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I Don't Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST
Is Jesus Coming Soon? A Biblical Blueprint of the End Times with Pastor Robert Furrow
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- [00:03]
A
Ladies and gentlemen, about 10 days or so ago, we had Pastor Robert Furrow from Calvary Chapel, Tucson on to talk about the nation of Israel and what the Bible says about it. Because there's a lot of controversy out there on the web about this. Seems to have arisen largely since Charlie was murdered. Charlie was such a, a wonderful sort of glue that held the conservative movement together. And now that he's gone, it seems like people have gone off in all sorts of different direct on issues like this. And so 10 days ago, we had a complete podcast on it. We're going to continue our conversation here. We're not going to recover all the ground we covered in the last show. So if you want to see what we covered in the last show, listen to that podcast. But Pastor Robert, the new book that's going to come out in August is called the Difficult Passages in Revelation. But I want to cover some things we didn't get a chance to cover last time. And one of the objections you hear to eat for even from Christians is, look, we cannot support this government that's in Israel right now. They're a secular government. They believe in a lot of things that are against the Bible, including same sex marriage, including abortion. Sort of like what we do here in America. So why would, why would we want to bless a nation like that? How do you respond?
- [01:29]
B
Yeah, well, I think, you know, I mean, God said to Abraham, I will bless those who bless you and I will curse those who curse you. And I think that that is standing and people will get upset because Israel, they're not doing everything that the Bible says to do. In fact, as you said, they're a secular nation. They are culturally Jewish, just like the United States. We are that. People say, well, the United States is a Christian nation. None of us think that. We know that who are living here. We know that. But, but we are culturally Christians. We celebrate Easter, we celebrate Christmas, we close places are closed on Sunday. Not as much as they used to be, but they, they, they are. And we're much more so. But we don't agree with everything that our government does. But we still support our government. I support our government, but I don't agree with everything that they do. I don't agree with everything that the conservatives do. I don't agree with everything that Trump does, although I support Trump. I believe that God has restored Israel into the land and that we don't have to agree with everything that they say. And people at my church will get mad at me and I'll get letters. I've got an email they could send things to and I'll get emails from them that they're upset that I had said we don't agree with everything that Israel does. But there's anti Semitic movement on the left. There's an anti Semitic movement on the right, and there's a growing anti Semitic movement in the middle. I get on our. Our YouTube channel. I get. When I talk about Israel, I'll get people calling them the Synagogue of Satan. I'll have to erase that or try to explain that that was in the Book of Revelation. But it was one specific group, not the entire movement. They're trying to label the entire movement as the Synagogue of Satan. God's in the process of restoring them. The land became desolate. God restored the land first. That was in the early 1900s. Then he brought Israel back into the land in the. In the. Just say 1830 ish. Until. Until they became a nation in 1948. And now they're back in the land. They've taken control. And they only had 45 of the land when they declared themselves a nation. Then there was an immediate war. They took more of it. Then 67 was a war and they took the Golan Heights. Then there was 73 and they took Jerusalem. So it's expanding. And God is now he's restored the land. He's restored the people to the land, but he's going to restore them spiritually. They are going to, as a nation realize they made a mistake and that Jesus is the Messiah. There's more Jews being saved today than at any other time. So many Jews are open to the Gospel that they made a law in Israel that you cannot proselytize a young person. So if I go to a trip to Jerusalem and start to tell a young person about Jesus and there's possible jail time because so many young Jews are being saved. They read Isaiah 53, the suffering servant. They realize that's not Israel and they. So God's restoring them to where they will one day worship and serve Jesus our Messiah. They'll do it by faith. They'll accept him by faith. So we don't agree with everything that they do. Kind of like there is a biblical center to a lot of conservatism in the United States. And so we who are biblical are probably going to lean more towards conservative, although we're going to get a lot of pushback from the left about not caring about migrants or not caring about the poor, which we do immensely care care about them. But we have that conservative center and Israel's the same way because of the values of the Ten Commandments. They have this conservative center. And when you support that, then you get a lot of criticism. But we obviously don't support everything that they do. They're a secular government. They're just in the process of God bringing them to a total salvation.
- [05:25]
A
Yeah. And obviously we don't agree with them. Preventing people from evangelizing, that's not a good thing. And when you bless somebody, regardless of who it is blessed doesn't mean that you approve of everything they do. You know, if you're a, if you're a parent, you don't bless your kid by affirming everything they want to do. You would be enabling them to do evil if you did that. Bless includes correcting. And we ought to use, I think, as the United States of America, we ought to use our influence to correct Israel when they do something wrong. That's, that's blessing them. And as Christians, we have to do the same thing also. Can you guys, can you kind of give us an overview? Pastor Robert, because there's so much confusion about end times and eschatology. And what we talked about in the last program was sort of the dispensational view, which is the predominant view that you hold and that my mentor, Dr. Norman Geisler held about the fact that there will be a future for Israel and that, that Jesus is going to come back, he's going to rapture his church, then he's going to come back and rule for a thousand years. It's going to be a tribulation rule for a thousand years before the. He wraps up the whole thing. What are some of the other major views with regard to eschatology?
- [06:52]
B
So when you're talking about the actual return of Christ, it, it generally centers around the millennium. You have the preterist view, partial and full, that believe that the, all of that the book of Revelation was written before Rome destroyed Jerusalem and that it was a fulfillment of that. So that's the predators view. The full predators view believes Jesus already came back and we're not waiting for Jesus to come back again.
- [07:23]
A
And that's a heresy, by the way. Right, That's a heresy. We need to establish that now. Partial preterism is not a heresy.
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B
You're not a heresy.
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A
Yeah, Full preterism is. Yeah, okay.
- [07:32]
B
Yes. So you've got, you've got that aspect. Then you're going to go around the millennium. So we are pre millennialist. So someone who's just been, say, shells pre millennial, meaning we believe that Jesus is going to come back before the millennium. He's going to establish his kingdom and rule for a literal thousand years. Excuse me. It comes back to the way that we approach the Bible, which is in a literal sense, when we can take it literal. We know sometimes it talks about a beast with seven heads and 10 horns. There's nothing like that. We know that's got to be a metaphor for something, right? But when it's a literal, it can be literal. We know God said there's a cattle on a thousand hills and it meant, didn't mean a certain number of thousand. So we understand those kind of things. What we believe that Jesus is going to rule and reign for a thousand years. It's going to be a time of peace. It's going to be a time where, where we're going to walk in safety. It's going to be a time where animals and prey, where predators and prey will lie down together and Jesus will rule and reign and the devil will be locked up. Okay. And then it'll be released at the end and then there will be one last rebellion and it will be wrapped up. And all of that is in a study in Revelation, which gets a little confusing, but it's important again to study that because again, you're blessed if you read the book of Revelation because it's a revelation of Jesus Christ. It's not just a revelation of end time events. So then there's the amillennial view. Ah, in front of something means none. So that there really isn't a millennium that we're in the millennium now, that it's just a reference to what God's going to do periodically throughout the millennium. And there, of course, we look at that view and go, well, if Satan's locked up now, we're in a lot of trouble. There's wars everywhere. So how can people be. Be beating their swords into plowshares. You got prey that's still devouring animals. The child is still playing by the serpent. It doesn't go play by the serpents, the cobra's nest, because he's going to get bit and killed. So to do that in a metaphoric sense to me, doesn't make sense.
- [09:32]
A
Let me, let me pause right here because this is predominantly the Roman Catholic view.
- [09:38]
B
Amalia and Reformed.
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A
Okay, yes.
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B
Theology.
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A
Okay. Where do they get this scripturally? Why do they think that we're. The millennium is, is not literal, but we're sort of in the millennium now. It's. And we're bringing in the Kingdom somehow is, is this, is this their view? And what does that mean?
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B
Well, this is what I believe. I, you know, I think it's important to understand that if we were talking to them, they might say something completely different.
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A
Okay. Yeah. To be fair. Okay, to be fair, to be fair.
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B
You know, it's like these are, and these are open handed situations. We believe that people who are all millennials are Christians.
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A
Sure, of course.
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B
You know, it's, it's just a view that you believe. It does have nothing to do with salvation through Jesus Christ.
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A
Sure.
- [10:20]
B
But like the Catholic Church, you think about when they came up with their view on, on millennialism or on the last days eschatology, it was before Israel was ever a nation. It was in same thing with Reformed theology. When Reformed theology came along, they reformed a lot of things in the Catholic Church, rightfully so. But they wholeheartedly accepted their eschatology and they never reformed it. And so that's what I think. I think that the reason that you don't have someone like John Piper or others, some that are in the Presbyterian kind of lane today who don't believe in a literal millennials, because it was never Reformed. That's my opinion.
- [11:02]
A
Was, was, was John MacArthur the same way on that? Was he?
- [11:05]
B
No, John MacArthur was a hybrid. So he was a, he's a Calvinist, but he's not reformed. So he's a Calvinist who believe is a dispensation, a dispensational Calvinist which you don't find very many of. So John was very, very good when it came to eschatology and the millennium and defending the scriptures in general. Salvation theology.
- [11:28]
A
Yeah.
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B
Fantastic. But then he would get to what I see as Calvinism and he would just kind of go off the rails.
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A
Right.
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B
Which is just a real interesting thing that he wouldn't defend that would defend that differently than he did the rest of the scriptures.
- [11:42]
A
Yeah. So, okay, so they'll have their reasons, I guess. Augustine was an amillennialist, so he's written in about 400 A.D. if I'm remembering this rightly. It's been a while since I studied Augustine, like 30 years on this issue. And is it possible, as we talked about in the first show, that given the state of Israel at the time, people thought, well this really can't be true, there's no Israel in the land. So maybe we're going to spiritualize away Israel, a future for Israel. We're going to spiritualize away the millennium, we're going to spiritualize away these things that don't appear to be plausible given the fact that Israel doesn't exist.
- [12:26]
B
Yeah, I think that's exact. I think that's exactly what happened. How are you reading your Bible and Israel is all over eschatology? How do you deal with that if there's no Israel in the land? Yeah. How are you going to tell people what's going to happen? I'll give you an example of when that happened as well. Donald Barnhouse, you know who he is?
- [12:42]
A
Yes.
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B
Presbyterian Church.
- [12:43]
A
Yes.
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B
So, Donna, Barnhouse is probably the best exposure on Romans that there is. If you're going to cover Romans, you're going to read Barnhouse.
- [12:50]
A
Yes.
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B
So Barnhouse was alive during the 60s when they found the Piltdown Man. The Piltdown man was in England. It was a. The missing link was discovered, they thought came out, said the missing. Was discovered.
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A
It was in the 20s, actually.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then. But it was. And. And from that time, it took until the 60s that it was revealed as a hoax.
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A
Exactly.
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B
And Barnhouse had said that he believed in the gap theory, that there's a gap between Genesis 1:1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Okay. And there's another place that says it was God said it was good, but then it was formless and void, and it could say it became formless and void. So he believed that there were evolution, that he came to say there was evolution in those two verses. It's something he didn't believe in before. But because the. There was the missing link that was found, they thought he hadn't accepted it, changed his theology. And then they found out it was a hoax. It was the head of a human and the jaw of orangutan saying, you can see the file teeth. They needed to be clear. I mean, you could see it was just a horrible hoax. It wasn't good. They rubbed carbon paper on it to make it look older. It just was. It was a horrible hoax. So you never change your theology based on what's going on historically. You don't change your theology based on any discoveries because you don't know what's going to happen, how they're going to fill in. Like, for example, if all of a sudden they prove aliens. Well, I'm not changing my theology. You're not changing your theology just because something changes. People say, well, if aliens are proved and you guys are toast, it's like, no, not at all. How so not?
- [14:26]
A
It doesn't say that, you know, there could be aliens. The Bible doesn't say that there Are no aliens.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
- [14:33]
A
Now there is, there is import we get from natural revelation that helps us discover what the scriptures really mean. Like, for example, we don't think that the sun literally rises and sets in the sense that the sun is going around us, we're turning, and it appears that the sun rises and sets. But in our modern age, we know that, yet we still use the term sunrise and sunset because it's an observational situation. So you're always using natural revelation to interpret special revelation anyway. But I agree with you. You're not going to change your theology based on a discovery that is questionable at best. Because the Piltdown man was a hoax. They were trying to make it the missing link. And even if it was some sort of transitional form, you shouldn't, you shouldn't expect to find one. You should expect to find thousands of, of transitional forms. And you don't find that in the fossil record anyway.
- [15:34]
B
And I don't want to sound like I was being critical against Barnhouse, because I love him. Phenomenal. You know, he's phenomenal. But that was just a mistake. I think that we can learn from that. We don't make those kind of mistakes. And that can happen because Israel might not be where we think that it should be.
- [15:47]
A
All right, so I, I. Sorry I distracted you. When we went into amillennialism. Continue. You were talking about amillennialism, and there's other views. Go ahead.
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B
Yeah. So amillennialism is, is the belief that there's really not a millennial, that the millennial a thousand years means between the time Jesus left and when he's going to come back again. And so we're just living in that period now.
- [16:07]
A
Okay.
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B
I don't know what they do with the passages in the Old Testament that talk about, you know, people living to children being someone being 200 years old, still being a child. Just certain passages that we see as millennial passages. I don't know what they do with it, but they're gonna say all millennial will generally mock us for what we believe, for dispensationalism. And the Bible even says in the last days, mockers are going to arise. And it doesn't say their mockers are going to be outside of the church, but could be even inside of the church. Then there's post millennialism, which believes that Jesus is going to return after the world. Excuse me. Has goes into an area of peace. And this is a, a Pentecostal view, mostly charismatic Pentecostal view. It was very popular in the Azusa Seat Street Revival in 1905. Ish. And then World War I happened, World War II happened. We had the bloodiest time in history. And people began to realize the world's getting worse and worse and worse, not better and better and better. So post millennialism believes world is going to get better and better in every day, in every way, and then we're going to hand over a Christianized world to Jesus. So those are your three basic views. Four, if you want to include preterism into that of amillennialism, of millennialism.
- [17:25]
A
Now, in my study of this, I, I'm leaning in, in the direction that we're talking about here. But I don't take a hard view on it eschatology, just because I know people way smarter than me who know the original languages. And they come, they're conservatives, they come to opposite conclusions. I know we win in the end, but it does appear to me that this dispensational view appears to be most consistent in a hermeneutical sense, which is what we're talking about here. But there was something known as historic premillennialism. And I'm not up on the distinctions between historic premillennialism and dispensational premillennialism. Are you familiar with that, Robert? If not, it's okay.
- [18:11]
B
I'm just asking only a little bit, not completely. I do know that when you go back into church history and you see that people believed in a pre millennial, oftentimes they believed in three and a half years instead of seven years. They just hadn't quite worked out the three and a half and seven that you find all over Revelation and all over Daniel and the Old Testament. So there were certain views that they had. Historical premillennialism was different than what we have today. And I think it is because we don't go again, we talked about this in the last podcast. Yeah, we don't go to history to find out what we believe. We go to the Bible to find out what we believe. They had the Bible as well. But just like we could come to wrong conclusions, they could come to wrong conclusions. So you can't say that because they didn't believe the exact same way. Then you shouldn't believe in it. Otherwise we wouldn't believe in a lot of things because the early church, there were a lot of things that they were just, they were working out. They hadn't got it there yet. Well, let me, let me ask Augustine yet. There was no.
- [19:14]
A
Right. Let me ask you this then, from whether we're talking about a premillennial view, an amillennial view, or a post millennial view. Would all adherents, major adherents of those views agree that Jesus is coming back and he's coming back to Jerusalem where his feet are going to come down on the Mount of Olives. True.
- [19:36]
B
Yes and yes. And that, that Jesus is. Jesus is returning. And I kind of lost my train of thought, but yes, no.
- [19:48]
A
Okay, so he's coming back because Zachariah says his feet are going to come down on the Mount of Olives. It also says it's Zechariah 12 and 14. It also says that they will look on me whom they've pierced. Now, this is Old Testament, ladies and gentlemen, for those of you watching us here, I'm talking to the audience now, this is Old Testament saying the Lord saying they will look on me whom they've pierced. Question when was Yahweh ever pierced? Yahweh was Yahweh. The Father was never pierced. But if Yahweh is pierced, they're equating the Messiah Jesus to Yahweh. In the Old Testament.
- [20:29]
B
In the Old Testament, in Zechariah.
- [20:32]
A
So Jesus is going to come down from the same position he left the Mount of Olives, he is coming back to Jerusalem. So my question is for people that say there's no future for Israel, it has nothing to do modern state of Israel has nothing to do with the Bible. But when Jesus comes back, he's coming back to Jerusalem. What you want to add to that at all?
- [20:58]
B
Pastor ROBERT yeah, you know, so Jerusalem does become apostate during the tribulation period because the Jews are taken into the wilderness and protected by God. And in the end of the Book of Revelation, it calls Jerusalem this, the city where, where Jesus was crucified, spiritual Egypt and spiritual Babylon. So it our spiritual harlot. So it becomes a place where the arm armies fight against Jesus at Jerusalem. And remember, the Bible talks about the bodies being heaped up in the valley of Gehenna in the Old Testament.
- [21:37]
A
Yeah.
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B
And, and so that, yeah, they returned to Jerusalem. But there, there has to be Jews that are the nation of Israel for 144,000 to be sealed of each of the tribes of Israel for them to be taken into the wilderness and protected by God for God to regather them together and bring them into eternity.
- [21:58]
A
Again, Israel is mentioned in Romans 11, Ladies and gentlemen, that all of Israel will be saved. Now, as we mentioned earlier, theologians often debate what all means, but it certainly means a lot that Israel. This is the reason Paul is writing Romans 9, 10 and 11, because these people are unbelievers, but they're Jews. So if Israel was to completely go away when the church comes up, there's no reason to have Romans 9, 10 and 11 in the Bible.
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B
Right.
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A
There's no reason to talk about, oh gee, I give my own salvation up to save my people. And he would never say that Israel is going to be provoked to jealousy and ultimately become believers if there was no future for Israel. Now, is it possible. Go ahead.
- [22:49]
B
When we come to Book of Revelation too, you find Israel all over the book of Revelation. Yes, at, at the end. And so it's not only that God talks about them being a nation and are being a people in Romans 9, 10, 11, but also in the very last book of the Bible when things are, when things are eventually wrapped up, you find Israel all over that.
- [23:10]
A
And by the way, even, excuse me, even from a, a partial preterist view, I think it's totally legit to say that Revelation could have been written prior to 70 AD and much of what Jesus was saying was fulfilled in 70 A.D. but that's the near term fulfillment. There's also a long term fulfillment because not. Jesus hasn't come back and established a kingdom and obviously he hasn't come back a second time. So even a partial preterist view would still make sense from a prophecy standpoint because you've got the near term view. Jesus says these things are going to happen within a generation. Well, he said that in about 33 A.D. what's a generation? 40 years. It happens in 70 A.D. nobody who's writing the Bible says, look, Jesus was right. Why? Because it hadn't happened yet. Right. They don't go back and say that. But the people there, including Caiaphas, would have known. If Caiaphas was still alive at that point, he probably was gone already. But when he says to them after Caiaphas says, are you the Messiah's Son of the Blessed One? And Jesus says, yes, you will see the Son of Man coming with power on the Great, on. On the clouds.
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B
Yeah.
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A
That was a reference to the judgment that would come in 70 AD and that's a partial judgment because it's not the end times. Because when Jesus says, when you see armies descending on Jerusalem, flee to the mountains. If he was talking about just the end of the. Of.
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B
Of. Of the.
- [24:42]
A
If he's talking about the end of the world, it would make no sense to flee to the mountains because the world's, the world's Going to end. Right. He's talking about a near term fulfillment that is later going to be fulfilled again in a, in a second fulfillment.
- [24:53]
B
Is that, well, is that interesting about. So when, when Jesus said to Caiaphas, from here on out, you'll see the Son of Man coming on the clouds, given the power, kingdom and authority. That's Daniel 7. Yes. So you've got the Son of Man and he's telling him he's the one who's going to receive power, glory in the kingdom forever, that he is God in the flesh. Caiaphas tears his robe and, and, and, and from there they end up arresting Jesus and killing him. The, the near and far fulfillment in Luke 21 and Matthew 24.
- [25:24]
A
Yeah.
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B
When you read through there, you see Jesus talking about two different things. He's talking about the destruction of Jerusalem. When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then flee and, and Christians did that. They did that. Jerusalem was surrounded and Christians flee because Jesus said it.
- [25:41]
A
Yeah.
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B
So many of the Jews were killed. Not very many Christians were killed during that time. But he also talks about the last days. And this is important. You got it. You read through that, you look at it and you see that he shifts to the last days and talks about the last days in that same passage. So he's not, not always talking about near and far fulfillment. He's talking about two different times that are happening. No matter what position you take on the millennial, you believe Jesus is coming back for the living and the dead. So when, when someone who is all millennial mocks me for believing that the rapture could happen at any moment, I tell them, you believe it's going to happen because you believe some people are going to be alive when Jesus returns. He's going to catch them up to meet them in the air. But there's going to be a time the rapture is a smaller part of the larger resurrection. You have a resurrection and then what do you do with Christians that are alive? He comes back to judge the living and the dead during that time. And whether you're post, whether you're pre, whether you're mid. And that's the reason it becomes heretical if it's full preterism. Because Jesus didn't return for the living and the dead and Jesus returned. So that's extremely problematic. All of our creeds and scriptures that tell us that Jesus is going to return for the living and the dead.
- [26:55]
A
Yeah. No matter what eschatological view you take, no matter what end times view you take, ladies and gentlemen, the only view that is not orthodox is the preterist view, like Jesus has already come back full, you know, full preterism.
- [27:09]
B
Yes.
- [27:10]
A
Everybody else believes Jesus is coming back and they believe he's coming to Jerusalem. Yeah, there's something interesting about that and the current situation with regard to Israel being back in the land after being absent for 1900 years. And they come back speaking Hebrew, which had pretty much become a dead language, as you said in the first show, Robert, at least spoken. It was always written. That's never happened. That's never happened in the history of the world. To have the same people, group come back to a land after 1900 years speaking the same language. There's something special about that in, in Revelation.
- [27:53]
B
So we have the completion of everything. Right. So Revelation brings us to the completion of it all. And in the beginning of the book, we were talking about that, it says to be blessed. We're going to talk about that a little bit.
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A
Let's talk about that right now. In fact, I want to read the first passage on this and then maybe you could pick it up. Revelation 1:3. And this is in the book. Again, difficult passages in Revelation that come out in August. You can pre order it now by my guest, Robert Farrow. Here's what Revelation 1:3 says. Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep those things which are written in it for the time is near. And then there are several other blessings in that book. It says, blessed are.
- [28:36]
B
Why? Yeah, so there's a. There's seven Beatitudes in the book of Revelation blessings. So you find seven different things that the Bible, that Revelation tells us about being blessed. But so I'd like to start with Jesus. So Jesus is preaching and a woman cries out from the crowd, blessed is the breast that nurse you and the womb that bore you. And Jesus says, yes, but more so are those who hear my words and do them. So if we hear the words of Jesus and do them, we're more blessed than Mary, which is pretty amazing because Mary was blessed among women.
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A
Sure.
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B
What a blessing to raise the, the, the Messiah. And we're more blessed if we keep his word. Then James tells us that we're blessed in what we do. If we, if we do what the Bible says. So we're under a blessing when we're doing what God says and the things we're doing are blessed. When they said then in Revelation, it says, if we read and do the things in this book, you will be blessed. I think God put that there because a lot of people don't want to read it. A lot of people get. It's confusing, it's hard. Which is one of the reasons that we're covering the difficult passages in Revelation, because we want people to read it. Because you're blessed all the way until the last blessing, which is at the end of the book, the very end of the book, where it talks about the blessing of being with him throughout all of eternity, which is amazing. But I encourage you to read the book of Revelation. Don't shy away from it. The more you understand it, it is the revelation of Jesus Christ. It's not the revelations. Jay Vernon McGee used to say, there's no such thing as the revelations of Jesus Christ. It's the revelation of Jesus. Chuck Smith used to say the Gospels are Jesus in. In human form. Revelation is Jesus with the sword. And you have to know all of Jesus. You can't just know part of who he is.
- [30:23]
A
I just looked up, because I had that question earlier about the difference between historic premillennialism and dispensational premillennialism.
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B
Yes.
- [30:30]
A
One of the differences is, according to this anyway, is that historic premillennial, which was maybe more prevalent in the early Church, was that the Church endures the tribulation. So there's one return, there's no rapture. In other words. That's what I thought. That's what I thought was the case, but I wanted to verify it. Whereas dispensational premillennialism believes in the Church being taken out before the tribulation, Historic pre milism believes. No, there's just one coming of Christ
- [31:02]
B
about that.
- [31:02]
A
What's that?
- [31:03]
B
Do we have time to talk?
- [31:04]
A
Sure, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Please.
- [31:06]
B
Okay. So the. The tribulation period is a time of God's indignation and wrath that's established by the Old Testament. Clearly it's a time of God's indignation and wrath. Romans 5:9 and 1st Thessalonians, 5:9. And you can remember those by 5, 9. Right. Romans and 1st Thessalonians says, We have been saved from the wrath that is to come. And in first Thessalonians, it's in the context of his return that we are safe from the wrath to come. And Revelation 3:10 says to the faithful church, Philadelphia, because you have kept my word to persevere, I will keep you from the time of testing to come upon those on the earth. So we're going to be kept out of it. In Luke 21, verses 34 through 36, Jesus says, Don't let your hearts get weighed down with carousing, drunkenness, and the cares of this life. That. But. But be watchful. Watch and pray that you would be counted worthy to escape all these things that will come to pass and stand before the Son of Man. So we believe that Jesus is going to come and take us out before those days in Revelation 3:10. It can't be. Some people say, well, it means that God's going to protect us through the tribulation. But Revelation 13:7 says, God will give the saints over to the Antichrist. So he overcomes them. Those are the saints that become Christians after the beginning of the tribulation period. So the Bible clearly gives us that God is going to take us out before. It's not surprising the early church didn't see that, because they're learning and growing, and they don't have the collective history that we have of good godly people that have studied the Scripture over time to see what passages mean what, and make them connected together.
- [32:56]
A
Yeah, we have the privilege or the benefit of having 2,000 years of great minds looking at the Scriptures and seeing what an amazing tapestry it is and how many insights you gain from studying it repeatedly. We've been going through a series called the Bible. You never knew where. We're talking about all the types and shadows from the Old Testament that foreshadow Jesus. And once people see that kind of stuff, they go, wow, nobody could have just made this up. This is too intricate. There's too much of a tapestry here to say that these 40 different authors, written over 1500 years on three different continents, somehow pulled this all together without some sort of divine hand guiding them. So it's amazing. I. I've also heard Dr. Ger say this, and he says it in his theological. I mean, in his systematic theology, that the church seems to disappear from the Book of Revelation after, say, chapter four or from chapter four on. And so that is another way of saying, well, what happened to the church?
- [34:00]
B
When you think about it, you've got the letters to the churches in two and three to the Faithful Church of Philadelphia. He says, I've set before you an open door. In Revelation 4. 1, it says, and I looked, and there was a door opened in heaven and a voice saying, come up here. And after that, he has a heavenly view, and we have people worshiping the throne, which is amazing. Right. Revelation 4 and 5, worthy is the Lamb who was slain. And the, The. The. The seraphim are singing and all of that. And then you don't See the church again until you get into eternity, until you get into, you know, where there's no more pain, no more sorrow, no more tears. So the church is not in them. There are saints who are Jewish and there are saints who are tribulation saints, but the church is not there.
- [34:47]
A
Yeah, it's so fascinating. It was John Calvin who wrote, and I don't agree with Calvin on certainly his view of soteriology, how we're saved, but Calvin wrote commentaries on every book of the New Testament except Revelation because he said, I just don't get it. Right. And, and I think there's a lot of, a lot of Christians go, yeah, look, I just don't get it. I get that. I get that.
- [35:13]
B
I wonder what Calvin would done had Israel been back in the land.
- [35:15]
A
Yeah, maybe.
- [35:17]
B
I wonder now how, how we would approach it, because now you've got Israel. And when you're looking at all this stuff about Israel in Revelation, you go, wow, how does it fit? How does it apply?
- [35:26]
A
By the way, even if, say, Israel were to be kicked out of that land again, there's no saying that God couldn't bring them back a third time. I mean, that's certainly possible.
- [35:38]
B
Yeah, no, there's a passage actually, that says that God will reach out a second time and bring them back. He brought them back from the Babylon, exile in the. And they will never be removed again.
- [35:50]
A
Oh, is that, is that Isaiah 11? Maybe.
- [35:53]
B
Yeah, I think it's, Yeah, I, I,
- [35:56]
A
this is distant in my memory.
- [35:58]
B
Yeah. Anyway, yeah, but easy to look up. I mean, wanted to take time to look that up. But, yeah, that, that once they're brought back into the land, they will never be removed. And I think we're there. I think that's the second, you know, the first time. Babylon, second time that. Now, obviously sometimes we get our interpretations wrong. We're not saying that we're 100% right.
- [36:17]
A
Right.
- [36:17]
B
You know, we're saying that we're doing the best that we can to look at what's there, interpret what's there, and follow what's there.
- [36:24]
A
And friends, if you're listening to this and you're not even a Christian, first of all, thanks for listening. But just from a humanitarian perspective, if you look at the conflict, the current conflict between Hamas and Israel, consider yourself uninformed. If you haven't read the Hamas charter. Whenever I get a question on a college campus or even at a church, you know, what about a question about Israel and Hamas? I always, the first question I asked them, have you read the Hamas charter? I've only had one person say yes. If you read the Hamas charter, you're going to see genocide and jihad written in their charter as a goal. The reason they exist. I know people are, are, are trying to say that Israel's committing genocide. You have to investigate that in order to see if that's really true. But you don't have to investigate much on Hamas side. They proudly say that's their goal. It's right in the text. And this is, by the way, been going on for 1400 years. Not obviously, all Muslims believe this, but a significant minority do. They want Jews dead, then they want Christians dead. It's written into their documents, ladies and gentlemen. In fact, we're going to put the Moss charter in the show notes here, so you can read it for yourself. So if you want to have an opinion on this, fine, but make it an informed opinion. Read what these people actually say they want to do to Jews. They want them dead. That's just part of what they say. So. But we've been looking at the Bible side of this, ladies and gentlemen, and you can get a lot more in the book. The Difficult Passages in Revelation by my guest, Robert Furrow. Navigating the most challenging verses and topics with biblical clarity. Order it now. It'll come out in August. I also want to mention this book. Robert, you edited this book. I was privileged enough to have a chapter in it. It's called the Making of a Biblical Leader. A Practical Guide to Leading Others. Well, this thing gets almost 5.0 stars, almost universally on Amazon. So this is a great book. I only have one chapter in it. There are just tons of other great chapters from leaders in the church. You have a couple of chapters. You've got, I think Skip Heitzik in here. You've got Gary Hamrick in here. Yep, Gary Hamrick, yeah, several others. So a great. Daniel Fusco, a great book on leadership right here.
- [39:01]
B
I like to say of that book that you've got, you've got hundreds of years worth of leadership lessons that people learned while they were leading. That's being written out in that book by all of the different authors.
- [39:12]
A
Yes, yes. And Sean McDowell's in here. There are others as well. So check out those two books, the Making of a Biblical Leader and the Difficult Passages in Revelation. And friends, before I go, I want to mention, if you're listening to this on March 31, we are going to be at Ole Miss tonight, and then the following week it'll be at Louisiana Christian University. Then we're going to be up In Manhattan, New York City, at King's Church. All those details are on our website. We have future colleges coming up, so. So thank you so much for your prayers. Pastor Robert, anything else you want to say about this issue or about revelation or about eschatology before we go?
- [39:54]
B
No, I just think it's. It's the revelation of Jesus Christ.
- [39:57]
A
Yes.
- [39:57]
B
And that's what we're about. We want to know Jesus. We want to know better. We want to know what he said. We want to live it. And I don't want to be known as the revelation guy. I want to be known as the follower of Jesus Christ. I've given him my fealty. I'll serve him. I'll live for him. I'll die for him. And that's what we want. We want to know more about Jesus. And that's why the revelation of Jesus Christ is so powerful.
- [40:19]
A
Yeah. And I want to add to that by saying that a lot of people are put off by revelation. Wow. There's a lot of blood. There's a lot of judgment. Yes. But at the end, there's victory for those that have. They put their trust in Jesus. And God is not going to force anybody into heaven against their will. In the end, there's justice and grace. Those are the only two things you get in the afterlife. Either justice or grace. And we know we win in the end. If you come to a different conclusion about how the end times come into existence, okay, fine. Only preterism, full preterism is a heresy. But we do win in the end. Everybody agrees on that. Because Jesus comes to save us. And there's no other way. An infinitely just being can allow unjust creatures to go unpunished unless he punishes an innocent substitute in our place. And he does that, ladies and gentlemen. He punishes basically himself. He comes to earth and takes our punishment upon himself. And by trusting in him, you're not only forgiven, you're given his righteousness. So if you haven't done that, trust in Jesus. Because judgment is coming. Either your own personal judgment when you die, or if Christ comes before you die. You're going to be judged either way, so you might want to have him as your representative. Pastor Robert, thanks for all you're doing. Thanks for being a part of this
- [41:35]
B
show, and thank you for having me on. Love it.
- [41:37]
A
All right, Calvary Chapel, Tucson, ladies and gentlemen, if you're anywhere near Tucson, you definitely want to check out Pastor Robert there. He's a very seasoned man. He's a great preacher. He's. He's a real guy. He's been through a lot of pain and suffering himself. He lost his wife a number of years ago to cancer. I mean, you're not just a theoretical guy, man. You're living in the real world.
- [41:59]
B
Yep.
- [42:00]
A
So thanks for what you do.
- [42:01]
B
Doing all right. Well, thank you.
- [42:04]
A
Pastor Robert Fur, ladies and gentlemen. Check out his books, Check out his website. You can see his preaching online as well. So thank you for being here, and Lord willing, we'll see you here next time. God bless.