind of language. Right. He's defining events.

Right. That are happening. And so the, the, so covenant theology is, is, is popular in reform circles.

It is, there's not, like, it's, it's not something, again, we should probably divide over, we should debate it, but it's probably not something we should divide over.

The thing, though, is that it sort of forces you to allegorize certain things in, in the text, especially in Revelation.

All right. So you've got the covenant of works, covenant of grace, a view that, frankly, is a more modern view.

And one of the, one of the things that covenant theology, people that hold to that view, they'll say that, you know, the apostles held that view.

Right. I don't know that that's necessarily true. But they'll, they'll say that, you know, covenant theology predates dispensationalism.

Dispensationalism came in, in the 1800s. But dispensationalism is the view that the

Bible is actually broken into seven dispensations. The first dispensation is

Eden, innocence. The second dispensation is post -Eden, which is conscience. The third dispensation is post -flood, which is civil government.

The fourth dispensation is Abraham, or the promise. The fifth dispensation is

Moses, or the law. The sixth dispensation is Jesus and the church age.

And the seventh dispensation is the millennium and the theocracy. So covenant theology, you know, like I said, replaces

Israel with the church. And again, forces you to allegorize. Dispensationalism holds that the church and Israel are different.

And it allows you to read the Bible a bit more literally. When it's talking about Israel, it means Israel. When it's talking about the church, it means the church.

And one of the arguments that I make to folks who hold to covenant theology is, why would they just say the church?

They say the church in other places, right? They say the people of God, or the church, or the saints.

Why don't they just say that everywhere? Why do they have to say Israel? And why do we have to interpret Israel as being the same thing as the church?

If they say Israel, they mean Israel. If they say church, they mean the church. So again, we could, again, spend an entire class on dispensationalism versus covenant theology.

But because we're talking about pre -millennial dispensational views, I wanted to kind of just lay the groundwork for dispensationalism as a precursor.

So pre -millennialism holds that Jesus will return to the future, that there will be a literal thousand -year reign, that the first resurrection of the saved is at the beginning of the millennium, and it is followed by the thousand -year reign, okay?

Now we're going to talk a bit about the rapture, but that the first resurrection is at the beginning of the millennium.

At the end of the millennium, Satan is released. He deceives all that he can, right?

All the people that are, because they're people that are living, that are born in the millennium, in the millennial kingdom.

Not all of them come to believe, even though Jesus is reigning in Jerusalem, in the New Jerusalem. But Satan is released from his bondage, and then tries to deceive all he can.

There's a final judgment that follows, and the second resurrection happens. So before the millennial reign, there's a tribulation.

This tribulation is a literal seven -year period. Again, we're in pre -millennialism.

This tribulation is a literal seven -year period. There's the 144 ,000, 12 ,000 from each tribe of Israel.

The beast isn't Nero, in this view. The beast isn't Nero, but the Antichrist is a leader of the world at the time of the tribulation.

So he's a worldwide leader, worldwide government, right? We talked about that being Babylon, or, you know, a

Roman -like empire, right? If you remember when Rome basically ruled the world.

It requires a literal Israel nation, and a temple in Jerusalem.

This is why the, sort of, what would you call it, 1948, when

Israel was made a nation again, right? When Israel was given back to the Jews, right, in 1948.

This is why that was such an important event for Christians, because Christians looked at that as fulfilling a prophecy, right?

And so, and they are trying to rebuild a temple. Right now, the Temple Mount, you have a mosque, but they are trying to rebuild a temple, right?

So the millennium is where a bunch of promises are fulfilled about Israel having worldwide influence.

So this is where we start branching in the pre -millennial view, right?

So there are different views around when the church is actually raptured. For this tribulation, right?

So again, seven -year period. I think I had a slide before where we talked about, do

I have it? I don't think I, I don't think, yeah,

I guess this is the best I can do. That top, that top bar. Well, it basically, you have the entire tribulation is seven years.

It's probably hard to read on there. It's broken into two three -and -a -half -year periods. The first half is, you know, called like the birth pangs, and then the second half is called the great tribulation.

And, you know, there's, there's different things that happens. There's the seven seals, then there's the trumpet judgments, and then there's the bowls of wrath, right?

Now, the pre -tribulation, pre -millennial view is, again, probably most popular because who wants to go through a tribulation?

So, that's probably largely why it's the most popular. But there, there is a promise given to believers, though, in, in the

Bible. So, 1 Thessalonians 1, 1 Thessalonians 5, 1 through 11, which is, section is called the day of the

Lord, says, now concerning the times and the seasons, seasons, brother, you have no need to have anything written to you, for you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the

Lord will come like a thief in the night. The day of the Lord is kind of an important, an important distinction because a lot of these views around the rapture have to do with what is the day of the

Lord. For the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying there is peace and security, then suddenly destruction will come upon them as labor pains, right?

As labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief.

For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. So then let us not sleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober.

For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk are drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet, the hope of salvation.

For God is not destined to us for wrath. This is the important line. For God is not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our

Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep, we might live with him.

Therefore, encourage one another and build one another up just as you are doing.

For God is not, so this is verse nine, for God is not destined us for wrath. That is the promise that we hold on to around the wrath of God.

So the question is, when does the wrath of God begin? Right? So the promise is that we're not destined for wrath.

Does that mean that we're destined for all the tribulation up to the wrath? Not necessarily. But it means that at least we can hold to that we will not suffer the wrath of God.

So it's very clear that the wrath of God is poured out only after the sixth seal.

So it is at least possible that the church will undergo the part of the tribulation up to this, or just after the sixth seal.

That's before the three. That is just, that is, that is,

I think just after, isn't it? After. I think it's just after. It's just after the fifth seal.

The fifth seal is the mid. The fifth seal is the mid. The sixth seal is just after the mid, the middle of the tribulation, the middle of three and a half.

So pre -tribulation. Pre -tribulation arguments, other than the we're not destined for wrath argument, are also that Jesus told, one of them is also that Jesus told

John that the faithful church will be spared from the hour of trial. So remember we talked about the faithful church,

Philadelphia, right? I remember it was kind of cool that it was Philadelphia because we're very near Philadelphia.

Not that Philadelphia is any representation of a faithful church, but that aside. So in Revelation 3, verse 10, it says, because you have, this is

Jesus, because you have kept my word about patient endurance, I will keep you from the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world to try those who dwell on the earth, right?

So pre -tribulationists use that verse as a way to justify that we will be spared from the tribulation.

It's not just the wrath of God as it was in Thessalonians, but it was also the trial for the whole world, right?

Another that the pre -trib, I'm just going to call them pre -trib, that pre -tribbers hold to is that the seven year tribulation is specifically a time for God to work on the

Jews. That God's messenger angel, Gabriel, speaks of this in Daniel 9.

The tribulation is referred to as Daniel's 70th week when it talks about the 70 weeks.

So in Daniel 9, verse 24, it says, 70 weeks are decreed about your people and your holy city to finish the transgressions, to finish the transgression and to put an end to sin and to try to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet and to anoint a most holy place.

Paul also speaks of this in Romans where once the final

Gentile is saved, it says once the final Gentile is saved, the church is raptured and blinders are removed from the eyes of the

Jewish people. Again, this is all argument, argumentation around the tribulation really being about God working on the

Jews. So Romans 11 .25, it says, lest you be wise in your own sight,

I do not want you to be unaware of this, mystery brothers, a partial hardening has come upon Israel until the fullness of the

Gentiles has come in. So the theory here is that once the final Gentile that will ever be saved is saved, the church is raptured and God ushers in the tribulation, at which point he works on the

Jews, ultimately saving 144 ,000 of them, which then in turn saved many, a multitude more.

And another argument is that when Jesus said to Luke that we should pray that we are worthy to escape, right?

It says in Luke 21 .36, it says, this is Jesus, but stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are going to take place and to stand before the son of man.

So again, this is, again, I'm strong manning these arguments. So that's what the pre -tribulation, that's some of the arguments that the pre -tribulation

Christians make around why it is reasonable to believe that the church will be raptured prior to the beginning of the tribulation, the beginning of the seven years.

There's another view, which is a mid -tribulation view. This is right at the midpoint, the three and a half year point of the tribulation.

So mid -tribulationists point to the chronology given in 2 Thessalonians 2, 1 -3, where it talks about the man of lawlessness.

So in 2 Thessalonians 2, 1 -3, it says, now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word or a letter seeming to be from us.

To the effect, this was in Pastor Jeff's teaching when he was going through 2

Thessalonians where he talked about, you know, there must have been other people writing as if they were, you know, if they were

Paul. Let no one deceive you in any way, for that day will not come unless the rebellion comes first and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction.

What did Jeff always say, hammer home what has to happen for the end times? Apostasy, abomination of desolation, and the

Antichrist, right? So this is the chronology that Pastor Jeff was hammering home, right? He kept saying it over and over and over, right?

And so this is the chronology that mid -tribulationists will point to.

And it teaches that the Antichrist will not be decisively revealed until the abomination that causes desolation, right?

Which occurs at the midpoint of the tribulation. That's when the Antichrist is revealed. So mid -tribulationists will hold to that.

It's talked about in Matthew 24, 15, where it says, this is Jesus again. So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet

Daniel standing in the holy place, let the reader understand. And then in Daniel 9, 27, so this was a reference to Daniel 9, 27.

This is Jesus referencing Daniel. In Daniel 9, 27, it says, and he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week.

And for half of the week, he shall put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on the wing of abominations shall come the one who makes desolate until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator.

And we're actually running out of time. So I'm going to finish up mid -tribulation, and then we'll probably pick this up,

I guess, next week. So mid -tribulationists use Daniel 7, 25 as well, which says the

Antichrist will have power over the saints for three and a half years to bolster their point. So in Daniel 7, 25, it says, he shall speak words against the most high, and shall wear out the saints of the most high, and shall think to change the times and the law.

And they shall be given into his hand for a time, times and half a time. So they assume that the first half of the tribulation, and that the saints that are spoken of are the church.

They also interpret the day of Christ as the rapture. Therefore, the church will not be called up into heaven until after the

Antichrist is revealed. Another foundational teaching of mid -tribulationism is that the trumpet of 1

Corinthians, I'm not going to read these verses, but you can read them if you want. 1 Corinthians 15, 52 is the same trumpet mentioned in Revelation 11, 15.

The trumpet in Revelation 11 is the final in a series of trumpets. So it would make sense that it's the last trumpet.

But this logic is kind of flawed, because what was the purpose of the trumpets?

They were to judge, right? Not to call the saints home.

All right. So what we have left, because we're now at eight o 'clock.

What we have left may not fill an entire session next week, but we still have to go through pre -wrath.

I try to do these sort of chronologically. So pre -trib, obviously at the beginning of the tribulation.

Mid -trib, right at the dead center, three and a half years, which is at about the fifth seal.

Pre -wrath, which is essentially at the sixth seal. So it's just after mid -tribulation, but essentially holds very strong to that we're not destined for wrath.

And that's really when the wrath of God comes. And we'll talk more about why that reasoning, why some may hold that reasoning to be important.

But we'll go through the pre -wrath, and then we'll go through post -tribulation view.

And then after that, we have what Mike Winger calls the pre -millennial progressive dispensational view, which is an interesting view that I kind of like.

But we'll talk about that. And then we have amillennialism, and that's pretty much it. So it might not take up a whole session, but we'll table it till then and go through those views and maybe a bit of a review on what we've gone through.

But before we kind of wrap it up, were there any questions? I kind of went through it pretty quickly.

Were there any questions about any of the stuff that we've covered thus far? I just wanted to say to anybody interested in dispensationalism, a great little book is

Charles Ryrie's Dispensationalism Today. Excellent book. Yeah.

So I know this is a lot of firehose information. Well, one of the challenges we have with Preterists is, first of all, it kind of questions of the belief in the inerrancy of Scripture.

So you have a major issue with that in the hermeneutics part of it, right?

And the exegesis of some of the verses are just not quite aligned, especially if you go down into the

Greek or into the Hebrew, what was actually being said, and they're translating it differently. That's one piece. But the other part of it, which is,

I think, even more dangerous, is the fact that there is a hint of universalism that comes with that.

And if you're not careful and you're not grounded in Scripture well enough, you start to lean towards that, and it's very easy for the latest generation that we have, your son, you know, that generation that is accepting universalism, not him personally, or New Age or any, to kind of combine those type of,

I don't even want to call them doctrines, but with Preterists. It's kind of a very slippery slope, and it's something that just,

I guess, you know, Jeff is very clear about what the Bible says, you know, and this is exactly how it's going to be mentioned.

It usually aligns with the Greek and the Hebrew, and we all try to do that. But I think once you start to move away from that, and you're starting to question inerrancy, and that becomes kind of like a wild card, that you don't really have a good validation of what is really going on there.

Yeah. You know, although, like you're saying, there's a positive viewpoint to this, that they feel that you're aspiring to something else, but...

Yeah, the thing I like about Preterism, as I've said a couple of times already, is this optimistic view, evangelistic view.

It's the one thing I think we can take from Preterism. I personally am a pre -millennialist, and I lean towards pre -tribulation pre -millennialism, but I could be swayed to pre -wrath as well.

Again, I hold these things pretty loosely. But the thing that really wins me over with pre -millennialism is really the fact that these apocalyptic events clearly have not happened.

So you have to allegorize them, right, if you're going to say that these happened in the past.

I do get some of the Preterist arguments around the similarities between what happened to Israel.

It forces you to not read Revelation literally, which is a problem for me. The one thing that I would say sort of detracts from pre -millennialism is it is a very pessimistic view.

It's a view that the world is going to continue to degrade and get worse and worse and worse, to the point that Christians are going to be persecuted.

And even if they don't go through the tribulation, they most definitely will be persecuted as the world continues to fall into anarchy.

So regardless of whether you're pre -trib or pre -wrath or mid -trib or post -trib, Christians will suffer persecution.

They always have. Right. And so it sort of can cause people to retreat into, what did

I call it earlier, apathetic despair, right? Where it's like, well, the world's going to get worse.

Hopefully Jesus comes back. And you just kind of like, you don't evangelize, you don't reach out, you don't share.

You basically try to fly under the radar so you don't get persecuted and you essentially just kind of retreat into, it's a private matter between me and God and I'm just going to go to church on Sunday and pray in my prayer closet, that kind of stuff.

And so I think that the one thing we can take from preterism is that sort of optimistic, evangelistic view. Because I think we should be, as Drew said, operating in that way regardless of whether the world is getting worse and worse.

And it pretty clearly is. So that's the one thing I would take away from that.

There are, if you're interested in a debate, kind of a debate, between amillennialism, premillennialism, and preterism, or postmillennialism, there's one that John Piper moderated with Doug Wilson and I forget the other two guys that were in it, but it's called

A Night of Eschatology. It's an hour and something long. It's called A Night of Eschatology where they basically go through.

Doug Wilson, although I still don't hold to the postmillennial view, he probably presents the best argument for it.

So he's a good guy to listen to. And rock solid doctrinally otherwise.

So watching A Night of Eschatology, that's the name of the video, you can find it on YouTube, was sort of an introduction to the differences between these views.

The amillennial view comes out as being the kind of wishy -washiest or at least one, but I like the debate between the premillennial and the postmillennial views in that video.

If everybody voted, it's amillennial. What's that? I think Votibox.

It's amillennial. And many, many Presbyterians are amillennials.

Many of them are also preterists. But yeah, amillennialism,

I guess it makes sense. But it's difficult for me to read Revelation and see that.

When it talks about a literal thousand years, when it talks about a new Jerusalem, it's just difficult for me to say that that's all sort of a spiritual millennial kingdom.

Any other questions or comments? Can I give you a quote? Go for it. Dr. Harold Orlington from Liberty University.

If the plain sense makes common sense, seek the other sense lest there be nonsense. Yep, that's the truth.

That's also, going back to covenant theology and dispensationalism, that's also the thing that triggers me.

I could almost get behind the covenant of works and covenant of grace if I didn't have to allegorize everything in the

New Testament, right? If I didn't have to replace Israel with the church, like, you know, so anyway.

That's what's good about Charles Ryrie in the book. I was talking about this. He says we got to stick to a literal hermeneutic and not allegorize, because that's when we run into a lot of nonsense and confusion.

Except, you know, I think Drew brought up a good point. When it's clear that you're drawing a parallel or you're using a metaphor, the language could be read clearly, but when it's clearly talking about something specific, don't try and use your decoder ring to figure out what it actually means.

But even in those passages where it says, as if, using a metaphor, it's still referring to something literal.

Yes, it is. But what it's doing is it's talking about it as the writer understood it, right?

Versus, like, when it says Israel, it says Israel, right? You don't need to whip out the decoder ring and go, well,

Israel's really this, you know, and then you end up kind of, you know, whisper down the lane. Right. A thousand years is a thousand years.

He repeats it six times. All right. Jeff, go ahead.

Just a quick question about next Monday. It's Labor Day? Oh, that's right. Next Monday is

Labor Day. Then it'll be the Monday after. Okay. Yeah, we're not meeting on Labor Day.

It's the day already. So, good question. Yeah, very good question.

Thank you for that. One other thing when you're talking about Charles Ryrie, I'm reading that book right now.

What, that same book? Yeah, I have it now. I just read an article recently when you're talking about Hermann Nunes.

When is a wolf not a wolf? You know, when he talks, he goes through and talks about the

Hermann Nunes and how to take it literal versus symbolic. It was an interesting article.

Yeah. All right. Well, I'm going to pick on one of you two.

Ivan. Okay. Father, thank you so much for this wonderful teaching by our brother

Matt. Thank you, Lord, for this brotherhood that we have here that we can meet freely in this country, even during these dire times.

We thank you, Lord, and we praise you that we have that, afford that time to go ahead and share.

We pray for people who are suffering right now and pray for people who do not know you. And we ask that you would just open up their hearts and their minds,

Lord. And we pray that for the remainder of this week that you would just put your hand on all of us, Lord.

Give us those opportunities to reach others, Lord. And give us those opportunities to help others in whichever way possible,

Lord. We just lift each one of us up to you, Lord. Honor you. We love you. And we bless you,