Eschatology Archives - Mike D'Virgilio

The Material Implications of the Gospel

Mar 25, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

Most Christians reading the title of this post might think I’ve mixed things up. Shouldn’t it read, “The Spiritual Implications of the Gospel”? Well, yes, it does if read the right way. The gospel’s spiritual implications have material implications as well because we live in a material world. We can’t divorce spiritual from material, nor material from spiritual. Many varied influences throughout Christian history gave us a kind of dualistic thinking about things, as if material reality were on one side, and spiritual reality on the other, and never the two shall meet. And when we see or think of the word “spiritual” we envision a kind of ethereal non-material thing, ghostly, something you can see through, not something solid like a brick. I would suggest this is a faulty view of spirituality and the spiritual, more Platonic and Gnostic than Christian, influenced more by Greek philosophical thought than the Jewish faith which birthed the Christian religion.

Having recently read through the Old Testament again, I was impressed with what an earthy book it is. There is even a sect of Jewish religious professionals that developed in the intertestamental period called Sadducees who we read about in the gospels. They only accepted the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses, and because there is little reference to “spiritual” things in the Pentateuch, they denied the resurrection of the dead, and the existence of angels and spirits (or demons). The concept of heaven and a non-material reality where God and angels dwell is an Old Testament theme, but everything about the Jewish faith is focused primarily on man’s life in this world, and the implications for it. They had no conception of a bodyless spiritual existence of the soul going to heaven when they died. The focus for Jews always remained on this world where God blessed His people with long life, prosperity, children and descendants into the future, rather than on hope for existence after death. The are many examples of God exhorting the Israelites to obedience that they might receive blessings in this life.

Deuteronomy 8 is a good example. Moses is giving the people a vision of the life they can have, the material blessings of the promised land, if they just obey and observe His commands. Toward the end he says:

¹⁸But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers, as it is today.

We tend to think of wealth in a narrow sense, as mainly money and material possessions. The Hebrew word for wealth, however, is much broader and all encompassing. It has the sense of a force, whether of men, means or other resources. So, it can be an army, wealth itself, money, or virtue, valor, and strength, along with the idea of being able, of activity, like accomplishments, even an army, or band of soldiers, or great forces, including power and riches, strength and valor. The way I read this verse is that because of God’s covenant promises to the Patriarchs, he gives us the ability to prosper and flourish in this life, to accomplish substantial things for His glory, our good, and the good of others. Blessing in this life is the point of Christianity, not an accidental by product of capitalism. It was Christianity that allowed for the creation of capitalism!

This more Jewish conception of blessing carried over into Christianity, but it also inherited a strong other worldly focus that often competed against life in this fallen world. Nonetheless, Christendom was built by men and women who sought blessing in this life, not escape of this life for the next.

The Origin of our Faulty Notion of Spirituality
Joe Boot wrote a book called The Mission of God, and when we see a phrase like that, most Christians immediately think of proclaiming the gospel, of saving people from their sin so they can go to heaven when they die. The word missions brings to mind the same thing, people going to the nations of the world to proclaim the gospel with primarily a spiritual or soteriological focus, the saving of people from their sins so they can have eternal life and escape the punishment of hell. Of course it is that, but it’s so much more. Everything about the mission of God changed for Christians in the 19^th century, from a this-worldly spiritual focus to a primarily other-worldly spiritual focus, the faulty kind. Nineteenth century conservative Protestant Christianity is exemplified by evangelist D.L. Moody (1837-1899). All things, including doctrine, took a backseat to winning souls. By the early twentieth century, according to George Marsden in Fundamentalism and American Culture, for Christians “evangelism overshadowed everything else.”

When I became a Christian in 1978 I was born-again into a type of fundamentalist Christianity where the focus was on evangelism, Bible reading, Scripture memory, and fellowship with other Christians. Discipleship was about developing our relationship with Jesus, and sharing that with others so they too could experience that same saving faith. This is all to the good; the problem is that that’s as far as it goes. Any implications of this faith for the culture or societies in which we lived was never mentioned. It was irrelevant because the implication was that it was the spiritual, eternal things that matter, not this life and its worldly concerns. This kind of fundamentalist Christianity came from somewhere, and I’ve written about that here many times, so I won’t rehash all that. I will briefly, though, mention the word I would like anyone who is influenced by my work to remember, Pietism. That mindset, a faulty view of spirituality, is the enemy of the true full orbed mission of God in the world.

As I always have to say, however, I’m not talking about being pious, something I’m grateful to have learned from my brothers and sisters in college in my early Christian life. I still daily practice all the things I learned there, but what I constantly warn Christians about is the German Lutheran movement of the 17^th century with good intentions that over time ended up destroying Christian cultural influence in the world. Fundamentalism with its narrow, truncated version of Christianity came from that influence. It went through a first and second Great Awakening, and the Moody type of revivalism in the 19^th century, eventually doing battle with the German higher criticism. Praise God for the fundamentalists in the early 20^th century who did battle against the modernists and liberal Christians who turned Christianity into a completely different religion, a non-supernatural religion.

By the 1920s, unfortunately, fundamentalist Christianity had become almost completely culturally enervated and lost its ability to influence the culture it once created in America. The symbolic turning point was the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial.” The cultural irrelevance and caricature of conservative Christianity started there until in the 1960s when it was finally openly mocked and despised, when not ignored. Scopes was the first culturally accepted overt hostility to Christianity in American culture, and it eventually weaved its way into the popular imagination in the 1960 movie Inherit The Wind, staring Spencer Tracy and based on a 1955 play of the same name. For decades prior to Scopes, modernists were portraying fundamentalists as backward, benighted enemies of progress, science, and all that was good about civilization. As Marsden says about the liberal perception of fundamentalists:

Modern liberal culture was fighting back against the efforts of “bigots and ignoramuses” (as Darrow described them) to retard its progress, and ridicule was perhaps the most effective weapon.

After Scopes the mainstream media was merciless. Marsden says the trial and its fallout “would have far more impact on the popular interpretation of fundamentalism than all the arguments of preachers and theologians.” Unfortunately, fundamentalists often lived down to the caricature, and their alienation from the wider American culture was complete.

In trying to keep from being defiled and reviled by the culture, Christians increasingly developed their own sub‑culture. Isolated in a Christian cocoon, they were soon creating their own educational system, books, movies, and media, all of which still have little impact on the wider culture today. Much of conservative Christianity for the next 50 years embraced a Christ against culture posture which is informed by an over spiritualized dualistic Platonic spirituality. Let’s see how God in Scripture reveals to us a different kind of spiritually, one that has material implications for this world.

Christianity and Transforming Our Material World
One of the challenges of reorienting to a more this world spirituality is that modern Evangelical Christianity tends to focus on the New Testament to the exclusion of the Old. It’s built into the fundamentalist theology inherited from dispensationalism that separates the Jewish Old Covenant people of God from the Christian New Covenant people of God. The implication is that the Old is not relevant for the New, that Moses and the Law of God revealed to Israel no longer apply to the Christian life. That’s unfortunate because the New is the fulfillment of the Old, not something different from it. Everything that was revealed under the Old Covenant was to find it’s fulfillment in the New, including the material blessings of a redeemed and renewed relationship with our Creator.

I was inspired to write this post after reading one of the most powerful gospel passages in the Old Testament, Zechariah 3. Standing before the Lord being accused by Satan, the high priest Joshua is wearing filthy clothes. The Lord rebukes Satan and tells the angel to take off those filthy clothes and he tells us why. “See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put fine garments on you.” He next gives Joshua a charge to obedience that should always result from a sinner being saved, and then telling him about a Branch to come, a prophecy referring to Christ. Then the chapter ends with this:

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

To our modern eyes there doesn’t seem to be anything overtly “material” here in terms of prosperity or success, but to an ancient Jew living in Israel in the 5^th century BC it definitely suggested exactly that. The phrase “in that day” and variations is used 16 times in Zechariah, and they are all Messianic references. Do a Bible word search and you can see all 16 on one page. It’s a powerful confirmation of God’s transformational intentions of the mission of the Messiah in this world, with not one mention of a heavenly or spiritual life.

Given that the entire Old Testament is about Christ, you would expect there are probably more than a few passages that refer to the transformation of Messianic fulfillment to come, and the specific material implications for this world. It starts with God’s promise to Adam and Eve that her seed will crush or strike the serpent’s head, and that promise begins to make its way into history with God’s calling of Abram. The blessing God promises him and his descendants implies a this-worldly prosperity, and the Hebrews eventually called Jews as those from Judea certainly believed that. As I mentioned above, to them God’s covenant promises were for the blessings of a prosperous life in this world, the spiritual making itself real in the material circumstances of their lives. It was sin that got in the way of true peace and prosperity which would only be found in relationship to their Creator God as he dwelled among them. They missed that it was only in the Messiah that they would find the fulfillment of this promise, in Immanuel, the one who would be God with us.

If you want a wonderful picture of how Christ and the gospel and God’s word, the Bible, really changes the material circumstances of our lives, I’d suggest reading a wonderful book by Indian Vishal Mangalwadi called, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. As an Indian, he has seen first-hand what a civilization without Christianity looks like, in his case a Hindu culture. I recently listened to an interview he did with Jordan Peterson called India, Europe & Biblical Revolution. I highly suggest giving that a listen.

A Different Kind of Discipleship
My college Christian experience was all about discipleship, but a truncated, narrow, other worldly one that ignored the culturally transforming power of the gospel. I would suggest a different kind of discipleship, one that sees cultural and societal transformation as one of the primary purposes of the gospel, of bringing God’s kingdom to earth just as Jesus taught us to pray. That was the purpose of Jesus being given “all authority in heaven and on earth,” to bring the fulfillment in this world of all the types, shadows, and promises of the Old Testament. That is a completely different, and more exciting vision for life than the over spiritualized personalized Pietism of much modern Evangelical Christianity.

That means a young person should taught beginning in their teenage years that their career is more than just making a living, but a calling, a way to live out a Christian, gospel infused world and life view in the marketplace. When we see the word gospel we tend to define it narrowly as salvation from sin and primarily personal, but the good news of Christ is that this salvation affects all that we are an everything we do. The transformation started in our hearts is then worked out into our lives into the lives of others and how those lives develop into a civilization. Christians miss this not only because of Pietism, but because of the modern notion of secularism that programs us to believe there is a realm where our faith doesn’t apply, but biblical faith applies to every square inch of existence, everything we see or do or experience, it’s all through the lens of our Christian faith.

We can see this civilizational transforming power of the gospel develop in the early centuries of the church as it battled paganism. When Constantine converted to Christianity in the early 4^th century, he started the process of outlawing crucifixion and gladiatorial games, blood for sport. A nation’s laws are a reflection of its faith and worldview. Christianity had begun a slow process of infusing its morals and values into Western culture. Thomas Cahill writes in his book, How the Irish Saved Civilization:

In his last years St. Patrick could probably look out over an Ireland transformed by his teaching. According to tradition, at least, he established bishops throughout northern, central, and eastern Ireland . . . With the Irish—even with the kings—he succeeded beyond measure. Within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased.

That is the gospel! As Paul says in Romans 14:17, the kingdom of God is a matter of “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” Christianity is never merely personal, and that is how we are to raise and disciple our children, with a faith that is transforming on a societal level, not just about their own personal holiness and relationship to God.

For just one example, in practice that means, speaking of laws, that if your son gets into the middle school years and likes to argue, you might begin thinking he could make a good lawyer. Then you begin teaching him about the Christian nature of law, where it comes from, what are its purposes, and so on. He can then see his calling as a lawyer as a Christian mission to advance God’s kingdom on earth by brining justice to the nation. It could lead to a political career as a Christian legislator who brings God’s law to bear upon the state’s or nation’s law. This can be done with any career, including the calling to be a wife or husband, a mother and homemaker or father. This gives our lives and our children’s lives what every person is looking for, meaning, hope, and purpose, and on a grand scale, the spiritual-material touching and influencing everything we and they do. Life doesn’t get any better than that!

Most Christians Don’t Believe in Postmillennialism, But the Left Does

Mar 18, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

In January I was listening to Steve Deace opine on the woman in Minnesota who was trying to block ICE agents on a suburban street. At one point it looked like she was trying to run over one of the agents, and he shot her. She died giving her life for the leftist religious cause of all things anti-Trump. You can bet if Joe Biden had sent Ice to deport illegal aliens, she would not have been on that street blocking them that day, and ICE wouldn’t be in the news at all. In fact, when Democrats have deported illegal aliens, and they have, there wasn’t a peep from the left, but if Trump does it, the left loses its mind. They are also invested in immigration, illegal or otherwise, because their power depends on it. A guy who goes by the moniker Raw Egg Nationalist put it well:

Mass immigration is an existential issue for the modern left, perhaps more than any other. Without mass immigration, the leftist project collapses. Kaput.

The word existential is one most people aren’t familiar with, but it says perfectly what’s at stake: existence itself. The concept developed in the mid-20^th century post-World War II, “where an entire generation was forced to confront the human condition and the anxiety-provoking givens of death, freedom, and meaninglessness.” The seeds of this intellectual movement go back to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the 19^th century, but it was the horrors of the 20^th century capped by Nazi death camps and atomic bombs dropped on Japan that gave it momentum. Existence itself, and it’s meaning, seemed to be on the verge of extinction. The radical left realizes this, and unfortunately most of the Democrat Party is right with them. Trump is the ultimate threat to their power grab because he realizes their threat to the American way of life, the liberty and prosperity handed down to us from our forefathers. Too many on the right side of the political, cultural, and religious spectrum don’t seem to get this, that this is a metaphorical war for a way of life we’ve come to take for granted.

Deace sees this, and was bewildered that more on our side, especially Christians, don’t get what’s at stake. He was also marveling at the religious commitment of this woman willing to become a martyr for the cause she believed in so deeply, and he was wondering how she became who she is. The media tried to portray her as an innocent woman caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, but she was in fact an anti-ICE warrior, part of a group of activists who worked to “document and resist” the federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota. She was a lesbian who was “married” to a woman and who was previously married to a man. She likely immersed herself in the left’s religious echo chamber, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times, etc. and was committed to applying her faith to all of life. She had a radical leftist atheistic secular worldview. She even sent her son to a woke charter school, which boasts that it puts “social justice first” and “involving kids in political and social activism.” She took her faith seriously.

What Deace was marveling at was this passionate commitment of leftists compared to most Christians who are committed to comfort and ease. For many Christians, their faith is irrelevant to this world, and thus this world is never influenced by their faith. As I’ve written about extensively here, I blame Pietism for this, the 17^th century German Lutheran movement with good intentions, that over the next three hundred years changed Evangelical Christianity from a transforming force in society into a culturally irrelevant one. A curiosity to me is how many people complain about how terrible things are, but don’t seem to realize the faith they believe is a transformational faith, not just for individuals but for entire civilizations. Look what happened to the once mighty Roman Empire; it was defeated by Christianity and turned into Christendom.

The Left: No Longer Democratic Rivals, but Existential Enemies
The existential battle between left and right, between good and evil politically and culturally, goes back to the French Revolution. That conflict gave us left and right, specifically from the seating arrangements in the National Assembly (also known as the Estates-General convened at Versailles). Those who supported the king, monarchy, tradition, and the old order sat on the right. Today these are called conservatives. Those who supported radical change, the revolution, limiting or abolishing royal/aristocratic power, greater equality, and republican ideas sat on the left. These are the leftists, liberals, progressives; Democrats have become the party of the left. That first radical Revolution in France led to tens of thousands of executions, upwards of 17,000 having their heads lopped of via Madame de Guillotine. It turned out to be a revolution in innocent blood, unlike the revolution coming before it in America.

Many revolutions followed in its wake, the most consequential the October 1917 Russian Revolution, out of which came communism and what is called the “Old Left.” This left gave us Stalin and purges and war on an industrial scale, but accomplished none of the dreams of its grandfather, Karl Marx. Communism simply didn’t work. Those who yearned for a world informed by the French Revolution, taking down the old order and everything supposedly inimical to “progress,” would never give up. In the 1920s and 30s a group of leftists in Germany developed a form of cultural Marxism, moved to America before the war, and eventually developed into the New Left in the 1960s. The current batch of woke leftists are the children and grandchildren of the New Left. The old Left focused on economics, labor issues, and socialism, while the New Left’s obsessions were issues like civil rights, anti-war protests, feminism, environmentalism, and plain old countercultural rebellion, sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll.

I grew up in the 60s and 70s when screens were limited to 3 main channels, CBS, NBC, and ABC, or channels 2, 4, and 7 in Los Angeles. PBS was channel 11, and then there were a couple local stations. Shocking to you youngster, I know. Protests of leftist hysteria over one issue or another was a consistent theme, and I had a front seat to it all in our house when the screen was turned to the news every night. So the antics of the woke left in our day are nothing new, and not at all creative. They’re basically a broken record, same old story, a turgid Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals movie, over and over again. It’s exhausting, and banal, not to mention dangerous. Susan Sontag, one of the New Left radicals, is a good example. Some people today are shocked by the anti-white racism of the leftist-Democrat liberal establishment, but Sontag wrote in 1967 that, “the white race is the cancer of human history.” You can’t get more anti-white than that! The real cancer of anti-white racism, which is anti-Christian and anti-masculine, has been around a long time.

What makes them especially pernicious is their self-righteous smug moral superiority. They believe themselves to be moral and good and right, and everyone else is evil, a fascist, a Nazi. Hitler for them is the apotheosis of evil; Satan doesn’t compare. Branding everyone who disagrees with them a fascist allows them to justify violence as a political tool. That’s why they’ve branded Trump as Hitler from the moment they realized he wasn’t one of them, and was a threat to their vision to take over the world. Of course killing Hitler is justified, then there would have been no World War II and no Holocaust. Go back to the 60s and 70s and we’ll see this is nothing new either. Their only real moral value is might makes right; the will to power rules all. Truth is a luxury they can’t afford.

The Christian Response to the Evil of the Left
These people take their faith seriously, and it is an all-consuming religious worldview applying to every area of life. Like we postmillennialists, they are confident their kingdom will eventually win and take over the world. They are something that appears contradictory, optimistic in their rage and anger. This actually reflects the futility of their efforts, but they don’t know that. They’re convinced they are, in the words of radical leftist Barack Obama, on the “right side of history.” Jesus begs to differ. When Peter in Matthew 16 declared of Jesus, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Jesus told them that he was going to build his church upon this declaration, and the gates of hell would not prevail against it. For most of my Christian life I missed that gates were defensive mechanisms in the ancient world. It is the church, Christians, who are on the offensive in this spiritual war, and the devil and his minions are on the defensive.

We give the devil entirely too much credit. After the resurrection Jesus had been given “all authority in heaven and on earth,” and at his ascension was coronated as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Paul affirms this in Ephesians 1 when he tells us that Jesus was seated at God’s right hand,

²¹far 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.

Notice, and this is critical, Paul took it for granted that his audience understood Jesus had all this power and authority now, in “the present age.” He felt he had to remind them, it was also for the age to come. The devil has no authority on this earth, zero, zip, nada, none. He only does what God allows him to do. Scripture further tells us when the Holy Spirit was unleashed on this world at Pentecost, that Christ “must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (I Cor. 15). Peter in the first sermon in Christian history in Acts 2 quotes Psalm 110 to affirm that this has been the plan all along:

“‘The Lord said to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”’

All of this started, the ushering in of the kingdom of God on earth, at Christ’s first coming. The victory in this world is ours because we belong to Christ, we are “in him,” as Paul says many times in his letters.

We have a problem, though. Most Christians don’t believe this. I didn’t believe it either until a few years ago. I was convinced sin and the devil were such powerful forces that things would get increasingly worse on earth until Jesus came back to save the day and finally usher in his kingdom. This is a relatively new eschatological perspective in the history of the church. Most Christians believed the kingdom of God on earth had come in Christ, and it was the church’s job to advance the kingdom on earth. In the 1830s this all changed with J.N. Darby and the rise of dispensationalism. Even those who are not familiar with that term or what it means, have heard of things like Antichrist, 666, the rapture, and the great tribulation. This mentality is fundamentally defeatist in the face of evil, like the evil presented to us by the political and cultural woke left in our day.

The other problem is non-theological. Most Evangelical Christians are conservatives. Unlike secular leftist radicals, and the Democrat big money donors that enable them, we just want to be left alone to live our lives and raise our families, and be productive members of society. That’s why we’re called conservatives. We think there is value in traditions and the Christianity that gave birth to our civilization, and want to conserve them against those who fetishize progress. We are on the right side of the French Assembly squarely against the Revolution. Most normal people’s lives are not consumed by politics, yet therein lies the problem. The radical left, which is the entire Democrat industrial complex today, will never leave us alone until they’ve ushered in their woke Utopia. Basically what it’s come down to is us or them, as I said, it’s existential.

As I write this, we are witnessing an existential battle for the American way of life in the streets of Minneapolis. Either the radical left and their minions of protestors are crushed, or America is over. It’s our will against theirs. Either truth, righteousness, and justice prevails, or it’s lies, evil, and tyranny. As a culture, a society, a nation, we have a clear choice, made all the clearer by the woke radicals: it’s either Christ or chaos. The church, as Jesus said, needs to “discern the signs of the times.’” It is either them or us. I will end this with the immortal words of Thomas Paine written in the darkest days of the Revolutionary War in late 1776. They apply to our present moment in history and we need to take them to heart. There is no place anymore for a personalized Pietistic faith. As with the Patriots of old, we must decide if America is worth fighting for:

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

That Old Rugged Cross and Our Home Far Away

Mar 4, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

Recently at a church service the closing hymn was That Old Rugged Cross, for over a hundred years a beloved hymn to conservative Protestants. It had been a long while since I’d sung it, and I noticed the final stanza got the ultimate hope of our faith backwards, although most Christians wouldn’t think so. I myself wouldn’t have given it a second thought until not too many years ago. The final stanza reads:

To that old rugged cross I will ever be true, its shame and reproach gladly bear; then he’ll call me some day to my home far away, where his glory forever I’ll share.

In fact, our home is this very earth upon which we live which Jesus came to redeem and restore to its previous Edenic glory, and Jesus will complete the job when he returns. Sure, it doesn’t quite feel “homey” because sin still exists and we long to be freed from being afflicted by its doleful effects. That, however, is a process only to be fulfilled at Christ’s second coming when we receive our new bodies and live on this new redeemed, renewed, and restored earth. That’s when we will be fully home. Heaven could never be our home because we won’t have our bodies, and we were never meant to live a bodyless existence. The Christian hope in the final analysis is not heaven, but a physical, resurrected body, on a material earth Christ redeemed from sin. We’re merely living the down payment now as we await the glory to come. These words of the Apostle Paul say it a whole lot better than I can, and notice not a word of heaven:

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

Our hope is completely material in orientation. Why we tend to think it isn’t, I’ll address below.

We give the devil entirely too much credit, as if this earth belonged to him and our goal is to escape it. Our goal, in fact, is to transform it, as Jesus prayed, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That wasn’t a prayer for thousands of years in the future when he returns, but a prayer fulfilled at his first coming. Like the mustard seed and leaven (Matt. 13), Jesus wants us to know his kingdom’s coming on this earth is inevitable and all pervasive. It’s why Paul says when we are in Christ we’re part of a “new creation, the old has passed away the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:17). One day nobody will be able to deny this new creation as the kingdom’s transformational power goes out from God’s people to all the earth.

Satan, the World, and our Home
If we’re to talk about this sinful fallen messed up world, it’s important to be clear about what world we’re talking about. The physical earth and material world while always belonging to God its creator, was ruled by Satan since Adam and Eve rebelled, and he remained in the driver’s seat until Christ ascended on high and sent his Holy Spirit 50 days later at Pentecost. At that moment, Satan like the strong man in Jesus’ parable (Matt 12, Mark 3), was bound up for a thousand years so he could no longer deceive the nations (Rev. 20:1-3) and the gospel could go forth and bear fruit across the entire earth as it has these last 2,000 years. Prior to the ascension and Pentecost, that couldn’t have happened.

The problem with thinking heaven is our home and that it is far away, is that it’s not true. Jesus tells us as much in Luke 17:

²⁰Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, “The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, ²¹nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”

The kingdom of God, of Heaven, is right smack dab in the middle of where we live. In that sense we’re “home,” only it doesn’t feel like it sometimes because we still need to tidy up, clean out the junk in the garage and attic, and put on some additions and redecorate. We need to truly make it feel like home, and that is the process of the Christian life, thy kingdom come!

Whatever heaven is, we can say with assurance that our residence there is only temporary. Theologians have termed our time there as the intermediate state, as in, it’s a temporary state of our eternal existence. We won’t get too comfortable there because we’ll be longing for our actual eternal home on this renewed, restored, and redeemed earth, the one paid for by Jesus’ blood. While we are in this fallen world living in our fallen bodies surrounded by fallen people, our mission is to make it as homey, eternally speaking, as possible, a place where God’s law is honored, and Christ exalted as King of kings and Lord of lords. In other words, in obedience to Christ we are bringing heaven to earth and discipling the nations. That is the Great Commission, not merely saving people from the fires of hell. We are not only attempting to sanctify ourselves, but working to sanctify the world, and the peoples and nations in them. It’s a tough job, difficult in every way, against the grain, but look at the progress over the last 2,000 years; from only a handful of people to over 2 billion, and transformation beyond what Jesus’ followers could ever imagine.

Havin said that, there are numerous passages in the New Testament that give us the impression this earth, rather than the fallen world, is not our home. Just this morning as I write this, we had a missionary from Thailand give sermon in I Peter 2. Peter opens his letter telling us he’s writing “to those who are elect exiles” in several Roman provinces in Asia Minor (modern-day northern Turkey). There is some debate as to whether Peter is speaking to Jewish or Gentile Christians, but Christians tend to read this as applying to our spiritual estate in the world, and not the literal description of Christians Peter was writing to who had been scattered, or dispersed, throughout Asia Minor. The word exiles in Greek means pilgrim or sojourner, so we conclude that must be us on this earth. Then in chapter 2, Peter says:

¹¹Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. ¹²Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.

Again, we tend to read this as if it’s directly to us and about our spiritual estate in this fallen world, we being the foreigners and strangers and aliens in a fallen world. In some ways that’s true, but Peter is in fact writing to Christians living in the thoroughly pagan cultures of the time. Yes, it is analogous to living in a fallen world among heathens in our own day, but we’re the ones doing the transforming. We are not helpless before the juggernaut of evil wrought by the devil in this world. He’s been defeated! And now we bring the victory earned by our Savior and God to bring Joy to the World. As Isaac Watts wrote and we sing on Christmas, “He comes to make his blessings flow, Far as the curse is found.”

There are other passages that we could explore that give us the same impression, but how we read these depend on our eschatological assumptions, which most Christians are unaware they even have. If we see the world as belonging to the devil, and that it will get increasingly worse until Jesus returns to save the day, we’ll think we’re the ones who are the exiles and strangers here. By contrast, it’s the lost sinners who feel that way in God’s world, and we have to help them see that. If we realize Jesus took the world back at his first coming, and enabled the possibility of his kingdom to invade what was enemy territory, then we’ll see our mission as taking back what is rightfully his. We’re the light that drives out the darkness, and light always wins. We’re the salt that preserves and enhances. And as Paul says in Romans 14:

¹⁷For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. ¹⁸Whoever thus serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men.

In other words, people want what we have! That is how the kingdom is advanced, as God’s Spirit is apparent in our lives and he works in the souls of those we encounter.

Why Do We Seek to Escape This World?
Why do we think heaven is our home and not this earth? Why do we think in such escapist terms? Until a couple hundred years ago most Christians didn’t, in fact. While they realized life was extremely short and perilous, instead of escape they saw their mission in life as bringing heaven to earth, God’s kingdom come His will be done. All Christians thought this way to one degree or another regardless of their view of “end times,” or eschatology. In fact it wasn’t until the mid-19^th century that the “eschatology wars” started because of a new player on the eschatology stage, J.N. Darby.

I won’t go into the details of his thinking because I’ve done that here numerous times before (see here and here and here), but since the 1920s it’s been known as dispensationalism, and by the 1970s Antichrist, rapture, and tribulation had become pop culture mainstays. The entire point of this version of “end times” eschatology is escape. The term “end times” itself was popularized in this period and came to mean a dystopian hell from which all true Christians were supposed to be rescued. I was born-again into this milieu in which the zeitgeist, or the spirit of that Christian age, was all about escape. I even remember praying one time right before I graduated from college that the rapture would happen so I wouldn’t have endure real life after college. But all of this mentality is the result of a false, unbiblical spirituality that goes back to the influence of Platonism on the early church.

If you never did your study on the ancient Greek philosopher Plato and his influence in church history, you wouldn’t know that the distrust of this material world found at times in Christianity came from him. His unfortunate influence in this regard was most powerfully felt with the rise of the heresy of Gnosticism in the second century. Plato gave the Western world a dualistic view of reality, upper/lower, spiritual/material, good/bad, and it’s wormed its way through Christianity ever since.

The 16^th century German Lutheran movement of Pietism was one worm that eventually allowed a kind of Gnostic dualism to fully dominate the church, which is the answer to my questions. Pietism is the bad guy. And in case you’re wondering, I’m not talking about piety, or a dedicated pious life of a vibrant personal relationship with our God through Christ. That kind of piety and Pietism are two completely different things. This kind of Gnostic dualism is a way of seeing the world, a mindset that mistakes this world for something inherently bad that we’re to get away from to experience true eternal life, the life of God meant for us in Christ. Francis Schaeffer called it a two story view of reality.

The Alternative to Escape: Transformation
One of the most unfortunate effects of Pietism is how it causes Christians to over spiritualize everything. The tendency is to downplay the importance of this world of material things, and only give true value to that which is forever, the spiritual, the not “this worldly.” I’m not talking about the perverse desires of this world the Apostle John talks about in I John 2, but rather to the contrast he makes, doing the will of God on this earth. The mission of God in Christ, the Great Commission, is distinctly for this world. The charge Jesus gave to his disciples right before he left the earth was to “make disciples of all nations,” not just the people in those nations, and having baptized them, teaching them to observe all that he commanded them. And he promised he would be with us always on this earth “to the end of the age.” This wasn’t his only final message. In Acts 1 he expands on it:

⁶So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” ⁷He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. ⁸But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

He wanted the disciples’ vision to be the entire earth so that the blessings promised to Abraham and the Patriarchs would come upon all peoples and nations; true Israel would now touch the four corners of the earth. The Great Commission and being his witnesses to the ends of the earth could only happen after Pentecost. Once he sent his Spirit he himself would be with us in power, the power to transform lives which in due course would transform civilizations. That is the point of the Great Commission, what makes it Great, not only saving souls to go to heaven when we die. Jesus wants his earth back, and we’re the down payment!

This transforming power, contrary to the Pietistic mentality of most Christians, affects every nook and cranny of existence, everything Christians put their hearts and minds to. I don’t need to define everything because it means, literally, every single thing we do. What happens when the spirit comes? Read Galatians 5, and compare “the works of the flesh” to “the fruit of the spirit.” This is transformation! And it not only transforms us personally, or in our relationships, but it makes us productive citizens. When Paul tells us the kingdom of God is a matter “of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit,” imagine a town or city or county or state or country filled with kingdom people who exhibit these qualities. Can you? It’s something wholly different than John Lennon could Imagine. We’re so used to seeing dysfunction and strife and “works of the flesh” we think that’s what it will always be. Jesus said otherwise.

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:

³⁴Truly 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 19^th 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.

²Many 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.
³He 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.
⁴Everyone 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.
⁵All 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,

My Kingdom is Not of This World

Dec 3, 2025 | Eschatology, The Gospel

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve read and heard this statement of Jesus as a reason for Christians to not engage in “the culture wars.” Doing this is in the old saying, like polishing the brass on a sinking ship. The implication, sometimes stated, sometimes assumed, is that this world belongs to Satan. For them, apparently, Satan is the king of this world. I’ll state my conclusion plainly up front: No he is not! As we’ll see, Satan was handed a kingdom he did not earn by Adam, and Christ came to take it back. We call this the gospel. For too long as a Christian when I heard or used the word “gospel,” I equated it with the salvation of souls, full stop. Sure, it has peripheral influences on the culture, but that was only a spillover from people being saved from their sins, as the theologians call it, soteriology.

Now, I see the gospel as a proclamation of salvation for the entire created order, starting with those who’ve embraced Christ as Lord and Savior, and God starting his reclamation and restoration project at his first coming. By contrast, the typical Pietist, fundamentalist, dispensational, Evangelical understanding of the state of this fallen world is that Christ will only fully clean it up at his second coming. Until then, Satan is more or less in control of this world, and the primary purpose of the gospel is to save people out of this world so they can go to heaven when they die. The world will get increasingly worse until Jesus finally comes back to save the day and set all things right. I used to believe this, more or less, but my embrace of postmillennialism a few years ago changed that. Let’s see how.

Satan Handed an Earth and a Kingdom
As we read in Genesis, God created the earth and everything in it “very good,” but something happened to ruin it. We’re all familiar with the story of the fall. God told Adam everything on earth belonged to him, but there was one tree from which he must not eat because when he does, he will “surely die.” We all know what death is on this side of the fall, but I always wonder what Adam made of those words. He had not yet seen or experienced death in any way, so I imagine it was an abstraction to him. Yet, he knew it must not be good. Maybe not fully understanding the implications of death is why Adam failed to protect the woman from the serpent, and Satan deceived her. We read in Genesis 3:

⁶When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. ⁷Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Notice what happens when the woman eats—nothing. Then she gives some of the fruit to Adam and when he eats what happens? Only then were the eyes of both opened, not before. Paul confirms it wasn’t what the woman did that caused the fall, but what the man did:

¹²Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned. . . . ¹⁴Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come. (Rom. 5)

²²For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. ²²For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. (I Cor. 15)

Paul also tells us in Timothy (2:14) that it was the woman who was deceived, but in Adam’s tending of the garden and protecting his wife, he was a colossal failure. Where was Adam when the serpent was allowed to deceive the woman? Why was he not there to protect and defend her? Why was the serpent there in the first place? We can’t know the answers to these questions, but we do know from Genesis 2 that prior to Eve being created, man was given the charge to work and care for the Garden:

¹⁵The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. ¹⁶And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; ¹⁷but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

He failed to “take care of it.”

Interestingly, the Lord says to Adam he would curse the ground, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded, ‘You must not eat from it’” He clearly had the option not to listen to her, and if he hadn’t there would have been no fall. The choice was his, and he blew it, big time. In the created order of things, God made it so that man has ultimate authority, and therefore ultimate accountability. It’s called federal headship, the basic idea being how one person represents and acts on behalf of a larger group, with the consequences of their actions being imputed (credited or charged) to those they represent. Our salvation from sin depends on this concept. Adam was the federal head for the human race through which sin came, and Christ was the federal head for his people he came to save from their sins (Matt. 1:21). Sin was imputed through Adam, and righteousness through Christ. Without the federal headship of Christ, we would die in our sins.

Thankfully, Christ was given a task from the Father, and he fulfilled it. We read in John 6:

³⁷All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. ³⁸For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. ³⁹And 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. ⁴⁰For 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.”

Another idea we get from the theologians captures what we read about here, the covenant of redemption. In the internal Triune purposes of God, the Father gave Jesus a task, “to save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). Jesus didn’t come to save everybody, or to make salvation possible for all people, he came to make salvation actual for all those the Father has given him. This salvation accomplished by Jesus during his life of obedience unto death, his crucifixion, burial, resurrection, and ascension, started to be applied at Pentecost. His kingdom was now established on earth, his having been given “All authority in heaven and on earth,” (Matt. 28). The flag of the kingdom, like a warrior in battle, had been planted right in the midst of the enemy’s territory, and he would now commence through the power of the Holy Spirit among his people to establish the new creation (2 Cor. 5:17).

A Ruined Kingdom Restored in Christ
The NIV translation of the verse in 2 Corinthians is the most literal of the translations, and to me the most accurate. It says, “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come.” Other translations infer that the new creation Paul is referring to is the anyone, so it says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” That is true, but that gives people the impression this new creation is limited to saved, redeemed people. I used to think that. In fact, it is God’s eschatological kingdom (the final fulfillment happening at his second coming) breaking into this dark fallen world that previously belonged to Satan—it does so no longer. The Apostle Paul tells us that salvation is a package deal, us and the rest of creation together (Rom. 8):

¹⁸I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. ¹⁹For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. ²⁰For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope ²¹thatthe creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

²²We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. ²³Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? ²⁵But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

Noticed how Paul connects “the glory that will be revealed in us” to the entire creation. Most Christians think we only got a very small down payment on this new creation at Christ’s first coming, and a wholesale change can only happen at his second coming. They believe this fallen ruined kingdom belongs to the devil and use the evidence of evil and suffering to claim it. So, when Christ tells Pilot his kingdom is not of this world it confirms what they believe. However, Christ did not say His kingdom is not in the world, but that it is not of the world—not that the kingdom is “not here,” but that it is not “from here.” The word “of” is a primary preposition denoting origin. This means the origin of Christ’s redeemed kingdom is not of this world because he came to redeem and transform it! Once his mission was accomplished and fully realized in his ascension and Pentecost, his kingdom was officially in this fallen world, like a mustard seed and leaven (Matt. 13) taking it back from the devil.

We always read the text based on our assumptions, so when we read, “Who hopes for what they already have?” we assume we’re not going to get it until Christ returns at the consummation of all things at the end of time. But Paul wrote these words in the 50s AD, so Christianity and its influence in the world had been limited to parts of the Middle East and some of Europe, that’s it. Even there on a societal and cultural level, Christianity’s impact was minimal, but since then the gospel has gone throughout the entire earth and been utterly transformed by it. I do not limit the gospel’s reach just to human interaction, but to the imprint our actions and ideas and effort put on creation. Remember the dominion and cultural mandate given to Adam in Genesis 1:

²⁶Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.

²⁷So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

²⁸God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

As the second or last Adam, Christ came to fulfill this mandate, and at his Ascension and Pentecost he began to fulfill it through us, his church. Human interaction on a societal level has been transformed by the gospel, and this includes science and technology and knowledge of every sort that has had an impact on how we live. Trust me, none of us would want to live in the ancient world, and the kingdom Christ came to establish is the reason we no longer have to live in such a world.

The Practical Consequences of the Ascension
Lastly, because Jesus is now king with all authority in heaven and on earth dwelling with his people by the power of the Spirit of God, the gospel has gone forth to the nations and God’s kingdom is advancing. As a result, the devil is on the defensive. Until I embraced postmillennialism, I thought it was the church and Christians who were on the defensive, and I thought this because I effectively ignored the ascension for God’s redemptive plans on earth. We are living in the fulfillment of God’s promise to Adam and Eve to strike or crush the serpent’s head, his defeat fully realized at Christ’s ascension to the right hand of God. The world now belongs to Christ!

Many Christians living by sight and not faith see how horrible the world can be and conclude the devil is “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4). The Greek often translated world is not cosmos, but aión or age. So Paul’s reference isn’t to the earth or God’s created order, but to the fallen world, the age of the devil’s reign on earth. Now, the devil is only the god of lost sinners, and God’s kingdom and Christ’s reign have been slowly taking over territory for the last two thousand years. That’s what the ascension means, the extension of Christ’s reign on earth and the advance of God’s kingdom. Our job as his body is to heavenize earth! When Jesus prayed to the Father, and taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” I imagine the Father was inclined to answer Jesus’ prayer in the affirmative. The point of Jesus’s coming was to establish his kingdom on earth, not wait for thousands of years to establish it. The parables of the mustard seed and leaven tell us the advance and extent of the kingdom will slowly but surely extend to the entire earth and everything in it.

The problem most Christians have with that assertion is how seemingly inconsistent the advance is. But, as I always say, God is never in a hurry. When God promised Abram 4,000 years ago(!) that all the peoples on earth would be blessed through him, for 2,000 years(!) the promise seemed hollow. This is why a common refrain of Jews prior to Jesus’ coming was, “How long O Lord!” David seemed like the fulfillment, then it all fell apart. Then Israel ceased to exist, and when they came back to the land, they were oppressed for most of the next several hundred years. Then Jesus! This little band of men and women in an obscure outpost of the Roman Empire literally turned the world upside down! As the men in Thessalonica exclaimed, “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also!” More like right side up, and I’m inclined to think we’re just getting started.

Why I Left Full Preterism by Sam Frost: A Review

Nov 26, 2025 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

Preterism was back in the news recently. Doug Wilson and Gary DeMar had another powwow in Moscow on Monday, November 3, this time an official debate. So, the timing is good to bring attention to this little book with big intentions.

The word preterism comes from the Latin word for past, and it describes certain biblical prophecies having been fulfilled in the past, specifically in the first century. Most Evangelical Christians are futurists, meaning they believe those same prophecies describe future events happening very far into the future, most not even having happened yet. I hadn’t heard the word preterism until I embraced postmillennialism in August 2022, probably because I didn’t put much stock in eschatology as a recovering dispensationalist. I was an eschatological agnostic.

In my zeal for my new postmillennial eschatology, I was learning everything I could find on the topic. One resource I found was Gary DeMar, whose knowledge of eschatology seemed encyclopedic. I started listening to his American Vision podcast and became a big fan. I didn’t know much about preterism, and nothing Gary said gave me the slightest indication he believed anything out of the ordinary about eschatology. I caught a few things here and there indicating he was supposedly controversial, but even when addressing the topic there were no red flags.

Then last year I went to the Fight Laugh Feast conference, and I mentioned something about DeMar. A number of people I respect seemed to agree he was in fact out of the ordinary eschatologically. Some even used the word heretical, which I found hard to believe at the time. Fast forward to DeMar some months back going to Moscow to meet with Doug Wilson and make an appearance on CrossPolitic. What I saw on the podcast certainly didn’t seem ordinary. Getting him to affirm something definitively is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall, frustrating. Thus, I began my journey down the rabbit hole of full preterism (FP). This interview and DeMar’s trip to Moscow brought out the full preterists on Twitter en mass. It was bizarre. These guys, and it seems they’re all guys, have a certitude about them that makes James White look positively doubt ridden. Ken Gentry wrote a foreword to Frost’s book, and in it says of such preterist zeal, “I have seen immature Christians swallow the system whole, then become intoxicated with a cult-like arrogance.” Surely not all who embrace it are immature, but I experienced a bit of that arrogance as well.

I still had no clue how deep the hole went, but not long after this I came across a Sam Frost interview on YouTube. As soon as he mentioned the book, I had to get it. I’m glad I did because now I know why I’m most definitely not an FP. Frost mentioned something in the interview I found surprising given what I was learning about Gary DeMar. On the back of the book is an endorsement by Gary DeMar! He writes that Frost’s book “is a great starting point in understanding the inherent dangers of a full preterism position.” I wonder what he thinks about that now.

Sam Frost has some credibility in writing a book about leaving FP because he not only embraced it, but taught and championed it, and wrote a couple books about it. He was a mainstay at FP conferences for a number of years until he grew disillusioned and saw what Gentry describes as “methodological errors, positional inconsistencies, and internal fragmentation.” What started to give me that queasy this is just not right feeling was the apparent rejection of 2000 years of Christian orthodoxy.

In the first chapter Frost gives us a short history of FP, and lays out four points on which all eschatological positions agree:

Christ will return bodily . . .
at the end of time and history . . .
and raise our bodies . . .
and bring full judgment to all.

Christians in history have been unified on what Frost calls “these essential matters.” I was shocked when I began to understand they didn’t believe these “essentials.” And it isn’t that they just don’t believe them, but they seek to “undermine them entirely.” How they do this is by claiming that all prophecies, all eschatological events (Matthew 24, Revelation, Daniel, etc.) were fulfilled in the past, and specifically in AD70 and the destruction of Jerusalem. AD70 is the ultimate hermeneutic by which they interpret everything in Scripture. The pretzel logic I encountered on Twitter of people trying to defend this was hard to believe.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, for average Christians to wrap their minds around such a concept. What do you mean Jesus isn’t coming back “to judge the living and the dead”? What do you mean we will not be raised physically, bodily, out of the dust of the earth in resurrected eternal bodies? When I started to grasp what FP is, I thought there is no way Gary DeMar believes such things. Then seeing him on CrossPolitic trying to talk about the resurrection and watching the incredulous faces of the guys encountering this, it seems he does. Like I said, it’s hard to nail Gary down.

The short history of FP Frost recounts goes back to the early 70s. Out of 2000 years a half century or so isn’t much. Yet we’re to believe Christians for all that time completely misunderstood what God was saying about the very nature of redemptive reality, of reality itself? Sure seems like it. One man is responsible for this, Max King, an ex-Church of Christ minister. He published his first book in 1971 called, The Spirit of Prophecy, and as the description at Amazon says, it “shook the foundations of modern Bible interpretation.” It must not have been very high on the Richter Scale since so few have ever heard of it or FP. He wrote another book in 1987 Frost calls his magnum opus, The Cross and the Parousia of Christ. And he adds, this is the first documentation of full preterism, even though preterist ideas are common in church history.

Another thing that is new in church history was the FP antipathy to creeds Frost recounts in a chapter on, “History, Creeds, and Sola Scriptura.” The latter is a Reformation affirmation, and is important in this context because the FPs claim they only reject the creeds at the points which they disagree with Scripture. But I always thought the creeds were based on Scripture. Apparently not. This explains DeMar’s fixation on “show me the verse,” which he repeats ad nauseam when discussing this topic, as if affirmative declarations in Scripture settle anything. Or that inferring something from Scripture that isn’t spelled out is illegitimate. Like, for example, the Trinity. The word doesn’t exist in our Bibles, so “show me the verse” isn’t going to work for something Christians have believed since Christ rose from the dead and Trinitarian orthodoxy agreed upon at the Council of Nicaea.

The problem with such extreme Biblicism is that it contradicts itself. Because God didn’t see fit to give us a textbook or operating manual, spelling out exactly what we’re to believe but rather a story; doctrine must be inferred or derived from the text. The authority of Scripture doesn’t come directly from the text but must be interpreted, and upon that interpretation we stand or fall. FPs are “stuck” with the rest of us interpreters, even though their absolute certitude indicates otherwise. The inevitability of interpretation means they criticize those who do exactly what they do, interpret the text! You would think this obvious reality might engender a little humility, but alas you would be wrong. Absolute certainty for finite creatures like us is an impossibility. Sadly, too many people haven’t realized that.

Another concept I hadn’t encountered before reading Frost is the idea of infinity, in the title of chapter 4. This is truly bizarre. According to FP the world as we know it will never end (remember everything was fulfilled, finished, in AD70), so there will be no end to baby making, or what they call “infinite procreation.” As Frost writes from the FP perspective, “’the Bible nowhere speaks about the end of time, but only of the time of the end,’ which of course was AD 70.’” And if the covenant is eternal, forever, then history must go on eternally. Like I said, bizarre. But what about the elect. There can’t be an infinite number of those because Scripture is clear on this, not much interpretation required. Frost quotes John 6:39:

³⁹And 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.

Frost writes a chapter on John 6 because it was critical in moving him away from FP.

Also, the concept of the book of life is affirmed throughout Scripture, and the idea is that a certain number of people are in it, not an infinitely expanding number of people. Daniel 12:1, for example, states: “But at that time your people—everyone whose name is found written in the book—will be delivered.” Doesn’t sound like an ever expanding book to me.

Frost finishes with a chapter on the reasons he left FP, and some might surprise you. One is that FP and dispensationalism “share a lot in common.” I didn’t see that coming, although he does mention dispensationalism several times. The similarity is that they are both “all or nothing” approaches, and both have a “one time fulfillment” in mind, among other things.

I could write much more, but my objective in writing this is to give you some sense of the bizarreness of this very newfangled eschatology, and the inevitable unorthodox implications that result. It’s worth the read if you’re curious or have someone in your life who is thinking about or embracing FP.

« Older Entries

The Material Implications of the Gospel

Most Christians Don’t Believe in Postmillennialism, But the Left Does

That Old Rugged Cross and Our Home Far Away

What Distinguishes Amillennialism from Postmillennialism?

My Kingdom is Not of This World

Why I Left Full Preterism by Sam Frost: A Review

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