All right, let's go for the Word of Prayer. Lord, we thank you for your Word. We ask that in this difficult subject that we'd be faithful to discern it properly. We realize that so much of Scripture is prophetic at the time it was written, so it's something that you would have us to spend some time in and evaluate and to understand more deeply what you have planned for us in the future, even though some of these things are hidden, and we won't know them until the time there's something here for us. And we ask that you would open it to us clearly. We ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. So, I had something that I wanted to talk about, about the early church fathers and that they were pre-millennial. And as I started to face wanting to present that data, I realized that maybe nobody even knows what pre-millennial means and doesn't know the other alternatives of post-millennial and amillennial positions. And, you know, not criticizing my father, but he just taught what he taught. And I kind of am more like, I'll tell you what the other positions are. And because I think in this age of media and things that we're facing a lot of people being able to, in your face, right, on a, a reel or some social media presentation all of a sudden be saying, you know, why premillennialism isn't right and amillennialism is right or why amillennialism isn't right but postmillennialism is right. And so I think given the time we're in, we probably ought to know about these other positions and why we hold, we don't, we're not, we didn't just go eeny, meeny, miny, moe and pick a position and hold it. that we believe from Scripture that it is the most secure. I've probably said this to several people, maybe even here, but I think of We don't know everything, right? So I think of it as a big jigsaw puzzle set out on the table. And if it was easy, we might read it once and put it away, like your lawnmower manual. Maybe you don't even read it once. Once you read it, you got the basics, and you don't need to look at it, think about it, pray about it. There's some complexity there and some unknown things that cause us to keep going back and looking and studying more deeply. But the premillennial pre-trip position, I believe, I'm just arbitrarily picking a number, fits 85% of the puzzle pieces. there's some scriptures that I'm struggling with, right? That are a puzzle piece that I'm not able to put in, okay? But when I think about reinterpreting scripture to fit one puzzle piece in, I lose 10 others, okay? And this is the struggle that I find, is that I believe that the premillennial position is a wonderful way to get most of the puzzle put together. And as soon as I think of, OK, well, what if I took this position? Well, then I lose the understanding of this passage, and I lose the understanding of this passage. And so I lose a lot more than I gain when I take a different position. But anyway, that's just a way to think about it. All right. Quick review. Who can tell me what the premillennial position is? Or what is millennialism? And then what is putting that prefix mean? So first, what is just millennialism? Or what is the millennial position? A thousand-year reign on Earth. What is the premillennial position? What is the pre-indicating? Christ's return. It's in the premillennial position. It's the pre is what is happening, everything but awe. The pre and the post has to do with the Christ's return, the timing of it, okay? So when you say you're premillennial, you mean I believe in a millennium, but Christ comes at the beginning of it. If you're postmillennial, what does it mean? Christ comes at the end of it, okay? Now, these are obviously very wide-based things, and there's a lot of nuance in these positions. Now, amillennial doesn't really tell you, it just means there is no, but it doesn't mean that they don't believe that there is a return of Christ, so that one sort of falls outside of the scope. Amillennial is, we're kind of rejecting the idea of millennium altogether, okay? And they usually come up with a post-millennial, Since we've defined the millennium as 1,000 years, because it's millennium, they would say, no, we believe it's a realized millennium, the amillennium, meaning we've kind of been in it since Christ, and there isn't really what you think of when you read Revelation 20 in the millennium. It's just we're going to go until Christ returned. We're currently in it. a post-millennialist, he doesn't really know when it's going to start. He believes that it's getting better and better and better until an ultimate culmination Of where we can start to say everything's so great. It it really reads like the millennium passages of scripture like almost like the That the lion will the environment will get better. The lion will lay down with the lamb. There will be no war and and and so all of a sudden we get to the point and say that we must be in it now because it is reading like maybe it's starting to fill the passages of the millennium and then christ can come back So let me just read a summary. Pre-millennialism holds that Christ will return before a literal thousand-year reign of peace and righteousness on earth known as the Millennium, which is often associated with a future tribulation period preceding its reign. So yes, I'm not discussing the tribulation. I'm not discussing the rapture. All we're discussing is this thing called the Millennium thousand-year reign. How do we define it? Okay. means literally no millennium, teaches that the millennium is not a literal thousand-year period, but symbolically represents the entire era between Christ's first and second comings. So it's just a vague sort of time period from His first coming to His second coming. Amillennialists believe the kingdom of God is currently spiritual and invisible, existing in the present age, and that the final judgment and resurrection will occur at Christ's return at the end, While they acknowledge the triumph of God's kingdom, they often expect a period of increasing evil and apostasy just before Christ's return. So they don't have things getting better until His return. It's kind of a cyclical, we're in it, it's mostly spiritual, not earthly, so they're not looking and saying, they're not looking at saying things like, Health life spans are getting longer. Therefore things are getting better Technology is getting better and we can travel faster. So in airplanes and go where we want. So there's evidence of the Millennium They're not saying that kind of thing. They they are focused on a spiritual spiritualized allegorical understanding of the Millennium meaning the more Christians there are then there's more of a influence of Christ on earth, but still there's places that there isn't, and it's not really going to culminate in anything high, and even this says that there could be great apostasy at the end, which is more what we would see just because of the tribulation and things. Postmillennialism teaches that Christ will return after the millennium, which is viewed as a period of widespread Christianization and a triumph of God's kingdom on earth, leading to a golden age of peace and righteousness. This view is optimistic, expecting the gospel to progressively advance and transform society before Christ returns. So that's the upward slope all the way to Christ's return. We're mostly in charge meeting Christians to bring that into, okay. So those are the positions. What my intent was last time I was here was to get to, hey, we've got all these weird positions, where did they all come from? How did that come about? That would be a long study about the origin and that he came up with a spiritualizing way of looking at scripture where you don't really look at it literally. Then Augustine picked it up, wrote it into his book, The City of God, I think. And then at the Council of Nicaea, as the church is now we're talking like 325 AD, they sort of sat down and they solved some important things, but they also made some decisions that this It was kind of anti-Jewish because the Catholic church was really starting to say, hey, we're the people of God. We're superseding the Jews. So when it says Jews, it must mean us, the church. And so all of a sudden, this weird way of not taking scriptural literally and to start to write the people of God as the church into the Old Testament. And then once that happened, then it was just a real spiritualizing of everything. What I want to do just to start with is I just was shocked to find out, because I was taught premillennialism. Then all of a sudden, when somebody says, well, there's these other positions, why do you hold premillennialism? I'm like, I don't know. It's literal. But I don't know why you hold what you hold. So then you study a lot, and you start to. see how they got where they got and you start to figure out why you are where you are and it really has to do all the way back to like what is your when you read scripture are you deciding that you can spiritualize it or are you bound by a very literal as much as you can stay literal okay if it sounds literal i gotta take it literal okay and that's the way you get to a premillennial position is you don't have the freedom to say what I'm going to read of other people saying. you'll see how if you've been in our church, and a lot of churches that are premillennial, when we read scripture, we're trying to figure out what it says, and we're trying to make it fit with other passages, and we're looking at history, and we're looking at the grammar, and what words were they using, and what did that mean to them at the time? It's almost like an originalist view of the Constitution versus a progressive view of the U.S. Constitution. It's what do we want it to say? and it's an evolutionary, it's an evolving document, would be a progressive way, i.e. spiritualizing way of looking at our Constitution, or a historical way, which is what did the founders mean when they wrote this, and we kind of got, we need to stick with that. There is a way to change this Constitution, and a procedure to do it, so if we don't like what it says, we have to go through the work to change it, not just say, well, We think it really didn't mean that at the time, and we're just gonna interpret it differently. It's an evolutionary document, or a living document was the word that they used for a number of years. And Scalia and those guys were pretty good at, so Scalia in particular would speak about, no, the Constitution is meaningless if we can do whatever we want to it. It's a document that we're bound to. So I was told that the early church was amillennial, Wait a minute, when I read, I don't get an amillennial position. So doing a little research, I found this book that the early early church before three, what they're doing is they're saying past 325, it became amillennial. Well, wait a minute now, you're playing with 200 years there that the early church fathers said things that were clearly premillennial. So what we would hear if we were looking for statements that sounded premillennial, we would hear earthly, we would hear thousand years, and we would hear Christ returns at the beginning of it to establish it. That's the crux of the definition of why we hold what we hold. This was a wonderful quote. Dr. Phyllis Schaff, a leading expert on church history who served as Dean of American Church Historians, although Staff Schaff was not a premillennialist, but instead a postmillennialist, he offered the following summary concerning the majority eschatological view, so eschatological is the view of eschatology, of the anti-Nicene fathers, so the pre-Nicene council fathers. So here's a guy who doesn't agree with it, but here's what he says. The most striking point in the eschatology of the anti-Nicene age, so before 325, after the completion of the canon, so 90 AD to 325, is the prominent premillennialism, or millennial, well, let me skip that word. That just means the same thing, millennialism. That is the belief of a visible reign of Christ in glory on earth with the risen saints for 1,000 years, before the general resurrection and before the final judgment. It was indeed not the doctrine of the church embodied in any creed, form of devotion but a widely held current opinion of Distinguished teachers. So if everyone agrees with something usually they don't work up a doctrine about it. You know what I mean? It's like if we all There are certain things that You're just understood and so nobody's this decides to write it down and really define it. But when there became a Opposing view right like we're gonna spiritualize this stuff, right? It's like wait a minute Well, we need to say why we don't and all sudden we begin to talk about it as pre-millennial We give a name to it. There wasn't a name. There wasn't a doctrine because everyone just accepted. All right Here's a few of the people. I'm not gonna read their biography. I'm just gonna read what they said This is Papias who lived 70 AD to 155. He was the bishop of Hierapolis According to Poppius, quote, boom! Clearly he did not believe in amillennialism or postmillennialism. 120 A.D. to 202 A.D., a student of Polycarp. Arrhenius declared, quote, "'When this Antichrist shall have devastated all things in this world, he will reign for three years and six months and sit in the temple at Jerusalem, and then the Lord will come from heaven in the clouds in the glory of the Father, bringing in for the righteous, the times of the kingdom, the millennium." Okay, so Christ returns and brings his earthly kingdom. Hippolytus, a student of Arrhenius, 170 AD to 236. This is in his book, Refutation of All Heresies. The point is not that they have all their doctrine right. The point is that they had a premillennial view, an earthly Christ's return before a thousand years. The Sabbath is the type and emblem of the future kingdom, the millennium or Sabbath rest as it was called then. What he actually wrote is, the Sabbath is the type and emblem of the future kingdom of the saints when they shall reign with Christ when he comes from heaven. Okay, so an earthly reign, he's coming from heaven, earthly reign, okay. Tertullian, 150 to 240, founder of Latin Christianity. Tertullian known for coining the term Trinity, first one to have that word coined. We do confess that a kingdom is promised to us upon the earth. Dot, dot, dot, so there's some other words there. Inasmuch as it will be after the resurrection for a thousand years. Boom. Victorinus of Petua died 303, around 303 or 304, we don't know when he was born, theologian. He remarked, therefore, as I have narrated, that true Sabbath will be in the seventh millennia of years when Christ with his elect shall reign. So there was a notion that that it was broken down into the whole time of history was broken into 7,000 years and the last thousand was going to be Christ. Don't think that that's in scripture, but they kind of believe that. So anyway, they thought that, that it worked well with the idea of man is being six, six, six, six. So six, 6,000 years is the time of man. And then Christ the number of perfection completes. I don't agree with that, but he does believe that Christ is gonna return. All right, and the last one that was here is Lactantus, 250 to 325, so died in the year of the, he should have been there at the Nicene Council. When the thousand years shall be completed, the world shall be renewed by God and the heavens shall be folded together. Okay, so this is something he wrote. So all of these are alluding to a true thousand years. That's hard to get away from, from Revelation 20, that there isn't a thousand years when it says it six times in that passage. Okay, so I'm ending what I started just to give you some data on The early church, without doctrine, just accepted the basic reading of Revelation that Christ would return, set up His kingdom, reign for 1,000 years, and then we would go into the new heavens and new earth or the eternal state. It is not true that the early church fathers were something other than premillennial. Now, that doesn't mean that every single one was. There's all kinds of positions. There's people that think Christ has already returned, preterists. There's things there's people think we are in the new heavens in the new earth new earth right now So what we're what we're presenting is the three major positions, which is pre-millennial all-millennial post-millennial Okay now to scripture I want to go over Just so you can get your little psyches jarred And I'm gonna prove my point about Okay, Revelation 20, you will have had a lot of time thinking the way I think, because you've been under the teaching of my father, and a lot of the people that we listen to, about trying to, we don't play with scripture and try to say that there's some spiritual fulfillment. We take it very literally, and we think that way. And when you stop thinking that way, you can move into these other ways of, so, It's like having two different pairs of glasses on. When you discuss with somebody who believes in amillennial, postmillennial, since they are spiritualizing, and you're not, they just don't see it the way you see it, and you can't see it the way they see it, because they're using a paradigm that is a different colored glass. Does that make any sense? There's a different hue to it because they're looking differently at it. Okay, so let's just review something very interesting that we're trying to look at this as literally as we can. Revelation 20, one through three. Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven holding the key of the abyss and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold of the dragon, the serpent of old, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years. And he threw him into the abyss and shut it and sealed it over him so that he would not deceive the nations any longer until the thousand years were completed. After these things, he must be released for a short time." Then flip over to 7. When the thousand years were completed, Satan will be released from his prison and he will come out to deceive the nations which are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together for the war. The number of them is like the sand of the seashore. up on the broad plain of the earth, surrounded the camp of the saints in the beloved city, and fire came down from heaven and devoured them. And the devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophets are also, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever." This is a post-millennialist kind of, there may be more modern works, but this is a definitive work from a post-millennialist, okay? named Lorraine Bettner, he wrote it before the World War II. I think you're just gonna be like, what? Here we go. The binding of Satan, described in Revelation 20, verses one through three, we now perceive to be not a sudden event, but a very long, slow process. It has been in process of accomplishment for more than 19 centuries, and much progress has been made, but no time limit can be set as to how much longer the process may have to be continued before it is crowned with success, nor how long the era of righteousness will prevail over the earth before the Lord returns. So you can see that he believes it's appropriate somehow He believes it's appropriate to change scripture that much. Like, we just don't feel like, like when I read, just to read that, it almost feels blasphemous. Like, when I read scripture, I feel like I'm constrained by the words, right? Now, when I read that he's a, I see an angel with a chain in his hand and a, right, to bind Satan. I know Satan is a, He's a spiritual being, right? He's not a physical being. So I'm not saying that there's a type of special steel that binds demonic creatures, okay? I think... Isn't he a physical, I mean, you can't say they're a physical being, they have to be a spirit? Well, he can manifest, right, and he can indwell. He's a physical being, but he's got a new glorified body. Correct, correct. What I'm saying is that if he was in the room, you couldn't grab onto him. Okay, but I think we're talking about meeting Satan. I think what I'm saying is is that when I read scripture, I can see the parts that are kind of trying to let me know something of imagery, because he's seeing a vision, he's seeing an image. So it's communicating to John with imagery in a spiritual realm. But what we can clearly see is that he's taken out of commission and locked in something called an abyss. It's sealed over so he can't get out. Where does he get the authority to progressively over 1,900 years? It doesn't even make sense. You're either in prison or you're out of prison. There isn't a way to even understand it spiritually that way. Yeah, kind of. I mean, that would be a modern way of seeing his binding. prison doesn't happen slowly. Right, that's a violent act, and then slammed, and then sealed. And what is the vision trying to communicate? That while Christ is reigning for 1,000 years, Satan is not deceiving the nations any longer, and he's put into a place where he is unable to escape, and unable to carry on his activities that he was able to carry on before. Something's changed. Okay, he's somehow his hermeneutic of spiritualizing allows him to And here's here's one of the problems. We're all a little bit guilty of it. But one of the problems is I think he starts with a notion And forces scripture into it so if you have if you have a post-millennial view and there's no place to have It fit the way it's described that we just read, you have to spiritualize it. You can't do anything else, because if you take it literally, your position of post-millennialism doesn't work. OK? All right. Did this guy write a commentary on any other part of the Bible? Oh, yeah. He goes through all of this. I mean, he goes through many. Can you look at his background? So your dad wasn't the same when he would look is so certain to see where he was going to be. Right. Well, some verse, I can't, I don't remember. Yeah, I don't remember which one it was either. He always had, somebody turns you on a commentary and see what they interpreted. You know, it's a commentary that we're going to comment on. It's even going to waste time. Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't remember what Dad's was. Maybe Scott has that. And he's said it many times over the years. About eschatology, he would, there was a certain, just in general. On a commentary. Okay, he would go to a certain passage and see what their position was and know whether he wanted to pursue that further or not. It was like a litmus test, so to speak, for whether he was going to use this guy further. It was a simple way without reading the whole book, basically. I do remember him saying that several times. I remember that too, but I don't remember. Unfortunately, we don't know. You know, maybe you could look up Genesis 6 real quick and see, well, what do they think about the angels in Genesis 6? Right. That might let you know. I'm sure it's in the 1700 hours on Sermon Audio. It's probably. Yeah, it might. 19 years ago. Yeah, for sure. Oh, multiple times. Yeah. But I did, I was reading something a while, not too long ago, and oh, let's see. whole thing, they're taking eschatology in a non-literal sense, looking at the same verse, but they're seeing something completely different. But somebody read, I don't know if it was Feinberg or who, but if they took that same non-literal approach and applied it to redemption and made it to Doctrines, they'd completely fall apart. Horrible. Or the First Advent? Yeah, any of those things. They can't They take this non-literal, but they're going very literal on those other ones, or else they would have nothing. They call it apocalyptic literature. It's not really scripture, it's a different category. And it is because it's prophetic and it is apocalyptic and we are looking at it through the eyes of John as he's seeing it and he's trying to communicate things that he's seeing that He's describing it the best he can right and there's a lot of confusing things, right Right, right and And there are times when Scripture necessitates a spiritualizing, because it is a spiritual concept, okay? I think the way to say it that I've seen, the most kitschy way to say it is, we seek the literal sense. That's it, that's it. Yeah, if the literal makes sense seek no other sense unless you fall into nonsense is the final So it's it's an attempt to start it literal first Okay. Now we just read about so so that was the binding. That's his that was his opinion on the binding What about the releasing of him at the end of 1,000 years, because now he's got a problem. If it's a slow roll binding for 1,900 years, then what are you going to do with this releasing and this rebellion, right? That's going to be hard to explain. Well, here it is. Furthermore, after we have been shown in the Revelation 1911 through 21, which is Christ's return, how complete is Christ's victory, and how thoroughly crushed are all his foes, we cannot believe that at the end, God, as the sovereign ruler of the world, will suddenly and purposefully throw away that victory and permit the devil a worldwide triumph, even for the briefest time. Once the hard-fought battle is over and such a magnificent victory won, we may be sure that it will be properly safeguarded and that the devil will never again be allowed to rise as a serious contender against God." I read that. I wrote in the side, Here's the summary, we cannot believe. That's what he said, we cannot believe. So he's basically saying I can't believe scripture. My understanding of what I think God's gonna do overrides what's written. Like, I've said from the pulpit as I, why does Satan have to be released, right, at the end of, Satan must re-release for a short time. What's Revelations 3? Is it the verse 3? 20 verse 3. What do I say? Why? Can't we just leave him? Well, he's saying not only can't we just leave him, we have to leave him because God has, he has no other choice. I'm like, Are we telling God what the end's gonna be, or is he telling us what the end's gonna be? Like, it's just blasphemy to say he would never give up the victory. Well, I don't see him giving up the victory. Let's figure out why he has to release Satan, and fire comes out of heaven and destroys them all. It's not like it, I don't know. That's just an example of when you don't take it literally, and you're not trying to figure out exactly what's being taught, that kind of the guardrails are off. All right, now, if you hold a amillennial or a postmillennial position, you really, if you think about it, you have really no intermediate kingdom at all. You kind of have the church age, Christ return, eternal state. So you have no place for what we would call, Dad never called it this, but an intermediate state. So what do we mean by an intermediate state? Once Christ returns, it's his kingdom. It's the beginning of his kingdom, right? But we know from Scripture, or at least we premillennialists read Scripture and say, there is a difference from what we read in Scripture between his millennial reign and then after the judgment, what happens in the eternal state, right? So he has kind of two different reigns. One, here on earth, with nations from Jerusalem, with Israel, and then we have the further, the continuation, right, into eternity of the eternal state, okay? So if you hold an amillennial position or a postmillennial, then it's kind of now and then eternal state. Christ returns, judgment, eternal state. So you never have a time when you have a blessed fulfillment on earth, but not perfection. Is that the best way for me to say it? Because we find in the millennial state some talk of sin, right? The postmillennialists and the amillennialists do not know what to do with anything that is Christ ruling and reigning, yet not perfection, clearly. Okay. Isaiah 2, 2-4. These are hard subjects. If anybody has a question that pops, please feel free to throw it at me, because I don't know how well I'm communicating this without like a two-year study. Isaiah 2, 2-4, now it will come about that in the last days the mountain of the house of the Lord will be established as the chief of the mountains, and it will be raised above the hills, and all the nations will stream to it. And many peoples will come and say, Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us concerning his ways, and that we may walk in his paths. For the law will go forth from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He will judge between nations and will render decisions for many peoples, and they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, and never again will they learn war." Okay, so what do we got here? What sounds like, well, here's what we got. Christ is there, okay, so he's on earth, ruling from Jerusalem, right? One thing, what you can do is you read this and say, does it sound like this has ever happened before? That the law is going forth from Jerusalem, two nations, and that the one deciding and judging, The nations is doing it from Jerusalem. That's never happened before, right? Nations have to come to get adjudicated from one chief king. Well, that fits perfectly with the millennial reign of Christ, okay? We're not in the eternal state of sinless perfection. We're not in the state of no more crying, no more tears. We're still having judgment happen, okay? So if there's judgment, that's judging between right and wrong, right? He will render decisions for many peoples. This is, it cannot be their eternal state of perfection. There's still some, there's sin going on here. And they will hammer their swords into plowshares. Well, that sounds really good. There is not war, we can say that. There's not war, I would say until the final release of Satan and there's this brief rebellion, which I don't, I think that they didn't learn war. This is an idea of training for a military training. Like they didn't have an army set up that they constantly trained for war in. Okay. Nation will not lift up sword against nation. It's a very peaceful time for a, for a thousand years. Okay. Here's why we, as premillennialists say, there's an intermediate earthly reign of Christ that isn't perfection, but it's really good. It's a blessing on the world. It's peace. People aren't dying in a war. God is ruling and reigning in a way that is sufficient to bring about that peace, even though there's still things going on in the world. There's still sin and still rebellion that's kept, but he's ruling with a rod of iron. The whole notion of ruling with a rod of iron necessitates an intermediate kingdom. So if Christ has to rule with a rod of iron, that means that he is ruling a people that need iron to keep them in check. We would never say Christ is gonna rule with a rod of iron in an eternal state, a sinless state. That would make no sense, okay? What would you need nations for? Yeah, an eternal state. Now, he may still use nations, possibly, I don't know, but you would. You're not even married. That's a good point. Why would you have a nation? It's certainly possible. There is not a lot said about the eternal state, right? So to definitively say this is the way God's going to do it, I remember my great-grandfather saying, I think the Lord's going to populate the universe in the eternal state. That's an interesting thought. He's got all this space and eternity, right? I don't know. I never talked to him about it. That's something Dad told me. Micah 4, 1 through 3. And it will come about, this is very similar, whole different prophet, very similar to what we just read. And it will come about in the last days that the mountain of the house of the Lord will be established as the chief of the mountains, and it will be raised above the hills. and the peoples will stream to it. Many nations will come and say, come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord. Has that happened in history, that nations want to go to Jerusalem to see, quote, the mountain of the Lord? Come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us about his ways, that we may walk in his paths. For from Zion will go forth the law, even the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, and He will judge between many peoples and render decisions for mighty and distant nations, and they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nations will not lift up sword against nation, and never again will they train for war. Each of them will sit under his vine and under his fig tree, with no one to make them afraid, for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken." So again, judging, right? Some rebellion, but in general, people know who's in charge, go to Jerusalem to seek his ways. They wanna be there, close to the king, okay? But there's nations far away that are not making war, but they're getting judged somehow. He's gotta make some decisions and some adjudication. So we would say, what a perfect explanation for a millennial reign, an earthly reign of Christ here in time, okay? Now, how does a non-millennialist deal with these passages? He says that these have already been fulfilled in the person and the work of Jesus Christ, and therefore that the conditions they describe are a present reality. When I hear that he's ruling from Jerusalem and you have to go there, I think of it as being represented as actual place. Well, how can that be now? Well, it can only be now if you spiritualize it, you change the words into something that we would say is not, right? what is the spiritual meaning of they beat their swords into plowshares and they train for war no longer? Is that just only Christians don't train? I mean, I don't know what you do when you just say, hey guys, it's fulfilled in Christ, leave it alone. It's like, well, Yes, the peace that is going to come is fulfilled in Christ, and Christ is going to be the one ruling, and He's the one that effected it and made it happen, but it wasn't in some mystical sense, right? He literally came and had Armageddon and put every nation under His authority, and then He could rule from Jerusalem. So we're looking at it and looking at it very literally. They're not bound by the literal. for some reason. I don't know why. I don't know why they feel comfortable, other than that there's a historical, once a few people start doing it, there's a historical precedent for it, and, anyway. Isaiah 11, one through nine. See, this is one of those places where I think my metaphor of a puzzle that put together, like I can do something with these passages. I know where to put them, right? The Millennium is a perfect place to put these passages. Things are great, Christ is ruling from Jerusalem. But there's some rebellion, so we're not in the eternal state. Wow, that puzzle piece goes right smack in the millennium reign of Christ. Doesn't say millennium, doesn't say 1,000 years. But boy, that fits well there. It doesn't fit well here in time now. I can see no way of fitting it in the church age. I can see no way of fitting it in the eternal state, because there's sin and rebellion. Has to be in some intermediate kingdom. If I say, a millennialist is correct, man, I'm losing pieces all over the place. I don't know what the millennium means, and I lose all of, of Revelation 20. It just becomes weird. I have to say things like he says that happens over 1,900 years, and God would never do that. I'm just losing peace. The table's falling apart, right? I mean, the puzzle's falling apart if I can't have a millennial reign. Okay, Isaiah 11, 1 through 9. Then a shoot will spring from the stem of Jesse, a branch from the roots will bear fruit, the Spirit of the Lord will rest on him in the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and strength, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. And he will delight in the fear of the Lord, and he will not judge by what his eye sees, nor make a decision by what his ears hear, but with righteousness he will judge the poor and decide with fairness for the afflicted of the earth. And he will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, So I think as we're reading, we can see, okay, here's a beautiful picture of Christ, who He is, okay, and that He's now in a judgment phase. He came the first time and said, I'm not here to judge. So this is a different, I don't think this is fulfilled in his first advent. He's a judging person now, a judging God on earth. It says earth, okay, has righteousness about his belt, faithfulness about his ways. Okay, and then it starts, okay, so now we're talking about kind of what is it like during this time that he is in this judgment phase? And the wolf will dwell with the lamb. Well, that doesn't happen nowadays. We got to have guard dogs to keep the wolf away. The leopard will lie down with the young goat and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together. And a little boy will lead them. Well, you wouldn't ever let a little boy lead the leopard, right? So something clearly has changed in the environment at this time when he is judging on earth. So we would say, wow, that sounds like he's made a few things different and new in his millennial reign, his intermediate kingdom on earth. Fits well there. Also the cow and the bear will graze, and their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child will put his hand on the viper's den. They will not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." Amazing. Could it be now? No. Could it be the eternal state? Well, why is he needing to judge with a rod of his mouth? Could it be this beautiful time where there is still sin on earth and rebellion, as evidenced by the release of Satan and a lot of people that are really mad at having to be under Christ's rule? In this time, we call the intermediate, well, current theologians call it the intermediate state before his final kingdom and eternal rule in the eternal state. That's a great place to put that, right? He's definitely done something with the environment where he's put the animals, so we call this making, Dad would say he's made a perfect environment. He's fixed the environment. He's put the animals back to before the fall, before the flood, when no meat eaters, everything ate vegetables. He's put it back to that state and taken away any of this killing and things. And obviously, there's no fear of man and the animals anymore, which is the way it was before the flood. Because after the flood, he said, I got to put the fear of man and the animals so that you're not devoured by the animals. When we see a bear, he just doesn't immediately say, food, and run for us, unless he's been acclimatized over a lot of time to not fear people. But his initial reaction is fear of people. And all these animals are until, You know, we can acclimatize them and overcome that. But instinctively, God has the animals pretty much not. You don't just walk up to if I'm in the woods and there's a wild squirrel, he's not coming to eat out of my hand. They only eat out of your hand when you've trained them. And I don't know if you've ever tried to do that before, but they're pretty skittish. But anyway. So something has been fixed in the environment. So we get more indication of what the millennium will be like, is that the environment is repaired. There's more passages that are perfectly fit in the understanding of a millennial kingdom. Giving us bits and pieces. Revelation 20 giving us the timeframe, which we didn't have before, right? We didn't have that it'll be a thousand years. It'll start here and it'll end here. We get that in Revelation. And we, I mean, to me, I really read Revelation 20 and my eyes are opened to, oh, Now I have a category to fit all these pieces in that can't really fit anywhere else, right? A real focus on Jerusalem, a real focus on Christ ruling and reigning, still rebellion, but a lot of wonderful things. No war, a perfect judge, right? A righteous judge, not corruption. So that's why I'm a pre-millennialist, right? It's literal, it fits great with Scripture, and I don't believe that we're allowed, where it clearly can be interpreted literally, that we're allowed to just not interpret it literally, right? We're bound by that. We call them guardrails, right? They guide our investigation. It's the best I can do on that. Why I'm a pre-Millenniumist. I think scripture teaches it and the spiritualizing view clouds scripture and gives me too much leeway to just make it be whatever I want. Last thing to be said, something Dad said a lot was, if we can spiritualize away promises and things, what is our assurance that these promises of our salvation couldn't be spiritualized away? That's mostly dealing with fulfillment for Israel, that he promised over and over and over again, and then The amillennial and the postmillennial position holds those promises to Israel as being really voided and given to the church in most cases. If He can do that to them, what is our assurance that He wouldn't just do that when we're rebellious? All right. Our Father, we just thank You for Your Word. These are difficult subjects, but we pray that we'd be true to it and faithful to what You were communicating, to the original intent and context and grammar. understanding of these words at the time. Yes, they are complex and keep us looking, but We will look forward to your return, and that thousand-year reign, and then the eternal kingdom where everything will be no more crying, no more tears, and everything will be made right. We yearn for that, Lord, so much corruption in the world, and sin, and destruction, and we really pray for that. Come, Lord Jesus, quickly, right? Our Father, we thank You for these things, in Jesus' name, Amen.