73. Don't Just Do Something... Stand There (End Times Series 24)

Welcome back to the Prodcast, where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 73, Don't Just Do Something, Stand There. White Rabbit Dispensationalism. Not long after falling down a dank and darkened rabbit hole, Alice found herself chasing after the most peculiar and eccentric little white hare that she could have ever imagined.

Now in some ways, this particular lagomorph would have been like any other with fur and whiskers, hoppity gate, and other such rabbit-y features, but with a clever little vest, an antique pocket watch, and a frantic demeanor that was accentuated by being terribly late for a very important date, this tiny white buck was unlike any creature or waskily rabbit that Alice had ever encountered.

Now suppose that you've had the good fortune and pleasure of seeing the original 1951 Technicolor Disney rendition of Lewis Carroll's famous fable. Well in that case, you will remember the scene at the White Rabbit's home where the flummoxed bunny was running around erratically, spouting various issuances of nonsensical commands, including the memorable line that was given to Alice, Don't Just Do Something, Stand There.

Well apparently, the rabbit was so captivated and crippled by not being on time that he was rendered no good in time. To say that another way, he was so upset over missing an engagement in the future that he was no good getting there in the present.

This, our furry white friend, shares so much in common with the modern church regarding issues of eschatology. Now as one pastor once quipped, they're so heavenly-minded that they're no earthly good.

Many who hold to the eschatological immediacy that is so common today are so frantically attempting to discern the signs of the times that they have forgotten how to get on with the things that Jesus actually commanded us to do.

From believing that the Fauci ouchie was somehow the mark of the beast, or that someone in the World Economic Forum was going to rise up as the new Carpathian Antichrist, more than a bit of time has been wasted staring up at the clouds and forgetting that we have work to do here on the ground.

This eschatological defeatism, expecting that each day is going to further devolve us into more extraordinary instances of tyranny and chaos, is not going to abate, according to its adherents, until Jesus swoops in on a cloud and vaporizes us out of thin air with a secret rapture.

That view has not only led to a lazy and an unengaged church, but it's also produced an apathetic church as well. For instance, why would you spend your life working to make disciples of all the nations?

That takes a lot of time, especially when the rapture is going to return at any minute, because our time is uniquely evil. It's somehow worse than every other age in human history, which in fact is a dubious claim if you ever take the time to read history.

Then, if all that's true, you would probably spend your days either hiding in a hole somewhere, maybe in an underground combine, or frantically evangelizing and attempting to convert as many possible souls as you can before Jesus returns.

You wouldn't waste time with discipling them, you just need to convert them and convert as many as you possibly can. And the result of that endeavor would be a legion of converts who've never been discipled, who've never been taught how to be godly men and women, who've never been given a vision for faithful, to be faithful believers over a lifetime and over generations, which is precisely why the sort of languid and superficial Christianity that exists in the West exists today.

Because we've become captivated by the imminent and the immediate. We've become no good at being faithful in the present. If the church, the church of our Lord Jesus Christ, has any hope of recovering from her slothfulness and shallow, easy-believism, then we must discard the hemlock of dispensationalism and adopt a more biblical view.

Review of the Previous Eschatology Series

A brief look backwards. Now, if you've been following along with the blog for some time, you will know that this is already 23 episodes in to eschatology, and it's been some time before since we've talked about eschatology, but maybe you're like, 23 episodes on eschatology sounds a bit obnoxious and maybe somewhat like overkill, given that everyone believes that the sky is falling and that we're somehow going to be teleported out of here any day now.

But if you've been tracking along with the episodes and the articles, you will remember that many of the end times so-called passages that we've covered are not awaiting future fulfillment but have already been fulfilled in the past.

In this way, we are what is known as partial preterists, meaning that we believe that a portion, and albeit a large one, of the New Testament eschatological passages have already occurred in the past.

Now, if you're new here and you're wondering what in the world I'm talking about, I would suggest that you go back and reference those first 23 episodes. They are worth your time. They're going to be marked End Time Series, and they're on our website, they're on our podcast, and they're wherever you can find your podcast, that's where they're at.

And in those, I'm going to share a fair amount of content that maybe you've never heard before. And in that sense, I believe that those episodes will not only be intellectually stimulating to you, but they'll demonstrate to you that this view that we are talking about is not a matter of mere farcical opinion, but it comes out of a robust exegesis of the text.

The Gospel Foundations of Partial Preterism

Now, with that much settled, I want to take up the cause of eschatology once more. If you remember, we've been writing a lot about culture. We've been writing a lot about male and female roles, and we've done 29 episodes now since we've been on the topic of eschatology.

But I want to come back to the topic again, because I think that it's so important to understand how do we engage in culture. Because if, like I said, if you're waiting on an imminent rapture, it's going to either cause you to hide or it's going to cause you to overly focus on evangelism and not focus on discipleship and raising up faithful generations that are going to last for centuries.

And that's going to impact the way that you view the world and the way that you engage in it. So I want us to pick back up on the topic of eschatology. But before we do that, I wanted to give you a little bit of a reminder of where we've been.

If you are familiar with those 23 episodes, what we've done is we've built a case from the Gospels that the immediate return of Jesus Christ in the Gospels was focused on the downfall of Jerusalem. The axe was already at the root of the tree, John the Baptist says, when Jesus came upon the scene in Matthew 310, the fruitless city of Jerusalem was about to be thrown into the flames like the withered fig tree, Matthew 21.

The kingdom was going to be taken away from the Jews and it was going to be given to a people who produced the fruit of it, Matthew 21, 23 and 46, which meant that a unique event, a fiery judgment was about to be rained down upon the city of Jerusalem, Matthew 22, one through 10, especially verse seven, which culminates in the fact that God's wrath that has been stored up since the very first murder of righteous Abel is going to be poured out on those Jews of that generation, Matthew 23, 34 through 39, and also Matthew 24, 34.

All of this is described in riveting detail for us in the Olivet Discourse and what we found is that all of this section applies to things that are going to happen in a single generation from the ascension of Christ, which we know now in history occurred in AD 70.

We've covered all of this before, so now it's time for us to skip ahead. I just wanted to give you that as a reminder of where we've been. The foreshadowing of Theophilusian eschatology. After the Olivet Discourse, where Jesus was giving his last in-time prediction before he was arrested, after that he was arrested, he was brutally murdered and he was placed in a borrowed grave where he would triumphantly rise again on the third day, according to the scriptures.

Now, as you can all imagine, all of Jerusalem would have been stirred up by this most unusual occurrence. Apparently, there was more than 500 eyewitnesses who saw Jesus risen from the dead, who saw him alive, 500 eyewitnesses that Paul alludes to that you could go and that you could talk to and that you could ask them questions, and that's in 1 Corinthians 15, 6.

Now once Jesus rose from the dead, his prophecy of a 40-year countdown, a generation of time, before the destruction of Jerusalem that was given in Matthew 24, that timeline, that countdown began at the ascension of Christ.

Then after Jesus rose from the dead, he spent 40 days, one day for every single year that it was going to take for Jerusalem and the Old Covenant to be put out of his existence. Jesus spent 40 days teaching his disciples and commissioning his church on what he wanted them to be focused on.

Now this teaching includes what we know as the Great Commission, which is recorded at the end of Matthew's Gospel in Matthew 28, 18 -20, as well as the urgent missionary mandate that was given to his newly created church in the very first chapter of the book of Acts.

Why the Book of Acts Matters for Eschatology

So what we're going to do is we are going to look at how the church transitions into its first couple years as a church, and we're going to look at the text, we're going to look at the passages from the book of Acts, and we're going to see what eschatological teaching is there.

Now admittedly, there's not a lot of teaching in the book of Acts. It will take us several weeks in order to cover it, but we want to look at what did the first church believe about eschatology, about Jesus' coming, about his appearing.

And we're going to take several weeks to cover that from the book of Acts, and at some point in the future, we'll cover the writings of Paul, we'll cover Hebrews, we'll cover John's epistles, we'll cover all of those things, and we'll eventually get to Revelation as well.

Now, why more eschatology, you may be asking yourself. It's my hope that as we work our way through all of the relevant statements of eschatology in the New Testament, especially that are found in this remarkable book that's dedicated to Theophilus, that we're going to see that the immediacy of Jesus' judgment return does not apply to us.

The judgment that he was talking about was a shadow that was hanging over apostate Judah's head. That return would be to put away the old covenant trappings and to establish an unrivaled church that would bring about our Lord's kingdom into all the nations.

Now, let me clarify here. That does not mean that we do not believe that Jesus will return again. We do believe that, and we're going to get to that, but we have to build out the rest of the case, and we have to show how some of these passages actually don't apply to that.

There are passages that do, and we'll get there, so trust me on this. But it's my hope that we're going to see that the passages in the book of Acts that we're referencing do not apply to the future coming of Christ.

They apply to the coming of his coming and judgment in AD 70 in Jerusalem. Now, furthermore, it's also my hope that as we begin to see these things in the ensuing weeks, which will especially be true of the passage that we'll look at next week, that our focus will not be on cloud-watching, nasal-gazing, chart-drawing, and tinfoil hat-wearing eccentrism.

Instead, it is my hope that our posture towards eschatology and our posture towards Christ's return will be one of trust, that we will trust that he will determine when he returns, and until then, we have a responsibility to work and to build for the glory of God.

When our master returns, I don't want him to find us staring at the clouds and looking at our navels and hiding in a bunker somewhere, thinking that, you know, Nikolai Carpathia is just around the corner.

No, I want our master to find us working, like the parable of the talents or like the parable of the returning master, where some slaves are found being lazy and slothful and some slaves are being found working.

I want us to be found working. So one of my hopes in doing this is that we would see these passages and see the hope and see what they actually mean, and that it would cause us to work for the glory of Christ until Christ returns.

Conclusion and Ministry Updates

So with that, I want to invite you to join us next week as we continue our series on eschatology, as we move from the Gospels and what they say about the end times to the book of Acts and what it says about the end times.

And until then, God bless you. Do not be frantic like the white rabbit and do not stand still. There's a lot of work to do until next time. God bless you. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of the broadcast.

By the Lord's grace, we've been able to do 73 of these episodes so far, and by the Lord's grace, I hope to do 10 ,000 more. If you like what we're doing and you like to support this show, you can give to the ministry of the Shepherds Church by going to www .theshepherds .church and clicking the give tab on our website.

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With that, I hope you have an amazing day. God bless you, and we'll see you again next time on the broadcast.