Due to some global news events you might’ve heard about, something about a virus I think, and some subsequent questionable moves by certain politicians, Christians have been talking a lot about the End Times. However, for much of the church, and in this case the Western Evangelical church, it is a subject that is often ignored or only discussed superficially. Many dismiss the study of the End Times, or eschatology, to be ethereal doctrine that has little to no practical impact on how one lives their Christian life, but right now we are witnessing how people’s actions and attitudes are indeed shaped by what they think will happen in the future.
Many books, and large ones at that, have been devoted to attempting a comprehensive explanation of Christian eschatology. We will not be attempting a comprehensive study here, but we will introduce a few foundations so that our eventual disagreements can be sustained within the realms of Orthodoxy. We will then consider issues with the framing of eschatological differences in Christian conversation, and finally this author will make specific comments on some elements of the subject where he plants his flag and is prepared to engage in hearty debate.
Firstly, a note on perspicuity. The Christian Scriptures are the result of the self revelation of the True and Living God, who told us that his memorial name is Yahweh. He is a communicating God, with both intra-trinitarian communication and communication with his creation, us. He has inspired and preserved his word that we might learn from it, and he has given it with enough clarity that he will judge us by it. The Scriptures are essentially understandable. Admittedly, scholarship and study are required, but that doesn’t compromise the fact that the Scriptures can be known and understood. One of the earliest enemies of the Christian faith is Gnosticism. Paul writes against it in much of his work. What’s more, gentle reader, if you have been reading these theological reflections for any length of time, you will have encountered our engagement with Gnosticism as well (though we do not blush to say that Paul did it better).
The place where Gnosticism rears its ugly head is that it denies the idea of the perspicuity of the Scriptures, and a Gnostic attitude to reading the Scriptures will motivate you towards looking for the ‘secret truths’ or the ‘buried original meanings’, or perhaps pseudo-translations of the Scriptures that are geared towards ‘unlock[ing] the passion of God’s heart and express[ing] his fiery love’. Another expression of Gnostic hermeneutics would be the idea that something other than education in the original languages and historical context is absolutely necessary for proper exegesis, such as spiritual pedigrees or lines of pastoral/apostolic tradition that might incline a leader towards acting as if they have ‘access to higher truths’ or ‘new and never-before heard words from God’.
The foundation of perspicuity is the belief that God’s word can be understood, and that it is not hiding secrets and novel doctrines that have never been seen before.
Secondly, a note on audience. The Scriptures are written by God, through people, to others, about Christ, for us. That was a mouthful, take a second to chew it and wash it down. All of Scripture is for us, but strictly speaking, none of it is to us. We are reading someone else’s mail, and yet we are commanded to live in light of it! This simply means that we must do proper biblical and systematic theology when we read the Scriptures. Leviticus is for us, and so are the Psalms. Matthew is for us, and so is Hebrews. However, Leviticus was not written to you, Moses didn’t secretly have 21st century Australia in mind when he wrote the Law. This remains true, even if, as we see in some parts of the New Testament, those things were written for us or took place for us, as teaching tools. This shows dual authorship in action. Moses didn’t know about you when he was writing, but the Holy Spirit did. In the same way, each Gospel account was written for a certain demographic or people group, and none of those were 21st century Australian Christians. All of it is for us, none of it is to us.
Third and finally, a note on mission. God’s word has given you plenty to do. To be honest, the letter to Ephesus alone has given you plenty to do. There is so much room for growth in the faith, even with the simplest of matters (e.g. patience, forgiveness, holiness). This author, though still early in years, can see many lifetimes of sanctification ahead of him. A bishop called Ryle has had some influence there. The reason we mention this is that potato chips have something in common with Christian teaching. People have grown tired of the ‘Original and the Best’, and now stray into such ‘new and exciting’ flavours as Loaded Baked Potato, Cappuccino, Crab flavoured, Wasabi Ginger and Mint Mischief. Many, catechised into a consumerist society, have grown tired of what is plain and well-known in God’s word, and now search for new and exciting doctrine. Woe for the day when Wasabi Ginger or Mint Mischief make it into your Study Bible! But seriously, consider what we are saying, and how wonderful it is. We’ll have homework for all eternity, I imagine, and how exciting is that! To think that you may always have another degree of God’s brilliance and power still to discover! The point is this. Many movements and fads today are the result (we contend) of people finding the Bible stale, and considering it to not have enough exciting new stuff for them to pursue.
To apply those three principles to eschatology, let us make this summary: Revelation has been fully understandable since the day it was written; Revelation was not written to you, and there’s plenty for you to learn about Revelation and all eschatology within the bounds of clear exegesis and historical Christian Orthodoxy. You would be surprised how many Christians long for truths that have been known for centuries, and simply neglected because they are kept in books with unimpressive titles or dust-jackets.
Here is a fact of history for you. Matthew 24 was understood by the people it was written to. They acted upon it, and did so correctly. Jesus told his followers about events of cosmic significance that would all happen in their generation. He told them that when they saw the abomination that causes desolation, those Christians who were in Judea were to flee to the mountains (Matt 24:15). So, when they saw ‘Jerusalem surrounded by armies’ (which is Luke’s way of referring to the abomination that causes desolation to a non-Jewish audience that wouldn’t have understood that phrase; Luke 21:20), they fled to the hills of Judea. If you stop and think about it, that’s amazing. Jesus prophesied accurately down to the very details something that would happen nearly 40 years in the future. In fact, Jesus’ accuracy with that prediction causes many unbelieving scholars (whether they profess the faith or not) to insist that Matthew was written after A.D. 70. (we shall talk more in another post about how worldview affects data). We know that those first century Christians escaped to a place called Pella, both from the archaeological evidence and from Eusebius’s Church History (3.5.3). Brothers and sisters, (and make sure you are sitting down), we even contend, and with great apprehension, that if that prophecy had not been fulfilled, Jesus would be a false prophet. Anyone who wants to assert that Matthew 24 refers to future events, likely appealing ‘multiple fulfillments’, must justify why that prophecy is expected to have successive fulfillments, and how many, and why not every prophecy is expected to have such numerous fulfilments. Otherwise, you could not correct someone for claiming that any old thing that happens to them is a successive fulfilment of some obscure Old Testament prophecy. The ball is in your court.
In fact, after Jesus had prophesied all the judgements on covenantally unfaithful Israel, he gave them an idea of timeframe.
“But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.”
(Matt 24:36-37, emphasis mine)
Here is the paradigm Jesus sets for his coming in judgement forty years later. He says it will be like the days of Noah. In Noah’s day, people were going on living their lives, and when judgement came, all who were not in the ark were swept away. Those who remained on the Earth were the God-fearers; Noah and his family. Let’s put that to you one more time. In Noah’s day, the evil were taken away, and the righteous remained on the Earth. Now let’s see Jesus applying it to that generation.
Then two men will be in the field; one will be taken and one left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken and one left. Therefore, stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. (Matt 24:40-42)
Due to the ‘Left Behind’ books and films, most of the Western church has it backwards, thinking that the Christians will be ‘taken’, and the non-Christians ‘left’. Some films would even have you believe that your socks, shoes and belt buckles might remain on the Earth as you fly up into the sky in your birthday suit, alongside your friends from church. Picture that! Actually, nevermind.
Whether you believe in some kind of rapture or not, the one that much of the West believes in today is simply false. The way Jesus taught it, the believers remain.
It should be noted that even great exegetes and giants of faith will have varying interpretations of this chapter (and its synoptic partners). John Murray separates the first part of this chapter into three sections: v4-14, v15-28 and v29-31. As far as this author can see, it appears that part of the reason for this is to solve the problem of Matthew 24:34, which says ‘Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened’. If the ‘all things’ of v34 covers everything preceding it, then v29-31 must be a past reality, which Murray says “did not occur in the generation of which our Lord spoke” (Murray, J in Murray, V 1977, ‘The Interadventual Period and the Advent: Matt. 24 and 25’, The Collected Writing of John Murray, Versa Press, East Peoria).
The problem we see with Murray’s interpretation is that he assumes that ‘the end’ referenced in v14 refers to the end of our current age, rather than the end of the Jewish age in which Jesus was speaking. Additionally, he assumes that v29-31 must be in the future, therefore he introduces divisions into this part of Scripture that we find unnecessary.
That was fun, wasn’t it? Let’s do it again. When the Revelation to John was written, the people to whom it was written understood who John meant by the beast (when we use the phrase ‘the beast’, please assume that we are referring to the first beast, or the ‘beast out of the sea, since the controversy does not surround the identity of the second beast, or the ‘beast out of the Earth, nearly as much).
The following is Douglas Wilson’s succinct introduction to this character, the ‘beast from the sea’:
“At the beginning of this chapter, we have the introduction of the great beast from the sea. This is one area where most commentators agree—a remarkable feat given the nature of this book. This beast is best understood as representing the Roman Empire, for some of the following reasons:
The sea represents the Gentile nations generally (Is.17:12; 60:5). In Daniel 7:1-7, we are given a description of four beasts, representing four successive empires. The fourth in that series was the Roman Empire, and the description of the beast here largely matches the description given by Daniel.”
(Wilson, D 2019, When the Man Comes Around, Canon Press, Moscow, p. 148)
That explanation shows the importance of reading the Bible with biblical categories and motifs, rather than bringing a 21st century material literalism to everything. He goes on to explain another element of how this beast is described:
“Rome was known as the city of seven hills, and additional information gleaned later (from Rev. 17:9-11) tells us that the seven heads of the beast were doubly symbolic. They represented seven kings, and they also represented seven hills. Rome was known in the ancient world as the city of seven hills, and just as we recognise the Big Easy as New Orleans, or the Windy City as Chicago, so the first century readers would have instantly known that we were talking about Rome.
The fact that the seven heads were seven kings also helps us date the book using internal evidence. Beginning with Julius Caesar, Rome had seven emperors during this period. They were Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, followed by Galba who reigned a “short while”, meaning just a few months. These heads, we are told, were crowned with blasphemy, and it is striking that Caesar worship began in the reign of Augustus, and was particularly intense in Asia Minor—where this book was addressed.”
(Wilson, D 2019, When the Man Comes Around, Canon Press, Moscow, p. 148)
The lesson here goes back to our foundation of perspicuity. These descriptions aren’t some great mystery that no one has ever truly understood, or anything like that. They were a bit of a riddle, but the riddle was one that the first readers could actually understand, and at that, even better than most of us! To put it simply, the first beast was Rome generally, and Nero specifically.
That idea might sit uncomfortably with you. We feel no need to argue that the beast was a person who is now long dead, that much is unavoidable. Let’s take a moment to talk about Gematria and the Syriac manuscripts. Ok, so Gematria is not something you want to get too interested in. It’s a prime example of all that ‘hidden code’ ‘secret rules of the universe’ stuff we’ve already denounced. However, we do have to understand it to understand the most well known number in the Bible; Six-hundred and sixty-six. In Hebrew, Latin and Greek, they didn’t have numbers. In today’s English, we use Roman letters and Arabic numerals. However, in Hebrew or Greek, letters corresponded to a numeric value. Most of us are familiar with this if we’ve ever seen an analog clock. IV is four, XI is eleven, all that jazz.
Revelation 13:17-18 explains that the ‘mark of the beast’ represents ‘the name of the beast or the number of its name’. Oops, look at that, there goes all the theories about barcodes and microchips right out the window. Forget about all that. John calls for wisdom, and asks the reader to calculate “the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666”. We can confidently say that the number 666 corresponds to the name of a man, and that that man is the specific representation of the first beast, aka the beast out of the sea. The second beast, on the other hand, is a different character, who is identified as the beast out of the Earth. We mentioned Syriac manuscripts a moment ago, and let us say, you will never have found Syriac manuscripts so juicy as you will now! The name Neron Kaisar, when transliterated into Hebrew, has the numerical value 666. The reason John didn’t write ‘the beast, who is Nero, is going to be overthrown and killed!’ is because he was a political exile, and his letters didn’t have end-to-end encryption, so that type of blatant dissidence might’ve greatly reduced his life-span. He gave them a little riddle, and it would’ve been perfectly understandable.
However, the Scriptures have been translated into many languages since then. What do you do when you’re copying Revelation in Syriac and an important point John is making about Nero requires the numerals of Hebrew? Why, you change the number of the beast, so that the Syriac numbers will also be equivalent to Neron Kaisar. As it turns out, that’s what happened. Your Bible may tell you in the footnotes, if it has footnotes, that some manuscripts read ‘616’. This isn’t a mistake. This is people understanding that 666 is equivalent to Nero’s name, and changing the number to fit the maths of their alphabet, since it is his name and identity, more than the number, that is important.
So, while we’re here, stop calling the leader of the political party you dislike ‘the Beast’. Stop calling vaccines the mark of the beast. It’s embarrassing to watch. 666 is not a reference to barcodes and the Great Reset and Bill Gates. Stop it.
One major set of elements in this discussion that are past their use-by date and ready to be unceremoniously discarded are the ways in which we misframe the disagreements.
Let’s firstly talk about Millennial differences–and no, we don’t mean those differences that manifest in smashed avo toast and thrift shopping. Some wise commentator whose name escapes us once said, and aptly at that, that the Millennium is one thousand years of peace that Christians like to fight about. Indeed, many people start the eschatological taxonomical process by asking “are you premil, postmil or amil?” To spell out that question, the person is asking “do you believe that the Millennium will occur after the Second Coming of Christ, before the Second Coming of Christ, or do you believe that it began at the Resurrection and will end at the Great White Throne judgement?”
This makes the fundamental division of Eschatological views center around one detail that is mentioned once in Scripture, and one which we suggest has relatively little impact on your actions compared to other escatological details. Indeed, there are many functional similarities and overlaps between those three Millennial positions. Gentle reader, if you are now regretting telling your brother or sister that they are in danger of apostasy for being Amillennial, now is your cue to ask for their forgiveness.
Another useless set of badges that the Western church created to know which Christians to throw rotten apples at are whether you are ‘pre-trib, mid-trib or post-trib’, and then for each of those three categories, whether you are ‘pre-wrath’ or ‘post-wrath’. We will not go into all of the several combinations of those categories, but they basically serve to describe (a) if you hold to a Dispensational Premillennial view of the ‘rapture’, and then (b) when it occurs in relation to the ‘Great Tribulation’, and then (c) when all that occurs in relation to the wrath of God and of Satan, respectively. Luckily for those of us in Australia, the fights over those categories are mostly limited to the great land of the free, where many of those positions were created.
As we write this, we vaguely feel as if many pearls were just clutched at. Alas, but these things must take place, and trust this, they are only the beginning.
‘Ok’, the steamy reader might retort, ‘if you don’t like those categories, what categories should we use to determine who believes what?’
What we will suggest here is not the slightest bit new or original, and when it comes to Eschatology, it pays to be historical and orthodox, not novel. The ‘four views’ of the Revelation to John, though focalising the subject through one book, are probably the right place to start taxonomically. We would say that these give the broadest hermeneutical principles for how one approaches the study and subject of the ‘last things’ or ‘end times’ in Scripture, and in particular in the Apocalypse (yes, we love calling the last book of the Bible a variety of different things, it keeps you on your toes!) These four are as follows:
- Historicism
- Historicism basically sees the fulfillment of much of Biblical prophecy taking place throughout the past, in the present, and into the future. This creates a very long timeline, in which the Book of Revelation is sometimes treated like a very slow roadmap (pardon me Victorians, I know the phrase ‘very slow roadmap’ is not something we are fond of). Historicists may say the ‘period of the Church of Pergamum is coming to a close, and we are beginning the period of the Church of Thyatira’. That’s not a direct quote, just a hypothetical example. Though this author does not hold this position, he is bound to respect it, since it was held by many of the Protestant Reformers such as Luther, Cranmer, Calvin and Knox.
- Futurism
- Futurism sees most of Revelation, and key parts of Daniel and Ezekiel as still awaiting future fulfillment, e.g. Daniel’s 70th week (look it up if you don’t know what we mean by that, this article is already threatening to burst its seams, and then we’d be spoiling both the wine and the wineskin! What would Jesus say about that! Forgive our fast and loose bandying with and mixing of metaphors, sil vous plait). This view is closely aligned with Dispensational Premillennialism, but until that system was created, it was shunned by most non-Catholics. One major challenge with Futurism is that it necessitates a ‘revived Roman Empire’, due to the nature of the prophecies in Daniel and Revelation.
- Preterism
- Preterism is actually straight Heresy, (ooh look, even a capital H!) because it asserts that everything in Revelation has taken place. That is a fundamental denial of any meaningful concept of the return of Christ, the vindication of the saints, the judgement of all the earth, etc. However, partial preterism, (which is the view proffered by this author) hears the announcement over the speakers that ‘this train is an express service running direct to Heresy station, stopping no stations’, and gets the heck off just in time. Partial preterism is the position that some of the things in Revelation have already taken place, and some are still to come (see, not so scary now, and no heresy either, which is nice).
- Idealism
- This way of reading Revelation treats a lot of the major characters that appear after the seven letters as being symbols or types that describe various historical and still yet to come conflicts that face or have faced the Christian church. This view may tend towards turning things that seem concrete into symbols, but it makes the reading easy because you can do a lot of interpreting, and you don’t have to read much history.
If you want to read more on that, countless books have been written, and we would encourage you to consider all four very carefully. However, we want to steer this in a different direction. Let’s talk meat and bones, let’s talk about how it affects how you live and make decisions.
Some Postmillennialists, like this author, will (though with a degree of friendly rhetoric) suggest the terms ‘‘pessimillennial’ and ‘optimillennial’ as the essential distinctions between eschatological frameworks. The reason for that is that Postmillennialism is a uniquely optimistic framework. To the Amillennialists who disagree and claim an optimistic framework, I say that one or both of us does not understand your system, and it may very well be this author. Postmil folks have an essentially optimistic view of the future, because we expect Christ’s kingdom and his government and peace to slowly spread over all the Earth, so that the final scenes of this world will be of global victory, not global defeat, with one First Baptist Church somewhere in Texas being the last True Church on the planet. Since we don’t see the world ‘going to hell in a hand-basket’, and since we are waiting for probably thousands of years of world evangelism still, we consider it thoroughly worthwhile to build and build and invest and plant so that our great grandchildren’s great grandchildren might be able to benefit from what we left them. Aside from this being us unashamedly plugging Postmillennialism, this is an example of what we mean by applied eschatology.
Others, those who we might call ‘pessimillennialists’, are ultimately pessimistic about the future of Christ’s true church on Earth. They appeal to remnant theology, and the idea that God’s true people are always a small remainder of the visible assembly on Earth, whether they’re the elect during the Old Covenant or the elect during the New Covenant. They think about the world as a place ultimately controlled by Satan, where things will just keep getting worse, so there’s really not that much point polishing brass on a sinking ship.
We will not mince our words in saying that we denounce this attitude. The central eschatological thrust that all Orthodox Christians can affirm is that Christ will return bodily one day, and that that is very good news. Whatever your positions are on the little things, we hope that your doctrine of the End Times encourages you to build, to invest, to work the ground and kill the weeds, to reach the lost and fund Bible translation into languages that haven’t even begun to be written yet.
Every four years, everyone suddenly becomes an expert on the Olympics, and every man at his armchair becomes accredited to give critique and assessment to the most elite athletes from around the whole world. (This writer may indeed be guilty of having become temporarily very interested in a number of sports).
In the same way, major movements and dramas in history are often quickly and unnecessarily drawn into the realm of eschatological speculation and then dropped. Since we don’t talk about eschatology enough (or well enough) most of the time, when it does come up, every theory seems plausible. It’s this carelessness that has seen public figures (Henry Kissinger, Pope Leo X, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, John F. Kennedy, Mikhail Gorbachev and even Pope John Paul II!) throughout history misidentified as ‘the beast’ and ‘the antichrist’, even by such glowing characters as Martin Luther (who accused Pope Leo X of being the Antichrist).
We will be blunt: Don’t make a fool of yourself and become the proverbial boy who called wolf by calling everything the mark of the beast. Stop it. There’s always going to be some terrible world leader who starts a rumour about a war and then overnight there’s an amateur documentary about how he’s the Beast. It’s embarrassing. One little note to add here: We think there’s room to say that certain men throughout history (Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot) have acted in the same spirit or manner as the Beasts of Revelation 13, and so some very light comparison can be made to comment on how much of a terror such men have been, but that is using an analogy to reflect on human evil, not eschatological speculation.
Now, my dear Theophilus, we will switch focuses somewhat, whilst staying broadly in the same food court from which we have been eating. Please, we adjure you, pay attention to the core point of our following criticism, for it is this: the modern reader, especially if they are Western, and even more especially if they are American, takes it for granted that the ‘State’ currently called Israel which perches on the shoulders of Palestine is identical with the ‘all Israel’ (that will be saved) in Paul’s discourse in Romans 11:25-32. We will henceforth treat this assumption as a positive claim, and therefore begin this discourse not by levelling a rebuttal, but by asking for substantive argument for that claim, since a substantive argument is not made when this position is taken a priori. A good thought experiment that demonstrates this is to ask the 21st century Western Christian what interpretation a faithful Evangelical might have had of Romans 11:25-32 in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, when Greater Palestine was controlled or administered by the Ottomans and the British? One could not read ‘all Israel will be saved’, pull up a map, point to Jerusalem, and say, ‘ah yes, this is what Paul refers to’.
Have we made our point? This author will make no pretence of neutrality or dispassionate academic interest on this subject. We find it to be a historically untenable position that the judicially hardened Israel spoken of in Romans 11 can be easily identified with the settler-colonial nation of the same name that currently exists in Historic Palestine. This is possible, but by no means self-evident, and would reasonably require a positive case that is comprehensive and compelling to be made before it could be taken a priori.
This connects to what we established earlier about the audience of Scripture. Romans 11 was not written to you, it was written to first century Christians living in Rome. Also, because of the perspicuity of Scripture, those Christians will have been able to understand who Paul was referring to. If you bristle at this because you want to defend your idea of who Paul refers to in this passage, consider this: you must assert that Paul was unintentionally prophesying a future event, or that Paul was intentionally obfuscating his argument by referring to a future people with terms that already had established meaning in Scripture.
Let’s move on to the manner in which today’s ‘Israel’ was created. The first thing we can say is that it was not done by Christians, whether Messianic biological descendants of Abraham or otherwise. It was not done on the basis of Just War Theory, for which there are categories in Christian doctrine. Though one cannot simply describe how and why it was done, it shouldn’t be controversial to say that geopolitical motivations were prominent, not religious/prophetic/eschatological reasons. Herzl and the Zionists were a political and essentially atheistic movement.
The conquest of Palestine by the Zionists after the British Mandate is not comparable to how Joshua was commanded to conquer Canaan, not at all. Joshua was given direct revelation from God, he was given specific and limited instructions to seize the land God had promised his people and kill the people who resided there. Let us say as a side note that God would be entirely just in commanding any person or nation to destroy any other person or nation, because there is clearly and well established pattern in Scripture of God wielding unrighteous nations as tools of punishment and chastisement for other nations. However, this doesn’t mean that when a power-hungry leader annexes their neighbouring country, that they can say they are being wielded by God as a sword of Divine Judgement. In fact, that would be a 3rd Commandment violation. To claim that the conquest of Canaan establishes a precedent for the colonisation of Palestine is to establish a very dangerous precedent. That would permit anyone to appropriate the sections of God’s word where an individual is given a specific commandment and apply it with God’s authority to their life. Imagine someone saying that murdering their political rival was established biblically because of the climactic events in Esther, or imagine a young Egyptian Christian reenacting God’s judgements via Moses to disastrous effect!
To put it more simply and clearly, those things were God’s revealed will, but the colonisation of Palestine wasn’t. Now, all things happen according to God’s decretive will, but let no one make the elementary mistake of appealing to God’s sovereignty as a justification for their immoral actions.
If you hadn’t already suspected or deduced as much, this author is unashamedly pro-Palestinian.
This is because of a number of combined factors, including the unlawful nature of the establishment of ‘Israel’, the false justice of punishing Palestinians for the sins of Germans, the plight of the Palestinian people today, the asymmetry of the conflict, international law, and more. Now, (and you might say, mercifully), we’re not going to go through all of those things comprehensively. We do actually want some of you to finish reading this essay.
We will address a hypothetical that many ask: ‘what would you have done to fix the conflict?’ Our answer is this: as ethnic Jews fled various parts of the world to come to Palestine, it would have been more lawful for them to become Palestinian citizens (we are aware that this was not exactly possible, given the Palestinian people’s timeless lack of self-determination or independent nation-hood). One nation, one ‘nationality’ and as many ethnic and religious groups as you like. This is, incidentally, how many modern nations work. You can be an Australian yet come from all the nations of the Earth. However, you don’t come here and set up your own private enclaves and parallel economies. You learn English, and you invest in the country that has welcomed you and given you the right to call it home. Let us say this clearly. This author thinks it would have been more in accordance with God’s revealed will (more lawful, more truly fair) if the modern state of ‘Israel’ had never been created. However, God is the author of history, and not this author, so we will not go as far as to say that it should have happened differently, in the ultimate sense, because that would constitute a challenge against God’s wisdom, and well, we rather enjoy being alive.
The political discourse in the last 20 years has largely surrounded ideas like the ‘two-state solution’, and the ‘reality on the ground’. In short, those two things are mutually exclusive of one another. The ‘reality on the ground’ is the fact that the Settlers have effectively complete control over Historic Palestine, a status that they only wish to expand and increase. The ‘two-state solution’ is essentially the idea of there being two distinct, independent, sovereign states; namely, Israel and Palestine, whose borders would roughly follow the Green Line (a.k.a the 1949 Armistice Line). To spell it out, the reality on the ground is that ‘Israel’ has 9 marbles and Palestine has 1. The two-state solution would give both of them 5 each, and, well, the Settlers want to keep their marbles. Many commentators say we are heading towards an inevitable one-state solution, but there are a number of complicating factors that might prevent this, unless the Settlers are willing to go to Holocaust levels of purging, and wouldn’t that be ironic.
Ok, that’s enough on Israel/Palestine. We are going to propose a number of ‘eschatological bumpers’, which are hopefully straightforward texts that can give us some safety bumpers to help us stay within the realms of what is clear about Christian end times doctrine.
First things first, let’s look at 1 Corinthians 15:20-28. Paul is teaching on the general resurrection, an important end times event. Let’s see how he builds his argument:
- Christ has been raised from the dead
- As the firstfruits of the dead, Christ’s resurrection proves the resurrection of all who are ‘asleep’ in him.
- Death came through a man
- Because of (3), the resurrection of the dead also comes through a man. (Side note: this argument alone necessitates the teaching that there was no death or sin in the world before Adam, which challenges most evolutionary worldviews. Conversely, rejecting the idea that death came through Adam falsifies the premise Paul gives for why the Christian can expect resurrection).
- Just as surely as the fact that all people who are in Adam will die, you can trust that all people who are in Christ will be made alive.
This is the point where in a few short verses, Paul puts down an understandable and clear sequence of events that relate to the general resurrection. They go as follows.
- First Christ is risen from the dead (which has already happened, obviously)
- Then, when he comes, all who have fallen asleep in him (died trusting in him for salvation) will be raised bodily.
- Then, the end will come. This time is identified as ‘when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power’. (So, from the internal logic of that verse; the destruction of all dominion, authority and power will precede Christ presenting his kingdom to his Father, which is ‘the end’.)
- Here, Paul adds some more detail about Christ’s kingdom and the destruction of his enemies. He says ‘for [Christ] must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death’.
Let’s put all of that together now. (a) Christ’s resurrection is the grounds and promise of your resurrection. (b) Christ reigns, right now, and he will continue to do so until all his enemies have been put under his feet/destroyed. Once all his enemies are destroyed and/or brought into submission, he will present his kingdom to his Father, and that will be the end. We hope that the reader can agree that this exposition is straightforward, and absent of any extra interpretation. We have used only the words and grammar of the passage to lay down that timeline.
There is certainly room for discussion about what it means for all Christ’s enemies to be ‘destroyed’ or ‘put under his feet’. However, most Christians do not believe that the defeat of Christ’s enemies marks The End, but rather the victory of Christ’s enemies against a ‘remnant’ church on the Earth. This author throws down the gauntlet thus: if you believe that, prove it.
Jesus told his people to disciple the world and teach it to obey Christ (Matthew 28:18-20, Romans 1:5, Romans 16:26), and to be spiritual gate-crashers (Matthew 16:17-19). Do you really think that he gave the church a mission to spread the gospel to all the world, to teach the obedience of faith to all the nations, to expect the submission of all his enemies before the Last Day, but actually the Christian church will either be broadly defeated or whisked off to heaven while the unrighteous inherit the earth? Well, this author finds that preposterous. If you disagree, prove it from Scripture, and refute our arguments.
We wish to add one further note about a phrase that this author really does find confusing. Romans 11:25b-26a reads “Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved.”
This author does not know what to make of that phrase. Are we expecting that one day, the last elect Gentile will be saved, and then there will be a national softening and repentance given to the true Israel? Does that mean that when Christians start seeing a widespread avalanche of Jewish* converts that their unbelieving Gentile friends have missed the chance, since the full number of Gentiles comes in before nation Jewish* repentance? Well, whatever it means, this author imagines that it is a while away, yet.
*We say this with an asterisk because the term Jewish has many meanings other than the one we are trying to go for, namely, a term denoting membership in the true Israel that Paul refers to in Romans 11.
Finally, a comment on Daniel, whose prophecy is closely related to the core eschatological doctrines. Daniel’s prophecy in Chapter 2 about the statue made up of different materials is a truly awesome prophecy, and it powerfully shows that God is sovereign and decrees the future in its historical accuracy and fulfilment. In short, Daniel prophesies about a statue made of four types of materials, and each of those materials represent successive kingdoms that will rule in the lead up to God establishing a kingdom that will never be destroyed. These four kingdoms were the Babylonians, Medo-Persians, Greeks and finally Romans. In the prophecy, the statue is brought to an end by the arrival of the ‘rock cut not with human hands’ which smashes the kingdoms before it, and brings the arrival of God’s kingdom, one that will never end or be defeated. History tells us that it was during the power of the Roman Empire that Christ came and established his kingdom on Earth. How amazing is that! Daniel’s words have been fulfilled so accurately. The ‘rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled the whole Earth’. Mountains are a common OT symbol of national powers, so this is essentially saying that Christ’s kingdom will grow like a formidable nation until it fills the whole Earth.
With that, we have reached the end of this author’s tirade of gauntlet-throwing and pot-stirring. We started with three foundations, namely the perspicuity, audience and mission of Scripture. Then we applied that to two important sections of Scripture, Matthew 24 and Revelation 13. After that, we considered how the conversation has been misframed by Millennial differences, and instead offered the ‘four views’ as a more helpful taxonomy for eschatological ‘camps’, with an aside about optimillennialism and pessimillenialism. We encouraged the esteemed reader not to find Beasts and Antichrists under every rock and leaf, and Next this author gave a political and historical analysis of the current Israel/Palestine situation in the light of Scripture, and where that topic intersects with Romans 11. We sought to provide some bare-basics eschatological bumpers by doing a close reading of 1 Corinthians 15, then advanced the Biblical case for the success of the gospel in history, challenging the popular idea of the Christian church ultimately being a whittled down remnant.
If you have read this far, honoured reader, you have our sincerest gratitude, and hearty thanks. We hope that this essay has caused you to think in straighter terms about the End Times, and hopefully to be prepared to extend grace to your brothers and sisters who think differently. If you feel personally attacked, don’t hesitate to contact this author. The word on the street is that he takes reconciliation seriously!
If, by some inexplicable and curious miracle, you have read this far and yet know that you do not profess faith in Christ, and are not trusting in him for salvation, then hear us clearly: the Bible speaks with utmost clarity that you will bow to God one day, and it won’t be pretty. John could barely find the words to describe how terrifying the Glorified Christ was to him, and we shudder to imagine what it would be like to come before the Great White Throne Judgement, clothed not in the righteousness of Christ, but instead bearing an immense record of our own sin and guilt. In the end, Christ will be victorious. We plead with you today to trust in him, to submit fully to him, and to find in him the most firm assurance of salvation and satisfaction.
Distilled Orthopraxy 