Category Archives: Eschatology

Jesus, the Israel of God

Posted on by

I was going to write a post on Jesus as the Israel of God; on Jesus as the new humanity of God, who in fact is the Son of David, in all the scandalous particularity that ought evoke. But as I began to index the various passages I might use to make this case I thought it more organic to simply lay them out, with the emboldened sections intended to highlight how I might make the case for Jesus as Israel. He is not some transcendent extra, some Gnostic ethereal demiurge, some link between heaven and earth (as merely an instrument of God). He is the promised King of Israel; He is the One for the many; He is the fulfiller of all the promises of God (made to Israel); He is the substance of the shadows; He is the One upon whom all the governments of the world rest upon His shoulders; He is the sacrificial Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world; He is ethnic and spiritual Israel, indeed, that has always been of apiece; He is the new humanity of God for the world, first for Israel, then the Gentiles. But to be sure, He is the ontology (being) and teleology (point) of Israel; just as sure as He is the first fruits of God, the firstborn from the dead for all of creation. Maybe you will be able to see how I might proceed in making the above case from the following pericopes of Holy Scripture.

11 See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand. 12 Those who desire to make a good showing in the flesh try to compel you to be circumcised, simply so that they will not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. 13 For those who are circumcised do not even keep the Law themselves, but they desire to have you circumcised so that they may boast in your flesh. 14 But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. 15 For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. 16 And those who will walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God. –Galatians 6:11-16

11 Therefore remember that formerly you, the Gentiles in the flesh, who are called “Uncircumcision” by the so-called “Circumcision,” which is performed in the flesh by human hands— 12 remember that you were at that time separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14 For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, 15 by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, 16 and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity. 17 And He came and preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near; 18 for through Him we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father. 19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household, 20 having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone, 21 in whom the whole building, being fitted together, is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, 22 in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit. –Ephesians 2:11-22

16 Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh; even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him in this way no longer. 17 Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. 18 Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, 19 namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. II Corinthians 5:16-19

13 The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 And He found in the temple those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. 15 And He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables; 16 and to those who were selling the doves He said, “Take these things away; stop making My Father’s house a place of business.” 17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for Your house will consume me.” 18 The Jews then said to Him, “What sign do You show us as your authority for doing these things?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “It took forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?” 21 But He was speaking of the temple of His body. 22 So when He was raised from the dead, His disciples remembered that He said this; and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken. –John 2:13-22

22 I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. 23 And the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb. 24 The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. 25 In the daytime (for there will be no night there) its gates will never be closed; 26 and they will bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it; 27 and nothing unclean, and no one who practices abomination and lying, shall ever come into it, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life. –Revelation 21:22-27

39 You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me; 40 and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life. 41 I do not receive glory from men; 42 but I know you, that you do not have the love of God in yourselves. 43 I have come in My Father’s name, and you do not receive Me; if another comes in his own name, you will receive him. 44 How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and you do not seek the glory that is from the one and only God? 45 Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father; the one who accuses you is Moses, in whom you have set your hope. 46 For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me. 47 But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?” –John 5:39-47

9 Then he *said to me, “Write, ‘Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.’” And he *said to me, “These are true words of God.” 10 Then I fell at his feet to worship him. But he *said to me, “Do not do that; I am a fellow servant of yours and your brethren who hold the testimony of Jesus; worship God. For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” –Revelation 19:9-10

An Anthem: The Christian’s Immortality

Posted on by
As a Christian, as those in union with Jesus Christ, in union with the One who alone dwells in unapproachable Light and Immortality, we live an indestructible life; because our life is indestructible. Our energy is resurrection power of the immortal type; the type that rises from the dead, ascends, and comes again and again, and finally again. Nothing can stop us; death is no match for us; because Life came, assumed death, looked at it, mocked it to its face, and left it in the abyss of nothingness. The Christian is always on the verge of breaking into the eternal reality, never to suffer again. The Christian is unstoppable, because the Christ is first in us that we might be in Him. Let’s keep steaming ahead because one day very soon the heavens will be rolled back like a scroll, and the glory of the Almighty God in Jesus Christ will finally break through, once and for all, in consummate and consuming form. Don’t lose heart, Christian; Jesus is King. Maranatha

Full Preterism, Partial Preterism, Gary DeMar, and Various Heresies

Posted on by

If you’re on theological Twitter you will have noticed an uptick in discussion surrounding a doctrine known as preterism. Gary DeMar, a thought leader who has always been on the fringe of the fringe of Theonomic (or reconstructionist) Postmillennial theology has apparently ‘converted’ to a heresy known as full preterism (which the kids nowadays are calling: ‘hyper-preterism’). This has caused some stirrings in the minority report of theonomic Christianity, and thus I thought I would highlight it once more. I originally wrote the following post in September 2013; it details and defines the basic differences between full and partial preterism. I offer further reflection on my post, as you’ll see (this isn’t the first time I’ve reposted this one). When I originally posted the following I was still progressive dispensational, premillennial, pre-tribulational with reference to my biblical eschatology. As you will see I identify how I developed further beyond the writing of this original post. Let’s read:

Briefly, I will provide a quick survey of Preterism (Latin=praeter, meaning beyond or past), and its inherent hermeneutical/theological problem. There are two camps within this particular belief system, either full preterist or partial preterist.

A “full preterist” believes, in relationship to the second coming of Christ that in fact it has already happened. They believe that Christ already came, when Rome destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D. They see this judgment, as the fulfillment of the resurrection prophesied by Jesus. Note Kim Riddlebarger’s analysis here:

. . . full preterists teach that the resurrection—which, they say, is not bodily but spiritual—has already occurred. To teach, as full preterists do, that Christ has already returned and that the resurrection occurred in A.D. 70 at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem is heresy, according to the apostle Paul.[1]

As noted above, the full preterist position is heretical because it undercuts the blatant scriptural teaching that the general resurrection will be bodily not spiritual (cf. II Tim. 2:17-18). But there is a variant teaching, that does not cross the threshold of heresy, it is an adaptation of “full preterism” known as “partial preterism.”

Partial preterism, contrarily, does not believe that the “resurrection” or second coming happened at 70 A.D.; although they do believe that Christ did “judge” Jerusalem at the 70 A.D. date. They believe that this judgment signified the end of the “Jewish Age”, and concurrently inaugurated the “age to come.” Note Riddlebarger:

Partial preterists, however, do not believe that the second coming and the resurrection occurred in A.D. 70, although they do believe Jesus did come back in judgment on Israel (a parousia), to bring about the end of the Jewish age (this age) and to usher in the age to come. According to many partial preterists, this view resolves the tension found throughout the New Testament between those texts which teach that Jesus and his apostles expected our Lord to return within the lifetimes of the apostles then living and again at the end of time when Jesus will return to judge the world, raise the dead, and make all things new.[2]

The interpretive problem this poses is one of positing a position that presupposes two returns of Christ (one local and one universal). The scriptures nowhere teach a local/universal two time return of Christ—only one return (cf. Acts 1:10-11; Heb. 9:27-28). The preterist position (full or partial) is an untenable position to forward, at least in its relationship to the clearer teaching of scripture (analogia fidei).

__________________________________

As you can see at the end, I critique partial preterism as well, and I did so from my Dispy Premillennial perspective. I am willing to concede that there are some partial preterist elements going on especially as noted in the Olivet Discourse (cf. Mt. 24), and aspects of the book of Revelation (but I’d rather label what I hold as historist in a denotative way, and not in the connotative way that developed among the Calvinian Reformed and Lutherans who saw Roman Catholicism and the papacy as fulfilling the role of the Beast and the anti-Christ; I see the Roman Empire, in the context and historical situation of the book and theology of Revelation, as typifying the ‘kind’ of Beastly power that is characteristic of ages and peoples who are opposed to the purposes of God … I think even literarily this correlates well with a motif and theology of Babylon throughout scripture’s usage).

As far as Full Preterism, as I said, quite strongly, I see it as a full orbed heresy; why? Because it, by definition denies the bodily resurrection of all believers from all ages. According to scripture this transformation (Phil. 3.20-21) will happen when the last trumpet sounds, the dead in Christ will rise first, prior to those living at the time of Christ’s second coming (I Thess. 4 etc.); all of which will happen in a twinkling of an eye (I Cor. 15.) It contradicts the clear teaching of scripture and the angelical declaration that Christ will return in like manner; in like manner to his ascension, which was bodily. Acts 1.9-11 says,

9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. 10 They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. 11 “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”

This requires no argument, it is straightforward; Jesus will return just as he left, bodily, and visibly; not secretly or platonically spiritually. There are theological points associated with this, especially by the book of Revelation; but those points aren’t necessary to undercut the aberrant teaching that Jesus will not return bodily (of course how ‘bodily’ is understood for some varies; some hold to the ubiquity of Christ’s body, for example, but even this view must account for the particularity of Christ’s body as understood in context found in Acts 1) and a second time (as the epistle to the Hebrews also refers to more than once).

__________________________________

Okay I’m back to 03-19-2023 😉. I find full preterism, not to mention theonomy in the main, to be so fringe and abstract that I don’t think about it that much these days. But when it rears its head for the younger generation’s consumption I feel compelled to rise up and speak a few words as a counter-voice. Let me also say this in critique of partial preterism (which can be ‘orthodox’): the primary problem with a full-throated partial preterism is that it is supersessionist, or believes that the Church has supplanted or ‘replaced’ ethnic Israel as the people of God. Superessionism is just as heretical as full preterism insofar that it believes God’s physical and spiritual promises made to the nation of Israel have been abrogated (they’d say fulfilled) by the generation of the Church. But this is antiChrist. Jesus will always be the Jew, the Man from Nazareth, Son of David. Orthodox theology cannot affirm a supersessionism and remain orthodox vis-à-vis the prima facie teaching and witness of Holy Scripture. Jesus is God’s Israel, as such the nation of Israel isn’t superseded by God’s economy in Christ, but brought to fruition. We might say the ‘purpose,’ the mediation of the nation of Israel was made whole, that it was expanded to include the promises made to Abraham (see Rom 4), and the patriarchs: i.e., that he and they would be the father[s] of many nations (see Gen 12; Jer 31; Ez 36 etc.). Again, remembering that Jesus will always be the Jew from Nazareth (the scandal of particularity is the scandal of the incarnation of God and the cross, both for the Jew and Greek).

With all of the above noted: Gary DeMar and his followers need to repent of affirming the heresy of full preterism. Full-throated partial preterists need to repent of supersessionism. And we must all affirm as catholic Christians:

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to hell.
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended to heaven
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic [universal] church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.

 

[1] Kim Riddlebarger, A Case For Amillennialism: Understanding The End Times, 239.

[2] Ibid., 239-40.

Jesus and Bobby on Christian Universalism

Posted on by

I just came across a Tweet from some random person that stated (my paraphrase): “I no longer believe in an eternal unending hell.” He said: “I understand why some still do, but why do so many who do act is if they are excited about it; as if it’s a sign that they were right, and those who rejected Christ were wrong and now will pay for it in an eternity of unending, hopeless torment?”

So, of course, we are referring now to Christian universalism (CU). CU has been growing some serious legs over the last two decades, and even more so over the last five years or so. I am not a Christian universalist. I believe Jesus taught the traditional view of an eternal conscious hell; so does the Evangelical Universalist:

[G]ehenna was a place of punishment and fire but beyond that was generally left unexplained. When we find Jesus drawing on the idea of Gehenna, we must remember that it was not a clearly worked out concept. Beyond its being a place of fiery punishment for the wicked, the details, if anyone wanted to fill them in, were up for grabs. That said, I think that it is quite clear that Jesus’ contemporaries would not have thought the he was a universalist of any variety. To the traditionalist this settles the case, but I think that there is more to be said. I want to argue, first of all, that none of Jesus’ recorded teachings about Gehenna explicitly affirm the notion that it was everlasting; and nothing Jesus is recorded to have said rules out the possibility that some or all of its inhabitants may at some point come to salvation. I am not trying to show that Jesus taught universalism nor that he taught that those in Gehenna could or would be saved, for he did neither. My aim is the much more modest one of showing that what he did teach does not formally contradict universalist claims. This, of course, does not provide any reason to suppose that a universalist interpretation of Gehenna is biblical without substantive additional reasons for embracing such an interpretation. My second task is to show that we do have such reasons. [Gregory MacDonald (aka Robin Parry), The Evangelical Universalist (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2006), 144-45]

That said, I do not glory in the notion of an eternal conscious hell for those who reject Christ; indeed, I detest it! But I am not God, and thus do not fully understand His ways or thoughts. I trust that God is fair, just, gracious, merciful, and most of all loving. As such, I hold out the hope that even post-mortem it might be possible for people to still say yes to Christ, even while in the confines of hell. I don’t think Scripture, or even Jesus taught this, but I also don’t think it would contradict who God is, by way of character, and thus as God is a God of hope, I maintain hope that this seeming impossibility might have a chance to become possible yet future for those who leave this life without being “in Christ” spiritually. Further, I still think Barth’s and Torrance’s objection to CU is the best way to think this: God is free, we are not, except as we participate in His freedom. In my mind, following Barth and Torrance, to dogmatically assert that CU just is true ends up violating and/or foreclosing on God’s freedom to make that ultimate decision by imposing our limited decision upon His.

Some would want to say that I am a hopeful Christian universalist. I would say that I am a hopeful hopeful Christian universalist in the sense that I have hope that God is always already the God of Hope, and in this I repose. I am unwilling to be dogmatic about this because Jesus wasn’t, and in fact seemingly teaches the traditional view of His day in regard to an eternal notion of hell. I understand that there are number of “universalistic” texts that can be marshalled by the CU. But on the contrary, there are just as many particularist passages of Scripture that counterweigh the universalistic texts. Again, I repose in God’s freedom, and the reality that He is indeed the God of Hope.

A More Responsible Way to Think About Biblical Eschatology: Engaging with Karl Heim Through TF Torrance

Posted on by

The following is a repost from September 25, 2018. It is this kind of thinking that moved me from a premillennial understanding of the last times, to an amillennial perspective (although I still retain the right to a historic premillennial perspective depending on the moment). The following post sounds like I have no interest or time for paying attention to geo-political and theopolitical trends as those might or might not pertain to God’s inbreaking into the world in an end times type of way. I am a futurist, I think you have to be because Jesus was; because the Old Testament prophets were; because Yahweh in the Old Testament is etc. I do think there is an end that we are moving towards in a linear, albeit apocalyptic, type of way; in other words, I am not an idealist (like I noted, I am a futurist, in historicist types of ways). See read the following with that in mind. The material in this post simply has to do with the way that the eschatological, as that is relative to the analogy of the incarnation, has to do with the way that time and eternity come together in consummate form; first in the Godman, and then as that applies to all of the creation (and the re-creation of all things). If you’re interested in understanding my biblical eschatology you can read the following post. 

In North American evangelical circles when you hear the word eschatology your mind typically races to The Late Great Planet Earth or the Left Behind series. Or, if you’re old enough, you might even think about all the artistic charts providing a linear timeline for biblical prophecy and eschatological events. But when we engage with this word from a more historical and Christian Dogmatic frame of reference, indeed, if we engage with this word and its conceptual matter from the New Testament itself (by engaging with its inner theo-logic) a different sense emerges. The ‘end’ is certainly in view, but the way that transposes with the now supplies us with a very different frame for thinking things eschatological. Clearly, for the Christian our hope is that Jesus Christ will return bodily (just as he ascended Acts 1.8), and usher in the new creation in consummate form unending; this is indeed the eschatological hope. What this ought to do for us though, in a broader less idiosyncratic frame, is cause us to ponder the relationship between time and eternity; and maybe wonder what the latter has to do with the former.

This is sort of pondering actually didn’t happen in earnest until the modern period; or at least the modern developments re-ignited a focus on the biblical understanding of the eschaton that was certainly present in the Patristic period. But what happened in the modern period under the pioneering work of someone like Albert Schweitzer and his Jesus Quest was to recognize just how central eschatological thinking was to the whole of the New Testament. It was in fact the rise of historic-critical tools that developed as a result of Enlightenment forces, that caused this focused engagement with the text of the New Testament that made its critics, Schweitzer among them, recognize the lacuna of previous scholarship in understanding just how central the eschatological was to the New Testament project. While Schweitzer was unable to follow through with his identification of the eschatological as the inner reality of the New Testament witness, vis-à-vis the apocalyptic, it was his work along with some others that brought the need to re-examine the New Testament witness in the light of eschatological reality.

Thomas Torrance offers some important delineation of the impact of this re-focused emphasis on eschatology as he surveys the work of theologians following this sort of New Testament studies revolution. He first identifies the early Barth and his commentary on Romans as taking Schweitzer’s insights to their theological conclusion; taking Schweitzer where Schweitzer himself failed to go. TFT then notes how Barth later corrected some of his early thinking as he matured into the Barth of the Church Dogmatics. But I don’t want to focus on TF’s survey on Barth; instead I want to highlight his sketch of Karl Heim’s work. I find the analogy that emerges in Heim’s thinking to be quite compelling in regard to the way we might think of time’s relationship to eternity in a christological frame. Torrance writes (once again at length):

Even more significant that the work of Althaus, however, has been the work of Karl Heim. On the one hand, his significance lies in the fact that he stands in a closer relation to the biblical message, working out an eschatology in terms of justification and forgiveness, and bringing into history the acute tension manifest in the death of Christ in the contradiction between the powers of evil and the holy love of God. On the other hand, Heim’s significance lies in his efforts to break with the idealist conception of time that has for so long done violence to our understanding of the biblical message. For help in his interpretation, Heim turns partly to Bergson and partly to the changes in modern notions of time due to the new physics, and certainly he manages to introduce into his views something of a Heraclitean tension.

Critics argue that this is only to understand primitive mythology in terms of modern mythology, but although it is not always easy to understand or agree with Heim’s notions of time, particularly when they are influenced by transient scientific theories, he has done us great service both in thinking eschatology and soteriology into each other, and in overthrowing what he calls a static (stabil) view of time in favour of a dynamic (labil) view as the time-form of the Ego. The latter means that he works out a view of eschatology in close association with the life of the church, for our Christian view of time must inevitably be bound up with God’s action in history through the church as the place where eternity is so to speak within time. Eternity does not stand forth only at the end of time but is the frontier of time all along the line. It is the other side of time and beyond time, the final reality that bears upon time. That reality is supremely manifest in the incarnation, and through the death of Christ and through the church in her proclamation of the gospel, it gets to grip with time in the matter of guilt. Thus history, particularly history in relation to the church, is read in terms of the contradiction of sinners against the man of Calvary, and the whole panorama of time has its meaning unfolded there in terms of a dynamic tension so acute that every time is seen to be the last time. Heim does not think in terms of alternatives such as realised eschatology or a future coming of the kingdom at the end of time, but in terms of both.

It is characteristic of Heim that he speaks of these difficult matters again and again through illustrations. Thus he likens the church of the New Testament to a vast iron bridge which spans the torrent of time with a single arch supported by only two pillars, the cross of Christ which stands on this side of time and the coming of Christ in power which stands on the other side of time. The church of Christ in history is maintained from age to age by these two supports and its very being is bound up with the essential unity of these two events, the perfected event of the death and resurrection of Christ and the future event of the parousia. It is because the very being of the church is proleptically conditioned by a new creation to be revealed at the parousia, the return of Christ, that she lives in dynamic tension here and now at the very frontiers of eternity.

This tension is through the tension that lies at the heart of justification, the relation that exists in the conflict between guilt and the power of evil (in which Heim sees behind the outward façade of world history the embattled array of Satanic forces) and the redeeming purpose of God. It is because that struggle was supremely concentrated in the cross, and because Jesus Christ emerged there as absolute victor over all evil that God confronts time through Jesus Christ by whom at last the world will be judged and all history brought to its great consummation. But because it is through Jesus Christ that God confronts the world in its history, history will inevitably repeat on the full scale of humanity the conflict of the cross, but it will be a conflict or cataclysm in which Jesus Christ will emerge triumphant with his new creation of heaven and earth. Because we are concerned through all of this with a dynamic or fluid (labil) view of time we cannot think of the consummation by a lengthening of time but in terms only of God’s moment fulfilling and ending our time. Hence we cannot say in what day or hour the parousia will take place. All we know is that we are confronted now through the gospel with God’s will and with eternity as though this were the last time.[1]

The illustration Torrance shares from Heim is instructive in regard to the hangars of time; hangars that pivot on the first and second advents of Jesus Christ. Biblical eschatology in this approach starts with the res (reality) of Scripture, with Jesus Christ; as if there is a cosmic battle taking place, but one that has been won by the risen Christ. The way the eschaton conditions time and our daily nows is through the proclamation of the Gospel by the witness of the church. It is the reality of new creation known by faith, and given power by the resurrection that the church serves as the witness to the mediator between time and eternity in the hypostatic union of God and man in Jesus Christ. There is a great conflagration inhering in the Christian’s life, of an eschatological vector, as the Christian lives in and from the Omega of God’s eternal life as that implicates the Alpha made present in our daily lives in this mundane world as the Christ’s church.

What we see presented in Heim’s thought, according to Torrance, is a better and more biblical-theological way to think about eschatology. The Bible does not lay out a line of biblical prophetic events that must take place in a domino sort of fashion; it does not give us a code waiting to be decoding by the newspapers, per se. Instead, a biblically rich understanding of the eschatological is to think it in the sort of terms that Heim does; to think it in and from the terms laid out by the incarnation of God, and the obedience of that reality in Jesus Christ as he made a public spectacle of the devil and his demons at the cross. The church, as she bears witness to this powerful reality, in union with Christ by the Spirit, is involved in living the eschatological life that is God’s life in confrontation and destruction of the principalities and powers at work in this ‘world system.’ This is what the eschatological entails; not charts.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, edited by Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2008), 312-14.

The No-Death of the Kingdom of Heaven

Posted on by

Death is so anti-climactic relative to the world at large. You can live 80 good years on this earth, and then simply die. Those you leave behind will grieve and mourn the absence, but the world at large keeps going as if nothing happened. And yet in the Kingdom of Heaven every death is charged full with God’s death for the world in Jesus Christ. There is no more death, in fact, in the Kingdom. In the Kingdom what was once death, in the fallen world, was put to death in the death of Christ. As a result, there is only life, that is for those spiritually (not just carnally) in Christ. This world might continue on in its character of spiritual blindness (and deadness), but in the Kingdom what appears as death to the naked eye, that is for those spiritually in Christ, is not death at all; it is consummation, it is glorification (currently in an intermediate status). Jesus said (and demonstrated) that He is ‘the resurrection and life,’ and thus ‘though you die, yet shall you live.’ Death in the Kingdom is the most climactic event currently unfolding in this in-between; for it is really only a transition into the resurrected life that stands behind, above, and in this world by the Spirit. It is the realization of what we once only saw by the faith of Christ.

The world at large only goes on phenomenologically, to those who live by sight. For those of us who see and hear with the faith of Christ we know that the world at large is circumscribed by the re-creation and resurrection of Jesus Christ (cf. Rom. 8:18ff). We know that the resurrected humanity of Christ is the ground of all reality in the Kingdom. We know that the new creation, that the new time, is first and foremost in the One who is the firstborn from the dead; the One who is the firstfruits of God for the world. In the Kingdom there is no world at large, as if some generic habitat that abstract souls construct meaning for themselves within. The Kingdom is the new world, the new creation, and its King and reality sits at the Right Hand of the Father. Yes, death remains an enemy, but a vanquished one. It has been triumphed over, made a public spectacle of at the cross of Jesus Christ. Death now stings, but it loses its sting when we can walk in step with the Spirit and see the beauty of God’s Kingdom come and coming in the face of Jesus Christ. We can repose in the reality that death has no reality in the Kingdom, and as sons and daughters of the Kingdom, as co-heirs with Jesus Christ we can stand boldly before the throne of grace, which is the ground and reality of Kingdom reality, and stand victorious before the fear and dread the world at large lives with in the face of last enemy.

We are here, then, as ambassadors, as emissaries of the Kingdom life. We are not of this world, but of the Kingdom. The Kingdom is not of this world, but stands on architecture that God alone has constructed from the dust of Christ’s glorified humanity. While, as ambassadors, we might experience the travail and tempest of this far country we’ve come to inhabit as harbingers of the Kingdom, but at the same time we understand that we are simply here for the other. We understand, as Christ did first, that there is a joy set before us that allows us to endure whatever crosses and deaths we might experience here and now. We recognize, as emissaries of the risen Christ, the King of the Kingdom, that there is no death at the gates of Heaven. We experience loss and grief, but not as those without hope.

On a Personal Eschatology

Posted on by

Personal eschatology isn’t a term you hear used every day, but it is, indeed, terminology used, technically, in eschatology classes, at least in conservative circles, whether that be in bible colleges or seminaries, rather frequently. For my ecclesiology/eschatology class, in undergrad, this was the first time I heard such terminology. Personal eschatology, if you hadn’t guessed it, or if you’re unaware, has to do with a person’s death, and the subsequent translation into the heavenly abode (on the positive side). Often, and mostly, when people in the churches refer to eschatology they generally have collective eschatology in mind; rarely, in such discussions, is personal eschatology on their mind. And yet personal eschatology is the most predominant form of eschatology currently being realized, at least in the transmigratory sense.

Being brought into the presence of the Lord, realizing ones’ mortality, only to be swallowed up by immortality (or mortality realized), is a second-by-second global reality. According to the World Death Clock, 1.8 persons are dying every second worldwide; 56,000,000 persons die every year. Far from the suspended middle, or agnostic waywardness people live their lives from on a daily basis, in regard to the things of God in particular, the realization of God’s reality is being realized en masse, by millions upon millions of people on an annual and second-by-second basis.

Personally, as I reflect on these things, it is rather mind-boggling. The scale of the Kingdom of God in Christ is massive, and this is only with reference to the ‘very good’ of humanity. There are, of course, unseen, ineffable, inarticulable, inexpressible realities regarding the bigness of God, as that finds co-inherence in the perichoretic relations of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the world, the eternal life, the Christian is being translated into second-by-second all across the globe.

Inversely, those who leave this world outside of Jesus Christ, that is as subjectively and personally experienced through saving faith in Him, is equally ineffable. People, en masse, are exiting this life only to be confronted with the fact that life as they knew it really wasn’t life after all; that is, if they attempted to live lives now as an existential construction of their own making and assertion. Unfortunately, as Jesus taught, this is the broadway, this is the side of ‘personal eschatology’ that most people in the world are experiencing on an ongoing basis. There is this type of ‘transfer’ from this life to the next, even as the next, one way or the other, impinges on this life, that is the ongoing reality whether we consciously think about it or not. As I write this, country and western star, Naomi Judd just died today. She, with so many others, one way or the other, were finally confronted with the reality of God as God. She, and they, finally can no longer escape the fact that they are not God (and I have no idea what Judd’s standing before the Lord was). For the Christian, we relish the fact that God is God; for the non-Christian, they, by definition, relish the thought that they are God of their own self-imagined/constructed universes—universes based on their ‘word’ rather than God’s Logos. But this, again, is where personal eschatology terminates: all of us, one way or the other, will have this personal moment in time that finally gives way to the eternal reality of time, as time is surely conditioned and given its context by the eternality of the triune God.

I simply wanted to register some thoughts on this typically unspoken theology of personal eschatology. It is the most vernacular of theology that the person is faced with on a day-to-day basis; viz. our own mortality vis-à-vis God’s ineffable immortality, as we come to stand before Him.

The Ethics of the Resurrection: Applied to Transgenderism

Posted on by

I was contemplating the absurdity of the man who claims to be a woman, who then puts on a swimsuit, enters a woman’s swim-meet, wins the contest, and then is declared the fastest swimmer among some of the top-tier women swimmers in the world. As I contemplated this, I tweeted the following: “You can identify as a bird all you want, but the second you step off the Golden Gate Bridge physics take over.” I elaborated further on Twitter, this way:

And just to be clear, physics isn’t the judge, God is the Judge. When people rebel, and physics, physiology, psychology, presses back against their rebellion, it isn’t those components that have an inherency of their own; they simply reflect God’s recreative order. People aren’t simply being “metaphysical rebels,” they are acting out according to their sin nature; the nature that self-possessively and viciously maintains that it is God, and that the real God is not. When they rebel, they are loving themselves, and not God. And it is this self-love, incurved upon itself, that leads to the various aberrations and disaffected expressions we see all around us. According to the logic of self-Godhood, even when something clearly bespeaks aberration, new logics must be constructed in order to persuade the self and others that in fact their personal expression of sin is no aberration at all; that it is in keeping with the kingdom they have constructed as “self-God.” The problem arises because these self-declared self-Gods inhabit the only genuine and living God’s creation, and recreation in Jesus Christ. As such, we end up in a diabolical spiritual battle wherein all of humanity is born believing itself to be God, while all along being confronted with the fact that they live in a universe that inherently declares the very opposite by the wisdom of the cross. The wisdom of the cross, and/or the staurologic therein, is the ground of the new creation that finally attests that the old has gone the new has come. It declares that God is God, and we are not. It isn’t until the person ‘repents’, bows the knee to the wisdom of God in Christ, that the Son finally sets them free indeed. But to the logics of the world the freedom of the Son looks like bondage because it contradicts the very essence of what the world takes to be the way, the truth, and the life; that they are God, and God is not.

I want to be clear that creation itself has no built-in or abstract value-center of its own; that’s why I refer to staurologic or the wisdom of the cross. The original creation, I take it (protologically), to be created so that Christ might be born (see David Fergusson). In other words, the created order is eschatologically conditioned by God’s free choice to be for the world, in the world, in Jesus Christ; i.e. He is the telos of creation. As such, when He comes into this world order in ‘Bethlehemic flesh,’ it serves as an irruption, of the sort wherein this world finally comes to understand its actual orientation. So, the new creation that God accomplishes in Jesus Christ was always already the reality of this world’s trajectory to begin with; sin, in this sense then, becomes an aberration that only God, extra nos (outside of us), could invade, take to Himself, enter it from the inside/out, and put it to death. It is as this ‘seed’ fell into the ground, died, that new life could come to blossom, such that the old becomes the new, but under the pressures of a totally elevated and/or actualized sort. In other words, what I am attempting to articulate, is that the point of continuity between the old and the new isn’t an inherency that the “original creation” had potent within itself. The point of continuity between the old and the new is God’s choice, before creation, to be for the world and to create the world for Christ; but not without us, but with us. He is the order of this world, the new has left the old behind, but the old bore witness to the coming of the new insofar that the new was in fact the origination of the old to begin with; that is in God’s free election to be God of the humanity of Jesus Christ.

Hence, the aforementioned entails that what it means to be human was already actualized prior to creation in God’s choice to be human for us in the ‘to be’ enfleshment of the Son (Deus incarnandus). Since His humanity is the ground of the created order, even as that is given subjective-distinction in the particularity of ‘our humanity’ as ‘images of the Image,’ this entails that creation itself is not free to be free in abstraction from its root and reality in the vicarious and archetypal humanity of Jesus Christ. As such, judgments about what is right and wrong are not left to self-proclaimed human agents, as if this was an obtainability inherent to simply being created. Human agents, as has been observed, are not free unless they are living in and from what it means to be humanly free coram Deo (before God). It is only in this freedom, since anything outwith is bondage, wherein right and wrong before God comes to be known, internalized, and with the possibility of creational reversal and transformation through the re-creation of creation’s telos and esse in the resurrection of humanity in the eternal Logos’ Self-assumed humanity in the man from Nazareth.

It is from this continuously irruptive reality that a human agent comes to understand the order of the Kingdom, as that has always already had a cruciform shape. It is in this mode and posture before God in Christ whereby creatures, as participants in God’s life through the grace of God’s humanity in Jesus Christ, come to have the capaciousness to discern the straight from the crooked. This vicious desire to be self-God becomes non-directive for the creature attempting to live against their ‘election’ to be genuinely human in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, and thus they come to have the lights to live from the Light of God. There is an experience of freedom that invades their lives with the result that the new life of the new creation explodes upon them such that God’s order becomes the only order for them that appears safe and secure. Living outwith this order becomes as distant as the old is to the new; as Barth says: “What took place on the cross of Golgotha is the last word of an old history and the first word of a new.” This ‘first word’ becomes the norming norm for the new-creatures’ life, and, for example, being born a biological male, rather than female, or vice versa, is lived into as the order and telos that God recreated as the eschatological bliss He saw fit for the world to begin with; just as the bride to the groom symmetry bears witness to the beauty of God’s design in Christ to His Church.

A Reflection on Hebrews 10:26 and the Futility of Fighting for this World Order

Posted on by

26 For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, 27 but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. 28 Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. 29 How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? 30 For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” 31 It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. —Hebrews 10:26-31

I want to focus on the emboldened clause in verse 26. It seems lost on people, Christian people even, that the One who spoke the world into existence, the One who continues to hold the visible and invisible worlds together by His power, this One became human that we might by the grace of adoption become sons and daughters of the living God; just as Jesus Christ is our brother. I enter this brief excursus with the aforementioned attempt to orient our perspectives because everything, all of reality hangs on that reality. The incarnation and atonement, the death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ has become too domesticated. The sui generis otherworldly / thisworldly nature of the Theanthropos, Godman breaking into this world has become all too common. Because of this people generally fail to grasp the significance of the clause under consideration.

What people, in the main, fail to appreciate is that God become human in Jesus Christ, all the way unto the obedience and death of the cross, means that there no longer is a normal world to which we can return. The world has genuinely and apocalyptically been put to death, and anyone attempting to find their identity therein, and therefrom, are only attempting to breathe life into a corpse incapable of resurrection. ‘There no longer remains a sacrifice for sins’ entails that there was only One person, God in Christ, who had the resource and power to penetrate into the dark abyss of the fallen human heart, put it to literal death, and from that start afresh anew and re-create a new heavens and earth, under the foot and dominion of the Son of Man, and all those co-heirs with Him. In other words, this sort of pining away for a recuperation of the world that Christ has already declared dead, and put to death, by His death of all deaths, is the satanic errand that even the Egyptian high priests knew was the fool’s errand; they knew, and so should we, that only the ‘finger of God’ can bring new life ex nihilo. 

Robert Dale Dawson sums up what I am after as he comments on a doctrine of the resurrection in the theology of Karl Barth: “The event of the resurrection of Jesus is that of the creation of the conditions of the possibility for all other events, and as such it cannot be accounted for in terms considered appropriate for all other events. This is not the expression of an historical skeptic, but of one who is convinced of the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God.”1 I take this notional reality in Barth’s theology of the resurrection as the ground for allowing the author to the Hebrews to make the astonishing claim that ‘there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins,’ if and fact a person rejects God’s Self-sacrifice for them, for the world, in Jesus Christ. In short, for the Christian, there is no other world to return to, but the Kingdom of God that has been established outwith human hands; the Kingdom, the new creation that has been established and re-created by God alone. It is high time that Christians demythologize the notion that in this world we have a home; we surely, and clearly do not. We are ambassadors of the fact that this world in fact is no more, and that the only world that has concrete perduring reality to it is the one that has come in the dust and blood of Jesus’ body.

1 Robert Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (UK/USA: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 13

A Constructive Proposal for a Biblically Formed Understanding of the ‘End Times’

Posted on by

The following is a post I wrote some months ago in response to my wife’s request for a summation of how I think about biblical ‘end times.’ I still stand by most of this, and thought I’d share it here. It seems timely and apropos.

This post is per my wife’s request. We both grew up as your typical Conservative Baptist, dispensational, premillennial, pretribulational Christians. I have already shared my “testimony” out of the dispensational/premil part of that, more than once; so, we won’t revisit that now. I persuaded my wife, about ten years ago, to the amillennial position; and it has stuck. We are both committed to that position, but I have done more work on thinking a way out of the dispy past. And so, my wife would like an eschatological ‘timeline’ per an amil understanding (a very dispy way to think). So, for the remainder of this post that’s what I will attempt to do.

The amillennial timeline is quite straightforward, actually. In fact, this is one of its compelling features; i.e. I think it fits well with the spirit of what we find in Peter’s second epistle when he writes:

10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up. 11 Therefore, since all these things will be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, 12 looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire, and the elements will melt with fervent heat? 13 Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. –II Peter 3:10-13

Peter’s timeline seems to suggest that the next event we should expect biblically-eschatologically is the second coming of Christ, at which time ‘all things will be dissolved,’ and the new heavens and earth will be realized. If we are looking for the simplest explanation (Occam’s Razor) about a timeline of such things, Peter’s seems to be the most compelling. In the interim, between the first and second advents of Christ, the amillennialist maintains that what Revelation 20 refers to—the “1000 years”—is figurative for that in-between time. There is an exegetical case for that, but we won’t attempt to make that here. Suffice it to say, what Revelation does refer to, as Richard Bauckham so persuasively argues, is the book itself should actually be understood as a circuit letter (epistle) to the seven churches. If so, it makes sense to think that all of its referents, while prophetic, have a local context in mind per the original reader’s milieu. Bauckham, in sum, shows how almost all of the prophecies in Revelation (barring chapters 19—22) make the most sense when in reference to the Neronic Roman Empire, and all of its attendant characteristics. While those prophecies have a nearer to the original audience fulfillment, what remains prophetic for us, is that the power of the Beast, and the AntiChrist, are typified by every other subsequent world empires that feature the same sort of attributes that we find shaping the Graeco-Roman empire. So, a power that seeks to enrich itself, at all costs, by military might, built upon the backs of slave labor and its necessary means: human trafficking.

Having noted the above, I still think there can be multiple referents in mind in regard to the book of Revelation. So, while there were literal fulfillments nearer to the original audience, those prophecies could also have a yet future fulfillment. In other words, I am not against the idea that a literal figure known as the AntiChrist (although not by a flashing sign hanging around his neck) could emerge and bring in world-peace, and a Utopian like actualization that meets all of the aspirations that people have to live a healthy and wealthy life. In fact, it seems almost likely that something like that could be upon the globe even now; but who knows, at the moment. I just know that at the first coming of Christ most people missed it. There was no perfectly charted timeline, but there were ‘signs’ that those with eyes to see and ears to hear could identify in relationship to the Messiah’s first coming; the New Testament identifies the few who had that type of insight.

As far as the so-called Great Tribulation (cf. Mt 24) I think, more than likely, we have been in that period ever since Christ ascended (see Keener’s thoughts below). I do believe, along with other amillennialists, that parts of what Jesus refers to in the Olivet Discourse were fulfilled at the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. That said, I don’t necessarily take the so-called partial-preterist position, per se. Just that the Great Tribulation that the ‘world had never seen’ was fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. That said, I am still open to even this having a yet future fulfillment. In other words, just as I noted in regard to the book of Revelation, and its referents, I think it is possible that we could have a climaxing Great Tribulation just prior to the second coming of Jesus Christ. This time period, I would take it, won’t have a flashing sign saying: this is it! Just like the AntiChrist (whether that be a single messenger, or a federation of leaders with a figurehead who has the prominent speaking position), he or they won’t have a blinky light overhead; this will all be just as organic as the first coming of Christ. That said, as the Apostle Paul notes in I Thessalonians 5:

But concerning the times and the seasons, brethren, you have no need that I should write to you. 2 For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so comes as a thief in the night. 3 For when they say, “Peace and safety!” then sudden destruction comes upon them, as labor pains upon a pregnant woman. And they shall not escape. 4 But you, brethren, are not in darkness, so that this Day should overtake you as a thief. 5 You are all sons of light and sons of the day. We are not of the night nor of darkness. 6 Therefore let us not sleep, as others do, but let us watch and be sober. –I Thessalonians 5:1-6

Verse 4 drives home the point that, like at the first coming, those with eyes to see and ears to hear (or in the light) shouldn’t be surprised at the coming of Christ. In other words, the Apostle Paul believes that there will be certain characteristics present that the Christian ought to be able to identify; to the point that we should be able to have a general knowledge about the timing of Christ’s second coming. We see Paul, in context, refer to the ‘labor pains’ analogy that Jesus Himself refers to in His teaching on the same topic. The defining feature that Paul tells the Christian to look for is a world that is characterized by the sensation of ‘peace and safety.’ This does seem to correlate to the idea that the AntiChrist, or in the Thessalonian context, the ‘Man of Lawlessness,’ will usher in a time of pseudo-peace wherein the globe believes something magnificent and even miraculous has happened.

Getting back to the Great Tribulation category, let me refer us to Craig Keener’s helpful index for attempting to think about how the Great Tribulation, and all the events referred to in Matthew 24 might play out. You’ll notice that the way I described the Tribulation above fits into the sweep of what Keener describes. And out of the options that Keener describes, I am in full agreement with his personal take:

In Matthew, the tribulation seems to begin with the sanctuary’s destruction in A.D. 66 and concludes with Jesus’ return (24:29). If, as I think most likely, Matthew writes some years after 70, this allows several interpretive options: in Matthew 24 Jesus (1) skips from this tribulation to the next eschatologically significant event, his return (Fuller 1966;  cf. Lk. 21:24; especially compare Mt 24:21, “nor ever shall,” with Dan 12:1; cf. Jos. War pref. 1); (2) regards the whole interim between the Temple’s demise and his return as an extended tribulation period (“immediately” — 24:29; e.g., Carson 1984b: 507); (3) prophetically blends the tribulation of 66-70 with the final one, which it prefigures (see Bock 1994: 332-33); (4) begins the tribulation in 66 but postpones the rest of it until the end time; (5) intends his “return” in 24:29-31 symbolically for the fall of Jerusalem.[1]

Further:

I currently favor (1) or (2) with elements of (3). (Against the view of a “spiritual” coming are the many emphatic statements  about a personal, visible coming in the context — 24:27; Gundry 1982: 491). The third option may in fact deserve more attention than my current inclination has given it: certainly the prophetic perspective naturally viewed nearer historical events as precursors of the final events. Early Jewish texts also telescope the generations of history with the final generation (Jub. 23:11-32). As in Mark, the tribulation of 66-70 remains somehow connected with the future parousia (Hare 1967: 179), if only as a final prerequisite. Further, the context may suggest that Jesus employs his description eschatologically, as in some Jewish end-time texts; in this case, the disasters of 66-73 could not have exhausted the point of his words (cf. Harrington 1982: 96). In any case, the view (circulated mainly in current popular circles) that Matthew 24 addresses only a tribulation that even readers after 70 assumed to be wholly future is not tenable; Matthew understands that “all these things” (probably referring to the question about the temple’s demise — 24:2; Mk 13:4) will happen within a generation (Mt 24:34), language throughout Jesus’ teachings in Matthew refers to the generation then living (e.g., 11:16; 12:39, 45; 16:4; 23:36; cf. 27:25). Further, Luke dispenses with much of the symbolism and lays the emphasis almost entirely on the Roman conquest of Jerusalem, in which Judean slaves were carried among the nations. For Luke, the “abomination” that brings about desolation becomes simply the Roman armies surrounding Jerusalem, promising desolation (Lk 21:20; A. B. Bruce 1979: 292; Cole 1961: 202).[2]

Summary

Let me attempt a timeline based on all that I have hashed out above: I believe the next event the Christian should be ready for is the second coming of Jesus Christ. I think that Great Tribulation has been upon the world ever since the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD; just ask most of the third and developing worlds about that. But I also believe that the Tribulation has been intensifying, like ‘labor pains,’ and at the very end there will be a climaxing intensification of that which will be the final iteration of the Great Tribulation Jesus referred to so long ago on the Temple Mount. In the midst of this there will be an emerging federation (the Beast), potentially with a Messianic-like figurehead, who, with the power of overwhelming military might, and the technological enrichment that entails, among other “riches,” will provide a peace the world has longed for since Adam and Eve’s fall in the Garden. In the midst of this ‘false’ sense of peace, Jesus will return. This federation, like the original “Babel”-lonyians, would like to think that they have finally reached the heavens and become God Himself. They will be deluded to believe (cf. Rev 20:7-10)[3] the “battle” has finally been won, but just in that moment, Jesus will return, and destroy all those with the ‘mark of the Beast’[4] (i.e. people without the ‘mark of the Lamb’) by the Sword of His mouth (cf. Rev. 19). At this moment, the Great White Throne judgment will occur; the new heavens and earth will come into full consummation; and we will be with Christ forevermore.

Personally, I think it is possible that what the world is currently experiencing, with all of the strange chaos and tumult, could be the time I just described. But we won’t know that, not really, till after the fact. That said, I think with the Apostle Paul, that we ought to imagine, as sons and daughters of the Light, that we might have the capacity to sense just when the second coming of Christ is upon us; such that that day does NOT take us as a ‘thief.’ If a global peace somehow comes out of the current global chaos we are experiencing; if a global federation, and maybe a particularly charismatic figurehead rises up out of that; I think it highly likely that Jesus’ second coming is just upon us at that point. Then again, it just might happen this very moment. We ought to WATCH!

[1] Craig S. Keener, A Commentary On The Gospel Of Matthew, 577-78.

[2] Ibid.

[3] “7 Now when the thousand years have expired, Satan will be released from his prison 8 and will go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle, whose number is as the sand of the sea. 9 They went up on the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city. And fire came down from God out of heaven and devoured them. 10 The devil, who deceived them, was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are. And they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.”

[4] I take the ‘Mark of the Beast’ to be in reference to those who were born in their sin, born into the kingdom of darkness, and never freely chose to take the ‘Mark of the Lamb’ (i.e. they never repented and came to Christ, being sealed with the Holy Spirit).