Because it's an introduction, I'm going to be doing more lecturing today. It's very hard to have an introduction where we're discussing things that you don't know what we were going to talk about. But hopefully in the coming weeks, there'll be more interaction around eschatology. I'd very much like to know what your concerns, questions, thoughts, ideas are, so that we can all work together toward conforming our thinking to the Word of God. We're going to talk about the already and not yet of biblical eschatology today. The not yet is you're wearing coats for worship and it doesn't explicitly tell us in the Bible but I am fairly confident that in the new heavens and the new earth you will not be this cold during worship. The already is, I believe, that people in Eritrea would think that we've arrived at post-millennialism if they could worship with us this morning, because it is much better here in the cold than it is in Eritrea with the persecution. Okay, I think everyone's had an opportunity to get a handout almost. If we could keep searching, oh, Bill's busily putting it. Bill, you might need to get some help. I'm going to go ahead and start because we're already running quite a bit behind today. I want to begin with a simple thing that I want you to keep coming back to over and over again, and that is biblical eschatology is about hope. It is about hope. That's the one word you need to keep in mind. The purpose of biblical eschatology is not that the Lord would give us charts so we would know all these details about the future that our unbelieving friends don't know. The reason why he tells us about the future is because he wants us to understand what he's doing so that it would encourage us in the present. And by encourage, I mean that literally, give us courage and give us hope so that as we're going through various struggles in life, which we certainly will have, we understand that there are better days ahead for us as God's people. The word eschatology literally means the study of last things. Now, in popular discussions, and I'm talking about this in the Christian church, when people say eschatology, they think very quickly to the rapture of the church, a whole bunch of stuff that's supposedly going to happen around that time, often really, really bad. You don't want to be there, it's going to scare you. maybe a little bit about the second coming, and then in various schemes, some sort of golden age that's going to take place after the second coming. And often in popular works, there's a great deal of effort to connect the Bible to the newspaper. And so what happens is, is when you identify the Antichrist, depending on what century you're in, it moves around, but the idea that you can draw those connections remains the same. It might be Saddam Hussein. It might be Gorbachev, who had a very unfortunate birthmark that really played into this for the Bible prophecy guys. It may be Putin and so on. I'm just waiting for someone to come out with a book on this where all the characters are like in some part of India with names that none of us in America can pronounce. Because interestingly, when this stuff is generated here, all those end times connections connect and make America really important. Now this may surprise you, but the United States of America is not in the Bible. I hope that doesn't disappoint any of you. So naturally, we're going to talk about the rapture and events around Christ's second coming because the rapture's in the Bible. We're going to talk about the millennium because the millennium is in the Bible. But the rapture is mentioned once, and the millennium is mentioned once. They are not central to God's biblical eschatology. And you're going to find that we put them in the broader structure of what God is teaching us in his word. that they actually take on a very different context than you probably have heard in popular literature or on the radio. So as I say, fundamentally, eschatology is about hope, or as Cornelius Venema puts it, it is the promise of the future. Now hope has always been central to the Christian life. I say Christian, but I mean the people of God throughout all the ages. From the very moment of creation, as soon as we get past man falling into sin, God gives a promise. Man's rebellious no against God will not have the final word, but it is going to be swallowed up in God's yes and amen in Jesus Christ. So right there in Genesis 3, we are told by God, by the way, this is called the first announcement of the gospel. I'm gonna ask you a question here. Who is the gospel first told to? Anybody? Adam and Eve is a guess. Anyone else have a different guess? Who is the gospel first told to? Satan. It's told in front of Adam and Eve, but it's told to Satan. It's God's word to Satan that the seed of the woman will crush the seed of the serpent. And that he, that seed, will crush Satan's head, right? It turns out that's not really good news for Satan, but it was good news for Adam and Eve. And so from the very beginning of the time that humanity was fallen, human beings were looking forward to the coming redemption. where Satan would be defeated. Genesis 3.15, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall crush your head and you shall bruise his heel. Hope has always been the issue. It's true of all biblical eschatology, but I want you to see it doesn't begin with the book of Revelation. Hope has always been the very central part of living by faith. It is a certain hope of dramatically better days ahead for the people of God. Think about some of the major characters of the Bible and how this plays out. I mean, Abraham has promised a son. It's not simply that he's promised a son and that's important for himself personally. He's promised that through his son, one that will come from his own loins, will come the promised seed who's going to redeem the world. That is, through his own son, there's going to be a line that leads to his own redemption. And Abraham, in fact, has promised that through this seed, He will become heir of the land, which we discover is a type for the fact that he's going to become heir of the entire world. Abraham, therefore, had to live in hope. David was given the promise that his son, who came as one of his own physical descendants, would sit upon his throne forever. Or think about around Christmas, we always go back to this passage in Isaiah, that this promise from the Lord For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace, there will be no end. On the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness, from this time forth and forevermore, the zeal of the Lord of hosts will accomplish this. And when you read through the Old Testament, you can come up with a thousand other examples like this. I mean, these are some of the highlights. But you come up with a thousand examples like this where God is saying, I'm going to deliver you. I'm going to bless you. I'm going to defeat your enemies and cause my people to dwell in my presence in safety. Biblical eschatology is about hope, and it doesn't begin in our future. It began all the way back in the garden with the fall. I'd like to say a word about the importance of hope. I'm not a cultural critic, but in my judgment, the West is moving toward despair. And this isn't just my judgment, people that study these things are talking about the rise of depression in the West, the rise of suicide in the West, and particularly when you look at secularized Europe, almost a complete sense of despair about the future. So I talk about hope, but it turns out that modern Westerners are tending to hope for comfort and to be spared problems in this world, rather than hoping to do great things. And naturally, that's not gonna work. The problem is, is God didn't create us to simply escape and be comfortable. He created us to reflect his image into the world. He created us to love one another, even when that love, now in a fallen world, might be very costly. And so what is going on is people are becoming more and more comfortable, and they're becoming more and more depressed. And it turns out things that we normally think of as making lives better, affluence and better educations, actually contribute to this problem. People become more affluent, they become more aware of what's going on in the world, and they are just more aware of the fact that they don't have a hope that they can lean on and stand on. There's a French philosopher, Pascal Bruckner, wrote a little book called The Triumph of the Slippers. I actually got this book from David Koenig, our pastor up in Pilgrim. He did a presentation on this in one of our ministers' fellowship. It's a really interesting little book by a French philosopher who's quite old now. He's been working on philosophy since the 1940s. And the subtitle of his book actually tells us a great deal about what's going on in the West, particularly in France, where he lives. The subtitle is, On the Withdrawal from the World. And what Buckner points out is that for many modern Westerners, out there has become scarier, while our homes have become increasingly more comfortable. Think about that, out there, whatever out there means. It means you watch the news and you think that, well, gun violence is getting worse and we're going to get overrun by terrorists or whatever it happens to be. The economy is going to crash. That's how financial news works, by the way. They want to scare you so you can watch them, right? If you just say, probably not much happened today, no one's going to watch those shows. But it turns out people are not just scared about big things happening to them, they're increasingly scared over things like, I can't ask anyone out on a date, what if she says no? People have always dealt with that to some degree, but it's become harder and harder for young Westerners to actually broach that. And so what they're doing is withdrawing from the world, living very secluded lives with the comfort of electronic media and nice housing and air conditioning, all those things that are perfectly fine in themselves, and they're missing out on a life that is filled with meaning. And the good news of the Bible is, God has something far better for us as his people. Right now, we have already begun to know the Creator. We're growing in that knowledge of the one who made us and who loves us with an everlasting love. And we have been called into the greatest possible cause in the entire universe. We have been called to participate in God's own mission to reconcile the world to himself in Jesus Christ. See, the Christian life is filled with meaning and it's filled with hope in this meaning because God is at work in you and God is at work for you. Remember that when Jesus Christ gives the church the Great Commission, he doesn't start with what we're to do. He starts by saying, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. We are sent out in his power. And then after he gives us this mission, he says, oh, remember this, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. The Christian life is not simply one of hope, it is one of a certain hope. Because anything that you do for the Lord will never be in vain. Throughout the centuries, the Old Testament people of God looked forward in hope to the day when the Lord would fulfill all of his promises. And so for them, eschatology was almost entirely future. But that's not true for us. See, we live on this side of the cross in the empty tomb. We live on this side of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Many of the promises that were given through the Old Testament pointing forward to the coming Messiah have already, in part, begun to be fulfilled. So, you know, we like to do graphs. We're Westerners. We do everything linearly and so on. So you've got a timeline that goes along. And a lot of people, when they think about that timeline, they've got a spot here where you put a cross, you know. There's a timeline. There's the cross. There's the empty tomb. I want to encourage you to think differently. When you get to the cross, don't keep going. Go up. Right? You want that as your picture in your mind. We're not yet home. We have a great deal of promises that God is still going to fulfill for us or fulfill for us in a more rich way. But one of the things we're going to talk about in our study of eschatology is the fact that we are more privileged, more blessed than the people were before Christ rose from the dead. You are a universal priesthood of believers. Think about that for a moment. 400 BC, you want to consult with God? Well, the high priest, once a year, goes into the Holy of Holies, has access to God. And in Jesus Christ, because Christ has come and his work on the cross is finished, any moment of any day, you have immediate access to the throne room of heaven. That's not a minor difference. And God has poured out the Holy Spirit in a fuller way. I mean, the Holy Spirit was active in the Old Testament. Nobody would ever have been saved if the Holy Spirit hadn't changed their hearts, right? But of course, what we actually see in the Old Testament is most of the people were not saved. The Holy Spirit's been pulled out in a much fuller way upon us. So we talk about The blessings we have, the partially fulfilled promises of God as the already a biblical eschatology. And yet, of course, you have many things you're still looking forward to. You still weep. A day is coming when God will wipe away every tear from your eyes, right? One of the ones that's really hard for us to get, at least hard for me to get, is what the new heavens and new earth will be like when I don't have sin anymore. I can't even understand that because I live all the time with my brokenness and my fallenness. I, like you, I've been redeemed. I've been completely forgiven. I am already justified in Christ, but I am still a sinner. Luther liked to say, simul justus et peccator, simultaneously justified, righteous before God, and yet still a sinner. And of course, there is so much more to hope for. We'll talk about that in the coming weeks. I do want to say this framework of the already and not yet is very important for understanding the Bible. When I was in my 20s, I hadn't heard about this. Don't want to say maybe someone taught it, but I didn't learn it. And that would be my fault. But I had not heard about this. And I was just baffled when I'd be reading the prophets and I'd be trying to go, okay, Micah says this, when does it take place? Is that now? Is it future? And I was very confused. When you understand that many of the prophecies have begun to be fulfilled because all the promises of God find their yes and amen in Jesus Christ and Christ has come. and yet there's still more to be fulfilled in the future, it'll be a lot easier for you to understand scripture. It will make a world of difference for you to understand your current blessings and that you also have a far greater hope for when Christ comes again for you and for all who love his appearing. I want to give you a bare bones, oh, I should stop every now and then. Did I lose you here? Questions? I'm going to give you a bare bones outline of what I'm hoping to cover in eschatology over the coming several, well, maybe two dozen weeks. I don't know how long I'll be in this. You know how I am. I haven't written this yet. It may be a long study. There's a lot to cover. Questions, though? Let me give you a bare bones outline of what I want to cover, and you can ask some questions about that, and I certainly invite you to send me emails and questions, suggestions and so on, and I won't call you out by name, but your suggestion may end up in one of our classes. I should say, I'm gonna basically be following, with a few changes, the outline, Bill. You asked if we had questions and didn't give us a second to think. Oh, I did. I just thought you were quicker. We're not as quick, all of us. OK. Yeah, what's your question? Now I forget. I'm wondering if you'll have time or if you can discuss, and I don't need an answer now, but as you're thinking about this, if we see something happen in the world, this is in the news, this is going on, and we think, oh, that sounds like, what is the appropriate way for us to deal with that kind of a, or we have Christians in our lives. I have a person I'm very fond of who says, see this, and what is our appropriate responsibility for this, and how do we deal with it? So Bill's question is, what happens when you look at the newspaper or turn on the evening news and you see something go on? I wonder if that's what was taught in Revelation, Zechariah, Ezekiel or something. And also we have friends, family members who in fact do that very thing. What do you do with that? Okay. And we are going to talk about that. I'm going to try to mention it today where we really don't have as much time as I was thinking today, but we're gonna try to talk about that today a little bit, but I'm gonna spend an entire section talking about this issue of signs, right? Because there's a lot of confusion on it when people see various things, but I want to encourage you to note that actually, people get this backwards. Jesus actually will say things like, what are you gonna hear about? Rumors of war and earthquakes and all that, and people go, yep, that's it, those are the signs. And Jesus says, oh, by the way, that means nothing. That does not mean I'm coming. He actually is telling us they aren't signs of his coming. Second, we should note that Jesus explicitly tells us that nobody knows the day and the hour, not even the Son of Man. So all the desire to make those connections is doomed to failure because we can't know. That's a very important part of doing biblical eschatology is to realize God has revealed some things to us. He has not revealed others. So humility is really important. The fact that I might have a question about the future does not mean God has answered that question. Because God's interest is not satisfying all my curiosity. God's interest is in giving me enough information about the future that I have courage now. After all, we're called to live by faith. Not by sight in this age. We're called to live by faith, which means we're trusting God and his promises. I will also point out that that has gone on throughout the history of the church. This is not a new phenomenon. Gary DeMar wrote a book called Last Day's Madness that just takes some of these examples and you just go right throughout history of people saying, it's so obvious Christ is coming back right now because this is happening and that is happening and it turns out that's 400 AD or 500 AD. We've probably elevated a bit because we've probably had more of this in the 19th and 20th century than went before it, but it's not a new phenomenon. And you should just realize that's not what God's doing. But we'll talk about that. We'll talk about that in some length. Let me get through the major topics here. We'll see if you have questions about that. I'm going to probably go to 12.10 today, so if you have to run, I won't feel offended. First, we're going to talk about the future is now. What I mean by that is just realized eschatology. We're talking about those things that already are true in the present age because Christ has come. Second, we're going to talk about the intermediate state. I won't spend a lot of time on this, but this is about personal eschatology. Eschatology is not only about what happens in history, but what happens in your life. Your life is going to come to an end. You are going to die. What happens if you die instead of being caught up in the era when Christ returns? Well, it turns out that your body and soul are going to remain separated because your body is not going to be raised. until Christ comes back. So we talk about the intermediate state. I do want to say one thing here, though. In broad evangelicalism, it's very popular to talk about heaven as though heaven is the destiny. Heaven is not the ultimate destiny. The ultimate destiny is the new heavens and the new earth. The intermediate state is just that. It's a temporary situation till Christ comes back and our bodies are all raised. As one scholar likes to put it, heaven is important, but it's not the end of the world. I like that, okay, I like that. You're going to get a lot of that in this class, regrettably, because I'm leading it. Third, I want to talk a little bit about the future of Christ. We often talk about what eschatology means for us, but we should think about it from the standpoint of our Savior as well, and how he is glorified publicly in a number of different ways. Fourth, as Bill suggested, we're going to spend probably a fair amount of time talking about the signs of the times. Fifth, we're going to talk about the future of the kingdom. This is where we're going to talk about millennial views. Talk a little bit more than that, but should remind you, the kingdom of God is very important in scripture. Both when John the Baptist and Jesus come and they proclaim the very beginning of the ministry, what are they here to do? They preach the kingdom of God. Right? Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. The millennium is a subcategory of the teaching about the kingdom of God. I trust that many of you will be interested in it because it's one of the hotly debated topics. We are going to spend some time on that. And six, the future of all things. Here we'll be discussing the resurrection of the body, the final judgment, the doctrine of eternal punishment, and the new heavens, and the new earth. And as you can imagine, particularly with me leading the class, this is going to take a while. Thoughts, comments, questions? Please do write me if you have questions. Please do write me if you have things you think we ought to talk about as a group that aren't in this big bucket. That's a fairly comprehensive bucket. I was going to say, I'm basically going to follow the outline of a book by Cornelius Venema called The Promise of the Future. In my judgment, it is the best book on eschatology available in English right now. There are some older books, one in particular by Herman Hokema. You can write me, I'll give you the spelling. called The Bible in the Future, which is also very good. It's a bit more technical. But if you're looking for one book to read, I'd encourage you to read Cornelius Venom, The Promise of the Future, and it should be in a footnote on this handout. You can find it if you want to do that. And you'll be surprised to discover just how dependent his book is on my leadership of this class. I trust most of you got that. Maybe the other way around. Very fine scholar, just recently retired president of Mid-America Reform Seminary. So let me ask you a few questions. First, does everyone have a general idea, I'm not gonna quiz you on it, but a general idea of where we're going? Like what the topic of eschatology is actually about? Let me know if you think there's something that you think doesn't fit under these categories. Okay, I'm gonna do this as quickly as I can. Unless you had a question. I want to start with this idea of hope nurtured by the word. One of the sad realities is, is that so much about the future that's been done is just raw speculation. And the truth is, everybody wants to know about the future. Often the wanting to know about the future is personal stuff, you know, young person going, will I get married? Or will I get this job or so on? And all throughout history, people have done all kinds of crazy things. to try to know the future. And I'm sorry I say they're crazy, but they're crazy. It's palm reading, it's horoscopes, and this has not gone away. If you look in your town, there's almost certainly someone there who's promising to help people know their future or whatever by doing medium sorts of things. The issue, of course, should be straightforward for us. If you want to know about something, you want to talk to someone who knows about that. I want to know about medicine, I go talk to medical doctors. I want to know about physics, I go talk to Ben. I don't understand what he's saying, but I ask him anyway. And so on. Well, if you want to know about the future, there's only one person who knows about the future, and that's God. The future is hidden to everyone other than God and those to whom God has revealed things about the future. What that means is we don't want to build an eschatology on the speculations that get spun out of human minds. We want to build our eschatology on exegeting the scripture. What does God say? I'll give you an example from history because Bill was talking about this people bringing things up. Let me just give you an example from Pope Gregory. Pope Gregory I think the 5th century, no 6th century, 500s, right? Do you remember that? 500s. So a long time ago. Pope Gregory assured the world that the return of Christ could not be far off since he claimed that so many prophecies were being fulfilled in his day. He writes, Of all the signs described by our Lord as presaging the end of the world, some we already see accomplished. For we now see that nation arises against nation, and that they press and weigh upon the land in our own times as never before in the annals of the past. Earthquakes overwhelm countless cities, as we often hear from other parts of the world. pestilence we endure without interruption, it is true that we do not behold signs in the sun and the moon and the stars, but that these are not far off we may infer from the changes of the atmosphere. Now please note, Pope Gregory's actually one of the very best popes. He's universally referred to as Gregory the Great, in part because he launches the very first large-scale mission work out of Rome to bring about conversions, and this is relevant to some of us, it was to the Anglo-Saxons. This is a very gifted, learned person who loved the Lord as far as we could tell. You can look at church history, there's a lot of popes. They weren't believers, right? Gregory was. And yet we have this crazy speculation. And we look and go, well, that was 16 centuries ago. We know how crazy that is. But if you simply change the dates and the names, I can give you all sorts of evangelicals who say exactly the same thing over the last 150 years. even though the very things that Pope Gregory mentions, earthquakes, pestilence we hear about, wars and rumors of wars are things that Jesus said are not signs of his coming. So don't fall prey to last day's madness. You don't need to read Gary's book, you just need to read your Bibles. Cornelius Venema puts it well, Though we cannot know or predict the future, the triune God who created the world and all things in it, who providentially superintends the life and history of the creation, he is able to do so. For in his word, he reveals the things we need to know for our salvation, including those things which pertain to the future. He reveals precisely what we need to know about the shape of things to come. This is the only antidote to counteract the speculation that abounds today about the future. We need to listen carefully to the word of God, taking notice of what it promises regarding the future, and disciplining ourselves not to go beyond what it warrants. It is the only safe course available to us in this otherwise confused and disputed terrain. We must therefore be both grateful and humble. Grateful to receive what God has been pleased to teach us in his word about the future. And humble to remain within the limits of this revelation. Be grateful, but right now I want to emphasize be humble. You are the servant who's receiving this gift from God. Enjoy what he gives you, but don't go beyond what is written. Where God has spoken, we must speak. Where God has been silent, we must be silent, right? Because after all, our hope is not that we can connect all the dots. Our hope is Jesus Christ, and he is certainly coming again for us as his people. I would also just add what should be obvious, the things that God emphasizes we should emphasize. It's not just does God talk about things. The things that God says, this is really important, we ought to be thinking, this is really important. One of the ways we see that is you talk about Christ's second coming, it's mentioned all over the New Testament. It's really important. The rapture is mentioned once. Okay, it's in the Bible, God gave it to us for a reason, we ought to understand it. But anybody who comes to you and they're gonna major on the things that only get mentioned once in the Bible, and minors on the things that God is going, this is important. Pay attention to the resurrection of the dead. I'm gonna explain it in great depth in parts of the Bible, particularly 1 Corinthians 15, but it's mentioned frequently. that teacher's leading you in the wrong direction, even if they're not technically telling you anything that's wrong. We ought to have our theology balanced the way God has given it to us. So let me say just one more thing. Sorry, I'm kind of rushing this, but eschatology can seem really confusing. And it's confusing if you think of it as a bunch of detached topics. I got a little piece over here, a little piece over there. This one's about Gog and Magog, right? What I want you to see is it's not a bunch of detached topics. The center of history And the center of the future is Jesus Christ. And all of eschatology is connected to him. It's not about looking for the Antichrist. It's about our Lord, Jesus Christ. The very first gospel promise in scripture is that the seed would crush the serpent's head. And the book of Revelation is the revelation of the exalted and glorified Jesus Christ. Just think about our Lord's conversation on the road to Emmaus. Luke tells us that he was talking with them about how all the Old Testament prophets pointed to him. It's about Jesus, right? That's the thing you want to keep central in your thinking. As the Apostle Paul explains to the Ephesians, In Christ, God is making known to us the mystery of his will according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in him, things in heaven, and things on earth. The biblical revelation regarding the future, therefore, always fixes its eyes on Jesus. Our hope is firm Because it comes from God's word, which cannot be shaken. And our hope is glorious, because it is found in Jesus Christ. I'm not even going to give any questions. It's 10 after. Peter, would you pray?