124. How The Book Of Revelation PROVES Postmillennialism! | A Practical Postmillennialism Series

The Purpose of Revelation and Its Imminent Judgment

Those prophecies were not meant to confuse you and they weren't meant to send you into the arms of Nostradamus or the Mayans or anyone else who writes some sort of crazy eschatological future. They weren't meant to get you best friends with Tim LaHaye or any of the other nonsensical charlatans who promote the premillennial vision.

Those prophecies were meant to give you absolute certainty, not that they occur in multiple millenniums into the future, but that they occurred in the past. Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf.

This is episode 124, how the book of Revelation proves post-millennialism, what this is and what it isn't. Whenever one attempts to write on the subject of eschatology in general and also about Revelation in particular, well, it won't be long before an army of what-about-thisers and what-about-thaters are crawling up to the surface and pummeling you with a litany of questions.

It's not necessarily a bad thing so long as the questions are relevant, so long as they're connected to what the author, me in this sense, is trying to accomplish. For that reason, I thought that I would explain myself, I would qualify my very narrow purpose in this episode.

I am not attempting to cover an extended exposition of Revelation 20 on how post-millennialism is the only and right millennial view of that great chapter. I believe that that's a good, a very good and a very necessary thing that I could be doing, but that's not what I'm doing today.

Today, I intend to accomplish something different. I am planning a full-scale series on the book of Revelation in 2025. Maybe that's an announcement. Maybe I've never even said that publicly before. I don't think I have.

Hey, I'm going to be doing a series in Revelation in 2025. It's going to be epic. We're going to go through the whole book. So more is coming. So with that, I'm not going to be doing an extended exposition today.

I'm not going to be talking about the beast and who he is. I'm not going to be talking about the mark of the beast, the 144 ,000. I'm not going to be getting into any of that stuff, and I hope that that's okay.

I want to save those details for my longer series next year, which is happening and it's going to be great. It's going to be epic. Stay tuned. Today, my hope is actually to show the structure of Revelation and how the book is organized and how that proves a post-millennial vision.

So if you're down with that, if you're down for that modest goal, and if you're down for the final episode in our post-millennialism series, isn't that crazy? We've been going at this now for like six months and we're at the final episode of the biblical part of this series.

We've got some more interviews that are coming, but we're at the final episode. So if you're down to see how Revelation is the post-millennial capstone on a post-millennial Bible, then all I have to say to you is own word, Christian soldier, let's go.

Revelation as the End of the Old Covenant World and the Beginning of the New

Part one, the difficulty with the book of Revelation. The most natural expectation that a reader can have is that a book's conclusion concludes the story. That's obvious, right? After investing hours into a plot line, perhaps multiple volumes of novels, the reader should expect that the end of the book ends the book.

That again is sort of basic, but it's not always the case. Chronologically speaking, the final pages of a book are supposed to describe the final events in the story arc. There's supposed to be nothing significant that comes after that unless there is a continuation of the story.

And yet, contrary to our expectations, the book of Revelation does not end that way. Now on the one hand, the book does form a kind of grand conclusion, but not in the way that we're thinking. We come to the last book of the Bible, expecting it to tell us about the final moments of our future.

And that's not its purpose. Its purpose is not to describe how the world is going to end. In fact, its purpose actually is to describe how the new world begins. We assume that because it's the last book of the Bible, that it's going to deal with the final moments of human history, which is why so many people have become confused when they come to this book.

Instead of it being a conclusion for our story and the end of all material reality, Revelation is doing something very different. It's describing the end of the Jewish age through apocalyptic images, and it's talking about how Jesus fully and totally brings a new world order, a new creation, a new church, a new city, a new bride that he's going to use to redeem everything that was broken.

So in that sense, Revelation 1 through 19 is the explosive ending of the old covenant world. It is the old covenant world crash landing and blowing up, as it were. And Revelation 20 through 22 describes a new beginning, a new beginning of a brand new world where Jesus is going to transform everything that was broken, everything that was twisted, everything that was mangled as a result of the fall, and he's going to heal everything.

The curse is going to be eliminated through his church. Now, that kind of structure where you've got one dramatic ending and then a little pop up, it's almost like a plane comes down on a runway and smacks the runway and bounces back up.

That's sort of what we're looking at here in the book of Revelation, and 19, it looks like a plane crash, and then all of a sudden, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the church comes back up and starts to take off, and you don't see when it lands.

All you do is you see the takeoff of the church. Now that kind of ending has happened in literature. If you've been around this channel long enough, you know that I love J .R .R. Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings.

I love all of those books, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, The Unfinished Tales. I love those stories. Well, The Fellowship of the Ring is kind of like this. If you remember, I was in Iraq when I read The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time, and as I was reading it, that's the only book that I had.

My grandma, it took her three weeks to send a package from North Carolina to Baghdad, Iraq. It was going to take me a while, and she didn't know if I was going to like the story, so she only sent me that one.

As soon as I got to the end, The Fellowship and the formation of all those storylines kind of resolved themselves, and then the book doesn't end. Instead, it sets up new challenges and unresolved issues, and before I knew it, I had been cliffhung, and I was ready to read the next volume, and I was eagerly on the satellite phone telling my grandma, please send the next books, please.

I had to wait three or four weeks to get them. Well, in a similar way, Revelation concludes the story of the Old Covenant world at chapter 19. It's done, and yet the story is not finished. It's talking about a new story, a new narrative arc, new conflicts, new challenges, a new world, and it's going to bring us to eventually the end of all things.

But Revelation leaves that a little bit vague, so that understanding helps us understand this book, and if we don't understand that strategy, then we're not going to understand the book of Revelation.

If we don't understand that Revelation is telling the story of the end of Adam and Israel and the glorious beginning of Jesus and his new church, if you don't understand that, then the book of Revelation is going to be sorely confusing.

So that's one aspect of why this book is so difficult to read. Another aspect is that we don't understand why John wrote this book. I think there's an answer to that, but many don't understand why he wrote this book.

Let me explain it this way. John's gospel is the only gospel, remember there's four of them, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. John's is the only one that does not contain the Olivet Discourse. Now that's the section of the gospels, if you're not familiar with what the Olivet Discourse is, where Jesus is prophesying about the end of the Jewish age, Matthew 24 .3, where the temple is going to be destroyed brick by brick, Matthew 24 .2, wars and rumors of wars are going to be unleashed upon the land, Matthew 24 .6, false prophets are going to be leading the people astray, Matthew 24 .11, famines and earthquakes are going to break out in the Roman world, Matthew 24 .7, the church is going to be persecuted in a very increasingly intense season of 40 years, Matthew 24 .9.

And for her covenant crimes against her God, Judah will be totally destroyed, Matthew 24 .15 through 22, such that the only thing that is left of her in the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 is the dead bodies that lie in the streets of Jerusalem, the vultures are pecking off the meat from the bloody cadavers, that's Matthew 24 .28.

Matthew's gospel has this dramatic prophecy of Judah's end that's called the Olivet Discourse and it's described for us in Matthew 24, Mark covers it in Mark 13, Luke enumerates it in Luke 21, but John doesn't even mention it.

The most remarkable prophecy that has ever been uttered on human lips that came true with the most astonishing clarity, it's unrivaled in literature, it's not even alluded to by the fourth gospel, it's not even mentioned at all.

Why? Well, many point to John's gospel being written for a particular purpose. His purpose is revealed to us in John 20 .31, he said, these things have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that by believing in him you have life in his name, which is undoubtedly true.

And it means that John's gospel's purpose was the salvation of sinners, therefore the Olivet Discourse did not really have a purposeful place. But it's also true that John didn't ignore this content totally.

It's also true, and I'm going to prove this today to you, that John not only didn't include it in his gospel, but he also wrote an entire book about it. You see, John, instead of just making it one chapter like the synoptics have done, he writes an entire book on the Olivet Discourse, which we know by the name of Revelation.

What I'm going to be arguing is that John gives us an expanded 22-chapter exposition of the Olivet Discourse that's in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21, that is going to show us how Jesus inaugurates his new bride, the church, and puts down the old covenant whore called Judaism.

Now with that in mind, I intend to show you today how the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 is clearly and unmistakably about the first century end of Jerusalem. And as I'm demonstrating this, I'm going to show you how the book of Revelation perfectly follows the Olivet structure so that Revelation is saying the same thing as the Olivet Discourse.

If the Olivet Discourse and Revelation follow the exact same structure, they're saying the exact same things. The Olivet Discourse is talking about the end of first century Jerusalem, so is Revelation.

And I'm going to prove that to you, that in AD 70, the book of Revelation, this is what the book of Revelation is about. So with that introduction, let us begin our final biblical episode on this series by looking at John's Olivet Revelation.

Imminent Timeframe References in Matthew 24 and Revelation 1

Part two, comparing the Olivet Discourse and Revelation, opening timeframe references. Now as Jesus leaves the temple mount for the final time in Matthew 23, after cursing the city for her covenant crimes, he indicates something.

He tells us that God's wrath is going to be poured out on that wicked and adulterous town. According to Jesus in Matthew 23, all of God's wrath and fury that has been stored up all the way since Cain killed Abel was about to be let loose on that generation, Matthew 23, 35 through 36, which is going to result in the imminent destruction of the Jerusalem temple and the holy city of Jerusalem within a 40 year window of time.

You'll remember that in the Bible, a biblical generation is 40 years. This means that as Jesus began his most detailed and expansive prophecy ever given, the one that is directed squarely at the Jerusalem temple and the Jews, he took the time to indicate to you and I when this was going to happen.

And he did that so that none of us would be confused. Instead of us believing that these things are about the end of our world or about the end of material reality, Jesus doesn't do that. He tells us that this is all going to happen in a single generation.

These are events that are not far off in the distant future. They were imminent judgments against the ones who crucified him, against the ones who pierced him, against the ones who persecuted his church, and against the ones who wholly turned away from their God.

Matthew 24, 34. The timing of Jesus's coming and judgment against Jerusalem and the Olivet discourse is not distant. It is imminent. The same can be said about the book of Revelation. Now the book of Revelation gets this sort of moniker or reputation as being about things that are in the distant, distant future, but it's not.

It's so clearly not. For instance, the book of Revelation, do you know what the very first verse says? It begins by saying that this is the revelation of Jesus Christ about the things that are soon to come to pass.

Revelation 1 .1. The very beginning of the book of Revelation is a timeframe reference that is indicating that it's about things that are soon to happen. Because the judgment, he says in verse three, is near.

Now thankfully, you and I do not need to be linguistic scholars to understand very complex words like soon and near. These are not the kind of words that Jesus uses when he's talking about thousands of years into the indeterminate future.

Jesus uses these kinds of words when he's talking about things that are coming soon and that are near. And he even says that the ones who pierced him are going to be the ones who see his judgment coming, Revelation 1 .7.

There you have three timeframe references right in the first seven verses. And I want you to remember something. None of us, 2 ,000 years after the crucifixion, none of us were a part of the piercing of Jesus.

Now you may say that mine and your sin was a part of what nailed him to the cross. We sing that in one of the great songs. I get it. You're correct in a spiritual sense. But in a physical sense, you and I did not hammer those nails into Jesus' wrist.

We did not stab him in the side with a spear, and we did not deliver him over to Pilate and assume the guilt of our trespasses, saying to Pilate, his blood be on us and our children. None of us were there.

None of us are over 120 years old, much less over 2 ,000 or nearly 2 ,000 years old. So when Revelation says that he is returning and the ones that who pierced him and who delivered him over to this crucifixion are the ones who are going to see his near-term judgment coming to pass, when it says that, it's not talking about us.

Jesus comes in judgment against the ones who pierced him. That's what Revelation 1 .7 says, which means that the events that Revelation described are not about you. Unless you were one of the ones who pierced him, unless you were alive 2 ,000 years ago, Revelation is not about you.

It's about them. It's about Jesus returning to deal with the ones who crucified him, the ones who persecuted his bride, and the ones who turned against their God. In both the Olivet Discourse and the book of Revelation, Jesus began the prophecy with imminent timeframe references.

Why? So that you and I would not be confused and so that we would not believe that these events happen long into the future. I laugh because Jesus himself put these clues in the text so that we would not be confused, and yet we have found a way to make Revelation the most confusing book on earth.

That just goes to show you that he did not choose us because we're smart. The birth of the church. Now Matthew 24 and the book of Revelation also speak about the birth of the church. Not only do they speak about the exact same time period, 40 years between the resurrection of Jesus and downfall of Jerusalem, 8030 to 8070, 40 years, that's biblical generation.

Not only do they talk about that same time period, but they also use the metaphor of pregnancy, which again shows that these two scriptures, Matthew 24 and the entire book of Revelation are intricately connected.

And I don't believe that this is coincidental also because pregnancies last for 40 weeks and not only do average pregnancies last 40 weeks, but the Jerusalem Jews who were under the ban of God, under the judgment of God, we're going to limp along, wander along for 40 years.

So the metaphor of pregnancy is actually incredibly insightful in the same way that a woman experiences pain and trials all the way leading up to her labor for 40 years. The Jewish people are going to experience three phases, three hostile phases of increased intensity that is going to steadily increase all the way to the very end.

Just like a pregnancy. Now, at the end of a pregnancy, a child joyfully arrives, and that's what we're going to see. The child is the church. Jesus blood bought church. But we're also going to see how the Jewish people have increasing tribulations and woes that do not get better.

They get worse all the way until their destruction. That is what we see in Matthew 24 and how he compares this era to a pregnancy. But that's also what we see in the book of Revelation that does the exact same thing as well.

For instance, in Revelation 12, John envisions a woman who is in hard, full on labor, crying out in pain as she's given birth to a male child. This child symbolizes the church who comes under the constant threat and the beratings of Satan, the dragon, and his illegitimate progeny, whose Jesus already has identified as the Jews of the first century.

In John 8, he says, you think your father's Abraham, your father is Satan. So in both the Olivet discourse and in the book of Revelation, the church is the one who comes into the world through violent tribulations and labors like a woman who's in the throes of her pregnancy.

But in both scriptures, the baby symbolized by the church that is being attacked by the Jews and it's the Jews are the ones who are going to be destroyed in both passages. Christ will put away the Jewish opposition so that his child, the church, will exist on earth without rival.

Now for a moment, I want us to dive a little deeper into this pregnancy metaphor. I want us to look at the three trimesters of increasing suffering that are going to happen in Matthew 24 and Revelation.

Now you remember Jesus says that this is the beginning of the birth pains and later he says this is the continuation of the birth pains and then he says the labor has come. That's Matthew 24. Revelation also describes three sets of seven judgments.

The bowl judgments, the trumpet judgments, the seal judgments. So you have a sort of threefold structure here that I'm saying looks a lot like pregnancy. Three trimesters. So for a moment, I want us to look at the three eras of this period of time from AD 30 to AD 70 when things get steadily worse like the pain in a pregnancy where it happens in three sequential phases which I'm going to call trimesters and these exist in both Matthew 24 and in the book of Revelation which say the exact same thing.

So if you will, let's look at that for a moment. Number one, the first trimester. Now the conception of the Christian church accounts as the second most consequential conception in all of human history.

Only exceeded by the incarnation of Christ in Mary's virgin womb. In these 40 gestational years of the church's early establishment, Jesus predicted that she was going to experience all kinds of tribulations, pains and sorrows and a very hard delivery.

For instance, in the first trimester of pain, Jesus after he ascends into heaven, this newly conceived church almost immediately witnesses the rise of false messiahs which Jesus prophesied in Matthew 24, four through five.

Then he said that they're going to go through wars and rumors of wars in a period called the Pax Romana where there were no wars, Matthew 24, six. Jesus says that they're going to go through earthquakes, Matthew 24, seven famines, Matthew 24, seven.

Again, the initial stages of persecution, Matthew 24, nine and a growing number of early believers in Christ are going to leave the church. They're going to apostatize because the pain and the persecution were too great.

Matthew 24, 10. Now Jesus is not the only one who talks like this and revelation also mirrors it, but we'll get to that in a moment. What I want to show you is that the book of Acts confirms everything that Jesus said.

Everything that he said is going to happen in Matthew 24 happened. For instance, Acts 5, 36 through 37, Luke mentions that there's going to be, or that there were a rise in false messiahs. He even names two of them.

He names them Thutis and Judas, which is easy to remember because they rhyme, Thutis and Judas. He said that they rose up and they led the people astray. That's fulfillment of prophecy. Jesus said false messiahs were going to rise up and Acts confirms that they did.

Acts 11, 28 confirms that a great famine occurred under the reign of Claudius, and I think it's Suetonius who said that it was a worldwide or a Roman empire wide famine, which means that here you have another fulfillment of Jesus's prophecy.

In Acts 11, the persecution of believers was a recurring theme in the book of Acts with early instances such as the beating of James and John, the stoning of Stephens, the persecutions that were led by Paul or Saul against the early church.

These persecutions led to the scattering of believers with some of them even turning away from their faith, which is why Acts 20 verse 29 through 30 reminds people not to abandon their confession. So all of these events confirm the accuracy of Jesus's Olivet discourse, that false Christ famines, earthquakes, wars, rumors of wars, and apostasy were going to be a part of that first era of Christian travail, Christian pain.

And that era probably is about 80, 30 to 80, 40, 80, 45, somewhere around in there. That's that first gestational era. Now, unsurprisingly, this same pattern shows up in the book of Revelation. Like Matthew 24, where Jesus gathers his disciples around him, Jesus gathers seven Asia minor churches and strengthens them and encourages them in Revelation two through three.

Then after this, he ascends into heaven. He sits down on the throne of his father to rule over his church, Revelation four through five. Then after he's sitting on his throne, he initiates the very same kind of tribulations and trials that he's already predicted in Matthew 24.

I want you to think about it like this. Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew 24 what he's going to do. Then he ascends to heaven and he does it. That's what Revelation chapter six is talking about. For example, in Revelation two, verse two and 14 through 15, Jesus reveals that false prophets, false teachers were arising in the church, fulfillment of prophecy.

Jesus opens up the seal in Revelation six. Do you know what happens? Wars and rumors of wars. That's in verse three through four, followed by famines, earthquakes, and various pestilences on the earth.

Roman or Revelation five or six, five through six. Then what happens? Persecution, martyrdom, and apostasy of some believers. Revelation two, 10 and Revelation six, nine through 11. All of these things perfectly mirror what Jesus was talking about in Matthew 24, which makes perfect sense.

Jesus told his disciples on earth what he was going to do, and now in Revelation six, he's accomplishing that in heaven. That is what the book of Revelation is describing. It has the same eminent timeframe references.

It has the same language of pregnancy and has the same period of time with the same tribulations occurring right there in the church's first couple of years of existence. These similarities continue as we go forward, and they really bind these sections of scripture together in a way that is undeniable.

Revelation despite all of its fantastical images of beasts and flying objects and apocalyptic symbols is really just the apocalyptic version of John's Olivet discourse. It's telling the same exact story.

The Second and Third Trimesters of Tribulation

Number two, the second trimester. Now as the church continued into its second and third decade, you're talking about years like 45 to 65. As it's continuing on, the pain that Jesus prophesied was going to happen began to increase, especially in Jerusalem.

When the church began to increase in Jerusalem, Acts 2, 41 through 47, and as it began to spread in Judea, Acts 8, 1, spread in Samaria, Acts 8, 5 through 8, and spread to the uttermost parts of the Roman world, Acts 13, 47, a new phase of more intense sufferings began to emerge, which was akin to a woman transitioning out of the first trimester of her sufferings into the second.

These increasingly difficult trials were marked by increased persecution, internal conflicts, external threats, all of which were part of the birthing pains that Jesus said were going to prepare the church for her delivery.

Now according to Jesus, the persecutions that were present in the first period were going to drastically increase in Judah, and more specifically in Jerusalem, and they were going to continue to increase as the church moved forward towards her delivery, Matthew 24, 9.

So along with increased persecutions, the Jewish people were going to also devolve into greater instances of immorality. Jesus describes the increase of persecution as being more intense, and the increase of the Jews' immorality as being more insane, becoming increasingly unhinged the longer they persisted in their unbelief and rebellion.

I want you to think about it like this. They killed Christ, then they persecuted God's people, and because they refused to repent, they didn't get better, and they didn't stay the same. They got worse, and worse, and worse, to a degree that they could not even imagine.

Instead of the Jews maintaining or improving with every decade, they got worse. They became more mangled and a more satanic version of themselves, spiraling into the kind of sins that they would have never been able to stomach just a few decades before.

It was clear that God was giving them up to insanity, to degrees of depravity that are deplorable, and over the four decades that we're talking about, from 8030 to 8070, they descended into a kind of doomed and insatiable madness.

In fact, I'm not just making claims here, I'm going to actually back it up with some receipts. Josephus, the Jewish historian, records that by the 50s, 20 years after Jesus was crucified, the city of Jerusalem descended into a state of lawlessness and chaos, just as Jesus predicted.

Now, what I find so fascinating is that Christians today don't know these stories. So as I'm telling you these things, go and read Josephus, read the Jewish wars, read what he says. This is an eyewitness account from a Jewish follower of the Mosaic law.

He hates Christ, he hates the church, and yet he's honest. And what you will find is that Josephus so perfectly and so clearly supports the fact that Jesus was right. Everything Jesus said, Josephus confirms.

He is an eyewitness of the unfolding of Jesus's prophecy, and he describes it in gruesome, ugly, and awful details, the likes of which I have never read anywhere else. So as I'm telling you these things, pay attention to the details, but don't just take my word for it.

Go read it. Go read the Jewish war. I think it is so critical to understanding eschatology, because if you don't, you're going to be like, well, none of these things happened. And they did. They actually really did.

But if you don't know that they happened, and you ignore history, then you're probably going to be the kind of person who's either a pan-millennialist and says, I don't know, I'm going to pan out in the end, or you're going to be the kind of person that says these things clearly didn't happen in the first century, so therefore I'm going to believe that there's still future.

That's false. Just because you're ignorant of history doesn't mean history didn't happen. So go read it. Josephus describes some incredible things, and I'm going to tell you a lot about them today. For instance, the high priest and the ruling classes in that 50s era, they started engaging in violent power struggles.

The high priest and the ruling class turned against one another, and even go in so far as to assassinate one another in order to gain control of the city of Jerusalem. So you have the priesthood turning against the aristocracy.

It was pandemonium. The zealots, who was a Jewish militia, this militant Jewish sect, they were inciting rebellions in the city. They were slaughtering any single person that they believed were collaborators with Rome.

They were even going throughout the city with swords, killing people if they violated the Sabbath. The city had descended into lawlessness. The love of people had grown cold, just like Jesus said. The temple itself became ground zero for this battle.

It was desecrated by bloodshed and corruption by those who claimed that they were lovers of God. Josephus talks about this in the Jewish war, book four, chapter three. Another thing that was happening is that brigands and robbers were roaming through the countryside of Judea, and they were plundering villages.

They were raping women. They were causing widespread fear and panic among the people. This period was a period of increasing lawlessness and brutality within Jerusalem and Judea that was a direct result of the fact that God was abandoning them.

Romans one says that when God gives you over to these things, he abandons you and you become worse. This is exactly what was happening in Judah. Without the God of the law, the people who said they believed in the law slipped into lawlessness.

Without God, their empty religion wasn't enough, and they descended into madness and the moral repugnant that set the stage for their catastrophic judgment and calamity and downfall, which demonstrates to us that without a relationship with God, it don't care what society you're in.

If it's built on law and order, I don't care. It will degenerate into chaos and brutality, which is exactly what we're going through right now in our society. Because we've abandoned God, we're devolving into chaos.

This is what was happening in Judah, but like to the thousandth degree, Jesus predicted it was going to happen, and it came true with awful certainty as the Jews flagrantly marched towards their own destruction like lambs before the slaughter.

Now, before showing you how the book of Revelation says the exact same things, because that's what it does. It says the same things that the Olivet discourse says. Before we get there, I want to prove even more that these things were going on by adding some commentary from the rest of the New Testament and also giving you some more detail from Josephus.

So the book of Acts, the book of Acts tells us that the persecutions were increasing. Jesus said persecutions are going to get worse, and they did, and it was because of the bloodthirstiness of the Jews.