Other early premillennialists included Pseudo-Barnabas,[9] Papias,[10] Methodius, Lactantius,[11] Commodianus[12] Theophilus, Tertullian,[13] Melito,[14] Hippolytus of Rome, Victorinus of Pettau[15][16] and various Gnostics groups and the Montanists. What he is saying is, a literal interpretation of the Old Testament is going to lead you to a premillennial view, and since we dont want to get there, we cant use a literal approach. Wannabee Obi Wan Kenobi Oct 27, 2007 #9 No to Scofield. But, you know, of all the people on the planet who should be premillennialists, it should be those who believe in divine sovereign election, of all people. This will be followed by an additional return of Christ with his saints (though there are post tribulation dispensationalists, such as Robert Gundry). No kingdom on earth ruled by Christ before He gets here, and no kingdom on earth ruled by Christ after He gets here. 4. He comes pre, not post; He comes before. I had, as theologians might call it, my own my own ordo eschaton; that would be the chronological sequence of the end times. You can believe and be saved and then you can forfeit your salvation. The Rise of Philo-Semitism and Premillennialism During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. JOHN MACARTHUR is the pastor-teacher of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California; president of The Master's College and Seminary; and featured teacher for the Grace to You media ministry. (Matt .25:31-46; John . Or another way to say it would be this: how many of you have attended an amillennial prophecy conference? Whats that about? During the 2007 Shepherds Conference at Grace Community Church in Los Angeles, John MacArthur delivered a lecture entitled "Why Every Self-Respecting Calvinist Should Be a Premillennialist." It created quite a stir among Reformed pastors and theologians. They will die for that truth regarding the church, but unashamedly abandon that same truth for the elect nation of Israel. And Im really grateful that the Spirit of God is moving the way He is these days, and moving in the church to reestablish the glorious high ground of the sovereignty of God in salvation. But in both cases it will be the flow of history under the influence of the church, so theyre really looking at the same thing. Theres a recovery of premillennialism in the modern era, and the recovery of premillennialism in the modern era came from two very unlikely sources. He wants us to get it right; thats why He put it in the Scripture and the Scripture is replete with it. [37] The Anglican Church originally formalized a statement against millenarianism in the Anglican Articles. Our church just finished up a 7-week series on eschatology. Turn to Revelation chapter 1. a.Dispensationalist Premillennialism 1. by Craig L. Blomberg and Sung Wook Chung [Grand Rapids: . This morning John MacArthur opened the 2007 Shepherd's Conference with a loud blast that will no doubt be heard around the Reformed world in the coming weeks. I have dragged you through virtually every verse in the New Testament. Premillennialism, in Christian eschatology, is the belief that Jesus will physically return to the Earth (the Second Coming) before the Millennium, heralding a literal thousand-year golden age of peace. So, I said, Would you do me a favor? He is currently the chancellor emeritus of The Master's University in . Enter your email address and we will send you instructions on how to reset your password. In the meantime, Ive continued to study the Old Testament to write all the footnotes for the MacArthur Study Bible through the entire Old Testament. A History of Christian Zionism: Philo-Semitism and the Expectation of Israel's Restoration. I recently read this great article and would recommend every professing Calvinist to give it a read, I believe John MacArthur's arguments for Pre-Millennialism are biblically irrefutable, mainly because the traditional Reformed view (Amillennialism) does away (Replacement Theology) with future Israel (God's Elect) and that is far from the truth He assigned each age to a particular person of the Trinity as the guiding principle of that era. Premillennialism is based upon a literal interpretation of Revelation 20:16 in the New Testament, which describes Jesus's reign in a period of a thousand years. Israel disobeyed the law, youre done. You cannot fight the war on every front, and at the great time of the Reformation, they were fighting the war where the battle raged the hottest. Whether youre an amillennialist or a postmillennialist, you basically say Israel forfeited all its promises. More recently dispensationalism has been popularized through Hal Lindsey's 1970s bestseller, The Late, Great Planet Earth and through the Left Behind Series by Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins. The proponents of amillennialism interpret the millennium as being a symbolic period of time, which is consistent with the highly symbolic nature of the literary and apocalyptic genre of the Book of Revelation, sometimes indicating that the thousand years represent God's rule over his creation or the Church. I remember when I flew to Kazakhstan in about a 35 or 38-hour flight; got off the plane at 7:00 in the morning to speak at a conference. John F. MacArthur, Jr. is a United States Calvinistic evangelical writer and minister, noted for his radio program entitled Grace to You and as the editor of the Gold Medallion Book Award winning MacArthur Study Bible. Well, this is such a great chapter - verse 51: I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep. Christ's Prophetic Plans: A Futuristic Premillennial Primer. So, I told the pastors at the conference, and the title of this talk is, Why every self-respecting Calvinist has to be a premillennialist. Because, if you believe in divine sovereign election, then you have to believe that as God will be faithful to His promises to His church, He will also be faithful to His promises to His elect nation Israel. We can take prophetic Scripture at face value. XVII., condemns the Anabaptists and others who now scatter Jewish opinions that, before the resurrection of the dead, the godly shall occupy the kingdom of the world, the wicked being everywhere suppressed."[35] Likewise, the Swiss Reformer Heinrich Bullinger wrote up the Second Helvetic Confession, which reads "We also reject the Jewish dream of a millennium, or golden age on earth, before the last judgment. Out of their own mouth - whats wrong with that? The beliefs of Premillennialism are far from "rightly dividing the word of truth"! It is the single most inexplicable story in human history, that this small group of beleaguered people, attacked and assaulted by everybody around them for centuries, still exist as a pure ethnic race. Origen did this in his Commentary on Matthew[19] when he taught that Christs return signifies His disclosure of Himself and His deity to all humanity in such a way that all might partake of His glory to the degree that each individuals actions warrant (Commentary on Matthew 12.30).[20] Even Origen's milder forms of this teaching left no room for a literal millennium and it was so extreme that few actually followed it. And by the way, if we change the rules, what are the new ones? But, in any case - and by the way, postmillennialists and amillennialists differ as to the details of these kinds of things. He loved the ministry. by John MacArthur and Richard Mayhue (Chicago: Moody, 2012), 24. So, heres how to get the foundation for a good sound eschatology: get election right, get Israel right, you got it. One calls it a kingdom and says it will expand and expand and expand - thats the positive spin. In the fifth book of Against Heresies, Irenaeus concentrates primarily on eschatology. We can interpret it the way we interpret any other passage of Scripture, with the same use of the normal, natural means of interpreting language, and we should; and it will yield for us as clear an understanding of the future as the Lord wants us to have. And then the effect of it is in verse 58: Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, and you can stop right there. He was a voracious reader, and he just loved his ministry. Whalen has noted that modern premillennialism is "criticized roundly for nave scholarship which confuses the poetic and inspirational prose of prophecy with fortune telling", though "Premillennialists retort that they merely follow the Word of God, regardless of ridicule." Oxford theologian Alister McGrath has noted that "all medieval theology is Augustinian to a greater or lesser extent. Turn to 1 Corinthians 15; 1 Corinthians 15. DP also believes that God has a place for both national Israel (cf. Contrarily, certain Anabaptists, Huguenots, and Bohemian Brethren were premillennial. John MacArthur News Why TMS? We still have Mark to go, but there are only a couple of discourses and a couple of miracles in Mark that arent in the other three gospels, so not a lot of new material. I was talking to one of our missionaries just this same week I gave this talk to the pastors, and he was coming back from China and he said, Theres only one view in the church in China and its the premillennial view. Of course, because they just take what Scripture says. Craig Blaising and Darrell Bock, Progressive Dispensationalism That is called historical premillennialism: Christ will come, set up the kingdom, but it won't have the Jewish character that we anticipate from Old Testament promises it would have, because those promises were cancelled to Israel and given to the church. Increase Mather wrote "That which presseth me so, as that I cannot gainsay the Chiliastical opinion, is that I take these things for Principles, and no way doubt but that they are demonstrable. Coining the word was "almost entirely the work of British and American Protestants and was prompted by their belief that the French and American Revolutions (the French, especially) realized prophecies made in the books of Daniel and Revelation."[3]. "[43] His Puritan contemporaries, Increase Mather and Cotton Mather, openly proclaimed a belief in a literal millennium. It is often post-tribulational, meaning that the rapture of the church will occur after a period of tribulation. Have you ever heard of that? This makes two distinct judgmentsone for Christians and one for non-Christians after the millennium. Not one reference anywhere in Scripture - and there are over two thousand, referring to Israel - means anything other than Israel. Why do we want to change the rules in interpretation to avoid that? Well, we now come to the doctrines that relate to the end times. by R. Scott Clark on April 8, 2020 | Dispensationalism describes a way of reading the Bible and a system of theology the nearest roots of which are in the 19th century. Chicago: Moody, 2012. The faithful spend eternity in the New Jerusalem. That position was that Israel was to be identified with the church and this position is the seed of amillennialism, as well as postmillennialism and historic premillennialism. And Im not in to newspaper exegesis, where you where everything that happens in the news fulfills some obscure Old Testament prophecy. We also applaud his insistence that the Bible must be interpreted literally, according to its normal sense. God filled the Bible with prophecy and much of it looking to the end. I have - they can try to terrify me with all this stuff; I am unmoved. And for most evangelicals, for most people who hold to a sound, biblical view and Reformed theology, they would live and die that the text of Genesis 1 through 3 means exactly what it says it means, because thats the only way to interpret Scripture. The following resources pertain to eschatology the study of the end times. Isaiah 65 - really, the whole chapter is about Israel, Gods elect - verse 22: My elect again shall enjoy long the work of their hands. Israel repeatedly called Gods elect; we know what that means. And the longer I think about it and the more I study the Scripture, the clearer it becomes to me. 3. He loved to read and study. Please respond to confirm your registration. They didnt really get to the front of ecclesiology either, the study of the church, but those two kind of go together - as well see in this study - in some very fascinating ways. We are responsible for our sin, but in the end, we believe because He moves on us. Do you know - are you watching this media? Its just a lot of material. But we distributed that, and I arranged - and I dont know when its going to happen for you - I arranged to get a copy for every family at Grace Church as a gift. After this period of fulfillment of divine wrath, He shall then return to rule from a holy city ( i.e., the New Jerusalem) over the earthly nations for one thousand years. Another Rapture passage - great one - verse 16: the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, the trumpet of God, the dead in Christ shall rise first. Julian of Toledo (642690) summarizes the medieval doctrine of the millennium by referring to it as the church of God which, by the diffusion of its faith and works, is spread out as a kingdom of faith from the time of the incarnation until the time of the coming judgment. Daniel was one of the first groups of deportees, and Ezekiel followed in 597 B.C. 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