Eschatological Assumptions and AD70

Eschatological Assumptions and AD70

Nov 20, 2024 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

From early in my Christian life I knew Jerusalem was completely destroyed, decimated, by the Romans in AD70. However, before I embraced postmillennialism in August 2022, I didn’t realize the significance of that event both eschatologically and theologically. I also didn’t understand the importance of assumptions, and how they inevitably determine how we interpret everything, literally, including eschatology and theology. We are assuming creatures. Presuppositions are built into our worldview, how we see and think we know things. That is called the discipline of epistemology. Having presuppositions means we assume certain things, we pre‑suppose them.

Most people know what assumptions are, but few have any idea of the role they play in how they view the world, how they understand, process, perceive, and interpret reality. In fact, most people don’t believe they assume anything at all! But they do; all human beings do because technically we can’t “prove” anything. Ask someone how they know what they assert or claim. More often than not you will reveal they don’t know something, but simply assume it. For example, the assumption behind “True for you, but not for me” is that thoughts are their own justification. People assume that nothing outside their own thoughts or feelings can determine whether what they believe is true or false. Of course, just because someone thinks a thing is true, doesn’t make it so. Such an assumption can’t be proved and there is no evidence for it; it is merely assumed as if it is true. Uncovering hidden assumptions is one of the most powerful tools in our truth armor, and also a cause for epistemological humility, something in short supply among sinful human beings, Christian or not.

I’ve learned when we come to eschatology that assumptions are baked into the cake. We can’t read any eschatological text in the Bible without bringing certain assumptions to the table, and few Christians are even aware their assumptions determine how they interpret the text. Given most pastors never teach or explain what I just said, and also given most Christians have not been educated to the degree we all wish we could have been, assumptions are mostly invisible, as if they didn’t even exist. This is especially true when it comes to eschatology. Which brings me to AD70 and the fall of Jerusalem.

Preterism, Futurism, Historicism, or Idealism?
These are four approaches to eschatology, and I’ll briefly explain each one.

Preterism – The word comes from the Latin preteritio, meaning “a fact or condition of being in the past.” So preterists believe biblical prophecy already happened in the past, especially the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24; Mark 13) as referring to the Roman army’s destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in A.D. 70. Preterists also argue that the Apostle John wrote the Book of Revelation before A.D. 70 and that it describes Nero Caesar’s persecution of the church. The references to judgment on Babylon refer to Israel, not Rome. We’ll discuss this in more detail in a moment because since I’ve embraced postmillennialism I’ve become a preterist (partial for those who know what that means).

Futurism – In this position as it implies, biblical prophecy is about the future, post AD70. So the events Jesus and John refer to will happen well after the first century, and in fact haven’t happened yet. Premillennialists and dispensationalists are futurists, and they tend to believe Revelation was written after AD70.

Historicism – From gotquestions.org: “In theology, historicism is an approach to eschatology and prophecy in general. In historicism biblical prophecies are interpreted as representative of literal historical events. Historicism looks at the whole of Bible prophecy as a sweeping overview of church history, from Pentecost to the end times. This approach involves interpreting symbols or figures in the Bible as metaphors for actual events, nations, or persons of history. Historicism was especially popular during the Reformation, when it was used to suggest that the Catholic Church was part of the end-times apostasy, with the pope as the Antichrist.”

Idealism – This approach differs from the others in its reluctance to identify any particular historical events, institutions, or people with the visions of the book of Revelation. Revelation to idealists is a portrayal of the church’s struggle throughout the entire period between the first and second comings of Christ.

I was a pan-millennialist (eschatological agnostic) for most of my Christian life, but when I embraced amillennialism in 2014 I embraced idealism. It made sense to me because I assumed that eschatology was so difficult a topic to grasp that a general application of the basic ideas throughout time seemed to fit the text. I’d rejected dispensationalism a long time ago because it was basically newspaper eschatology driven by headlines and predictions that never came to pass, and I knew absolutely nothing about postmillennialism so that was never an option, until it was. I thought I knew it was a completely discredited position and unworthy of seriously considering even though, like I said, I knew nothing about it. Until, that is, it dropped out of the sky on my head in August 2022. Now preterism makes total sense, and even more so the more I learn about it.

Back to assumptions. We will interpret eschatological passages depending on our assumptions based on these four positions. Given premillennial dispensationalism is the dominant position held by the vast majority of Evangelicals, whether they could articulate that or not, most Christians are futurists.

Before we get to discussing the date of John writing Revelation, I will briefly mention why preterists feel the need to use “partial” as a qualifying adjective. Preterists believe Jesus came again, as I’ll explain, in judgment against Israel in AD70, and for some of them that’s it. That’s Jesus’ second coming and there will be no other. Needless to say, that’s the extreme minority report in Christianity historically, and considered heresy. Non-heretical (partial) preterists believe Jesus came in judgment then as well, but also believe there is some futurist elements to the prophetic witness as in the creed that, “He will come again to judge the living and the dead.”

Before Jerusalem Fell
This is the title of a book by Ken Gentry I recently read that made a compelling case for John writing Revelation before AD70. I had no idea given the post-AD70 position is by far the most popular in Christianity today, that the pre-position was so strong. In fact, I was under the impression that the post position was beyond if not question, then beyond a reasonable doubt. However, anyone reading Gentry’s book will have to conclude there is very much a reasonable doubt. Whatever conclusion one comes to having studied the evidence, it has to be acknowledged that the pre-AD70 position is credible and worthy of consideration. For me, it’s beyond a reasonable doubt, but I also bring my postmillennial assumptions to the evidence, so I want it to be written before Jerusalem Fell. I can’t look at it any other way because those are my beliefs and deeply held convictions.

Since we can’t completely escape our assumptions, we need to at least be aware we have them. This allows us to see how Revelation and the Olivet discourse are interpreted with the various approaches to the text. As I said, almost all Evangelical Christians are futurists, so it’s easier for them to believe Revelation was written after Jerusalem fell even if the evidence doesn’t support that. Exactly what is the evidence? There are two types of evidence, and Gentry goes into great detail on each one. I’ll explain them briefly, but before I get there we must come to some agreement on why John wrote Revelation. These are the two choices:

  • Post AD 70 during the reign of Domitian (reigned 81-96)
  • Pre during the reign of Nero (reigned 37–68)

Of the various ways to interpret the text of Scripture, what we call hermeneutics, the most important is authorial intent. In other words, what was the intention of the author who wrote the words. The second most important is what the author’s audience would have reasonably been expected to believe. To put this in laymen’s terms, context is everything in interpretation.

We know whether it was written in the 60s or 90s, persecution was the context. Historians are in agreement that the Neronic persecution in the 60s was more intense than any persecution under Domitian. Nero didn’t start out as the horror he became, but when he decided Christians were the enemy, he went all in. Christians were thrown to the lions in arena for sport, covered with tar, put up on poles and burned alive. It was so horrific that Romans began to feel sorry for them, especially because Nero seemed to be doing it to blame the Christians for the great fire of Rome in July 64. Nero even had the two great leaders of the early church, Peter and Paul, killed. Imagine living in that time, and the abject fear you live with every day that you could be next. This kind of mindset filled with foreboding would not have been present in the 90s under Domitian. Eusebius in his Church History provides the first reference to Domitian persecuting the church writing over two centuries later in the early fourth century. Speaking of the context of Revelation, Gentry writes:

Revelation has two fundamental purposes relative to its original hearers. In the first place, it was designed to steel the first century Church against the gathering storm of persecution, which was reaching an unnerving crescendo of theretofore unknown proportions and intensity. A new and major feature of that persecution was the entrance of imperial Rome onto the scene. The first historical persecution of the Church by imperial Rome was by Nero Caesar from A.D. 64 to A D. 68.

In the second place, it was to brace the Church for a major and fundamental re-orientation in the course of redemptive history, a re-orientation necessitating the destruction of Jerusalem (the center not only of Old Covenant Israel, but of Apostolic Christianity and the Temple).

If Revelation was written in the 60s that will necessitate a rethinking of the futurist interpretation, but if it was written in the 90s, then the futurist interpretation of the prophecies to the distant future is more plausible. A lot rides on dating the writing of Revelation. Few Christians, unfortunately, are aware of the arguments one way or the other, and even as well-read as I am, a seminary graduate no less, I knew nothing about any of this until I read Gentry’s book. The two types of evidence are external and internal, and we’ll look at the former first.

External Evidence
I never knew exactly why the consensus was a late date, and Gentry does an extensive survey of the scholarly opinion because scholars have been wrestling with this question for a long time. The evidence for the late dating of Revelation depends completely upon the external evidence, that is evidence coming from comments in the writings of the early church fathers of the first three centuries of the church. All scholars agree whatever their opinion of the dating, that John was banished to the barren, virtually deserted Island of Patmos, as John himself tells us in the first chapter:

I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.

To put it bluntly up front, the external evidence for the AD90s writing of Revelation is weak. Yes, my assumptions as a preterist make me inclined to believe this, but you judge for yourself, and a short blog post is not going to convince you one way or the other. Reading Gentry’s book is a good start, but I will briefly lay out the case here.

The late date external evidence rests most heavily on the church father Irenaeus (130-202), and he wrote about it in Book 5 of his work, Against Heresies, written in 180-190. The context is in a passage where he’s commenting on identifying who “666” might be. Here is the passage:

We will not, however, incur the risk of pronouncing positively as to the name of Antichrist; for if it were necessary that his name should be distinctly revealed in this present time, it would have been announced by him who beheld the apocalyptic vision. For that was seen no very long time since, but almost in our day, towards the end of Domitian’s reign.

Apparently for many scholars that settles it, but not so fast. Gentry says, “there are several considerations that tend to reduce the usefulness of Irenaeus for late date advocacy,” and then he goes into exhaustive detail on each one.

The first issue is the translation of the Greek, and while it’s impossible for me to address the issues in short order here, let’s just say there are enough questions to raise reasonable doubt as to the meaning of the text. There is also the issue of Irenaeus writing almost a hundred years after the events, and questions about his chronological understanding of the history he writes about. Gentry reviews other church fathers who comment on John and Domitian, but most of them depend uncritically on Irenaeus. Gentry concludes, “A bold ‘thus saith Irenaeus,’ cannot be conclusive on the matter.”

Internal Evidence
To me the internal evidence, i.e., the content of the book itself, as they say in a court of law, is dispositive, which is “an adjective describing something that resolves a legal issue, claim or controversy.” In court it gets us beyond a reasonable doubt, and I am confident if you studied the internal evidence, you too might get beyond such doubt. I can only briefly review it here.

I will refer to the thoughts of others, but I start with the most obvious “proof” to me coming from the very first words of the book:

The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place.

The late date advocates and those not disposed to the preterist position have to explain away “soon.” For the futurist, I have to believe “soon” really means thousands of years into the future, and for the historicist it is also hundreds if not thousands of years in the future, and for the idealist it isn’t any time at all. I think it’s best to take words in their plain meaning, and take soon to mean, well, soon, just as I take Jesus in Matthew 24 when he says “this generation will not pass away until all these things come to pass” to mean, that very generation of people he was talking to.

Gentry gives us the “major lines of evidence” from various scholars, each of which he then explores in detail, but here I will just list them to give you a flavor of why the internal evidence for an early date (pre AD70) can be so compelling.

  1. The peculiar idiom of Revelation indicates a younger John, before his mastery of the Greek language evidence in his more polished gospel from a later period.
  2. The existence of only seven churches in Asia minor (Rev. 1) indicates a date before the greater expansion of Christianity into that region. (I would add John addressing “the seven churches in the province of Asia,” with the definite article indicates there were in fact only seven at the time, while 40 years later in the 90s there would have been considerably more.)
  3. The activity of the Judaizing heretics in the Church (Rev. 2, 3) should be less conspicuous after a broader circulation of Paul’s anti-Judaizing letters.
  4. The prominence of the Jewish persecution of Christianity (Rev. 6,11).
  5. The existence and integrity of Jerusalem and the Temple (Rev. 11) suggests the early date.
  6. The reign of the sixth emperor (Rev. 17) must indicate a date in the AD 60s.
  7. There is lack of internal evidence for a late date.
  8. The nearness of the events had no fulfillment beyond the dramatic events of AD70.
  9. It is easy to apply Revelation’s prophecies to the Jewish War.

Lastly, I’ll mention two points he addresses from scholar F.J. A Hort. First, the language of Rome and the Beast fits the dreadful last days of Nero and following in the late 60s, not the local and short reign of terror under Domitian. Hort further claims, “Nero affected the imagination of the world as Domitian . . . . never did.” Second, the tone of Revelation fits much better with the tumultuous time after Nero’s death much better than the stability of the time of Domitian.

Wherever we come down on the dating of Revelation, what happened to Jerusalem and the temple in AD70 was the redemptive and covenantal turning point in history, definitively from old to new, separating Christianity from Judaism once and for all. God’s judgment on the Jews led to the salvation of the world, and in due course the Jews too.

 

Societal Transformation by the Sword of the Spirit

Societal Transformation by the Sword of the Spirit

Nov 13, 2024 | Eschatology, Politics & Government, The Gospel

When I embraced postmillennialism after four plus decades as a Christian, I encountered ideas I’d never seriously considered before, like theonomy, or what God’s law over a nation would look like. Or what a Christian nation is, or even that a nation should be Christian. Ever since I first read Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There around 1980, I’ve always been a worldview Christian who wanted Christianity to influence the culture, but I never considered the nuts and bolts of governing a society from a biblical perspective. Like many Christians I wanted the Christian worldview to influence how our country is governed, but being a post-World War II conservative I was for all intents and purposes secular. I didn’t believe the so called separation of church and state meant the separation of religion and state, yet the idea of our nation or any nation being specifically Christian was never something I considered until postmillennialism.

Like most Evangelical Christians, I read the Great Commission of Matthew 28 through a Pietist lens. We’ll remember Jesus’ charge to the eleven 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.”

Even though Jesus distinctly said “nations,” like most others I read it as, “make disciples of all individual people.” I’m sure I thought a corporate body like a nation can’t be discipled, so Jesus must mean individual people, that is if I ever thought about it at all, which I didn’t. Clearly Jesus used the word nation to give us a vision of the worldwide nature of the great commission, that it would be people, as the Apostle John says in Revelation 5, “from every tribe and language and people and nation.” But post post-mill, I now looked more closely at the word nation in Greek, which is ἔθνος-ethnos, which means a race, people, nation, “or people joined by practicing similar customs or common culture.” It is instructive that he didn’t use a comparable Greek word for persons, for individuals. Since God doesn’t use words randomly in Scripture, this choice of wording by Jesus must be significant.

Which brings me to the reason for this post. I’ve found whenever the topic of a Christian nation comes up (let’s stay away from the loaded term Christian nationalism), most Christians, let alone non-Christians, think of force. I wrote about this recently after I heard Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College say, “a Christian nation is an oxymoron.” I yelled at my little MP3 player as I was listening to him say that, “No, Larry, a Christian nation is not a contradiction in terms!” Why would he think such a thing? Why would any Christian think such a thing? Because, as he implied when he continued to explain, if a nation is Christian, that means Christians are forcing the people of the nation to believe and behave a certain way. No, Larry, they are not! That’s not what Christians do, ever, even if some have done it in the past. Mark Rushdoony explains why Arnn and others believe this:

Theocracy is falsely assumed to be a take-over of government, imposing biblical law on an unwilling society. This presupposes statism which is the opposite of theocracy. Because modern people only understand power as government, they assume that’s what we want.

Yes, there was a time in Christendom when Protestants and Catholics killed one another because of their beliefs. It had more to do with geopolitics than faith per se, but nonetheless, Bloody Mary Tudor of England killed some 300 Protestants who refused to repent and become Catholics, burning them at the stake. And Catholics murdered several thousand Huguenots (Calvinists) in France during the infamous St. Bartholmew’s Day Massacre in 1572. As the Reformation grew, Protestants fought back and we got the so called Wars of Religion. You get the picture. That’s not what we’re talking about when we talk about a Christian nation. Nobody can be or should be forced to believe anything.

The Failed Rationale of Secularism
This fratricide among Christians lead to the development of the Enlightenment concept of secularism, the idea that a nation could be irreligious, or secular, and that would obviate the need for Christians to kill one another. Nobody would be forced to believe something against their will. That was the idea anyway. It hasn’t exactly worked out as secularists thought it would. As we can see, secularism hasn’t turned out to be the pluralistic peaceful Utopia its adherents promised. The reason is simple to understand. No government can be morally neutral, and some worldview, some faith commitment, some religion, will always drive the moral framework, i.e., laws, of a nation. In the history of the world, Christianity was the only religion and worldview that gave us liberty and the rule of law, which is critical to understand if we’re to contrast it with secularism, which inevitably leads to tyranny, something modern secularists, both Christian and non-Christian, do not seem to realize.

I need to repeat my claim, strongly, so it’s clear, especially to conservatives who still buy into the myth of neutrality: Secularism will always inevitably lead to tyranny. America and the West circa 2024 is exhibit A. We call this version of tyranny woke, a variant of cultural Marxism. Only a Christian nation, a nation committed to Christ as its ultimate sovereign, and the Bible as its ultimate moral guide, will allow for true freedom of conscience and political liberty. Secularism, by contrast, can give us no rational for liberty because all the competing worldview (moral) claims in a pluralistic “Utopia” have an equal claim upon ultimate authority, and only one can win. The secular state always has the upper hand because it claims to be irreligious, and the people assume it can be too. The referee is not in the game but determines the rules of the game and will enforce those rules, which will always be moral and thus religious in nature. The inevitable totalitarian nature of secularism is well made in the book Classical Apologetics by Sproul, Gerstner, and Lindsley:

The impact of secularism . . . has been pervasive and cataclysmic, shaking the foundations of the value structures of Western civilization. The Judeo-Christian consensus is no more; it has lost its place as the dominant shaping force of cultural ethics. . . . Sooner or later the vacuum (the rejection of theology in the West) will be filled, and if it cannot be filled by the transcendent, then it will be filled by the immanent. The force that floods into such vacuums is statism, the inevitable omega point of secularism.

And this was written in 1984! Secularism has proved to be a jealous God, and if you question that God, the state, you will be made to pay. The delusion of secularism is part of what came to be called the post-World War II “consensus.” The illusion held when the remnant of Christian culture was still the worldview of most Westerners, but in a post-Christian environment secularist statism has turned completely anti-Christian. We’ve had to re-learn something the early church quickly realized. The assertion that “Jesus is Lord” is a political statement, one which means Caesar is not. Our ultimate allegiance is to the Lord Jesus Christ revealed to us in Scripture, and thus it cannot be to the state. The only means for the state to enforce its will is the sword, or violence, because the state is power not persuasion. That is the distinction we must understand if we’re to get it right as we implement Christendom 2.0.

Christianity and Liberty by the Sword
When we speak of the sword in the context of a Christian nation, it has a dual meaning, and both of these meanings are the only foundation for true liberty. The seed of this liberty goes back four thousand years ago. After the flood and the Lord scattering the people from Babel, humanity was heathen, and would have remained so, lost to truth, had not God taken the initiative and called one man, only one, out of Ur of the Chaldeans (southern Iraq) to go to Canaan. This was the bifurcation point of history which created the two branches of humanity, the heathens, whom God did not call, and His people, starting with this one man. Think of it as the proverbial fork in the road. Down one fork, sinful humanity remains benighted, lost in sin and darkness, trying to figure out reality and what it means, but only having the revelation of creation. Down the other are God’s people given verbal revelation directly from the Creator God.

God promised Abram all the nations of the earth would be blessed through him, and the theme of blessing the nations runs throughout Genesis. Most see the word blessing and think of a kind of vague happiness, things going well, circumstances to our liking, something like that. This is not at all what the Bible means by blessing. Christians can be blessed in very bad circumstances because they belong to their God, forever, but God’s blessing extends to every human being. A simple definition is to bestow divine favor. I like to extend this definition from something I heard in a lecture on the book of Genesis by Dr. Mark Futato of Reformed Theological Seminary. He defines blessing as empowerment. When God blesses people He empowers them to do a wide variety of things, as he puts it, “God empowers people to flourish.” I love that! Secularists paint Christianity as repressive and intolerant, but what it represses and doesn’t tolerate is sin! Sin destroys everything it touches and makes true flourishing impossible. It is by definition dis-empowering. Jumping forward two thousand years, Jesus says the same thing (John 10:10):

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

And despite what Satan wants us to believe, that God is a big meanie and he’s parsimonious with his blessings, it’s clear from Genesis and in God’s covenant promises to Abram that these blessings are to touch so many people they literally can’t be counted (sand of the seashore, stars in the sky, and dust of the earth). God is not miserly in spreading his blessings on earth, but this does not mean His blessings do not include adversity or in some cases suffering. Immediately after the fall, we realize all of God’s blessing is done in the face of a cosmic spiritual war to frustrate the devil’s plans. As we’re told, thorns and thistles. This means it will never be easy and we will encounter constant adversity and opposition. As I taught my kids as they were growing up and still as they are adults, life is constant friction, resistance at every step. But as muscles only grow stronger when there is resistance, so does our character and holiness.

Because Christ rose from the dead and was seated at the right hand of God “over all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is named,” (Eph. 1:21) he empowers us through the adversity and friction and resistance to flourish, in fact flourish in the face of and because of it. As I also taught and still teach my kids, we learn nothing from success. This is where the swords come in and how both are required if a nation is to experience true liberty.

The State, The Gospel, and the Sword
The two biblical swords have different purposes in a society, and we must not confuse the two, as many have done in the history of the church. First, Paul describes the sword utilized by the state in Romans 13:

3 For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. 4 For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.

We notice those who abide by the law, doing right, have nothing to fear from the state. Liberty can only be had within the confines of well-defined and just laws people willingly abide by. America was bequeathed the rule of law from almost 900 years of British history, which means in the words of Samuel Rutherford’s 1644 book, Lex Rex, law is king. Rutherford states, “A man commanding unjustly and ruling tyrannically has in that no power from God.” Thus, from Alfred the Great in the ninth century grew the common law, and the idea that even the king was under law, a radically new notion in the history of the world, a power British kings would not easily relinquish.

This was a specifically Christian idea that separated the Christian nation from the pagan nation. It’s one or the other, the law over the ruler, or the ruler over the law. A secular nation is a pagan nation, and thus man’s law not God’s law rules, and the result is tyranny, as we see in America and the West today. The answer is theonomy, however we define it, God’s law not man’s law as the ultimate authority over the state. This is the point at which Christian secularists get terribly confused, thinking theonomy means using the sword of the state to enforce certain beliefs. It does not! Freedom of conscience that came through European, primarily English, history gave us America’s First Amendment, the freedom of religion, and what we’ve come to know as the separation of church and state. The church institute, as Joe Boot calls it, does not exercise any coercive power over individuals, nor does the state outside of enforcing civil and criminal law. 

We must understand this, and teach Christians and non-Christians alike, that we advance the Christian cause in society by words, first God’s words then ours. People and societies are transformed not by force, but by reason; as the Lord says through Isaiah, come let us reason together (Is. 1:18). Greg Bahnsen in his Theonomy in Christian Ethics puts it well:

Christ repudiates the use of the sword in spreading the gospel of the kingdom because this task belongs to His church, and the church and state are sperate (as the Old Testament taught and Christ confirmed). The civil magistrate may use the sword as the proper means of enforcement, but the church may not.

And you do not get more theonomic than the late great Greg Bahnsen. Yet most conservative Christians, like Larry Arnn, believe a Christian nation means using force to advance Christianity. The reason, again, is the persistent myth of secular neutrality. The Book of Revelation is also an excellent source for understanding this critical distinction. We notice in the following verses the sword Jesus uses to advance his kingdom.

In his right hand he held seven stars, and coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance. (Rev. 1:16)

“To the angel of the church in Pergamum write: These are the words of him who has the sharp, double-edged sword. (Rev. 2:12)

Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth. (Rev. 2:16)

Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. (Rev. 19:15)

The rest were killed with the sword coming out of the mouth of the rider on the horse. (Rev. 19:21)

From the moment the Apostle John wrote these words in the first century, the sword of the word of God has gone forth to conquer the nations and advance His kingdom of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (Rom. 4:17).

 

 

Why Eschatology Matters

Why Eschatology Matters

Nov 6, 2024 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

If you had asked me for most of my Christian life if eschatology mattered I would have said no, not at all. I was a committed eschatological Agnostic. It was a waste of time, speculation heaped upon speculation about verses in the Bible that seemed to have a variety of contradictory interpretations. I apologize for anyone who’s familiar with my story because I’ve repeated it here numerous times, but I must do so again because it is critical for making my case why eschatology matters and why so few Christians think it does. In fact, recently on Charlie Kirk’s show, which I often watch during the day as I work, he made this point. He said he’s heard Christians defend all the positions, pre, A, and post-mill, and said in so many words, it’s basically irrelevant and we just need get down to fighting the battles in front of us. Indeed we do, but how we see “end times,” an inaccurate description of what eschatology is about, determines not only what we do, but how we perceive the doing and the expectation of results, or the lack thereof.

Born again in the fall of 1978, exactly 46 years ago as I write these words, it was right in the middle of Last Days Madness, in the title of a book by Gary Demar. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, a massive best seller, was a common topic of conversation among Christians. The Middle East was in turmoil, and there was talk of antichrist and the immanent rapture. In fact, it was ubiquitous, virtually inescapable. Even though I’d read Lindsey’s book, I could no more defend the dispensational position than I could defend the hypostatic union (Jesus being both God and man for the theologically challenged), but I completely bought it. One day in the spring of 1982 just prior to my graduation from Arizona State University , I was standing out in front of my dorm, Best Hall, and prayed fervently that the rapture would happen so I wouldn’t have to graduate and figure out real life. No such luck.

As we all know, the rapture didn’t happen, and by the grace of God I’ve done a middling job figuring out life. In the immediate decades to come, the obsession with “end times” didn’t subside. The 90s was the decade of Left Behind in popular culture, and antichrist and rapture speculation only accelerated. The problem with such speculation, however, is if predictions and expectations don’t come to pass, people become jaded and skeptical. So most Christians in the year of our Lord 2024 are where I ended up not too many years after college, pan-millennialism, as in what Charlie Kirk basically believes; it’s not worth worrying about because it will all “pan out in the end.” Well, yes it will, but I must rebuke my younger self with being a cop-out, although it’s completely understandable. With all the “end times” hype proving untrue, newspaper eschatology as I’ve heard it called, disengaging is a perfectly reasonable response, but God won’t so easily let us off the hook.

Eschatology Matters Because God Says So
I will quote Paul in a verse familiar to all Evangelical Christians from 2 Timothy 3:16:

16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

This should settle the matter, but we’re stubborn little sinful creatures, so it won’t, but I’ll do my best to contribute to the settling. If what Paul says here is true, then all Scripture, including eschatology, is profitable for His people in these ways, and my disregarding it for a large portion of my Christian life is basically telling God that it’s not. That’s not good. So if we can agree on this, let’s first look at what eschatology is and why it is profitable.

Eschatology comes from the Greek word ἔσχατος (éskhatos) meaning last, and ology means study, so it’s the study of last things, not “end times.” And although most pastors don’t preach with an eye to “last things,” it’s all over Scripture, and not just in the most obvious places. Those would be Revelation, Portions of the synoptic gospels where Jesus speaks to the destruction of the temple, Daniel, portions of Ezekiel and other prophets. The other passages, while not so apparent, are Messianic in nature. For example, take this passage in Genesis 49 that is clearly Messianic when Jacob is blessing his sons, and he gets to Judah. I won’t quote the whole thing, but just one verse in the middle:

10 The scepter will not depart from Judah,
nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,
until he to whom it belongs shall come
and the obedience of the nations shall be his.

Nobody questions whether this applies to the Messiah, even Jews, but for Christians the question is whether Jesus started accomplishing this at his first coming, or will only accomplish it at his second.

After I embraced postmillennialism, I realized that for my entire Christian life, at that point almost 44 years, I’d read every single Messianic passage in the Old Testament as being fulfilled in Christ’s second advent. Which proves the premise of this piece, that eschatology matters. My assumptions about “end times,” starting with the dispensationalism I was born again into in 1978, very much mattered in how I interpreted Scripture. If you’ve ever been to a doctor’s office where you sit on the exam table and they take out a hammer and tap on the front of your knee, you’ll know where the saying “knee jerk” got its meaning. That was me: Messianic text, knee jerk, second coming. I could write for days giving you examples, but a few will have to do. Here are two verses from Psalm 2:

7 I will proclaim the Lord’s decree:

He said to me, “You are my son;
today I have become your father.
8 Ask me,
and I will make the nations your inheritance,
the ends of the earth your possession.
9 You will break them with a rod of iron
you will dash them to pieces like pottery.”

With my dispensational, pan-mill, or A-mill assumptions, of course this will only happen when Christ returns. Isn’t it obvious? The earth’s a hellhole, and Satan obviously has the upper hand “down here.” Well, that’s one way to look at it, but are those assumptions justified? Or take these verses from Psalm 110:

5 The Lord is at your right hand;
he will crush kings on the day of his wrath.
6 He will judge the nations, heaping up the dead
and crushing the rulers of the whole earth.
7 He will drink from a brook along the way,
and so he will lift his head high.

This certainly looked to me like it could only be true of the day of Jesus’ return when he declares the final victory over all his enemies, but the context of the Psalm is clearly not for the final consummation of all things. And Peter uses both these Psalms in Acts 2 and 4 as being fulfilled at Christ’s first coming with his resurrection and ascension to the right hand of God as the currently reigning Messiah. The Apostles did not see Christ’s Messianic reign for the spiritual life of Christians, but for all of reality. Paul says as much in Ephesians 1 when he declares of Christ that God,

seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.

I love the way Paul says this as if Christ’s complete and total rule over all things is in this present age is obvious, and then has to add if anyone is unsure, also in the age to come.

Eschatology Matters Because Christ Changed the Course of History
Which brings us to one of the major problems with the church in the modern age: it has no vision of history. This is the direct result of Pietism, which narrows the faith down to personal salvation. In my early born-again years, I believed the extent of the gospel was about our going to heaven when we die and our own personal holiness. I hate to put it this way, but this completely trivializes the Christian faith. The Apostle Paul has a cosmic vision of the faith as we learn from 2 Corinthians 5:17:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

This translation from the NIV is spot on. The subject isn’t so much the salvation of an individual, which of course is included, but the entirety of the created order! When Christ was resurrected from the dead, death itself was put on notice; you are no longer calling the shots! At the very moment he escaped the clutches of death, history was forever changed, a literal U-turn in all things diametrically opposed to the fall and curse of sin.

History now became the outworking of the story of what Paul in this passage calls the “ministry of reconciliation,” that God in Christ was reconciling the world to Himself. Paul uses the Greek word cosmos, meaning the entire ordered system of the universe as God created it. And this reconciling of it all, every square inch, every single thing, started when Christ rose from the dead. Fifty days later he ascended to the right hand of God, the place of ultimate authority in this created order, visible and invisible, as we saw in Ephesians 1. This, brothers and sisters, is not a recipe for defeat or failure! And God forbid we should think, like I did for most of my Christian life, that real victory was only meant for when Christ returned to earth for a second time. In fact, in 2 Corinthians 2:14 Paul declares this ministry of victory:

14 But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. 15 For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing,

That smells like winning! And everyone smells it, lost and saved. And who doesn’t want to be on the winning team!

We also know not every minute of every game looks the same, so it may appear for the moment that we are on the losing side, but we know who wins in the end! Not every battle in a war appears the same to the participant, but there can only be one victor. Every game, though, has a palpable direction, a kind of momentum everyone can feel, and we’re on the side of the one who conquered death. Which brings up the issue at hand. Is this victory only for the end? Or is victory intended by God through Christ for here and now? Is this reconciling happening in a substantive way in history, or are our reconciling efforts basically futile until Christ returns? How we answer these questions proves eschatology matters. Here’s Paul’s answer in I Corinthians 15:

25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 27 For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.”

There are two phrases here that function in time, “until he has put,” and “The last enemy to be destroyed.” That means going from A, the Asension, to Z, Christ’s second coming, we don’t skip B to Y, and every letter in between, lower and upper case. This is the “triumphal procession” Paul is talking about. I love the extended meaning of procession from Strong’s:

properly, to display triumph openly; publicly exalting the victor who leads a victory-procession – and putting the conquered on display (exhibition, as “totally defeated”).

This is what Jesus accomplished on the cross and resurrection. Satan doesn’t have the upper hand “down here,” although sometimes it looks like it when we live by sight and not by faith. Paul says elsewhere (Col. 2:15) that Christ:

having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

Eschatology Matters Because of the Teleology of History
History is going somewhere. There is a purpose, a telos, or end goal to which it is pointing and unfolding. As Christians we believe God providentially ordains all things toward his perfect ends. What are those ends? We learn these from God’s promises to Abram, that through his offspring all the nations of the earth would be blessed. From that moment, what we call redemptive history commenced and zigged and zagged for 2000 years to the fulfilment of God’s covenant promise, which is to “bless the nations.” When we talk about eschatology, or “last things,” those started at Christ’s first coming. The blessings from what he accomplished in conquering sin by paying the ultimate price for it, would now flow, not only to individuals, but through them to the entire created order. For God so loved the cosmos that whosoever believes tells us that the salvation of the individual is ultimately connected with God’s created order. This is massively different than being saved to go to heaven when we die.

The Apostles realized this, but they could never have imagined in a “mere” 300 years Christianity would become the official religion of the Roman Empire. And when Constantine the Great converted, he began the process of changing the Empire from bloodthirsty to blessing. He abolished crucifixion in 337 specifically because of Christ, and he started the slow process of gladiatorial contests to the death being completely outlawed within the next 150 years. We can see that an empire or nation ruled by Christ is completely different than one ruled by Pagans. There wasn’t a Christian leader or layman who could conceive of a Christianity that didn’t affect the conduct of how a nation was ruled or the culture of its people. They wouldn’t even have known what we were talking about if we said Christianity is mainly about going to heaven when we die and personal holiness. It wasn’t until the 19th century, some 1800 years after the resurrection that this radical narrowing of the faith became common place.

With Pietism the Christian church eventually lost the idea of the purpose of Christ’s unfolding of his kingdom rule on earth. We substituted the Four Spiritual Laws for Thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, not on earth after Christ returns, but on earth here, now. We went from blessing nations corporately to merely blessing individuals within nations. In the West we went from Christendom to secularism, to acknowledging God’s law and Christ’s kingship over the nations, to making Christianity a personal preference, one among many in a religiously pluralistic society. A large number of Christians, unfortunately the majority it seems, are okay with this because eschatology matters. For them the telos of God’s purposes in salvation are, like I used to believe, ultimately only for the end of time and the consummation of all things. That was my view of “end times,” so I was a defeatist and generally pessimistic. I even made fun of my younger idealist self for thinking I could actually “change the world.”

By contrast, my new postmillennial self understands the purpose of God in Christ is exactly that, to change the world! If we’re new creations, and part of a church of new creations against which the gates of hall shall not prevail, then the very purpose of our corporate lives is to change the world! Every day we get up, we are light pushing back darkness, fighting the fall and the curse of sin with righteousness, bringing order out of chaos, beauty out of ugliness, truth from lies, peace from conflict, love from hate. We all know who wins in the end, but why do we believe evil is destined to win here, now? Eschatology. Scripture doesn’t teach us things will get increasingly worse until Christ comes back to save the day, but if we do believe that it will affect our teleology of history. Rather, Scripture teaches us Christ’s reign and victory over sin’s effects are for this world. Often mustard seed slow, they are yet relentless and inevitable, until the last enemy, death is destroyed forever.

 

Rebuilding Christendom and the Consideration of the Alternative

Rebuilding Christendom and the Consideration of the Alternative

Oct 30, 2024 | Apologetics, Uncategorized

As we slowly, but I trust surely, rebuild Christendom, i.e., push back and defeat secularism, Christians and the church in general need to rebuild the Christian plausibility structures of Western society. I recently wrote about the role Jordan Peterson is playing in doing just that. Few of us have the kind of platform Peterson does and can make such a sizable contribution, but each one of us has our own sphere of influence, and every piece of the plausibility puzzle matters, even the smallest piece. What exactly, you may ask, is a plausibility structure, and why is it so important? Good questions.

The term was coined by sociologist Peter Berger in his books, The Social Construction of Realty (with Thomas Luckman) and The Sacred Canopy. As a sociological construct (i.e., what it means to live with and among human beings and the culture and meanings they create), it simply means what seems true to us, and the social structures that contribute to that seeming. A simple example is that for many of our neighbors, God seems no more real than Santa Clause  Whether God is real is not the point; what seems real is.

Society creates the plausibility structures that contribute to God and Christianity being plausible to us, or not. These structures are built into our educational systems, media, entertainment, etc. In the West, God is persona non‑grata, unwelcome; if he exists at all he is merely a personal preference. We call this secularism, and our job is to discredit the secular plausibility structures, and put Christian ones in their place. God has been providentially ordering this to happen since, as I argue in my latest book, Trump came down the escalator in 2015, but this started happening before Trump. One could date it to the election of Barack Obama and the takeover of the Democrat Party by the woke left. With him, the media went all in with Fake News, and the security apparatus of the deep state, and its bureaucratic minions became tools in the hands of the party. The reactions of the Tea Party were the rumblings of the awakening, but they were stillborn because those patriots were a threat to Uniparty globalist establishment in power, Democrat and Republican.

As I also argue in the book, secularism is an experiment in society without God in Western culture, and it has failed, miserably. It has nowhere to go. And as nature abhors a vacuum, something must fill the plausibility hole left in its wake. That would be Christianity. What Trump, or the reaction to Trump, exposed was how brittle a veneer secularism is to hold a society together  in a post-Christian world. Thus the opportunity and need to re-Christianize the culture.

This rebuilding and tearing down of plausibility structures must first, of course, start with us, then our families, then out from there (my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, is how I did that with my children) . This means we have to know not only what we believe, but why we believe it. The latter is what we call apologetics, the defense of the Christian faith. The word and the charge to do this comes from I Peter 3:15:

But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.

The word for “answer” in Greek is apologia, which means a reasoned argument or defense that presents evidence supplied as compelling proof. Ancient Greek lawyers used apologia when defending a client in court. I wonder how many Christians are actually “prepared” to give an answer as to why they believe Christianity is the truth. I’m afraid it is not very many, but that is why we ourselves need to become prepared, and to encourage others to as well. You are now officially encouraged!

The Consideration of the Alternative
Thus we come to the purpose for this piece, the consideration of the alternative, probably my favorite apologetics tool. I realized how powerful it is using it on myself over the years as I dealt with the inevitable doubt that comes from faith. I’ll get more into faith later as I flesh out that concept, but there were times in my four plus decade Christian journey when Christianity didn’t seem so plausible to me. Over time I began to realize an inevitable conclusion that comes from doubt: if one thing isn’t true, something else has to be. First for the concept. Tim Keller in The Reason for God points out something so obvious I wondered why I had never thought of it myself:

But even as believers should learn to look for reasons behind their faith, skeptics must learn to look for a type of faith hidden within their reasoning. All doubts, however skeptical and cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternative beliefs. You cannot doubt Belief A except from a position of faith in Belief B.

As I began to understand the inevitability of having to choose one belief or another in life, it slowly dawned on me how important it is for defending the veracity of Christianity. This comes down to an issue of epistemology, of knowing, which we’ll discuss, but think about it. I have a choice to believe or trust in almost every encounter in life. I can choose to either trust the doctor, or not. When I go to the store and buy food or go to a restaurant, I can choose to believe the food is safe and won’t harm me, or not. When I drive, I can choose to believe the other drivers will abide by the rules of the rode or not. In any case, we can never be absolutely certain, the importance of which we’ll get into shortly.

But before we get there, prior to understanding all this this, I went through a period of what I call plausibility insanity in my Christian journey when I could almost see why not believing in God was plausible to some people. By this time I’d been a Christian for over 30 years, and you would think I would have a solid grasp on why I believed in it, but I hadn’t studied apologetics since my seminary days when I was in my 20s, and at that time I’m around the half-century mark. In 2009 after a pathetic apologetics experience with a co-worker, and I was really bad, I decided I had to get back into it, and started listening and reading everything I could get my hands on. But a plausibility structure isn’t built overnight, thus the insanity.

For example, I would be in church seeing people praying and singing hymns and wonder if they were just doing that to the air. Mind you, intellectually I absolutely believed Christianity was truth, and materialistic atheism was not, but we’re talking about plausibility here and what seems real, not what we believe is real. The question is, of course, is it real. Does God exist, and is Christianity the truth, or not. There is no in between. The choice is binary as we say nowadays, either/or. Another question logically, inevitably follows from this, one very few have considered: If Christianity isn’t true, then what is? Something has to be true about the nature of reality, so we are forced to deal with “the consideration of the alternative.” What exactly would that be. Ther are, as we know, many alternatives, but not as many as we think.

Let’s Consider the Alternatives
I’ve come across skeptics who will trot out the well-worn line that there are thousands of religions so who are you to say yours is the only absolute truth. Well, I didn’t say is it. Jesus, the foundation upon which Christianity is built, said it. And the Bible from beginning to end means to be taken as the ultimate truth about the nature of things. So, what are the alternatives to Christianity? Starting with the big picture, there are only three: theism, atheism, and pantheism. Every religion falls under one of these three. I will share how I deal with each one.

Atheism, which simply means the material is all that exists, is the least plausible of the three. Whenever I wonder if it’s all real, I simply look outside and think to myself, “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is a product of chance. Impossible!” Is it really plausible that everything we see and experience is the result of a mindless, purposeless, cosmic accident, matter in motion crashing into itself to create . . . . all of it? Really? The human heart, the human brain, the human nervous and immune system, all merely a product of chance, a cosmic accident. I know instantly that is absurd, which is why there are so very few atheists in the world. It takes far more faith, a Grand Canyon sized leap of faith, to believe the atheist worldview than to believe in the all-powerful Creator God of the Bible.

Pantheism, from a definition in Britannica, is

the doctrine that the universe conceived of as a whole is God and, conversely, that there is no God but the combined substance, forces, and laws that are manifested in the existing universe.

Thus the universe, as in atheism, is impersonal. Which is odd when you think about it because how could a universe have a world filled with persons itself be impersonal? This would mean that everything is God, the rat, the tree, the spider, the sun, the moon, the stars, you, me, the dirt, all of it. Animism is a form of pantheism in that all things are imbued with some kind of spiritual essence, although impersonal. African and native American religions, for example, were animistic, but Africa is now becoming maybe the most Christian continent on earth. Pantheism is the least credible of alternatives to modern westerners.

Theism is really the only game in town. Of the varieties of theism, we can cross polytheism off the list from the start. The ancient Greeks and Romans blew that up, and when Alfred the Great defeated the pagan Viking heathens from the north, paganism finally died in Western culture. It seems, however, that the Hindus didn’t quite get the message, but our discussion is specifically in the context of Western civilization, and thus Hinduism doesn’t qualify, although it is indeed as discredited as the polytheism of old. We can also cross off the list the seemingly infinite variations of religions that pilfer from Christianity. As I say in my book, Uninvented, everyone wants a piece of Jesus. Sorry, you can’t have him! Why should I trust Mohamed, the bloodthirsty raider who came 600 years after Christ, more than the Apostles? I won’t. Another of the ancient theistic religions that doesn’t steal from Christ is Zoroastrianism because it developed in Persia five centuries before Christianity, but it too has no appeal in the West, and doesn’t make claims to ultimate universal truth as does Christianity.

What is most fascinating about every other religion, and philosophy for that matter, save Christianity and Judaism, is that none gives us any kind of plausible explanation as to where evil comes from. For most of them, it just is, now we have to figure out a way to deal with it.  None of the answers are satisfying because they don’t deal with the central issue, man’s rebellion against his Creator. Man’s nature, who he is in his fundamental being, is the problem, not his circumstances or others, but himself. Every other religion or philosophy seeks to change man’s behavior or thoughts, but can’t change his being, his natural inclination to sin, to do wrong. Only God in Christ promises by His power and initiative to do that, to change our sinful rebellious hearts of stone to flesh, that we might be born anew with the ability to change what we do and think because God Himself in Christ has changed who we are. As Paul says, when we are “in Christ” we are a “new creation, the old has gone, the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:17)

Nothing else satisfies our deepest plausibility need, the thing we can grab on to which seems real, which makes sense of everything, like Christ. A C.S. Lewis quote I use all the time says it perfectly:

I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Jesus of Nazareth is the reason Judaism by itself can’t claim the mantel of ultimate truth because it’s a story without an ending, and that ending is Christ. All of Isreal’s religion and history pointed forward to him, as Jesus himself told us after he rose from the dead (Luke 24).

Epistemology, Faith and Doubt: It’s All About Trust
This is the title of a section of my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, because what we know, why we know, how we know, are all important in raising our children in the faith, thus epistemology, or the study of that knowing. Rene Descartes wrote in the 17th century that absolute certainty was attainable by reason alone, but that proved as attainable to catch as Moby Dick, and as dangerous to try. When reason was exalted over revelation, knowing became the Holy Grail. Prior, philosophers had started their quest with being or ontology, and thus God and metaphysics came first. Now with the knower, man, coming first over his Creator, epistemology dominated intellectual discourse. God slowly became irrelevant because fallen man will always tend toward Babel if he doesn’t start with the God revealed to us in Scripture and creation.

Faith and doubt are an inescapable part of knowing because to know something requires faith to know it. As finite creatures absolute knowing is a chimera, an illusion which far too many think is possible. Yet how many people believe they have attained absolute certainty a la Descartes? One is too many, but alas they sprout like weeds in an untended garden. We can know things. Knowledge in Scripture, being able to know and trust what we know, is assumed throughout, but what I’m challenging is a specific definition of knowing: that to “know” a thing is to be absolutely certain about it, and that we can only “know” via our reason.

Which brings us to faith, a concept that is not intrinsically religious. All human beings utilize faith every day, or they wouldn’t get out of bed. It basically means trust, and when we exercise faith we generally do it with justified warrant. That is, there is enough evidence to justify putting my trust in something or someone. Since we are finite, limited in every way, human reason is incapable of achieving knowledge of an absolute sort. Much of what we “know” is not the result of some kind of logical process, deduction like a syllogism, or rigorous inductive reasoning. What we “know” can’t be proved in the final analysis. Rather what we “know” must be accepted by faith, which is warranted trust based on evidence. When we get right down to it, faith, and the acceptance of its inevitability in life, is to pay homage to our finitude. But human beings are not fond of admitting they are finite.

This refusal to accept our created nature makes perfect sense in light of what we read in the first few chapters of Genesis. We learn that our Creator is God and that we are not (shocking to some, I know). We learn that the fall from our esteemed created state was instigated by the temptation of wanting to be like God, to usurp his place as the one who defines reality, good and evil. The first temptation of man, that which caused all the suffering, misery, and death, was epistemological. The insistence that we ought to have absolute certainty and that we can reason our way to perfect knowledge, is an indication that we are by nature rebels who refuse to accept that we are contingent beings. We are dependent on God, as the Apostle Paul told the Greek philosophers in Acts 17, for life, breath, and everything else. That pretty much covers it all, including our knowing. Thus I conclude, we ought to pray for epistemological humility, which as we learn from I Corinthians 8, is knowing exercised in love for the service of others.

To a Thousand Generations: The Triumph of the Covenant

To a Thousand Generations: The Triumph of the Covenant

Oct 23, 2024 | Theology

I was born and raised a Catholic which was my religious life until I went away to college at 18 and was born-again into an Evangelical and Protestant faith bearing little resemblance to Catholicism. The primary reason I embraced this new version of Christianity was because I learned the Bible stated clearly, many times, I could be assured when I die I would go to heaven, that such assurance was mine if I trusted in Christ. How come, I wondered, I’d never been told this in my 18 years as a Catholic. The fear of going to hell when I died was a very real presence in my life, and as I understood the Catholic faith I could not have assurance of my salvation. When I learned of this I was not a happy camper, and became virulently anti-Catholic for a number of years.

I was born-again into a typically Baptist environment of the 1970s “Jesus Revolution,” and like my boomer brothers and sisters was dunked and re-baptized because I guess I thought the first one didn’t take, or something. Being a Baptist was among the anti-Catholic responses of my young faith, and baptizing babies made no sense to me, or any sense to anyone I associated with in the first five years and four months of my Christian life. Then by God’s wonderful providence, I met a man named Steve Kennedy. One evening I went to his house in Newport Beach to meet him for the first time, and he introduced me to Reformed Theology. He would become a mentor of mine, and change the course of my young life (I have a wife and three children and two and a half grandchildren because of this secondary cause). I could accept TULIP, that made sense, but baptizing babies? No way! That was Catholic!

One Sunday morning not too long after I met Steve I went to a Reformed Baptist church, of course, and it so happens, also in God’s wonderful providence, they were doing a baby dedication that morning. I had learned from Steve the biblical concept of covenant, something rarely discussed in the non-Reformed circles I’d been involved in. As they were dedicating their babies a thought unbidden crashed into my brain; they are treating their children as strangers to the covenant! And it ticked me off. I have no idea where the thought came from, but it was powerful and I was instantly converted to paedobaptism. I could see in an instant that the faith of our fathers was, is, and always would be a generational faith. The Lord thought this idea was important enough that just prior to the Israelites going into the promised land after 40 years wandering in the wilderness, He felt the need to emphasize the specifically generational nature of the faith. We read this in Deuteronomy 7:9, and there are many more, but this specific verse gives us the practically eternal nature of His covenant faithfulness:

9 Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments.

If a generation is 20 years, that would be 20,000 years! We’re just getting started!

The Bible teaches us that baptism, and this includes baptizing babies, is more about God’s covenant faithfulness than it is about our personal decision to trust Christ. As the Westminster Confession says, it is a “sign and seal of the covenant of grace” (28). When Christ came, God’s covenant promises didn’t all of a sudden become solely focused on individuals, but were now capable of being fulfilled to the generations because of what he accomplished on the cross. Jews in the first century, including Jesus, were incapable of seeing their ancient faith in individualistic baptistic terms because God’s covenant promises to His people was always about “you and your children” (Acts 2:39). Our generational faith is rooted in the concept of covenant.

The Centrality of Covenant in Biblical Religion
I can say this with absolute certainty: There is nothing as important in the redemptive history found in our Bibles as the covenant. There is actually more than one, but they are subsumed in the ultimate covenant of redemption made between the Triune God in eternity past. Jesus in John 6 gives us a glimpse of what happened in this covenant when he says:

38 For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. 40 For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.

Jesus was given his name (Matt. 1:21) to accomplish what he shares with us here, that “he will save his people from their sins.” His people, the ones he will save from their sins, are the people God the Father gave the Son in eternity past, specifically to raise them up at the last day. Those given by the Father will believe in the Son, will come to faith in him. You can theologically call this whatever you like, but I call it biblical, and it is bound up in God’s covenant promises revealed to us in redemptive history.

I will contrast the biblical concept of covenant with the primary competing alternative in the modern West, secularism, later, but its centrality to redemptive history happens immediately after the fall in Genesis 3. When Adam and Eve rebelled and introduced sin and all its consequences into the world God reveals that the solution to this catastrophe has already been put in place, and notice who is calling the shots:

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

I like the NIV using “crush” for the second “strike” but the Hebrew uses the same word. Clearly, striking a head will be more damaging than striking a heal, and ultimately cause fatal damage. We also learn from this promise of God that humanity will be divided into two mutually exclusive camps, the offspring or seed of the woman, and the offspring of the serpent. As much as we might not like the implications, this was all determined before God even created the world, and we’re playing our part in this cosmic drama.

The covenant next appears with Noah in Genesis 9:

8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: 9 “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. 11 I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

Although this isn’t specifically a promise related to salvation from sin, notice again it is to Noah and his descendants, as are all the covenant promises of God to His people.

God’s covenant implementation starts in earnest with Abram in Genesis 12 when He calls him out of his homeland to another land and that he will make him “into a great nation.” The covenant will be made official in chapter 15, but in chapter 13 showing Abram the land he will inherit he says to him:

16 I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted.

The promise, the covenant, is always to Abram and his offspring. In chapter 15 the Lord promises Abram that his offspring will be as numerous as the stars in the sky, and then he performs a very strange ceremony to modern sensibilities to confirm the covenant with Abram. Covenants were legal agreements in the ancient world with blessings and curses as stipulations, shown vividly in this ceremony. The strange thing about this ceremony isn’t just animals being cut in half, which was common at the time indicating that if the stipulations were not followed, may that party end up like the animals. What was strange is that the Lord in the ceremony indicated he would be responsible for both sides of the agreement. It was a unilateral covenant for two parties because man could never hold up his end of the agreement.

In chapter 17 the Lord confirms his covenant with Abram through the sign and seal of circumcision and changes his name to Abraham. The key point is that God’s covenant promise to Abraham is generational:

9 Then God said to Abraham, “As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come. 10 This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised.

When Isaac is born, the Lord puts Abraham to the ultimate test asking him to sacrifice his son, his only son, and when he passes the test by completely trusting the Lord in the face of such an absurdity the covenant is yet again confirmed:

17 I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18 and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.”

The Lord confirms his covenant with Isaac and Jacob, and the details yet again make the point that God’s covenant promises have always been, and continue to be, generational. This did not stop with the New Covenant. As I quoted Peter above, it is and always will be, “to you and your children.”

The Appeal of the Redemptive Covenant Story to the Next Generation
All Christians of whatever theological tradition want to pass their faith on to the next generation and generations to come, but this isn’t happening to the extent it should be. Thus the rise some years back of the “nones,” those who pick “None of the above” when asked on surveys about their religion. This is unacceptable. Why is it happening? When I wrote my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, starting in 2015, the “nones” were big news. When I read my first story of what we now call a “deconversion,” I was livid. How in the world, I thought, could the competing faith of secularism, a life where God is secondary or not welcome at all, be more appealing to young people raised in Christian homes than Christianity? If we can’t sell our children on the attractiveness of the Christian story, something is wrong. Or we’re not trying, thinking their faith will take care of itself. Many parents take their children to church and assume that will take care of them, but it won’t. As I title the first section of my book, “It’s All About Parents.” We determine whether their faith is generational or not. And for those who don’t like the sound of that, we are as responsible in our lives as God is sovereign over them. How do we do that?

The answer is actually quite simple. It’s all about the story. Apologetics, or defending the veracity of Christianity is crucial, but that is all part of helping them see the grand narrative structure of the story we as Christians are part of. Every human being whether they consciously think about it or not, and most don’t, see themselves as part of some kind of narrative, a story arc, that gives meaning to their existence. In the 21st century post-Christian West the competing story is a ubiquitous all pervasive secularism. Either we sell our children on God’s covenant story in history, or the secular culture will sell them on its story. And the secular culture is selling them twenty-four/seven. Thankfully, the secular story is weak and pathetic, but it’s up to us as parents to make the case to our children, and it’s a very easy case to make.

Since the so-called Enlightenment, Western civilization has had two diametrically opposed origin stories, and thus two ways to read history. As rationalism ascended post Descartes in the mid-1600s, and God was relegated to the fringes of society as persona non grata (an unwelcome presence), there needed to be some other plausible account of things. The most common question in all of human history, why? will be asked and must have an answer, even if it’s one as absurd as everything came from nothing for no reason at all. Enter Satan’s greatest post-fall invention into the stream of history, Charles Darwin and his 1859 Origin of species. It’s brilliant! Perfect, really. As atheist Richard Dawkins said one hundred and fifty years later, evolution has made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist—albeit a deluded one. But the insidious beauty of Darwinian evolution was that in the 19th century it was a plausible explanation for heathens who insisted man gets to be his own god. Looked at from the scientific knowledge of 2024, however, and it is almost comical, if it weren’t so tragic.

Survival of the fittest was sinful man’s attempt to imbue life with meaning, hope, and purpose where it inherently has none. Without God the Creator, all we are is star dust, a chance collocation of meaningless atoms, so much lucky dirt, a little more than mere animals who by some freak chance of “natural” selection can talk and think. We have to make our own meaning in a fundamentally meaningless universe, between two poles of meaninglessness, as the Great RC Sproul put it, where we came from, meaningless, and where we’re going, meaningless, back to dust. We have to build our hope on circumstances we think we’ll like, and create purpose in trying to attain them, all the while knowing we are hurdling toward inevitable death, turning into the dust from which we came. How inspiring! Life is basically a Woody Allen movie. One of my favorite scenes is in his 1986 hit movie Hannah and Her Sisters. Allen, unsurprisingly, plays a hypochondriac and he’s convinced he has brain cancer. This scene on the sidewalk is right after the doctor gives him a clean bill of health. He’s skipping and jumping saying he’s not going to die, then it hits him.

Woody Allen movies were a great apologetics tool I used with my children as they were growing up. We can have Christianity, which gives our lives real meaning, hope, and purpose, and it also happens to be true, or secularism which promises everything and delivers nothing, and to add insult to injury, it’s a lie. Life becomes a Woody Allen movie, ending either in despair or mostly resignation.

The Christian covenant story, by contrast, of God working out his purposes for our lives, and our children’s lives, and the world’s redemption is epic. And as they said in the old boomer movie days in the 60s, it’s in technicolor! I could write and talk for days about the meaning, hope, and purpose Christianity gives our lives, but I will restrain myself, and not tax your patience. I will end with two quotes, one from the greatest apologist and story teller combo of the 20th century, C. S. Lewis, and the other from the Bible. Lewis, an ex-atheist realized in his 30s that atheism had zero explanatory power, meaning it has no plausible explanation for anything:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

We either give our kids puzzle pieces for a puzzle that doesn’t even exist, or we give them the story into which all puzzle pieces ultimately fit. The Apostle Paul said something about those pieces fitting together by the Puzzle Grandmaster in Romans 8:28:

28 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.

I used to joke with my children, and often still do, that Paul certainly didn’t mean all; maybe 95%, but all? Yep, every single thing, every moment of every second of every day, God is working in us, on us, and through us for our good and his glory. Talk about hope, meaning, and purpose! Add to that we get to change the world in our own little corner of it, to advance God’s kingdom on earth and His glory to this fallen world.

That, brothers and sisters, is an easy sell. And children raised with it, will never abandon their faith.