Conclusion – Bad Eschatologies Have One Thing In Common
Bad Eschatology – Part 12
Writing this series has helped clarify a couple points that I hadn’t thought of as so foundational:
Our eschatology directly impacts what we believe about God.
Except for a tiny few – no one understands the Redemption of Israel, or even cares about it.
Our churches sent their pastors to seminary, where they were taught a man-centered faith. They learned ‘scholarship’ and how to be a ‘theologian’. They were immersed in the thoughts of men who promoted false doctrines of the worst kind. So, it’s no wonder that so few understand the Bible.
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Conclusion – All Bad Eschatologies Have One Thing In Common
Bad Eschatology – Part 12
One of these days, I will need to write a book about how I got to be where I am. It’ll probably be called:
Confessions of a Feral Christian
I have stories of mishaps and misadventures that are absolute proof that a boring and unexciting life is a blessing. And yes, curiosity can get you killed. So, stay boring. Really.
The Feral Christian
But wait. What’s a feral Christian?
You’ve heard of feral cats. They’re the opposite of the domesticated bundles of fur and claw that roam our houses and demand that doors should be open. House cats have learned the rules and regulations of living with humans. Feral cats have not.
Feral Christians?
Well, we didn’t go to seminary, and we were taught by those who rejected the artificial structures that Theologians imposed upon them. And, feral Christians like myself didn’t learn the complicated vocabulary that ‘christian’ scholars like to throw around.
I still remember the moment when a friend said, “So, you’re a Dispensationalist.”
A WHAT?
Dispensationalist?
What was that?
Well, I had to do some research, and what I found seemed pretty good. But, my friend was a bit of a troublemaker, so I knew that there was a catch – which meant extra digging. That’s when I discovered that I was NOT a Dispensationalist. And, it took even longer to find out what category I could hang a hat on:
Historic Premillennialism – (The Spurgeon Kind)
The non-Spurgeon versions of that eschatology make the one mistake that all other bad eschatologies make:
They throw out the Redemption of Israel
And yes, every eschatology – every single one except for the one Spurgeon embraced – throws Israel onto the garbage heap of the Last Days. They either deny Israel’s Redemption outright, or claim that it happens within that tiny window of time called the Great Tribulation. And when I began this study months ago, I was hoping to find someone, anyone who actually took the prophets seriously and knew God’s intention to bring the Children of Jacob back to Himself.
Yes, others claim to understand the prophets, and they make a lot of noise about how this prophet or that confirms their version of eschatology. But they are all, with almost no exception, parroting the words of someone like Augustine, Darby or Gill. The Feral Christian in me doesn’t want to understand why anyone would do that, but I’ve been domesticated enough at this point in my life to see why.
We love our teachers, and it’s really hard to go against what so many taught us.
I get it, but it took a very long time to get there. However, that doesn’t change an important fact:
Domesticated Christians aren’t ready for what’s coming.
Those who follow Amillennialism, Postmillennialism, Preterism, Dispensationalism, or even Historic Premillennialism are not ready for what is coming. They have literally no idea that the coming of Gog and Magog will crush what is left of our civilization when it arrives. And if I’m right about what occurs during Revelation 6, we are definitely not ready for the ride of the Red, Black and Pale horses.
Our ‘modern’ civilization is an exceptionally fragile thing. It will not survive the Ride of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And when God shakes the Earth in Seal Six, what’s left will be crushed. And, I’m truly hoping that Seal Six is the Redemption of Israel, because if it isn’t…
…it’s all very much worse.
Trust me. You do NOT want to see Ezekiel’s Fire occur BEFORE the Four Horsemen ride. You just don’t. But, I’m saying that as if we have a choice. We don’t, and that’s where we’ve gone off the rails.
It’s Time To End The Rebellion
We thought that we could vote on how the Last Days would play out, and that God would be moved by our opinion.
We’re sheep. God isn’t going to ask us for permission on how the Last Days play out. What He requires is our obedience and submission to His actual words, and we are refusing to do that.
What is it that Samuel said to Saul?
For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, And stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, He also has rejected you from being king.”
– 1 Samuel 15:23 (NKJV)
Beware fellow Christian. If you rebel against God, do not expect Him to accept you and say “Well done.” We have been rebels for too long.
It’s time to end the rebellion.
So, let’s conclude this series on bad eschatology with a summary look at the rebellious ideas that have plagued the Body of Christ for far too long.
Five Bad Eschatologies
As I said, this study has been tremendously enlightening because it showed just how toxic bad eschatology is. And, it has reordered my understanding of how we got to this point, a time when so few know what the Bible actually says.
Amillennialism – The Sword Of Augustine That Murdered Millions
Amillennialism – A Somewhat Older Insanity
https://revelationsix.com/2023/05/27/amillennialism-a-somewhat-older-insanity/Amillennialism – Augustine’s Greatest Blunder
https://revelationsix.com/2023/06/03/amillennialism-augustines-greatest-blunder/
If I had known that Amillennialism was the foundation of the Roman Catholic Church and their murderous rampage across Europe, I would have started there. And when I expand this study into a more permanent form, this invention of Saint Augustine will lead the way.
Yes, Augustine and his ‘City of God’. It was a well-crafted lie that made you want to believe it. It seemed so empowering. It gave permission for the ‘citizens of heaven’ to murder all who disagreed with the thunderous rule of the Papacy. It introduced the practice of turning difficult scriptures into something symbolic.
Do you want to know how we can be LGBTQ-affirming and appoint female and homosexual pastors?
Look no further than Augustine. By making the Millennium symbolic, everything in the Bible could be (and was) made symbolic. The Pope could be made infallible. You could sprinkle babies instead of immersing believers. You could burn heretics at the stake and call it mercy. You could worship idols and call them saints. You could call church elders priests and deny them the right to get married. You could ally yourself with Satan and still call it righteousness.
Without Augustine’s Amillennialism, it would have been harder for the Roman Catholic Church to do what it did. But, I’m sure that they would have found a way. Evil always does.
Postmillennialism – Amillennialism On Steroids
Postmillennialism – Amillennialism On Steroids
https://revelationsix.com/2023/06/17/postmillennialism-amillennialism-on-steroids/
As the first thousand years after Christ ended, Amillennialism was looking a bit tattered. Augustines’ predictions failed miserably, and the Roman Catholic Church was looking a bit bewildered. So, their theologians looked for a way out. But, it wasn’t until an Anglican priest came along that an answer was found to their dilemma.
That ‘priest’ was a guy called Whitby. And he proposed that Amillennialists were all looking in the wrong direction. He claimed that the Millennium would start sometime in the future, after the world was conquered by the Gospel. And, he went on to say that after this thousand year rule by Christianity was finished, we would hand the Kingdom to Jesus.
That’s right, according to Postmillennialism, Jesus Returns AFTER the symbolic Millennium is over.
Unfortunately, this new ‘Amillennialism On Steroids’ has inspired modern Postmillennialists to think of how much faster we would get to their desired goal if we employed more Carrier Strike Groups and Armored Brigades.
Just think of how fast the Gospel could work, if we shot all the bad guys first, right?
There’s a part of me that is sympathetic to the idea of ‘shooting bad guys’, but that is NOT the Way of Christ. Here is how Satan is conquered:
And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death.
– Revelation 12:11 (NKJV)
You cannot defeat Satan by killing his minions. That’s not how Christ will have victory. Our job is to share the Gospel and die for our Lord, when the time comes.
Preterism – An Antichrist Heresy
Preterists Take a Knife to the Bible
https://revelationsix.com/2023/02/11/preterists-take-a-knife-to-the-bible-bad-eschatology-part-6/Preterism – An Antichrist Heresy
https://revelationsix.com/2023/05/20/preterism-an-antichrist-heresy/
A hundred years before Whitby, the Pope was in something of a bind. The Protestants were calling him the Antichrist, and he didn’t like it very much. He had already sent out the Jesuits to defeat the Protestant Reformation, but they weren’t getting much in the way of success.
That’s when Jesuit Cardinal Luis del Alcázar came to the rescue with his book Vestigatio Arcani Sensus in Apocalypsi , published in 1614. It launched the Preterist movement. The Pope didn’t like it very much, so it didn’t make it into the Roman Catholic Catechism. But, the Jesuits did peddle their fiction to the Protestants with some success.
Preterism plodded along until Max King, who took Jesuit Preterism and made it worse. Lots of people fell into it, when they realized that Dispensational Premillennialism and the Pretribulation Rapture didn’t make sense. But, instead of seeking for a more Biblical answer, they dove into the worst possible eschatology.
We’re glad that Max is no longer around to cause trouble, but he didn’t shuffle off this mortal coil before launching two new ideas:
I will leave it to you to plumb the depths of King’s heresy, but it’s really, really bad. He took a lie from the pits of Hell (The Roman Catholic Church) and made it even more antichrist than it already was.
Why do we allow such evil to thrive in our midst?
Dispensational Premillennialism – The Painful Fantasy Of False Optimism
Bad Eschatology, Part 3 – The Pretribulation Rapture
https://revelationsix.com/2023/01/21/bad-eschatology-part-3-the-pretribulation-rapture/Bad Eschatology, Part 4 – Pretrib History
https://revelationsix.com/2023/01/28/bad-eschatology-part-4-pretrib-history/Bad Eschatology, Part 5 – Why This Is So Hard
https://revelationsix.com/2023/02/04/bad-eschatology-part-5-why-this-is-so-hard/
Preterism wasn’t the only eschatology that the Jesuits created. They were also the authors of the Pretribulation Rapture theory. Their first attempt was in the late 1500s, when two Jesuits, Francisco Ribera and Roberto Bellarmino put forward the idea that the Rapture would happen before the Great Tribulation – where all the Good Catholics would go to heaven and leave behind the Bad Catholics.
The Pope didn’t like the idea of ‘bad Catholics’, so he banned their efforts.
Then, along comes Chilean-born Manuel Lacunza, a Jesuit priest who found himself with too much time on his hands, because he’d been defrocked. (Remember that part about the Pope disbanding the Jesuits in 1773?) Lacunza built on the ideas of Ribera and Bellarmino that all the good Christians (i.e., Catholics) would be resurrected BEFORE the Antichrist. However, he said that after this ‘rapture’, the Roman Catholic Church would side with the Antichrist.
The Pope liked it, except for the last bit, so he banned this idea, too.
Undeterred, Lacunza chose to write in Spanish and publish under the name Rabbi Juan Josafat ben-Ezra. The book gained popularity throughout Spain and eventually wound up in the hands of a Scottish Presbyterian, Edward Irving.
Irving was so fascinated by Lacunza’s ideas, that he could talk about nothing else. Eventually, this idea of a pretrib rapture got to John Nelson Darby, who decided that it was the perfect addition to his theory of Dispensationalism. However, Darby’s Dispensational Premillennialism might not have been successful without the steam-powered printing press and a corrupt lawyer – Cyrus Ingerson Scofield.
Scofield did the one thing that no one had ever thought to do – create a Bible that had his commentary inserted alongside the words of God. Some thought it to be a blasphemous idea, but it soon became one of the most popular Bibles of the early 1900s. Scofield made millions and injected the false theories of Dispensationalism and the Pretribulation Rapture into churches and seminaries across the English-speaking world.
It was proof that you could convince people of anything, if you said it often enough and loudly – along with inserting it into your version of the Bible.
Once this Jesuit pretrib theory took up residence in our seminaries, it was all over. Dispensationalism and all its terrible flaws was here to stay.
Historic Premillennialism – The Almost-But-Not-Quite Dead Eschatology
Historic Premillennialism – The (Almost) Dead Eschatology
https://revelationsix.com/2023/07/01/historic-premillennialism-the-almost-dead-eschatology/
The least favorite of all eschatologies, is the oldest. It was the belief of all Christians before Augustine – which is why it is called ‘historic’. But after Augustine, you had to keep quiet about what you believed or get burned at the stake. That wasn’t the only reason the Roman Catholic Church would murder you, but Historic Premillennialism was certainly a clear sign that you needed to be killed.
After all, only a heretic would ever deny Amillennialism and believe that the First Resurrection and the Rapture would occur before the Millennium. And, everyone knows that heretics should be burned at the stake to cleanse them of such awful ‘heresy’.
However, the Protestant Reformation allowed persecuted Christians some breathing room, and Historic Premillennialism – originally just called premillennialism – started to gain ground. Unfortunately, John Gill stuck his foot in and muddied the waters with his love of Talmud, Mishna and the Zohar (Kabbalah).
John Gill was the number one reason why Historic Premils lost sight of Israel. He was a Baptist pastor in England during the mid-1700s, who was also a prolific commenter on the Bible and the first to openly refute the Amillennialism of the Protestants. His clear set of arguments for Premillennialism helped make this the eschatology of Baptists everywhere. Unfortunately, he dumped the Redemption of Israel into the tiny window of time called the Great Tribulation.
It was the ultimate face-palm moment for eschatology. It’s as if you were running the Marathon for the Olympics and are about to cross the finish line and win the gold medal, only to make a wrong turn at the last minute. Gill could have laid out an eschatology that was completely Biblical, were it not for his love of Jewish fables and demonic mysticism.
What a tragedy.
Were it not for Spurgeon, we wouldn’t have much of an example of Historic Premillennialists who understood Israel’s place in Eschatology.
Blindness
Bad Eschatology, Part 2 – Blindness
https://revelationsix.com/2023/01/14/bad-eschatology-part-2-blindness/
All of this bad eschatology exists because of something that happened when Adam ate the fruit offered to him by Eve:
Willful Blindness
It’s literally everywhere you look. There isn’t a single corner of the human condition that isn’t affected by the scourge of willful blindness. We go to war because of it. We use it in politics and education. We preach it from our pulpits. We corrupt everything in our society because we love it so much.
Willful Blindness is the deliberate closing of your eyes to what is true because the consequences of believing it would be too severe. Here’s a statistic that will hopefully drive this point home:
About 85% of any given group of people are engaged in willful blindness.
Eighty. Five. Percent.
That figure comes from a number of studies of companies and institutions. And, I learned quite a bit about that from this TEDx talk by Margaret Heffernan:
Margaret Heffernan: The dangers of “willful blindness”
Eighty five percent of those who follow an error, know that there’s a problem with what they believe. They know that their beliefs just don’t ‘add up’. But, they refuse to acknowledge what they carefully refuse to see – because the price is too high.
To my mind, this is the number one reason why Christians hold on to bad eschatology. The truth is too expensive for them. The cost would destroy their comfortable existence that they’ve built for themselves, so they close their eyes and lie to themselves about what they claim that they cannot see.
Bringing Back The Redemption Of Israel
As I mentioned at the start, part of the reason why I see the problems of bad eschatology is due to being raised as a Feral Christian. I was never force-fed the foolishness of this or that theologian, and ignoring commentaries gave me plenty of time to read the Bible. So I did.
Also, at the same time that my spiritual life was maturing, I had developed a fascination with Israel. As someone who had been studying the evil of war, the struggle for survival by the Jewish State was deeply compelling. It was the clearest story of Good versus Evil that you could find in our modern era. It was David and Goliath all over again.
Better yet, it was prophecy coming true.
So, when I was offered the chance to go to Jerusalem, to play whatever bit part I could in the Redemption of Israel, I jumped at the chance. And for 15 years, it was a place that I called home.
However, as is the story that so many of you can relate to, God had other plans for me. And, I find myself in another fascinating place that also has a David and Goliath feel to it – Taiwan. China is preparing to invade and the lives of millions are at stake. But, I’m not sure that I would have been in the position to write all this, if God had not drawn me to this rather small island.
When you read the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, one thing becomes very, very clear if your mind is not weighed down by the dusty commentaries of men:
The Redemption of Israel is a cornerstone of eschatology.
There is a mountain of prophecy about Israel’s Return to faith in God. In fact, when I wrote my two books, I had to trim back the number of references to the Children of Jacob accepting Jesus as their Lord and Savior. There were just too many to talk about.
Those who throw out the Return of Jacob from their understanding of the Last Days, are also throwing out a huge part of the Bible. In fact, to put it more bluntly:
To discard the Redemption of Israel is to call God a liar.
I know that none of you want to do that, and I shudder to think of what God will say to those who hold such error. They will all answer for the false teaching we promoted, when they stand before God. I fear God greatly and know that I will answer for all the false claims that I have made. And, I’ve had to repent of quite a few false beliefs over the years, and I truly wish that more Christians were willing to do that.
It is time to end our rebellion against God and accept the proper place that the Redemption of Israel has in the Last Days.
I truly hope that you’ll be ready for this
A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished. – Proverbs 22:3
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Keep this ministry alive with a donation.
Subscribe for free to Revelation Six and receive my articles in your inbox:
And, read my two books:
I created an Android App that will help you read through the Bible in a Year. You can find it here:
https://revelationsix.com/android-apps/
If you miss my rantings about geopolitics, idiocy, resource collapse and incompetent globalism, follow me on Twitter.
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I refuse to be put into a box of what I believe as far as eschatology of the end times goes. I didn't know what people were talking about at first, then read through all the types & realized that I don't really fit into any category 100%. That was when I decided to ignore all the nonsense & just read my bible asking the Holy Spirit to guide me & reveal what is happening next as we come closer to it. I just shake my head at some people's ideas as they are not Scriptural at all, so I wonder how they come to their conclusions to be honest.
I probably come closest to Spurgeon as I have always taken God at His Word in that He chose Abraham & made a people for Himself to be a light unto the gentiles but they failed unfortunately. However He knew that they would & used them anyway, the main thing is when you read the OT Scriptures you must be stupid if you can't understand that right throughout He says that they are His people for eternity. I've just read 1 Chron. 16 again where God promises David that He will establish his family line forever which He does through Jesus. His Word tells us that He is God & does NOT change His mind as He is not a man. I am just so thankful that He NEVER changes His mind or I would be in serious trouble because He is my stability in this world. My solid Rock of dependability.
The closer we get to the end of days the sillier people are becoming in their understanding of what Scripture truly says, probably because they don't read the OT or that they interpret what they read according to their ideas & not according to what the Lord is actually saying & boy am I just so thankful that you pushed me into reading it in 2017 so that my eyes were opened to the truth by the Holy Spirit.
Just last week I learnt a bit more about the so-called early church fathers that blew me away as I hadn't realized just how unbiblical most of them really were eg., many go on about Augustine being so great. (RC Sproul was one) Well, if what I read last week is the truth then the man had some dangerous ideas, not to mention destructive. I did have an old copy of one of his books & struggled through it but in the end threw it in the garbage & think that people who think he was great are nuts. If the person's writings aren't in Scripture then I am not interested in reading their books.