Will the Rapture Be September 23, 2025?

Will the Rapture Be September 23, 2025?

Sep 23, 2025 | Eschatology

This was the title of a YouTube video. I was surprised because I thought the failure of dispensationalists predicting the rapture for almost 200 years had put an end to this prediction business. Apparently not. This specific video was of a guy shooting down the prediction, which is like shooting fish in a barrel, given the woeful track record of dispensationalist predictions, not to mention the theological errors inherent in it.

We live in a different eschatological world than I did when I first became a Christian in 1978. That was the decade of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, a book popular in a way inconceivable to us now. Published in 1970, it eventually sold over 35 million copies by the 1990s, and talk of the rapture and antichrist and Armageddon was everywhere. And world events at the time seemed to lend credibility to the wild speculation. It was all over Christian radio, and popular culture as well. Prophesy conferences were common, as were sermons about it in church. Rapture speculation was common. I’ll never forget one day right before I graduated from college in May 1982 standing out in front of my dorm at Arizona State University praying for the rapture to come so I wouldn’t have to go out into the real world and deal with real life. No such luck! On January 1, 1988, a former NASA rocket engineer named Edgar C. Whisenant self-published a book with the unfortunate title, 88 reasons Why The Rapture Will Be in 1988. We’re still here, by the way.

The frenzy continued into the 90s with the Left Behind series of books, a collection of 16 Christian fiction novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, published from 1995 to 2007. These were turned into a film trilogy from 2000 to 2005, probably the pop cultural apex of “Rapture theology.” (One of the ironies of recent history is that the star of those films, Kirk Cameron, is now a bona fide postmillennialist!) There was even a Left Behind movie in 2014 with Nicolas Cage, although by that time dispensationalism had pretty much run its course. Saying that I do not mean this eschatological perspective on “end times” has gone away, only that it’s no longer a relevant topic of conversation for most Christians. But having said that, dispensationalism hasn’t gone away, only now it’s become the furniture of the Evangelical mind, the background to life that colors how conservative Protestant Christians see things. It’s the assumed eschatology, not much discussed or debated, except maybe on social media. If you asked most Christians if Jesus is coming back soon, or any moment, or if the world is going to get increasingly worse, they would likely say yes. They are familiar with antichrist, rapture, and 666, but don’t much think about it or come across it in church or Christian culture.

Most Christians also live a kind of dualistic pietistic Christianity which fits perfectly with their dispensational assumptions. Christianity is primarily about saving souls, going to heaven when we die, and personal holiness. All of this is predictable given how modern Evangelical Christianity developed over the last two hundred years as the offspring of the Second Great Awakening and the fundamentalism to which it gave birth. For those who are younger among us, they’ve likely never heard conservative Christians referred to as “fundamentalists,” only as Evangelicals. Here’s a brief history as to why.

The word fundamentalist or fundamentalism today is rarely if ever used to refer to conservative Protestant Christians because of 9/11. The words were regularly used to refer to Islam and Muslims, and the angry “New Atheists” tried to slap that label on us in their short stay in the pop cultural sun, but it didn’t stick. In due course conservative Christians were always referred to as Evangelicals. This was a fascinating development for me because when I became a Christian, fundamentalists were a subset of conservative Christianity because of the modernist-fundamentalist controversies of the early 20th century. Evangelicals were a separate subset. This break came after World War II when a small group of Christian leaders, including Billy Graham, wanted to break out of the cultural and intellectual insularity of fundamentalism. They founded Christianity Today and Fuller Theological Seminary, and would only refer to themselves as Evangelicals. After I discovered Francis Schaeffer in college I was ever thereafter an Evangelical. Now we all are.

Why the Rapture?
As I said, most Christians assume dispensational eschatology, and that we are in the “end times,” but few know where it came from or why it exists. Sadly, Christians are as woefully ignorant of history as most Americans, and dispensationalism is one of the defining theological characteristics of modern Evangelicalism nobody knows about. If you want a solid history of its development and demise, I would suggest Daniel G. Hummel’s excellent book, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism. I was only vaguely aware of some aspects of this development, and Hummel filled in all the blanks. Before we get to the rapture, I’ll briefly give you my synopsis.

Hummel doesn’t do this, but I would place the start of dispensationalism with the rise of Pietism among German Lutherans in the 17th century. From there Pietism, a dualistic form of spirituality, spread throughout Europe, especially with Wesley in England and Whitfield in America, as well as the Puritans in the First Great Awakening. In the 1830s out of the dynamics of these religious movements, a group of British and Irish dissenters, the most prominent among them J.N. Darby, came up with a novel idea of biblical dispensations, eventually to be called dispensationalism in the 1920s. Until then they were called the “new premillennialists” because their version of eschatology was very different from what thereafter came to be called historic premillennialism. They were also known as the Plymouth Brethren, after the city in England where they had their biggest gatherings. Probably the first real eschatological pessimists, they believed the church was so corrupted that God’s judgment was coming on the world because of it, and likely soon. Their theology developed over time, but became dominant with C.I. Scofield (1843-1921) and his bestselling Reference Bible.

What really ramped up the growth of dispensationalism were Darby’s visits to America from 1862-1877, seven times in all, encompassing a total of seven years. The new premillennialism made its greatest impact through the great evangelist of the 19th century, D.L. Moody (1837-1899). He and American revivalism would never be pure enough for the pessimistic Darby, but his teachings through the Plymouth Brethren came to dominate American Evangelical Christianity. According to Hummel speaking of Moody:

His premillennialism helped to popularize some of the key points as taught by Brethren and early American converts, including the imminent rapture and heavenly nature of the church.

As a successful businessman, Moody was an organizer, and it was the network he built that moved the new premillennialism to the center of Northern Evangelical culture, which continued into the fundamentalism of the 20th century, north, south, east, and west.

The connection between revivalism and this new pessimistic eschatology can’t be overstated. Hummel states it well:

These two implications of Moody’s ministry—the popularization and fusion of new premillennialism with revivalism—could hardly be separated. They worked together to form a potent and wildly successful message. Moody’s ministry spearheaded an interdenominational evangelical ethos shot through with the influences of the new premillennialism.

The Civil War played no small part in that. Given the death and destruction and horror, it wasn’t a stretch to believe that Jesus would be coming back soon to rescue his church. Moody’s version of the new premillennialism was a simple one: “Jesus could come at any moment, and you don’t want to be left behind.” For Moody the Pietist revivalist, the details of doctrine were not that important. And doctrine was divisive and only got in the way of what was most important—soul saving. What mattered in life and Christianity was whether you were going to heaven or hell when you died. Then once you were scared into eternal life with Jesus, what counted was living “the higher life” and personal holiness, and victorious Christian living. It was a potent message for me in 1978. In fact, an experience of what I call “drive by evangelism” was instrumental in bringing me to Christ. One evening at a party not long before I was leaving for college, a buddy of mine and I were outside of a party having a smoke, and a VW bug, the old school one in those days, parks across the street, and a guy gets out of the back seat and walks over to us. I think he’s going to shoot us or something, and he says, “If you died right now would you go to heaven?” I did not want to go to hell when I died, so soon thereafter when I went to college I was praying “the sinner’s prayer.”

The Rapture and Its Predictions
If we’re talking about the Rapture, it will help to know what dispensationalists actually believe about the primary doctrine that defines their eschatology. Hummel here is helpful.

The close of this dispensation will be heralded by the imminent rapture, a sudden taking up into heaven of all true Christians to meet Jesus in the air (based on I Thess. 4:13-17). With the church removed from the earth, God will unleash judgments for seven years as part of the plan for world redemption. God will allow evil to reign and will permit the rise to power of the antichrist, a perversion of Christ’s incarnation that sees Satan fuse with the human dictator of a one-world government. Plagues, geopolitical machinations, and wars will ensue—the earth will be utterly devastated. Israel, God’s chosen people and instrument for world redemption, will be seemingly on the verge of destruction, but a remnant will find supernational preservation. At the climax of the seven years, the battle of Armageddon will see the victorious raptured church, led by Jesus himself, vanquish the forces of the antichrist. Satan will be bound for a thousand years; this is the same span of time that the millennial kingdom will reign in Jerusalem, its realm the entire globe, its rule one of peace and justice. A final confrontation with Satan after the thousand years will dispatch the devil forever into the lake of fire and prompt the final judgment of humanity.

The doctrine of the Rapture, if we can call it that, developed from Darby’s theological assumptions, most importantly his view of the church. First, he saw the church of his day as a corrupted body, and its ruin would be the precursor to the second coming. This was in contrast to what he considered the perversion of postmillennialism that saw organized Christianity ushering in a millennium of peace. Most importantly, he separated ancient Israel from the church. The Hebrews or Jews in ancient Israel were in no way connected to the New Testament church. Christians were citizens of heaven, but the kingdom of heaven on earth, a reign of peace could only ultimately come through Israel.

The details of this theology were worked out throughout the 19th century, but especially with Scoffield and his reference Bible. Old and new premillennialism intermixed in this development, but the rapture was an early feature. As it moved to America even prior to Darby’s visit, the Millerite movement led by Baptist minister William Miller got into the prophecy speculation business, and declared that Jesus would return (often associated with a rapture like event) on October 22, 1844. When it didn’t happen it came to be known as the Great Disappointment, but it would only be the first of many disappointments. Before this September 23 predication popped out of the dispensational rabbit hole, the last modern prediction was from Harold Camping who predicted the Rapture on May 21, 2011, followed by a revised date of October 21, 2011, after the initial failure.

It is impossible to know exactly how many of these predictions happened over the years, but once a rapture like event entered the Evangelical bloodstream seeing world events as indicating some kind of apocalyptic end was a common occurrence, even if most Christians didn’t get into the prediction business. This dispensationalism mentality, the pessimistic the “we lose down here” perspective of life on this fallen earth, in the words of John McArthur, is the worldview of almost all Evangelical Christians. To one degree or another, they all share it regardless of their eschatological convictions or knowledge. That was my perspective most of my Christian life until I embraced postmillennialism just over three years ago. Things were inevitably going to get worse until eventually they got so bad Jesus would have to come back and save the day.

The Rapture and Futurism
Fundamental to dispensationalism and the rapture mentality is futurism, or the idea that the prophetic texts in the Bible refer to events in the future, not to any historical proximity in which they were written. There are three basic eschatological assumptions regarding prophecy and timeline, futurism being one. The others are historicism, which correlates prophecy to historical events, so for example, to the Reformers the Pope was the antichrist, and preterism, which says the events of prophecy happened in the past. The most solid biblical case can be made for a mixture of preterism and futurism. Some Christians have decided that it’s either all preterism or all futurism, but those lead to all kinds of problems, as we can see from Darby and the dispensationalism his thought eventually gave birth to.

For most of my Christian life I was a futurist, but I didn’t even know the term, nor had I ever heard the word preterism, which just means past in Latin. I’ll never forget one morning walking into our bedroom as my wife was reading about the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 or Luke 21, and understandably confused, she asked me some questions. I remember being just as confused and replied, “Oh well, who knows. God does.” That was typical of my pan-millennialist tendencies, that it will all work out in the end, so why bother with it. Then the most repeated month in my writing happened, August 2022, and postmillennialism dropped out of the sky on my head. For some reason I read this title of a James White sermon on YouTube, “My Journey to Hope for the Future,” and downloaded it on my trusty little MP3 player. Steve Bannon had turned me into an optimist, but I had no substantive theological reason for it, until I heard this sermon.

I hadn’t realized until these last few years that my basic pessemism about the present and future was due to futurism and its assumptions. Kim Riddlebarger, a scholar and pastor for many years, is a perfect example of why. He is not at all a fan of an optimism/pessimism paradigm, as he argues in a piece he wrote some years ago, and part of the reason is his furutistic reading of Matthew 24:

Jesus himself speaks of world conditions at the time of his return as being similar to the way things were in the days of Noah (Matt. 24:37-38)—hardly a period in world history characterized by the Christianizing of the nations and the near-universal acceptance of the gospel associated with so-called optimistic forms of eschatology.

This is only true if Jesus is referring to his own second coming at the end of time, not the coming judgment on Israel in AD70 he is in fact talking about. In Matthew 24 Jesus has told the disciples while they were standing on the Mount of Olives looking at the magnificent temple, “Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.” That was shocking, so they ask: “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

Every futurist, which is the vast majority of Christians, assume the coming Jesus is talking about is the second coming, the end of time and the consummation of all things, and the age is this fallen world system. But Jesus says clearly that is not what he’s talking about: 34 “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.” It takes all kind of pretzel logic to claim “this” doesn’t mean “this,” but that hasn’t kept Christians from doing it because they come to the text with their futurist assumptions, like Kim, and have to say it doesn’t really mean “this.” When I was confused, I figured some of what Jesus said referred to the generation he was speaking to, and some didn’t, but that was pretty much arbitrary.

Even though plenty of Christians were futurists throughout Christian history, it wasn’t until Darby and his novel dualisms of the church being heavenly and not earthly, and the church and Israel, that his potent pessimism became a feature of Christianity. His theology informed by his futuristic assumptions enabled rapture theology to blossom into dispensationalism that would eventually envelop almost the entire Evangelical church. Thankfully, there will be no rapture on September 23 because Christ did not call his church to escape the world, but to overcome and transform it. As Jesus taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.”

 

Why Critics Misunderstand and Distort Postmillennialism

Why Critics Misunderstand and Distort Postmillennialism

Sep 17, 2025 | Eschatology

I’ve written here and there about how woefully misunderstood postmillennialism is, but I’ve never given it the full blog post treatment. There are deep historical and theological reasons for the typical knee-jerk reaction that will be fascinating to explore given Christians live in profound eschatological tension, the already and the not yet. The question and the debate always has and always will come down to the scope and extent of what N.T. Wright calls inaugurated eschatology. In other words, what will be fully realized at the end broke into our world at Christ’s first coming, his life, death, resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost. The moment the tongues of fire came down on the 120 disciples in that upper room in Jerusalem, the Holy Spirit was unleashed in His redemptive power to bring God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. What does that all mean? What are the practical results in this still fallen world from Christ’s accomplished work? Therein lies the debate.

John Murray, the great Scottish theologian who helped found and for decades taught at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, wrote a book called Redemption Accomplished and Applied, the title of which captures the essence of this debate. He writes primarily about soteriology and the order of salvation, or how we are saved, but salvation is not limited only to our own personal saving from the guilt and penalty of sin. Salvation is much bigger than just us, as we learn from the Apostle Paul in Romans 8:

18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; 21 because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved.

Our salvation is literally cosmic in scope. That means creation in all its manifestations will be redeemed and renewed, starting with the apex of God’s handiwork, man, who will become fully human through everything it means for him to be a human being. Paradise lost will become paradise restored, slowly but surely in this life, then completely at Christ’s return.

Aristotle in his Politics said man is a political animal, not exactly a biblical way to put it, but yes, human beings are intuitively driven to organize with others in developing societal structures, be it family, church, business, or government. Christ’s redemption is applied to all these spheres, specifically under his kingly rule from the right hand of God. This is why before he ascended to that ultimate position of power in the universe he told his disciples:

18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Notice Jesus says all authority to all the nations. One would think given the clarity of Christ’s command, along with the clarity of redemptive history in God’s revelation, the scope and extent of the church’s mission would not be a point of contention, but it is. Jesus even used a Greek word we translate in English as nations, and not a comparable Greek word for individual. His charge was to disciple people groups as corporate entities, not merely as isolated people in their personal lives. This was accepted by all Christians regardless of their eschatology until the Second Great Awakening in the mid-19th century when soul saving became evangelicalism’s raison d’etre, or reason for being. Conservative Protestant Christianity became about saving souls so we can go to heaven when we die and personal holiness. Cultural transformation now became, at best, the incidental fruit of the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth, not as Christ seems to be saying one of its primary purposes. It took a while in the form of fundamentalism in the 20th century for our version of Protestant Christianity to completely turn in on itself. But by the middle of the century Christianity in America had become culturally irrelevant and the Great Commission had changed. The charge had become to save as many as we can from a sinking ship while the world goes to hell in the proverbial handbasket.

How the Enlightenment and Dispensationalism Took Down Postmillennialism
It seems my favorite bogeyman has to make an appearance in all such discussions, and this one is no different. The Enlightenment, a period of Western history starting in the mid-17th century, gave birth to the philosophical concept of rationalism. Man, so it was thought, via his reason could discern all truth without any reference to revelation. This process slowly progressed through the 18th century, but by the late 19th as Friederich Nietzsche said, God was dead and Western intellectual man had killed him. This entire period coincided with the Scientific Revolution and a remarkable increase in knowledge that inspired sinful man’s Babel like tendencies that he could accomplish anything. Given the Western world at the time was known as Christendom, it was inevitable that Enlightenment rationalism would make its way into Christianity.

The first consequence we see develop among Christians in the late 18th century is the heresy of Arianism, a rejection of the Trinity. Ironically, what came to be called Unitarianism grew out of Puritan churches in New England that in due course would come to be known as the mainline churches in the 20th century. The abolition, feminist, and temperance movements were filled with such Unitarians, people who still embraced Christianity but rejected Christ as God. For them, and the liberal Christianity they birthed, Jesus was a great moral teacher and example, but not the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. At the same time as this liberalizing tendency was taking over large parts of more intellectual and activist Christianity, the Second Great Awakening burst onto the cultural scene in response. This revivalist movement was anti-intellectual and anti-theological, and out of which would come dispensationalism. These two streams of Christianity would flow in opposite directions both of which would end up discrediting postmillennialism in the eyes of all Christians.

Into the 1800s Christ’s prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” was something all Christians believed was the mission of the church. Even Monastic movements prior to the Reformation sought to transform this fallen world with the righteousness of Christ, as did the Pietistic movements inspired by them after the Reformation. What united all Christian visions of transformation prior to the 19th century was a dependence on the Spirit of God. These were not Babel building projects of man’s hubris, but God working through His people to crush Satan under their feet (Rom. 16:20). Once orthodox Christianity was thrown under the bus, the spirit of Babel merged with a growing secular confidence that nature itself could be conquered by human ingenuity and will. The “new premillennialism” developed by the Plymouth Brethren and J.N. Darby in Ireland in the 1830s was a response to this secularizing tendency in the church. They saw corruption everywhere, and the convoluted eschatology of dispensationalism was the result.

Largely because of the Enlightenment and the growing secularism it spawned, Christianity encountered a fork in the road in that fateful century. Down one road was a this-world, man-centered hubris, down the other was an other worldly over spiritualized piety of escape. Biblical postmillennialists who affirmed a rigorous orthodoxy would not take either road. They would, however, after World War I, be tarred with the Babel label. The collective insanity of the Western World known as The Great War, the war to end all wars, would cement pessimistic eschatology into the minds of Evangelicals for the rest of the century. Postmillennialism would be discredited as the perversion of unbiblical secular progress, man thinking he could usher in the kingdom of God based on his own efforts and ingenuity. That is exactly what I thought it was until August of 2022. I was actually shocked that a biblical case could be made for an optimistic eschatology.

Optimism or Pessimism: The Parable of the Wheat and The Tares
In addition to postmillennialism having the baggage of being secular progress, critics contend its optimism is biblically unwarranted. I thought so myself. When I embraced amillennialism in 2014 I found over time that it turned me into a pessimist. In the parable of the wheat and the tares, or weeds, Jesus tells of the kingdom being like a man who sowed good seed in his field. An enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat. Jesus says the weeds should not be pulled up before the harvest lest the wheat gets pulled up with them, so the weeds and the wheat will grow up together until the end.

Both pre- and A-mill see this as the metaphor for life in our fallen world. Sin and righteousness are in constant conflict and in due course the weeds win. Pastor and theologian Kim Riddlebarger, who convinced me initially to embrace amillennialism, puts it this way:

Aside from the fact that many contemporary notions of optimism have stronger ties to the Enlightenment than to the New Testament. . . the New Testament’s teaching regarding human depravity (i.e., Eph. 4:17-19) should give us pause not to be too optimistic about what sinful men and women can accomplish in terms of turning the City of Man into a temple of God.

You can see in his comment two of the straw men I discussed above. One is that postmillennialism is a product of the Enlightenment and not Scripture, and the other is that it teaches that we usher in the kingdom of God through human effort. Neither of which resembles the truth in the least.

The conflict of sin and righteousness, good and evil, is what informs the worldview of most Christians, as it used to do with me. If you think this way and simply look at the world in all its misery and suffering, it’s almost impossible not to be a pessimist. If we live by sight and not by faith, we will inevitably see the weeds as the ultimate winners in our fallen world. But, as I found out, if we live by faith it’s a completely different story. Instead of seeing conflict everywhere like two heavy weight fighters pummeling each other for 15 rounds, we can begin to see the struggle in terms of conquest. It is difficult to convey how transformational this shift in perspective was for me. I’ll never forget what I heard Doug Wilson say only a few weeks after I embraced postmillennialism:

Now you have the theological justification for your optimism.

Bingo! I’d already started becoming more optimistic for a variety of reasons, but it had nothing to do with theology. I was looking for a biblical justification for it, and the very last place I thought I’d find it was in postmillennialism.

In my pessimistic phase, when I thought we lose “down here,” I didn’t realize the field into which the weeds are sown is a wheat field. It is a field primarily of wheat, not weeds! In any wheat filed weeds are a nuisance, but when harvest time comes there is always more wheat. I always missed that. I also missed that the next parables Jesus tells are of the mustard seed and leaven (yeast). I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a coincidence, Jesus putting these parables together, and in this order. I believe he did it to give us the context for how to see the parable of the wheat and tares. I’ve written about this in depth, so I won’t do that here, but the parables teach us about the extension and scope of the progress of the gospel. The kingdom of God and Christ’s righteousness will inevitably be like the largest tree in the garden, and the leaven will go through the entire batch of dough. Everything, every single thing, will be impacted, influenced, and transformed by the power of God, far as the curse is found.

The Greatness of the Great Commission
This is the title of a book I recently read by Ken Gentry which raises a question: What makes the Great Commission Great? Is the greatness limited to the salvation and transformation of individual lives and the personal relationships they have? I’ve listened to hundreds of testimonies over the last handful of years, and I hear supernatural greatness in every one of them. Transformed lives are one of the great evidences of the truth of Christianity, but so are transformed civilizations. In the foreword of the book, Gary North puts it well speaking of the grace and restoration made possible in the healing power of the gospel:

Nothing is to be excluded from Christ’s healing: not the family, not the State, not business, not education, and surely not the institutional Church. Salvation is the salve that heals the wounds inflicted by sin; every type of wound from every type of sin.

One could expand his list to include art and architecture, law and entertainment, agriculture, science, and health. The scope of God’s transforming power in Christ is as expansive as God’s creation. This was man’s task, dominion, before the fall, and the gospel calls us to exercise that dominion through the second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45-49). That is what I argue makes it great, the discipling of entire nations and everything contained therein. This has only become my perspective, and conviction, since August of 2022.

Prior to that date, to my embrace of postmillennialism, I believed salvation was primarily for saving the souls of individual people, and the real, substantive transformation of the world would have to wait until Christ returns and makes all things right. I believed we should apply a Christian worldview to all of these things, but the basic structure of it would be wheat and tares struggling it out on a level playing field until the end of time. That won’t change until Christ returns; weeds win, I guess.

I came across a perfect example of how I used to think about this from the magazine of my alma mater, Westminster Seminary. The issue is about global missions, and in one of the articles the author states what he sees as the mission of the church of Jesus Christ: “God is calling people to himself out of every nation . . .” Prior to my “conversion” I wouldn’t have given this a second thought, but now my response was, “No, He’s calling us to disciple the nations! To see them transformed by the gospel!” If our mission is calling people “out of” every nation, then we’re not teaching them to obey everything Jesus commanded his disciples.

If we look back through the corridor of time it becomes easier to see the greatness of the Great Commission. And I mean way back in time. Four thousand years ago, God called one heathen man out of all the people on earth, Abram, to create a people for Himself. He promised that all peoples on earth would be blessed through this man. All was darkness until God himself lit this small candle. The history of Israel, from a human perspective, can be described as Thy kingdom stalled on earth, fits and starts, seeming to go nowhere for 2,000(!) years. That’s a long period of futility. After all those years God’s kingdom had made its mark in one little plot of land in a backwater province of the Roman Empire. Then came Jesus of Nazareth, the most unexpected Messiah. The blessing God had promised Abram all those years before was about to break out, only it didn’t look like it, at all. The odds of this fledgling little religious movement within Judaism going anywhere was between slim and none, and the Roman government and Jewish leaders made sure slim had no chance at all. Not only did it go somewhere, but it also eventually came to dominate the civilization that was bent on destroying it.

Now looking back 2,000 years we can see the civilizational power in the Christian message, and it goes well beyond what most Christians consider “spiritual.” A non-Christian historian named Tom Holland wrote a book whose title says it all: Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Remade the World. An historian of the ancient world, Holland realized what he believed, how he lived, and how he saw the world, was nothing like the ancient pagans he’d studied for so long. What changed? Jesus of Nazareth! Christianity in what we’ve come to call Christendom changed everything. Specifically, his life, death, resurrection, and ascension. The great 20th century English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge put it in his own inimitable way:

The Man on the Cross dying to ribald shouts and mockery is validated, and seen to have guided and inspired through the Christian centuries all that is most creative and wonderful in human life.

From my new postmillennial perspective, I now see these 2,000 years as the fulfillment of Yahweh’s promise to Abram 4,000 years ago, that all peoples on earth would be blessed through him. As I always say, God is never in a hurry, which is why I think we may have a while to go before the final enemy will be destroyed, death (I Cor. 15:26). Until then Christ “must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet” (15:25). He will do that by the power of the Holy Spirit through his people, his body, the church. What makes the Great Commission great is that it brings God’s blessing in Christ to everything human beings do, not just their “spiritual” lives. And at the end of the day everything creatures made in God’s image do is spiritual. That is our mission field.

 

 

The Redemptive-Historical Significance of AD70

The Redemptive-Historical Significance of AD70

Sep 10, 2025 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

Until August of 2022, the year 70 AD was just another year in ancient history to me. It held no special significance other than I knew that a Roman army destroyed Jerusalem, and Jews and Christians were scattered throughout the empire. I could infer God’s purpose of separating Christianity from Judaism once and for all, but in terms of His salvific plans, I didn’t see any connection. And I don’t ever remember being taught in over four decades of my Christian life that there was any redemptive-historical significance to the horrific fall of Jerusalem. And horrific only begins to describe it. The ancient historian Josephus describes it in disgusting, often stomach turning detail. I’m sure I learned something about it in seminary, but whatever it was, it wasn’t memorable.

Then in that fateful month very much to my surprise, as those who read me often will know, I embraced postmillennialism. Up to that day I thought it was a completely discredited eschatological position. I found out I had rejected it for the same reason most others do: I was completely ignorant of what it really taught. If there is a way to know less than nothing about a topic, I knew that much. Yet I thought it was some kind of joke, until I learned it most certainly is not. I’ve learned since then that whatever critics think they know about it is always wrong, and I mean one hundred percent of the time. I have not found one single solitary steel man among those criticizing it. What I find is an abundance of straw men, question begging, and non sequiturs. That’s a lot of logical fallacies! And for whatever reason, postmillennialism lends itself to that. Before we get into the meat of the significance of AD70, let me tell you why I rejected the post-mill position, and every critic I’ve encountered seems to do so for the same reasons.

The Rejection of Postmillennialism
After my Christian youth when I was born-again into the thoroughly dispensational premillennial environment of the late 1970s, I eventually became pan-mill, as in it will all pan out in the end. Up to that point I engaged in “newspaper eschatology,” and all of the predictions about future events supposedly contained therein. Eventually it just came to seem like futile guess work and conjecture. Because of that I came to assume we can’t really know anything definitively about how things will end, so we just need to trust God who apparently didn’t to see the need to communicate that stuff clearly. Oh, how wrong I was! But we learn, hopefully.

Then in 2014 I was exposed to a solid case for amillennialism, and saw that just maybe God did communicate these things more clearly than I had realized. Unfortunately, this perspective on “end times” seemed to make me more pessimistic about the human race and life in this fallen world. The a-mill position teaches that the wheat and tares (weeds) grow up in the field of this fallen earth, and that good and evil are in perpetual conflict until the end. Given the seemingly ever present suffering and misery we see in the world, it’s not surprising I turned into a pessimist, as do most a-mills I’ve encountered. They, like our premillennial and dispensational brothers and sisters, see things growing increasingly worse until , as David Chilton puts it, “Christ returns at the last moment, like the cavalry in B-grade westerns, to rescue the ragged little band of survivors.” That’s basically what I believed because that’s what I thought these positions taught, and what I still think they do.

In studying postmillennialism, I learned something powerful that completely changed my perspective. Lorraine Boettner in his book, The Millennium, contrasts this idea of a conflict between good and evil, with the conquest of good over evil. It didn’t take long for him to convince me the latter is the biblical take on the nature of reality in our fallen world. Christ did not come to earth, die, rise again, ascend to the right hand of God, and send his Holy Spirit, to just pluck a few embers out of the burning fire of fallen humanity. Rather, he came to conquer the sin that destroys everything in His creation. That not only has profound effects on individuals saved from sin, but also in the communities they build, starting with families and extending out from there into society and cultures. Isaac Watts in the great Christmas hymn Joy to the World put it poetically best:

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse is found.

The entire hymn is about Christ’s rule and reign on earth, not just in the hearts of his people or in the church, but over everything!

Unfortunately, until I learned what it really was, I thought postmillennialism was a late 19th and early 20th century version of liberal Christian and secular progress. Man in his hubris with the light of science and technology would conquer the world and usher in the kingdom of God. It was clear from my pre, pan, and amil perspectives, science and technology could never overcome sin in the heart of man, so postmillennialism was a delusion. William Jennings Bryan echoed what many Christians believed prior to World War I, and what many equate with postmillennialism today:

Christian civilization is the greatest that the world has ever known because it rests on a conception of life that makes life one unending progress toward higher things, with no limit to human advancement or development.

After he said this, in the 20th century some hundred million people died or were killed in the name of progress, and postmillennialism was tarred with the Bryan version of “progress.” That, however, has nothing whatsoever to do with a biblically rigorous postmillennialism.

Futurism, Preterism and AD70
Unfortunately, because of the perversion of postmillennialism at the hands of Christian liberals and secularists, the fall of Jerusalem in AD70 eventually turned from being a profound redemptive-historical pivot point, to an historical curiosity.

The growth of the “new premillennialism” of J.N. Darby and the Plymouth Brethren would in the 20th century turn into the dominant Evangelical eschatology of dispensationalism. This eschatology necessitated a futuristic interpretation of the Olivet discourse (Matthew 24:1–25:46; Mark 13:1–37; Luke 21:5–36) and the Book of Revelation, meaning the events that Jesus and John spoke about would not happen in the first century Jewish-Roman context, but at some time far off into the future. Amillennialists believe the same thing because when I embraced that eschatology for eight years that’s what I was taught and believed. Now it seems abundantly clear to me from a postmillennial perspective that a preterist interpretation makes the most sense of the texts and the historical facts on the ground.

The events Jesus spoke about, and most of the events John refers to (called partial preterism), have already happened. The word preterist comes from the Latin word for past, so this view is a contrast from the futurist view. Learning about the preterist view can almost cause one a case of intellectual whiplash. It makes my neck kind of ache just thinking about it given how unexpected it was after four plus decades as a Christian.

The debate about Revelation relates to the dating when John wrote it. For most of my Christian life I accepted “the consensus” of a later date, in the 90s AD, because the “experts” all seemed to believe that. I didn’t realize their motivations for deriving that perspective were primarily driven, known or not, by their eschatological assumptions (I wrote a piece last year about this, Eschatological Assumptions and AD70). If one takes a futuristic view of Jesus’ teaching in the Olivet Discourse, then it makes sense to see Revelation in the same way. So whatever evidence there is for the late date becomes dispositive, meaning it’s basically a slam dunk. Then last year I read Before Jerusalem Fell by Ken Gentry on the dating of the Book of Revelation, and I was shocked at how weak the evidence for the late dating was. I suppose a plausible case can be made, but to me the internal evidence, the actual content of the book itself, what John wrote, is dispositive, and slam dunk would describe it well—like a Michael Jordon tongue out in your face dunk. I was kind of shocked, really, not least because I had so easily accepted the later dating all these years.

The debate about the Olivet Discourse turns on how one chooses to interpret this verse in Matthew 24:

34 Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.

The debate is over what Jesus meant when he told them that all the things he was describing, not some of the things, would happen in “this generation.” It seems pretty straight forward, that it was the generation of the people he was speaking to when the words came out of his mouth. It’s a stretch to say Jesus meant “some generation in the far off future when these far off future events are going to occur.” It’s crazy to me that very serious people actually try to make that case, but they do and it’s what most Christians believe because of their eschatological assumptions. These people admit some of what Jesus was speaking about happened in the first century, but Jesus doesn’t give us that option. He says clearly, “Until all these things have happened.” So it’s either all in the past, or all in the future; there is no other option. Reading it the way Jesus intended, and his hearers would have understood, points to AD70, no pretzel logic required.

I would encourage anyone who wants to come to their own conclusions and not just take another’s word for it to read Gentry’s book, and for the Olivet Discourse and AD70 I would suggest two other books. The first is a little book from the early 19th century called, The Destruction of Jerusalem by George Peter Holford. He lays out in exacting detail how the historical record proves the preterist interpretation. The other is a book by R.C. Sproul called, The Last Days According to Jesus. Skeptics who have been trying to discredit the Bible for well over 200 years have argued that Jesus was predicting all these events, and since they didn’t happen Jesus was not who he claimed to be. The futurist position is one way to deal with it, but we don’t have to distort the text or Jesus’ words to address the critics’ lies. Preterism will do that nicely. Now let’s move on to some theology.

The Judgment of AD70
Unfortunately, because of the futurist focus on “end times” prophetic passages, the theological significance of the destruction of Jerusalem gets lost in the shuffle. That event, however, was a profound turning point in the history of redemption, of God’s plan to redeem His people and his entire creation. It took me a while on my postmillennial journey to figure this out. Theologically this has to do with God’s judgment upon His people, and what that meant for His redemptive plans.

In the discourse, everything turns on the meaning of the disciples’ question, “what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” People often take the Greek word for age, aión-αἰών, to mean world, so Jesus was telling the disciples about the end of the world. What comes into our minds when we hear that phrase? Likely a dystopian hell we’ve seen in a thousand movies. If one reads Revelation futuristically with that mindset, it certainly appears that way. But that is not what Jesus is referring to. I have a critically important question most Christians seem to miss. To whom was Jesus sent? And for whom was Jesus’ ministry? It was first the Jews, and only after that Gentiles, the rest of us.

The first passage confirming this message comes in Matthew 10 when Jesus sends out the 12.

5 These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. 6 Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.

Jesus confirms this in Matthew 15. The headline of the passage in our Bibles says, “The Faith of a Canaanite Woman.” God is using a heathen woman from a people with a lot of historical baggage for the Jews to make a theological point. She is screaming out for Jesus to heal her daughter of demon possession, and Jesus makes his mission clear:

24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

Notice Jesus says “only.” It’s news to most Christians that the gospels are not about us! They are about God coming to His people, sending His anointed one to them, their Messiah. Only when he was rejected did the message extend out to the Gentiles. If you read through the Old Testament, but especially the prophets, this dual message is clear. Yahweh is consistently declaring blessing and judgment on His people, but eventually that blessing is to extend to the nations as he promised Abraham and the Patriarchs. It seems the blessing would not break out to the rest of the world until judgment came.

That judgment to come, what we see happen in AD70, was declared by John prior to the Baptism of Jesus in Matthew 3.

7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? 8 Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. 9 And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. 10 The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

Given my futurist eschatological assumptions, I completely missed that John is clearly declaring judgment to come upon the Jews. I thought John was mistaken like many Jews were about Jesus. His first coming wasn’t in judgment, but in mercy and grace. Judgment was for his second coming. That’s how I read the Olivet discourse as well, but Jesus is clearly speaking of Jerusalem where “not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

Yahweh was in a legal covenant relationship with His people with the stipulation of blessing for obedience, and curses for disobedience. We see this laid out in detail in the Pentateuch, and played out in Israel’s history, declared in excruciating details in the prophets. Reading Jesus’ words in the Olivet Discourse from a preterist perspective is not at all a stretch, but in fact fits the entire flow of the historical narrative perfectly.

The Theological Significance of AD70
The Jews were promised salvation from sin and death from the very beginning when God told Adam and Eve the woman’s seed (offspring) would strike or bruise (crush in the NIV) the serpent’s head. When the covenant is revealed to Abraham, Paul confirms this seed refers not to offspring in general, but to Christ (Gal. 3):

 16 The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. Scripture does not say “and to seeds,” meaning many people, but “and to your seed,” meaning one person, who is Christ.

All through Israel’s history, God communicated his redemptive plans in signs and symbols, or types and shadows as the theologians put it. These were concrete illustrations of the forgiveness of sin to come pointing beyond themselves to a greater truth, to the one who is The Truth in which redemption is found. When he came to fulfill all the promises, the Jewish religious leaders who represented the nation rejected the fulfillment for the types and shadows as if they were the thing, as if the blood of bulls and goats could do anything. The entire book of Hebrews was written to convince first century Jewish Christians of the superiority of the New Covenant. In chapter 8 quoting Jeremiah 31, the writer says:

13 By calling this covenant “new,” he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.

This could be considered a prophecy of the coming destruction of the temple. Hebrews was written while temple still stood because the writer was trying to convince Jewish Christians not to go back to the Old Covenant way of doing things. That was a possibility at the time he wrote. It seems the Jewish nation, including Jewish Christians, would not get the message that a new and superior way of salvation had appeared until God made the message clear. AD70 and the utter destruction of Jerusalem made it undeniably clear.

From that moment the Jewish religion changed completely. It was no longer the Mosaic religion of atonement for sin in sacrifice, but a moralistic religion of works. Jewish Christians now had to realize the former way was dead, over and gone forever; they could never go back. It was either Judaism or Christianity, the law or salvation by grace through faith, man’s works of futility or God’s transformational power in Christ in the human heart. God’s kingdom had now come in a completely different way than any Jew had foreseen. After Jesus had risen from the dead he told his disciples in Luke 24 that the entirety of Israel’s history found in Scripture, our Old Testament, was about him. Once the temple fell, God declared his covenant had been fulfilled in his Son, his kingdom come, His will now being done on earth as it is in heaven. Israel’s futility was ended, and in Christ alone would be found this good news of God (I Cor. 1):

30 It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, sanctification and redemption.

Now with God’s law put in His people’s minds and written on their hearts (Jer. 31), God’s kingdom would no longer be limited to a tiny point of light in the Middle East. We read these prophetic words from Habakkuk 2:

14 For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

 

 

Death as a Key to the Meaning of Life

Death as a Key to the Meaning of Life

Sep 3, 2025 | Apologetics

I’m not a real big fan of this whole mortality thing. Apparently nobody else isn’t either given death is the ever present reality most people do everything they can to ignore. Death is like the FBI knocking on your door in the middle of the night and responding, “I don’t hear anything.” I’m the guy saying, “What? It sounds like an army! Are you nuts!” Nonetheless, most people just don’t want to deal with it until they have to, one way or the other. Even at a funeral most people are thinking, unconsciously no doubt, “I’m glad that’s not me.” All the while knowing one day it will be, sooner rather than later. Even those who make it to a hundred think it’s coming way too soon. I can imagine your average centenarian thinking as death approaches, “But, I was just born!” If you’re under 40 you won’t get that, but one day you will.

So, I am going to address the most important and least popular subject known to man, going in as Alexander Pope may have said, as a fool “where angels fear to tread.” Of course angels have never had the pleasure of experiencing death, but from the moment of our conception we are condemned to die. Something, I can attest, you do not want to bring up to your newly pregnant daughter. Way to be a buzz kill, Pops! Yes, I really did that, I confess. Me and Woody Allen aren’t so different after all. Of course we come to different conclusions in the face of the inevitable, and that’s what this little discourse into the intolerable elephant in the room is really about—hope.

Scripture and the Resurrection
Recently we had a shocking death in our extended family, and the next morning in my reading I was providentially at Iasiah 25 where I read these hopeful words:

7 On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
8     he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.
The Lord has spoken.

9 In that day they will say,

“Surely this is our God;
we trusted in him, and he saved us.
This is the Lord, we trusted in him;
let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”

I’ve been on a resurrection scripture memory kick of late because as much as I believe in the resurrection and everything Paul says about in I Corinthians 15, I still find it difficult to believe it’s all true.

(A brief apologetics excursion. One of my favorite means of defending the veracity of Christianity is something I call the consideration of the alternative. If something isn’t true, then some alternative must be; there is no in between. So, whenever I wonder about our resurrection or life after death, I look outside. The creation screams of God’s existence and Romans 1:20 comes to mind:

20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so people are without excuse.

It’s impossible that it’s all a product of chance, which it would have to be if atheistic materialism is true. That is today by far the least plausible alternative. Pantheism, that God is everything, is almost as implausible, and that’s the only other alternative. So theism is the only explanation for the world and everything in it, and Christianity is the most plausible theistic religion, again, by far. Back to death, or our victory over it.)

Meditating on the resurrection verses in Scripture is comforting because it’s apparent the bringing of our dead physical bodies back to life eternal was God’s plan from the beginning. Let’s take a look at some of these passages.

Job 25
25 I know that my redeemerlives,
and that in the end he will stand on the earth.
26 And after my skin has been destroyed,
yetinmy flesh I will see God;
27 I myself will see him
with my own eyes—I, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me.

Psalm 71
20 Though you have made me see troubles,
many and bitter,
you will restore my life again;
from the depths of the earth
you will again bring me up.
21 You will increase my honor
and comfort me once more.

Isaiah 26
19 But your dead will live, Lord;
their bodies will rise—
let those who dwell in the dust
wake up and shout for joy—
your dew is like the dew of the morning;
the earth will give birth to her dead.

Daniel 12
But at that time your people—everyone whose name is found written in the book—will be delivered. 2 Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt. 3 Those who are wisewill shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.

Hosea 6
“Come, let us return to the Lord.
He has torn us to pieces
but he will heal us;
he has injured us
but he will bind up our wounds.
2 After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will restore us,
that we may live in his presence.

Revelation 21
3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4 ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

John in this passage was almost certainly thinking of Isaiah 25.

John 11
Lastly, I will comment one the most powerful passage in all of Scripture that proves beyond any reasonable doubt that our resurrection will happen and life after death in our physical bodies is a certain reality. Jesus has finally come to Bethany after allowing Lazarus to die. Before he got there he told his disciples his friend was sick, but he delayed going so Lazarus would die. He said the reason was “for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it,” and that they might believe.

When they get there the sisters of Lazarus are distraught and ask why he didn’t get there sooner—he could have healed Lazarus. Martha still believes God will do whatever Jesus asks, and he tells her, “Your brother will rise again.” She replies, yes “he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” But Jesus has isn’t talking about that. And his reply is something that if it isn’t true is not only cruel, but it would mean Jesus was a liar. As we’ll see in a moment, however, a liar doesn’t bring a dead man back to life.

25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though he die; 26 and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

Who says something like this! Either an absolute lunatic madman, or God and the Savior of the world. The latter is the only thing that makes sense.

Then we come to the part of the story that can only be explained by its being true. My contention is that nobody could make this up, let alone a first century Jew. The Messiah they were all expecting did not have this kind of power. When Jesus is taken to the tomb to see where they laid Lazarus we have the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.” John also tells us, twice, that Jesus was “deeply moved.” Strong’s gives us the extended meaning of that phrase:

From en and brimaomai (to snort with anger); to have indignation on, i.e. (transitively) to blame, (intransitively) to sigh with chagrin, (specially) to sternly enjoin — straitly charge, groan, murmur against.

In other words, in the not so polite vernacular, Jesus was pissed! At what, you might ask. Death! It’s wrong, it’s ugly, it’s horrible, an aberration, the apex of his creation experiencing the most horrible humiliating form of demise and decay. But this brings us to another powerful apologetics point. Why would Jesus be angry knowing in a few minutes he would bring Lazarus back to life? That makes no sense whatsoever, unless the entire story is true. As we say, also in the vernacular, you can’t make this stuff up! The reason Jesus did it was to give them, and us living 2000 years later, evidence that they might believe it was God the Father who sent him. Our hope is solid and secure, so as Paul tells us, that when we encounter death we “may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (I Thess. 4:13).

How Do We Explain Death?
I’ve long thought of death as the great question mark. In the history of the world, religions and philosophies have arisen to answer the Big Questions of life: Why are we here? Why is there evil? Why is there death? What is our destiny? Modern secular man is unique in all of history in that he is determined to not ask such questions. Why are we here? Who cares. Eat, drink, and be merry . . . . Evil and death? Just deal with it, or try to escape it if you can. Somebody’s bound to find the fountain of youth eventually. Destiny? Dirt. What an inspiring vision for life! Yet in the 20th century secularism became the dominant worldview of the entire Western world, including much of Asia. All that matters is this life, and it is assumed we can’t know anything beyond that, so why waste your time speculating when everyone disagrees about it anyway. Yet these questions persist because of the great question mark.

I never thought I’d see the great Berlin Wall of secularism fall. Like the real wall separating free from communist Germany in the Cold War, secularism is also built on lies, and lies are ultimately unsustainable. Liars can get away with it for a short time, but eventually lies reveal themselves for what they are: not the truth. Death, it turns out, is the implacable foe is secularism. Like Jesus, every human being knows it’s wrong, ugly, and that it shouldn’t be. In fact, every animal and bug knows it too. Why do you think it is that pesky fly or mosquito does everything it can to keep you from crushing it? It doesn’t want to die! When your typical secular agnostic person goes to a funeral of someone who lived to be a hundred, death is easier to ignore; they lived a good long life, let’s celebrate it. But if they go to the funeral of a five year old? This is wrong! This shouldn’t happen! The question haunts them. But they shove it down and move on with their secular life.

Given the dominant media culture is secular, including our entertainment, programming to ignore the Big Questions is everywhere, and effective. A great example of how pernicious this is comes from your typical TV show or movie. There are no angry atheists denouncing God, but God is pretty much invisible, persona non grata. That’s much more effective. The average viewer without even thinking comes away with the impression that God is irrelevant to life. Thus secularism perpetuates itself. Yet something surprising is happening in this third decade of the 21st century—secularism is dying. Even if secular people are inclined not to ask the Big Questions, in the depths of their being everyone is looking for meaning, hope, and purpose. They will try to squeeze them out of this life, but that’s becoming increasingly difficult. The Berlin Wall of secularism is crackin’ bad

Most people don’t realize secularism is a several hundred year experiment in Western culture that isn’t working out quite like planned. Religion supposedly created all the strife in the world, if we just get rid of religion, or completely personalize it so it’s invisible in society, harmony and peace will reign. It hasn’t quite worked out like that. Not to mention that the Big Questions won’t go away, and secularism has no answers, as in zip, zero, nada, as in none. Evil? Deal with it. Death? Too bad. Why are we here? Who cares, just get all you can, and can all you get. Without God, specifically the God of the Bible, the questions are unanswerable. Death and evil are the most persistent and unanswerable of the questions. If you look at world religions, none attempt to answer why they exist. We are born into a world in which they exist, so religions developed to try to deal with all the pain and suffering of life. Only one religion has a plausible answer as to why they do.

The Problem of Evil and Death
Ever since the French Philosopher Voltaire blamed the great 1755 Lisbon earthquake on God, more or less, evil and death have been the problem for Christians. When it is referred to as “the problem of evil,” it is assumed to be a problem only for Christians. Which is ironic given Christianity is the only religion or explanation for existence that offers any answers that makes sense. Like I said, other religions don’t attempt to answer why they exist, but just accept that they do and try to deal with them. The atheist, secularist, irreligious have presumed since Voltaire that they don’t have to address the problem because it isn’t a problem for their worldview. But it’s a big, huge problem, and one they have no answer for. If you get rid of God, does that make evil and death any more palatable? Does a God-less universe help us make any more sense of all the senseless pain and suffering in the world? Make sense of the wickedness of man? It does not.

The only atheist response is, deal with it. In philosophical terms evil and death are just brute facts. They simply are and have no reason for their existence and no purpose beyond our trying to avoid them, and when we can’t, making our lives miserable. They are simply unfortunate and meaningless events in our unfortunate and meaningless existence. No wonder atheism in all of world history is a very tough sell. Nineteenth century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, an atheist, believed religion was a way for human beings to deal with evil and death; it was merely projection. As Marx put it, religion was the “opium of the masses.” Yet he, like other atheists after him, felt the slightest need to in any way prove that we in fact do live in a God-less universe. For them it is so obvious it need not be proved. They like most secularists believed that as science and knowledge advanced, religion would lose all credibility and wither on the vine. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

Another way to refer to the problem of evil is theodicy. The word has God in it, in Greek theos, so it developed as a vindication of God’s goodness and power, but every worldview must have a theodicy. Atheism on that account fails miserably. This could not be said any better than by William Shakespeare himself. In the face of a God-less universe who could argue with this:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Christianity, on the other hand, has a perfectly plausible explanation, whether someone accepts it or not. We read the story in Genesis 1-3, which, by the way, is the only explanation anywhere in all of history of why evil exists. The beauty of the story is that it is perfectly plausible, unlike other ancient pagan myths. God created man, male and female he created them, perfectly good. He gave them one command to assure their obedience and loyalty to him, to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And what was his warning if they did? “For when you eat from it you will certainly die.” As we know Eve was deceived by the serpent, ate, and Adam went along for the ride. Everything went to hell in that moment. We only get one chapter in, and murder rears its ugly head as Cain kills his brother Abel. And it has been thus ever since. We can see this drama play out in the life of every human being because as Solzhenitsyn said, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Everyone knows this is true. Genesis 1-3 tells us why.

Lastly, only Christianity offers a solution, as indicated by all the hopeful passages above. We find that in God’s promise immediately after Adam and Eve’s rebellion, as if God had it planned all along. He tells them,

15 I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”

We learn in due course that this offspring, seed in Hebrew indicating one person, was Jesus Christ, who would once and for all deal with the problem of evil, of sin, suffering, and death. He rose from the dead to confirm the victory promised here, and ascended to the right hand of God to rule through his Holy Spirit to bring it all to pass.