91. The Death Of Dispensationalism (A Practical Postmillennialism. Section 1. Part 1)

Hello, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf.

This is a new series called A Practical Postmillennialism.

This is episode one,

the roadmap for our series.

Now, before you delve into the juicy contents of any book, you should encounter a table of contents

that provides a roadmap for where you're heading.

Now, if I were to present to you a table of contents or a roadmap for this new series, I would divide it into

three distinct sections.

In section one, which we're gonna begin today, I would aim to defeat the defeatism

that is alive and well in Christianity today.

I intend to show you how an expectation of defeat has actually crept into

the modern church, making us morbidly discouraged.

I also plan to demonstrate how this defeatism has crippled the modern American church

and individual Christians, preventing them from joyfully engaging in

the mission that Jesus has given us.

Additionally, I want to expose how it has produced a generation of

curmudgeony, disillusioned Christian isolationists who are

disengaged from culture and ever hopeful on being raptured out of here.

Now, in section one, which is today, we're gonna strive to conquer this

pernicious canker sore called defeatism by examining it in its three manifestations.

Now, this week, we're gonna explore how dispensationalism, which is an eschatological doctrine, we'll

get into it in a moment, don't worry, has contributed to this disease.

Then in weeks two and three, we're gonna conclude this section by observing how historic premillennialism, which is better,

and amillennialism, which is even better, have in some ways, even though much

less, also fostered an expectation of pessimism and defeat in the modern church.

And it needs to be repented of if we're going to move forward and build Christendom in our generation.

Now, in section two, after we move past the defeatism category, I want to present a biblical case

for optimism.

And what I mean by optimism is I mean that we can have an optimistic view of the

world as being, instead of being engulfed in flames ready to collapse in a

moment's notice, I want us to see how the Bible actually anticipates Jesus's

worldwide universal victory.

I want us to see how Jesus is gonna claim all the nations, that his reign is gonna be unopposed, that he's

gonna bring his kingdom of peace over the entire earth as the water covers the sea

before this old world concludes.

And then in section three, after demonstrating the Bible's optimism about all of these things,

well, I want us to do something that I have personally not seen done before.

I want us to apply the concept of postmillennialism to every aspect of

our lives.

I want us to answer questions like, what does it mean for me that Jesus reigns, that he is

achieving a total and complete victory?

How will my king's victory impact my manhood, my parenting?

How is my being a dad going online with his victory as a part of the winning team?

How is our womanhood, our mothering, our marriages, our church participation, our community transformation, our

evangelism, discipleship, our vocation, our finances, all of it, how is it gonna support the

unfolding victory of Jesus Christ?

And after exploring all of this, it's my hope that you will leave this series

invigorated, no longer expecting the worst, but working for the best, anticipating

the growth of Jesus's kingdom in our lifetime and engaged in that mission

with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

My goal is simple.

When we defeat the disgusting idol of defeatism that has captivated Jesus's church

for far too long, and when we embrace the Bible's call for optimism about our future,

about our king, about his victory, then the Christian church will stop feeling so powerless.

She will cease being angered by the negativity porn that's all over the news, and she will

discard the kind of pessimism that keeps her secluded and hiding in her churches, disengaged from

culture, reluctant to be the salt and light of the world.

Instead, she will stand up boldly and confidently, bringing all of Christ

to all the world.

That is my goal, defeating

defeatism.

Now, within the diverse landscape of Christian theology, few theological systems have sparked as much debate

and reflection as dispensationalism.

This theological system with its distinct method of interpreting the end times events in the Bible and

understanding God's role in human history has not only shaped legions of modern Christians, but it's

also spoiled many people within the evangelical fold.

And by that, I don't mean a good thing.

Unfortunately, this is true whether you realize it or not.

I mean, you don't need to know what dispensationalism actually is or to be an expert on these things to have

drank the Kool -Aid.

It is everywhere.

It is ubiquitous.

It is much the same way that you cannot detect micropollutants in the air when you breathe.

Well, so many in the church have been toxified by this 200 -year -old view that has seeped its

way into everything.

In eschatological studies, which just means the discipline that examines the last days and the end times, that's

what eschatology is, is studying the end times, dispensationalism has become the aerosol poison

that has leaked into the ventilation system of the church, infecting everything.

From its obscure beginnings to its majority status within the American church, it is hard to avoid it

and has caught many uninformed captives in its gloomy, melancholy nets.

The result of its incredible spread has not been a strong and vigorous church ready

to attack the day, seize the day, bring the gospel to the nations, disciple the nations according to

what Jesus told us in Matthew 28.

No, it's instead produced a sickly, defeated, and lazy church that's unwilling to build

anything, unwilling to share the gospel to anyone.

This dumpster fire of a doctrine that we're gonna be looking at today, I don't care if you get offended by that, honestly.

That dumpster fire of a doctrine is what we're gonna be looking at today.

But before we begin, I have to admit that this topic deserves an entire

book.

This is especially true when you consider all of the biblical texts that this viewpoint has mangled over the years, all of the

failed predictions, all of the laughable, silly things that has come out of this doctrine.

It deserves an entire book, maybe even a series of books.

But today, we're just gonna barely be able to delve into the murky waters, perhaps maybe only

even staining the smallest little pinky toe in those murky waters by examining

today its history, its roots, dissecting its core tenets, addressing its addiction to hyper -literalism,

its rigid futurism, and how it gives birth to rampant defeatism.

Today, I wanna show you how this has happened and how this viewpoint has

successfully immobilized the modern church.

It stymied her mission and it's caused the world to rapidly decay all around us.

Now, if that's your jam, then buckle up and let's get started.

Dispensational definitions.

What is dispensationalism?

Well, dispensationalism is a theological system that divides human history into seven

unique eras of history.

And in those eras of history, God interacts uniquely and unrepeatably with man according to whichever era that man belongs.

So if you live in Noah's era, God deals with you in one way.

Well, if you live in Old Testament Israel, God deals with you another way.

The New Testament church, it's still a different way.

These divisions in history are hard divisions which are called dispensations, which is where we get the

term.

Now, let me give you an example of this.

Imagine history as a grand play that was written and directed by God.

As you know, most plays, at least if they're good, advance a single unified story from the beginning to

the end.

The beginning sets up the story, the middle builds and crescendos to some sort of climax, and then the

climax and resolution happens, and then the story ends.

The characters go through various ups and downs in the narrative, their twist and plot turns in every

story, but overall, every element of every play, again, at least the ones that are worth their salt,

advances a single unified story from the beginning to the end.

But this is not the case in the dispensational worldview.

According to dispensationalism, God has divided the world into seven micro dramas or

seven disjointed and fragmented chapters where God is doing unique things that do not

contribute to the overall unified story, at least not in any meaningful way.

These seven dispensations are like seven chapters from seven different books taped and pasted together,

and you expecting to get something out of it when you read it.

These seven dispensations of time are meant to highlight the disunity and the

discontinuity within the redemptive historical story, and they're not meant to highlight the

overall unity that the Bible actually describes.

A brief history of dispensationalism.

Now, to understand the rise of dispensationalism, we don't need to go back to the New Testament era or the

ancient and apostolic church.

We don't even need to go back to the Reformation because unlike most theological systems that exist,

dispensationalism is relatively new.

Its popping up into existence happened only about 200 years ago in the 19th century England.

Now, that fact alone should cause us to be skeptical of this view since none of the apostles,

none of the original disciples, none of their disciples, nor their disciples' disciples, or anyone in the ancient

church actually believed this way or had even heard of such a ridiculous view.

That point alone doesn't make it wrong, but it does present an astronomical burden of proof that

dispensationalism unfortunately cannot muster.

Now, regarding its origins, a 19th century man named John Nelson Darby, who was a

theologian and a member of an Anabaptist sect known as the Plymouth Brethren, was the first person to begin

codifying these views.

Again, 19th century England, John Nelson Darby.

The problem though was that Darby wasn't just presenting a new idea, but he was actually

presenting an entire new paradigm for how to view the Bible and how to view history and how to view God's

actions in it.

Now, one may reasonably wonder why the Holy Spirit waited 1700 years to reveal such a

fragmented view that would cause the church to basically be paralyzed in defeatism, but

notwithstanding all of that and its novelty, Darby had a new vision for how to interpret the scriptures that ran

afoul of the vast majority of interpretations that had ever been given.

According to Darby, he saw the Bible not as one continuous story from the author God,

but as a series of distinct chapters, each with its own theme and its own lessons.

As we said before, he called these chapters dispensations.

Now, this approach was entirely different from the traditional way of understanding the Bible that had been handed down for the

first 18 centuries, known as covenant theology.

In covenant theology, God mediates a relationship with sinful humanity through successive

covenants.

These covenants are terms by which God is going to pursue and dwell with sinful man.

They come right out of the text, the covenant with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, you get my point.

All of these covenants actually also culminate and move forward and point to the new covenant administration

that's in Jesus Christ.

Now, while covenant theology focuses on the continuity of redemptive history and it's actually

demonstrable from the text, well, Darby segmented biblical history, attempting to prove

that God had somehow changed his mode of operation with each successive chapter.

Soon, those ridiculous ideas, I'm sorry if I'm being dismissive, but they are,

they're again, they're not demonstrable from the text.

Soon those ideas begin to spread in England and in Europe, and eventually they crossed over the Atlantic where

they took hold.

Now, as said, Darby's ideas found their most fertile soil in the

hyper individualism and pull yourself up by your bootstraps soil of

America.

It was like planting an old seed and new highly fertilized soil, which basically is

full of manure, where it grew twice as fast and gained a firm footing on these shores.

This quick acceptance from the American church and even faster growth within the Americas was primarily

thanks to the Schofield Reference Bible, which was published in 1909 and brought

Darby's dispensational thinking to the masses.

Now, the Schofield Reference Bible, by marrying publishing excellence and marketing genius

and appealing to Christians who wanted to study their Bible, all that added with dispensational thinking in a

single study Bible, well, the average Christian was exposed to Darby for the first time and they drank it in.

This would change the fabric and character of American evangelical theology in this country for more than a

century and it still continues to this day.

Now, beyond impacting just the average Christian or the run of the mill evangelical church, prominent 19th

century theologians arose during this era who affected by the system of thinking that they found at home in

their Schofield Bibles, grew up and began founding influential institutions like the Moody Bible

Institute, which became strong supporters of this new theological framework.

You think Dallas Theological Seminary as well.

And all of this happened like the wild spread of Japanese kudzu in rural Georgia.

America went to bed with the first little sprig of dispensationalism sticking up out of the garden only to wake up

for an entire infestation in the generations ahead.

Now, it's essential, however, to note that while dispensationalism as a whole is wholly

modern, some of the elements of dispensationalism have ancient roots.

For instance, historic premillennialism, which we're gonna talk about next week is a very ancient view that Christ is gonna

reign physically on the earth for a thousand years after the church is raptured out of the world.

The world's gonna fall into a seven -year tribulation.

Christ is gonna set up his millennial kingdom, all of that.

We're gonna talk about that next week.

And while I wholeheartedly disagree with that system and with that idea, it actually does go back to

the ancient church.

Now, on the other hand, dispensationalism borrowed some of these ancient premillennial beliefs and

combined them with Darby's new way of chopping up the Bible and created a

new breed of theology, which as the cool kids say, is kinda sus.

Influence on the modern church.

Now, as we delve deeper into dispensationalism, it's crucial to recognize how this once modest theological sapling

morphed into a colossal oak tree, casting its pervasive shadow over much of the

evangelical landscape.

Dispensationalism is more than a legacy of misplaced beliefs that was inherited from past generations.

It has actually become an opaque lens that has blinded a significant portion of Jesus's church,

confusing her about the world, the church, engaging with culture, how the Bible is interpreted and

what's gonna happen in the future.

Like a pervasive weed in grandpappy's garden, dispensationalism has entrenched itself

within the backyard of modern church thinking, especially in its approach to eschatology

and the modern nation state of Israel.

Because dispensationalism teaches redemptive history through successive disjointed chapters,

Christians are not taught to see themselves living in the climax of human history during the

reign of their king, but instead during an asterisk period where God is

graciously permitting Gentiles to come to him because his true bride rejected him.

It's almost as if the Dispies are saying God took on a temporary girlfriend while waiting for his

wife to come back home.

This of course is preposterous since the Gentiles were grafted into the people of God by the

finished work of Christ.

The church age is not an asterisk period.

The church age is not an allowance that God allowed to happen while the Jews are in rebellion.

No, when Jesus died and rose from the grave, he made us into one people out of both Jews

and Greek, Galatians 3 .28.

In that event transformed his church into an entirely Jewish phenomenon, into

the Israel of God, which is made up of people from all over, every tribe, tongue and nation.

That's Galatians 6 .16, the Israel of God.

Instead of playing around with the church while he's waiting on Israel to return, the Bible describes God

as already having Israel in the church.

Israel and the church are the same phenomenon in the Bible, made up of Jew and Greek, male and

female, slave and free, which of course is all accomplished by the

glorious working of his son.

Now, despite clear biblical teaching on these things, dispensationalism views the church as nothing

more than an add -on era, one of the seven.

According to proponents of this view, one day Israel is gonna end her rebellion and God is gonna

revive her again in the future and he's gonna give her a new temple to worship him in, and this of course is blasphemy.

Since Israel already exists through the manifold people of God on earth, we're not waiting for Israel

to come back, Israel's already his, but also to say that there's gonna be a new temple that's

gonna be built is actual blasphemy because the final sacrifice, to end all sacrifice has

already happened in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It's Hebrews 10, 12.

And instead of seeing Jesus as the true temple or as the true sacrifice or as the true high priest,

which are all biblical doctrines, dispensational gurus nullify the finished work of Jesus,

claiming that the Jews are gonna one day trade in everything that Jesus accomplished for a blood

-lusting, animal -sacrificing temple.

This is like trading in all of the romance and intimacy that is experienced with an

actual bride for a faded out Polaroid picture.

Clearly, this teaching is ludicrous.

Now, according to dispensationalists, this messianic -induced return to a Mosaic temple is gonna be

ushered in by a grand and resounding defeat of Jesus's church.

Isn't that exciting?

So in order to get back to the temple, the church has to crash and burn in fantastic defeat, only adding to the

absurdity of this ridiculous position.

This view asserts that the church will ultimately fail in her mission to win the world to Christ, immorality

is gonna continue growing unchecked and cover the entire world with its glory, apparently, and the

church is gonna be raptured out of here as lovable losers, and an antichrist is gonna rise to

power in an intergalactic battle in Armageddon where Jesus is gonna come in and liquidate all of

them.

Now, this theological nonsense has spread aggressively through Christendom at the same time

that media empires stopped telling feel -good stories, and that's important because things don't happen in a vacuum.

Movements don't spread without a context.

At the same time that Fox News, CNN, and other media companies discovered that it was profitable,

more profitable, in fact, than telling feel -good stories to pump doom and gloom narratives incessantly

into our living rooms and public squares because it sells, well, at the same time that happened, American

theologians and pastors have taken up this addiction to carnality, selling and peddling

panic, pessimism, and doom to generations of Christians who've become paralyzed just like the

consumers of cable news.

By focusing constantly on how the world is going from bad to worse, a culture of

Christians have grown up fantasizing more ardently about a rapture where they're gonna leave the world

behind in a blaze of glory than actually doing the hard and faithful work of seeing this world conform to

the image of Christ.

For decades, a left -behind -style abandonment complex has taken hold in the church,

looking past the world that we're living in and the work that's called to be done here to escape to a

Gnostic -like, bodiless heaven.

This is like a teenager refusing to clean his room because he knows his mother will eventually burst in and do it

for him.

In the same way, the church has abandoned the great commission from Christ to disciple the

nations, hoping, or at least betting on the fact that the world is gonna one day get so

bad that Jesus is fed up with it and he comes back to clean up the mess that we made.

Instead of looking at this as a commission that he gave us, empowered by the Spirit, for us to oversee

for the good of the world, we've abandoned our calling for escapism.

Instead of ardently trying to see the great commission accomplished in our lifetime, thinking strategically about

how do we evangelize and how do we make disciples and how do we take back land that belongs to Jesus, instead of

strategically thinking about these things, dispensationalism has employed an attitude of saving

as many people as they can before the ship sinks.

This is why megachurches have carnal concert -style worship services because the goal is

to save people before Jesus returns, to pull them out of the flames.

Don't worry about discipling them.

Discipling takes way too long.

Who has time for that?

And that's why this culture of Christianity, this dispensational cult, has produced

a multiple generational problem of baby undiscipled Christians who've

never been brought up in the faith, never been taught good doctrine, and who basically are

perpetually immature, waiting on an imminent rapture.

And yet, the rapture that they're all waiting for hasn't come.

Hasn't come after 100 years of failed predictions.

It hasn't come after thousands of ridiculous prophecies, all unfulfilled.

And it's not gonna come in the way that the Dispys are thinking because that's not what the Bible says.

We're gonna get into that more later.

But it's gonna have to wait for future episodes.

Now, to paralyze the church with such defeatist propaganda,

dispensationalists have leveraged the domain of Christian book publishing companies and entertainment companies

who've churned out a litany of volumes that are steeped in this kind of evangelical

panic porn, eschatology, sensationalizing Bible prophecy that

melds current events from the newspaper and now from the tickers on the screen or from your Twitter account

into end times failed predictions.

Series like Left Behind, The Late Great Plan Earth, 88 Reasons Why Jesus Will Return in 88 are

examples from last generation of how these commercialized ideas take hold

in the book publishing companies, making their writers fat and wealthy and leaving a generation of Christians

brought up speculating on whether COVID -19 and its vaccine is the mark of the beast.

This skewed perspective has tainted the modern church's ability to understand God's faithful work in

history, His ongoing mission in the present and the ultimate trajectory towards a triumphant and

glorious future that is coming in Jesus Christ.

Dispensationalism is a miracle that it grew because every story that

you and I have ever watched, every movie that we've been touched by has a glorious end.

Why would we think that the writer of the Bible would

take the church and cause its grand and glorious finale to

be that it crashes and burns and loses?

That sort of thinking has fostered a climate where the headlines in the newspapers are often more important than the

scriptures, leading to a frantic obsession with current events like wars in Israel,

potential epidemic outbreaks, who is in charge of the who, geopolitical shifts in

power dynamics, all of that deemed as precursors to us getting zapped out of here.

In essence, dispensationalism propelled by theologians, pastors, publishing houses, Christian

media, all of that has promulgated a fragmented view of the Bible.

And is it any wonder since dispensationalism fragments the Bible?

It's destroyed our view of Jesus as bride, the church.

It has caused a generation to be addicted to panic and pessimism instead of hope and

the gospel.

And this has not only diverted the church's attention away from the Great Commission, but it's also ingrained a

defeatist mindset within the evangelical world, contradicting the hopeful and

transformative message of the gospel, rendering us ineffective for the mission.

Now, where did all of this defeatist mentality come from?

Is it just a symptom of a few bad dispensationalists or is it a feature of their entire theological system?

Beyond what we've already discussed, which is enough for me to say that the view has failed and no one should believe it.

Well, but beyond that, I want us to explore a couple additional concepts that make dispensationalism pernicious and

ludicrous.

Again, much more could be said, but I only want to, in this episode, give you a summary for now.

Other failed concepts in dispensationalism.

Number one, a commitment to hyper -literalism.

Now, along with a fragmented approach to the Bible, a misunderstanding of Israel and the church and a preoccupation with

leaving the world instead of discipling it, dispensationalism also has a strict commitment to

literal interpretation of scripture.

Now, at first blush, this kind of sounds epic, especially in a world constantly challenging the truth and the authority of

scripture.

Yet, it's not a healthy view of literal that distinguishes dispensationalism.

Instead of interpreting the text literally, they employ a foolish approach that I like to call

literalism.

For instance, literal means understanding something according to its literature.

This means that we may know poetry rightly and literally when we employ the rules and strategies that work

best for poetry.

You don't read poetry like you read a phone book.

You don't read a law book like you look at a comic strip.

This, of course, makes perfect sense, and it means that different genres of writing require

different interpretive tools in order to understand them literally.

Now, let me give you an example.

If I said that I am so hungry that I could eat a cow, the literal truth that I'm communicating to you is that I'm

starving.

I do not intend to communicate that I can literally fit a 2 ,000 -pound beast in

a three -ounce stomach.

Interpreting my words that way would actually be silly, stupid, and literalistic, which is

precisely what dispensationalism does.

Regarding scripture, the dispensationalist violates the rules of literature and employs

strategies that are needed to extract the most ridiculous meanings.

For instance, in the eschatological genre of apocalyptic literature, there's a funny example of this.

This is sort of a classic example that I use a lot.

Instead of attempting to figure out what locust means in apocalyptic text and what the Old

Testament worldview has to say about that, what the Exodus account actually informs in that, how that has to

do with plagues and everything in the Bible, instead of trying to dig into the apocalyptic genre,

dispensationalism says that the locust are just John's way of describing Apache helicopters because

John, he didn't know how to describe an Apache helicopter because he saw his vision about our time period, so he

described it with things that he knew.

Well, that helicopter kind of looks like a locust.

And of course, Apache helicopters aren't even in use anymore but dispensationalism or dispensationalists

have said that before.

Now, the same is true when disputes say that the mark of the beast, which is taken on the wrist or on the forehead, must be an

implanted microchip that's connected to your bank account so you can buy and sell.

Of course, the meaning of this had nothing to do with John and his audience.

It has to apply to us because the Bible was not written for the first 19 centuries.

It was written for us.

We're the focus.

That's sort of the point.

You can even give the more ridiculous one that I've seen on Instagram or other memes that the M in the monster energy drink

is actually the 666 mark of the beast that John is referring to.

So don't drink monster, apparently.

This bastardization of the apocalyptic genre produces limitless, whimsical

interpretations that are frankly embarrassing for Christianity and can be dreamt up by any

crackpot interpreter with a weird imagination, producing work that bears more

resemblance to an ayahuasca trip than accurate biblical exegesis.

Now, ironically, dispensationalists do not interpret other Bible passages with the same sort of

rigid, fantastical literalism, and of course they don't.

Why would they?

If they did, we would all be removing two -by -fours from our forehead before we get the sawdust out of someone else's

eye, or we would expect a thousand -pound camel to enter through the eye of a needle

before any rich man could get into heaven.

Now, don't get me wrong.

A literal approach to scripture is reasonable and it's necessary so long as we honor the

literature to which every text is pulled from.

The problem occurs when we adopt literalism, making every eschatological

text fit into our world instead of from the world to which it was written.

This method imposes strange and inconsistent rules upon the text,

leading to wild and ridiculous conclusions that must be avoided like the

bubonic plague.

Number two, addiction to futurism.

Now, along with a commitment to wild and outlandish literalism, dispensational chaps are more addicted to

futurism than lab rats being force -fed cocaine.

By futurism, I'm talking about the principle of interpreting the text in a

particular time.

For instance, in eschatological studies, there's sort of four views on how to interpret end -times passages.

Those who think the end -times passages have a primary spiritual meaning are called idealists.

Those who believe that the majority of the passages are gonna be worked out sequentially in epics of history are

called historists.

They don't really exist very much anymore, but it's a historical view.

And those who think that most of the eschatological events happened in the past, happened in the time period

which they were written, those are called preterists.

And then the fourth, there's those who believe that the overwhelming majority of the end -times events will

not occur until an uncertain future.

Those people are called futurists.

Instead of reading the scripture in the most appropriate manner, which is tempting to uncover what the

original author intended to say to the original first century audience, dispensationalism with its hyper

-literalism assumes that the reader of scripture is at the center of

biblical interpretation.

What I mean by that is that the writers of scripture, the New Testament was not written to a specific people about

a specific events that were gonna happen in their world, that's preterism.

Dispensationalists believe that the lion's share of eschatological passages were written to us.

They have no application whatsoever to the period to which they were written.

They treat scripture, in fact, as if its writers were writing to us, looking

beyond the people who were standing right in front of them, asking questions of them to speak to us.

This view is not only wrongheaded, but it prioritizes our generation as the generation

that scripture was concerned with, rendering the past 2 ,000 years of church history a necessary

foregone conclusion that needed to pass away in order to get to us because 2 ,000 years of church history

could not understand these passages because they weren't written to them.

They were written only to us.

This is not only arrogant, but it's decidedly foolish.

Scripture was written to its original audience.

By God's grace, it has application to all generations.

That is the faithful view.

Dispensationalism promotes defeatism.

Now, as we come to the point, when you take dispensationalism literally, now, no pun

intended here, you end up with a worldview suffocating with pessimism, lunacy, and defeatism.

When you view biblical history as fragmented, more fragmented, in fact, than a Tarantino movie, then

you not only see the eras that we are living in as significant, but you see Christ reigning

on his throne as nothing other than a placeholder for a future Jewish temple.

This unbiblical view will cause and has historically caused Christians in the church to lie

back, remain unengaged, and to treat the building of their vocations, their families, their stock

portfolios as more important than the building of Jesus's kingdom.

Why?

Because the era we live in is just an asterisk.

The era that we live in is not significant.

We are waiting on Israel to repent, and until then, as many Gentiles as can come in can come in.

Once you're saved, go on about your life.

This fragmented approach to history and prophecy paints a demoralizing picture of a

world that is spiraling into more profound evil and a church that is destined for

abject failure.

What a winning narrative.

This theological system is a worldview where despair overshadows hope and inaction trumps

the gospel.

This segmentation also risks detaching believers from a sense of God's

continuous and unified plan of history, leading to a compartmentalized faith that

fails to recognize the overarching narrative of redemption.

Welcome to the modern American church.

It's like viewing a mosaic where every piece is isolated.

Dispensationalism loses sight of the complete covenant picture of God's redemptive work, and it leaves people

disoriented and paralyzed.

When the church adopts that sort of foolish thinking about Jesus's bride, the nation state of

Israel, we begin to see the church age as nothing more than God's plan B, an accommodation

because Israel decided to reject him.

Instead of seeing the church as the radiant bride of Christ, we begin viewing her as the rebound

Jesus chose to make Judah jealous.

What a silly and shallow perversion of the true gospel story that narrative is.

And when the church adopts that kind of stupidity and pessimism that's rampant in

dispensationalism, we also begin to see the world not as a field that's ripe for the harvest, but as a

sinking ship that is destined for destruction.

This belief in the church's imminent failure and imminent rapture instills a sense of futility

and defeatism among Christians.

It anticipates a decline in the church's influence and a rise in global evil, which

demoralizes believers.

And it dampens their zeal for mission, because honestly, who wants to work on a losing team?

Who wants to put all their energy and effort into a failed project?

By focusing on futurism, the tribulation, rapture, nanobots, and all of that, our focus

has been shifted away from the apparent responsibilities that Jesus has given us, like discipling the

world and that, and onto a strange, unclear, and esoteric future.

Instead of being warriors for Christ, we've become closet weirdos with tinfoil hats who suspect

every world leader is a new candidate for the Antichrist.

This sinful preoccupation leads us to neglect true evangelism, the long, hard work of

discipleship, and being engaged in culture as salt and light that Jesus commanded.

By focusing on a rigid, hyper -literalism, many turn

the hope -filled genre of apocalyptic literature, such as the book of Revelation, into a cheap

knockoff of the Hunger Games, and then wonder why we produce such second -rate

dystopian Christian media.

This perspective risks overshadowing the gospel's transformative power and the hope that can be found

in Christ and Christ alone.

Can you see why the church has actually become so paralyzed under this system of thinking?

Is it starting to make sense?

Dispensationalism does not lead us to clarity.

It leads us to confusion.

We are under the spell of that heathen, and I believe, demonic system, and we

will not see the church in the same way that Scripture depicts her until we give up that view.

We will miss the critical role that the church is meant to play in the world and among the nations, and we will

attribute a mystical status to Israel, treating that godless and secular state, yes, it is a

godless state, it is a secular state, it is not a biblical state, and we're gonna treat it like a good luck

charm so that God will bless us if we bless them, God will care for us if we side with them.

Those kind of blind allegiances cause us to be blind in

our treaties that we make with foreign nations.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't be a partner with Israel.

I'm just saying that they're not a good luck charm, and they're not God's unique covenantal people, the

church is the Israel of God.

Having this point of view will cause us to miss the point of what world history is.

History is not moving toward a reinvigorated mosaic temple, it is actually coming

under the lordship of Jesus Christ so that all of his blessings will cover the entire earth as the

water covers the sea.

There's gonna be more to come on that, but for now, let's conclude our time.

Defeating defeatism.

I wanna thank you so much for listening to another episode of the podcast where we're reclaiming a biblical view of

optimism, defeating eschatological defeatism, and working towards a practical post -millennialism

where we're gonna see how Jesus's ongoing victory applies to every facet of our lives.

Today, we expose dispensationalism for just some of its hyper -pessimism and

addiction to isolationism and defeatism.

But as we draw this episode to a close, our mission is far more important.

It's far from over.

As we move forward, we've got to remember that our fight against defeatism isn't about

dismantling a quirky or flawed theology, but it's about reigniting biblical hope

and reinvigorating the kind of optimism that pervades every single book of the Bible and

foretells of a world that is entirely under the dominion and authority of Jesus.

We have to reclaim that.

We don't need to be raptured out of this world for that to happen.

This is gonna happen in this world, one converted sinner, one discipled saint at a time, until Jesus

returns to a Christian world.

That optimism, as we're gonna see in the weeks ahead, is robustly biblical.

It's inherent in the gospel of Christ, and we're gonna learn that the Bible doesn't paint a picture of a

defeated church and a future Israel.

It portrays a triumphant Israel of God -like bride, confidently advancing

the kingdom of God by the power of the Holy Spirit in obedience to her king and her bridegroom.

Our task is to reclaim this biblical vision in order to see the church as Christ

sees her, vibrant, victorious, and vigorously engaged in transforming the world that he has

given her.

As Eve was meant to make Adam's garden beautiful, the church, the bride of Christ, is meant to transform this

world according to his vision.

And in the upcoming episodes, we're gonna delve deeper into that biblical case for optimism, and we're gonna explore

how the scriptures affirm a victorious future for Christ's kingdom.

We're gonna dissect how this optimism should reshape our understanding of our roles as men and women in the church, as

in our families, in our communities, and we're gonna challenge ourselves to envision how our vocations,

our parenting, and even our daily interactions can be part of advancing Christ's victory to the ends of the earth.

Our goal is clear.

Our goal is to awaken the church from the slumber of defeatism.

My goal is to inspire you out of the discouragement and the lethargy and into passionately engaging in the mission of Jesus

that Jesus has entrusted to us.

It is time, my friends, to discard the chains of pessimism and embrace the empowering truth

that we are part of the winning team.

We are not called to retreat, but to advance, not to cower in fear, but to conquer in faith.

We, as we conclude this episode. Let's commit to coming back here next week with hearts ready to

learn, spirits eager to be uplifted, minds open to being transformed, and let us join hands in the building of Jesus's kingdom

today, to the ends of the earth, to the end of time, and being the salt and light that are, that

desperately need, that's desperately needed in a decaying world.

And I'll see you back again next week.

We continue to prod God's sheep and beat back wolves like dispensationalism.

Until next time, God richly bless you.