The Power of the Gospel Revealed in Zechariah

The Power of the Gospel Revealed in Zechariah

Feb 25, 2026 | The Gospel

My last post was my perspective on the Catholic faith from my Protestant perspective, and how much over the years I’ve come to appreciate it and see the nature of my faith in some ways more in line with theirs. This post, however, will highlight the significant differences in our understanding of the gospel. I’m not going to compare and contrast, but this will come from my Reformed perspective, which Rome at the Council of Trent declared heretical and anathema. Catholics aren’t so hard core today, for the most part, and they believe we Protestants are Christians too. There are, however, fundamental differences between the Reformed and Protestant understanding of how God saves His people from their sins, and I believe Zechariah highlights these differences.

There are numerous passages in Zechariah that reveal the gospel in the Reformed tradition of salvation being a monergistic work of God in the soul of man. First we’ll define monergism:

The word monergism comes from a combination of the Greek terms for “one” and “energy.” Combined, they mean “a single force.” When applied to salvation, monergism implies that God is entirely, completely, and solely responsible for any person’s salvation. This view contrasts with synergism (“a combined force”). Synergism suggests salvation is accomplished through a cooperative act of God and man.

I learned the phrase above from reading Charle Hodge’s Systematic Theology back when I was 24 and 25 years old and brand new to Reformed theology. He explained this most profound truth in the simplest statement: “Salvation is the work of God in the soul of man.” God does the work, we respond. By His almighty power, he calls us out of the grave spiritually as Jesus called Lazarus out of his grave physically, and guides us through life in holiness, service, and love. We call the former justification, and the latter sanctification, although having lived almost five decades as a Christian, I now call it the pain of sanctification.

Both of these, justification and sanctification, are the work of God to save His people from their sins (Matt. 1:21). He initiates and completes it all, and even our cooperation, our “working out our salvation with fear and trembling,” as Paul puts it, is the sovereign work of God. That eventually became apparent to me a bit later in this journey with Christ when the truth I Corinthians 1:30 hit me in a way I had previously not appreciated. Paul says:

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.

First we are only in Christ Jesus because of God, because He sovereignly put us there. He chose us and put us “in him,” one of Paul’s favorite salvation phrases, “in Christ.” Jesus tells us the nature of our salvation in John 6:

44 “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.

Jesus is confirming here all of Paul’s descriptions of our salvation, from God choosing us in Christ, to our justification, declared righteous because of Christ’s sacrifice, God’s making us holy, sanctifying us, setting us apart increasingly to Him, and our redemption, the resurrection of our bodies. It’s a package deal! All of it includes us, every part of what makes us human, emotionally, psychologically, our choosing, our failures, our wills, but none of it is ultimately up to us. I didn’t quote what Paul says in verse 31 right after he affirms the monergistic nature of our salvation:

31 Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.”

Paul is quoting from a passage in Jeremiah 9 in which the Lord is talking about boasting of our wisdom, strength, and riches, and now Paul is adding to that our very salvation.

Related to our salvation is another area where Hodge is helpful. He said that we tend to equate God’s “control” with human control, which requires coercion and destroys our free will. God, however, can “control” human beings without destroying or in any way distorting their humanity or agency. He is sovereign and God, almighty in every way, and how he does it we have no idea; we simply trust him that once he chooses us He will never let us go. As Paul says in Philippians 1, that God who began a good work in us “will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”

Monergism in Zechariah 3 & 4
Zechariah is given visions that point forward to a day when this salvation Paul declares will be fulfilled in Christ. It’s an amazing testimony to the power of God to save His people from their sins (Matt. 1:21). It is the most Messianic of the 12 minor prophets, and in that it is not unlike Isaiah. He lived not long after the Israelites had returned to Judah after their exile in Babylon in the early 500s BC into the early decades of the 400s prior to Ezra and Nehemiah rebuilding of the temple. It is a book of encouragement to give the Israelites strength to endure the troubles to come. Nothing they are planning to do will be easy, as is living a Christian life in a fallen world in a fallen body among fallen people always will be. We are always working against the gravity of sin, trudging up a mountain with that heavy backpack of sin, and we get a picture of that in chapter 3 as the scene is set up.

Joshua is the high priest at the time, not a coincidence the same name the Lord would give our Savior five centuries into the future. In Zechariah’s vision he is standing before the angel of the Lord and Satan himself. The devil is living up to his name, accusing Joshua, of what we’re not told. Then we see the Lord defend his high priest as he will one day the final high priest:

2 The Lord said to Satan, “The Lord rebuke you, Satan! The Lord, who has chosen Jerusalem, rebuke you! Is not this man a burning stick snatched from the fire?”

As Jesus says in John 10:10, the thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy, and the accuser does it by accusing, by rubbing our sin in our faces as if God is incapable of saving us from our sins. To make the point, we’re told that Zechariah is dressed in “filthy clothes.” The word in Hebrew doesn’t just mean dirty, as if your toddler was out playing in the mud, but something much more disgusting. It means, “soiled (as if excrementitious).” To keep this family friendly, he is covered in crap, smelly, disgusting. That is what sin does to us. What does the Lord do with this “burning stick snatched from the fire”? Then we get a beautiful picture of the monergistic nature of our salvation from sin:

4 The angel said to those who were standing before him, “Take off his filthy clothes.”

Then he said to Joshua, “See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put fine garments on you.”

5 Then I said, “Put a clean turban on his head.” So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him, while the angel of the Lord stood by.

Of ourselves, we can’t do anything about our filthy clothes. Only God Himself can have those taken off. And it’s not just that our sin is taken away like those clothes, but God Himself has us dressed in fine garments, the righteousness of Christ himself, enabled by the active and passive obedience of Christ in life, even unto death. As I heard Tim Keller say many times, Christ lived the life we should have lived, and died the death we should have died. Unlike Catholics, we believe that not only did Christ die for our sins, but his righteousness was given to us as well. We are as Luther put it in Latin, simul iustus et peccator, or simultaneously righteous and sinner. We are declared righteous before God, legally, yet we are still sinners. It is a forensic declaration because of the transaction, that actual ransom paid for us, on the cross. This is justification.

Then we see that this is only the start. The Lord charges Joshua to walk in obedience and keep his requirements. There is no room for antinomianism, or being lawless, in the Christian faith or life. We don’t continue to sin because we figure we’re forgiven. As Paul says in Romans 6, God forbid! We are saved from the slavery of sin, like the Hebrews were saved from slavery in Egypt, to live like them in obedience to the law, to righteousness. There are also material implications to a full orbed gospel, as we learn next:

10 “‘In that day each of you will invite your neighbor to sit under your vine and fig tree,’ declares the Lord Almighty.”

The phrase, “that day,” is a critical part of Zechariah’s prophetic power, which I’ll get to below, but we see here, and throughout the Old Testament prophetic declarations of salvation, that the blessings coming as a result are not only “spiritual,” but material as well. This is something Evangelicals either ignore or think has nothing to do with the gospel. God in his revelation, however, says differently. The Old Testament is an incredibly earthy document, focused on blessings in this life more than on the life to come. With Christianity we get both!

The Importance of “That Day” in our Salvation
This phrase is used 20 times in Zechariah to indicate the time in which salvation will come to God’s people, and it will be in one day, as we know in hindsight. Let’s look at some of the hopeful declarations the prophet gives to us.

Chapter 2:  
10 “Shout and be glad, Daughter Zion. For I am coming, and I will live among you,” declares the Lord. 11 “Many nations will be joined with the Lord in that day and will become my people. I will live among you and you will know that the Lord Almighty has sent me to you.

Chapter 9:
16 The Lord their God will save his people on that day
as a shepherd saves his flock.
They will sparkle in his land
like jewels in a crown.
17 How attractive and beautiful they will be!
Grain will make the young men thrive,
and new wine the young women.

Chapter 13:
“On that day a fountain will be opened to the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity. 2 “On that day, I will banish the names of the idols from the land, and they will be remembered no more,” declares the Lord Almighty. “I will remove both the prophets and the spirit of impurity from the land.

9 The Lord will be king over the whole earth. On that day there will be one Lord, and his name the only name.

And it ends in chapter 14 with the final references:
20 On that day holy to the Lord will be inscribed on the bells of the horses, and the cooking pots in the Lord’s house will be like the sacred bowls in front of the altar. 21 Every pot in Jerusalem and Judah will be holy to the Lord Almighty, and all who come to sacrifice will take some of the pots and cook in them. And on that day there will no longer be a Canaanite in the house of the Lord Almighty.

The Old Testament is a powerful testimony of the sovereignty of God in salvation. The plan of redemption, of God saving His people from their sins since the fall has always been the work of God. He says to Adam and Even in Genesis 3:15:

And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”

In Hebrew crush and strike are the same word, but I like the NIV’s rendering because while Satan can do some damage, symbolically the heel, the seed of the woman, Christ, defeats and renders powerless the devil, symbolically the head. From that moment, history is a very slow beeline to the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, redemption accomplished, to Pentecost, redemption applied.

The Gospel Fulfilled in Zechariah
There are two passages in the book that are amazingly specific about how this salvation to come is to be accomplished. In chapter 3 where we read about the Lord taking off Joshua’s filthy clothes and putting on fine garments:

8 “‘Listen, High Priest Joshua, you and your associates seated before you, who are men symbolic of things to come: I am going to bring my servant, the Branch. 9 See, the stone I have set in front of Joshua! There are seven eyes on that one stone, and I will engrave an inscription on it,’ says the Lord Almighty, ‘and I will remove the sin of this land in a single day.

Those reading Zechariah’s words for the next 400 years must have wondered how sin could be removed in only a single day. Mixing metaphors, the Lord tells us the servant will be a branch and a stone, and Jesus tells us (Matt.21 and Mark 12) quoting Psalm 118,

‘The stone the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
the Lord has done this,
and it is marvelous in our eyes’

Who did this? The Lord. We also learn something about the identity of this branch in Isaiah 11, one of the most glorious salvation chapters in the Bible. It starts with the Branch:

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
2 The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—
the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and of might,
the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—
3 and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.

This eventually leads to the suffering of the Lord’s servant in Isiah 52 and 53, where we read the gospel

5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

Several hundred years later Zechariah echoes Isaiah in chapter 12:

10 “And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son.

In perfect biblical hindsight it becomes apparent just how true it was when Jesus said to his disciples after his resurrection: “Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” Or the two on the road to Emmaus, telling them, “what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” The Bible has one author, Almighty God, and every bit of it points to Christ. In the immortal words of the Hallelujah Chorus which proclaim Christ sitting at the right hand of the Almighty:

The kingdom of this world is become
the kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ,
and of His Christ;
And He shall reign for ever and ever,
King of kings, and Lord of lords.

Hallelujah!

A Protestant Take on the Catholic Faith

A Protestant Take on the Catholic Faith

Feb 18, 2026 | Theology

I’ve been a Christian north of 47(!) years now. That’s insane. There was a time I couldn’t conceive of ever being 47 years old; now 47 is receding in the rear view mirror. I was born-again in the heyday of the Jesus Revolution late 1970s, and as the Grateful Dead also in the 1970s sang, what a long strange trip it’s been. I’ve found as I’ve gotten older that in many ways I’ve become more Catholic than Protestant in my basic understanding of the nature of things. Mind you, I could never embrace Catholic theology given I’m a convinced Reformed Christian in the Presbyterian tradition, but I think I’ve grown increasingly more Catholic than Protestant in my perspective on things, as I’m going to attempt to explain in this post. 

Coming from an Italian heritage I grew up Catholic, but firmly rejected it when I was introduced to the Evangelical faith my first semester in college. In fact, I became vehemently anti-Catholic for a period of time because they never told me I could be assured of salvation and have eternal life, not wonder if I did. For example, When I was introduced to Romans 10 the night I prayed the Sinner’s Prayer, I was blown away:

9 If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 

I will? I didn’t know this as a Catholic, and one of my big fears was going to hell when I die; maybe that’s a Catholic thing. I was also early on introduced to this passage in 1 John 5:

11 And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. 12 He who has the Son has life; He who does not have the Son of God does not have life. 13 I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. 

I can know this? Really? When I realized the Catholic Church had never told me this, it ticked me off. Of course it horrified my mother and father. My mother is still convinced that I had gotten involved in a cult, but I keep telling her that no, I was just a young know-it-all teenager who had no idea what life was all about.

Eventually I lost my animus toward Catholicism as I got to know about the many solid Catholics I highly respected in the conservative movement. These people were not stupid or ignorant. Eventually I came to accept that they simply came to different conclusions with the information and facts presented to them. I also was able to learn more about Catholic theology, and I discovered it was far more nuanced than I realized in my know-it-all ignorance. There is much I disagree with, but they are not as far away from what I believe as I initially thought.

It’s far too complicated to explain, and I don’t know enough to really do that, but I’ve concluded that no, Catholics don’t believe their works will save them, that in effect obedience to the law will earn them God’s favor. Some Protestant Catholic haters will declare that, but it’s a caricature. They too believed we are saved by God’s grace alone, and Christ’s merits, only that it’s applied in and through our lives differently than we Protestants understand it. Most importantly, they are passionate about standing for the ancient creeds that declare the historic orthodox Christian faith. For me, as long as someone can proclaim the Apostles or Nicene Creed, we’re brothers or sisters in Christ regardless of their other theological convictions.

What exactly is it about my perspective on things that has become more Catholic? The nature of salvation is one, and the nature of reality is the other. I may be going out on some thin ice, but I’m confident it’s much thicker than it first appears.

The Difference Between a Proposition and Trust
Protestants are a people of the Book, of words, of propositions. Our Reformation, our break from the Roman Catholic Church, was declared by the five Solas, one being Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone as our ultimate source of authority. Catholics, on the other hand, are people of the Church and the sacraments, of grace infused, not merely accepted rationally. Scripture is but one piece of the puzzle for them, whereas for us it is the puzzle. That said, the Roman Catholic Church stands strongly on the inerrant, authoritative word of God. In fact, growing up a Catholic gave me an inherent respect for the Bible, so that when I was presented clearly with what it said, I believed it was in fact authoritative truth about the nature of reality, including how we are saved.

Which brings me the first of what I think are my more Catholic perspectives, salvation. As Evangelical Protestants, we believe in the primacy of propositions. If you believe in X, Y, and Z, you shall be saved. If you only believe in X and Y, and are not quite sure about Z, or ignorant of it, it’s iffy. If you only understand X and don’t get the others, you’re out! I don’t buy this anymore. I know this will send my Protestant brothers and sisters into a tizzy, but it shouldn’t. I came to believe a long time ago that there will be no theology test to get into heaven, or to receive our new resurrected bodies when Christ returns and death, the final enemy, is destroyed. As I became less dogmatic in my certitude about things, realizing I’m finite and in the cosmic scheme of things know pretty much next to nothing, I even told a friend we might get there and find out, to his horror, that the Roman Catholics were right!

As I came to have a more capacious understanding of salvation I never changed my basic theological convictions. I was a Calvinist then and I’m a Calvinist now. Only now, I don’t think everyone who disagrees with me is going to hell. In fact, I now believe anyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, even if they don’t quite understand what they are calling on. The opposite holds true as well. Someone can believe all the right things, have every proposition down and intellectually assent to them all, and still be headed for hell. Mere intellectual assent is not the basis of salvation, trust in a person is.

Which brings me to John 3, and Jesus analogizing the process of salvation from sin on the cross to Moses and the snake in the desert:

14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”

As modern, post-Enlightenment people, when we see the word believe we immediately think, one who intellectually assents to something. The Greek, however, doesn’t mean that at all. It doesn’t preclude it, but it only tells part of the story. The word means trust, to put your faith in something or someone. Of course one has to have some understanding of the object of our faith or trust, but we don’t have to fully understand it to believe, to trust, to entrust our self to it, him, or her. I can trust getting on an airplane without understanding anything about physics or aerodynamics. I simply believe, trust, that the plane will get me safely to my destination. We exercise faith, or trust, every single day of our lives in ways too many to count. It is the glue that hold families and societies together.

We read the story of the bronze snake in Numbers 21. As with much of what we read in our Bibles, it’s a bizarre story. The Israelites are in the desert on the way to the promised land and they are complaining. They figure, Moses brought them out into the desert to die. A rebellion ensues, and God sent venomous snakes into the camp as a judgment against them. They quickly realize the error of their ways, repent, and ask Moses to pray to the Lord for them. The Lord tells Moses to fashion a snake and put it on a poll, so that, “anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” I guess Moses melts some bronze, makes a snake, puts it up on a poll. “Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.” They were to look up to an image, a symbol, of the thing that is killing them? How strange is that! You can imagine the people saying to themselves, that’s it, just look up and we’ll be healed? Did they understand anything about how or why it worked? Nothing. They just trusted Moses’ words, and were desperate enough that instead of looking down at the injury, they would look up and be healed.

Now Jesus tells us the cross and the salvation it brings is analogous to this. How much do we really need to understand the nature of soteriology, or the how and why of it all, to be saved? Most Christians could agree nobody understands 100 percent, but is 80 percent good enough? How about 60 percent? Forty or 20? For all of Christian history until the 19th century, not only were most people illiterate, few people outside of the church owned Bibles. Even after Guttenberg, Bibles were hugely expensive until mass printing in the 20th century. The vast majority of Christians heard it read and preached on Sundays. Most of these could likely not explain the intricacies of salvation and the gospel, but trusting Jesus to forgive them and give them eternal life, that they could understand.

All of this is why I believe my mother, for example, will be with Jesus when she dies. She couldn’t explain the gospel very well, and as a Catholic of 92 years of age, a personal relationship to God is an abstraction she has a hard time grasping, but I keep giving her hope that she just needs to trust in Jesus for what is often difficult to believe and understand, and she does as best she can. As I said, I’m convinced there will be no theology test to get through those pearly gates, which I why I always just encourage people to look to Jesus, and get to know him and his word if they at all can. Hopefully, the understanding will come along in due course.

Lastly, do we intellectually assent to something before we believe or trust? Or can the assenting to something as true come after trusting? A wonderful movie with Mark Whalberg about the life and faith of Father Stuart Long opened my eyes to how powerful the Catholic approach to faith and trust can be, as well as the testimony of Shia Labeouf in his interview with Bishop Barron. Neither of these men would have become Christians with an Evangelical, intellectual first approach. Rather, as those who had yet to believe, they were invited to participate in the sacraments, which in turn created faith in them as their understanding was illuminated by what stood behind those sacraments. To we Protestants, that’s all but heretical. Nope, you have to understand and accept before we’ll let you do any of this Christian stuff.

Now, on to the minor topic of the nature of reality.

Reality is a Lot Messier and More Complex Than We Think
This one is a bit harder to explain, or maybe a lot harder. An allusion to a hit movie might help. We live in the Matrix, in a world, a universe, of information and data so infinite in magnitude and complexity that it makes all the AI data centers and computing power in the world look like a child’s sandbox. We can take our blue pills and pretend what we see is what we get, reality obvious, right in front of us, or take the red pill and go down the rabbit hole. The Protestant mind tends to the more rational, logical, explainable, and I’ve found over the years the more I know, the more confounding reality becomes to me. Maybe it’s a more mystical take, a less buttoned down, I’ve got reality figured out take. Like I said, this isn’t easy to explain.

It seems to me Catholic thinkers, and the Catholic worldview in general, tend to see a more seamless connection between the eternal or heavenly non-material world, the Matrix, and our material world than Protestants do. This became especially true as conservative Protestant Christianity grew more Pietistic and tended toward a Gnostic dualism in their understanding of spiritual and material realities, upstairs and downstairs if you will. Catholics tend to see the world as more enchanted, more connected to that which is not of this world, which is why praying to saints is plausible to them and anathema to Protestants. They see the vail between the two worlds as more permeable, a water wall rather than a brick wall.

Regarding this, I heard Bishop Barron, I’m sure the Catholic thinker I respect most, explain praying to saints using Hebrews 12:1, that “we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses.” Building on chapter 11, the great Hall of Fame of faith, this cloud of those who have gone before us is not off on some other planet with an unbridgeable gap between us, but all around us, invisible to our five senses, but there all the same. I couldn’t buy his argument, but at least it was plausible given how Catholics perceive the world we live in. So no, I haven’t started praying to the saints, and after all, Scripture is clear, every Christian is a saint, a holy one set apart to God.

On an intellectual level, Catholics going back to Augustine through Aquinas and many others, have developed a much more robust and broad intellectual tradition trying to apply their Christian worldview to every nook and cranny of existence. I think they got much wrong, but they also God much right. Conservative Protestant Christianity, now called Evangelicalism, has been anti-intellectual for some two hundred years. Add to that anti-theological and ahistorical. In fact, historian Mark Noll, an Evangelical, wrote a best-selling book in 1995 called, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. I began to understand this in my early Christian walk through Frances Schaeffer, and learned more as I embraced Reformed Theology in my 24th year. The Reformed tradition is much more intellectually robust, but we’re a small portion of the greater Evangelical church.

Art is another area where a Catholic and Protestant worldview diverge because of The Matrix. The Reformation gave us iconoclasm, taking the Second Commandment against making images and bowing down to them and worshipping them as a commandment against making any kind of images. Catholic Christendom gave us the most amazing art and architecture the world has ever seen, and Protestantism rejected all of it. That’s why if you go into Evangelical churches there is no art, and of course, no statues. By contrast, if you go into Catholic churches it’s usually a visual feast, something that inspires the worshipping soul to connect with a different world to which the art points.

Having said all this, I’m no less a Reformed Calvinist than I’ve ever been, only that after well over four decades following Christ I’ve come to appreciate the Catholic Christianity that gave us birth. I came to realize a while ago that I can disagree with my Christian brothers and sisters theologically, and still see them among the great cloud of witnesses to our glorious Lord and Savior. To put it crassly, we are on the same team, and together we are doing our best to obey the Lord Jesus when he taught us to pray, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

God’s Provision in Jonah’s Life, and Ours

God’s Provision in Jonah’s Life, and Ours

Feb 11, 2026 | The Gospel

I recently read through Jonah in one sitting, and yet again it reminds me why it’s one of my favorite books in the Bible. It’s got a kind of honesty about it that makes it endearing. You think, this guy is not unlike all of us! And the Bible makes no apologies for telling his story.

Speaking of the Bible, we call the different writings in our Bibles books, and the word bible, τὰ βιβλία in Greek, means a collection of books, but many of the “books” in our Bibles are very short. Jonah has only four chapters and is a quick but compelling read. It starts right away with action. God calls Jonah to go to Nineveh, and he runs away in the opposite direction! He doesn’t just walk, or saunter, or slither away, he runs! I love how honest the Bible is about human rebellion and sin amongst God’s own people. The portrayal of those people is not flattering to say the least, which is one reason the Bible has such verisimilitude and credibility. It reads real and seems real because it is in fact the accurate story of this people whom God has called to bring salvation to the world. Only, it doesn’t quite work out the way they envisioned it, Jonah being a prime example. To use a semi-vulgar word to express this, Jonah is pissed about God planning to have mercy on this pagan nation who are the sworn enemies of his people. 

What stood out to me this time through was the word “provided” in my NIV, used four times as the story rushes along. Some other translations use appointed. The Hebrew word has these meanings:

  1. (properly) to weigh out
    2. (by implication) to allot or constitute officially
    3. also to enumerate or enroll

In other words, God is calling the shots here. I like the word provided because it implies what is being supplied or made available is meant to help that person. It’s not just God telling us to do something because He said so. God commands us for our Good and His glory. As I was reading, Romans 8:28 leapt to mind:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

And Paul is making sure we understand this isn’t speculation, isn’t something we wonder about or should have any doubt about, but something we know.

God’s Provision for Jonah
Jonah in his rebellion decides to run away from God’s express command, hitching a ride on a ship specifically to run “away from the presence of the Lord.” We’re familiar with the story, but it’s the little details that make it so powerful.

Not long into the journey a violent storm arises and threatens to wipe out the ship. As the crew is throwing things overboard to try to save the ship, Jonah goes down into the hold and of all things, falls asleep! The man was depressed. And why not. He knows this is God rebuking him for his choice. The men go down to get him and see he’s asleep and they are shocked. How in the world can this guy be sleeping at a time like this? Being ancient people they cast lots to see who’s to blame for the storm, and of course it falls to Jonah. When they ask who he is, and where he comes from:

9 And he said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.

He’s almost blasé. He obviously doesn’t fear this God enough. After he tells the men what he did, they are terrified. So when they ask what they must do to mollify this Creator God, he says to throw him into the sea. I’m sure they think this will only make this Creator God angrier, so they try harder to save the ship which makes the storm worse. Then despite their inclinations, they throw him overboard, and of course the storm calms immediately. Chapter 1 ends with telling us what happened to Jonah next:

17 Now the Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

Ah the big fish. These is where the skeptics sign off. Surely this is metaphorical because nobody could live three days in the belly of a big fish like a whale. Impossible! As if anything is impossible with Almighty God, He who created everything out of nothing and controls every molecule by his infinite wisdom and power. Yet, the text doesn’t say Jonah was alive in the belly of the fish. I’ve always assumed he was until I came across this short video which lays out the argument that Jonah died. I always assumed he was alive because the text says that “Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish,” and if he prayed he was alive. But when Jonah prays he says, “out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.” Sheol is the realm of the dead. Also, Jesus affirms Jonah’s ordeal in the big fish as a symbol of his death (Matt. 12:40) and implicitly of his resurrection. If Jesus was dead while he was “in the heart of the earth,” so Jonah was dead in the belly of the great fish. As Jesus was brought back to life, so was Jonah. Either way, the story works as a picture of God’s ultimate redemptive plans in Christ.

God’s provision of a big fish for Jonah is meant to get his attention, something we sinners always seem to need if we’re going to finally quit running away. It works. Chapter 2 is Jonah’s prayer of lament and repentance after which the fish vomits him on to dry land. It seems kind of extreme that the Lord would have to put one of his own people through this, but as the great 19th century poem by Francis Thompson declares, He is The Hound of Heaven. The first stanza fits perfectly:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
   I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
   Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
             Up vistaed hopes I sped;
             And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
   From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
             But with unhurrying chase,
             And unperturbèd pace,
     Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
             They beat—and a Voice beat
             More instant than the Feet—
     ‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me’.

To one degree or another, this is every Christian’s experience. Jesus was given his name because he came to save his people from their sins (Matt.1:21), and God’s plan of redemption would never be left up to his creatures. Somehow, some way, he will always “get his man,” or woman. But God’s “provision” for Jonah wasn’t done yet because Jonah was a reluctant convert. Chapter 3 starts with, “Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.” God is willing to give Jonah a second chance, and he’d best listen this time lest the big fish swallows him for good.

Jonah was reluctant because God was calling him to preach to Israel’s hated enemies, the Assyrians. It would only be a generation later that the Assyrians would wipe out the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC. That wouldn’t have surprised Jonah. So we can imagine him thinking, “Why in the world would the Lord want to have mercy on this people, on Israel’s enemies?” Jonah goes through the city for three days, as he was in the belly of the big fish, preaching God’s judgment to come, and to his horror they repent so God relents and doesn’t bring judgment upon them. I love to read Jonah’s response because it reads so real (4:1):

But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. 

God, how dare you have mercy on these people! They aren’t supposed to get a second chance. I read some time ago the kind of evil and horror the Assyrians were capable of, and Jonah’s response is not unreasonable, but his job isn’t to think, only to obey. Jonah tells us exactly what he feels:

2 He prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. 3 Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

Just kill me now! Then God’s provision kicks in again to try to get His message across to Jonah, that he has no right to be angry (4:4). Jonah goes outside of the city to see what’s going to happen to it, hoping God decides to bring calamity after all. As he’s there, God provides three things: a plant to grow and provide shade for Jonah which makes him “very happy”; a worm to eat the plant, no more shade; then a scorching east wind and hot sun so Jonah grows faint. Unhappy again, he hopes God would just take him out of his misery and kill him. As the king of the universe He should for his rank insubordination, but He is the gracious and compassionate God Jonah so despises.     

God asks him if he’s justified in being angry about the plant, one he had nothing to do with growing, and he says he is. Then he tells the Lord:

“And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.”

There’s no resolution in this little book, and the story ends with God asking him a rhetorical question. Jonah had nothing to do with the plant growing, nor did he with the great city of Ninevah. The Lord asks why He shouldn’t have concern for the people and even the animals of such a city. That’s it. Story over. 

God’s Provision in Christ
It’s fascinating that Jesus would use the story of Jonah to point to God’s ultimate sacrifice for the sins of His people, and his own brutal death and burial. As is the crucifixion, the story of Jonah is one of God’s mercy, something we find hard to comprehend exactly because it’s God’s mercy. Why would God have to do something so horrible just to have a relationship with His people? His judgment and ultimate justice requires it, but he decided to do it because of His mercy. As Paul says of the crucifixion, and Jonah could relate (I Cor. 1:23):

We preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.

All Christians believe God is sovereign, the king and ruler of the entire universe, of all things visible and invisible, but most Christians have a hard time believing He is sovereign over the salvation of His people. God choosing whom He will save doesn’t sit well with them, and that the Hound of Heaven never fails.

God, however, is a choosing God, not a God who waits for the choosing of his creatures to accomplish his redemptive plans. He chooses Noah, then Abram, then Jacob, Moses, and eventually David through whom He will bring about a Messiah who will be prophet, priest, and king. We see this choosing God in the story of Moses asking God to show him His glory (Ex. 33):

19 And the Lord said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. 

God is the one who decides who will get his mercy, and as with Jonah, to us it can often appear unfair. God’s nature is to be the one who initiates the relationship to save, and at that moment in history God chose to have mercy on the people of Ninevah.

None of us can conceive of why God would create a world in which he would allow a fall to happen, and thus have sin and death enter his perfect created world, but here it is. He told Adam, the day you eat of the tree I told you not to eat of it, you shall surely die. The moment he listened to his wife and took and ate some of the fruit, everything changed. In my study of philosophy and world religions, I discovered that the only plausible explanation for evil and suffering and sin is found in Judaism and Christianity, and this is it. God never had to create anything. Unlike Islam where God is a solitary monad, alone, in Scripture a Triune God is revealed who can have existed perfectly content without other beings, but he decided otherwise.

When He did create these beings, both angels and humans, they had to be genuinely free and able to chose obedience or rebellion. Any real relationship that isn’t robotic requires such choosing and the free will to choose. God being God knew the risk, and what would happen, but there was clearly no other way. The devil chose rebellion and treason first, then when God made man the devil was allowed to take man down with him. However God already had a plan for that, a provision if you will, and that was He Himself in the person of His Son becoming a man and being the required sacrifice for that rebellion and treason. It’s so bizarre yet strangely plausible enough to enable us to believe it with integrity. The evidence, historical, philosophical, textual, archaeological, personal is so overwhelming that after 2000 years over two billion people believe it. They agree with me and the argument of my book, Uninvented, that there is absolutely no way it could be made up, mere invention of the human imagination.

That’s where Jonah and the crucifixion and God’s provision in our salvation come in. Who could ever make up such stuff? The ancient pagan gods were not known for their mercy, to say the least. They had to be placated in all kinds of silly and horrific ways. Read the prophets. A big fish swallowing a man for three days who vomits him out so he can go preach repentance and mercy to his bloodthirsty enemies? Really? If you want someone to believe your story, you don’t make this one up. Then this same God coming Himself, becoming one of his creatures to take their place so justice could be done and the relationship restored? Seriously? No wonder Paul calls the cross foolishness to the Gentiles, the pagans, and a stumbling block to the Jews. It’s absurd! But true.

When Jesus said we are to love our enemies, he provided the first example by loving us, even unto death on a cross. I’m sure to Jonah that would have “seemed very wrong.” In the ancient world you didn’t love your enemies, you killed them! Who would say something so stupid? Jesus! Again, nobody in the ancient world makes up something like that. The concept of sacrificial love was unknown among ancient pagans, Greek or Roman or any other peoples. Jews alone among ancient peoples knew about “loving your neighbor as yourselves” (Lev. 19:18), but nobody could comprehend the Creator God becoming a man to love us! He Himself is our provision. Out of that provision flows true human flourishing and ultimate fulfillment, flows the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, material blessings in this life, and spiritual blessings forever more.

What Distinguishes Amillennialism from Postmillennialism?

What Distinguishes Amillennialism from Postmillennialism?

Feb 4, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

While I very much appreciate my optimistic amillennialist brethren, or what I call practical postmillennialists, it’s important to understand that being optimistic, or not, is not what separates these two eschatological perspectives. It’s more than merely seeing the glass half full. On a surface level that is non-theological or biblical, it can appear the two have much in common, but our eschatological optimism is the result of something much deeper than a desire to see things turn out the way we want. Having an optimistic perspective with a fundamentally pessimistic theology is like running up hill. When you believe things are going to the proverbial hell in a handbasket, one way ticket, it’s tough to maintain a positive outlook.

As those of you who are familiar with my work will know, I was born-again into the Late-Great-Planet-Earth late 1970s, which meant I accepted the dispensational premillennialist outlook on eschatology and the world. Things were getting increasingly worse, quickly, and the Rapture was happening any day, so be ready to go. Such newspaper eschatology got wearisome after a while, and even after my stint in seminary, I wasn’t really keen on eschatology. That lead me to adopt a kind of eschatological agnosticism, what I later heard termed pan-millennialism. Or it will all pan out in the end, as indeed it will, but that’s a copout.

Because I was a recovering dispensationalist, I was convinced God didn’t see fit to reveal much that wasn’t confusing about eschatology, so why bother. But would God really want to confuse us and leave us in the dark about a topic as important as how it all ends? Where everything is headed and how we get there? Sure, every orthodox Christian agrees, that as the creed says, Jesus will come from the right hand of God “to judge the living and the dead.” We know God will usher in a new heavens and earth where sin and suffering and sorrow will be no more, and he will wipe every tear from our eyes. The question is whether it is true that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and Jesus comes back like Batman to save the day. That’s what I used to believe, and what most Christians believe. Or alternatively, did God begin establishing His kingdom at Christ’s first coming, and like a mustard seed and leaven it is slowly and inevitably growing throughout the entire earth to eventually usher in the final sin free and reconciled kingdom on a new heavens and earth when Christ returns. These are the questions which most Christians would never ask, and if you ask it they think you’ve been drinking too much of the funny juice.

My Journey through Amillennialism to Postmillennialism
For whatever reason, God created me as something of an idealist with a kind of ambition where I believed if I worked hard enough I could accomplish anything. Of course that is not true, but when I was young I believed it completely. My dad used to make fun of me. My first obsession being a SoCal boy was surfing, and I just had to have that David Nuuhiwa surfboard and went to the beach to work on my surfing as much as I could. Then I moved on to guitar, and without a doubt I would be one of the greats. Eddie Van Halen had nothing on me! Being from SoCal himself, I saw him as a rival, which is kind of funny. I practiced for hours every day and got pretty good, but not close to Van Halen good. One thing my dad would never let me forget was haranguing him into get me a wawa pedal. For the rest of his life he would say to me, “You just had to have the wawa pedal.” Yeah, dad, then I could play Robin Trower and Hendrix! Then I got diverted into golf, and not only did I want to be great, but in fact the greatest in the world! Sadly, I only had the talent to be the greatest in my family. Yes, delusions of grandeur came naturally to me.

Then I went away to college and got born-again, and the idealism didn’t stop there. I was going to become a missionary and change the world like William Carey, but realized I’m to addicted to the comforts of American life. Then after college it was politics. I’d learned about what it means to have a Christian worldview from Francis Schaeffer, and was determined to apply it to all of life, and I dove into political activism. It didn’t take long to get disillusioned with that. I’d embraced Reformed theology, and went to Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia and Academia was my next rout to change the world. God rescued me from that life because I met my wife to be at Westminster, and we were married and started life together. We got involved in an Amway business, which my older readers will be familiar with, for the decade of the 90s, and that was the next vehicle to change the world, and get rich! That didn’t happen. Then in the late 2010s after I’d gotten disillusioned with politics again, I decided to start a non-profit called The Culture Project because I realized that’s the way we have to change America. That didn’t go anywhere either.

Through all these permutations of my delusions, I still maintained my idealism. Then in 2014 I embraced Amillennialism. I didn’t intend to become a pessimist, but in hindsight I see that’s what it did to me. When I embraced it through the teaching of scholar, theologian, and pastor, Kim Riddlebarger, I was so excited to learn that God actually did have something to say about “end times.” Eschatology wasn’t just a means to confusion and bickering after all. It was only after my embrace of postmillennialism in August of 2022 that I could look back and see what amillennialism did to my idealism that being dispensational and pan-mill could not.

Anyone who it familiar with my story knows it was Roman Catholic Steve Bannon and his War Room podcast after the debacle of the 2020 election who slowly turned me into an optimist. I then started to look for a theological, biblical justification for my growing optimism, and found it in the eschatological position I’d rejected all my life as a joke. I did not see that coming! It was one of the many ongoing effects of the red pill I unknowingly took when Donald J. Trump came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 to run for president. It’s kind of amazing to me that at almost the age of 55 I would begin to rethink so many things in my life, and change my mind more often than not. I’m an object lesson to not allow our beliefs to become so ossified that when presented with different ideas and facts and perspectives we won’t change our minds.

Prior to Bannon and still embracing amillennialism, I even got to the point where I would mock my younger self for being an idealist. I’m not changing thew world because the world can’t change. I came to believe the world isn’t changing fundamentally until Jesus returns. Sin was too powerful a force in a fallen world filled with fallen people to change, and things would get worse until Jesus returned to clean up the mess. After my “conversion” I tried to figure out why I’d come to believe this so strongly. Mind you, prior to that I still believed in the things getting worse and Jesus coming back to save the day paradigm, but it personally didn’t turn me into a pessimist. Amillennialism did.

Why Most Amillennialists are Pessimists
This is a bit of a sensitive topic because our amillennialists brethren don’t really like to be considered pessimists. I certainly would never have considered myself one of them, especially given my history, but that’s what I became. It goes with the territory. An interesting aside as we discuss this topic is that I’ve found that even though premillennial dispensationalists according to their theology should be even more pessimistic than amillennialists, they often become the most robust culture warriors while the a-mills generally don’t. You would think it might be the other way round. I’m all for theological inconsistency when it comes to this!

One thing you’ll find widespread among a-mills is Christian worldview thinking, but as I argue and have written about here, while it is a requirement for all Christians, a Christian worldview is not enough. The reason is that it is primarily an intellectual exercise rather than a theological imperative rooted in the authority of the ascended Christ at the right hand of the power of God. Things will get better and the influence of Christianity will spread like leaven in bread (Matt. 13), not because people are thinking in a Christian way about things, but because God in His power through Christ is advancing His kingdom, extending Christ’s reign, and building His church. It is not our work that makes the difference, but God working in, through, and for us. What postmillennialism is not, is positive thinking. It is realistic, biblical thinking.

The a-mills don’t see it this way. I’ll give you a couple quotes from a piece written by the man who persuaded me to become a-mill. Referring to the Olivet discourse in a piece at Modern Reformation magazine, he says:

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 assumes a futurist perspective on Jesus’ words, that what he’s talking about is his second coming at the end of time, not what a preterist like me believes, that Jesus was speaking to the generation who was listening to his words. As Jesus says just a few verses before his reference to Noah:

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

So just three verses before the passage Kim uses to refer to a generation thousands of years into the future, Jesus says it’s his generation. People try to make his words into something they are not, but in Greek, or English, or any other language you choose, this means this generation, not some other one far into the future. In another passage from the same piece, he says:

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.

This of course assumes postmillennialism’s case for optimism comes more from human than biblical teaching, but it doesn’t. That’s one of the reasons I embraced it, realizing I’d gotten this wrong, and the case for eschatological optimism was thoroughly biblical and exegetical. Kim is not a fan of the optimistic/pessimistic paradigm, and I respond more in depth to Kim in a piece I did previously.

Why Postmillennialists are Optimistic: The Ascension and Christ’s Kingship
It wasn’t but a few weeks after I embrace postmillennialism that I heard Doug Wilson on a video say, “Now you have a theological justification for your optimism.” Bingo! That’s what I was looking for, and God provided it. Amazing. And this optimism had nothing to do with secularism and science and human knowledge that distorted postmillennialism in the 19th century, but with God’s clear declarations in Scripture of victory in Christ. We see this through all the covenant promises and prophetic declarations in the Old Testament pointing forward to Christ. It’s easy enough to pick out the declarations of judgment, but to me they are overwhelmed by the power in contrast to the declarations of victory of God’s kingdom rule to come. Again, it is the Scriptural proclamation of victory of the plans of God that compelled me to embrace postmillennialism once my mind was opened to it, which previously was shut like a trap door I was convinced was unable to be opened.

Since that is the basis of our eschatological hope “not only in the present age but also in the one to come” (Eph. 1:21), I will end with one passage and how I now see it, and others like it, as applying to Christ’s first coming and not his second as I used to. Reading through Micah I came to these stirring words in chapter 4:

4 In the last days

the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established
as the highest of the mountains;
it will be exalted above the hills,
and peoples will stream to it.

2 Many nations will come and say,

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the temple of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion,
the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
3 He will judge between many peoples
and will settle disputes for strong nations far and wide.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.
4 Everyone will sit under his own vine
and under his own fig tree,
and no one will make them afraid,
for the Lord Almighty has spoken.
5 All the nations may walk
in the name of their gods,
but we will walk in the name of the Lord
our God for ever and ever.

With my futurist assumptions I automatically saw this, and the many other passages like it, as of course applying to Jesus’ second coming. Swords into plowshares? Not in this fallen world! Now I realize that’s exactly why Jesus came, to bring, as the shepherds proclaimed, peace on earth, good will toward men. If you compare the ancient world into which Jesus was born to the modern world as brutal as it can still be, it is peaceful in comparison, all because of the Prince of Peace. Just because the peace has yet to seep into every nook and cranny of existence, doesn’t mean the peace hasn’t been slowly coming all over the world since the resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost. No Christian would deny that peace has come to personal relationships and families, but it isn’t limited to that. The modern world shaped by the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ is utterly different than the ancient world into which Jesus was born.

It is also clear, as it is in many other such passages, that they are speaking of life in a fallen world, not a perfected sinless and restored world. References to disputes among nations imply sin still exists. So does the possibility of being made afraid, or nations walking in the name of some other god. The kingdom’s coming is a painfully slow, mostly imperceptible process until you look in the rear view mirror—it nonetheless transforms wherever it goes. Maybe in a decade, or even a century, it doesn’t look like much transformation is happening, but look back 2000 years and the transformation is as obvious as a volcano in full bloom. Reading the Scripture, especially the Old Testament, with transformation expectations, can bring a new appreciation for what Christ is doing in our day,