Daniel Message 7

Special: Pre, A, and Postmillennialism – Part II

 

We’re going to continue where we left off on the millennial issue.  By way of review, there are three schools of prophecy that have grown up in the Christian church.  These three schools are called premillennialism, amillennialism and postmillennialism.  For the sake of our study I have picked out three checkpoints so that you can go to each of these three schools at exactly the same place, exactly the same checkpoint and test and see how they compare.  There are 108 different checkpoints that we could run on these schools of prophetic interpretation; it’s very complicated and very detailed.  We don’t have time to do that; we’re just using three checkpoints. 

 

The first checkpoint is Christ’s return, does Jesus Christ’s return or does it not terminate history into the eternal state.  Or does the return of Jesus Christ in fact bring in a temporary millennial kingdom and then the eternal state.  So the first parameter, the first checkpoint we’re asking is of what nature is Christ’s return.  Is Christ’s Second Advent a final act of history or is it to usher in the final age of history?  That’s one checkpoint.  The premillenarian school differs on this checkpoint from the other two.  In this the premillennial school of interpretation of prophecy is completely different from the other schools.  The other school, the amillennial school and the postmillennial school, both of them hold that Jesus Christ when He returns ends history, period, there’s no further history after that.  The premillenarian contends, however, that when Jesus Christ returns He returns to set up a kingdom, and when that kingdom is ended history is terminated.

 

The second checkpoint is the kingdom’s relationship to society physically, socially and politically.  Under this checkpoint the question is: does the kingdom of God ever subdue human culture?  On this the amillennial school stands alone against the premill and the postmill.  Both the premill and the postmill argues that Jesus Christ’s kingdom, the kingdom of God, must, if it is to be a true accomplishment in history, it must accomplish the original mandate, namely not just to save people but also to save society along with people.  So the premill argues that the millennial kingdom is the salvation of society corporally as well as the postmillennialist who argues that the church will bring in that saved society.

 

The third checkpoint is does evil need the Second Advent for its eradication; does evil need the cataclysm of Christ’s return to be destroyed.  On this the postmillenarian stands alone against the amill and the premill.  Both the premillenarian and the amillenarian hold that evil is so deeply rooted into present history that it can never be eradicated apart from a cataclysmic return of Jesus Christ back into history.  So those are the three areas and we went through the history of the premillenarian viewpoint; we showed how it dates from even before the Christian era.  We studied the three areas of the premillenarian point of view.  We said that basically it looks like this: here’s the cross, we have the Church Age, Jesus Christ returns, when Jesus Christ returns He sets up a kingdom of one thousand years and then we have the eternal state. The kingdom is here; the kingdom is not the same as the Church; the Church is the forerunner of the kingdom of God but the Church itself isn’t the kingdom of God.   The Church leads and makes possible the kingdom but the Church itself isn’t the kingdom. 

 

The three checkpoints of premillenarianism: the first one is that when Christ returns the eternal state begins, the thousand year kingdom begins, and so Christ’s Second Advent ushers in the millennial kingdom, called millennial because of the thousand year reign.  The second point was that this kingdom, when it does come, will dominate human culture.  So human culture will be saved along with human individuals, though it will be saved after Christ’s return, and you’ll have a vindication of all institutions of society, all the institutions finally functioning the way they were designed to function in the millennial kingdom.  The third point of the millennial kingdom was that evil will persist, it will remain in force, Satan is the god of this world, until he is bumped from the scene by the cataclysmic return of Jesus Christ.  So that’s a statement in very brief form of what the premillenarian school believes.

 

The center or the main line of reasoning to support the premillenarian viewpoint harps back to the prophecies of a golden age inside mortal history.  The premillenarian insists that that golden age can’t refer to the Church because it’s physical.  The premillenarian insists that those prophecies can’t refer to the eternal state because they involve mortality and the signs of a mortal history.  And therefore the prophecies, since they can’t refer to the Church and since they can’t refer to the eternal state, must therefore refer to an intermediate golden era brought in by the return of Jesus Christ. 

 

Now we start with the amillennial school.  By far the amillennial school is the majority view; by far in today’s world, though it wasn’t for the first three centuries, it dominates.  Again we will treat the amillennial school the same way we handled the premillennial school: we will treat it first from the standpoint of its origin in history, and then we will treat it from the standpoint of its three features.  We’ll run by the three check points to see what it’s saying. 

 

What is the origin in history of the amillennial position?  The amillennial position has its roots, again, before the time of Jesus Christ.  It goes back to the time of a famous Jew by the name of Philo of Alexandria.  Philo was a philosophical Jew, a man who tried to combine the Old Testament with Plato; a man who tried to mesh Biblical concepts with philosophy and in order to do so Philo developed what has come to be known as the allegorical approach to interpretation.  Philo originated the concept that the Scriptures have a surface meaning, but that’s not the real meaning, the real meaning is deeper, it’s underneath, you get deeper down into the allegories involved; that’s where the real truth is Philo argued.  And so Philo, living in Alexandria established an allegorical hermeneutics.  “Hermeneutic” is simply a word which means the law of interpretation or hermeneutics, which is the science of interpreting literature, and Philo began allegorical hermeneutics.

 

He was followed in Alexandria after the time of Christ by a man by the name of Origen.  Origen took over allegorical hermeneutics and gave it to the church.  It is Origen who was deeply disturbed in his time by the crude literalism, the absurd literalism, literalism had gotten so bad by Origen’s day that people would interpret the Bible and they would make stories up about the numerical equivalent of each letter in the sentence.  That was how far they carried literalism, and Origen, just like many of these movements in history, it’s simply a reaction, the pendulum doesn’t sit in the middle.  And Origen, to balance the crude literalism of his day went over to emphasize a more deeply spiritual interpretation. 

 

Origen was followed by the man who basically is the father of amillennialism; his name is Augustine; his book is The City of God.  The City of God is the first comprehensive statement of amillennialism in church history.  No one had ever stated it before Augustine.  Before Augustine the Church was largely premill.  The Church was largely under the Jewish influence of that future golden age in the mortal world.  But with Augustine several things happened.  With Origen and with Augustine the prophecies of that golden era are handled in one of two ways.  They are handled as applying to the Church, or as applying to the eternal state, they do not really literally refer to a golden era in mortal history.  They are spiritualized, to be carried over to the Church or they are spiritualized and carried over as emblems of the eternal state. 

 

So Origen, Jerome, and Augustine, so these men say when you read the Old Testament and you read about the lion and the lamb you’re reading about a golden era, but the golden era either refers to the Church or the eternal state, because in their view the Church Age goes on until the return of Christ, and then you have the eternal state; there’s no room for an intermediate age.  So the prophecies of the golden age have to refer either to one or the other, but they can’t refer to some golden age stuck in between the Church and the eternal state.

 

They would argue, for example, in Hebrews 12:22, they would argue that here is a case of proper use of allegorical interpretation.  They would argue that allegorical interpretation is not at all unbiblical, that in fact it’s found in the New Testament.  They would argue that they are being soundly Biblical; they haven’t compromised a thing by interpreting prophecy in a spiritualized way.  We read in Hebrews 12:22, “But ye are come unto Mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels,” see says Augustine, see says Origen, we haven’t come to literally Jerusalem, this is a spiritual passage, this is an emblem, this is an example of how the New Testament is built, it’s applying the idea of coming down to Jerusalem to the Church, it’s a spiritualization, it’s an allegorization of the thing, you don’t take it literally, we’re not actually marching down to a literal city of Jerusalem, we come to Jerusalem like this author does in 12:22. 

 

Origen and Augustine would argue, for example, in Revelation 11:8, another place where emblems are used, symbols are used, and therefore they are being consistent with Scripture when they interpret prophecy symbolically or allegorically. In Revelation 11:8 it speaks of the literal city of Jerusalem, but it speaks of Jerusalem by means of symbols, “And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.”  See, they say, verse 8 refers to the literal Jerusalem but it refers to the literal Jerusalem under a symbol, and it even says, “which is referred to spiritually,” and so therefore spiritualizing prophecies are soundly Biblical.

 

So amillennialism went on after the days of Augustine, it was the official position of Roman Catholicism and still is, not necessarily in their creeds but basically Roman Catholic theologians have been amillennial.  It was the position of the Reformers; Luther and Calvin were both amillennial.  Luther and Calvin did not change Roman Catholic eschatology; they brought it over hook, line and sinker, and kept it within the Protestant form. Great reformers like Abraham Kuyper, at one time the Prime Minister of Holland, the man who wrote the classic work on the Holy Spirit, Abraham Kuyper is an amillennial.  Today at Calvin College in Michigan, men like Louis Berkoff, William Hendricksen, are the leading amillennialists.  Amillennialism is the official creed of the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church. It is the official creed of the Christian Reformed Church. It is the official creed of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.  It the unofficial creed of the Churches of Christ and most Baptist conventions. So amillennialism today basically has reign over most areas.


Now what are the features of amillennialism?  That’s its history; it’s in the majority view, you ought to know that if you’ve been raised in the independent greenhouse and you haven’t had contact with people in the outside world, when you do you’ll be amazed to find out many amills you’ll run into.  I’m telling you before you run into them that there are many of them that you’ll run into.  Now the features of amillennialism, and this is interesting because right from the start we have a problem.

 

Amillennialism is basically a negative position; it’s basically amillennial, anti millennial.  Amillennialists don’t agree on many things except there isn’t a millennium, so therefore their position is less defined than that of premillennial people.  In fact this has been admitted by their own people.  Jay Adams in his book on amillennialism complains that most amillennial works are all negative in tone; they never present you with something positive.  Lorraine Boettner says the same thing, who was a postmill.  He argues that that is the weakness of amillennialists, they always want to attack, they are always want to attack, they are always anti-Chiliast, they always are anti-millennial but when it comes to putting out a positive answer, a positive system, a well-based set of doctrines, you can’t get anything of the sorts. 

 

One of the world’s leading theologians today is a man by the name of Berkouwer at the Free University of Amsterdam.  His work put out several years ago, The Return of the Lord Jesus Christ, I was just studying it in preparation for this, Berkouwer is a leading amillennialist, you look at the table of contents of his book which is supposed to be the final statement, look in the back where he has Scripture references, and interestingly I looked for Genesis 12:1-3 because obviously it’s the Abrahamic Covenant, you think he’d have something to say—nothing in 1,000 pages.  I looked in vain in Berkouwer’s book to find anything on Deuteronomy 30, which is a passage that talks about Israel returning back to her land.  Obviously if he’s going to interact with the premillenarian position something ought to have been said in Deuteronomy 30, but it’s not listed in his index.  Then I decided, well let’s look at Jeremiah 31, Ezekiel 36 passages that we’ve always used to talk about the New Covenant; not listed either.  And so this is the great deficiency; you find that amillennial works attack the premillennial position, but when it comes to a positive exposition of their own position they’re very week.  Feinberg, a Hebrew Christian, when he wrote his book Premillennialism or Amillennialism, concluded this is the amillennial method, to raise as many questions as possible but at the same time to build no system of one’s own. 

 

Now this isn’t intended to be sarcastic; I’ve quoted Adams, I’ve quoted Boettner, they themselves are aware of this, I’m not trying to run them down.  I’m just stating a fact; this is typical of this position.  And they themselves will admit that they’ve got a long way to go. 

 

Let’s look at our three check points.  What are the features of the amillennial position?  First what does it look like in a general picture?  The return of Christ, the Church Age, which is redefined as the kingdom, Christ returns, the eternal state.  That’s the picture of amillennialism.  Now let’s go in for some details.  What do they do with passages of Scripture?  What does the amillennialist look like?  If you heard one teach you ought to be able to analyze, after you’ve been acquainted with the Word of God for some time you should be able to categorize where the man stands. 

Let’s take Matthew 24 and 25.  The amillennialist insists… remember the first checkpoint was that the return of Christ, does it or does it not end history; he says yes, the return of Christ does terminate history and throw it into the eternal state.  Therefore when the amillennialist reads Matthew 24-25 he insists that what we have here is the final judgment.  He insists, for example, that in Matthew 25:33, when Jesus Christ separates the sheep from the goats, that those people are already in their resurrection bodies.  He insists that the separation occurs and eternity begins, and he quotes Matthew 25:46, “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”  There he says is the beginning of the eternal state.  And so Matthew 24-25 definitely teach one return of Christ and the immediate setting up of the eternal state.

 

He would turn to 2 Peter 3:10  and say here’s a passage that definitely and conclusively proves the amillennial position because this passage that Christ returns, he says, to set up the eternal state, not to set up a temporary golden era in the mortal world.  “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heart; the earth also, and the works that are in it, shall be burned up.”  That, he says, is the eternal state, for in verse 13 he says see, “…look for a new heavens and a new earth, in which dwells righteousness.”  Therefore the day of the Lord begins the new earth. There is no separation; there is nothing that comes between Christ’s return and the eternal state.  Matthew 24-25 and 2 Peter 3:10 are the key passages for the amillennial position. 

 

Well what happens with passages like Isaiah 65, I’ll refer to the same passages to sort of minimize the confusion and try to show you how going back and forth in the same passage from viewpoint to viewpoint you can how different schools handle them and why when we get into Daniel in detail we handle it the way we do.  If you can’t understand this, don’t worry, don’t give up, just stick it out.  In Isaiah 65:25 where it says “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock, and dust shall be the serpent’s food,” those are to be interpreted as symbolic of harmony.  The man, Isaiah, is using literal events in this world and abstracting the principle of peace and harmony and righteousness and throwing that into the eternal state.  So therefore passages that speak of a golden era are either appropriated by the Church or thrown and cast into the eternal state.  And that’s how passages like Isaiah 65 are handled.

 

But, says the premillenarian, how do you handle Revelation 19-20?  Amillennialists study the book of Revelation just like premillennialists.  So what do they do with Revelation 19-20?  It can be handled in a variety of ways, at least four or five ways; if you want a good discussion of the amillennial all collected together in 4 pages of reading, refer to John Walvoord’s book, The Revelation of Jesus Christ, Moody Press.  On four pages, when you deal with his preface to his chapter on Revelation 20 he summarizes very succinctly there, quoting from the sources, it’s all pulled together so you can see what the amills do with Revelation 20.

 

Now what’s the problem with Revelation 20? What’s the checkpoint?  That Jesus Christ’s return sets up the eternal state.  But if Revelation 19 refers to the return of Christ, and then immediately in Revelation 20 you have a thousand year gap between chapter 19 and the eternal state, the amillennialist must handle this in some way, compatible with his system and approach toward prophecy.  How does he handle Revelation 19-20?  There are a number of ways but we will classify them two ways; there’s two approaches the amillennialist uses here. 

 

One is the chronological approach; this makes chapter 19 and chapter 20 chronologically coherent, in other words, 19 comes before 20, the chronological approach.  That’s just like the premillenar­ian; we believe it’s chronological too.   If it is chronological, let’s watch what happens.  If here we have Revelation 19 and Revelation 20 and we have this era of the binding of Satan and we have the great judgment in the eternal state, and the amillennialist makes the beginning of the eternal state equal and coterminous with the return of Jesus Christ, then Revelation 20 must refer to the return of Christ, not Revelation 19.

 

So on the chronological amillennial approach Revelation 19 is not talking about the return of Jesus Christ; Revelation 19 is talking about the beginning of the kingdom of God in history, particularly the destruction of Rome for it says the kingdom of God shall smash the Roman Empire, says the prophet Daniel.  And so Revelation 19 is an imagery, it’s symbolic of the fall of Rome, 400-500 AD.  When Jesus Christ slays the enemies with the sword out of His mouth, that they say is symbolic of the gospel that is preached.  And Jesus Christ slaying His enemies with the sword that comes out of His mouth in Revelation 19 is the Church that destroys Rome through the teaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  So Revelation 19 in this view can’t be the Second Advent, it has to be something else and what it is, is the Church triumphant in the days of Constantine.

 

But there’s another amillennial approach for the inherent weaknesses of this most amillennialists today have dropped this view.  They’ve gone over to what is called the recapitulation view.  In the recapitulation view Revelation 19 and Revelation 20 are not chronological. Revelation 19 is the last chapter of the history; Revelation 19 is the return of Jesus Christ, but Revelation 20 is a recapitulation of the entire book of Revelation, and so the thousand years here refers to Revelation chapters 1-19.  Revelation 20 recapitulates the rest of the book.  So that’s called the recapitulation view of the book of Revelation. 

 

We’ve looked at the first check point.  The first check point is, is the Second Advent of Christ simultaneous with the setting up of the eternal state.  The amillennialists insist it is and interpret Scripture as I indicated.  What does the amillennialist do, however, don’t we read in Revelation 20 that Satan is bound, what does he do about the binding of Satan?  To what does that correspond?  If Revelation 19 corresponds to the Church triumphant, what does the binding of Satan refer to.  He says it’s unfair because he says Satan is bound in a number of ways; in Matthew 12:29 Jesus said He bound Satan.  In Colossians 2:15 Christ is said to have triumphed over Satan.  That’s the binding, the same binding of Revelation 20 that’s spoken of in Matthew 12:29 and Colossians 2:15.  The restrainer, spoken of in 2 Thessalonians 1, that’s the binding, the Church, the presence of the Church in the world is the binding upon Satan. And Satan is cast into a prison during the Church Age according to the amillennial position, not that his works are missing totally from history but that they are reduced in history, there’s been a reduction.  As the gospel goes forward the works of Satan are diminished during the Church Age.  This is the view of the amillennialist.

 

That’s the first check point; the second check point was does the kingdom of God ever dominate world history, does it ever really triumph socially and politically and visibly?  The amillennial says no it doesn’t, so his answer to the second check point is a big NO!  His support for this Biblically, turn to Matthew 13, here’s where the amillennialist will take you; be prepared, know these passages of Scripture.  Don’t underestimate premillenarians who study the Word of God.  There’s a certain arrogance that attends a lot of premillennialists and they think they’re the only ones that study the Word of God.  That’s not so; you can be convinced of our position but you don’t have to go around thinking that the other people don’t study the passages. 

 

Matthew 13:1 is the amillennial justification for saying that the kingdom of God, it never triumphs visibly and socially in history, but rather the kingdom of God takes on a spiritual form.  “The same day went Jesus out of the house, and sat by the seaside. [2] And great multitudes were gathered together unto him,” and verse 3, “He spoke many things unto them in parables.”  But then in verse 10, “And the disciples came, and said unto Him, Why do you speak in parables? [11] He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.”  So says the amill, here is the place where Jesus Christ corrects the carnal, political, literal understanding of the Old Testament kingdom.  Here is where Christ says now I will let you in on a secret; the kingdom of heaven isn’t political and outward and social; the kingdom of God, I am revealing a mystery to you, is inward and is spiritual. And so the amill goes to Matthew 13:11 particularly, to justify his position that the kingdom of God has taken on a new spiritual form under the teaching of Jesus Christ.

 

What other Biblical evidences do they use to substantiate the second position, that the kingdom of God is no longer literal, physical and political, that the kingdom of God is inward and spiritual?  There are many passages of Scripture, two I’ll show you: Galatians 6:16, here they say Paul takes the word “Israel” and he doesn’t refer to a literal Israel or a physical political Israel.  Here in Galatians 6:16 says the amill, here Paul uses the word “Israel” in a spiritualized way.  It says “upon the Israel of God.”  That isn’t the literal Israel says the amill, it’s “the Israel of God,” the new spiritual Israel, the Church is the new Israel.  That’s another famous theme in all of this, the Church is the new Israel.  When you see that you are listening to either an amill or postmill.  The Church is the New Israel; no premill who knows his stuff would ever say that.  That is a tip off that the person you are listening to is not a premillenarian. 

 

Another passage is Romans 11:17, they say see, this proves the continuity of Israel and the church because obviously you have the tree, you have the branches broken off and you have the wild branches grafted in; into what are they grafted but Israel.  And so the wild branches are broken off and you have continuity and the Church becomes the new Israel, Romans 11:17, “And if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert grafted in among them, and with them partakes of the root and fatness of the olive tree, [18] Boast not against the branches.  But if thou boast, then bearest not the root, but the root thee. [19] Thou wilt say, then, The branches were broken off, that I might be grafted in.”]

 

What, says the premillenarian, do you do with the land promises?  Wasn’t Israel given land promises in the Bible?  What do you do then on your second check point if you say that the kingdom of God never attains a social, political, visible reign?  What about all those land promises given to Abraham?  It’s handled in three different ways.  As I say amillennialism has its variability about it.  Premills do to but not to this degree.  The land promises and those kind of things are handled by either saying that they were literal and fulfilled; in other words, God actually met and gave to Israel the land promises once in history.  So He’s fulfilled that promise, He doesn’t have to fulfill it again.  For proof they would use 1 Kings 4:21 and Nehemiah 9:7-8.  They say that the land promise was fulfilled under Solomon, so there’s no need for us to worry about the land promise any more, it’s all over. 

Another way it’s handled is to say that there was a hidden condition in the Abrahamic Covenant, and “if” clause; the Abrahamic Covenant was not an unconditional covenant, it was conditional, and so the land promise isn’t given because they never met the condition, it’s that simple.  That’s the second way it’s handled; the promises are scraped because Israel never met the implicit conditions of the covenant to begin.  So that’s a second way they would respond to your query about what do you do about the land promise.

 

Then there’s a third way, an outright spiritualization.  For this they rely on Romans 4:11, they say there’s nothing astounding about it at all, the land promise was given to Israel, to Abraham’s seed, but in the New Testament Abraham’s seed becomes the Church.  That’s why it says, according to Romans 4:12, “And the father of circumcision to them who are not of the circumcision only, but who also walk in the steps of that faith of our father, Abraham, which he had yet being uncircumcised.”  So since Abraham is the father of all them that believe, then the New Testament believers are the seed of Abraham, and then our blessings that we receive in Christ are the real things that God was intending to teach in the Old Testament.  They’re talking about actual land.

 

So you have these three ways it’s handled.  Either the conditions were never met in which case the land promises are scrubbed.  Two, the land promises were fulfilled; or three, these promises carry over as spiritual blessings in Jesus Christ.  That is the second touch stone; remember the second point, does amillennialism teach that the kingdom of God will dominate culture?  The answer is no!

 

The third touch stone, the third feature of amillennialism, which is identical to that of premillen­arianism, is does evil persist until the return of Christ.  The answer is yes, for reasons identical to the ones I gave you under the premillenarian position.  The amill and the premill at one in saying that evil is so deeply rooted into history that it takes Christ’s return to eradicate it, and therefore their reasons are the same as our reasons on this point, on this touch stone.

 

So much for the amillennial position.  Now we come to the last one, the postmillenarian position.  Looking again at the three check points, making sure we haven’t lost our way, going back and taking a check again at the big picture, we’ve come through the premillenarian position.  Christ’s return does not end history; Christ’s return introduces a temporary kingdom.  The kingdom does conquer history according to the premill; evil remains in force.  The amill says Christ’s return does end history; the kingdom does not conquer the world, and evil remains.  He is the same as the premill on the last point, so we don’t make any special bone here.

 

Now we come to the postmillenarian; here is his position.  Does Christ’s return terminate history?  Yes, he says, and he agrees with the amill for the same reasons.  So we need not even go into that reason, they’re duplicated.  The postmill believes that Christ’s return brings in the eternal state for the same reason the amill believes that Christ’s return brings in the eternal state.  Together they are united against the premill in saying this.  They fall together at that point.

 

The second point, the postmills believe that the kingdom will conquer human culture.  In that they agree with the premill, so the postmill and the premill both agree at this point.  This is why we discuss economics and things like that when we’re talking about this culture, the premill and the amill share concerns of this culture, not to the same degree and the same depth, but nevertheless both premill and postmill consider this, whereas the amill could care less, and it was reflected in the attendance of the clergy at the Gary North conference.  You didn’t see any amillennial clergy there, and you wouldn’t, because amillennial clergymen aren’t interested in applying the Word to society in this way.  The kingdom of God is not intended to have any repercussions in these areas; only premills and postmills were there because only premills and postmills have anything to say about the application of the Word of God to culture.

 

But now we come to a third position.  Both of those positions in the postmillenarian position we’ve covered before. We covered the first one, it’s just like the first one of the amill. The second one is the same as the second one under premill.  But now the third one; here is the uniqueness of the postmillenarian position, the third touch stone.  And that is, he believes that evil will be reduced radically before Christ returns.  This is the central difference in which the postmill stands alone; he stands against both the amill and the premill in this [can’t understand word].  By applying the Word of God evil will be driven from society and then Christ shall return. Society will be Christianized. 

 

Why does he do this?  To be consistent with the way we’ve approached matters, we will examine postmillenarianism first under its origin in history, and then we’ll deal with just the third touch stone because the other were covered under the other positions.  What is the history of postmil­lenarianism?  The postmillenarians claim Augustine, like the amills, as their father.  They claim it because Augustine believed that the Church equaled the kingdom, that the church indeed brought in the kingdom, it smashed Rome, they say, and that Christ would return around 700 AD.  And this was Augustine’s forecast.  But Augustine for this matter is looked upon also of postmillen­arianism as well as amillenarianism. 

 

However, it wasn’t really developed until the time of the Reformation.  A man by the name of [can’t understand names] and Jonathan Edwards were postmillenarians.  Jonathan Edwards was a post­millenarianism who believed that the Church would bring in the kingdom.  Many of the Puritans who set up the commonwealth of Massachusetts were postmillenarians; the believed that by setting up the commonwealth the Christianization of the world would begin from Massachusetts.  And today we’ve had men, the two Hodges, the father and son, Charles Hodge and A. A. Hodge at Princeton, Dr. Shedd who was a famous theologian at Princeton; Dabney who was one of Stonewall Jackson’s staff, he was a theologian of Virginia.  Augustus Strong, a Baptist theologian; B. B. Warfield and J. Gresham Machen were all postmillenarians.  Today we have J. Marcellus Kick who was the associate editor of Christianity Today and R. J. Rushdoony, and Lorraine Boettner.   These are the leading postmillenarians.  Rushdoony is Gary North’s father-in-law.  So we have those men living today as the postmillenarian spokesmen.

 

What are the features?  We’ll just examine the third one; you already know the first two.  The third feature is why will evil gradually eradicate from history.  What’s the basis?  They are obviously intelligent men, they must have some basis, so they must be reading Scripture in a certain way to get this viewpoint.  What are they doing?  Turn to the great commission; this is the famous passage used by them.  Matthew 28, says the postmillenarian, is not just a command, it is a prophecy.  It is not just a command to make disciples of all nations but in fact is a prophecy that all nations will one day be disciples.  So the great commission is the heart of the postmillenarian position.  As I have insisted, incidentally, and with this I would agree with the postmillenarians, the great commission is not just evangelism; if you read the great commission carefully you will see in Matthew 28:20, “Teaching them to observe all things,” not just the four laws, “all things whatsoever I have commanded you, and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”  “ALL things,” so the great commission does include a mandate to bring the Word of God into every area of life.  But the postmillenarian believes it is not only a mandate but will be successful before Christ returns. After all, he says, look at Matthew 28:18, doesn’t Jesus say in verse 18 that “All authority is given unto me in heaven,” Satan doesn’t have any authority, Christ is all the authority, and if Christ is all the authority, then the great commission must be fulfilled before Christ returns.   All society, on a worldwide global basis must be Christianized.  The kingdom of God, says Boettner, “is now being extended in the world through the preaching of the gospel and the saving work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of individuals, that the world eventually is to be Christianized, that the return of Christ is to occur at the close of a long period of righteousness and peace.”

 

In Matthew 13 the postmillenarian would go back to Matthew 13 and he would argue from one the parables there that it’s clearly stated that the Church is to conquer the world for Christ’s sake.  One postmillenarian, James [can’t understand name, sounds like: Snowden], said this about the great commission, he said: “To reduce this great commission to the premillenarian program of preaching the gospel as a witness to a world that is to grow worse and worse until it plunges into its doom and destruction is to emasculate the gospel of Christ and wither it into pitiful impotency.”

 

Now the postmillenarian, we may disagree with his position, but as we examine these positions, and I’ve always been an advocate of this, if you’re really sure of your position you have nothing to fear by studying someone else’s position.  I have come to my premill position historically because I read the amill position.  I was an amill before I became a premill.  And it always worked that way, I became a creationist after I was an evolutionist.  I’ve always insisted upon knowing the other side first and then coming to my position.  And in this case there’s an observation that I’ve picked up.  If you approach things this way it will make you a much stronger believer because you will pick up on the way little truths here and there, little observations to watch.  And one of the observations that you’ll notice about a postmillenarian is that he is intellectually aggressive.  B. B. Warfield, J. Gresham Machen, Gary North, these men are intellectually aggressive men; notice that.  Now they may be getting their aggression from false reasons, but I want you to notice something; there’s something that is appealing, the fact that they’re not mousey people, like a lot of premillenarians, worrying about Christ coming tomorrow so let’s sit on our hands and fold toilet paper until He comes back or something, that kind of attitude.  Postmillenarianism is an aggressive position.

 

In Matthew 13 he’s talking about the seeds that do not sprout.  There’s only one seed that sprouts; this is the regenerate believer, but the seed that sprouts grows and encompasses the entire world.  For example, in the passage beginning at verse 33, the parable of the sower and the seed is amplified by Jesus.  Matthew 13:33, “Another parable spoke He unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like leaven,” this is the key parable to the postmillenarianism position, the key parable, “the leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened. [34] All these things spoke Jesus” and it goes on, the idea is that the leaven is the Church, and the leaven permeates out and takes over society and Christianizes it.  That is the postmillenarian position. 

Their argument is that evil is reduced as society is Christianized.  The binding of Satan, says Boettner, occurs by imperceptible degrees; we can’t pinpoint when it begins but he says passages like Isaiah 2 which refer to all the nations coming to Jerusalem and learning the law of God, he says what that really is saying, it’s referring to the Church that has attained a position so it stands out like a mountain on a plain, and it becomes prominent in world affairs, so that all the nations come to the Word of God for their directives.  So Isaiah 2 is applied to the Church, spiritually.

 

All through the postmillenarian argument is the position that the world is getting better and better.  Boettner says, on page 43 of his book, an astounding statement, that “all the false religions today are dying.”  In chapter 7 of his book, entitled “The World is Getting Better,” so there’s a note of optimism among the postmillenarian men. 

 

Now we’ve surveyed the three schools and we come to the time of how do we decide; on what criteria do we decide the issue?  How do we decide the issue?  Everyone agrees that the issue is one of hermeneutics.  The postmill says this and we could cite hundreds of statements; the premill says the same thing and we could cite more statements and references; the amill says the same thing, so everybody agrees on why they disagree at this point.  Everyone is at least agreed here, and this is healthy, at least we know why we’re disagreeing.  We all disagree, says each of the three schools, because of the degree of literalness in those golden age prophecies.  That is the key.  How literal or how figurative do you take the prophecies of the golden age, the kingdom, the golden age of the kingdom?  How literal?  If you take it literal you’ll wind up in the premill camp.  If you tend to take it figuratively you’re going to wind up as a postmill or an amill. That’s where the argument is decided.  The argument is decided on how literal or how figurative you take these prophecies. 

 

To get the point across turn to Isaiah 2 and I’ll give you the various interpretations of it.  In Isaiah 2:2-4, this is the one that’s inscribed in the UN building.  “And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow into it.”  The “mountain of the LORD’s house,” the premill comes to this passage with a literal hermeneutic and he says the mountain of the Lord’s house is the mountain of the Lord’s house, it’s Mount Zion, the Lord’s house is the temple.  And so with a literal hermeneutic he insists that if this is God’s Word it’s got to somehow occur in history, there’s got to be a golden age in this mortal history.  Verse 4 talking about beating their swords into plowshares, it’s talking about the destruction of military weapons, this has got to literally occur someday.  Now the premill, then, has a literal hermeneutic and it causes him to make the golden age a golden age inside mortal history. 

 

The amill usually interprets Isaiah 2 to refer to the Church, the world coming to the Word of God is the world coming to the Word of God that originally came from Jerusalem.  Or, it can refer to the eternal state, the last days in verse 2 is the eternal state of the New Jerusalem, that concept.  The postmill again spiritualizes the passage and argues, as I quoted from Boettner that the mountain of the Lord’s house is simply the Church that has become politically permanent, it stands out like a mountain and people come to it. 

 

So you see the battle of the hermeneutics; everyone agrees on this.  Now what I’m going to add to this I have not seen put in writing in anything I’ve read in my study of all this.  It seems to me there is a way of solving the problem, very clearly, and I think men who have come to their position as premills have used this all along but they’ve just never stated it clearly. So I’m going to give you why, four things, four criteria of how literal do you take a passage, because if that is what we boils down to and we say passage X, let X be any passage of Scripture that you’re interpreting, we come to passage X, isn’t the issue how literal do we take passage X.  All right, then what we’ve got to do is decide how do I decide how literal to take passage X?  We’re back to some criteria.

 

I believe there are four criteria that can be used; I believe these criteria are clear enough that when they’re applied it will become clear to any person who considers the evidence that the premillenarian position alone solves the problem.  What are these four criteria that control when we come to a passage how literal do we take it, how much figurative nature do we allow in the passage. 


Here’s the first criterion.  The first criterion is what I’m going to call the cosmic possibility of the passage.  Turn to Isaiah 65:25 and I’ll demonstrate it, talking about that wolf and the lamb business.  There we have a prophecy, and the question is, how literal do we take it; do we take it figuratively just for harmony as the amill and postmill do, or do we take it literally that there’s a transformation in the zoological realm?  I say that when a man, I don’t care who he is, how many degrees he has after his name, how many years he’s been studying the Bible, he is making a decision when he hits something like this 25th verse, and unconsciously or maybe even in an unstated way this is the decision that he has made.  He has decided what is cosmically possible and what is cosmically impossible.  He has first decided whether or not that actually could occur or couldn’t occur.  So he has, prior to interpreting the passage he has a view of the range of what is possible in this world.  He has the idea of the number of changes that are possible. 

 

The man who would tend to the amill or postmill position would have the idea, no, this really isn’t possible, that the changes in God’s creation aren’t of this great magnitude, they’re smaller than that, so this therefore must be figurative, not literal.  And I would argue that on the basis of the great changes that we saw at the curse in Genesis 3, taking that literally, the great changes that we saw in the flood from Genesis 6-8, taking that literally, with the transformation of the zoological kingdom and the Noahic Covenant that creation has this range of choice in it.  So I see that much cosmic possibility.  So when I come to a passage like Isaiah 65:25 I take it literally because I say that is possible.  Why?  On the basis of other Scripture, the nature of the cosmos itself.  The cosmos itself has this much flexibility built into it, therefore the passage can be taken literally.

 

Another illustration of cosmic possibility and that is the idea, can spirituality be demonstrated physically?  And I say the incarnation is the ultimate argument.  Jesus Christ walked around in a physical body, took up space, was material, was literal, and He demonstrated spirituality out of that body in a material physical way, so why can’t spirituality be demonstrated physically in the world system.  It seems to me the incarnation is a major argument; the incarnation proves there’s a cosmic possibility of showing spirituality into the material universe.  The amill tends to be very cautious here; remember what was the fountainhead of amillennialism?  It was Augustine; remember where he got his allegorical hermeneutics?  Out of the men who were trying to correlate Scripture with Platonism, and Platonism said that the spirit is good and evil is bad, and they contracted the cosmic possibility, that it’s not possible that spirituality really be manifest materially and physically.  And I say on the basis of Scripture it can be, so when I see Scripture where it says that the Word of God shall be demonstrated in ever institution of man, I say that’s possible; the cosmic possibility is that big. 

 

Then we have another problem, again under the cosmic possibility. This is another kind of application of this criterion.  Turn to Micah 5:5-6, what do we do when we face a passage like this?  Certainly says the amill and the postmill, you’ve got to take this one figuratively; there’s no way you can take this literally.  And he has a very persuasive argument.  It says in verse 5, “And this man shall be the peace, when the Assyrian shall come into our land; and when he shall tread in our palaces, then shall we raise against him seven shepherds, and eight principal men. [6] And they shall waste the land of Assyria with the sword, and the land of Nimrod in the entrances of is; thus shall he deliver us from the Assyrian, when he comes into our land, and when he treads within our borders.”  He says look, they’re not using swords now, you can’t take that literally, see you premills, you’re not consistently literal because obviously they’re not going to use swords, they’re going to use guns, the weapon systems are far more advanced.  The sword can only be figurative.   And certainly the Assyrian nation has died and become extinct in history; who’s going to correspond to the Assyrian today? 

 

So they would argue that this is not cosmically possible and I would argue again that that is a premature judgment, for several reasons.  One, the way nations are viewed in Scripture is always tribal, never political, and when he is talking about Assyrians it is talking about the sons of the Assyrians, so wherever the sons of the Assyrians are today, that is the Assyrian, you can call him Iranian, or he can be called the Iraqians, he can be called any political name you want to call him, but genetically and genealogically he’s the sons of the Assyrians, the sons of Asher.  So I would argue that the Biblical view of the genealogical structure of history says that these nations have not become extinct.  I would use as other supporting evidences the fact that the Levites, the tribe of Israel, is still manifest today by their name.  All of us belong to those 70 tribes in Genesis 10, we have the nation here in this congregation and we can’t trace it but God can.  And so there’s the cosmic possibility that in the end times the configurations of men on the earth will be clear as far as God is concerned, and the prophecy will literally be fulfilled.

 

What about the archaic weapon system; swords, literal swords?  This is one of the problems the premill has; we might as well acknowledge it here.  Ever since we have got into the age of sophisticated weapons we can add this, that previous expositors could not appreciate about modern weapon systems.  In the military today as the weapon systems have become more advanced we have faced a crisis called the crisis of degradation; that’s not social degradation, it’s technological degradation.  For example, let’s imagine a little scenario here of the end time.  The end time has great cosmic and geological disturbances.  During these cosmic and geological disturbances many earthquakes fracture the surface of the earth, and in the fracturing of the surface of the earth, pipelines are broken and petroleum is lost, the refineries are shut down.   If the petroleum supplies of the world were shut down, if huge cracks in the earth ruptured the holding tanks that the Navy has, where would the modern weapon systems be. Where would your airplane be, where would the destroyed be without petroleum.  If there were all sorts of geophysical disturbances, including those corresponding to nuclear force, we have electromagnetic poles, EMP, that wipes out radio communications in certain frequency.  In that situation, where are your remote control weapon devices. Where are your radar systems under an EMP type situation?  Where are the weapons systems of the sophisticated arsenal under times of great physical upheaval and catastrophe?  I claim that it’s cosmically possible that man in the last days will be fighting with very primitive weapons; these are the only ones that work. 

 

So much for this first criterion, the cosmic possibility, and that’s a function of your worldview; it’s definitely a function of your worldview, and that is applied every time you’re deciding to take a passage literally or figuratively.  What is the cosmic possibility?  I say the cosmic possibility is great enough to permit me to be a premillenarian on these passages.

 

A second criterion that is employed in the use of deciding whether a passage is figurative or whether it is to be literal: the second would be the criterion of theological fulfillment.   What do I mean by that?  It’s simple, Genesis 1:26-28, man was created to subdue nature and that history is not going to end until God has seen to it that that goal is reached.  That was the mandate given to man and man has to reach that goal because Christ is going to lead him. Sure, it’s going to be by grace, but grace or not, man will reach that goal of subduing nature.  Man is going to finish the game inside history, and so I say there’s a tremendous fault with the amill position; he sees history as a big box, people are saved out of history, but nowhere in history does mankind ever reach its corporate destiny.  It’s as though you’re playing a football game and suddenly the whistle blows and instead of at the end of the 4th quarter it’s in the middle of the 3rd quarter, and the game stops and the game never finished. 

 

In my own thinking I see the amill position as an unfinished history, the whistle blows, Christ comes again, and mankind has never been vindicated in history.  Human civilization has never been redeemed, the game is finished off into eternity some place, but history, mortal history never sees victory, it’s robbed of all purpose.  The postmillenarian is better on this criteria, he sees the theological [can’t understand word, may be: sum] of the church is going to fulfill it, but I say that in Genesis 1 it says that when man subdues nature it means subdue nature.  And it means therefore that man will subdue nature, physical nature, so that the changes brought in through the millennial kingdom fulfill Genesis 1:26-28 better than the postmill position.  The postmill argues that society is just Christianized, that’s as far as the subduing goes.  I argue no-no, the subduing goes further than that, when Christ comes and sets up His millennial kingdom, not only is society Christianized but nature is transformed and comes under the rule of mankind in a direct way.  So there’s a natural cataclysmic miraculous transformation of nature that fulfills that creation mandate.  So again I take that literally, the theological fulfillment; on this base I see man as having a total and thorough theological fulfillment.  The premillenarian position alone gives the [can’t understand word].  The postmill comes close; amill doesn’t qualify on that point.

 

The third criterion is the criteria of historical responsibility.  This has been pointed out by many writers, I just invented the word or something but let me show you what’s happening here.  This criterion says that by its very nature when you make a predictive statement the predictive statement is always open to volition and responsibility, that prophecy by its very nature is never fatalistic determinism.  Prophecy by its nature is always open, and let me show you some examples of what I’m talking about. 

 

Turn to Genesis 4:1, “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bore Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.”  Some would read it: “I have gotten a man, even the Lord.”  Now in Genesis 3:15 God had made a promise; the promise was that the woman shall conceive and her seed shall bring redemption. Eve thought of the promise literally and she thought her first son was the Messiah; she read the promise that way.  There’s nothing wrong with the way Eve read it, she read it just normally, literally, but the only error in her thinking was that this promise had no time factor in it.  It was a promise of what in fact would happen, but not when it would happen.  It was open to a whole flow of events that would work together and conspire to bring Messiah along, but not Eve’s child. 

 

You have the same thing in Moses’ time, they thought when they went into the Promised Land that all they had to do was go in there and conquer the Canaanites and then rest, then would be the millennial kingdom, just a short term off, and so we found out later, no-no, century after century after century intervening here.  In other words, prophecy is expanded, it’s like a balloon, God gives it in an uninflated form and time puts air in the balloon, so it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and as you blow up the balloon you begin to notice features about it that you hadn’t seen before.   You know some of these balloons that are shaped in all sorts of funny colors and faces the kids have; when it’s flat you don’t see what the balloon looks like and you start blowing air in it and you see it has ears on it, a mouth or something, you begin to see it has form.  Prophecy takes on complexity with time. 

 

So what does all this mean?  The third criterion means that when you meet a prophetic portion of Scripture the better interpretation will be the one that allows for the most complex development, not the simplest form. Eve made her mistake, she interpreted the prophecy simplistically, it would just be her literal son, and it turns out it was a literal son, but far more complicated factors were involved than just Eve’s son.  So the third criterion means, and it sounds completely contrary to most concepts of interpretation, that the simple interpretation yields the complex, not in prophecy.  In prophecy the complex interpretation controls your simple interpretation, and I base that on the fact of watch what’s happened in prophecy.

 

Furthermore, included in this third criterion or prophecy is the fact that there will be apparent contradictions in prophecy, and when you see these apparent contradictions, remember that as the balloon blows up they’ll be resolved.  Let me give you some apparent contradictions.  Noah was told to preach to his generation repentance.  What would have happened had Noah’s generation repented?  Would there have been a flood?  The answer is no.  But Noah’s generation in fact did not repent, and God knew it ahead of time.  But there was a theoretical option because Noah truly preached repentance.  An obvious illustration is Jesus Christ, He preached “the kingdom is here, the kingdom is here, accept Me, I’m your King.”  Suppose the people had accepted Jesus as their king, would He have been crucified? Probably not, on theoretical abstract ground; there was this option open that maybe in fact they would accept Christ, from the human point of view.  So prophecy comes to you all wrapped up like that balloon that’s uninflated, and until time inflates the balloon you never really see how all these details fit.  So when we have, in this case the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, and we have golden age prophecies, we have eternal state prophecies and so on, I would say the premillenarian position of the return of Christ is superior because it is a more complicated second return.  It’s not a simplistic second return, and this would fit with the fact that prophecy in the past, it was always taken simplistically, it was found to be insufficient. 

 

Finally, the fourth criterion that can be used.  The fourth criterion is the criterion of New Testament precedents.  What about New Testament precedents?  Can we tell how prophecy was fulfilled in the New Testament to act as a control on how prophecy will be fulfilled in the future?  Now at this point we have to be careful because some will argue ah, ah, ah, ah, in the New Testament there is allegorical interpretation, look at the epistle to the Hebrews, allegorical interpretation, so by New Testament precedents we have allegorical interpretation.  I’d reply not so; there’s a difference between typological interpretation and allegorical interpretation, and here’s the difference.  In typology I am dealing with a past fact of history; in allegory I’m dealing with a past prediction in history.  And I claim there is no allegorical treatment of predictive prophecy in the New Testament.  There is typological treatment of features in the Old Testament but never, never allegorized fulfillment. 

 

My argument would be that where this seems to be so it is simply by criteria three, it is simply yet only partially fulfilled, that when we are called the seed of Abraham, it is only in a partial sense, not in a full sense, that in fact when the calendar of Israel, in the spring calendar we have Passover, we have the day of Firstfruits, we have Pentecost, I say look at the calendar of Israel and you tell me, did Jesus die literally on exactly Passover?  You bet He did.  Did He rise from the dead exactly on the day of Firstfruits and literally?  You bet he did.  And did the Holy Spirit come exactly on the day of Pentecost according to the Israelite calendar? You bet He did.  Isn’t that literal.  And there’s a fall part of that calendar that is unfulfilled. What about the Day of Atonement, the Day of Trumpets and the Feast of Tabernacles; what about those three. There’s nothing in the New Testament that corresponds by date to those three, and I say that those three are left unfulfilled; Israel’s calendar is only partially fulfilled.  The fall cycle of Israel’s calendar is yet to be fulfilled.  The inferences are that it will be in the fall of the year when Jesus Christ returns, that He will return one year on exactly the Day of Atonement, and that the millennial kingdom will begin in the fall of the year, just like Jesus Christ was crucified and died for the sins of the world in the spring of the year to fulfill literally the Jewish calendar.

 

We could go on and describe these but I’ve basically, for the sake of limited time, tried to show you that first wherewith we’ve come, we’ve dealt with three schools, the premill, the amill and the postmill, we’ve examined those three schools, we have seen how each of those three schools conspired together and agree that the primary argument is one of hermeneutics. And I’ve just offered four controls on hermeneutics which must be used in interpreting Scripture that I think if are used biblically will yield the premill position.  Shall we bow for prayer….