What Our Citizenship is in Heaven Really Means

What Our Citizenship is in Heaven Really Means

Feb 5, 2025 | Eschatology, The Gospel

When I became a Christian in the fall of 1978, born-again as we used to say, it was into the kind of Christianity described by three words: Pietistic Gnostic dualism. It was a campus ministry where I imbibed what I now see as an over spiritualized version of Christianity. I look back at the time fondly, living among a group of young people who took their faith seriously, but eventually I realized they saw the important things in life being the spiritual, like Bible reading, prayer, church, evangelism, and the like, and everything else being less important. It was implicitly a bifurcated take on reality, something divided into two separate spheres, some things are in the sphere of the spiritual and thus important, and other things in the sphere of the material and mundane, and thus not so important. I say implicitly because I’m not sure this was ever overtly taught, but I started to see reality through a Christian lens perfectly described by these three words.

Because of this, I want to consider Philippians 3:20 & 21 and how my young Christian self interpreted this passage, and how most Christians do so today as well.

20 But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so they will be like his glorious body.

Back then, my citizenship being in heaven obviously meant heaven is my home, where I belong, where I feel most comfortable. I don’t belong to this messed up old fallen world which, after all, belongs to Satan. As we’ll see, it doesn’t mean that at all, but it sure sounded to me like it did. From a Pietistic Gnostic dualism perspective it made perfect sense. The old hymn says it best while getting it exactly wrong:

I’m but a stranger here,
Heav’n is my home;
Earth is a desert drear,
Heav’n is my home;
Danger and sorrow stand
Round me on ev’ry hand;
Heav’n is my Fatherland,
Heav’n is my home.

The hymn was written by Henry Bateman in the mid-19th century when the concepts from these three words were coming to dominate the Evangelical church in light of the Second Great Awaking. As dispensational premillennialism and fundamentalism began to dominate the church in the 19th century, all but taking it over in the 20th, the words of this hymn became axiomatic. Of course heaven is my home! Verse 20 would bring others to mind like I Peter 2:10, where Peter calls Christians foreigners and aliens, or sojourners, the idea being someone residing in a strange country, just passing through. This idea appears to be confirmed in Hebrews 11, the great hall of fame of faith. Speaking of Abraham, the writer says:

10 For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

Clearly, that’s not the city I now live in on this earth. The writer seems to make it even more clear, using the phrase like Peter that these heroes of faith “were aliens and strangers on earth,” and then telling us:

16 Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

That settles it! This earth is not our home, which is off somewhere else not here, a spiritual heavenly home, and the point of the Christian faith is that when we die we get to go there. Jesus even told us in John 14:2:

My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?

Clearly, Jesus is telling us this place is off somewhere else, not this earth, and this place is where we’ll go when we die.

Then if we combine all this with passages in the New Testament telling us this world belongs to Satan, it has to be an open and shut case. For example, Paul calls Satan “the god of this age” (2 Cor. 4:4), and “the ruler of the kingdom of the air” (Eph. 2:2). The Apostle John tells us, “the whole world is under the control of the evil one” (I John 5:19), and he also makes a strong contrast between “everything in the world,” and those who do the will of God (I John 2:15-17). As horrible as the world can be, it seems kind of obvious it fulfills the phrase often ascribed to some of it, a hell hole.

Looking back I can see why all of this this would have made sense to me, but I’ve come to realize it’s a distortion of the biblical message of the kingdom, in fact an upside down distortion. Jesus came not that we might escape this world for heaven, but that we might be part of him bringing heaven to this fallen world through us. God in Christ is making this world our home because God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son for it. It’s a package deal, us, the people he came to save (Matt. 1:21), and His creation, which as Paul says is “groaning as in the pains of childbirth,” (Rom. 1:22,23) itself to be redeemed with our bodies at the resurrection. This process of making it our home started at Jesus’ first coming, and will ultimately be fulfilled at his second. The big disagreements in the church are about what happens between these comings and what it all means.

The Biblical Orientation of the Christian Life
As we consider the dominant other worldly perspective of most Evangelical Christians today, the question before us becomes one of the proper, biblical orientation of the Christian life, whether our focus is this life or the life to come, and even what these concepts mean. The are two reasons these verses in Philippians are so important to the Christian life in the 21st century. One is the improper interpretation, and the other is the contrasting proper interpretation which completely changes the orientation of the Christian’s life. The contrast is powerful and instructive. In the improper interpretation, it’s like we’re living in a foreign land where we don’t speak the language or know the customs, and we’re constantly longing to go home where we belong, to the familiar, the beloved, the comfortable. In the proper interpretation, we are home in this world, living where we belong, among the people we know and a culture of familiar sights and sounds and feels, even as we seek to improve it and make it a better, more heavenly place to live.

Because of Pietism, these verses tend to be interpreted by most Evangelical Christians in a dualistic way, in effect making us so heavenly minded we become no earthly good. That’s overstated, but it’s imperative we understand the point. In Francis Schaeffer’s image, modern Christians live in a two story reality where upstairs is the important spiritual stuff, that which is related to faith, and downstairs the mundane, material, not so important stuff, and everything not related to faith. I’ve heard this version of Christianity compared to red double decker buses in England, with the spiritual and important stuff on the upper deck, and the not so important mundane and material stuff on the lower deck. Thus we get the term dualism, or the idea of two separate parts or ideas determining how we understand and live our lives. I add the qualifier Gnostic to dualism because we’re seeking a kind of secret knowledge about that other spiritual life apart from this world. Whether we think about any of this consciously or not, it does affect all of us.

The correct orientation gives us an exciting fundamentally transformational and engaging vision for our lives, while rejecting an escapist two-story Christian mentality. Think about it. If we view this life, this world, like a sinking ship eventually going down, or a burning building, our instincts are going to be to get the heck outta here! If we see our efforts to save the ship or the building as futile, how motivated are we going to be to put in the effort to transform it? This is the reason a few years ago I stopped praying for revival. I know what you’re thinking. I’m so earthly minded I’m no heavenly good! Actually, I decided I needed to expand that prayer, so now I pray not just for revival, which Christians tend to view as people being saved so when they die they can go to heaven, but also for renewal, restoration, and reformation as well. I call it praying the four Rs. Notice I don’t pray for revolution because the objective isn’t change into something new and different, but a fulfillment of God’s created order toward its perfect ends. Notice each of the additional Rs don’t seek metamorphosis, a worm into a butterfly, but transformation into fulfillment of what God always intended his creation to be, very good.

This is what God has done in redeeming and reconciling His creation to himself, reversing the effects of the fall “far as the curse is found,” in the words of Isaac Watts’ great Christmas hymn, Joy to the World. The four Rs are a prayer, but it takes more than prayer. We must add our efforts inspired by those prayers to bring to fulfillment God’s grand design in the cultural or dominion mandate given to Adam in Genesis 1:

28 God 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.”

We are to fulfill the mandate in the second or last Adam (I Cor. 15:45) where the first failed, which is an exciting vision for the Christian life, especially in contrast to the escapist, we belong somewhere else version of Pietistic Christianity. The question is which vision or version is Paul communicating in these verses.

Citizenship in the Ancient Roman World
The history of the Ancient city of Philippi is central to how we should understand our Christian mission in a fallen sinful world. A city in Macedonia (modern day Greece), Philippi was originally founded in 360 BC and named Krenides which means springs. Shortly thereafter it was conquered by Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, who renamed the city after himself. He saw its potential commercial importance due to neighboring gold mines and its position along the great royal trade route running east to west across Macedonia. The Third Macedonian War (171-168 BC) marked the end of its Hellenistic period when Philippi was conquered by the Romans, and continued to develop its significance in the Roman Empire.

Because of that significance, one of the most important battles of antiquity took place there in 42 BC. Following the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44, his heirs Mark Antony and Octavian, called the Second Triumvirate, confronted the forces of his killers, Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, outside the western walls of the city. In effect, it was the end of the Roman Republic, as both Brutus and Cassius committed suicide in a losing cause. The battle was part of a long series of civil wars in the Roman Republic that would eventually turn into the Roman Empire ruled by one man, a Caesar. In the decades following, Octavian and Antony released some of their veteran soldiers to colonize the city, and in 27 BC when Octavian was proclaimed as Emperor Augustus, he reorganized the colony and established more settlers there. Philippi was now developed as a colony of Rome, administratively modeled on the Empire’s capital, governed by two military officers, the duumviri appointed directly from Rome. It can also be seen in the city’s layout and architecture as a colony resembling a “small Rome.” Phillipi is also indicative of how Rome developed regions into the larger Roman Empire to extend its influence.

The military and political history of Philippi is the contextual metaphor for Paul’s words to the Philippian Christians in these verses. The Apostle visited Philippi in 49-50 AD on his second missionary journey. As Paul and his companions were traveling they intended to take a turn and visit Asia, but Paul had a vision of a man begging them to come to Macedonia, so they went left to Europe and forever changed Western history. Luke tells us (Acts 16),

12 From there we traveled to Philippi, a Roman colony and the leading city of that district of Macedonia. And we stayed there several days.

We learn through their visit about the highly valued status of citizenship in the Greco-Roman world, conferring rights, privileges, and responsibilities within a city-state or the Empire itself. Without it, a person had no rights or recourse to abuse by the state. We see this play out in Paul’s experience as the city’s magistrates give him and Silas their version of non-Roman citizenship justice. They are both in fact citizens of Rome, so we can see the stark contrast of how Roman citizenship confers benefits not offered to non-citizens.

Paul became a Roman citizen at birth because his parents were citizens, and he used that to his advantage when he had to, as we see here in Philippi. A slave girl had been following Paul and his companions for many days, harassing them to the point where Paul had finally had enough and exorcised her. She lost her money making power to predict the future, resulting in Paul and Silas being arrested, “severely flogged,” and thrown in prison. As the men were singing hymns to God at midnight, there was an earthquake and the prison doors flew open. Thinking the prisoners escaped, the jailor was ready to kill himself, but Paul told him not to harm himself because none of the prisoners had escaped. He famously asked what he must do to be saved, and he and his family became the second converts in Europe after Lydia and her family.

The next morning Paul and Silas were told they were allowed to leave, and that’s when Paul played the citizenship card:

37 But Paul said to the officers: “They beat us publicly without a trial, even though we are Roman citizens, and threw us into prison. And now do they want to get rid of us quietly? No! Let them come themselves and escort us out.”

The city magistrates got nervous when they heard this because punishing and putting a Roman citizen in prison without a trial could be capital offense. Trying to appease Paul, they escorted them from the prison and asked them, nicely I gather, to leave the city.

Citizenship in Rome and in Heaven
From this story and the history of Philippi, we can see the dynamic at work Paul had in mind when he used the phrase, “our citizenship is heaven.” Here is what he did not mean. You citizens in Philippi, your real home is Rome, Italy, itself, and your goal as a Roman citizen is to go back there. You’re only here in Philippi for a short time, so don’t get used to it because you will only really belong when you get to Rome. Here, in contrast, is what he did mean. As citizens of Rome, you are creating in Asia Minor a little Rome, bringing all the dynamics of Roman civilized society and order to an outpost that knows nothing of the blessings of Roman citizenship. In that way, the Roman Empire and its influence and blessings will flow well beyond the city’s borders.

Notice Paul also says, “we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ,” and not we eagerly await going to heaven to meet our Savior there. It would be the same as saying we eagerly await Caesar to come from the capital of the Empire to visit the outpost we’ve been building so he’s just as at home in Philippi as he is in Rome. He will be looking to see how successfully Philippi has been in replicating Rome as an outpost of the First City.

The first thing we need to know and then be continually aware of is Christ is King. In Matthew 4 after his baptism in the wilderness and at his most vulnerable after fasting 40 days and nights, Satan comes to tempt him in various ways.

8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. 9 “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” 10 Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”

Prior to Christ accomplishing his mission, Satan was the king of the world, the earth and its kingdoms belonged to him. The most radical and momentous moment in human history was about to happen, and nothing would ever be the same after. Only without the eyes of faith do we not realize the radical revolution that took place only a few short years after this cosmic confrontation. In Acts 17 when Paul and Silas were in Thessalonica, the words of the Jewish leaders captured well the consequences of what Christ accomplished when they say in exasperation, these men “have turned the world upside down.” More like right-side up!

Christ officially became King, experienced his coronation, at the ascension, something we read about in Acts 1. If you happened to see the coronation of King Charles III of England in May of 2023, you’ll get a small sense of what the coronation of Jesus must have been like when he ascended to heaven. We read about it 500 years before it happened in Daniel 7:

13 “I saw in the night visions,

and behold, with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
14 And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed.

Many Christians believe this is a future event that will happen at Christ’s second coming, his Second Advent, but Paul in Philippians 1 doesn’t allow us that interpretation:

That power is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, 21 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. 22 And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

The conclusion from the plain text of Scripture and supported by the entire history of redemption, is that Christ became King of this world, dethroning Satan, at his first coming. Further, his rule and reign started then, not just over the hearts of Christians, but as both these passages proclaim, over every single thing, every single person, and every single power spiritual and temporal. I’ve always loved how Paul seems to be saying his rule in the present age is so obvious, so accepted by Christians, they have to be reminded his rule is also for the age “to come.”

This absolutely essential aspect of Christian theology is all but ignored in Evangelical Christian churches. For most of my Christian life, the ascension never stood out to me as an indispensable theological foundation of the Christian life. From this foundation we live our lives in confidence, optimism, and the hope of victory both in this life, as well as in the one to come. That age to come will be in a resurrected body on this earth, redeemed, renewed, and reconciled to its Creator. In that hope we “eagerly await a Savior from there” when Jesus not only comes to visit this earthly colony of heaven, but because we have made it a “little heaven,” he will make heaven of the entire earth!

 

 

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.

 

The Rise and Fall of Dispensational Premillennialism in American Christianity

The Rise and Fall of Dispensational Premillennialism in American Christianity

Oct 9, 2024 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

When I embraced postmillennialism in August 2022, I knew next to nothing about where the most popular Evangelical eschatology, dispensational premillennialism, came from or how it developed. The reason this is important is because eschatology matters. What we think about “end times” will color everything we think about current times. It determines how we interpret the past, present, and future, not just the end of that future, but everything in between now and when the end comes. If we think planet earth is destined for an apocalyptic dystopia guess how we’ll think of current events. I’ll explain why, but I didn’t believe eschatology mattered for most of my Christian life. The speculation surrounding eschatology coming from dispensationalism drove me to become an eschatological agnostic. Or as it’s often called, a pan-millennialist, as in, it will all pan out in the end.

I’ve heard it called newspaper eschatology because it takes headlines and develops predictions from current events that supposedly tell us about when the antichrist will appear and the rapture will happen. These predictions have been going since the mid-19th century, and even though they never turn out to be accurate, that doesn’t seem to diminish dispensationalism’s popularity. At least as it is assumed by probably 90% of Evangelicals to be the truth about “end times.” When I became a born-again Christian in 1978, eschatology was a topic of conversation everywhere. The New York Times even declared Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, published in 1970, to be the bestselling “nonfiction” book of the 1970s.

 

I’ve been learning the fascinating history of how Evangelicalism got to this point in a book I first heard about in this interview of the author, Daniel Hummel by Al Mohler The book, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation, has been a revelation for me. Most surprising has been learning that the development of this thinking in the 19th century was a direct response and repudiation of the dominant postmillennialism of the time. I’ll explain why, but I’ve been under the impression it was the horrific disasters of the 20th century that discredited the post-mill position, but that lamentable century was only the final nail in the coffin of its credibility. It was rather the distortion of the concept of progress in the 19th century with the development of knowledge and science. The distortion was a direct result of the secularism growing out of the empiricism and rationalism of the Enlightenment. God was pushed to the periphery of Western culture, and man enthroned as sovereign creator of progress and civilization. As God said of the builders of Babel, they believed “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.”

Speaking of Lyman Stewart, the founder of Biola (Bible Institute of Los Angeles, 1908), Hummel writes:

In his view, amillennialism was a battering ram to break up the postmillennial hold on nineteenth century Protestantism. With the growing popularity of theological modernism, which adjusted Christian teachings to the intellectual climate of the late nineteenth century, Stewart had identified his main rival.

The reaction against postmillennialism, however, goes back to the mid-19th century and, Irishman J.N. Darby. The earliest “new premillennialists,” as they were called to distinguish themselves from the old ones, are what we now call dispensationalists. To the new guys on the block, the world and the church were far too corrupt for the kind of progress 19th century postmillennialism promised. However it was Darby bringing his version of “end times” to America in 1862 right in the middle of the Civil War that dispensationalism’s march to dominance in American Evangelical Christianity began. There’s nothing like more than half a million of your fellow countrymen being slaughtered fighting each other to bring into question the very idea of progress. But it wasn’t only the trauma of war. As Hummel points out:

The days of postmillennial consensus ended in the 1860s. The Civil War’s violence and destruction helped shatter the image of the United States as the vanguard of the coming kingdom, but this was just the initial shock. Higher criticism of the Bible and Darwinian evolution, two academic discourses that permeated seminaries and universities after the war, began to unravel the biblical case for postmillennialism.

But as well see, the American obsession with progress would not die easily.

Progress and the Spirit of Nineteenth Century America

It’s striking to look back on this side of the unimaginable suffering and misery of the twentieth century, wars and numbers of dead, to realize just how much progress obsessed post-Civil War America. George Marsden observes that “in a nation born during the Enlightenment, the reverence for science as the way to understand all aspects of reality was nearly unbounded.” This reverence grew out of the heady Enlightenment assumption that science and reason could solve all mankind’s problems eventually. The stunning advances in technology seemed to justify the hubris.

All these changes were part of the industrial revolution after the Civil War transforming the largely agrarian society of America’s founding into a worldwide economic powerhouse. Along with change came problems. Industrialization and growing populations of immigrants flocking to cities along the East coast created deplorable conditions for a significant number of people. Christians thought Christianity provided an answer in what came to be known as the Social Gospel; a significant change in American Christianity was on the horizon. Many nineteenth century reformers, like the abolitionists, were Unitarians having rejected what they considered the illogical concept of the Trinity; their hearts were in the right place, but their theology wasn’t. German biblical criticism and its rejection of the Bible as reliable history and God’s authoritative verbal revelation had a profound effect on Christianity in the growing secular age. The also spreading rejection of orthodox historic Christianity in the mainline denominations, along with the suffering brought on by the industrial revolution, produced the response of the Social Gospel.

This struggle for the soul of Christianity (pun intended) playing out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to be called the fundamentalist-modernist controversies. The new premillennialists (the term dispensationalism didn’t get coined until 1927) were part of the broader fundamentalist movement that eventually came to dominate American Evangelicalism. On the fundamentalist side were an amalgamation of Christians loosely held together by a handful of orthodox beliefs about the historical veracity of the Christian faith, and on the modernist side were liberals who embraced the social gospel and a religion of progress. To say these two were incompatible is like saying water and fire are not compatible.

From the late 1870s to Word War 1, the leadership of mainline Protestant denominations slowly but surely gave up any pretense in believing the Bible was a supernatural document. They accepted the Enlightenment assumptions of empiricism and rationalism, including the inevitable conclusion of German biblical critics’ attacks on the Bible’s veracity. These were the liberals, and conservatives who stood against them came to be called fundamentalists from a series of twelve short books, The Fundamentals, written from 1910 to 1915. Even though he was a conservative, William Jennings Bryan echoed what almost all Christians believed prior to World War I:

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

As George Marsden adds, “evangelicals generally regarded almost any sort of progress as evidence of the advance of the kingdom.” The Great War was used to attack the credibility of postmillennialism, but it was World War II that put the nail in the coffin. The Soviet Union and Mao’s communist China didn’t help.

Dispensationalism’s Eventual Triumph
Regardless of Bryan’s conservative Christian convictions, he embraced a concept of postmillennialism that dispensationalists rightly believed came from liberal Christianity and a distortion of the Bible’s understanding of progress as the providential working of God in history through His people. A postmillennialism based on Enlightenment assumptions could never last because progress is a Jewish and Christian concept the pagans stole and bastardized. It’s almost like thinking a man can become a woman and a woman a man, not that anyone would ever think such a thing. The two versions of progress are as mutually exclusive as the sexes. But why did dispensational premillennialism triumph and become the dominant eschatology of 20th century Evangelicalism?

Before the nail was driven into the coffin by the horrors of 20th century war and death, revivalism and the great evangelist, D.L. Moody, paved the way. According to Hummell:

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

It’s hard to imagine in post-Christian America just how popular and influential Moody was. When he embraced dispensationalism It gained instant credibility, which in due course would influence one of the most consequential Christians of the 20th century, Cyrus Ingerson Scofield. Scofield developed and published his reference Bible in 1909, which arguably became the most influential book molding 20th century fundamentalism which in due course became Evangelicalism. It sold a million copies in less than a decade and became the best-selling book in the history of Oxford University Press. Nothing like Oxford printing a book to give it max credibility.

Scofield systematized the dispensational hermeneutic, and with it as Hummell says, “Scofield transformed the new premillennialism [dispensationalism] into a full-blown religious identity for millions of Christians.” The Scofield Reference Bible was ubiquitous among the baby boomer generation of Christians. When I became a Christian in 1978, I remember it being spoken of in glowing terms, and highly suggested as a reference source. In fact in the early decades of its adoption, “it became a common marker of right belief in Moody movement circles.” This triumph was a long time coming for a new movement. It started with the Pietism growing up in 17th century Germany, made its way into a Brethren movement that eventually influenced Wesley, but importantly for the rise of dispensationalism, Darby, then Moody, then Scofield. His notes established the new premillennialism, revivalism, Higher Life teachers, and what are called Exclusive Brethren concepts as the default for fundamentalist Christians.

This peaked in the 70s with The Late Great Planet earth mentality, and I was born-again embracing every bit of it. For me it couldn’t last, thankfully. Yes, the 90s was the Left Behind decade, but when Kirk Cameron himself becomes post-mill, you know the jig is up.

Dispensationalism’s Pietistic Dualism
Although dispensationalism today has nothing like the credibility and awareness it had in the 20th century, it’s assumptions dominate Evangelical Christianity. It is those assumptions that led to Christianity’s cultural irrelevance in America. One of those is a type of gnostic dualism, a two-story Christianity, in Francis Schaffer’s words, which I learned in 1979 or 80 in his book The God Who Is There.  There are various ways to describe this two-story version of the faith, but it breaks life into two competing realities. Picture a house where upstairs is all the important stuff, the things that are truly meaningful and real, and downstairs is for the servants, the mundane everyday stuff. Even though it’s the same house it appears like two completely different houses, say upstairs is 19th century Victorian, and downstairs 1960s hip modernism. In Schaeffer’s words, upstairs “is above the line of despair.” Everyone without access to the stairs, is stuck downstairs trying to find meaning, hope, and purpose. If you do have a pass, you can go upstairs when you want to access the things that really matter in life.

This is where the Gnosticism comes in. This philosophy of Greek influence is a kind of secret knowledge which exists in the upper story, and it has little to do with what we experience downstairs. In fact, the stuff downstairs is only relevant as it points to and gets you the pass to the stairs. Then you can leave behind the servants, the Plebes, the hoi palloi, unless they too are given one of the passes, and they will get the knowledge that’s only had in the upper story. I’ve pushed the metaphor far enough, but you get the idea. Gnosticism, a version of Platonism, was a constant threat in the first few centuries of the church. It was the battle against this threat, among others, that forced the church fathers in response to develop the orthodox Christianity of the Nicene Creed we believe today.

After the Reformation, in due course the assumptions from dualism through Pietism, revivalism, and dispensationalism became the dominant worldview of Evangelical Christianity. Spiritual things were the important part of life, and the mundane and material a necessary evil, to be escaped through religious exercises like Bible reading, prayer, and church going. This was my born-again Christianity until I found Schaeffer and began my journey out of an upstairs/downstairs dualism of Pietistic Christianity. It took postmillennialism to finally eradicate it completely for me, but one doesn’t have to embrace that eschatology to escape from gnostic dualistic Pietistic assumptions. It’s just harder to do because these influences are ubiquitous in American Evangelicalism, like oxygen invisible and everywhere.

It’s fascinating to learn how this understanding of Christianity developed in its 20th century version from what came before. It’s impossible to overstate the influence of the development of fundamentalism in the first 30 or so years of the century, and how it’s become the default form of Christianity of almost all Evangelical Christians today. It informs, whether they know it or not, how they see not only the practice of their faith, but how they perceive the culture, including politics. The problem is that because of this Pietistic dualism, secularism completely took over American culture, and Western culture in general. I argued in a recent post that Pietism and secularism are two sides of the same coin. (I’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s ironic because a solid subset of the fundamentalists believed cultural and political engagement was a priority, but they eventually lost to the inherent dualism in their theology.

In the history of Christianity this kind of dualism was rare, although monastic life was a version of it. Reality for people in the Christian West was both material and spiritual. God and the spiritual realm of angels and demons was every bit as real to people in the Middle Ages as the material world they lived and worked in every day. It wasn’t until Pietism and the Enlightenment developed simultaneously in the 17th and 18th centuries, that secularism began its long march to dominance in the West. Christians, including me, often rail against secularism, and rightly so, but it was the dualistic over spiritualized version of Christianity in Pietism that gave secularism the cultural air to breath and grow. Even though Christians up to the early years of fundamentalism attempted cultural engagement, they didn’t stand a chance against the juggernaut of secularism.

To one degree or another Christians became so heavenly minded they were no earthly good. Add to Pietistic dualism an eschatology that sees evil and sin as inevitably growing worse until Jesus comes back to save the day, and you have a recipe for zero cultural influence, which is exactly what has happened. Thus we live in Wokestan. Cultural Marxism made it’s long march through the institutions with little or no push back from Christians and the church, and what pushback there has been, has been ineffectual. To bring Evangelical Christianity down to earth, both Pietism and dispensationalism need to be addressed critically for the inherent dualism they brought to the Christian faith.

A Christianity with cultural influence also requires an optimistic eschatology of victory, whatever you call it. Going into battle believing we’re going to lose is a recipe for getting more of what got us here in the first place. Embracing postmillennialism is what made all the difference for me and many others. It’s worth giving it a look if you have yet to consider it. The battle for the soul of Western culture is only just begun.

 

 

Numbers 13-14: Exploring Canaan and the Case for Christian Optimism

Numbers 13-14: Exploring Canaan and the Case for Christian Optimism

Sep 25, 2024 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

God communicates his redemptive story through a real people in history as a living metaphor for realities he would bring to pass in due course, a very long course. As I say, God is never in a hurry, and this took 2,000 years from its announcement in the calling of Abram in Genesis 12 to Christ. So as we read the Old Testament, the stories point forward to an ultimate fulfillment of those stories. Theologians call certain parts of those stories shadows and types of a reality to come. We only know this in supernatural hindsight because it took the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, to tell us so in Luke 24 after the resurrection. In this passage we learn from the word of God himself the ultimate Scriptural hermeneutics, or how the Bible is to be interpreted.

In this passage familiar to most Christians, two disciples left Jerusalem and were heading to a town called Emmaus, which is about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were undoubtably aware of the entirety of Jesus three-year ministry, and as they walked they were talking “about everything that had happened.” Jesus was once in a generation drama. In fact, the Jews had been waiting 400 years for their Messiah to come and rescue them from oppression. As I said, God is never in a hurry. As they were talking about the drama, Jesus came upon them but Luke tells us, “they were kept from recognizing him.” Jesus asked what they were talking about and they tell him:

They stood still, their faces downcast. 18 One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?

They tell him about this prophet Jesus of Nazareth, “powerful in word and deed,” and about the crucifixion and an unfathomable report the tomb was empty and he’d been seen alive. Jesus didn’t seem to care that a crucified and resurrected Messiah was, literally, beyond the ability of Jews to fathom, and he rebukes them:

25 He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” 27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

I laugh sometimes when I read or think about this passage because how in the world could they have understood something they could not conceive? It’s almost like him gently rebuking Peter because he couldn’t walk on water. Really? Does anybody but the Son of God not sink? I like the Greek word Luke uses here for foolish. The extended meaning from Strong’s Concordance:

properly, non-thinking, i.e. not “reasoning through” a matter (with proper logic); unmindful, which describes acting in a “mindless, dense” way (“just plain stupid”).

I think we can pull out Jesus’ meaning from the rebuke considering how obvious he is saying the meaning really is, so obvious that you’d have to be a moron to not get it! Being God, he fully understands that no Jew prior to his encounter with the disciples on that road would have understood that everything in the Old Testament was about the coming Messiah. Certain prophecies, certainly, but everything? Yes, everything. We can now see with perfect 20/20 hindsight how it teaches us about the Messiah, this young man named Jesus from Nazareth, and he wants us to continually mine the depths of this teaching so that with the Apostle Paul at the end of Romans 11 after he’s laid out this redemptive history, we proclaim:

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
    How unsearchable his judgments,
    and his paths beyond tracing out!

In modern parlance from my boomer upbringing in the 60s and 70s, it’s mind blowing!

The Exodus as Metaphor for Christ’s Work on the Cross
Before we get to Canaan, we have to go backward to understand the picture God is painting as he saves his people from bondage and slavery in Egypt. We know from Genesis 1-3 that man, male and female he created them, was created good, but rebelled in disobedience to God’s command and fell into sin and death. God, of course, had a plan revealed to us in Genesis 3:15. The seed that will strike the serpent’s head in perfect biblical hindsight is Jesus, and the rest of Israel’s history helps explain exactly who Jesus is and what he came to accomplish.

The next significant step in the story comes in Genesis 12 with the calling of Abram, not discounting what came in chapters 4-11. God promises to make him into a great nation, and that all the nations of the earth will be blessed through him. In chapter 15 God begins to fill in the contours of the story promising Abram an heir even though he is childless at 75 years-old, and his wife is barren at 65. We then see a bizarre ancient Near Eastern legal ceremony through which God declares he will unilaterally accomplish all that He is promising Abram. He then tells Abram his descendants will be enslaved in a foreign country for 400 years, but that He will rescue them, “and afterward they will come out with great possessions.” That foreign country is Egypt and the next significant step in the story is how God rescues them.

Near the end of the 400 years, God raises up Moses to lead his people out of slavery. He does this dramatically by killing all the firstborn of Egypt and instituting the Passover where the shedding of blood covers Israel so they don’t suffer God’s wrath as the Egyptians do. The Pharaoh is finally willing to let them leave, and by mighty acts of God they are led through the sea to eventual safety in the desert where they wander for 40 years. Prior to entering the land God promised Abram in the bizarre ceremony I referenced above, we learn that land is Canaan on the other side of the river, the west side. Before we get to there, though, let’s take a short theological look at where the story has taken us so far.

Israels’ slavery in Egypt is obviously analogous to our slavery to sin. God makes it very clear that as it took divine supernatural power to rescue the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt, so it takes His divine supernatural power to rescue us from our bondage to sin. In both, he takes the initiative and we respond because He wants to make clear what he proclaims through Zecheriah, “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,” says the Lord Almighty (4:6). This truth of God’s almighty sovereign power and control over all things is a reality on both sides of the river, what we theologically call justification, rescue from Egypt and sin, and sanctification, taking over the land.

Wonderings in the Desert and Living by Faith
The story of the Israelites spending forty years wandering in the desert before they enter the promised land is familiar to every Christian. The why of the wanderings is probably not so well known. The Israelites made a beeline from Egypt to the border of the land God planned for them to inhabit. In Numbers 13, God picks twelve men, one from each tribe, to explore the land of Canaan. It was a scouting mission so the leaders of the tribes would know what they were going to encounter when they entered the land. It is wisdom 101 to never go into any project without knowing what we’re getting into and what we will likely encounter as we engage it. The men spent forty days exploring the land before they came back and reported to Moses, Aaron, and all the people what they had found.

All reported that indeed it was a land flowing with milk and honey just as the Lord promised, but there were clearly obstacles to them taking the land and enjoying its fruits. They reported that “the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large.” This was the report from ten of the twelve men who saw these as obstacles to taking the land. One of the other two didn’t see it that way:

30 Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.”

That’s called positive thinking! But the ten focusing on the obstacles wouldn’t see it that way:

31 But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” 32 And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. 33 We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

Given sinful human beings tend toward the negative anyway, this didn’t go over well among the people. They decide to rebel against Moses and Aaron, even saying it would have been better for them to die in Egypt or the wilderness than to go into the land and get slaughtered and enslaved by these giants. But the two who saw things differently implored them not to rebel:

6 Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephunneh, who were among those who had explored the land, tore their clothes 7 and said to the entire Israelite assembly, “The land we passed through and explored is exceedingly good. 8 If the Lord is pleased with us, he will lead us into that land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and will give it to us. 9 Only do not rebel against the Lord. And do not be afraid of the people of the land, because we will devour them. Their protection is gone, but the Lord is with us. Do not be afraid of them.”

Of courses they don’t listen, and God says they will spend forty years in the wilderness, one for every day the explored the land. Then He also struck down the ten who caused the people to rebel.

I facetiously called what Caleb and Joshua were doing positive thinking, but it actually has nothing to do with that phrase coming from the modern self-help movement. The question before the Israelites and before every one of us is, will we trust the word and track record of the living God, or our lying eyes. Our eyes, or how we interpret the events in our lives and in the world, will always lie to us unless they are informed by faith, by trust in God’s goodness and love, His promises, power, and plans. The essence of sanctification, of becoming more holy and set apart to God is this struggle of either trusting God, or not. It’s binary as we say nowadays, either/or, we do or we do not. My constant prayer comes from Isaiah 26:3:

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.

If it ain’t perfect, we aren’t trusting God.

Expanding the Field of Trust: The Entire Earth is our Canaan
It is obvious the message from this story is that our lives should be reflected by Caleb and Joshua, the joyful warriors, not the ten who grumbled and complained about the impossible odds of taking the land God had promised. And unlike where I was most of my Christian life, I now believe this perspective, the victory which we are to expect because of God’s promises and commands, applies not only to our sanctification or personal holiness, but to everything in life as far as the curse is found. Isaac Watts wrote the great Christmas hymn Joy to the world in 1719 and paints the picture of the Christian’s field of trust. The first two stanzas he wrote let the earth receive her king and the Savior reigns. Here are the final two to get us in the Yuletide postmillennial mood:

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

He rules the world with truth and grace
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness
And wonders of His love
And wonders of His love
And wonders, wonders, of His love!

Even though I’ve been a culture warrior since I discovered Francis Schaeffer in the early years of my Christian faith, and believed all truth is God’s truth, and that a Christian worldview applies to every square inch of life, deep down I was a pessimist. In the land we are to conquer, the entire world, all I could see were the giants. I believed we didn’t really have a chance, and it’s all gonna burn in the end anyway.

That mentality, thankfully, was prior to my embracing postmillennialism in August 2022. I had a typically Evangelical perspective of the Israelites wanderings in the wilderness as a picture of the sanctification in the personal life of the Christian. Those 40 years were a wandering, as is ours in this wilderness of a fallen world, so we have a lifetime of mostly futility because even though we can grow in personal sanctification, Satan has the upper hand “down here,” or so I believed. After all, “our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3:20), a verse completely misinterpreted as meaning what really matters is heaven and the afterlife. Sadly, I bought the misinterpretation, which meant I was stuck in the wilderness until I die . . . .  then victory! That was the crossing of the Jordan river into the promised land, a figure of heaven. I no longer see it this way. Crossing the Jordan into the promised land was when the battle really began.

The tragic constricting of the gospel only to the Christian’s salvation and personal life only developed recently, in the mid-19th century with the rise of dispensational premillennialism. Those who developed it believed the world and the church were hopelessly corrupt, so they proclaimed the gospel should be preached and as many people as possible saved from the sinking ship because Jesus was coming back soon. In fact, dispensational premillennialism grew as a rejection of a secularized and liberal Christian view of postmillennialism that viewed it as the inevitable progress of science and knowledge. That position was completely discredited by the disastrous 20th century with only a few stalwarts willing to espouse and defend it.

Thankfully, that started changing in the last twenty years, and especially in the last ten. There has been a revival of postmillennialism, and I encourage you to join us. Once you buy the Scriptural argument, it’s a much more inspiring way to live because God in the reign of Christ is taking back the world from Satan one square inch at a time. As he promised the Israelites victory in the land of Canaan if only they would trust him and fight, so He’s promised this world to His Son, and we are his body to accomplish the task by the power of His Holy Spirit.

Read Psalm 2, Psalm 72, and Psalm 110 back to back, and ask yourself these questions . What if these truths apply not just to when Jesus returns to bring heaven to earth a la Revelation 21, but apply to his first coming when he accomplished his mission of God reconciling the world to Himself? Could it be that it is we, his Church, his people, who are to bring heaven to earth as he taught us to pray? That it is we who are to slay the giants and to cultivate the land, to be fruitful and multiply for generations to come, to subdue the earth and have dominion over it as Christ extends his reign, God advances His kingdom, and builds His church?

I’m just askin’.