TiL Interview with Josh Howard

The Meaning of Eschatology and Why It Matters

Welcome to the Truth and Love podcast. We hope you will stick around with us this evening. Tonight we have a special guest, a Truth and Love podcast interview with Dr. Josh Howard from Eschatology Matters.

We're going to be looking at.

Amillennialism and postmillennialism. Stick with us. Welcome back to the Truth.

And Love podcast. Just want to remind you that the comment line, as I refer to it, is open. We would love to hear from you. Let us know that you're watching. Ask a question. Give us a critique. We're open to all that, but we would just love to know that you are with us.

Dan, how are you doing? Good. How are you doing? I'm doing well. I'm Rob. That's Dan, and above us is our special guest, Dr. Josh Howard. Josh, I was corrected at the Laborers Conference the last weekend of April this year.

We had a special fill-in pastor that I think you know, Michael Schultz. Yeah, yeah, I know Michael. Yeah, he filled in for us last minute because we had a dropout, and we were thankful for that. Out of respect, because I know that it takes a long time, and it takes a lot of hard work and dedication and sacrifice, so if someone has earned their doctorate degree, I like to give them honor, and so that's why I refer to you as Dr. Josh Howard.

I refer to him as Dr. Michael Schultz, and he said afterwards he preferred Brother Michael Schultz, so I should have previously asked you. I should have learned my lesson from the conference, but do you have a preference?

Is Dr. Josh.

Howard okay? I'm fine with whatever. I think most people just call me Josh, but yeah, I appreciate the honor. Absolutely, you deserve it. It's a lot of.

Hard work and sacrifice. So yeah, we're gonna talk about amillennialism and postmillennialism, which is, I believe, right up your alley based on the podcast that you've been doing for a while now. Would you let everybody know who you are?

Give us a little bit of intro about yourself. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm a father and a husband. We're celebrating 19 years in about a month, so I was just making plans earlier today for how to honor my wife, speaking of honor, for that.

We have four kids. I pastor a local church here in Battle Creek, Michigan, so we're in the southwestern part of the Mitten, if you're familiar with the topography up here in Michigan. But I've been up here for about three years.

I mentioned before the show, I have the southern accent. You'll hear it popping through. Not as strong as Michael, as you mentioned a minute ago, but still there and lingering on. So I pastor a church here.

I'm the primary preaching and teaching elder. I do some writing. I've written some books, been able to contribute some articles. In fact, I'm one of the contributors to a new venture called Clear Truth Media, so I would commend anybody that's watching to check that out.

It's an excellent venture, but yeah, it's about how I keep busy. And then Eschatology Matters obviously is a side venture. I'm one of the co-founders of it with a guy named Brandon Wood, so I always am sure to tell people that you see my face on there, but what you don't see is Brandon Wood holding the entire thing up on his shoulders, almost single-handedly.

So yeah, that's what we do on the side.

Eschatology as Story and Christian Hope

There's the Lord. Let's step into it, Dan. Yeah, let's do it. So just start broad. Why.

Does eschatology matter at all? First, I guess, define what eschatology is for folks that may not know the word, and then why does it matter? Yeah, so.

Eschatology, you know, if you get your systematic theology book or, you know, whatever reference guide and you flip open and you look up the word eschatology, you'll find some definition of, like, the study of the end things or the last things or the final things.

Generally, that's the word. You know, etymologically, if you break down the word, that's where it comes from is eschatos and logos. So it's pretty much a breakdown of the study of the final or ultimate or last things.

But if you start to look at eschatology, one of the things we've tried to kind of commend on our channel is to think of eschatology less so as some sort of checkbox or some sort of nuance of a systematic theology text, and instead think of eschatology as a sense of story, because I think that's really the way Scripture sort of teases this out.

You know, when you encounter Scripture, one of the things that I think frustrates a lot of us that have kind of an analytical mindset is that God does not give us a textbook. It's not a systematic theology.

He doesn't give you, here is your chapter on angels, and now we can move on. Here's your chapter on soteriology, et cetera. He gives you a story, and he gives you a story because he wants you, I think, to think in terms of story.

And I think that's something that all people really do is we think in terms of story. The question is, are we thinking in terms of the right story? You know, I've heard a lot of guys recently make much of the fact that there are certain ontological or, like we could say, creational truths that are true whether we do well with them or not.

And just to give you an example, I mentioned that I'm a father. I am a father, which means I lead in my home. The question isn't whether I'm going to lead my family. The question is, really, am I going to lead well or am I going to lead poorly?

There's many other ways we can work through that, right? If you're a child of God, you are a child of God. He considers you a child of God, and nothing can change his opinion of who you are in him. The question is, will you be a faithful child of God?

Will you be a child of God who is not faithful? So if you're to look at eschatology, then the question is, what story are we really talking about? Are we talking about God's story, and hopefully biblically truthful, or are we talking about the story of the world?

And that's one thing that I think has become very apparent for many of us, is that the world has its own eschatologies. Obviously, false religions have their own eschatologies. We're familiar with that.

But just the world itself that swirls around us, the culture around us, has an eschatology. If you turn on the news, if my kids flip on, heaven forbid, Disney Channel without me monitoring it very closely, whatever that looks like, they're going to be told a story of, here's what we're a part of, here's where this thing is going, and here's who you are in this story.

They're being told eschatology. Here's where it's all headed, even. So one of the things we want to be sure to do as Christians is to promote a biblical eschatology. And we recognize that's tough, right?

There's parts of Scripture that are tough. Revelation is tough. Ezekiel is tough. We understand that, and we can have a lot of charity and patience with each other. But we want to be sure to communicate especially those big tenets of that big story.

We want people to be thinking in terms of the story that God has made, even if we might have some substantive disagreement on some of the details. The fact that Christians have a story to proclaim and a direction to proclaim, I think,.

Is something that's very vital in the world around us right now. Sure, yeah. So you have a podcast called Eschatology Matters. Obviously, you believe it does matter, as you just explained. I'm sure hoping so, yeah.

Yeah, right? It makes sense that you would. So explain a little bit more about your podcast and what y 'all hope to do in showing, I'm guessing you're trying to show people why and how eschatology matters.

Explain a little bit more about how the podcast plays a.

Role in that. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. So I won't bore your listeners with the origin story of Eschatology Matters. We've told it a few times, but the general gist of it was that Brandon, my co-founder, hosted a conference.

He pulled several of us together presenting on eschatology, that sort of thing. And the channel was sort of birthed out of that initial conference. And so since then, we've had conferences and small things that we've done here and there.

But the channel has been the mainstay of this. We started with YouTube. We branched out into our website, eschatologymatters .org. We have podcasts. We joined Fight, Laugh, Feast Network. So it's kind of grown from there by the grace of God.

But our aim was pretty simple. We wanted to look at eschatology and really try to not only encourage Christians, as you just pointed out, that eschatology does in fact matter. And it matters beyond just some Thanksgiving dinner table argument over when the rapture is or whether there'll be a rapture event in the way people conceive it.

Something beyond that, right? And this broad conception of eschatology. We wanted Christians to know that it matters and it's good. When you read these passages, if you were to think of like any eschatological passage, like those key passages, so to speak, usually they're given with encouragement.

And I think that's what's so unfortunate about the way we read those passages oftentimes is we read them and we're confused, we're discouraged, we're divided over it. When they were given, not for our confusion, they were given for our hope.

So I think our approach to eschatology should even be when it's like, okay, I cannot quite remember what's going on at Daniel 11 right now. I haven't studied this in a while, but I remember it's for my hope.

So I'm not going to let that discourage me. I'm going to remember there's a story about which Christ is winning. I may have forgotten some of the details along the way or be confused about them, but I know this is a story meant for my encouragement.

So that was kind of the impetus of the channel. We set out to do that. One of the things that we approached it from was we titled it just sort of from a broadly reformed perspective. And we did that for a specific reason.

When you look at eschatology, there's a lot of very similar approaches to eschatology, but there's some covenantal differences that come into the mix that make things a bit difficult. So when you're talking about amillennialism, postmillennialism, even historic premillennialism, there's a whole lot of continuity, a whole lot of similarity between those views that you have kind of a common working ground from which to then kind of walk through these issues.

And from there, you can kind of make the differences and the similarities more clear. Because again, that's one of the things we wanted to do is provide clarity. We don't want people strawmanning each other and misunderstanding each other.

As much as we can, we want to make those differences clear. When it comes to the dispensational view, dispensational premillennialism, we have brothers who are dispensational. We have, believe it or not, guys on our team at eschatology matters that are dispensational and we're grateful for them.

It's difficult to engage that view sometimes because the approaches are so radically different. So it's one of those things where we have graciously just said, hey, we're going to try to focus on the more covenantal or reformed viewpoints of eschatology and kind of try to walk.

Through some of those things. Sure. So in the light of that, what you were just talking about, if you could touch on this for just a moment, you talked about when you're reading Daniel chapter 11 and remembering that it's for our hope.

A lot of times when we think about eschatology, we're thinking about either an imminent hope or a far off hope. And it's the end of all things. But eschatology has an impact on our everyday living. So what have you learned that teaches.

Us that eschatology plays a factor in our everyday life? Yeah, there's a lot of things that I think, you know, I remember we, a dear friend of mine, he went to church plant up in New England. And I remember we reached out, we were helping him out with a need they had had.

And it was one of those unexpected, you know, God sort of orchestrated the events. But he reached out and was just thanking us for it and just praising God for God's timing in this whole matter. But I remember he used a phrase and it's always stuck with me.

He said that he and his wife had been struggling right before this whole, you know, all these events took place with us. And he said that they were preaching the gospel to one another. And I just thought that was such an interesting phrase.

And it kind of tripped me up when I read the letter. I was just thinking to myself, like, preaching the gospel to one another. That phrase has stuck with me since then, because I've experienced that in my own marriage and in my own family.

I wouldn't have framed it that way then, but I certainly do now, is that you're reminding each other of what is truly true. So when things are tough, when a relative dies, when sickness hits your house, when financial difficulty, whatever those challenges are in the immediate, you know, day-to-day life of the Christian, you preach the gospel to one another.

Hey, wife, remember Christ has saved us, redeemed us. Christ has bought us with his blood. Christ has counted us as sons and daughters. We have a hope that's eternal even beyond this. And Christ will certainly see us through no matter what those struggles may look like.

It's, you know, reminding one another of the hope that we have. That's sort of what this eschatology thing is about. You know, we're in an election year. This is 2024. I don't have to say a thing controversial on here.

Everybody, when we say it's an election year, you have all the worries of what could happen, what's already happening, what might happen. There's plenty to look around and be genuinely discouraged about, genuinely upset about.

But the Christian has that hope of eschatology, which is not, like you pointed out, it's not just a future hope, although it is, praise God. It's also a hope of right now that Christ is actually victorious right now, that he is actually reigning and ruling right now, and that he is actually, that he's actually bringing us through victoriously even right now.

Now, within that, there's a lot of differences in the way we might suss those details out, but I think most Christians would agree on those things, that Christ is actually bringing.

His kingdom through, that we will be triumphant. So digging in, starting to begin the actual topic for tonight, Amill and Postmill, and people like to talk about dates, and I'm sure most people would, you're going to talk to different people with different opinions on dates, but from your study, your perspective, amillennialism and postmillennialism, when did they begin as something that was a major theology of the church?

The History of Amillennialism and Postmillennialism

Yeah, so my sarcastic answer would be that they began with the New Testament, but I'm sure I'm not the first one to make that sassy claim. No, it's one of those interesting things. So when you look at the Old Testament, there's a certain eschatological hope.

Sometimes it gets a little bit hard to suss out what that exactly looked like, especially if you look at some of the Second Temple Judaism writings and pseudepigraphal writings, things that were swirling around that were not necessarily scripture, but sort of help us maybe see what they were thinking in the background of the situations.

But there's a clear hope in the Old Testament, right? There will come a serpent crusher. He will crush the head of the serpent. We know this from Genesis 3 onward. There's the hope of the coming one, and that there will be a final kingdom of some sort, right?

Christ will, or the Messiah would reign forever in some form. But as with many things in the Old Testament, things are just a bit hazier than, praise God, we get more clarity within the New Testament with the mystery being revealed, as Paul talks about in Galatians.

So when you get to the New Testament pages, then it's a little bit tough to suss out, I think, what some of the early church fathers were thinking. I know a lot of people say a whole lot of things about the early church believed this.

Typically, the general rule is to say that the early church was generally historic pre-millennial. There's been some really great works written sort of challenging some of those assumptions and walking through what exactly were the early church fathers saying, what was the context.

It's difficult sometimes to read what they said and anachronistically sort of read what we are hearing back onto what they said, and that's just not the categories they were working with. There's a book called Regnum Calorum that's really helpful with that.

I think Charles Hill, I believe, is the guy that wrote that one. But in any case, when you see the early church, it's a little bit of a mixed bag. You see an expectation of a kingdom, but you can kind of pick out different elements throughout the early church.

When you look to the then kind of future development of the church, really from, let's say, the 400 to 500s, the time of Augustine and some of the early church fathers on into the Reformation, one of the dominant views would be the post-millennial view, and when I say post-millennial, I'm including post-mill and amill in that view, and I can explain what I mean by that in a minute if you'd like me to, but it's sort of the view that when Christ returns, he's returning finally and fully.

There won't be any sort of taking away of the church in a secret rapture, but instead that the church will rise to meet Christ. Christ will return. He will consummate his kingdom, and he will be with us forevermore, that sort of viewpoint, and you see that really hold into the Reformation when you read the Reformers.

Several of them talk very much about this sort of viewpoint, but when you move on down through the kind of more recent centuries, the pre-millennial view starts to take off, and especially in the West, you see it really dominant with a lot of during the Great Awakenings.

Here in the United States specifically, it's tied quite frequently to dispensationalism, although that's not the only expression of it, but you see a lot of pre-millennial thought recently within the United States, but if you were to look at sort of like the dominant perspective of church history, I think that most would agree it falls in the generally post-millennial category, and again in that I'm including post-mill and amill together, but generally post-millennial from there, where you see the two diverge.

I hope I'm not talking too long on this one, but it's kind of a lot. Okay, so when you see post-mill and amill begin to be referred to differently, because if you were to look back to the 700s and ask some Christian, hey, who's post-millennial and who's amillennial, they wouldn't have any frame of reference.

You really start to see those into the 1800s, early 1900s. I would be real hesitant to put a sort of pin in the map on that one and say exactly what year we could credit it, but you can certainly see it if you look back to the sort of old Princeton crowd.

You have the Hodges, both of the Hodges, and then you have B .B. Warfield coming after them, sort of those three old Princeton guard. You start to see from them and then that generation that comes after them a divergence in broadly post-millennial thought.

So if you're to think of post-millennialism as simply the fact that Christ returns post or after the millennium, so we are in the millennium now, and then Christ returns to consummate all things. He returns to consummate the kingdom and be with us forever.

If that's post-millennial thought, you start to see amill and post-mill sort of start to diverge there, and like I said, in the late 1800s, early 1900s. So by the time you get to especially some of the Westminster crowd that comes after that time, Gerhardus Voss and some of those guys that were writing at that time, you start to see real distinctions pointed out between what we now refer to as amillennialism and post-millennialism.

Prior to that, they would have just called it all post-millennialism and been like, oh, he's one of that kind of post-mill or that other kind of post-mill.

It's so interesting to me when we think about dates and how we approach what we believe in when it comes to dates by what we've learned and how we've been taught to learn. So we want to match what we believe with scripture with the confessions and what the church has held to for years to make sure that we're not off in some other world based on what church has taught throughout the centuries, what confessions have taught.

So when it comes to dating and theological belief, it's funny how sometimes we think about how, well, ours was first, so ours must be right. But I don't think that's always the case, and it's so interesting with eschatology that we've had so many gatherings of great minds to flesh out these things and give responses to this confession or that confession.

But when it comes to eschatology, there are some truths that we don't negotiate on, but we're still fleshing things out along the way.

Anybody that reads, you go back and you read Athanasius and Arius and some of those early church controversies, and you see number one, just the difficulty in categorizing people into these neat categories, but you also read some of the just widespread disagreement, not that everybody's completely off base, but there's widespread substantive disagreement on some of these issues.

Just reading some of those early church debates, I think it should give all of us a little bit of just healthy humility, I think, with trying to be too quick to just brush stroke who was in what camp and who can claim what century.

It's usually not quite that neat and tidy. I think anybody that's in local church ministry can attest to that. These things aren't.

As neat and tidy as we would like to remember them by. So when you see these two popping up today, where are they popping up? What denominations are holding to these views.

And which ones are more popular where? Between Post Mill and Amill, there's a really interesting swath. If you just think toward the American context, I think you could probably say, number one, Amillennialism is definitely the dominant view.

Post Millennialism would be in the minority, as it stands right now in the categories that we're working with. You can find a lot of Post Millennial scholarship coming from primarily within Reformed ranks, and I would even push in a little bit farther and say many of them within Presbyterian circles, but you could push back and say much of the same with Amillennial thought.

The broad swath of modern evangelicalism within the U .S. is Premillennialism. I would say you could probably push that a little further and say there's been a dominance of dispensational Premillennialism within the last, let's say, 140 years within the United States, but a lot of that is a little bit hard to suss out again because once you get down to the details, I think the categories become a little bit swimming.

But again, when you look to denominations, many Baptists would confess some form of Premillennialism, many within the Reformed camps, and by that I mean Presbyterian Reformed church in America, those sort of denominations, Christian Reformed church, many of them would fall into the more Amillennial or Post Millennial thought.

Sometimes you can find some interesting nuances. I know we've touched base with Miles Christian, who has his own channel, and he does a lot studying Seventh-day Adventism, which I'm not counting within Orthodox Christianity, but at the same time he's looked at some of their eschatological beliefs, and a lot of times eschatology is a huge driver, especially with some of those, we could say, more fringe movements that sort of are at the edges of Christendom.

But yeah, that would be kind of my general take on where eschatology stands in America. I think for most people, this has been our experience at the channel anyway, most people come out of what I would gently and lovingly describe as an unstudied dispensational Premillennialism.

And by that, again, I say that gently because I'm not trying to throw shade unnecessarily. I just mean that many of us just grew up, we sort of knew of the Left Behind series or some other media presentation of a Premillennial pre-trib rapture, so we sort of assumed that was it.

But if you'd asked me, you know, like, hey, where is this in Scripture? Like, nobody's really at least in many circles, nobody's really studying through those things. It's sort of just the zeitgeist or the kind of common conception that many grew up in.

So but that again, that's sort.

Of a recent thing within the US. So kind of along with that, you talked about earlier on, there was and you put together all meal and post meal as post meal. And then there was kind of a fork with those two.

And then there was the rise in dispensational Premillennialism that most of us probably grew up with. And just in my case, personally, I didn't even know what it was called. But that's the only thing I was taught.

And that was the only thing I knew ever existed until I began to, you know, branch out and study for myself. So the rise and fall, why do you think that there was there was a rise and fall? The ideas of post and all meal kind of took a back seat?

And there was a rise in premill dispensational premill? In your estimation,.

What kind of happened there to cause that? Yeah, um, there's there's things. So I think the two the two mile markers that I would point out, and I point these two out just to emphasize why I kind of disagree with, with, with some of these mile markers sometimes.

Because again, history is really complicated, right? Like the way people arrive at convictions is it's not so neat and tidy a lot of times. But most people, if you were to ask, and you were to ask why, why did dispensationalism take off, they would point to key speakers, key evangelical voices, especially that held the dispensational thoughts.

They may very well point to the Schofield reference Bible, which was, you know, famously dispensational. And the Schofield reference Bible for quite some time within the US became sort of the standard with with the rise of modern liberalism.

Those who were actual Bible believing Christians, what we would consider today, like conservative Christians, or those who took the scripture literally, even, you know, with, with, with brackets around that word literal, they were the ones reading the Schofield reference Bible.

So it became kind of a litmus test or a, you know, a shibboleth for who's actually taking the Bible seriously. If you had the Schofield reference, you were probably good people. You probably believed what, what the Bible confessed about creation and those sort of things.

If you rejected the Schofield, you're probably one of those, you know, those browbeaten liberals who was, who was denying the incarnation. So that's one of the contributing factors. You look back to that, you say, well, that sounds really neat and tidy.

And I don't doubt that played a huge role. I don't know if that was like the key contributing factor that really drove those things, but it's of post-millennialism or its, or its popularity. The one thing I typically hear, and it's typically targeted at post-millennial thought, is that post-millennialism was grand right up until the world wars.

So the general conception is that it was, it was popular with the Puritans. You had this coming to America, this land of promise and all the manifest destiny and all the sort of, you know, these grandiose visions of what God might accomplish through this new land that they, that they were coming to.

You had the awakenings that happened, but really that it came down to the world wars and that the horrors of World War I and the trench warfare and the chemical weapons that were being used. And then you know, that, that, that sort of repetitious horror of World War II and atomic weapons and all of this horror sort of shook people out of their stupor with believing post-millennialism.

That's one of those things, again, and I'm pointing these out to show like, I don't really agree with those mile markers that much. I think they're compelling. I don't think they tell the whole story because with post-millennial thought were some shaken by the world wars and maybe abandoned their, their confession of post-millennialism.

I'm sure that probably did, that did happen. And I'm sure there's, there's many examples that we could point to. But in general, if you were to look back to the Puritans and you were to say, okay, where can we find some of the most eloquent or at least the most long-winded and, and, and, you know, long, long versed expositions of post-millennialism, you could look to the Puritans, right?

This is the Puritan paperback series. And you know, some of the publishing, publishing houses out of Grand Rapids have made these things very widely available. So we're reading the Puritans and we're recognizing, ah, they've got this, this heartbeat of post-millennial hope.

They, they have a, an optimistic approach to things. And especially with what God might accomplish in this world. And that sounds real good as if they had things so keen and so neat. And then you read about their lives and it's like, oh, they had 17 children and 15 of them were dead by the age of four.

And then he loses his wife by the time she's 25. And then his house gets burnt down. Like these aren't people living in just easy times where, where one might kick back one's feet and think, ah, I think things are very easy.

I'm going to munch a donut and assume God wins in some sort of post-millennial vision. So I don't think it's really doing much justice to what that heartbeat was. The, the, the truly compelling presentations of eschatology.

And I say this, I say this with all the views, even the ones that I firmly disagree with. The compelling ones to me are always the ones that are born from biblical exposition. Those that are born, not from our looking outside and not from what the world looks like, but instead born from what we think that God is confessing he is truly doing in this world.

I care very little. In fact, when it comes to my eschatology, I care nothing for what I read on the news. If 2024 is a dumpster fire and the world looks darker than we could have ever imagined in a few months, it's not going to shake my eschatological hope any more so than I think it shaped Paul's eschatological hope when he's in a prison cell with Silas and he's in the inner cell and he's in uncomfortable chains and he takes to singing because his hope for what God is actually accomplishing is not dependent on how dark the walls are, how tight the chains are.

So I think, I think, I think we do each other a little bit of a disservice when we assume that the winds and the waves of culture, what determine true belief in. There's always Christians who are just kind of swept along by winds and waves.

We know that from the New Testament warnings, right? But for those of us who are serious and those who are of us who are trying to ground our faith in what God has confessed in his word, and we recognize we falter and we recognize we fail.

We also recognize God knows the true truth of things, even when our vision and our scope of things is quite limited in this world. That eschatological hope is something that's born from what God says and not from what the world around us looks like.

When I think of that eschatological hope, one of my favorite stories is of Robert Louis Stevenson, which, you know, many, many grew up with him and are familiar with his works. But as a child, he was, you know, famously sickly and he's, he's there in that, that upper bedroom window and he's looking out on the streets of London late at night, you know, by all accounts in a place where he could, could well have been despairing or could have been a poor hope and poor cheer.

But he looks out his window and he sees the lamplighters about their trade, you know, down there on the streets, lighting the lamps at night. And he, you know, in the way only somebody gifted by God with such, such artistic language could say, he described it as those lamplighters punching holes in the darkness every time they would light a candle.

That, that, that to me is what eschatology looks like. It's God punching holes in the darkness. And sometimes those holes look very small. After World War I, yes, the hope in this world and, and in God accomplishing things, it might look very small, but the, but the hope is not in the size of the holes being punched.

The whole, the, the hope is that there is a lamplighter who will punch the holes that he has promised to. And that, that light is glorious and it is shining and the darkness does not overcome it to, to paraphrase from John a bit there.

So yeah, that's kind of my overview of like where I see some of those events, but why I think that the true eschatological hope is something that's much more deeper and much more grounded than those world events may indicate.

Key Similarities and Differences Between Amillennialism and Postmillennialism

Hmm. Yeah. So when you look at, at our millennialism and post-millennialism, um, when we look at their, their actual beliefs, uh, obviously they were lumped together for a while, so they're, they're fairly similar, but there's things that distinguish them.

So what are some of those major similarities and differences? Yeah, well, I mean, one of them.

Is right and one of them is really wrong. I mean, I think it's the major, um, no chuckle on that one. You're in a safe place here. Are we all safe? Are we friends still? I'm,.

I'm, I'm, so I chuckle quietly.

I'm totally stealing that. That's gold. Okay. So, um, yeah, some of the major differences. So, so I'm millennial and post-millennial, um, both of them are expecting Christ to return post-millennium, right?

So the millennial reign, which, um, famously is, is in, it's in Revelation chapter 20. It's mentioned six times, uh, there, I think it's six times, but it's in those like mainly in the first six verses there in Revelation 20.

Um, but really it's that section of one through 10 is where we get the, the thousand year reign, the Kiliayete that's mentioned. Um, but really everybody's trying to grapple with that. And, and obviously that that's not just by itself.

These things tie from the old Testament. They tie from the new Testament. There's, there's much to inform that passage, but all millennial and post-millennialism both says Christ is going to return after that millennial reign after that thousand year reign, Christ returns.

And when he returns, he, uh, raises the dead. Um, he judges the wicked. He vindicates the saints. Um, all will stand before his throne. All will be raised from the grave. He will consummate the kingdom.

He will bring in the eternal state. Everything comes when he returns. This is, this is the event we look to. Um, so both, both of those views would agree. There's not a secret rapture. And when I say secret rapture, I mean a rapture that comes unbeknownst to some prior to Christ's return.

Um, millennialism and post-millennialism are both in agreement that Christ returns and that catching up of the church that we read about in, in, uh, the letter to the Thessalonians. Um, that's a catching up to meet him in the air, but that we returned with him.