Okay, I've got this mic turned on and I'm not
hearing it on and I'm not in charge of that so
I'm going to recommend that you move up to the
front as close as you can because if it doesn't
get on I can't go much louder than this and
have anything left.
So let's all stand up and sing a song and you
might want to move down a little closer.
Jesus is Lord my Redeemer. How he loves me. How
I love him. He is risen. He is coming.
The Lord come quickly.
The older I get the more I like those songs
about Lord come quickly.
In fact let me tell you a true story and I
always think it's funny when a preacher says
this is a true story.
But I had only been preaching at the Southern
Hills Church of Christ in about a year.
They hired me in 1978 when I was 21 years old.
Why they did that none of us really know.
But I'd been preaching there about a year and I
was doing graduate work here at ACU and I was
going to duck into a restroom quickly before I
went to my next class.
And back in the old days when I was on school
there wasn't a Bible building so the Bible
classes were in the old administration building.
And so were the business classes because the
business building wasn't built either.
We only had about two buildings on campus when
I was in school.
And so I went down this hall to go into the
restroom real quick and outside there were a
bunch of students waiting to get into their
accounting lab and the doors were locked.
And so they were just waiting for the teacher
to come.
So I rushed into the restroom and I took about
three steps and I thought well this is strange.
When did they put a couch in the boys restroom?
And I took that you know I had that moment
there where I'm trying to reorient myself and
get my bearings.
And then on the other side of a door I heard a
couple of girls visiting and I realized I just
walked right into the women's restroom.
And then I realized 40 people just saw me walk
into the women's restroom.
So I've got this dilemma. What am I going to do?
I can I can walk out and be completely
embarrassed in front of a bunch of college students.
I can stay here. And suddenly this headline
flashed in front of me on the front page of the
Avenueport News.
Minister arrested in women's restroom.
And I finally decided that embarrassment was
better than a criminal record.
So I prayed oh Lord oh Lord oh Lord please let
that class be open all those kids be gone.
And I peeked around the door and open that door
and there were 40 kids just smiling as big as
they could ear to ear.
Wondering how long I would stay in there before
I came out.
And I remember I think that's the first time
that I ever remember thinking this would be a
good time for Jesus to come back.
I've had many moments like that since.
The Bible says one of our most precious
possessions is hope.
It says in Titus 2:13 that we wait for the
blessed hope.
The glorious appearing of our great God and
Savior Jesus Christ.
What I want to do in this session today is talk
about my personal theology of what that
appearing might be like.
And then tomorrow I want to talk to you about
the new heavens and the new earth.
And I think both of these teachings are very important.
Now let me just say up front this wasn't my
choice of what to teach on.
Some of this material is controversial.
Evangelical Christians argue a lot about this.
When Mark Love asked me to teach on this I said
why don't you get one of your scholars there on
campus to talk about this.
They should be more qualified than I am.
I don't think any of them wanted to touch it.
And so I'm going to deal with it.
But as I said yesterday don't email me to fix me.
I'm going to tell you what I think and if you
don't like it that's okay.
Because Jesus is going to come back whether you
like it or I like it.
And he's going to come back how he wants.
Ultimately none of us are all-millennialist or
pre-millennialist or post-millennialist.
Ultimately we're all pan-millennialist.
Because we think when he comes back it's all
going to pan out.
And so we're going to start with 2 Peter 3.
Look with me in your Bibles.
It's a long text.
We'll start in verse 3.
Because one of the things that we have to deal
with as believers is the skepticism of an
unbelieving world saying you guys have been
talking about this.
Get over it.
Your hope is not valid.
Now he's going to come back in chapter 3:3 and
say, and I'm reading from the New Living Translation.
First I want to remind you that in the last
days there will be scoffers who will laugh at
the truth and do every evil thing they desire.
This will be their argument.
Jesus promised to come back, did he?
Well where is he?
Well as far back as anyone can remember
everything's remained exactly the same since
the world was first created.
They deliberately forget that God made the
heavens by the word of his command and he
brought the earth up from the water and
surrounded it with water.
And then he used the water to destroy the world
with a mighty flood.
And God has also commanded that the heavens and
the earth will be consumed by fire on the day
of judgment when ungodly people will perish.
But you must not forget dear friends that a day
is like a thousand years to the Lord and a
thousand years is like a day.
The Lord isn't really being slow about his
promise to return as some people think.
No, he's being patient for your sake.
He does not want anyone to perish so he is
giving more time for everyone to repent.
But the day of the Lord will come as
unexpectedly as a thief.
And then the Heavens will pass away with a
terrible noise and everything in them will
disappear in fire and on earth and everything
on it will be exposed to judgment.
Since everything around us is going to melt
away, what holy godly lives you should be living.
You should look forward to that day and hurry
it along.
The day when God will set the heavens on fire
and the elements will melt away in flames.
But we're looking forward to the new heavens
and new earth.
He has promised a world where everyone is right
with God.
And so dear friends, while you are waiting for
these things to happen,
make every effort to live a pure and blameless
life and be at peace with God.
I remember reading an article by a man who for
some time served a church in Hawaii.
He was an ardent fan of the NFL and one team in particular.
And so he was always eager to see how his team did.
Now, if his team, for example, was going to be
on Monday Night Football,
they would delay the broadcast so that he could
watch it in the evening in Hawaii,
although the game was over, you know, seven,
eight hours earlier.
But if it was his favorite team, he couldn't
stand to wait that long to know if they won.
So he would find a way to get on the Internet
or something and get the score of the game.
But then he would watch the game, tape delayed,
later that night.
Now, he said, here's the thing I learned.
It makes a complete difference how you watch
the game if you know the end before you start
watching it.
If you know your team is going to win, and then
you watch the game and they throw an interception,
or they get a stupid penalty, or they fumble
the ball, you don't get so uptight
because you already know who wins while you
watch what's going on.
Now, he argued, and I think he's right,
that is what the New Testament is telling us
consistently with regard to the end of history.
Since we already know who wins, we don't have
to get so upset about all the evil that we see
around us right now.
But it is a dilemma that it seems to our
perspective that Jesus has been slow in returning.
So I want to deal with that real quick and deal
with three principles,
and then we'll get right into these end time views.
Principle number one, Peter says, what seems
slow is still completely under God's control.
And it must be admitted, the return of Christ
has delayed well past the expectations of the
earliest Christians.
And so what a lot of Christians through the
centuries have done, and they're still doing it today,
they're attempting to defend God's honor.
So they take prophetic texts and they mix them
and they match them,
and they come up with a set date for the return
of Christ.
They've been doing this for centuries, and
every single time they've done it, they've been wrong.
And it proves futile, and frankly, it proves embarrassing.
They forget what Jesus told his disciples in
Acts 1:7.
It's not for you to know the times or dates the
Father has set by his own authority.
Now we all yearn for the triumphant
consummation of the kingdom of Christ,
but we've got to remember a couple of things.
Number one is that God's not bound by time.
And so when we say Jesus is coming back soon,
what does that mean in Heaven?
Words like delay and soon.
What do they mean in Heaven to a God unbound by time?
The best illustration I can think of is ladies,
your husband's in front of the TV watching a
football game,
and you're wanting to go somewhere.
And you say to him, honey, how much more time
in that game?
And he says, just two minutes.
Don't go get in the car,
because he's going to be in that chair for 30
more minutes, watching the last two minutes.
Now something like that is going on,
that we've got to understand that what God
calls soon is a completely different thing than
what we expect.
But the second thing, and the most important
thing to remember, and here's what he's saying.
God's patience is as great as his faithfulness.
He specifically tells us why God hasn't
returned yet.
He isn't really being slow about his promised
return, even though it sometimes seems that
way, he says.
He's waiting for the good reason that he's not
willing any should perish.
He's given more time for sinners to repent.
Go back through our archive of songs about God.
How many songs on the patience of God do we have?
We love great as thy faithfulness, but we've
never written great as thy patience.
We should, because Peter says that's why the
return from our perspective has been delayed.
God is patient.
And the time before the return of Christ is time
in which God is actively redeeming the world
through the gospel of grace.
And so what Peter is saying is that ultimately
the future belongs to God.
And we're living in days like the days of Noah.
And if you lived in the days of Noah, you'd
think, man, everything around us is just so evil.
God must not be in control.
And Peter's saying, no, God was completely in control.
God knew how to deal with the world in the days
of Noah, and he knows how to deal with this world.
And he will.
We live in time where it seems like evil has
the last word,
but we know the end of the story.
So don't get so upset with how the game's
looking right now,
because you know the final score.
He's the Alpha and the Omega.
He's the author of the beginning and the end.
God knows, you see, the last ten funerals that
have been at my church.
But God knows the next ten funerals that will
be at my church.
God knows the last ten people who've been
elected president of this country,
and God knows the next ten men or women who
will be elected president of this country.
God knows the last time the Texas Rangers won a
playoff game.
And God knows when Jesus is coming back.
And so history is not an unending cycle.
It's moving toward a divinely appointed end,
the triumph of Jesus Christ.
That's principle number one. Principle number two.
The Scriptures show us enough about the future
to keep hope alive.
The fact that God has not revealed all the
details of the future
does not mean we should worry about a surprise ending.
The promise of Jesus' return is as clear as any
in the New Testament.
Listen to these Scriptures, 1 Peter 1:13.
Prepare your minds for action. Be self-controlled.
Set your hope fully on the grace to be given
you when Jesus Christ is revealed.
Hebrews 9 and verse 28 says,
So Christ was sacrificed once to take away the
sins of many people.
And he will appear a second time, not to bear sin,
but to bring salvation to those who are waiting
for him.
Now notice that. You find this often in the Scripture,
the first and the second coming of Jesus being connected.
The New Testament bases the promise of God's
ultimate triumph over evil
in events that have already concretely happened
in history.
See, the fact that God is going to prevail is
no longer in question.
We have already seen the future.
And you say, when did we see the future?
And the answer of the Scripture is,
we saw the future in the death and in the
resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Now let me show you that from 1 Thessalonians 4.
One of the favorite Easter messages I ever preach,
I do preach on Easter every Easter.
I think it's lunacy that I have more visitors
from the community
than any other day of the year
thinking about the coming and resurrection of Jesus
and I wouldn't talk about it.
But this year I teach on this text
and I talked about how if you believe that
Jesus is raised,
you know the future.
Look what he says.
Verse 13, Now, brothers and sisters,
I want you to know that what will happen to the
Christians who've died
so you'll not be full of sorrow like people who
have no hope.
For since we believe that Jesus died and was
raised to life again,
we also believe that when Jesus comes,
God will bring back with Jesus all the
Christians who've died.
Now do you see what he's saying?
He's saying the death and the resurrection of Jesus,
concrete events in history,
have shown us a glimpse of the rest of history.
If you believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus,
then you know who's going to win at the end of
the game.
He goes on to say, I can tell you this directly
from the Lord,
we who are still living when the Lord returns
will not rise to meet him ahead of those who
are in the graves.
For the Lord himself will come down from Heaven
with the commanding shout, with the call of the archangel,
with the trumpet call of God.
First all the Christians who've died will rise
from their graves
and then together with them we who are still alive
and remain on the earth will be caught up in
the clouds
to meet the Lord in the air and remain with him forever.
So comfort and encourage each other with these words.
Peter has the same idea, 1 Peter 1:3.
Praise be to the God and Father of the Lord
Jesus Christ
in his great mercy.
He's given us new birth into a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from
the dead.
So what I'm saying is our confidence in what
God is going to do
is grounded in what he's already done.
That's why it's very important
that we keep having our family meals.
That's why when we come together each week,
in order to help us keep hope alive,
we should take the bread and we should take the cup.
And what does Scripture say in 1 Corinthians 11?
Whenever you eat this bread and you drink this cup,
you proclaim the Lord's death.
What? Until he comes.
The family meal is to help fill the courage tank,
to help keep hope alive.
The memory of the death and the resurrection of Jesus
reminds us of the final score.
Every meal at the table reminds us his
victorious return is near.
Principle 3.
What we know about the future should impact the present.
See, I think one of the problems with a lot of
the modern evangelical eschatology
is we're trying to figure out when.
And the New Testament's focus is not on when,
it's on how.
It's on how should you live in view of the fact
that he's coming back.
He said in 2 Peter 3,
since everything here today might well be gone tomorrow,
do you see how essential it is to live a holy life?
We're to live by the values of the kingdom
we're soon to inherit.
Now when the Lord comes back, Scripture says,
he's going to find a largely unexpected world.
But he should find us living according to the
future we've already seen.
What I call it is we should learn how to live
in the future tense.
For us the future is now, or at least it ought
to be.
But I would contend, like I did yesterday,
one of the great losses of the church today is
we've lost an eschatological viewpoint.
We don't live with the end in view.
In this respect, we're not like the church of
the 1st century.
We're more like the church of the 2nd century.
The church of the 1st century so passionately
believed the return of Jesus was soon
that they even have literature in the
Scriptures about don't quit your job.
Go ahead and keep your job till he comes back.
I mean, they were so sure he was about to come back,
you had some issues there that they had to work
through about living until he comes.
By the time the 2nd century rolled around,
that passion for the imminent expectation of
Jesus had waned,
and the second coming of Jesus had become a
doctrine instead of a lifestyle.
We've restored the church of the 2nd century,
not the church of the first.
The only people I know that live with an
eschatological viewpoint are college students.
I say that because they don't ever write their
paper till the night before it's due.
Because why would you want to write a paper and
have Jesus come back
and you didn't get to turn it in?
Except for college students, most of us aren't
living in the future tense
like the Scripture implores us to do.
And so I would say then, and this is the most
important thing I'm going to say,
and now we'll turn to some of these end time viewpoints.
Let's talk about them, let's disagree if we must,
but let's remember the emphasis of Scripture is
not so much on when he's coming.
It is that he is coming, how should you be
living in view of the fact?
And that's where we need to focus the most.
Okay, you can go ahead and open your Bible to
Revelation 20
and we'll read that interesting text here in
just a second.
I did a series of teachings, as you can see
that you're outlining, in 1999.
You'll remember that was right before the big
2000, remember the Y2K scare and all that stuff.
And so I thought it would be a good time to
talk about what the end of the earth might look like
and do some teaching and I knew I was going to
have to deal with Revelation 20.
Now, I wasn't eager to do so because it is a
controversial text
and many people have very strong feelings about it.
In fact, shortly before I preached this sermon,
I heard about a man in Arkansas named Chester
Miller who was a preacher there
and he preached one day and he didn't deal with Revelation
like one sister in the church wanted him to and
while he led the closing prayer,
she pulled a gun on him.
And although I think that's hard to believe,
you remember I did say it was in Arkansas.
So, let's read Revelation 20.
Then I saw an angel come down from Heaven with
the key to the bottomless pit
and a heavy chain in his hand.
He seized the dragon, that old serpent, the
devil, Satan,
and bound him in chains for a thousand years.
The angel threw him in the bottomless pit,
which he then shut and locked
so Satan could not deceive the nations anymore
until the thousand years were finished.
Afterward, he would be released again for a
little while.
And then I saw the thrones and the people
sitting on them and had been given authority to judge
and I saw the souls of those who had been
beheaded for their testimony about Jesus
for proclaiming the Word of God.
And I saw the souls of those who had not
worshiped the beast or his statue,
not accepting his mark on their foreheads or
their hands.
They came to life again and they reigned with
Christ for a thousand years.
Now, this is the first resurrection.
The rest of the dead did not come back to life
until the thousand years had ended.
Blessed and holy are those who share in the
first resurrection.
For them, the second death holds no power,
but they will be priests of God and of Christ
and will reign with him a thousand years.
Now, to prepare for this lesson, I probably
read about 15 books.
There's no way in the world I could do that for
every sermon I've ever preached.
And then the week that I worked on the sermon,
I probably worked on it for about 70 or 80 hours.
It simply would be impossible to do that, as
you know, every time you preach a lesson.
But I wanted to be fair and I'm going to try to
be fair today.
And I've got this little chart here of the four
most predominant end time viewpoints
that we're going to look at and I'll give you
my evaluation of them.
I want to say a couple of things first, a
couple of initial observations.
Number one, each one of these views is biblical.
Now, what I mean by that, you can put biblical
in quotation marks.
Each one is biblical in the sense it is held by
followers of Jesus with a high view of Scripture.
In other words, all four of these views are
produced or propagated by people who believe in Jesus,
who believe in the inspiration of Scripture.
They didn't invent their view and then read it
into the Bible.
They came up with their view from their sincere
study of the Bible.
I've always been a little frustrated, not a
little, I've always been mightily frustrated
by the attitude of many who said, well, if they
just read the Bible, they'd agree with me.
The implication being you're the only person
that reads it sincerely
and anyone who disagrees with you must not be
sincere when they read the Bible.
That's just not true.
Here's what I learned.
I could take a new Christian.
Well, I'll give you an example.
Last year for Father's Day, my wife gave me a
golf lesson at a local club.
So I went and I met the local pro, 35-year-old
swim guy named Damon.
And while he's giving me this golf lesson, I
got to talking with Damon and I said,
Damon, I think I need to give you a lesson.
And so I went to lunch with Damon and went to
lunch again.
About a month later, I baptized Damon.
So now Damon comes every week to our church.
Well, last Wednesday night we had Max Locato
speak at our church and Damon came.
And Max is teaching on David and Goliath.
And at one point as he's telling the story, he
refers to David and Bathsheba.
And David committing adultery.
Well, after the lesson was over, Damon found
one of my friends and said,
that really frustrates me when you guys do that.
When we do what?
Well, when you allude to stories and you don't
tell us what happened.
David, did he really commit adultery?
And so he had never heard the story of David
and Bathsheba.
And I got a lot of people in my church like that.
It's one of the problems I have today with this
real popular inductive narrative preaching style
that most of our seminaries teach.
It assumes your people know all those stories.
And maybe they do in your church.
But in my church, a lot of my folks don't know
the stories,
especially the new Christians.
Now I could take Damon and I could give him a
book of any one of these four views.
And when he was through reading the book, he'd
believe it.
He'd say, that makes total sense.
They quoted Scripture. They showed the context.
That's what I believe.
That's what I mean when I say all these views
are biblical.
And note, all four of these views are supported
by conservative Christian scholars.
So that's the first thing we need to say.
They're all held by people that have a very
high view of the Bible.
The second thing I want to say is that all of
these views have a lot more in common
than is often realized.
For example, proponents of each view believe
that Scripture is the ultimate authority,
that Jesus is coming back visibly and bodily,
that His saints will spend eternity in God's presence,
that God will ultimately and be totally victorious.
And in some ways it's tragic.
There are a few topics that have been where
there's been more unjustified dogmatism.
So I want to state my ground this morning.
It is not going to be fighting ground.
I've got good brothers and sisters who will
disagree with my interpretation
and that's just fine because when Jesus comes
back it's all going to pan out.
Okay, let me give you the four views.
First one on your chart is historic premillennialism.
This view sees the return of Christ as a single event
after a period of intense tribulation
accompanied by the resurrection of the
righteous to reign on the earth with Christ for
a thousand years,
followed by the resurrection of the wicked,
final judgment,
and the ushering in of eternity in the new
heavens and new earths.
Now, this is an old view.
This view goes all the way back to the very
earliest days of the church.
Early church leaders who held this view include
Papias, Aranius, Justin Martyr, Tertullian.
This view has been around now for over 1800
years, historic premillennialism.
I'm going to give you the four views then I'm
going to come back and critique them.
The second one on your chart is amillennialism.
This view is the other view held by the
earliest believers.
It views the church as in the millennium now.
With Satan bound, and that thousand years is a
figurative thing,
Satan's bound now from preventing the gospel
from spreading to the nations,
and the dead saints are reigning now with
Christ in Heaven.
The return of Christ will be a single event.
It will bring about the resurrection of the
just and the unjust,
followed by judgment and eternity.
Now, this too is a very ancient view.
And there was a man about the 3rd or 4th
century after Christ named Augustine,
wrote a book called The City of God, in which
he promoted amillennialism.
And it became almost the exclusive view of the
church for about the next 1200 years.
Most of your ancient creeds are amillennial.
The third view is called postmillennialism.
This view sees the world as becoming
increasingly Christianized,
ushering in a golden age of spiritual
prosperity called the millennium,
which will be followed by the return of Christ,
the resurrection of the dead,
judgment and eternity.
It 1st really began to appear and gain traction
about the 17th century
during the Enlightenment.
And from the 17th through the 19th centuries in
the western world,
it was a very dominant view.
Great men like Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley
were postmillennialist.
Now, the final view, and it's here called the
modern premillennial view on the chart,
but probably it's most often known as dispensationalism.
This view is a relatively new view.
It began to gain traction back in the early 1800s.
There was a man named J.N. Darby.
He broke from the Anglican church in England.
He started a movement called the Plymouth Brethren.
He had a lot of prophecy conferences.
He was a prolific writer.
And he came to the unique conclusion that all
the prophecies that were about Israel
in the Old Testament had nothing to do with the church.
They were two separate bodies.
Now, his views became increasingly popular.
And in 1903, a man named Cyrus Schofield
adopted his views,
and he published the Schofield Bible with study notes.
It was an immensely popular Bible, especially
in America.
And the study notes promoted dispensationalism.
Now, dispensationalism introduced some very
distinct ideas.
The insistence that the church and Israel must
be kept separate.
The secret rapture of the church.
More than one resurrection of the righteous.
It is now the dominant eschatology of the
evangelical world.
Not so much at the scholarly level, but at the
popular level.
And so when you go to your Christian bookstore,
most of your books about end times will promote dispensationalism.
All the people in your pews that have read Left
Behind books
are reading fictional dispensationalism.
Now, it's very hard to get the chronology down,
but I'm going to do my best to help you
understand dispensationalism.
And I want to be very fair because it is a very
popular modern eschatology,
and it's kind of just assumed in most
evangelical churches and never challenged.
Here's what they believe.
You'll notice the chart begins with the church age.
But actually in Darby's theology, what Darby
noticed is that
there were promises made to Abraham and to Israel
that he determined were not fulfilled yet.
They were not fulfilled in the church.
So he concluded there had to be a future for
national Israel
that hadn't been realized yet.
He concluded that when Jesus came,
He came to inaugurate His kingdom among the Jews,
but that He was rejected.
So God basically stopped prophetic history
and introduced a parenthesis that we call the
church age.
But His ultimate plan is to get back to Israel.
So what's going to happen at some point in history,
there's going to be a rapture of the church.
It's going to be an invisible coming of Jesus.
And the church is going to be taken up to
Heaven with Jesus.
This is going to be the first resurrection of
the righteous.
Then there's going to be seven years of tribulation
as God again turns His attention to national Israel.
There's going to be a revival of the ancient
Roman Empire.
There's going to be an Antichrist.
He's going to make a treaty with Jerusalem and Israel.
Then He's going to break the treaty.
There's going to be horrible persecution and
tribulation on the earth.
And at the end of seven years, Jesus is going
to come back
and He's going to save Israel.
Now this is going to be the second, second
coming of Jesus.
Now it gets a little complicated as if it
wasn't before.
Because at this point, you're going to have the
second raising of the righteous
who were converted to Christ during the tribulation.
Now the first group that was raised by the rapture
and the second group is raised as a tribulation,
they're going to enter into the millennium in
their glorified bodies.
However, remember you've got people in the tribulation
that didn't die when Jesus came back, so
they're still in their mortal bodies.
So in the millennium you've got these mortal
bodies and immortal bodies
and they're all reigning together.
The mortal bodies are going to die. They're
also going to propagate.
Now that's important because they're still
having babies
and those babies are having babies. So at the
end of a thousand years
you've got Jesus on the earth reigning with the
immortal bodies
but with all the mortal bodies.
And among the mortal bodies there's going to be
another rebellion.
Satan's going to be loosed. Jesus is going to
squelch it.
And then you're going to have the third
resurrection of the righteous.
Now I hope I didn't butcher that too much.
It's a pretty complicated system.
And as I mentioned, for 1800 years in Christian
history it didn't exist.
But 2 things happened in the last century that
really had a tremendous impact
to accelerate the acceptance of dispensationalism
as the predominant eschatology of evangelical Christians.
Now the 1st thing was in the early part of last century
there was a tremendous fundamentalist liberal battle
over the inspiration of the Bible.
Liberal German scholarship, the demythologizing
of the Bible,
the questioning of the miracles of the Bible,
it began to permeate seminaries in America too.
In fact, in our own movement this was what
developed into the split
between the Christian churches and the
disciples of Christ
after we split with the disciples in 1906
because the colleges in our own movement became
decidedly liberal
and the Christian churches didn't want to go
that way
and that's why they started all the Bible
colleges they have today.
Well, who won the day? Who was out there preaching?
You've got to take the Bible literally harder
than anybody.
It was the dispensationalists.
And their seminaries and their professors and
their preachers,
they rigorously defended the authority of the Bible
and that carried great weight among Christians
and it caused their viewpoints to be considered
more eagerly.
The second thing that happened that really exacerbated
the acceptance of dispensationalism,
and you can probably already guess what this
was, 1948.
What did the United Nations do after World War II?
They reestablished the nation of Israel.
Well, according to their eschatology, well,
yeah, that's got to happen
because God's not through with Israel
and that really accelerated the acceptance of Israel.
Back when I started preaching back in the 70s especially,
man, those guys, they were just going crazy.
Every time there is a grenade that goes off in
the Middle East,
15 more books get written.
Now, back when I started preaching, everybody
knew that Russia was Gog and Magog
because they were the evil communists and they
were all over Revelation.
The problem is the wall fell and now Russia
isn't communist.
But that doesn't keep them from writing books.
They just write more books.
And they've got it all figured out how this is
going to work
and I'm sounding a little sarcastic.
I'm sorry, I don't really mean to be.
But you do need to know this is the dominant
eschatology today
at the popular level
and this is what most of our folks are reading
when they go to their Christian bookstore
and they buy your typical evangelical book.
Okay, those are the four views.
Let me give you a critique of them.
First, post-millennialism.
What I like about this view
is its optimistic vision of the church
conquering the world,
taking on the gates of hell and prevailing all
over the world.
But I think this view has serious weaknesses.
First, it doesn't seem to be in harmony with
the New Testament picture
of the end of the age.
2 Timothy 3:1 says,
Mark this, there will be terrible times in the
last days.
When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith
in earth?
The New Testament picture doesn't seem to say
that when Jesus comes back
everything's going to be going well.
It suggests it's going to be like the days of
Noah when he comes back
and there's going to be evil all over the world.
Second, its vision of the number of the redeemed
doesn't seem to square with the narrow way that
Jesus spoke of.
But finally, here's the biggest problem.
Post-millennialism inevitably undermines the expectancy
of the eminence of Christ's return.
How can you believe at any moment Jesus is
going to come back
if he can't come back until we've had a
thousand years
of spiritual prosperity on the earth?
Now, post-millennialism flourished during the Enlightenment
when science and technology and
industrialization began to take place in the West
and everyone believed we're about to conquer
all of the great problems of the world.
But in the last hundred years, two world wars,
the threat of nuclear war,
and other issues have pretty much diminished
this view.
And it's a pretty narrow view.
Now, not many people hold post-millennialism anymore.
Now let's talk about dispensationalism.
View number four.
What I admire about this view is there's zeal
to interpret the Bible literally,
but I've got major problems with dispensationalism.
Not the least of which is it didn't exist for
1800 years.
And too often I think we treat the ancient
saints as demwits
when in fact they were great minds.
And I have a problem with a theology that for
1800 years the church didn't have
and that we suddenly in all our wisdom figured
out what they were missing all this time.
Now here's some of the problems I have with dispensationalism.
First, I challenge the idea that God hasn't
fulfilled all his promises to Israel.
In fact, Joshua 21 says clearly,
the Lord gave Israel all the land he'd sworn to
give their forefathers.
They took possession of it, settled there.
Not one of all the Lord's good promises to the
house of Israel failed.
Every one was fulfilled.
I think every promise to Abraham either was
fulfilled in national Israel
or it's being fulfilled in spiritual Israel,
which I believe is the church.
Second, I don't feel the Bible supports a
dispensational distinction
between Israel and the church.
In other words, I do not believe the church was
plan B,
that the only reason the church exists is
because the Jews rejected Jesus.
I believe the church was always God's prophetic intention.
I believe the prophets spoke of the coming of
the church.
In Acts 15 when you have that great Jew-Gentile controversy
and the great summit there in Jerusalem,
James speaks up and he quotes from Amos.
Brothers, listen to me.
Simon's described to us how God at first showed
his concern
by taking the Gentiles of people for himself.
The words of the prophets are in agreement with
this as it's written,
after this I'll return and rebuild David's
fallen tents.
It's ruins I'll rebuild, I'll restore it,
that the remnant of men may seek the Lord,
that all the Gentiles who bear my name, says
the Lord,
who does these things have been known for ages.
In other words, he's just saying, listen, this
thing that's happening right now,
this church thing, this Jew and Gentile getting
together thing,
Amos talked about that.
This was God's prophetic intention.
In the New Testament, the very same titles
given to national Israel
are given to the church.
You know 1 Peter 2:9, you're a chosen people, a
royal priesthood,
a holy nation, a people belonging to God.
All those are phrases in the Old Testament for Israel.
Galatians 3 says, if you belong to Christ,
you're Abraham's seed
and heirs according to the promise.
I could go on and give you others, but I think
you get the idea.
The New Testament authors clearly saw the
mystery of the church
revealed in Old Testament prophecy.
And so I would disagree.
The dispensation says that the church age is
the parenthesis.
I would argue the Jewish age was the parenthesis
and the church was always God's prophetic intention.
Third, the part of dispensation is going to be
that there's going to be a rebuilding of the temple
and a return to the Old Testament sacrificial system.
They quote Ezekiel 43, which, by the way, talks
about sin offerings.
Now, I don't know how you do that with Hebrews,
how you can reconcile that with Hebrews.
There's not going to be any more sin offerings.
And so I have a problem there.
Fourth, I think the Scripture indicates the church
will experience the tribulation that we will
not be raptured
and get to avoid it.
2 Thessalonians says, Chapter 1, God is just.
He'll pay back trouble to those who trouble you
and give relief to you who are troubled and to
us as well.
This will happen when the Lord Jesus is
revealed from Heaven
and blazing fire with His powerful angels.
He will punish those who do not know God
and do not obey the gospel of our Lord.
They will be punished for the everlasting destruction
and shut out from the presence of the Lord
and from the Majesty of His power on the day
that He comes
to be glorified in His holy people
and to be marveled at among all those who believe.
I don't believe the New Testament promise
is that the church is going to be kept from suffering.
It's that we're going to be kept in suffering.
But finally, here's my biggest problem.
My biggest problem with dispensationalism
is what it implies about the cross.
We quote one of their authors, and this is an
old quote,
but he was a dispensationalist.
Listen to what he says.
S.D. Gordon is his name.
It can be said at once that his dying,
we're talking about Christ, was not God's own plan.
It was conceived somewhere else and yielded to
by God.
God has a plan of atonement by which men who
were willing
could be saved from sin and its effect,
and that plan is given in the Old Testament or
Hebrew code
to the tabernacle or temple under prescribed regulations.
A man could bring some animal which he owned.
The man brought that which was his own.
It represented him.
In other words, the argument was
God had a way for men to be right with God.
It was the Old Testament system.
And if the people had accepted Christ as the Messiah,
He would have inaugurated the kingdom right
then and there.
I cannot tell you how strongly I disagree with that,
that the blood of bulls and goats could never
take away sin,
that the cross of Christ was not Plan B.
It was not the afterthought of God.
I believe salvation by grace through faith
is the only salvation mentioned in the Scripture.
In the New Testament, when Paul wants to tell you
how do men get saved, he doesn't go to Acts
and show you conversion stories.
He goes to Genesis and tells you about Abraham.
This is how men get saved.
They believe God, and it's credited to them as righteousness.
Salvation by grace through faith is the only way
men have ever been saved by God.
1 Peter says we're saved by the precious blood
of Christ,
a lamb without blemish or defect.
He was chosen before the creation of the world,
but was revealed in these last times for your sakes.
And so, I can't go there.
I've got good friends who are dispensationalists.
I love them. I disagree with them.
One other problem I do have with dispensationalists,
if this is your eschatology,
and there's a good chance some of you today
this is your eschatology,
dispensationalists almost always become very political
because if your conviction is
that there can be no second coming of Christ
unless national Israel is restored,
the next thing you know,
your politics is completely biased towards
whatever promotes national Israel.
And so Christians often find themselves
supporting some strange things
and in bed with some strange people
because we have to promote national Israel,
and I'm uncomfortable with that.
I believe when Jesus cursed the fig tree,
he was suggesting that national Israel's time
was through in God's economy.
I think the destruction of the temple says the
same thing.
Now, by the way, I don't have any problem with
God having a future for ethnic Israel.
And I do pray, and you should too,
that there would be a tremendous revival among
the Jews to accept Christ as their Messiah
and that there are the conversion of tens of
thousands of Hebrews before Jesus returns.
And I've got no problem with that,
but I do have a problem with equating the
agenda of God with the affairs of national
Israel today.
So that's my critique.
I spent more time there than anywhere, but
that's the most popular.
I think it deserved it.
Historic premillennialism.
Now, this is important.
Keep in mind that for centuries,
premillennialism did not have all the
distinctives of dispensationalism.
Many, many of the great leaders of the
restoration movement were premillennialist.
They weren't dispensationalist.
Keep that in mind.
I agree with a lot about historic premillennialism.
The one thing I have a problem here, and I
can't make the chronology work,
is historic premillennialism teaches two bodily
resurrections and two separate judgments.
And that doesn't seem to me to be what
Scripture indicates.
Let me just read Scripture.
John 5, Jesus said,
Don't be amazed this.
A time's coming when all who were in the grave
will hear His voice and come out.
Those who've done good will rise to live.
Those who've done evil will rise to be condemned.
Acts 24:15,
I have the same hope in God as these men,
that there will be a resurrection of both the
righteous and the wicked.
Daniel 12:2,
Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth
will awake some to everlasting life,
others to shame and everlasting contempt.
Listen to Jesus' parable of the weeds in
Matthew 13.
Let both grow together, you know, the weeds and
the wheat, until the harvest.
At that time, I'll tell the harvesters first
collect the weeds
and tie them in bundles to be burned, and then
gather the wheat to bring it into my barn.
In that parable, the resurrection or the
collection or the judgment of the unrighteous
came first, not last.
And then finally, in 1 Corinthians 15,
Paul says the last enemy to be destroyed is death.
In all your premillennial chronologies, the
saints are raised and death is destroyed,
but then you have more enemies still to conquer
in the future.
And I don't know how to fit that into the chronology.
So ultimately, I haven't chosen to be premillennial.
So you've already guessed where I am.
I'm an amillennialist.
I believe the Scripture indicates the kingdom
is not a future but a present reality.
I believe in the first advent of Christ, Satan
was bound.
His kingdom has been inaugurated.
The saints are currently reigning with him.
I believe the kingdom is among us now.
I think Jesus taught that.
He said, from the days of John the Baptist
until now,
the kingdom of Heaven has been forcefully advancing,
and forceful men lay hold of it.
He said, having been asked by the Pharisees
when the kingdom of God would come,
Jesus replied, the kingdom of God does not come
with your careful observation
or where people say here it is or there it is,
because the kingdom of God is within you.
He said in Matthew 12, if I drive out demons by
the spirit of God,
then the kingdom of God has come upon you.
Colossians 1 says he's rescued us from the
dominion of darkness.
He's brought us into the kingdom of the sun
that he loves.
Now, I do think I need to say something here.
I do believe the kingdom is among us, but it's
not fully consummated.
We haven't seen the full expression of the
kingdom yet.
I've got no problem with the Lord's Prayer,
praying, thy kingdom come, thy will be done.
Does Jesus Christ reign on earth everywhere
like he will? No.
And until he does, I pray that prayer.
But I do believe the kingdom has been inaugurated.
We're not fully to inherit it yet because we're
still in these sin-polluted bodies,
and I'll talk about that tomorrow.
But it is among us.
I do look forward to an eternity on a new earth,
and I think many of the passages in the Old Testament
that are ascribed to a premillennial viewpoint
are actually describing the new earth,
but I'll talk about that tomorrow.
So for now, my rain forecast is that the second
coming of Jesus
will be the revealing of the kingship that is
already His.
All right. Now, why in the world Mark Love
didn't teach that lesson
instead of me, I don't know.
He owes me big time for working through all that.
I'm going to close with two final exhortations.
Number one, do not make rain forecast a test of fellowship.
Okay? I'm very clear about that in my pulpit.
Your particular theological position does not
exclude you
from what God is going to do
because God is bigger than our interpretations.
Let me take a moment and talk a little bit
about our own restoration movement
because there has been room in our heritage
for a variety of opinions on these questions.
Most of you know Alexander Campbell was a post-millennialist.
What was the name of his famous journal?
The Millennial Harbinger.
He saw the Millennial coming.
Campbell saw the advance of science and
technology and medicine.
He saw this new American democracy breaking forth.
He saw a return of people to New Testament Christianity.
And Campbell believed we were on the verge of
ushering in
a thousand years of glorified Christianized existence.
He never wavered from his position,
although the Civil War did greatly affect him
and began to shake his view.
But Campbell was a post-millennialist.
Barton W. Stone, the other man considered to be
the father of our movement,
was an avowed premillennialist.
Not a dispensationalist, but a historic premillennialist.
And so were many of the great fathers of our movement.
There's a long history of premillennialism in
the Churches of Christ.
Listen to these names.
Moses Lord, Talbert Fanning, David Lipscomb,
James Harding.
These men were all premillennial.
They didn't make it a question of fellowship.
They didn't quibble over whether a millennium
would actually be a thousand years.
But they absolutely believed that Christ would
return to the earth.
He'd reign on the earth before we were ushered
into eternity.
Lipscomb's book, Civil Government,
was a strong suggestion that we don't get
involved in the kingdoms of men
because we're apart and we're looking forward
to the coming of the kingdom of God.
By the way, that's why these men were ardent pacifists.
And one of the reasons why the Civil War had
such an impact in separating our movement
was because many of these guys down in the
south were preaching,
stay out of the war, and many of the preachers
in the north were saying,
let's enter it.
And there were hard feelings that were never
really completely resolved.
But we had a strong stream of premillennialism
and pacifism in the Churches of Christ.
It was so strong in 1917, the state of
Tennessee threatened to arrest the editors of
the Gospel Advocate
because they were publishing so many articles
on pacifism during World War I
that they were considered treasonous.
Same thing, Coral University in Oklahoma in 1917,
the state of Oklahoma threatened to arrest the
Bible faculty
because they were encouraging young men to not
enlist in the army and get involved in the war
because we have nothing to do with the kingdoms
of men.
We're apart of the kingdom of God.
And that faculty eventually wound up in Searcy
and became Harding University.
James A. Harding, National Bible School, was an
ardent premillennialist.
He was so strong that you don't get involved in
the kingdoms of men and menliness.
That's why he didn't believe in located preachers.
That's why he didn't believe in a missionary society.
You don't come up with any imagination of men
to do the work of God.
Now his son-in-law, James N. Armstrong, was not
a premillennialist.
He was all-millennial.
But he was sympathetic to these guys.
And here's what happened.
Like I said, in the early days of our movement,
there was room for diversity.
R. H. Bowe was the front-page editor of the
Gospel Advocate in the early years of last century.
He would publish passionate defenses of
premillennialism in the Gospel Advocate.
Now people would write him and say,
I disagree strongly with that and they'd have exchanges,
but nobody said you weren't brother.
And something happened.
1930, and Richard Hughes in some of his books
has done great work here.
In 1930, when Foy Wallace Jr. became editor of
the Gospel Advocate,
he made it one of his agendas to drive
premillennialism out of churches of Christ.
Now in the early days, he would call you
brother, but he would strongly disagree with you.
But by 1934, Foy Wallace Jr. was printing, if
you are premillennial, we can't call you brother.
He and his men began to demand that Armstrong
at Hardin University reject R. H. Bowe.
They called them Boweites and Bolsheviks.
And Armstrong wouldn't do it, partly because of
his loyalty to his father-in-law.
He would say, I don't hold that view, but I
will not disfellowship or refuse to associate
with men who do.
By 1938, Wallace came up and began to publish
the idea of the second degree of separation,
where he argued, I can't fellowship you if you
hold premillennialism,
and I can't fellowship you if you don't, but
you fellowship somebody who does.
And these wars became ugly.
And it became a way to not just deal with this
question, but with many questions.
And I think it was one of the darkest times of
our history.
And we are today still reaping the fruit of
this kind of bitterness.
Well, Wallace was successful.
Within about a decade or two, premillennialism
was almost completely eradicated from our movement,
with the exception of some churches in
Louisiana and in Kentucky.
There are still today about a hundred churches
of Christ in those two states that are premillennial,
but they're almost all gone now.
And so he won the war, but I'm not sure, take
it back, he won the battle.
I'm not sure he won the war.
To me, those stories are very sad.
And so you heard me say earlier, I'll state my
ground, I won't let it be fighting ground.
You think that the greatest scholars of the
days of Jesus
saw all the prophecies about the first coming
of Jesus and still misunderstood it.
Now if the greatest scholars of his day
misunderstood the prophecies about the first coming,
is it possible, as smart as we are, we may have
misunderstood a few prophecies about the second coming?
It would seem to me humility is in order.
And then finally, let me go back to what I said
at the start.
He who reigns is not as important as does he
reign now.
The message of Revelation is Christ wins.
Back in 1994, the 50th anniversary of D-Day,
they did a documentary.
And I remember they interviewed two men who
were part of the D-Day.
One was on the sea and one was in the air.
And it was interesting, the guy on the ground
said, from what I saw, it looked like there was
no way we could win.
But the guy up in the plane interviewed said,
from what I saw, I knew there was no way we
could lose.
Now, down on this evil world in the days of
Noah, it looks bad.
But Revelation and the New Testament says, look
at it from God's point of view.
And when you look at it from the heavenlies,
there's no way we're going to lose.
We know the end of the score. We know the final
score. We know the end of the game.
So we don't have to get so upset.
Here's what I know. How it happens, I'm going
to leave it up to God.
And I think God is allowed to have a few surprises.
But this is going to happen someday.
Every knee is going to bow.
And every tongue is going to confess that Jesus
is Lord.
And every atom and molecule in the universe is
going to be reconciled under His headship.
The question the New Testament writers keep
asking is, is He reigning in your life right now?
That's what we need to preach.
Thank you for your time. I'll see you tomorrow.