© Charles A. Clough 2003
Charles A. Clough
Biblical Framework Series 1995–2003
Part 6: New Truths of the Kingdom Aristocracy
Chapter 5 – The Destiny of the Church
Lesson 223 – Critics of Pre-Tribulationism
01 May 2003
Fellowship Chapel, Jarrettsville, MD
www.bibleframework.org
It’s been so long, tonight we’re going to finish up pre-tribulationalism and next week we’ll conclude with a review of the overall Framework. To put this in perspective once again, let’s remember what’s going on here, this whole area of eschatology and the destiny of the church. The attempt on all these views is to sort out the biblical data and since we’re dealing with a future event, not one we can see there are always uncertainties because the prophecies do not give a totality, they don’t tell you every little detail that’s going to happen; no prophecy ever has, God always room for surprises, that until the event takes place there’s a certain uncertainty about how some of these details fit together. Just like there was uncertainty about the First and Second Advent of Christ.
But as we said before, going through the Old Testament there’s the nation of Israel and then there’s the church, and the church obviously had a different character than Israel. Israel was a physical entity with a land, a nation, it had it own laws, it was made up of only Jews or Gentiles who had become Jews by ritual, circumcision, etc. The church, however, is made up of a subset of Israel who have recognized the Messiahship of Jesus, and is [also] made up of Gentiles who have also come to that conclusion. The two entities are different and so what the problem is is that Israel has one destiny, the church has a destiny. You find out about Israel’s destiny in the Old Testament and amplified in the New Testament; you find out about the church’s destiny only in the New Testament. So now the problem is how, if the destiny is the end of history, how do you mix these two together and come up with some sort of rational thing that honors the Scripture.
That’s what all these views are about. We know from the Old Testament that Israel looked forward to a time of the Kingdom on earth and Israel was to have this destiny and there was to be a time of tribulation prior to that Kingdom, and then there was to be the Kingdom. As time went on, it became ever more clear that the Messiah—there would be a Messiah first—and the Messiah of Israel would turn out to be the long-promised Seed of the woman in Genesis 3. Messiah was therefore tied to the earlier Gentiles, and this Messianic coming was to come at the end of this time of trouble to deliver Israel. You always want to remember that. Why was the Messiah to come? The theme was the deliverance of Israel and the beginning of the Kingdom.
Of course we have preterists now who are arguing that the coming of the Messiah has nothing to do with Israel. Some of them believe the coming of the Messiah happened in AD 70, not too many people noticed it but nevertheless they claim that it happened, and therefore all these prophecies are metaphors. The big thing about it is they don’t that advent of the Messiah as a delivering presence. They see it as a condemning presence, as a judgment of Israel, exactly opposite to the way the theme of the Old Testament portrays it.
Then there will be a judgment and then believers will stay in the Kingdom and unbelievers will be rejected; the godly will inherit the Kingdom and the ungodly will be removed. That’s why John the Baptist had that picture of the shovel and the grain, and it’s the chaff that’s blown away and what comes back is the grain. That’s consistent, so there’s a consistency to this Old Testament picture that the Kingdom is going to be inherited by believers. But when you come to the church and its prophecy, the church is said to go along in history and at a certain point in time every believer will be transformed and dead believers will have their souls reunited with their bodies and they go to be with the Lord Jesus Christ. The church is promised to be rulers in the Kingdom, etc. But the idea here is there’s no mention of any tribulation, there’s a direct transformation of everybody that’s ever been a Christian, is transformed into resurrection status.
Here’s the dilemma. If at this point all Church Age believers equal resurrection bodies, then that means at that point there are no people left on earth who are believers in non-resurrected body. If every believer, by definition, has been transformed or resurrected there aren’t any more believers in history with resurrection bodies. The problem is that this Kingdom seen in the Old Testament has death in it. It’s true it’s death after a hundred years or after punishment, etc. but the Kingdom is not conceived to be a Kingdom with immortal bodies. The Kingdom blends off into eternity with immortality, obviously, because there is resurrection in the Old Testament. But the Messianic Kingdom as it comes, if we are to take it literally, if we are to use a literal hermeneutic to those Scriptures, we have to come up with a conclusion out of the Old Testament that the Kingdom is populated by people in mortal bodies.
If this is natural bodies then how do you mix the two destinies? That’s the crux of this whole thing. That’s why we said you can go one of two ways here and you want to understand there are many different permutations and combinations, but there are only two stable ones. Either you blend Israel and the church together, and then, because the church is in resurrected body, you simply make this Kingdom the eternal state. There isn’t really a Messianic Kingdom. And that would mean amillennialism. If you mix the two together you wind up with amillennialism. It’s partly consistent, but once you do that you’ve abandoned a literal hermeneutics. So to get there you’ve eliminated the literal hermeneutic. If however you keep the literal hermeneutic that prevents you from mixing the church and Israel because of this resurrection body issue, and a few other issues. So now you wind up as a pretribulationist who believes that the Rapture has to occur here and then there are seven years after that plus, there may be gaps in there, we don’t know, then you come into the Kingdom.
I’ll review pages 137 and 138 in the notes to get a running start and then we’ll go through the four problems of pretribulationism. We’ve gone through a number of views; we’ve gone through post-tribulationism, mid-tribulationism, Three-quarter tribulationism, and now we’re on pre-tribulationism. Let me draw a picture of the chart; again Daniel’s 70th week so you have 7 years, you have the antichrist at the beginning, you have the covenant that started with the nation Israel and then you have the Second Advent at the end of that seven-year period. In pre-tribulationism you have the church raptured at some point prior to that and whether there’s a gap in there, we don’t know; there could be, there’s no necessity that a split second after the church is raptured that the antichrist has to make a covenant with Israel. There’s flexibility.
On the bottom of page 137 is where I kind of summarize in one paragraph the highlights of pre-tribulationism. I say “it clearly solves the problem of keeping the church from the wrath of God in a way compatible with Revelation 3:10,” because in Revelation 3:10 one of the promises is not I will keep you from tribulation, but I will keep you from the time, the hour of tribulation. Second, “it maintains the entire 70th week as a time of judgment focused upon Israel and the nations as this judgmental period is presented in the Old Testament.” Remember all the other views where you’re bring the church, instead of rapturing it out ahead of this, you bring the church into the Tribulation and you get it out either at the midpoint, you get it out at the three-quarter point, or you persist all the way to the end. When you do that you have to add in to the scheme of things how can that be when the Tribulation is the expression of the wrath of God. How do you say that the church is in it but not subject to the wrath of God?
That’s been the stumbling block on all these other positions, is that one way or another they have to deal with this problem. Either they try to make the Tribulation, parts of it, not the wrath of God, which seems a little silly since all the judgments of the Tribulation are the breaking of the seals in Revelation 5 and 6, surely that’s the wrath of God, or they have to say that the church is somehow divinely protected. If the church is divinely protected the problem you have with that is that there’s martyrdom going on in the Book of Revelation during the Tribulation period. How is that protection? Either way you slice it, if you bring the church into the Tribulation you’ve got some interpretive problems created; it’s not smooth sailing. There are some very serious problems.
Looking at pre-tribulationism the second point is that it maintains the 70th week of Daniel, so you can keep the Old Testament scheme, those are seven years of the wrath of God, and you don’t have the problem because the church is exited before that so you don’t have the problem of the church having to be protected from the wrath of God during the wrath of God.
The third thing, “it allows enough time for the Bema Seat Judgment and the Marriage Supper of the Lamb to occur prior to the church returning with Christ at the end of the 70th week.” There are these things that have to be fulfilled, the judgment of the church, 1 Corinthians 3, 2 Corinthians 5, and the Marriage Supper of the Lamb which is spoken of in the Book of Revelation where the church is looked upon as the bride of Christ and is made ready to come with Him at the Second Advent.
The fourth thing, “it permits a literal interpretation of the Millennial Kingdom, starting with people in natural bodies.” People can differ from the pre-trib position; all I’m saying is that if you do, then certain consequences necessarily follow whether you like it or not, they just logically follow and you have to cope with those.
Also I say that “Pre-tribulationism also raises the issue of ‘imminency.’ ” And that is the idea, page 138, that “the Rapture comes suddenly without warning.” There’s a “blessed hope” Paul says, a “blessed hope” and the church is directed to look to that blessed hope. The church is not directed to look for the antichrist; the church is directed to look for Christ. So the imminency means that we don’t have signs necessarily predicting the Rapture. Certain things can happen, certain prophecies can … obviously Israel has come back into the land and you’re going to see the present historical state in which we live right now, this year, this month you’re having a split start to show up within evangelicalism because those who are Replacement Theologians, those who come out of the Reformed position who don’t accept pre-tribulationalism and what do we know that they don’t accept if they don’t accept pre-tribulationalism, they don’t accept a literal hermeneutic of prophetic Scripture. People like D. James Kennedy and those people are now coming out and saying the idea that Israel is to be in the land is total misreading of the Scripture, etc. and that’s because speaking out of an amillennial and postmillennial position, Israel had no future and so it’s incidental whether they’re in the land or out of the land.
That’s one of the great divides and you’re going to watch this unfold as you see it in the press because it’s the issue of the establishment of a Palestinian state again with Israel. And the question, you’ll see people try to make a big apologetic for the existence of the Palestinian state. Of course there are historical reasons why it’s kind of a silly idea; never had a Palestinian state before when the Arabs were all under Jordan, nobody wanted a Palestinian state then. Suddenly we have to have a Palestinian state. Well, it’d better be well policed because if a new Palestinian state is going to breed terrorists and one of the commentators say “me-go-bomb vests” and these guys come into Israel with these things, Israel is going to be coming back into the Palestinian state and it won’t be much longer. So that’s the situation.
But within evangelical Bible-believing Christianity you’re going to see a split because you’re going to see a group speaking out against Israel from within the evangelical Bible-believing group. When that happens don’t be shocked; that’s the logical result of a non-tribulational theology, of a non-dispensational theology. It just follows; it’s not like these people suddenly got together on a hate Israel campaign, it’s just that the inherent logic of their position drives them to that position, just as the inherent logic of dispensationalism looks to a fulfillment of the nation Israel. When Jesus comes back He’s going to come back to a nation, Israel; a nation that has sabbatical laws, because what did Jesus say? “Pray that this thing not happen on a Sabbath.” Who cares if it happens on a Sabbath in the United States? Nobody cares about that because we don’t have Sabbatical laws; the stores are open on Saturday like they are any other time. Gas stations are open on Saturdays like they are any other time. We don’t have Sabbatical laws.
So, when Jesus says beware and pray that this not happen on a Sabbath day, He’s talking about some national entity where there are laws that control travel on Sabbatical days. It’s not going to be Russia. Who do you suppose it’s going to be? It’s going to be Israel taking over the Old Testament legislation. So there are various reasons why we hold to the fact … we’re not saying that everything Israel does is good, we’re not saying every Jew is a believer, Messianic Jews do live in Israel. All we’re saying is that the nation Israel has a role to play in history under God’s sovereignty and it’s going to play it, period!
There are four problems with pre-tribulationism. I outline those in the middle paragraph on page 138. We’re going to go into some of the Scripture connected with those, we’ll review Matt. 24 and go into 2 Thessalonians 2, but there basically are four objections to pre-tribulationism historically. One is a historical thing, they’re arguing that it was just in the mind of a guy by the name of John Nelson Darby and it’s sort of a cultic thing that just started in the 1800s. In particular they like to tell stories about some crazy lady in England that had these prophetic visions in 1830 and that Darby somehow got influenced by this 17-year-old girl that’s hallucinating, and that supposedly the origin of dispensationalism. The second one is critics have argued that dispensationalism misinterprets Matthew 24. The third is that it misinterprets 2 Thessalonians 2; and the fourth one is that it advocates an escapism for the church. Those are very popular things; you’ll see them over and over. I’ve gone through the first 2 so far.
Briefly on page 138, reviewing the first objection, it’s historically false that pretribulationism began in 1830. If you read the biography of Darby’s life you realize by dated letters that he’d already thought of the idea in 1827, three years prior to this hallucinating 17-year-old girl. Plus the fact that people who have looked at her supposed prophecies in 1830, they’re not pre-tribulational prophecies, so that goes down the drain. You also notice in that paragraph I mention that guys like Morgan Edwards, who was very close to pre-tribulationism and look at his dates, 1722–1795. The thing that is the icing on the cake is further on down you notice the date AD 306–373. This is a guy by the name of Ephrem, he’s a theologian in the Eastern Church in Syria and he wrote about not only a Rapture, he wrote about a seven-year tribulation. That document has recently been found in the last five or six years. The book is footnoted there; that book is a basic reference tool for that document.
On page 139 we’re talking about Matthew 24. Turn to Matthew 24, this is the Mount Olivet Discourse, everyone goes to Matthew 24 to see what Jesus teaches about His Second Coming which is fine. What people do with Matthew 24, among those who aren’t thinking through the details of prophecy so that they fit together in a rational way, they read down through Matthew 24 and they see things like verse 6, it talks about wars and rumors of wars. What’s the metaphor used in verse 8, observe the text, it’s pregnancy, delivering a baby, and that proves that the whole seven year period is a time of tribulation because the birth pangs, that metaphor birth pangs is not just the second half of the Tribulation, it’s the whole thing, because the second half of the Tribulation doesn’t till verse 15, so you’ve got the birth pangs before verse 15 which says then that the entire seven year period is conceived as the delivery of the baby, the baby being the Kingdom of God. And the paroxysm in the environment, the earthquakes and the famines, verse 7, are all part of the pain that the earth’s geophysical system feels. It’s not just people having problems in the Tribulation; it’s the whole geophysical environment having problems. It’s as though the creation is one with man in the sense that it too senses the coming of the Lord; the creation itself senses the coming of the Lord with all these catastrophes.
Then in verse 15 the Lord Jesus says “when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place,” now he’s referencing Daniel 9 that talks about the seven year period, and that passage establishes that abomination of desolation. If you have a study Bible you can see where Jesus is getting that passage from. So He comes right out of the very prophetic Scripture we’ve been talking about in the Tribulation, so He says when you see that “standing in the holy place” and the holy place according to Daniel is Jerusalem. The holy place is the Temple that is in Jerusalem. That’s how Daniel reads. See what I mean, you’ve got to go back to the Old Testament passages and see what the text said back there; how would they have understood it Daniel’s day. They would have understood it as a literal, physical temple on the Temple Mount in the city of Jerusalem. So all this is Jerusalem centered.
Verse 16, “then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, [17] let him who is on the housetop not go down to get the things out that are in his house; [18] and let him who is in the filed not turn back to get his cloak. [19] But woe to those who are with child and to those who nurse babes in those days! [20] But pray that your flight may not be in the winter, or on a Sabbath day,” when there are travel restrictions of one sort or another. The idea there is Jesus says when you start seeing that happen know that your evacuation is called for and get out of the way because things are coming. That’s the midpoint of Daniel’s period. There will be a Great Tribulation, that’s where that word “tribulation” and some of the people pick, pick, pick and say you can’t use the word “tribulation” for the entire seven years, only the last three and a half. It’s true, right here in verse 21 the Great Tribulation is that second three-and-a-half-year period. But theologians have taken the word “Tribulation” in general to refer to the seven years like we talk about the Trinity; the Trinity is not in the Bible either. It’s not a problem as long as you understand the definition of the label.
Then in verse 29, the next major paragraph, “But immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers of the heaven will be shaken, [30] then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky” and that’s a quotation. Where is the quotation taken from? It comes out of the Old Testament; it comes out of Daniel. So again Jesus is following the outline of the Old Testament. Verse 31, “And He will send forth His angels with a great trumpet and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of the sky to the other.” Gathering together the elect goes all the way back to Deuteronomy. The point here is that nothing Jesus has said up to verse 31, and after that too, nothing in this Matthew 24 passage differs by an iota from what the Old Testament has consistently laid out.
Think about this, it’ll help you think this through because there are Christians today that want to mix the church inside Matthew 24. Wait a minute here, think! If Jesus isn’t changing the Old Testament framework, rather He continues it; the church isn’t in the Old Testament because it didn’t happen until Pentecost. So if He’s continuing the Old Testament it should be no surprise that the church isn’t in Matthew 24, because Matthew 24 is Jesus’ exposition of the Old Testament prophecies about the destiny of Israel. People want to read the church into this chapter and it doesn’t work.
In Figure 11 I show you what is going on here. Last time we went through Zechariah 14. Turn back to Zechariah 14. If you look at Figure 11 notice the flow of the boxes. That’s Zechariah’s view. We’re going to see what Zechariah taught in the Old Testament to Jews of the nation Israel. Zechariah 14:1-2, “Behold, a day is coming from the LORD when the spoil taken from you will be divided among you. [2] For I will gather all the nations against” not London, not Washington, D,C,, not Moscow, “I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem” it’s centered on Israel, “to battle, and the city will be captured, the houses plundered, the women ravished, and half of the city exiled, but the rest of the people will not be cut off from the city.” So the first box summarizes Zechariah 14:1–2. The Gentiles come to destroy Jerusalem; that’s the first major action in this passage.
Figure 11. In the Mt. Olivet Discourse Jesus builds upon Old Testament prophecy and fills in more details for the disciples’ concern about Israel and the Temple.
Now we go to verse 3, “Then the LORD will go forth and fight against those nations, as when He fights on a day of battle.” What are “those nations?” “Those” is a demonstrative pronoun going back to some antecedent noun. Or it’s a demonstrative adjective going back and referencing a certain subset of nations. What nations? The nations in the context? Who are the nations in the context? Verse 2—the nations that have come against Israel, and the Lord is going to fight against those nations. It’s not like the preterists are saying, the Lord doesn’t come to destroy Israel; it’s the opposite, the Lord is coming to destroy the nations who have come against Israel.
Verse 4, “And in that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives,” where was Jesus standing when He preached Matthew 24? He was standing on the Mount of Olives. “… which is in front of Jerusalem on the east; and the Mount of Olives will be split in its middle from east to west by a very large valley, so that half of the mountain will move toward the north and the other half toward the south,” a geophysical thing happens. It’s not a metaphorical interpretation. How do I know it’s a literal interpretation? The mountain will split in half. How do I know it’s going to split in half? This isn’t talking about the politics are going to dissolve into two parties, the Democrats in the North and the Republicans in the south or something. See how silly that kind of interpretation gets. The mountain literally splits in half. Why? Look at the next verse, it tells you why you’ve got to interpret verse 4’s geophysical stuff literally.
Why? Because “you will flee by the valley of My mountains, for the valley of the mountains will reach to Azel; yes, you will flee just as you” did what, just as you fled in the day of a political disturbance, or a literal earthquake? A literal earthquake! You can go back, if you look at a study Bible you’ll see where that comes from in the Old Testament, you can go back to that passage and you can see it was a real earthquake. So these aren’t to be interpreted as political disturbances, they are geologic disturbances, they’re literal, they’re real, they happen at this point in time. So in the box on the top of page 140 what is the second action in the Zechariah context? That when the Gentiles come to destroy Jerusalem the Messiah is going to come to the Mount of Olives to rescue the city.
Then it on in verse 4, all the geophysical things, in verse, “For it will be a unique day which is known to the LORD, neither day nor night; but it will come about that at evening timer there will light.” That’s the same thing Jesus is talking about in Matthew 24. The third box is astronomical and geophysical catastrophes accompany the return of the Lord. Then in verse 9ff, “And the LORD will be king over all the earth; in that day the LORD will be the only one, and His name the only one. [10] And all the land will be changed into a plain….” Not only will the Lord Jesus come back but it’s saying that there will be geophysical adjustments to the land. You can’t have metaphor in verse 10 without having metaphor in verses 4 and 5. So if you’re going to be literal in verses 4 and 5 you’ve got to be literal in verse 10; there’s going to be a literal changing of the terrain at that point. I’d just love to have some of my friends in geology watch this. It doesn’t take a million years to move some rocks. This is going to happen very fast; this is catastrophic.
In the box you see the fourth action; the “Messianic Kingdom and world peace” come. If you just cover up the Jesus view, the four boxes underneath, and just look at those top four boxes that was what was going on in the mind of the disciples. So when Jesus, forget the Jesus view for now, just look at the top four boxes of Zechariah. If you thought that way and you heard the Lord Jesus Christ say guys, look at this Temple, there’s not going to be a rock left, this Temple is going to go. If you just had those four top boxes, which box would you be thinking if you heard the Lord Jesus Christ say this Temple is going down? What would you associate that with? You’d associate it with the first box; the city of Jerusalem is going to be destroyed. Why would that turn you on in one sense, you didn’t want the Temple to be destroyed but the fact that the Temple is being destroyed is a sign of what? What’s going to happen next? Messiah is going to come and deliver the city.
Now watch what Jesus does. In Matthew 24 He puts a spin on this thing and the kind of spin that the Lord puts on this passage, this Zechariah Old Testament view, He does here what the angel did in Daniel’s day. Let’s pause for a moment and review something in our minds. Daniel lived at the end of what period? The clock was running, Daniel was watching his clock and he knew 70 years was about up. The nation had gone into captivity in 586 BC. 586 minus 70 is 516. So Daniel is sitting there in Babylon, in Iraq, and he’s noticing the calendar and he’s saying you know, I studied the prophecies of Jeremiah and in 70 years God is supposed to restore this nation. So he prays about it. Daniel is not a fatalist, he’s not some hyper-Calvinist that says oh, seventy years and it’s going to happen. Daniel knows his theology well enough to know that no restoration is going to happen if God is a God who is holy and just and He was made at Israel to kick them out, what’s got to happen before Israel can go back in the land? They’re going to have to repent, there’s going to have to be an adjustment to the absolute holiness and righteousness of God. So Daniel confesses sin, and that’s a whole passage in there, and he’s confessing sin saying Lord, I’m ashamed of what my nation has done, we’ve erred from Your ways, we’ve violated Your word, and he does a confession there.
Then the angel shows up and he tells him, Daniel, there’s going to be seventy times seven. So now what appeared to be a seventy-year rule, and it was verified because what happened in 586 BC, they went into captivity, in 516 BC some of the nation came back and there was a partial restoration. But the tribes that had gone out in 721 BC, they’re all scattered all over the place. There was only a partial restoration, but enough to validate the seventy literal years of Jeremiah’s prophecy.
But what the Lord does, He says the accordion is unfolding here and there’s going to be a total of 490 years. So what did the Lord just do there through the angel Gabriel? He took a prophetic picture and he did this to it; he expanded it and dropped in more time into the prophecy. This you see over and over again. Think about it, think of another one. Can you think of another illustration in the Old Testament where the same thing happened? Think about the Exodus when the nation Israel was first born. In the original view of the Exodus what should have happened? Did it take 40 years to get into the land or not? They should have walked into the land and conquered it right then. But what happened? They rebelled and messed around so God said okay, this generation is messing around, stay out, you like the dessert, stay here for a while and we’ll wait until your children grow up and then they’ll inherit the kingdom. So the second conquest came under Joshua, this one was successful. So now you had a 40-year intrusion into that original … it should have been a year or two. Here you have the same thing; you have 420 years injected into what appeared at first glance to be a 70-year period.
Now we come to the diagram on the top of page 140 and I want you to make an adjustment in the diagram. What Jesus does is He takes that second box (on the Jesus view), I’ll explain this in a minute, I just want you to draw a note, the second box on the Jesus view is injected between the first and second box of the Zechariah view. Jesus is talking about something that occurs in between those two boxes on the top. The second box below is describing something that’s happening in between box one and box two on the top row. Then what I should have done, I should have had five boxes on that second row. Box number two at the top should be brought down and be put between box two and three on the bottom view. I left out “Messiah comes to Mount of Olives to rescue the city,” He’s got to do that.
What has Jesus just done? He’s done the accordion thing again; He’s opened up history to say that the Gentiles are going to come against Jerusalem. The first wave of Gentiles did come against Jerusalem in what year? When did they destroy Jerusalem as the Preterist say? AD 70, the Romans, the Gentiles, came against it. That is expanded in Luke 21, that’s Luke’s version; Luke 21 is the parallel passage to Matthew 24 but in the Luke passage Luke is careful to include enough detail so we know that the Lord Jesus Christ when He talked about the Gentiles coming against Jerusalem He included details what were unmistakably fulfilled in AD 70. However, then Jesus goes on to say that in the last days there will be these earthquakes, etc. and then you will see the abomination spoken of by the prophet Daniel. How can you have an abomination in a Temple that’s already been destroyed in AD 70? The Temple is destroyed in AD 70. So if the Temple is destroyed in AD 70 how do you get it rebuilt and have this abomination happen inside it? The answer is there must be a period of time that lapses between the times that the Romans destroy the Temple and the time the Lord Jesus Christ comes back, because prior to the Lord Jesus Christ coming back there’s got to be this antichrist guy and not only does there have to be an antichrist, Israel has to be in the land, Israel has to be in control of Jerusalem and Israel has to have a Temple. So there’s the man, antichrist, and all that Jesus injects in between those two boxes.
Box number 2 below is Jesus’ injection between boxes one and two above. Zechariah never saw that second box on the bottom row. The Zechariah passage doesn’t have that in it. That’s Jesus’ addition, but when He added that, when we went through Matthew 24 I said look in your text and see the Old Testament that He’s quoting. What did we say He’s quoting from? Not Zechariah but Daniel. So what is Jesus doing here? He’s taking bits and pieces out of the Old Testament and organizing them for us and saying guys, look at this. When you lay out all the individual prophecies and you start getting the pictures fit together, the jigsaw puzzle is coming together now. And what I’m telling you disciples, He’s saying, is that there’s an interim period here.
So Jesus in Matthew 24 is talking in terms of the Old Testament. He does inject time into the Old Testament position, but He’s not injecting the church into the Old Testament position. How do I know that? Look at the paragraph on page 140 underneath Figure 11. “The Old Testament prophesied that God would scatter Israel to the four winds. It also prophesied, however, that God would regather His elect nation from the four winds one-by-one accompanied by the sound of a great trumpet.” That’s the trumpet He’s talking about in Matthew 24:31. That’s not talking about the Rapture in verse 31; it’s a reference to the Old Testament trumpets and it’s talking in terms of the Old Testament of His elect nation (who are Jews.) What are those elect that being called by the great trumpet? They must be Jews, because that’s what Deuteronomy is talking about, that’s what Zechariah is talking about. So they’re talking about Jews coming back, the elect.
“The scenario is Israel’s not the church’s.” That’s why we defend the position that Matthew 24 isn’t talking about the church. It’s an exposition of the Old Testament, talking about Israel. In the next paragraph I point out that if you want to see the difference look at Revelation 2–3 which is directed to the church and try to find anywhere in Revelation 2–3 a reference to Israel, the nation, the abomination of desolation and all the rest of it. It’s not there because the church is commissioned to look for only one thing; not the antichrist in Jerusalem, not the Temple in Jerusalem, look for the “Blessed hope” and the “Blessed hope” is the one day that all of a sudden the transformation happens; it’s going to come without warning. I could happen tonight, it could happen a hundred years from now but no warning, it will just happen, and it will happen when the body of Christ is finished. Somebody is going to get a big surprise when they lead the last person to the Lord. When that last person is led to the Lord Jesus Christ and there’s n number of believers in the body of Christ and all the gifts are there functioning, God blows the whistle, the game is over; that’s it! That’s the church’s game. Now what happens?
The church is removed from history, it’s in resurrection body and the world is left the way it was before Pentecost. Now what happens? You revert back to the conditions where you have Jew and Gentile, and that’s exactly what you see in the Book of Revelation. Revelation is as though in chapter 5 and 6 it’s like it reverts right back to the Old Testament, citing Old Testament passage after Old Testament passage about Jew and Gentile, Jew and Gentile, Jew and Gentile, 144,000 Jews from every tribe. Now where do you get that talk in the New Testament epistles? You don’t see that, it doesn’t talk about Jewish tribes, other than Paul talking about his biography. You don’t see that kind of language in the New Testament epistles directed to the church. The whole purview of Revelation, once you get through the church period there is it reverts, it goes back to the Old Testament picture.
The next thing on page 140 is 2 Thessalonians so let’s turn there. In 2 Thessalonians 2:1–2, here’s a passage that is also said to negate pre-tribulationism. “We request you, brethren, with regard to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our gather together to him, [2] that you may not be quickly shaken from your composure or be disturbed either by a spirit or a message or a letter as if from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. [3] Let no man in any way deceive you, for it will not come unless the apostasy comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, [4] who opposes and exalts himself above every co-called God or object or worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, displaying himself as being God. [5] Do you not remember that while I was still with you, I was telling you these things?”
In 1 Thessalonians he’s talking about a Rapture, so people say if the Rapture occurred before the Day of the Lord, why in this passage in 1 Thessalonians doesn’t he [blank spot] Notice verse 1, “Now we request you, brethren, with regard to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together to Him,” our what? “Our gathering together with Him.” What do you suppose that is? That’s the vocabulary of 1 Thess. That’s the gathering together, so Paul has the Rapture on his mind. Now he says there’s a lie, or a deceiving doctrine that has come and these people are kind of quitting their jobs and thinking all I have to do is sit around because the Day of the Lord is here and it’s useless to deal with anything, etc. He’s saying that’s not going to happen to the abomination of desolation, he’s talking about the same thing in Matthew 24, don’t you remember I was teaching you these things.
So the picture here is that you have a seven year period and Paul says that you don’t have to, to these people that are upset, he’s saying look, what you’re talking about is what’s going to happen over here and I told you all about that because he taught the Old Testament prophecy. It’s going to happen over here, you guys are here. Now he’s talking about I beseech you by the coming of the Lord and “our gathering together with Him,” that is the Rapture. So the Rapture is out here and the question is why doesn’t he talk about the Rapture and use that as the answer to this heresy problem?
Look at the notes on page 141, there are several observations. What was their problem? They thought that a special time had come that endangered their safety. Whether this special time was the familiar Day of the Lord or some portion of it, the textual evidence varies.” By the way, there is a textual variant here and the textual variant occurs in verse 2 at the end where it says “the day of the Lord,” the Received Text doesn’t have “day of the Lord,” it has “day of Messiah” there, a different term. So that is a clue that we’ve got another problem going on in this passage, we can’t just drive in at 40 miles an hour and think we’ve got this aced, there’s something else going on here because there’s ambiguity in the manuscripts over what this thing is that the Thessalonians were upset about. “The majority text reading in 2:2 reads, “Day of the Messiah”, a slightly different designation than Day of the Lord. Perhaps this Day of the Messiah period was thought to be a special time of tribulation that the rumor claimed had come about already ahead of the actual Day of the Lord. If so, one can understand why Paul would not have bothered to use the pre-trib Rapture argument. He was battling a view that would have had this Day of the Messiah out ahead of both the Rapture and the Day of the Lord. The logical refutation required that he show that this Day of the Messiah was not going to precede the Day of the Lord but in fact was to occur after revelation of the Antichrist. In this logic the timing of the Rapture would have been irrelevant to the discussion.”
So these folks have an idea that this thing is happening: this is where it should happen; they’ve got it back way out here, that it’s happening right now, and Paul says it’s not happening right now - it’s not going to happen until after the antichrist does his thing, you guys are all mixed up here. Furthermore, if I were a post-trib I’d have a similar problem. The problem of 2 Thessalonians 2 is that we don’t understand what was troubling the Thessalonians in the first place. That is not clear and the fact that it has for centuries not been clear shows you because the guys that copied the text were hedging here. Some of them said this is the Day of the Lord they’re talking about and others said no-no, this is Day of Messiah, and they’re not using the same vocabulary so there’s a little confusion about what this thing was that was troubling the Thessalonians.
But let’s suppose we are a post-trib or we believe the church is going to go through the Tribulation. If the church is going to go through the Tribulation and this period is happening, the church should be all excited because what’s going to happen next? The Rapture in this position, because the Rapture in the post-trib position occurs here, so if they’re already in this position then the Rapture should happen. He should say well, you shouldn’t be bothered because the Rapture is going to happen anyway.
The point I’m making in the next paragraph is: “Whether some subtly involving a special Day of the Messiah is involved here or not, the critics of pre-tribulationism have the same problem with it as the pre-tribulationists themselves. Here is why. If a critic is a post-tribulationist, he either holds to a Rapture before a very short Day of the Lord (to avoid the church being exposed to the wrath of God)” remember the view, they have to collapse the Day of the Lord down to the last five minutes of the seven-year period. Why do they have to do that? Because if they have the Day of the Lord running a longer period of time, the church is exposed to the wrath of God. So they’ve got to compress the wrath of God down to that last five minutes. So the either hold to that “or he holds to a Rapture in the Day of the Lord (the church being somehow protected from the wrath after the manner of Israel during the Exodus). If the former view, then he has exactly the same problem as the pretribulationist. Why the silence of Paul since he should have reminded the Thessalonians that they would be raptured before the coming very short Day of the Lord? If the latter view, then the Thessalonians should not have been upset at all since the Rapture was imminent! Mid-tribulationists and Three-Quarter Tribulationists both have the same problem as the former post-tribulational view. The bottom line is that we don’t understand enough about the rumor that troubled the Thessalonians to be able to extract from this text any information about the timing of the Rapture favoring any of the competing scenarios.”
They all have a problem with this position, not just the pre-trib. We wouldn’t have a problem if we knew what was going on in the minds of the Thessalonians and this Scripture seems to be vague there. So 2 Thessalonians is not a crux only for the pre-trib. It’s a crux for all views. Furthermore there is also an argument that in verse 3 the word “apostasy” could refer to the Rapture, because that word means the departure. And it can be a departure in the sense of departing from the faith, that’s how it gets the name apostasy. And by the way, all Bible translations up until about the last 200 years translated that word not as “apostasy” but translated it as a “departure.” So it’s interesting back in the days of Roman Catholicism the translators were translating this as the departure. What they meant by that we could argue, but some believe, I think the evidence is ambiguous, I haven’t made up my mind yet about that word in verse 3, but there are many expositors of Scripture that believe that is the Rapture. If that’s the case then we don’t have any problem because what he’s saying is the Rapture comes first and then the man of lawlessness is revealed. That could be the interpretation of that passage.
Enough for 2 Thessalonians 2. You just want to be acquainted with Matthew 24 and 2 Thessalonians 2; there is a lot of study that has to be involved in these two passages. On the bottom of page 141 we have the last objection of pre-tribulationism, that’s it’s escapist. This is the easiest to answer.
“While sounding pious, this argument actually misleads Christians to misunderstand the purposes of suffering for the church. By definition the church is that group of humanity who has not rejected Israel’s Messiah” that’s the definition of a Christian, “and therefore cannot be accused of that sin. And it is that sin that brings the Tribulational judgments upon Jews and Gentiles alike. The church suffers indeed as Christ did, but for different reasons and in different ways. Christians suffer persecution and onslaughts of Satan precisely because of their identification with Christ in the fallen world. They are the only ‘part’ of Christ available to Satan to attack.” That’s why the church suffers; the church doesn’t suffer globally at the same time. It suffers in certain regions, geographic regions, but other geographic are free. Why is that? Because we’re not in the Tribulation. It’s only in the Tribulation when suffering is global and then the church isn’t involved because the suffering in the Tribulation is of a different purpose. The suffering of the church is to edify and build it up; the suffering of the world in the Tribulation is judgment. It’s not discipline—it’s judgment, a different cause, different purpose, different suffering.
The pre-trib position is not arguing that the church doesn’t suffer; all the pre-trib guy is doing is he’s saying that the suffering the church now faces is of a different nature and purpose than the suffering in the Tribulation. He’s distinguishing between suffering[s]; he’s not saying there’s no suffering today. It’s not escapist to argue for pre-trib Rapture. You can extend the thinking and say oh well, salvation of the gospel, getting out from hell, that’s escapism, we ought to go through hell and feel a little fire. Does anybody argue that way? No. Well then why are you arguing this way when you say that the pre-trib position is escapist? It’s a silly argument.
Next week what we’re going to do is look at the bottom of that page, and in that small diagram summarize the 8 years that we’ve been in class. And we’re going to go through that in one night and I’m going to try to show you how you can use that in various applications. These are key events; they are key events in Scripture and as I said when I introduced this series there are three themes that we’ve tried to emphasize. I said that this is not a class in Biblical exegesis nor is this a class in apologetics, nor is this a class in systematic theology, but this class has all three of those in it because I’ve mixed them together. In other words I don’t artificially separate the two. I do that for a reason. I came to this frame of reference when I was working with people who had come out of the hippie communes of Colorado, who had absolutely no understanding.
Early on I saw, Francis Schaeffer helped me see this, but I started to see it early on, both with respect to Genesis 1 not being understood by Christians, Christians being intimidated by Darwin, and then seeing that people, when my wife and I were in Dallas years and years ago, never forget an incident. Carol was into Child Evangelism [Fellowship], she knew some of the things, we lived in an apartment and this little boy came to the door, we had to take care of him because his mother was out somewhere and this kid was all alone, so Carol started talking to him about Jesus. The kid looked up at her like she’d talked about some fairy from Mars and asked “who is she.”
When we had that response we realized we can’t start with Jesus, we’ve got to go back further, and that’s the whole purpose of this framework, you have to go back. That’s what the missionaries have found in Papua, New Guinea. They had a mess up there where they evangelized this tribe and they found out just as soon as the tribe got into a mess they reverted to their pagan practices. They said, “Why is this? We sat here for years and witnessed about Jesus, and witnessed about the gospel, translated Scriptures here and there, and these people just don’t get it.” It’s syncretistic; they’ve got a syncretism here. So they did an analysis on the mission field back I the mid-80s; New Tribes Mission did this, and they came to the conclusion these people never understood the gospel in the first place. Why didn’t they understand the gospel in the first place? Because we screwed up in our evangelistic methodology.
We did not explain, we failed as Christians to explain and communicate the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ and as a result these people either aren’t born again or they are just little baby Christians being blown about by every wind of doctrine. So they resolved at that point to deal with this problem. And how they dealt with it was revert to saying if it took God the Holy Spirit 66 books to get to the gospel and get it straight, we’re not going to be doing evangelism in a five and a half minute presentation. We have to take it as slow as is necessary. It doesn’t mean you have to go through all 66 books, don’t get me wrong. What they’re saying is we have to go back to creation and understand who God is; if you don’t get that straight, kiss the rest of it off; you’re never going to get it right.
On the bottom of page 142 where do I start, what was the first event we did? We did creation. And what did we associate with that event? God, man, and nature. You have to start there. All this stuff about saving and sin and fall depends that we understand who God, man and nature is. You have to have those basic categories straight in your head or everything else goes down the tubes. So that’s why we start with creation. We don’t start with Matthew, we start with Genesis. That’s what they found, that’s what I’ve found.
My burden has been first to speak of these as events of history. I don’t speak of them as Bible stories. And the way I believe that you have to deal with this with the people you talk to and you come in contact with, you cannot just talk in terms of the Bible. Yes you do, you talk in terms of the Bible but what’s related to geology, related to science, such that when they hear you talk about Genesis 1 and God created the world, they don’t have some image, well that’s just a religious story, we had a big gas cloud on there and then later on people said let’s make a sweet story up about how this whole universe came into being, and I respect your Bible, it’s a nice religious story book. What have you done if you’ve allowed that thinking? You’ve just set them up to totally misunderstand the gospel. So unless you get it straight from the start that we’re talking about “in the beginning was God,” not gas, and you have to state it either/or sometimes for people to get it. Oh, I don’t believe that. Well then put on the brakes and let’s just talk about it. There’s no sense running on and talking about the fall and sin and blood atonement because they’re never going to get that. And if it takes you three years of discussion of Genesis 1 and 2, take three years to discuss Genesis 1 and 2. Don’t go on until they understand God, man, and nature.
This is hard for us to do because we want to rush, we want to help people; we want to get in there and stop the suffering and straighten their lives out. That’s Christian compassion, but our compassion can get in the way of truth sometimes. And what we do is we set up a false dealing with the problem and it falls apart later on. Next week we’ll deal with those events on the left side of that diagram. We’ll go through every single one of them and I’m going to tie them to the doctrines on the right side because associated with every one of those events is a concept of truth that the Bible teaches. And if you associate those things with the events on the left what do you do? Now you’ve created a rational consistency in your head between these real events and these real truths.
All I’ve talked about in the last five minutes is the bottom event, haven’t I. And on the right side of that event you saw three words, God, man and nature. Now if you learn this properly and you learn to relate God, man and nature to the act of creation, the act of creation, not just the story of creation, the physical cosmic act of creation, if you learn to associate that what’s going to happen if someone comes along and denies the cosmic act of creation? If you associate God, man and nature with the cosmic act and the act goes away, what also goes away? Your doctrine of God, man, and nature. Do you see what I’m getting at? Americans are all confused on this. If you’re an evolutionist you don’t have a concept of God, man and nature, I’m sorry; it’s floating in thin air, you have no basis whatsoever for human rights. You have no more right than a maggot because you’re part and parcel of anamorphous revolving universe. You’ve lost it; you’ve lost the benefits of talking about the dignity of man, truthfulness of his ideas and moral judgments because you lost the event that those are linked to. They are interdependent.
Said another way, erase the left side of this diagram and you’ve destroyed the right side. You can’t get the right side if you don’t have the left side. And if we don’t teach people this we are going to have people who are schizos, theological and spiritual schizophrenics that live with one foot in the Bible and the other foot in the world and are actually confused the rest of their days trying to live first in one world, then the other one, then this one, then that one, and they feel split up. Of course they feel split up because they don’t have a unified view of truth. That’s what this is all about. God is a rational God who has a unified field of truth. When He speaks of this He means this and it’s all woven together as one story. It’s not pieces. It’s not marbles rolling around. There’s a coherence to the Scriptures. And this is the coherence that we need. People substitute other things for this coherence and that’s one reason I feel very strongly that the revival of Reformed theology which you can explain in ten minutes with five points, people think they’ve got coherence in that theology and it’s attractive because people want coherence in a society that’s falling apart. There’s a natural gravitation to coherence. But that’s the wrong location of the coherence. It’s not a theological system like that, it’s in this Biblical story from beginning to end, that’s where the coherence is between science, history, literature, whatever field of knowledge you’re in in these stories. These are not isolated; you cannot compartmentalize the Bible and say that that’s religious, like the lawyers in the ACLU are saying.
We might conclude with a silly thing going on in our Congress right now. This week Bush is going to nominate Owens again and the objection of Owens as a judge by the lefties is that oh, will her personal beliefs affect the way she judges? No kidding! My personal belief that thievery is wrong is going to influence me, too bad. So it’s a silly idea, like their personal beliefs about abortion isn’t influencing their agenda to filibuster the candidate. Come on, we’re big boys and girls, let’s grow up; stop the being phony and let’s let it all hang out. That’s what we need to do. You have your beliefs - that’s fine, and they collide here, and you’ve got to support this candidate because this candidate honors life, and you guys that don’t believe, you believe in death, the death-culture people then you need death-culture judges, of course, I understand that. But when you put it that way people don’t like that because they don’t want to tie their personal beliefs to these moral judgments they’re making all the time. We’ll go through this and it’s a way of looking at it but that’s the design behind all of this.
Question asked: Clough replies: Yeah, he just sent me the statement of D. James Kennedy on Israel entitled Replacement Theology at Work. We’re going to see that, that’s why I’m warning you ahead of time. We’ll undoubtedly see a split here developing.
Question asked: Clough replies: Ezekiel, the Temple during the Millennial Kingdom is believed to be Ezekiel because it’s the Temple that is of the design in Ezekiel is not the Temple … it doesn’t correspond to any temple ever made. That’s why liberal critics of the Bible say it’s … first of all among liberal scholars Ezekiel is looked upon either as a conglomeration of various writers or is looked upon as a man who needed some serious psychiatric help. And therefore the content of his book, it’s the rantings of a psychologically unbalanced person. Ezekiel was kind of strange, God called him to do strange things, but He used him. But that’s the book to which the Jews today in Jerusalem who want to rebuild the Temple are using and getting very serious about designing things for that Temple.
Question asked, something about the sacrifices in the Temple in the Millennial Kingdom: Clough replies: That’s a good question, it comes up all the time, if you read Ezekiel and you talk about a temple that had sacrifices and we hold to a literal hermeneutics so we can’t symbolize it, then there are literal sacrifices happening in the Millennial Kingdom. What’s their function when the blood of bulls and goats takes not sin away; the Lord Jesus on Calvary has already taken away sin, including the sin of the people that live in the Millennial Kingdom, why do we have this practice going on when it’s been done away with at the time the church started. Of course, it was done away with actually when the Temple was destroyed.
But you have to deduce what the purpose is from the fact that it’s there, it’s continued, you have Hebrews telling us that the practice does not take away sin, but it is a sin offering. I think it has two functions. I think it has an actual social and political function like it did in the Old Testament, and we mustn’t forget this. In the Old Testament if you were physically not clean, either because you touched a corpse, because you didn’t have your latrine on the outside of the camp, and if you did not offer a sacrifice you were considered unclean and not welcomed in the community. It was part of the political identity of the people of that day, whether they were believers or not. It didn’t matter whether you were a believer or not, the rules of the society, the rules of the community were that we have hygiene here and if you don’t want to follow the hygiene, get out of here. So it was an exclusion principle.
Now we can look at that as Christians and say well there’s a spiritual lesson in that, God is a holy God and He doesn’t want uncleanness, and we can say that behind that rule, that social rule there was a revelation of a spiritual principle. That’s true, but there was a social rule there that you didn’t play around with, and I think it’s the same thing in the Millennial Kingdom, that those sacrifices are protocols of how the whole political social structure is run, and it’s not going to run without them. And everybody will be required to do that, whether they believe in the Lord or not, just like in the Old Testament, they will be required to do that. And you can say well that ignores whether they’re believers or not. That’s right, but that’s an imposition of a social function about the King and that’s what He wants to reveal so He designs the social structures to be revelatory in that sense, which gets us now to the second thing.
There is a spiritual thing in it and that’s the shock of substitutionary death. Let’s go back to the Garden of Eden. When Adam and Eve fell and they heard the word of Satan and God, talk about this thing called d-e-a-t-h, could either Adam or Eve have known the meaning of the word
d-e-a-t-h? How would they have known what that word means? They could only imagine what it must mean in some sort of separating sense. Now God comes into the Garden and what does He do to provide the skins? God had to kill an animal in front of both of them so they could watch the animal die and the blood spill out. That must have been a frightening, awful thing for creatures who had never known death to see, of all things, their God and Creator take an animal and destroy it in front of their faces. We make it too gentle. It was a bloody mess.
And I believe that God uses that in the Millennial Kingdom to remind people what sin does. We talk about reality TV going on, everybody wants reality TV. Okay, we’ll have reality TV, we’ll have blood sacrifice in the Temple; you like to see blood, you’ll see it. I’ll remind you what I went through, says the King. So I believe that it’s a shocking bloody messy thing that’s part of life in the fallen world. By the way, it also shows you that the Millennial Kingdom is populated by mortal people. That’s an argument for a physical political Kingdom that you have this going on because you’re not going to have it going on in the eternal state. So you have it going on in this physical Messianic Kingdom as a revelatory channel of the gospel. Worldwide, people are going to have to do it, they’re going to have to see it repeatedly, day after day after day after day and they will have enough doctrine, hopefully, the King is there, at least Israel will have light of knowledge, there won’t be anybody that needs to teach them, etc. there will be universal salvation in some areas and these people will know, yeah, I look at that and that’s what the King had to do. So I think it’s a teaching device. I think today when we talk about reality TV it’s a good way if you want to explain to somebody, yeah, that’s Jesus reality TV for people. They’ll understand it.
Question asked: Clough replies: How do the Gentile nations fit in the Millennial Kingdom? We know that they bring tribute to Jerusalem. Jerusalem will be the world capital and so there’s political homage that is done to the King. The King will be King of all nations, not just of Israel. And so there will be the relationship. As time goes on, who will be born? There will be babies born and those babies have to be led to the Lord, spiritually they have to believe or they’re not going to be believers. So there will be creeping unbelief in the population until at the very end of the Kingdom what happens? Satan is loosed for a season and we have a revolt.
Question asked: Clough replies: Only believers at the beginning of the Millennium. Something else said: Clough says: Because they will have become Christians during the Tribulation; during the Tribulation people get saved just like today they get saved. Same person says something about the Holy Spirit: Clough says: The Holy Spirit is gone in the sense that He … go back and look at how the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit has had three operating centers in history. Today we’re spoiled because the Holy Spirit indwells the church and He works through the church laterally and horizontally by the gospel outreach. But let’s go back into the previous age. In the previous age the Holy Spirit did not indwell all Israel because Jesus said to the disciples, He hasn’t indwelt, He’s come with you, He’s accompanied, but the Holy Spirit didn’t actually live inside of believers in the Old Testament. He had a different operating scheme, a different policy. That’s why when you go from age to age policies change. God doesn’t change but His policies change. So just as His policies change from pre-Israel when the Holy Spirit worked with different nations, then He worked almost exclusively with Israel, then He works with the church indwelling it, and now in the Tribulation how does the Holy Spirit work. He leads in the sense that the church is gone, His temple, the thing that He indwelt is gone.
So the Holy Spirit works presumably like He worked in the Old Testament and in the Old Testament He had many different ways of working. Strange things happen in the Tribulation and we don’t know what all how it happens. For example, the world is evangelized by angels, speaking in voices that the whole global population hears. How does that happen? I have no idea. Somehow that happens. So the Holy Spirit has numerous other ways other than the church. When we say the Holy Spirit is absent from the Tribulation we mean the church is removed, not that the Holy Spirit … He’s omniscient, He’s omnipresent, He’s everywhere, but it’s just that His base of operation is no longer on earth with the church.
Question asked: Clough replies: He’s poured out in the Millennium because that’s the Joel prophecy. Remember prior to that the Day of the Lord He pours out to prophesy. Presumably the Holy Spirit is very, very active in the Millennial Kingdom but the way to think about it, rather than get lost in the trees and lose the forest; the way to think about this is think through the Trinity. Just keep the Trinity in mind, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Which Person of the Trinity is always the content of revelation? The Second Person. If this is hard, here’s a way to visualize the Trinity and their functions. Think of God, the Word and the Spirit. When you think of mental content … content … information, you go to the Word. So the content of Revelation is always centered on the Second Person of the Trinity, Who reveals things about the First Person, but He is the center of the revelation, He is the vehicle of it. The Third Person of the Trinity works so as to glorify the Second Person of the Trinity. So the Lord Jesus was glorified by the Holy Spirit working among people. So if you keep the Father, Son, and Spirit, they always have this processional order to how they work and it’ll help you think this through.
It will help you avoid some charismatic extremists who talk endlessly about the Holy Spirit this, the Holy Spirit that, the Holy Spirit this, the Holy Spirit that, as though the Holy Spirit reveals things about Himself. But the Holy Spirit isn’t here to reveal things about Himself. Jesus said He takes of Mine and shall show it unto you. So the Holy Spirit’s function is to glorify Jesus, not glorify Himself. So where you have this undue exultation among the Holy Spirit you actually have a violation of the doctrine of the Trinity there going on.
Concluding, in the Millennial Kingdom the Holy Spirit, whatever He does and you can glimpse from the Old Testament Isaiah, Jeremiah, Joel, and those prophetic books, the Holy Spirit is very active in the Millennial Kingdom, but we know ahead of time what He’s going to be doing. He’s going to be exalting the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. He’s going to have to communicate to millions and millions of people that have grown up in the Millennial Kingdom that have never known another kind of history. The people that grow up in the Millennial Kingdom are going to be very spoiled people, the never have a war, don’t know what the military is about, have no concept of what kind of suffering climate, famines, earthquakes … They’re going to read about it in their history books, little kids will go to school in the Millennial Kingdom and they’ll read about these strange things that used to happen in history, back in “those days.”
Think about it, if you want a good mental exercise write yourself a story about what it would be like to be a parent in the Millennial Kingdom. What would you teach your kids in the Millennial Kingdom? Suppose you had lived through the Tribulation and you were one of the pioneers in the Millennial Kingdom and now you have babies and you’re raising these kinds and you’re trying to communicate to them what life was like before Jesus came. And you’re trying to tell them about famines, and they’re going to say mommy, daddy, can you tell me what a famine is, we never saw a famine. We look at television or whatever they’re going to have in those days and there are no famines on the weather report. So how do you teach them about a famine? How do you teach them about a war? What did they used to do? They had what? They had wars? Why’d they have those? Why did people kill each other? What was going on then that made people do that? Satan was there, he’s not here now, see, Satan’s gone in the Millennium, a big major point, and you should make that clear. Who is removed? The Holy Spirit may be (quote) “removed” in the Tribulation but who’s removed in the Millennial Kingdom? Who’s been in prison for a thousand years? Satan and all of his demonic powers.
So what you have is a cutback on energy for sin. People still have the flesh, people are still going to sin in the Millennial Kingdom but if you could take a video camera and record say the life of Joe Snodgrass or something and he lives on 3rd Downing Street somewhere in the new Millennial Kingdom, you follow this guy around and you can see he’s a sinner. But what you will not see is this powerful force that comes in almost addictively and takes people’s lives over and really screws them up. Sin is there but not with the intensity that we see it, and it indeed must be strange for people to live in those days to come and to try to think in what we’re living in. And really wonder what did you guys do back then? It gives you an interesting perspective. In your mind’s eye if you try this imagination trip. … [someone interrupts] But see, that’s the kind of thing and if you’ll think these things through, just play with yourself in your mind’s eye and try to think these things through. What you’ll find is it will deepen your appreciation for Scripture because not it’ll make you come back to the Scripture thinking of it as more real. So try to place yourself in the Millennial Kingdom. Write a 3-page story on how to raise kids in the Millennial Kingdom. Those are interesting things to think about. The Word of God is unfathomable, I mean you can have a mental journey in the Word of God that will take you on trips to all kinds of places and you never have to leave your house, just read the Word of God, it’s all free, God’s grace.