Come on. You should have a chart. Everybody wondering who would be foolish enough to cover eschatology on a Wednesday night? and intend to finish it in one sitting. I got to admit that 10 days ago when I started on this, this seemed like a good idea, but Monday when I was putting my notes together, I said, yeah, you're an idiot for trying to do this. For those of you that are familiar with the topic, eschatology tends to be a hotly debated issue. Scripture tends, Not to be clear enough to stop all the debate and the, I wouldn't say it's fighting, but the good-natured ribbing and the, I mean, we get, being Reformed folks, we get called a lot of names because of the particular view of eschatology that we take. We are called anti-Semitic. We are called Bible illiterates. There's a lot of names that come, that get focused on Reformed people because we don't typically, don't take the modern path in looking at eschatology that we take a much longer view, as old as 2,000 years anyway. So the reason I got into this was and thought we might talk about it tonight is that Because of what's going on in the Middle East, fighting and the bombing and Iran and Israel and all that stuff, there are lots of churches in America that are looking at what's going on in the Middle East and think that the return of Jesus is any day. I mean, they are preparing for it. I was reading a blog by Wayne Grudem, who wrote Systematic Theology. Some of you have that book. He was talking about how alarmed he is that in his church He's got people pulling their kids out of school quitting jobs selling property Because they're so convinced that because of the scene that they see going on in the Middle East That Jesus is coming back any day now. We're in a cocoon here. I mean we're real I mean with John we're protected from all that stuff, and I don't even realize that's going on on the outside but in Looking at this and researching it, it caused me to go back and remember some things. Now, Elizabeth and I were redeemed about the same time, 1981. And the first book anybody gave us was The Late Great Planet Earth. Anybody else read that? Okay. First Christian book ever was The Late Great Planet Earth. And if you're not familiar with the author, Hal Lindsey, I mean he's right on the precipice of saying you've got to read the signs in Israel. You've got to see what's going on all the prophecies in the Old Testament. They're all talking about Israel and Jesus is coming any day and he's still saying that he's about 87 years old. He's still saying that his website every day. It's Jesus today. Now one of these days he lives long enough. He's going to be right. I don't know how long he's got to live. He's going to be right at one of these points. But there's a real serious issue there with that trend in theology that twists and misinterprets what the scripture is saying in total. And that's what we're gonna talk about tonight and why you have that chart. We're gonna narrow this very broad subject down to the issue of the millennium. And what you have in your hand is the Actually three most prominent. There are some others we could talk about, but the Reformed Church typically looks at things from an amillennial viewpoint. Now that also happens to be the simplest. Amillennial being there is no millennium. Now this is very familiar to me because raised as a Catholic, that's what Catholics taught. You're gonna go and go and go and Jesus is going to show up in the eastern sky and that's it. So Catholic theology was a millennial in its roots and the way the only way I heard it. And I'll get into that chart a little bit later, but there are distinct differences there between the a millennial view, which is Jesus is coming back. He gathers his church and then the eternal state. And the modern view that most evangelical churches are taking, which is, I'm sure you've heard this, if you listen to Christian radio, you hear this all the time, that there is a rapture that's going to happen, that the church is going to be taken. The Left Behind series talked about that. If you read any of the Left Behind series, you had planes flying without pilots and cars, the drivers disappeared and all that. But I wanna say that that's a very new development. And it's a development that came out of something called dispensationalism. So, I'm going to blame Jacobs for this, John Jacobs, your pastor. He gave me a book by John Gerstner. If you know, any of you read Gerstner, this is R.C. Sproul's mentor. This is the guy that R.C. Sproul says knows more than anybody on earth. Gerstner wrote a book called Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth, which is a strange topic. But what Gerstner was doing was he was aiming his book at a book that was written by C.I. Schofield called Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth, okay? So Schofield, again, we're in a little cocoon here, but Schofield is one of the founders of dispensationalism, and this whole idea of the rapture, that the church is gonna be taken, there's gonna be a tribulation, there's gonna be a millennium period, that Jesus is gonna come back several times, and that the Jews are the focus of history. So Gerstner aims his book at Schofield to say, I think you're misreading the scripture. Now, dispensationalism and its effect on Christianity in the last 150 years are pointed to very specific issues. For example, now, any of you around in 1948, I mean, that you remember? You're well preserved for your years. The thing about 1948 was that was the year, for your history, that was the year that Israel gained their land back. You remember that? May 15, 1948, Israel got the land back. And that set off alarm bells all over the dispensational world. Why? because what they believed was 40 years from that point, Christ was gonna show up on the Eastern sky. 40 years, that was it. Now, some of them backed off the 40 years by seven years to say, okay, 1948 plus 40, 1988, minus seven, 1981, The thing that the left behind series talks of the tribulation was gonna kick off and the rapture of the church was going to be in 1981. So what I'm saying to you is those of you that were around at that time, particularly if you're in an evangelical church, you were preparing for the rapture in 1981. Now I didn't understand a comment that was made to me. I'd just been redeemed, brand new, never read a Christian book, the whole thing. And somebody asked me to give my testimony and I fumbled through to talk about what happened. And a guy came up to me afterwards and he said, you know, you just got in under the wire. And truly, I had no idea what he was talking about. Under what wire? So he hands me the late great planet Earth and says, here's the wire. And of course, that was a no joke, no pun intended. It was quite a revelation to me to understand that the church was going to disappear. And particularly for new Christians, that's not a good place to be. That is not a good place to be, to have a brand new believer before you ever introduce him to the gospels or to anything else, to be talking about the rapture of the church. And yet, we've got churches full of this going on. 1948 went to 1988. I know all you guys were around then. What happened in 88? What book got published in 88? Anybody remember? Tell me. 88 reasons why the rapture is gonna happen in 1988. What happened? It went through the dispensational churches, evangelical churches in America, were convinced that it was gonna be 1988. Now, 1988 passes, and that guy's name was Edgar Wisenant. He sold four and a half million copies. of 88 Reasons the World Will End in 1988. He had the gall to write a sequel. He wrote a sequel, On Borrowed Time, where he says, I was wrong about 1988, but I know for sure that it's 1989. He wrote a third book that claimed it was 1992. Truly. Now, to be honest, okay, he sold four and a half million copies of the first book and the last two never got published. I mean, we caught on after a while. But there were plenty of people that thought 1992 was the deal. In fact, if you're a student of precept Bible studies, you've heard Kay Arthur in teaching through the Gospel of John, she says on tape, she said, if you're watching this tape and it's after 1992 and I'm still here, you'll know I was wrong. Now, as Gerstner talks about this, and as he talks about dispensationalism in general, and in the millennium teaching in particular, what he says that dispensationalism has done is unnecessarily burdened and confused the church of Jesus Christ. I started to think about that because I tend to, I mean, those guys are, I mean, they're fine. They're brothers, and I don't tend to think about them, you know what I mean? And I don't tend to think about the impact of this. And yet, when you start to look at it, and you start scaring people into a confession of faith, what have you done to them? And, you know, there's a lot of that that goes on. Handing somebody like me the late great planet Earth, the first Christian book, Okay. Historically, the church has had a very different view than the dispensational view of rapture and millennium and all that. And I'm just assuming you're aware of that whole scheme, okay, that because you've read it and you've seen it and probably may have seen the movies and left behind and all that stuff. Historically, the church has always been amillennial. The church has held, the Protestant church has held the same position the Catholics and Lutherans held. that at some point of God's own choosing, he's going to return and that's it. Calvin, okay, talking about this issue, said, look, he said, here's the timeline. Christ returns, he gathers his church, the eternal state begins. He said, that's all the end time theology you need. Before I go on, let me stop and say this, that before I draw any more differences in Christianity, let me talk about the things that we all agree on. Just about any truly Christian church is gonna agree on at least four aspects of the end times. The agreement is going to be number one, Christ is returning. He is coming back. He's coming back suddenly. He's coming back in person. He's coming back visibly. He's coming back bodily. Just about every Christian church will agree on those points. And those are major ones. Those are big ones. Number two, we, as Christians, whose hope is in Christ, should be eagerly waiting to see Jesus. We should be eagerly waiting for his return. Second thing we all agree on. Third, now notwithstanding the people that try to date this thing, the vast majority of Christians don't know when Christ is returning and don't attempt to even try. It really is a fringe that tries to date it and think they've got the Bible code down the majority of Christians will freely admit, don't know when, just know that he is. And the fourth thing is, that there is just about 100% agreement on, is that the final results of the end times, heaven, hell, new heaven, new earth, eternity. So what you have is a terrific basis of agreement among all Christians as to what these end times are going to be. And what gets all the press is this little bit of the timeline that we dispute or debate. Okay, here is gonna be my point, and I'm stealing this totally from Gerstner. is that if you, and I'm assuming here that you're not all on the same page as far as the end times are concerned. I'm just making that assumption. But what I wanna say is that there are things that you can use to decide what is biblically correct about the end times. You don't have to be swept without any defense of saying, wait a minute, that doesn't look right to me. And Gerstner makes a few very simple points. He calls them diagnostics, if you will. I just lost my page. Elizabeth, did you steal my note page here? Ah, here it is. Okay, here's the diagnostic, I just got out of place. The diagnostic question that you can ask yourself, regardless of where you are and what your position is and what you tend to believe and what you want to believe and all that, some diagnostic questions to ask. Number one, according to the way you read the scripture, According to the way that you understand the total scripture the message of the scripture what it means as a whole What is God trying to convey to his people as you look at all that ask yourself question number one? Does Israel have a different deal for salvation? Than the church does Do you think it does? Do you think Israel has got a different redemptive plan than the church? That's diagnostic number one. That's gonna help you decide what you can easily believe about the end times. Because if you think there's different deals, that's gonna force you into a place that you might not be comfortable with seeing. Okay, number two. Do you believe that the central message of the scripture Is talking about Israel or is talking about Jesus? Now you'll get a lot of argument that it's talking about Israel. Particularly on this dispensational side, which is the whole point of this. That's where most evangelical churches are. They are dispensationalists and they're going to argue the point. That the scripture is talking about Jesus, excuse me, is talking about Israel. and that Jesus is in what they call a parenthesis of the church age. Now, I'll get into that in a bit. Okay, so that's diagnostic question number two. Number one, do Israel and the church have separate redemptive deals? Number two, do you think the scriptures talk about Israel or Christ? That's a pretty simple question. Number three, how many times do you think Jesus is coming back? Now, if you say two, That's gonna force you, that's gonna pigeonhole you into a certain position. If you say three, that opens up your options. What's the problem with three? Anybody care to guess? Well, Jesus said he's only coming back twice. He's coming once when he was there and he's coming back again and he doesn't say anything about three times. So I mean, you got a problem there biblically. Okay, but again, to, what is considered to be the dispensational, pre-tribulational, pre-millennial view of eschatology you have to say that Jesus is coming three times. Once in His life affirmed by the Gospels. Once for the Rapture to gather His Church. And then once for the Eternal State. You see what I'm saying here as far as your question? If you can settle some of these issues in your mind, you can't get swayed as to what eschatology is all about. Okay. And this is a little bit more technical point, but let me make this to you. what Dispensational America said was that Israel getting their land back was the fulfillment of the covenant that God made with Israel. Now, stay with me. Dispensationalists wanted to say that Israel getting their land back was the fulfillment of a promise that God made to Israel that he would return them to the land. Okay, does that sound familiar to you, vaguely? Yes, it does. That was their key point in substantiating their end time philosophy was that, aha, God fulfilled His covenant, put Israel back in the land. Is there a problem with that? Anybody know? You get bonus points if you get this right. Scripture didn't say that. In fact, what was the condition for Israel always as far as their land was concerned? What was the covenant stipulation for them? It was obedience. Now, does anybody, I'm a little sarcastic, but I mean, does anybody here think Israel was obedient to the covenant? And yet that was the very basis of the dispensational thought as to why the land was returned to Israel. So what I'm saying to you now is that I don't have any problem with God sovereignly governing the fact that Israel got landmass back. But is that what the scripture was talking about? So, I guess gave you four diagnostics to help you decide whether or not some of this other stuff is even valid biblically by some stuff that you already know. And by the way, if you care to check me up on the obedience thing, you go to Deuteronomy 28 verses 15 through 68. Okay, so it's not one spoof text. is 15-68 which is 50 verses, 53 verses that talk about if you obey and if you disobey. And on the disobeying side of those 53 verses you see pretty clearly Israel's history. Ok, go to this chart we'll talk through this a little bit. This is what it looks like. Now I've already kind of hit on this, but amillennium, and I'm just gonna say amill from here on because I get tongue-tied with this. The amill position is the historic Christian view, and pretty much across the spectrum, and I already mentioned Catholics and Lutherans all agree. Now the very term millennium comes out of Revelations 20, one through 10. So if you wanna go in and you look at that, I mean it's not as if millennium doesn't have any biblical foundation to it at all. It does, the word is used. And in Revelations 20, one through 10, the Emil view says that that is describing, and in fact, much of Revelation is describing the current church age. So the Emil view is saying to you, you're in the millennium. that the church age is that period that Revelations 21 through 10 is talking about. Now, this is an age in which Satan's influence over the nations has been greatly reduced. You gotta compare that to what it was before Jesus set foot on earth. so that the gospel can be preached in the whole world. Those who are said to be reigning with Christ for that millennium period are Christians who have died and already reigning with Christ in heaven. That's another one of your diagnostic questions. Do you believe that Christ is currently reigning over his church? It stumbles. I mean, because in the dispensational point of view, Christ is not reigning. Now it's hard for me to think that you can take that position, but because there is not complete obedience, dispensationalists want to say he is not reigning. Would that be because they would say his kingdom is the kingdom that's coming, while Amillennials say that his kingdom now is a spiritual kingdom that's spreading? Is that a fair... It is. I mean, for those who couldn't hear, Andre, There is in other ways of looking at the end times is that when Jesus comes back, the idea is he will reign with complete obedience covering the earth. If, and that is, if there is a millennium period that is separate from what we are in now, that's if. Now there's reasons to believe, looking at the scripture, that Christ, even in the dispensational point of view, doesn't live in a totalitarian reign. That in fact, even on the dispensational side, the pre-millennium side, is that even though Christ is living in the millennium, here on earth, there are people that go through that period and are not redeemed. That doesn't sound like a reign of Christ to me, but that's also a minor point. Okay, let me go to the post-millennial side. And really what the, you know, post-millennial after, and it's talking about Christ is going to return after the millennium, but the post-mill people, come awfully close to the AMIL people. And if you look at the chart, you see what I'm talking about. Because basically what they're saying is the post-MIL people, and by the way, this is a lot of people in the Reformed, according to Reformed theology, are either post-MIL or AMIL. I said they're all AMIL, but a lot of them are post-MIL because they do want to say they do want to optimistically say that the gospel has an effect on the world. So what you see from the post-meal people is that the church age morphs into the millennium. That's what those arrows are trying to show you there in that little chart, is that the church age, the preaching of the gospel, the effect of the church militant, doing its work, the grace of God, all of that has such an impact on the world that the church age morphs into the millennium where truly Christ reigning through his church and there is perfect peace and unity. Now, depending at what point in history you're talking about, that can be a tough sell. Post Mill people tend to be very optimistic about the impact that the Gospel is going to have on the world and that's why they make this claim. Now as we sit here today I'm thinking, there's no way. I mean I'm not doubting the power of the Gospel or the power of the grace of God. But I'm looking around saying, really? Well, yeah, I mean, but see, and as for the rest of it, postmill people, seeing the church age, morphing into the millennium period, looks a lot like the amill position, and then Christ comes back and the eternal state starts, okay? So you see those same aspects there between those two. Okay, let me flip to the, let me flip to not classical premill, but if you'll go, If you'll go to the last figure that you've got. Now this is where the majority of Christianity lives, in the evangelical churches. And this grew out of the dispensational point of view that chose to view Israel as being the centerpiece of the scripture. So that was one of your diagnostic questions. And if you choose to say, and if you think that Israel is the main focus, then you pretty much are locking yourself into this pre-trib, pre-mill point of view. The idea here is that the church age happens as we know it. that things actually, contrary to the post-mill, where things get better and better, the pre-mill people say things get worse and worse. Now, that happens to be an area that you might get some agreement on. I mean, but it gets worse and worse and leads up to the tribulation period, which you see right there, seven years. Now, this is just the general line of thought in pre-mill, pre-TRIB thinking, which is generic for the Left Behind series, Hal Lindsey, David Jeremiah, Dallas Seminary people, Moody Bible. There's a lot of schools that endorse what we're looking at right here. And we're going to talk about some of the deficiencies in it. But that church age gets worse and worse and worse until God finally decides he's going to put an end to it and he officially starts seven years of tribulation and he starts it with the kickoff event being Christ comes back and gathers his believing church, which is commonly called the rapture. It's difficult to find that word in scripture because it doesn't show. The verse is out of 1 Corinthians that talks about believers being caught up. But it just as easily can be played to any gathering of the church in any eschatology scheme. The pre-trib people want to say, and there's a reason for this and I'm going to get to, that they want to say that Christ comes back and He gathers His church and He leaves And that starts seven years of tribulation, at which point after seven years of tribulation, a literal thousand year millennium starts. The reason they're doing that, and the reason behind their theology is that in believing that Israel is the centerpiece of history, they take all the prophecies that come out of Daniel, Zechariah, They take all of those things and instead of applying those to the church, they apply those to Israel. And unfortunate is that the church is in the way of Israel in this particular case. And so when they talk about the church age being a parenthesis, what they're talking about is that we are an inconvenient truth that stands in the way of Israel getting to the millennium period. Therefore we've got to be taken out of the show Now the thinking is that as long as the church is here we are inhibiting That we are that we are inhibiting the prophecies that pertain to Israel We are inhibiting that from happening and as soon as we are taking out of the way Then Israel will continue the prophetic clock will start ticking again There's some problems here that I've already identified with this. Number one, is Israel the focus of the scripture? I think not. I think they are not. I think Christ is the focus of the scripture. Does Israel have a separate deal from the church? From, excuse me, from any man of any time, do they have a separate deal from redemption? Did the covenants, did the law ever save anybody in any one of their dispensations? They say, yes it did. we say it's the blood of Christ only, always, never any other way. So again, your diagnostics come to your aid there. But there's a point here in that, that what they have to say about Israel with the church being gone, that there has to be some method of salvation. Now, we're talking about what the, people talk about. With the Church gone, ostensibly with the Holy Spirit gone, which is part of their teaching, how is a man saved? With Israel reigning. They re-institute the sacrificial system. So, I'm pointing out to you here that with all the hysteria that goes on with what we see happening in the Middle East and the bombings and Israel and who's gonna stand by Israel and is the United States gonna abandon Israel and on and on and on and on and on, and the church's involvement in that, in that we should be looking at Israel Because if you want to see what God is doing, you watch Israel, that line of thought, what I'm saying to you is, is false. It's a false promise, it's a false aspect, and yet, we've got, I've got a fly going around here too. You're, again, back to Grudem's point, where he was alarmed at the people in his church. that were selling businesses and taking their kids out of school and selling their vacation homes and sitting in a room facing east because they wanted to see Christ come over the horizon. It's a lot of cattle, a lot of cattle. I mean, and that's what they teach. But getting into the particulars of it wasn't necessarily my concern. I was concerned with the damage being done by dispensational teaching because of what has to happen to the scripture in order to make their scheme actually fit. Now, let me give you a thought here. You read the book of Revelation. And typically most people are gonna say it's dated to the late 90s, excuse me, not 1995, 95 AD, 96 AD in there. What if Revelation was written in the mid 60s and not the mid 90s? What if Revelation was actually written in the mid 60s before the fall of Jerusalem? What would you be looking at? If you read Revelation, well, you'd be looking at the fall of Jerusalem being the finish of prophetic history within three or four years of its writing. Now, if you look, any of you read Josephus? Josephus was a Jew, in fact he was a Jewish general, actually a good one, was captured by the Romans, was, I don't mean this negatively, but was slick enough that he got a job with the Romans being the Roman historian. I mean he knew the Jewish side and he was learning the Roman side and he was the official Roman historian for the fall of Jerusalem. If you read Josephus, you think you're reading the book of Revelation. he talks about what's going on inside the walls of Jerusalem and outside the walls you think you're reading the book of Revelation. Now that's just a thought. Ok, not everybody agrees with an early writing of Revelation. But my point to you is that there is enough evidence that you really don't have to buy any of the pre-mill and pre-trib stuff and get into the hysteria that an awful lot of the Christian church gets into. And certainly don't be buying anybody that's a new Christian late Great Planet Earth. I mean that is not a good idea. And the next guy that comes up and says, 88 reasons, or 92 reasons, or 15 reasons, or whatever, that Christ is gonna come back on a certain day, you can say, I don't believe that. What do you say about Israel and the church? What do you say about redemption? So you have some things that you can use to defend yourself from them. I think we pray at this point. Pray at this point. Come quickly, Lord Jesus. I know some of the people that are sick.