Eternal life resides in Jesus and in Him alone. No one else! This is true now and will also be the case after Jesus removes His true church from the earth.
In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
What do people need the most? The answer remains the same as it’s always been: A clear understanding of the Gospel. By this I mean that people need Jesus, not the one that so many today create in their mind but but the One revealed on the pages of Scripture.
The church is the body of Christ with Jesus as its Head; it does not operate as a kingdom in this present world. And it’s most certainly not the restored kingdom of Israel.
The Lord never intended for His church to behave like a kingdom with an aristocracy that rules over it. We function on earth as Jesus’ body with each member possessing spiritual gifts that support the whole.
What does Daniel’s prophecy have to do with the Jesus’ imminent appearing? If the last period of Daniel’s “seventy weeks” is now nearing its start, this verifies that we live in the last days of human history. The scoffers of our day, however, tell us that Daniel’s words are no longer relevant for today and that Israel’s rebirth as a nation was just a fluke of history.
The opposition to Jesus’ future reign on earth remains intense. Although premillennialism grew dramatically during the twentieth century, many Bible-believing teachers and pastors have reverted to Augustine’s platonic view of reality that denies biblical teaching regarding the millennium.
What has caused this reversal in recent decades? I believe the roots of today’s passionate opposition to premillennialism lie in Satan’s continuing hatred of anything to do with Jesus’ future reign.
We live on the edge if eternity. For those who know Jesus as their Savior, it will start when He catches us up to meet Him in the air (1 Thessalonians 4:3-17). We live in biblical times.
As many of you know, I often write about the signs of the time. However, I feel compelled to do so again as reminder both to myself as well as to others of the nearness of Jesus’ appearing.
Amillennialism dominated the church during the dark ages and persisted long after the Reformation. The reason for this rests with three factors that fueled this teaching for well over a thousand years and remain in place today, at least to some degree.
It’s vital to our faith that we understand the errant foundation of amillennialism so we can recognize the error and defend the integrity of Scripture when others seek to lead us astray.
Life in the eternal state will undoubtedly be spectacular,. Randy Alcorn, in his book Heaven does an excellent job of expanding our imaginations regarding what life might be like on the new earth and in the New Jerusalem. We have much to look forward to when the words of Revelation 21-22 ring true throughout the earth and universe.
If such is the case, does it matter what I believe about the millennial reign of Jesus? Absolutely!
You may wonder why I am again writing in defense of the pretribulation Rapture, the belief that Jesus will come for His church before the start of the seven-year tribulation. I am doing so because we live in a time when many inside and outside the church ridicule our hope in Jesus’ imminent appearing.
How do we answer those who mock the hope we hold so dear?
In this two-part series, I will answer twelve questions that confirm our belief that the New Testament indeed teaches a pretribulation Rapture.
Covenant premillennialists believe Jesus fulfilled all of the Old Testament during His first coming; this includes all of God’s covenants with the nation of Israel including the promise of the Land, which the Lord says is an “everlasting covenant” (Psalm 105:8-11).
Their claim to be premillennial obscures their denial of a literal thousand-year reign of Jesus over the nations of the world.
As a child, I loved AWANA and grew up with its motto verse hanging on the wall of my bedroom. It read, “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15, KJV).
The Greek word for “rightly dividing” literally means to “cut straight” with the implication of interpreting Scripture accurately.
On September 15, 2020, President Trump presided over the signing of peace deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates as well as between Israel and Bahrain. Fox News reported President Trump as saying that the deals would form “the foundation for a comprehensive peace across the entire region.”
From a biblical prophecy standpoint, how are we to regard these peace accords that the Trump administration refers to as the “Abrahamic Accord?”
Why do we believe that the rapture will happen before the tribulation? There are a number of signposts in Scripture that point us in the direction of which I will write about in the coming weeks. I will start with premillennialism.
Premillennialism is the belief in the thousand year reign of Jesus before the eternal state (see Rev. 20:1-10). Those who hold to this position believe in a literal seven year tribulation after which Jesus returns to earth to setup His kingdom and rule over the nations from Jerusalem.
For several months I attended a church whose doctrinal statement affirmed its belief in premillennialism, the belief in Jesus’ reign over the nations before the eternal state. So my wife and I faithfully attended assuming the church stood by its statement of faith. Such was not the case.
Later, in discussing prophecy with the pastor I discovered he identified himself as a “covenant premillennialist.” I remained hopeful even then that he believed in a future for Israel and an actual millennium. I later discovered that he did not believe these things.
In 1893, Norwegian Expressionist artist Edward Munch painted what has come to be known as The Scream. Munch originally called his work The Scream of Nature.
According to Munch, the inspiration for the work came while on a walk at sunset. As the setting sun turned the sky to red, he sensed an “infinite scream passing through nature.” Historians speculate that a volcano eruption may have turned the heavens him into such a daunting red hue.
For those paying attention; world events scream with great danger for those who do not know Jesus as their Savior. For those who trust Him, we await the sound of the trumpet and shout of an archangel.
I could not have written this article several months ago. Although I had no doubts about the biblical truth of premillennialism, I did not fully comprehend the perils of denying Jesus’ thousand year’ reign over the nations of the world as described in Revelation 20:1-10 and Zechariah 14. The denial of Jesus’ rule over a restored Israel is known as amillennialism.
When I heard a popular prophecy preacher refer to amillennialism as a “false teaching” and a “doctrine of demons” (Tim. 4:1), I shuddered; I was not sure I agreed with him. Now I know he was correct.
To say the world is the same today as in years past – that we don’t live in unique times – is just not true. More than any other generation, ours has reason to expect the Second Coming. Jesus and the prophets said to look for specific signs heralding the end times. For over 1,800 years, you couldn’t find one of the signs they said to look for. Today, in one form or another, you can find all of them. Here are just a few examples:
We live in the last days of human history as we know it before the start of the tribulation.
We do not know the day or the hour when Jesus will come for His church or when day God’s fierce wrath will begin. The prophetic signs we see all around us, however, tell us these things are getting ever so close.
I shared this list a couple months ago through my newsletter. As events continue to point toward the soon return of Jesus, I decided to update the list and make it available to more who may be interested. I have also changed the order a bit.
Most of us have seen it at some point in our lives. The daytime sky becomes dark ahead of an approaching strong storm; the blackness of the clouds makes it seem like night outside our window as our smartphones buzz with weather warnings. This happened outside my window as I was writing this post.
In Jesus’ day, people did not have our technology to warn of approaching storms. Instead, they learned to recognize signs in the sky that told them what to expect.
