Welcome, welcome, friends, to The Line of Fire where we are studying the end times, the second coming Bible prophecy all this month. This is Michael Brown here to infuse you with faith and truth and courage to help you stand strong on the front lines. We love to pour into you every way we can, including our monthly frontline newsletter full of inspiration, full of information from a Hebrew word study every month to an article that will stir your heart to tell you the truth.
Today we are going to get into a lot of terminology and I don't want it to scare you off. Some of you love it, you love theology, you love terminology, you love the big words and some of you are just like, hey, I love Jesus, I love the word, I love my neighbor, isn't that enough? What I want to do is make sure you're familiar with terms and as we lay out different views about the end times, different views about the second coming, I want to do my best to be as fair as I can to the different views and then ultimately tell you where I land and why.
But what I want to do is find value and insight from each of the different main views that are held in the church today. Now remember, if someone comes and says the Bible is not the word of God, then I want to tell you where I am. They're not a believer. They're not a brother or a sister. If they say there are many different ways to God, we don't need the cross.
Jesus is one of many ways. That person is not a brother or a sister. They're not part of the family of God.
They're lost. If they say Jesus was a good man who died as a moral example but he wasn't God in the flesh, he didn't rise from the dead, they're not saved. There are things that are non-negotiable. There are things that we may hold to passionately about the end times. Those do not separate the saved from the unsaved. In other words, within the body we can have different views about the rapture, the second coming, the millennium and things like that. We can have different views and still be part of the same family. So I want to encourage you not to divide over these issues but to do your best to understand why different men and women of God through the centuries, different Christian leaders through the centuries have held to different views about the end times. And then again what I want to do is try to find something valuable and good and important in each of these different viewpoints and then unpack what I understand the Bible says about the end of the age. And we'll talk practically in terms of how it affects the way we live today, what our expectations should be, how we should be raising our children, etc.
I want to make this as practical as possible. Theology, coming from the Greek eschaton which is the end. So eschatology, the ology part is the study part. Theology is the study about God, theos, God. Theology, if you're talking about words and how they're formed. Morphology, the study of the formation of words and sounds and things like that.
Phonology is from phonetics, the study of the sounds, etc. So eschatology is the study of the eschaton, the study of the end times. What do you believe about the end times?
Now I want to throw something out to you. Would you say, looking back, that Jesus is clearly prophesied in the Old Testament? Would you say that a passage like Isaiah 53 clearly speaks of his death and points to his resurrection? Would you say that there are passages in the Bible that you look at them and you see, yes, the Messiah had to die?
I would certainly say so. But the disciples didn't see it. The disciples had a different expectation and didn't see it until after Jesus rose from the dead. And then in Luke 24, he opens their minds so we can understand the scriptures. He's going through the word with them and opening their minds and they look and there it is.
Now, here's my point. If the disciples could have a wrong understanding about the death and resurrection of Jesus, even though these things are prophesied and laid out in the Bible, let's not be so arrogant as to think that we can get all of prophecy right in advance. We know what God wants us to know.
We know what we need to know to live. But even when it comes to the world to come, eternal life, there are many questions that we have. For example, an aborted baby that goes to be in the presence of the Lord. In what state does that baby go to the presence of the Lord? Does that baby develop as a baby and grow? When the mother meets that child, at what stage of development will that child be? If the mother's a believer and she gets saved after the abortion, she's going to meet her child in heaven and the world to come.
What's it like? What's the state of someone that maybe dies at 95 years old and is suffering from dementia? What state of life are they when we're at the forever stage in our resurrected bodies? Are we like 30? Can you even count ages like that?
How does it work? There are many questions that we don't have answers to, but we know enough. Bible prophecy is not to satisfy our curiosity.
Let me say it again. Bible prophecy is not to satisfy our curiosity. Bible prophecy is to help us be ready so we know how to live. God would warn about disaster coming if Israel wouldn't repent, or promised blessing coming if Israel would repent.
God would give them enough information about the coming of the Messiah so they would be ready when He came, and even if they misunderstood things, could now recognize who He was based on the Scriptures. So when people give you every single detail of what's going to happen in the next 50 years, I always give a little warning with a smile. If you're going to keep a prophetic calendar, do it in pencil. I've been around a long time and I've seen predictions come and go, but the foundations remain short.
So what I'm going to lay out in terms of different viewpoints, I hold to certain views very strongly, but I don't divide in the body in terms of who I'll work with and stand with for the Gospel over these things. So eschatology, the study of the end times. Then there is the concept of the millennium. The millennium is the thousand year reign of Jesus.
So millennium coming from the word for a thousand is a thousand year reign. We get that figure of a thousand years from the book of Revelation, the 20th chapter, where it's referenced six different times, but the picture of the millennium, the picture of God's reign on the earth in a future kingdom is found in many Old Testament passages. For example, Isaiah the 11th chapter, where the wolf will lie down with the lamb when no one will be hurting anyone anymore.
A little child will lead them. Or Isaiah 2, where the nations will beat their swords into plowshares. And again, Isaiah 11 and other passages, the knowledge of the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the seas. The kingdom of God on the earth, the millennial kingdom. So there are different views among Christians in terms of where the second coming fits in and what the nature of the millennium is.
So again, some of you, this is so basic and you're like, get on with things, but I want to make sure everybody's in together and it's just a refresher as well. So the pre millennial view says that Jesus is coming back before the millennial kingdom. And some of you are like, well, of course we all know that Jesus comes back, establishes his kingdom in Jerusalem. Remember he left from the Mount of Olives and the same way he left, he's coming back. He will return. His feet will set down on the Mount of Olives.
He will establish his kingdom and rule and reign out of Jerusalem. If you are premillennial, you believe that Jesus returns. We are caught up to meet him in the air.
We can discuss the different sequences of belief there. We're caught up to meet him in the air. We receive our resurrected bodies. Those dead Messiah rise up to meet him. We return with him as he sets up his kingdom and our resurrected bodies.
And now he reigns over Israel and the nations, the survivors of the nations that attacked Jerusalem in the millennial kingdom. And this will be a glorious time of a thousand years on the earth with no war. If there's sin, it will instantly be dealt with. People will live long lives. Human beings will reproduce on the earth, et cetera.
And we will already be glorified. So Jesus comes before the millennial kingdom. That's called the premillennial view. If you hold to what's called amillennialism, amillennialism, the ah like in agnostic, someone who doesn't know or atheist, someone that doesn't believe in God or apathy, someone that doesn't have feelings either way about something.
So the ah, the a is the negating. The amillennial says there will not be a physical kingdom on the earth. The amillennial view is that the kingdom of God is entirely spiritual. And even now, Jesus is ruling and reigning over a spiritual kingdom. And when he returns, that's the end of the millennial period. And we just go into eternity. So the premillennial view says Jesus returns before, pre, before the millennium and then sets up a thousand year kingdom on the earth with Israel in the center of it.
And we are already glorified, Jew and Gentile in Jesus already glorified. The amillennial view says that there will be a spiritual kingdom only. Jesus is currently ruling and reigning over that. There will be no physical millennium. When he returns, we go straight into eternity. The post millennial view says Jesus returns after the millennium.
You say, I'm not as familiar with that. That would say that the gospel triumphs, that the gospel will spread all over the world until basically the whole world becomes Christian. So the millennial kingdom, the reign of Jesus over the earth in this glorious world will happen before he returns. And then at the end of the millennium, he'll return and we go into eternity. You say, how can we have such different views based on the same Bible? I'll explain it.
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Call 1-800-771-5584, 1-800-771-5584 or online at trivita.com. Welcome back, friends, to the Line of Fire broadcast. The book that we are offering all this month, we'll tell you how to get it later in the broadcast. I co-authored with Professor Craig Keener, Not Afraid of the Antichrist, Why We Don't Believe in a Pre-Tribulation Rapture, but it's not a divisive book. It's a book written with a gracious spirit in the midst of differences, but I think it will open up a lot of really important topics for you.
But we'll tell you later in the show how you can get a copy for yourself. Okay, so what are the strengths of the premillennial view, the amillennial view, and the postmillennial view? And then what are the major variations in the premillennial view? The strength of the premillennial view is to say that the promises God gave to Israel were real promises. That when he said that Jerusalem will be highly exalted, that the nations will come streaming to the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem to learn from the God of Jacob, that that will really happen. That when Peter said in Acts 3 that Jesus must remain in heaven until the time of the restoration of all things spoken by the prophets. But what did the prophets speak about? They spoke about this glorious time on the earth when God would be exalted and there would be peace on earth.
They spoke about these things and they will literally happen. God spoke them, his word is true and can be trusted fully in that regard. That's the strength of the premillennial view. God made promises to Israel in explicit language.
He's going to keep those promises. That helps you as a follower of Jesus today to say, hey, if he kept his promises to Israel, how much more will he keep his promises to the church through the blood of Jesus? The strength of the amillennial view is it emphasizes that Jesus even now is ruling and reigning.
Now, the views don't all contradict each other. In other words, if you're premillennial, you still believe Jesus is at the right hand of the Father even now. And you do believe there is a spiritual kingdom over which he is reigning even now, but you say there will be a physical kingdom as well. The amillennial view has the strength of emphasizing that Jesus is king and ruling and reigning even now and working out his purposes on the earth, but that his kingdom is not of this world, as he said in John 18.
If it was of this world or from this world, then his servants would have fought for him as a king, but he's a king in a different way with a spiritual reign. And therefore, when he returns at the end, the kingdom is finished and we now go into eternity. That's the strength of the amillennial view. The strength of the post-millennial view is that it says the gospel will triumph on the earth. It says, look at the parables of Jesus, for example, a woman putting leaven in a loaf and she's got several loaves, it's just a little leaven, but then the loaves become full loaves. You say, well, leaven is always evil in the Bible. Well, many times it's associated with evil, but here it could just be a parable speaking of the growth and spread of the gospel or the mustard seed, the smallest of the seeds, but when it grows, it's a giant tree.
And now the birds can take refuge in its branches. So it would point to verses, Colossians 1, how God reconciled all things to himself through the cross and how the kingdoms of this world become the kingdom of our God in Revelation 11. And the strength of the post-millennial view is this optimism that the gospel will triumph throughout the entire world and that all the nations will come to worship and know the one true God and the kingdom of God will be established on the earth and then Jesus will return. So each view can point to different scriptures.
Each view has something positive about it. Now let me break it down one more time, and today we're going to be really digging into a lot of biblical vocabulary and opening up key words and texts in the days ahead, but today is the terminology day. So if you just tuned in, we're going to be really edifying you with a lot of scripture in the days ahead and challenging you to think things through afresh about the end times in Bible prophecy, but today is our terminology day. There is in the premillennial camp a difference between dispensational premillennialism and historic premillennialism. Dispensational premillennialism believes in a pre-trib rapture, believes that the church age is a separate age not spoken of directly in the Old Testament, rather it's parenthetical.
So just think of a parenthesis and a sentence that you can pull out what's in the middle and it doesn't affect things on either side. So the church is here, the church is the mystery age, when the church is taken out God continues his purposes for Israel. So there will be a pre-trib rapture or a mid-trib rapture according to some. The church will be taken out and then God will continue with his purposes for Israel until the end of the age. That's the dispensational pre-trib view made famous by the Scofield reference Bible, made famous by Hal Lindsey's late Great Planet Earth, made famous by the Left Behind novel series, made famous by many movies that follow in this wake.
Widely held by many around the world today, but something that was virtually unknown in terms of the whole system before the 1800s. Historic premillennialism is the view that was most held to in the early church from what we can tell in the first few centuries. Historic premillennialism does not believe in a pre-trib rapture, it believes that God will preserve us right until the end here in this world no matter what tribulation comes.
But both agree that Jesus will rule and reign from Jerusalem over a kingdom on this planet. Now, what's the strength of dispensational premillennialism, the pre-trib rapture, Jesus coming any moment and we're out of here. What's the strength of that view?
On tomorrow's broadcast I'll break down why I held to this so zealously at a certain point in life and why I no longer hold to it having for, oh, probably over 47 years. But, what I want to do is explain a strength of dispensational premillennialism. The idea that we will be raptured out before the seven year tribulation. A strength of this viewpoint is it really does drive home the reality of the second coming. People really do think about it a lot and talk about it a lot, whereas in some other circles we don't talk about the second coming that much and yet it's a big, big, big subject in the New Testament. And it is our great hope and something we should be looking forward to. So often it's in the dispensational premillennial camp, the pre-trib rapture camp that there's a lot more talk about the second coming, a lot more expectation about the second coming. That's positive. And because there's so much conceptualizing about it, we're out of here any moment, we're going to be raptured out.
There's a sense of expectation and excitement and realism. Now, I haven't given the downside on these different views, but I'll do it briefly. The downside on the dispensational pre-trib view is the idea of we're out of here any moment can lead to escapism, it can lead to impractical living, how can I even make plans if we're out of here any moment. And it makes this complete separation between the church and Israel. The negative on the premillennial view more broadly is you could say that God brings Israel into the world to reveal the Messiah, now through the Messiah redemption comes to the whole world, and now you're going backwards. Now you're going backwards to Israel again, going backwards to an earthly kingdom. The weakness of the amillennial view is it spiritualizes many promises and statements made in the Bible, the things that were literal and earthly and clear with definite application now get spiritualized away, and because of that you often lose sight of God's purposes for Israel today and can't even connect the nation of Israel today with Bible prophecy because everything gets spiritualized. The danger of the post-millennial view is that there's a false optimism, there's this idea that the world will just keep getting better and often not a realistic assessment of where things are at and the urgency of the hour, and the post-millennial viewpoint can often miss God's purposes for Israel. So each one has strengths and weaknesses. Why do you believe what you believe and does it matter?
Why do I believe what I believe and does it matter? Alright, this is Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks so much for tuning in. Just a reminder that we are listener-supported. If we have been a blessing to you, if you're being enriched in the Word and prayer and your own walk with God through this broadcast, then stand with us so that we can reach many, many more and bless many, many more. Together, friends, we're making a difference. So go to thelineoffire.org, thelineoffire.org, and click Donate.
