Postmillennialism Defended

Introduction and Show Setup

This is Apologetics Live. To answer your questions, your host from Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rappaport.

Psych! It is not Andrew Rappaport. It is Drew flying solo tonight, although not really, because I have a couple guests that are backstage that are going to join us. But before we get there, welcome back to Apologetics Live.

Apologetics Live is a podcast ministry of Striving for Eternity where we seek to answer your questions about God and the Bible. If you doubt that, then pull up your Google Chrome browser, go to ApologeticsLive .com, click the duck icon, and join us.

You can also submit your questions live on YouTube and on Facebook, but just remember, as Andrew likes to say, I don't know is a perfectly acceptable answer. Now tonight, we are going to be discussing the dreaded topic of post-millennialism.

So we are going to address some questions that you have, maybe some myths about post-millennialism, but we're going to be looking at that particular view of eschatology. And, with one of my guests, we will also be hitting on the topic of theonomy as well.

But now before I get to the actual topic, I want to say that this episode is only happening because Andrew gave the go-ahead. And I just want to throw that out there because if you're a regular listener and a regular viewer of the show, then you know that Andrew and the other members of Striving for Eternity, they hold to the view of dispensational premillennialism.

And when given the opportunity to host, I never want to give the appearance that I am in any way attempting to undermine their teaching. So with that, I will bring in my first guest, Mr. Jeremy Collins.

Jeremy, welcome to the show, brother. Thanks for having me on. So for people who don't know you, which I feel like that's probably everyone in this, in our chat, anyone that watches this show, they probably don't know you.

Tell people who you are. Yeah, so my name is Jeremy.

I have a Theonomony under my name there. That's a podcast I do that talks about economics from a more theonomic standpoint. Now, granted, with that, a lot of it is just biblical economics. So I think most of what I say is people who even disagree with theonomy will still agree with what I have to say about economics.

That's a little bit about that word theonomy underneath there, theonomony. So that's the podcast. You can find that on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, all that stuff. I am married and I have one kid right now.

She is almost eight months old. She'll be eight months old next week. So hopefully many more to come in the future. And yeah, I've met I met Rappaport, Andrew Rappaport and Dr. Silvestro a couple of times each now, and I really love them and enjoy talking with Dr. Silvestro about health stuff.

I'm sure he's talked about that on at least a few occasions in past episodes.

Yeah, it's always funny because whenever I if I post something on Facebook, right, that's kind of health related or a question, anything like that, Dr. Silvestro will call me. He'll text me and then he'll call me and then he'll want to talk about it.

And it always turns into, you know, like a an hour-long conversation, which is great because he gives me all this knowledge and all this wisdom that I need. And he just gives me a bunch of stuff that I never thought about before, you know, about what's in our things that are in our food and things that we consume that we just don't think about that that has an effect on our health.

So I love talking to Dr. Silvestro about that stuff. But it looks like we have a comment for you. It says, What's up, Collins? This is Haps, Haps Addison. So, you know Haps? Yeah, I know Happy. Happy stayed at my house before.

It's been a while since I've seen him. So so there you go. Someone does recognize you. Yeah. And, you know, we you and I, we are also a part of Cruciform, Cruciform Media, Cruciform Ministries, which is actually how you and I got acquainted because I was coming on as a part of Cruciform and you were a part of that.

So we've just been, you know, keeping in touch ever since.

But I'd actually listened to an episode of your podcast before then, although I don't think you were on that episode. That was Chris and a guest, I think, the one on Reckless Love, Reckless Worship. Oh, no, that was that.

Oh, you were on that one. OK. Yeah, that was that one. And then like four months later, we met through Brandon. It was like, oh, I listened to your podcast.

Yep. So that's that's pretty funny that you that you listened to it before before you actually met me. That's yeah. Bethel Church in Christianity. That Facebook page shared it. Oh, that's right. That's right.

I remember that now. But we do have some comments that have come that actually came in pre show that are pretty funny. So let's see. Brother John Elving, the one who always sends me post-meal questions every time I'm on here.

Love you, brother. He says post-millennialism defended. Sorry, I find that is so funny. Looking forward to the show. Well, I hope that we can deliver, brother. I hope that we can deliver. What else do we have?

Let's see. I got to explain one of the comments there. The he's a Zoda warrior comment is in relating to this, my legend of Zoda Master Sword.

Oh, nice. OK, there you go. So he must have he must have remembered that from when he stayed at your house.

Yeah. There's a meme that shows up every once in a while of me holding that.

OK, OK. We have bond servant for Jesus, Melissa. And at some point, I'm actually going to be on Melissa's podcast. We just haven't been able to to work out a time. I was supposed to be on there this past Sunday.

And then my family decided that, well, hey, we're going to go have Father's Day dinner at 630. And I was supposed to be on at seven. So it didn't quite work out. But we're going to work out a time for sure.

But she says, I used to be pre-trib rapture. Now I'm all millennial. Well, you're headed in the right direction. So not quite there yet, but headed in the right direction.

Yeah, I myself went from dispensational pre-meal to. I'm not sure what I am. Post-meal seems really cool, and I want to be that. But like, I don't know if there's enough scripture to support it. And after like a few years being there, I landed on post-meal solidly.

Mm hmm. Yeah. Yep. And so Bible Care and Share Fellowship says I'm so pre I don't eat post toasties, man, no love for the post-meal guys, you know, no love at all. Brother Johnny in, he says, I am 100 percent pre-millennial.

Maybe Drew can change my mind. That's the goal. That's the goal. I'm just kidding. That's actually not the goal. That's not the goal at all. We just want to present the position, answer any questions that people have about it, that that's that's really what we're here for.

To that, I think I got to say, though, I think a big reason of why I'm post-millennial is that I'm 26, which means I'm not millennial. I'm Gen Z. So I literally am post-millennial.

See, I'm technically a millennial because I was I was born in 86. So I'm technically a millennial. My parents are Gen Xers, so I was raised by Gen Xers. And my entire life was everything Gen X. So I think I should be an honorary generation Xer rather than a millennial.

But I do have this kind of goes with something you were saying, Jeremy. Question for Drew, how long have you been post meaning post-meal? I have been post-meal for, I think, about the last five years or so.

And it came about just, you know, I really I never really looked into eschatology. I never really looked into it at all. And then I was hearing some podcasts, of course, by Apologia. They turned me on to some Greg Bonson and then Gary DeMar, which that's a whole different subject nowadays.

But I was listening to some of their arguments, their biblical presentations. And it just struck me as this is the most consistent view in scripture. So so that's how I how I landed, how I landed there.

And I just had a lot of questions about the dispensational pre-meal camp. And and to be fair, my my criticisms of the dispensational pre-meal was more about regarding the left behind aspect, that kind of group of people.

So so I had a lot of questions about them. And I and what they were saying just didn't quite sit right with what what scripture was saying. And so I really bypassed all meal and went straight to post-meal.

And that's kind of how I how I ended up there. So, Jeremy, what what about your how did you end up in post-meal?

Jeremy Collins on Economics, Theonomy, and His Path to Postmillennialism

Yeah, so I grew up being taught dispensational pre-trib pre-meal. Like to me, the pre versus post debate was pre-trib versus post-trib, not pre-meal versus post-meal. I grew up in the Baptist Bible Fellowship International.

I don't know if a lot of people know what that is, but it's it's somewhere towards the direction of a kind of IFB. It's not like Steven Anderson or anything like that. It's not like extreme IFB, but it's in that direction, you know.

And then I went to the college of the BBFI and it was at the dispensational pre-meal college that I stopped being dispensational pre-meal. And. I if you had me explain my eschatology when I left, I would probably explain something more or less post-meal, but it would probably be about another year or so after I graduated before I would actually like say that's where I stand.

But yeah, I remember like listening to or reading John MacArthur, why every Calvinist should be a premillennial list and like at the time thinking that was really good. And then like a year later, listening to some people like Jeff Durbin starting to realize like, OK, post-meal wasn't as crazy as MacArthur made it sound like it is.

Leaving dispensationalism was like I was listening to the dividing line with James White or sheologians with James White's daughter, Summer and Joy, and starting to question dispensationalism there. But I was still thinking Israel and the church were two separate peoples of God, not basically different terms for the same thing.

And then it was actually reading a book to help explain Romans. I was like reading through this two volume book going through the Book of Romans. It wasn't exactly a commentary. It wasn't that in depth and it focused a lot more on application.

But when I got to Romans 11 and that that the second volume of that book, I was just looking at Romans 11 like there is one olive tree. How can these be two separate peoples of God if the church is grafted into the same olive tree as Israel?

And that kind of just did it for me. And then I remember the next time I read Ephesians after that, especially in Ephesians two, you see that word one over and over again. And I'm looking at this thinking, how did I never notice this before?

When I read Ephesians before this, it was like it just opened my eyes to how many times you are one group now is in the Book of Ephesians. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that was a thing that always kind of struck me. The idea of the the the church in Israel as two separate entities. And of course, like you're talking about the being grafted in. It's like, well, they can't be two separate and they can't be dealt with two separate ways if you're grafted in to the same tree.

Mm hmm. And then one one argument I heard from Dr. Ken Gentry was. When we look at the result of AD 70, this the the destruction of the temple, and he said he related that to Israel, as we see in the Old Testament, is always portrayed as the adulterous, the adulterous wife.

Right. And so the stoning of the or the destruction of the temple was the symbolic stoning and putting to death of the adulterous wife. Whereas now you have the church that is the bride of Christ. Right.

And then we see what do we see in Revelation? We see the the the the bride coming or the the church coming down from heaven adorned as a bride. Yeah. And so it just started to make sense with me. And I was like, it just it just fits together too well for it to not be, you know, for that to not be the case.

But we did I do see a comment here that that I think is really good. Melissa Owens, she says the left behind series does not represent genuine premill disbees. And I highly recommend Michael Vlock. You know, I would actually highly recommend Michael Vlock to I've heard a lot of good things about his teaching, even his his book.

What's it? What's it? Dispensational hermeneutics. I'm not sure. Something like that. I know I know Darren has read it or he's read parts of it. And he said it's actually, you know, a pretty, pretty decently written book.

He liked it. But yeah, thank you, Melissa. I would agree it doesn't represent true dispensational premillennialism.

I have a friend who's dispensational, and he once told me, even just from a fiction standpoint, left behind isn't very good. Right.

Right. But, you know, really, I think we've really gotten ahead of ourselves a little bit, because let's explain kind of and we've done it here before on the show, kind of the different views. Right now, when we say premill, all mill, post mill, what we're discussing is the return of Christ.

When will Christ return? Will it be before the millennium, pre? And the millennium is what we see in Revelation 21, 22. I'm just going off the top of my head. But it mentions the thousand year, the thousand years, and the question is, when is Christ going to return?

Is it going to be before the millennium? Is it going to be after post the millennium? Or as all mills would say, there there is no literal millennium. It's figurative. It's it's a it's a great span of time and that we are actually in that span of time.

So really, all millennialists would technically be post millennialists because Jesus returns at the end of that millennium, what they call the millennium. But I see our other guest is here.

Defining Postmillennialism and Distinguishing It from Other Millennial Views

Darren, sorry, I'm having a very non post millennial day.

You hear me? We can hear you.

Good. Yes, I can. I'm having one of those days where everything is just not working. Even right now, my camera's not working very well. My microphones, all of my microphones, I have five of them. They all won't work.

So but the Lord is good. And here we are. So praise God.

That's right. So our listeners and viewers, you should know Pastor Darren Stid. And I like how you have Jeremy pointed it out pre show. You have Operation Save America under your name. Tell us what you do with Operation Save America.

What is it? What do you do with it?

Yeah. So I'm the assistant national director of Operation Save America. Operation Save America is a gospel of the kingdom organization. So what we're about is bringing the gospel of Jesus Christ and his kingdom in the conflict with the wickedness that exists in our culture.

And so right now, the bulk of what that revolves around is opposing the slaughter of innocent children. And so we do a lot of abortion, male ministry. We raise up Christians all around the country to get active, coming out of the four walls of the church and going to the streets with the gospel.

And then we do some political stuff. And we're basically working among the church, the family and the state, striving to bring about an end of the shedding of innocent blood. So but very gospel centric.

We believe the gospel of the kingdom of Jesus Christ is the answer to the problem.

So awesome. Awesome. And I do have an announcement now that you you have explained that. I have an announcement that Andrew wanted me to say. I was going to save it for the end. But he says next week, Mark Spence is going to be on the show to discuss the new Living Waters film.

What is it? And it's a it's a film on abortion. Nice. And so Mark.

They they did a film on abortion. What was it called? One eighty. One eighty. And that was one of the best things that's ever been released. And so I'm excited to see. I'm excited to see that it's going to be called.

What is it? That's exciting. That's awesome.

Yeah. So Darren, you're Post Mill.

I am. Yeah. Darren's also my pastor. Wanted to get that in there before we got too far away from his bio.

Yes. Right. So now, Darren, where do you pastor?

Harmony Baptist Church. So we're about an hour north of Indianapolis in Frankfurt, Indiana. That's where I'm at right now, which I believe that is part of the reason I'm having so many problems, because this office seems to have the prince of the power of the air seems to have extra ability in this office.

You know, none of the technology, the power of software. Callie, a guy named Callie and I used to do a podcast and I would try to do live from this office and it would never work. I'd always have to go somewhere else.

So but so, yeah, Harmony Baptist Church, about an hour north of Indianapolis. And Jeremy is a member here. We're Reformed Baptist 1689 congregation. And I would say I would not say that our church is post-millennial.

There are a lot of post-millennial people in our church, but there are people in our church that are not post-millennial as well. So and then there are, frankly, a lot of people in our church that just don't care.

So, yeah.

Yeah, that seems to be the case a lot of times. The those pan-millennialists, you know, it'll just pan out in the end and I'm not going to worry about it. But but Jeremy and I were also talking where you are also a part of Cruciform Ministries with us.

So basically, this is a cruciform takeover of striving for.

Is what it is.

So we kind of talked about our journey, how we arrived at post-millennialism. How did you arrive at the view of post-millennialism?

Well, so I started so a couple of different things happened. I've been post-millennial for about seven years now. And I have some friends who were post-millennial, a guy named James McDonald, not the one that everybody's heard of, but he's popular up in Peoria, Illinois, and a good brother that I love.

And he started talking to me about post-millennialism maybe 10 years ago. And I thought he was nuts. And so but he would share Doug Wilson books and different things like that with me. And so I started reading up on it.

And the thing that actually ultimately changed my mind, though, and this is again, it's been about seven years ago as I was reading through the Gospel of Matthew. And I kept noticing this discussion about the kingdom of God and the Gospel of Matthew and the thing that really the day I still remember the day I became post-millennial.

I was reading the Lord's Prayer in there in Matthew chapter six. And I was thinking through this. So we're Baptists, so we don't repeat the Lord's Prayer all the time. Maybe some of you guys who are more high church folks that have one of those types of liturgies.

If you don't know a lot about Baptist history, Baptists are very against vain repetition. And so but I was thinking about the Lord's Prayer. This is the pattern Jesus has given us for prayer. And I was reading through it in Matthew chapter.

I think it's chapter six there. And, you know, so I was going through it. You know, our father who art in heaven. I have memorized in the king's English because I'm spiritual. You're more holy. Our father, yeah, who art in heaven.

Hallowed be thy name. And then what's that's the first. There's six petitions in the Lord's Prayer. The second petition is thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And I was reading through it.

And that phrase stung me. At that point, I was premill. I was what they call historical premill, which is just to say that I believe that there was there was still a great tribulation coming and then the rapture after that.

And I believe the church would be here for the tribulation. And so my my theology was always, you know, that things are just going to get worse and worse. And then, you know, praise God. You know, Jesus is going to come back and, you know, then he'll have victory at the very end, but not in time, space and history.

And I look at Matthew chapter six in the Lord's Prayer, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And this is the pattern that Jesus has given us for prayer. And those words stung me.

And I began to think to myself, if my theology is true, I can't pray that. I can't pray that as a historical premill. I can't pray thy kingdom come. I will be done on earth as it is in heaven today. I can pray that maybe that might happen someday, but I can't pray that today because in my theology, that's not going to happen.

It may happen eventually, but it's not going to happen. And really, quite honestly, that was the thing that I literally I became very convinced, at least in my premillennialism, and I became a millennial for about four days.

And then after that, I became I as I was continuing to read through the Gospel of Matthew and what it says there, so much of what the Gospel of Matthew says about the kingdom of God. And then I became I became post-millennial.

And then at that point, I began to devour everything that I could find from Bonson and Doug Wilson and some of those guys about post-millennialism. But it was funny. After I went through that journey, I still would say I've read many books about post-millennialism now, stacks of them, Ken Gentry and so forth.

I think the book that offers the best defense of post-millennialism is the Gospel of Matthew. And I think it is very, very hard to read the Gospel of Matthew and not to see. From my perspective, I know there are men that do it, and I'm not trying to take anything away from those men.

But from my perspective, I think that the the post post-millennial theology is all through the Gospel of Matthew. So that's sort of the thing that brought me to the dark side, so to speak.

Yeah, we definitely are the minority.

That's right. Yeah. But minority right now, but we weren't the minority a couple hundred years ago.

That's right. That's right. I was going to say we're on the rise. That's right. Yeah. So so we've got a we've got a couple of questions. And let's just jump into it, because this you know, this episode was going to be one of answering questions and then, you know, maybe dispelling some myths about post-millennialism.

So let's get into our first one. This is D. She says, Do post-mill folks think that the Book of Revelation already happened? Oh, man.

You want me to take a shot at that first? Yeah. Yeah. You go, Darren. It's kind of a complicated question because the answer is both yes and no. Post-millennials people are like every other theological camp.

So if you think about pre-millennialism, there's about 500 different versions of pre-millennialism, right? There's historic pre-mill, there's dispensational pre-millennialism, and then there's all the variety of different places that people put the rapture.

It's the same thing with post-millennialism. So there are many there are many post-mill scholars that believe that the entirety of the Book of Revelation already happened. I am not one of them. I do not believe that the last two chapters of the Book of Revelation have already taken place.

I believe those things are still future. Having said that, one of the things that post-millennialists do not believe, and this is very important to understand, post-millennialists do not believe that all of the prophecies in the New Testament have been fulfilled.

That is heresy. That's called full preterism, and we do not believe full preterism. We do believe that there is still yet to come a future resurrection from the dead and a future physical bodily return of Christ.

There are some post-millennials that don't believe that those passages at the end of the Book of Revelation are talking about those events, but they still believe those events are going to come to pass in the future.

Anybody who denies that those events are coming to pass are actually not post-millennial. They're full preterists, and that's heretical. But so some scholars do believe that the whole Book of Revelation has been fulfilled, and some scholars do not.

And I wouldn't call myself a scholar, but I would say I land in the camp that I don't think those latter two chapters have been fulfilled yet. I think they're talking about the future.

Gotcha. Yeah, and you know, it's good that you mentioned full preterism because Melissa Owen says, the full preterism view seems to be on the rise. I wonder why that is, and that's actually true. The full preterist movement used to be kind of a fringe movement along the outskirts, and now it is gaining more traction.

And I just found this out about a month or so ago, talking to my father-in-law, and he said, there's actually a group in our town that is full preterist. And I was blown away because I had no clue that that was going on in our own town.

Crazy, man. Yeah, you're right. I mean, it is. And a lot of people want to attribute that to post-millennialism, that full preterism is on the rise because of post-millennialism. But if you ask any full preterists, they're not post-millennial.

Their view of the millennium is completely different than the post-millennial view of the millennium. And so post-mills tend, and especially the most prominent position among post-mills in our day, is the sort of partial preterist post-mill position, which is the belief that most of the prophecies in the scripture have been fulfilled, though there are yet those, there are those that are yet to be fulfilled.

But full preterism denies the bodily return of Christ and denies the future resurrection of the dead. And that's not post-millennialism. That's completely the opposite of what post-millennialists believe.

And so full preterism is heresy. The thing that all the other views have in common, whether you're pre-mill, amill, or post-mill, and whatever variety of any of those three things you want to call yourself, the thing that we all agree about is the physical return of Christ and the future bodily resurrection.

Those are the essential doctrines of the Christian faith with regard to the return of Christ. And full preterists reject those, and so that's the reason why we say it. And they would tell you they're not post-millennial because they don't believe the same thing about the millennial reign of Christ that we do.

Yeah, and one thing with that, I think even Todd Friel, who's dispensational pre-mill, and I believe a friend of Andrew Rapoport's, said recently in his podcast, we're all to some extent partial preterists.

I was really surprised to hear him say that, but he said that recently in his podcast because if nothing else, you think most of the Old Testament prophecies are fulfilled because most of them were just about Jesus and his death and resurrection.

Yeah. So a popular position among the historical pre-mill at this point is this concept of the multiple fulfillment. It's the multiple fulfillment view of prophecy. And so all of those guys actually would say, well, yeah, I mean, I'm a partial preterist in some sense.

And there's some sense in which you have to believe that because there are some prophecies in the Old Testament that have an immediate and a future fulfillment. And so like Isaiah prophesying about the birth of his son, right?

And then, of course, we know that that's ultimately about Jesus, we find out in the Gospels with Matthew and Luke. That's partial preterism. That prophecy is both fulfilled at an immediate and at a future fulfillment.

It's been fulfilled twice now. And so there are some that would take that and say, well, the same thing can happen with current prophecy, and while there are issues and strengths to that, but in that sense, everybody in some sense believes in a form of preterism.

Replacement Theology, Covenant Theology, and the Church as the Fulfillment of Israel

Yeah. All right, now let's get into a question that people love to ask the post-millennialists. Brother John Elving, question, what are your thoughts on replacement theology?

Oh, man. Well, I guess you want me to take that one first? Jeremy, you want to take that one first?

Both of y 'all are my distinguished guests.

I can say something, and then Darren can correct me if I'm wrong. Okay. Yeah, so on replacement theology, I don't like that terminology because, now this is a question more on covenant theology, not necessarily post-mill, so this might be something where Amill and Postman would both agree.

Replacement theology, like I said, I don't like the term because I'm not saying we don't believe that God basically kicked Israel to the side and then just replaced them with the church, but rather the church and Israel always have been the same.

Israel, when you're looking at the Old Testament, you're looking at the Old Testament church, and when you're looking at the New Testament, you're looking at the New Testament Israel, that they are just one and the same.

One didn't replace the other.

Yeah, I agree with that. I don't think the church was God's plan B. I think God's plan was always to bring about the coming of the church through Israel, and the scripture says that all of God's promises find their yes in Christ.

The scripture says that in the book of Hebrews. So all of the promises that God gave to Abraham, all of the promises that God gave to Moses, all of the promises God gave to David, all of those promises find their yes in Christ, and we are attached to those promises through Christ.

And so in that sense, I don't like the term replacement theology. Instead, I just think that there are these series of covenants that God has had with the nation of Israel coming up to the new covenant, and each one of those covenants looks back to the first covenant, the covenant of works, where Adam failed in the garden, and then looks forward to the new covenant, where Christ is going to do that which Adam was unable to do.

And so each one of those covenants with Israel is an intermediary covenant that look back to Adam and look forward to Christ. And so I wouldn't agree with the idea that the church replaced Israel, but instead I would just say that the church is the fulfillment of all of the promises that God gave to all of those patriarchs, whether it be Abraham, whether it be Moses, or whether it be David.

Yeah, and some passages in Scripture that kind of support what Pastor Darin and I were just saying, I would point to Romans 9 and Romans 11. Romans 11 I mentioned already a little bit ago, and Romans 9 talks about the spiritual seed of Abraham, the true Israel.

That would be believers as opposed to someone who is ethnically Jewish, whether or not they're a believer.

Yeah, I think I heard it from Dr. Bonson, one of his lectures, where he says also, don't like the term replacement theology. A better term would be continuity. It's a continuation of the covenant that continues on.

And I would agree with that. I would agree with everything that you gentlemen said. Now we have this question here. This also comes up in talking about Postmale all the time. Did Christ come back in 70 AD?

Matthew 24, 70 AD, and Apocalyptic Judgment Language

Yes, he did. I think this comes to our interpretation of Matthew 24. I think much of what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 24 is his coming return in 70 AD. And there are actually many premillennial theologians that agree with that as well.

And so that's that multiple fulfillment idea that I've talked about already. But I think it's hard actually to avoid the idea that Jesus came back in 70 AD. Because he says, if you start in Matthew 23, you really get that when you read.

I would encourage everybody that's listening right now to sit down with the Gospel of Matthew. Take two hours. Okay. And sit down with the Gospel of Matthew and read it from beginning to end in one sitting.

Okay. Regardless of your millennial perspective. And that is not just going to enrich your theology or end times theology. But that will enrich your whole theology of the kingdom of God if you do that.

But one of the things you see when you do that is in Matthew, Jesus begins to bring his condemnation on the Jews. And by the Jews, here it means the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and all of the Jewish religious leaders that are coming against him.

He begins to bring his condemnation of them all the way back in Matthew 23. And he tells them that he is going to bring judgment upon them and that judgment is going to come upon the nation of Israel.

And then when you come to Matthew 24 and you look at all of that discourse, people say, well, how could Jesus have come back in 70 AD? We didn't see him come in riding on the clouds. We didn't see the moon turn blood red and so on and so forth.

And what I would say to that is that is apocalyptic language. What we're reading when we read Matthew 24 is we're reading apocalyptic language. It's the same thing we read when we read the book of Revelation.

It's apocalyptic language. Daniel has apocalyptic language. Isaiah has apocalyptic language. But apocalyptic language, one of the misunderstandings about apocalyptic language is that it only points to the end times.

That's not true in the Bible. The Bible has apocalyptic language that does not point to the end times but points to a different coming or a different judgment of God. And we see this in particular in the book of Isaiah.