Content in category Opposing Views
[…] Through the mystery of the gospel, this grace (the salvation of the coming day) has appeared to all men in unexpected advance of THAT DAY. This is the revelation of the one new man through the mystery of Christ in you (even you gentiles), but this takes nothing from the promise that the gospel will yet be revealed to the beleaguered remnant at the end of Jacob’s trouble. That will be the time of the “restitution of all things spoken by all the prophets since the world began.” To conceive of that restoration as NOT including God’s covenant promise to ‘post-tribulational Israel would have been unthinkable, as it surely was to Paul. Instead, the church, for the larger part, continues to “boast against the branches” to this day, even while Jerusalem trembles (Isa 34:8; Zech 12:2), threatening the “literal” fulfillment of all unfulfilled prophecy that has been denied for most of church history.
So despite Jewish unbelief concerning Christ, the covenant places and institutions are still divinely regarded as “holy”. Therefore, when we speak of the rage of the Antichrist against the “holy covenant” (Dan 11:28, 30), we are speaking of Satan’s hatred of Jewish election and right to the Land on the basis of divine predestination. We are NOT suggesting that Jewish worship counts for anything apart from faith in Christ. Manifestly, it does not. Otherwise, their worship would be acceptable. That it is NOT acceptable is shown by the fact that Israel’s greatest discipline and judgment comes at the very time their religious self assurance is reaching its heights […]
[…] How we read Daniel and Revelation is first an issue of whether we can trust what Luther called, the priesthood of every believer, or whether we can only safely follow the tradition of interpretation that has come down to us through many of the churchs theological heroes, such as the famed magisterial Reformers, Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, and their vast theological progeny, as also the popes and bishops of the church of Rome. For the larger part, all have been Augustinian in their interpretation of the Daniel and the Apocalypse. This is why amillennialism has dominated most of Protestant and nearly all Roman Catholic eschatology. It is well known that St. Augustine of Hippo is the father of the a-millennial interpretation of the thousand years (i.e., that the church is the kingdom of God on earth and the millennium is symbolic of the church age).
Augustinian denial of a future millennium is not the only system of interpretation that denies the literal interpretation of the many prophecies that depict the post-tribulational salvation of a surviving remnant of the Jewish people and the restoration of the nation as a distinctly Jewish nation (Dan 2:44). Simply put, if there is no millennium, there can be no literal fulfillment of the vast amount of prophecy that depicts a glorious future for benighted and beleaguered Israel after the unequaled tribulation at the coming day of the Lord, which the New Testament equates with the time of Christs return […]
[…] Until recently, the church has, for the larger part, retired in defeat from Jewish evangelism. Yet nothing else is more calculated to prepare and deepen the church in its own faith than its encounter with the formidable Jew, the beloved enemy “for your sakes”. The Jew forces the church to do its homework. The challenge of outreach and witness to the Jew is calculated to deepen the church’s appreciation for the mystery of the faith as nothing else. If the church resigns its calling to go to the Jew first, it surrenders a key component in God’s larger strategy in the evangelism of the nations. Hence, the church that is ineffectual towards Israel is ineffectual in a crucial aspect of its mission, which must be accomplished in order for Christ to return.
Israel is God’s self appointed mission impossible. History has an appointment to keep. The glory of God is demonstrated in His ability to finally bring the very same people that He first brought out of Egypt into the Land to stay (see Num 14:11-21; Dan 2:44. Compare the phrase “other people in Lev 20:24, 26 with Dan 2:44). The divine conquest of Jewish unbelief will be the like the parting of the Red Sea. The birthing of Israel ‘in one day’ (Isa 66:8; Zech 3:9) will be a monument to irresistible grace, comparable to Paul’s sovereign divine arrest on the Damascus road (Gal 1:15-16; w/ Ps 102:13; 110:3). Only this will be public in the sight of all nations. Indeed God has bound the destiny of all nations to the fall and rising again of Israel. If the church knew this, as it once did, it could never pray for the kingdom to come on earth without this consciousness. It would see Israel’s salvation as a special object of its corporate travail (in analogy to Paul’s travail for his Galatians; Gal 4:19 w/ Isa 66:8; Rev 12:2). […]
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… With the new revelation has come a new language. But this is where we need to exercise caution. We learn from the doctrine of Christ’s pre-existence that for something to be newly revealed does not mean that it has come newly into existence.; This is an important distinction when we are speaking of Christ and the church. Much has come to light in the gospel that had real existence before the dispensation of the fuller revelation. This applies as much to the ‘body of Christ’ as to Christ Himself and the unity of persons in the Godhead. …
… Notice the the Lord’s unique use of ‘you’ in His indictment. It is the same in Stephen’s apologetic. It is the generic ‘you’ of corporate solidarity, hence an abiding generation. It is a generation that does not escape judgment, regardless of its particular location in chronological time, ‘UNTIL’ …. This is why Jesus could speak of a future day of public acknowledgment of His messianic dignity, and describes it in terms of the generational ‘until YOU will say.’ It is why He could indict His own contemporaries as present in the killing of the prophets in the very persons of their fathers (“whom you slew”). And it is why Zechariah can speak particularly of the last generation of Jewish survivors of the last tribulation as ‘looking on Him whom THEY have pierced,’ as though they were the actual historical murderers of the Messiah…
… So we fully affirm that a rapture will occur, but not as it is being taught. Those that teach that the rapture is BEFORE the tribulation (called the “pre-tribulational view. ‘Pre’ means before) see it as escape and exemption from the last persecution, which they confuse with the wrath of God, and point out that believers are not ‘appointed to wrath’ (1Thes 5:9). There is, of course, a clear distinction between tribulation and divine wrath. There is a clear distinction throughout the book of Revelation between the saints endure the wrath of man and those that are called ‘earth dwellers’ that experience the wrath of God. Manifestly, there are many saints in the tribulation period that are not “appointed to wrath,” but this exemption does not require physical removal from the scene (Lk 21:18; Rev 7:3; 12:6). …
[…] If ever there was an interpretation getting away with exegetical ‘murder’, it’s certainly preterism. They are forced to separate what God has joined. For example, it is exegetically impossible to separate the day of the Lord from the destruction of Jerusalem. The day of the Lord is the hope of Israel in the OT and the church’s hope of Christ’s return in the new. Orthodox preterists rightly recognize the NT’s references to the day of the Lord as still pertaining to the church’s ‘blessed hope’ of Christ’s return, but inconsistently deny its relation to the tribulation and Jerusalem for entirely dogmatic reasons. To do this, they must deny that the post-tribulational return of Christ described in the synoptics (MT 24; Mk 13; Lk 21) is connected with the church’s hope of Christ return, which, of course, the NT itself unambiguously identifies with the still future day of the Lord […]
[…] I’ve never studied the matter closely, probably because I can’t see where it would make a lot of difference. Sure, it’s a ‘make or break’ for preterism. They absolutely MUST defend the early date with all their might, and you know the power of a subjective interest. But that is only because they are content with a hodge podge of inconsistent exegesis. For example, if we make Nero the Beast, then how can we NOT make him Paul’s man of sin, which is obviously Daniel’s ‘willful king’ (11:36) ‘little horn’ (7:21) and beast (7:11)? Since this figure is clearly destroyed at no time short of Christ’s return (whether mystically or literally conceived), then you have a real problem, because Nero meets his ‘apocalyptic’ demise quite some time before Jerusalem is destroyed by Titus, (the other so-called return of Christ in ‘mystical’ apocalyptic judgment) some years later. So what’s wrong with this picture? Exegetically everything! The Beast is slain and the millennium of the martyred souls is believed to begin with the death of the Nero, the Beast, some years before the siege and fall of Jerusalem. It’s silly. In the real world of biblical exegesis, the brief tenure of the Beast’s career coincides with the final desolations of Jerusalem as perfectly concurrent . So early dating John’s Apocalypse assists nothing for the preterist’s cause. I have no problem with an earlier date, because I have no problem that the book might have had a very beneficial early circulation, bracing both Roman Christians in the north of the empire and Jewish Christians in the south for two very horrific but distinct periods of tribulation, both having much of the essence of the final tribulation that closes this age with the “actual’ return of Christ. […]
