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Revelation (Part 21)

Revelation

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the End Times from Revelation


What we’re going to do today with your kind permission is to do something in the realm of synthesis of what really boils down to a kind of systematic theology here. It’s not where I want to spend the bulk of the course. The course is supposed to be on Revelation, not how you put all of your eschatology together, but quite a number of you have asked how this fits in with this or with that or with something else, so I thought I should probably say something about it. If there is any part of the course where people are more likely to get angry, this is it.

What I will do is deal with a variety of positions, first of all, then isolate what the primary disputed factors are, and then within that framework tell you the direction in which I would move and why, and then we’ll still have time to do at least a bit on chapter 19. We won’t get much into chapter 20 tonight. We just won’t make it. Then next week we’ll have 20, 21, and 22. That’s what we’ll try and do.

Let me begin with the first chart. This is a chart, which in every one of these lines starts at creation and goes to the new heaven and the new earth or hell. So basically, it’s the entire timeline of the created order. In each of these cases, each of these lines represents a slightly different view of how to put it all together.

This is by no means an exhaustive listing. This is merely the listing of the most common views held by various branches of evangelicals across the history of the church. I will try to identify which groups have believed which line. The one that is most common in many evangelical circles is the messiest one, the top one. It’s the most specific. It is the one that is associated with premillennial dispensationalism. Let me explain what the term means, first of all.

If this period is the millennium, if this is the thousand years mentioned by Revelation 20, then the argument is that Jesus actually does come back before the millennium. Hence, pre-millennium. If, for example, you take tea.… Some of you may put the milk in before you put in the tea, and others of you may put the tea in before the milk. If you’re a pre-lactarian, you put the tea in before the milk. If you’re a post-lactarian, you put your tea in after the milk.

If you’re a premillennialist, you believe Jesus comes before the millennium. So that’s where the name comes from. Dispensational simply refers to the view that God has arranged his administration of this world in a number of periods or economies during which he does things a little bit differently. Dispensationalists have found 12, 13, 15 dispensations in some teachings.

All Christians are dispensationalists in some sense, unless you’re somehow offering sacrifices on Mount Moriah. In other words, we all think there are some changes in God’s dealings with the human race from the old covenant to the new. In that sense, we all hold that there are different dispensations, but the term dispensationalist is most commonly tied to the view that there are seven dispensations across here.

From creation to the fall is the age of innocence; that is, before sin enters the world. From the expulsion of Eden (that is, the fall and all that results from it) to the flood is the age of freedom. That is, what is meant in this analysis is the population is still so small. Governments have not been set up in large numbers. You don’t have world powers. There’s no giving of the Law at Sinai, so it’s sometimes called the age of freedom.

From the flood to Sodom, government. From Sodom to the Red Sea, the pilgrim age (that is, to the onset of Israel as such). Then Israel as a nation to the coming of Christ is sometimes called the period of Israel or the period of law. So this gives you one, two, three, four, and five. This line is not on scale, so it’s not at all as if it represents passage of time at the same rate. It’s event rather than a particular time.

Then right at the very end of the Israel period is the cross. That is, the coming of Christ, his death, burial, resurrection, and ascension, and in consequence of his ascension, the descent of the Holy Spirit, and with the descent of the Holy Spirit, the onset of what’s called the church age, number six, in which we live and move and have our being.

This is sometimes called the parenthesis period, because many on this view have held that, in some ways, the whole onset of the church, though foreseen by God, is not what the Bible is primarily about. It focuses things much more on Israel. It was because Israel rejected the Messiah that the millennium, the seventh age, did not begin right away. Instead there was something else that was put in there, a kind of parenthesis in the ongoing plan of God.

Then at some point, Jesus comes back and raptures the church out of the way. It’s gone. The whole church is gone, and with it the Holy Spirit as God’s agent for indwelling believers. The term rapture, then, in this context means.… It’s from really the verb rapio, to snatch away. The church is snatched away. It’s taken away. With this also comes the resurrection of the just, but only of the just, from every age, with the believers who are alive at the time.

So all of God’s people are raptured out of the way and you have the first resurrection. Then in this view, you have seven years from here to here. Here marks the onset of the millennium. During this period, you have the great tribulation. Some people call the whole period the great tribulation. Some people call only the first three and a half years the great tribulation.

During the second three and a half years, there is a remnant of Jews (and others, but primarily Jews) still being converted. Here, at the end of this period, all this terrible suffering and so on.… At the end of this period, those who die, those who are still left amongst the redeemed, are also transformed. The first resurrection is completed. Seven years. For those interested in Daniel, this is thought to be Daniel’s seventieth week.

Then there is at the end of this period a terrible struggle, the battle of Armageddon, the destruction of the False Prophet and the Beast of the time, and the onset of Christ’s millennial rule from Jerusalem, and Israel is restored. This is the kingdom era, the seventh in this view. Then right at the end of that, Satan is loosed again, but Christ destroys him. There is the final resurrection, the resurrection of the unjust, which then ushers in everything final, the new heaven and the new earth and hell.

That’s a very sketchy view. If you’ve never been exposed to this before, some of this is going to seem way off the wall. Some of you, on the other hand, have been brought up on it. You can’t imagine any other scheme. It’s the scheme represented, for example, in Hal Lindsey’s book The Late Great Planet Earth.

Now let me come to the second line. Let me simply go through these lines, first of all, and then I’ll pause for questions before I try to isolate what some of the interpretive issues are. In this next line, you don’t try to break things up quite so finally. You acknowledge there are changes as you move along, but you don’t deal with them in any of these next ones as fundamental dispensations. It is argued that the lines of demarcation simply aren’t strong enough. They’re not clear enough.

The principal lines.… You know, the onset of the law is still recognized, and the coming of Christ and of the Holy Spirit and so on. So there are some similarities, but one does not try to break things up into major periods of distinction. In this second view, it is sometimes called historic premillennialism. It has this name because here, too, Christ does come for his own people before the millennium.

It’s historic in that you can find people holding this view all the way back to the early fathers of the church. Full-blooded dispensational premillennialism I don’t think you can find before about 1830. You can find pieces of it all over the place, but a whole laid-out system I don’t think you can find before about 1830, which is, of course, one of the arguments that its critics use against it. This view is called historic premillennialism because it is a form of premillennialism that does go back to the early church.

What is understood here is that Christ comes, the Holy Spirit is given, and there is then the dawning of the kingdom. Hence the dotted line. The kingdom already dawns. It comes back from the new heaven and the new earth, from the millennium, however it’s construed, and it already overlaps this age. You are already in the kingdom. The kingdom is already here. It may not be here in its fullness. It may not be here in all of its plenty. It may not be here in its consummation, but it is already here.

Under this view, after all, Christ said, “All authority is given to me in heaven and on earth.” So in this view, you already have the kingdom reigning. Then toward the end of it there is the great tribulation. You do have a period of special tribulation at the end, but these numbers, the three and a half, the three and a half, and the seven, are understood symbolically for a sustained period of tribulation, and the whole period may be characterized by all kinds of tribulation and suffering again and again and again.

The point is that this does leave some place for tribulation here before Christ comes and you have the onset of the millennium. In this view, though, Christians go through the tribulation. It’s not that they’re raptured before the tribulation. This view is not only called premillennialism but pretribulational dispensational premillennialism. So this is sometimes called the double preview. That is, premillennial, pretribulational. Christ not only comes before the millennium but he comes before the tribulation to take the Christians out of the way.

In this view, on the other hand, the Christians are removed only at the onset.… They meet with Christ. Christ meets with them, and there’s the onset of the millennium right away after the tribulation. The point is Christians go through the tribulation in this view. Then you have roughly the same sort of pattern without the drama. Usually the Armageddon battle is understood differently to have symbolic and continuing and recurring effect rather than one particular event at the end of time.

Now this next line.… Here you have again the onset of law at the prescribed place and the coming of Christ at the prescribed place. Then I’ve put down here, “AD 70?” The reason for that is because on this view and on this view, many interpreters see many of the events described in the apocalyptic discourse taking place in the Roman Empire around the period of AD 70: the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of Israel, the destruction of the temple, the destruction of the priestly genealogical records, and so on.

Notice the primary difference between this view and this view is that all of the millennium is brought into this view. In other words, under this view the millennium is a symbolic way of referring to the entire period between the first coming of Christ and the second coming of Christ. So if it’s a thousand years, it’s not literally a thousand years; it’s just a long period of time, but it’s a time when Satan is in large measure bound, it is argued.

He doesn’t break forth in full frenzy until right at the end in this view, and he does break forth at the end in great tribulation. So there is a great tribulation at the end, although it’s not necessarily tied to seven years. The numbers are taken symbolically. Then when Christ comes, there is no onset of a millennium. There is the new heaven and the new earth, general resurrection, and complete reversal and everything all right away.

This view is normally called amillennialism. The a in Greek is what’s called the alpha privative. It’s like un in English, not in modern parlance. “I love you. Not!” Alpha is the alpha privative. It’s the not. So amillennialism simply means there’s no millennium. That, in a sense, isn’t quite fair to the view, because this group does not say that there’s no millennium. What it says instead is that there’s no thousand years millennium after Christ returns. What it says instead is that this whole period is the millennium. In this sense, you’re in the millennium.

This view, it has to be said, has been very common in the history of the church. One must not suggest this is only for liberals and other people who don’t believe in supernatural things. The vast majority of Lutherans have held this view. The vast majority of Calvinists have held this view. In various periods of church history, all kinds of Baptist and Free Church types and other people have held this view.

All kinds of people still believe this view. It is by far the most common view amongst Christians, for example, in England and Australia of virtually every stamp. It was first systematized in great detail by Augustine in the fourth century. He was no mean theologian, so one should not just simply write this off. It does mean you have to handle certain passages certain ways.

The last view is sometimes called postmillennialism. In this view, again, you have the Law coming at the regular place and Christ coming at the regular place. It may be that there is some special place given to AD 70 in this whole scheme. Like the top two views, there is no period for a decisive thousand-year reign, but unlike amillennialism, which either interprets the millennium in a completely different way that I’ll come to next week or sees the millennium as a way of referring to the entire inter-advent period between Christ’s first coming and the second …

In postmillennialism, it is argued that eventually, however long it takes in terms of suffering and attacks and deprivation and persecution.… Eventually, by the preaching of the gospel, the gospel will so triumph in the world that you enter into a kind of blessing that the world has never known, a millennial splendor. It’s not literally a thousand years. One thousand is ten to the third power. It’s a long period of time.

“The world shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” is one of the favorite texts of postmillennialists. They would argue, “Yes, there’s terrible persecution. There have been terrible martyrs and so on, but just think. There have been far more converts in the last 150 years than in the previous 1,800 combined. If the gospel augments in similar fashion the next 150 years, what will the end of this be?”

It may be that there will be such wonderful righteousness and so many kingdoms that you enter into eventually a period of millennium splendor, but eventually this comes to the end by a terrible outbreak from Satan himself. Satan unleashed from the Abyss in chapter 20 after the thousand years. A period of great tribulation there, and then the new heaven and the new earth and hell.

Now those are the four dominant views. There are all kinds of wrinkles, all kinds of footnotes, all kinds of specialty views, all kinds of novelties, but those are the four dominant views in evangelical circles. Now are there questions about what these mean, first of all, without me yet trying to identify strong points, weak points, what I would do with this, what I would do with that? Are there questions just about what they mean, what they look like?

Female: [Inaudible]

Don Carson: Yes, first resurrection here and continued here. Second resurrection is here. There won’t be any right after the rapture, but some will be getting converted. Because some will be getting converted (primarily Jews, but not exclusively Jews) during this period, it is argued, then what do you do with them at the end of this time? If this is a period of great tribulation and there’s nobody converted during it, who’s facing tribulation?

So people are getting converted and there’s trouble, it is argued. I’m not arguing for the case. I’m merely trying to defend it as it would be defended if I were someone who upheld this view. At the end of the day, therefore, when they get transformed, because you don’t want to call them the second resurrection, since on this scheme this clearly has to be the second resurrection, you call this the first resurrection, part two. You have two first resurrections.

What they would say is this is a continuation of it or the completion of it. Of course, inevitably, critics will pick it up for that too and say, “You don’t have two; you have three,” but I’m just trying to tell you how it would be defended from within the camp.

Female: [Inaudible]

Don: Yeah. Where do you say Christ comes back in this one? That’s why it’s called premillennialism. He comes back before the millennium.

Female: [Inaudible]

Don: Which line now? Top line? Fire from heaven. Again, that’s really a reference to Revelation, chapter 20, after the reference to the thousand years from verses 7 and on. Fire comes down, and by the word of his mouth he destroys the beast and sends him into the lake of fire, and so on. Is that reasonably clear? For some of you, I’m sure this is old hat. For some of you, it’s probably a bit daunting.

Now let me draw your attention to some of the things you have to sort out in this, regardless of position. There are entailments for all of these views about how you put your whole Bible together, and I want to highlight an arbitrary number of them for understanding, and then I’ll pick up a few of them to explain how you have to resolve some things no matter what you do.

Let’s begin with the top one again. Let me begin with the difficulties with it. Its great strength is that it is neat. It is a neat system. In fact, I would want to argue that the first and the third have this in common. They’re both exceedingly neat systems. They handle a great number of texts, and the question is whether they’re too neat. They’re both neat, but they can’t both be right.

This means, for example, when you come to this sequence here, does the Bible present the period from the flood to Sodom in some neat category of dispensation that can be easily labeled government or some other way? Does it get presented that way in the storyline? We can all agree that there’s law from Sinai to Christ. We can all agree there’s something from Christ on, but there are some clear changes there. Are some of these divisions here just too neat? That’s one of the questions that’s asked.

The second question that is asked is a more difficult one to handle. This one looks at a lot of texts, but I’ll raise it. In the dispensational scheme, you can go through every text in the Bible and say, “This passage is referring to that” or “This passage is referring to that” or “This passage is referring to that.” Every passage gets slotted in somewhere in the scheme. That’s part of what makes it neat.

When you start justifying, “Well, why do you say that this passage refers to that?” the answer always is, “Well, we know that the whole scheme is biblical, and this is the only place where this fits in the scheme.” But if every time you turn to a passage you get the same answer, then you have to ask sooner or later, “And where is the whole scheme taught?” In other words, there’s no passage.… I think all sides would agree. I don’t think I’m misrepresenting any defender of the view.

There is no passage that lays all this out for you, just as there’s no passage that gives us a full description of all of the attributes of God. If you want to write a book on the attributes of God, you have to run through Scripture to pick up bits and pieces from here and there and everywhere to do a fairly comprehensive overview. In this case, the question is how you put the bits and pieces together.

If in text after text after text you say, “Well, what’s the warrant for saying that this refers to that?” and the answer always is, “Well, it’s the only place it fits into the scheme, and the whole scheme is biblical,” what justifies the scheme as biblical? You start worrying after a while, after you’ve dealt with enough passages (at least I do).… I start worrying that when I read the passages, it’s not the obvious thing I would take.

For example, when you come to 1 Thessalonians, chapter 4, verses 13–18, almost everybody in this scheme takes those verses as the secret rapture right here. “I don’t want you to be worried about those who have fallen asleep in Christ, for when the Lord comes, not only will the Christians who are alive be caught up to be with the Lord in the air, but those who are in the graves will be caught up first,” and so on.

All of this is thought to be right here, the rapture. But one has to ask at least why, especially if you call this a secret rapture; that is, it just suddenly happens. The passage speaks of the trump of the Lord. It sounds like a very noisy secret rapture. In fact, the trump of the Lord normally is an eschatological apocalyptic term for the signal at the very end.

Then, in fact, it gets tied into your interpretation of 1 Thessalonians 5, which speaks of a time of great stress, and people then say it ties into this, but every other position on the camp would tie the threats and warnings and tribulation of chapter 5 instead to hell. So you’re dealing with more and more structures that interlock, and you always have to ask the question, “Does this particular structure, this system, deal fairly with most texts or does it begin to squeeze texts into a mold that’s neat but sounds a bit too removed from the text?”

Let me mention one other thing about this one. This is both a plus and a minus, and it’s one of the most difficult things. There are some passages in the New Testament that clearly seem to teach that Christ could come at any time. “Be ready. He could come at any time.” The notion that Christ could come at any time is often called the doctrine of the imminent return.

Imminent in this view does not mean he is coming imminently, as we commonly mean in English (that is, he’s impendingly coming). We don’t know that. It just means he could come at any time. There’s nothing to take place before he comes. But there are other passages that clearly seem to say that something must take place before he comes, as, for example, in 2 Thessalonians, chapter 2. Christ can’t come back before the man of sin is revealed.

This scheme neatly answers that question. Whether you agree with the answer or not, the way this scheme answers it is by having two comings. They’re not called two comings within the system, but that’s what it is. There’s this one here, and it is argued that this one is imminent. That is, Christ could come at any time, at any second. There’s no warning for that. There’s nothing that needs to take place before this one comes.

This one at the end of the tribulation period to onset the millennium, and this one.… Then there are things that have to take place, the coming of the Man of Sin and so on. So you’ve solved the problem of the tension in the New Testament texts between those passages that seem to talk about an imminent coming and those passages that seem to talk about something else happening first by saying that, in effect, what you have is two comings. Now we will have to consider whether that’s the best solution, but certainly it is a possible solution.

The last thing I want to say about this top line is on this view, as I indicated the first night, the only way you can make sense of almost everything we’ve read in the book of Revelation, from chapter 4 all the way to the end of chapter 19, is to stick it in the seven-year period, and that, finally, is where I have fundamental problems from the point of view of the book of Revelation with this view, why I have to tell you, frankly, I just can’t buy in.

At the end of the day, that means all of those passages that seem to be talking about, in the first instance, things that are going on in the Roman Empire, which is I think the way those passages would be understood first.… In terms of the apocalyptic of the day, a genre that was understood, in terms of the symbolism, the clear references to Rome, I think they would be read first in terms of things going on in their day. I think that’s the way Christians would read them. I don’t think they could read them in any other way.

Now I’ve already indicated that there are also hints in the book that some of these things prefigure further things. Thus, the first beast coming out of the sea. Don’t forget there’s an eighth element to him. That is, beyond the seven there’s an eighth horn, which is not of the seven and yet follows the seven.

There are hints, if you recall when we studied the first beast from chapter 13 and chapter 17, that he extends beyond the Roman Empire. He’s a king who comes again. He’s dead, and then he comes back again. He was, is not, and then comes back again, and all the earth is astonished because they see him coming back again. There are all of these kinds of hints that you’re going beyond the immediate thing and moving on and on and on.

I don’t deny that the book has all kinds of things that are forward-looking, but there are just so many elements between chapters 4 and 19 that, in my view, have to be taken of things in the first century that it raises a number of fundamental problems if you try to squeeze all of them exclusively into here. If you want to read a commentary on Revelation that does try to squeeze them all into there, read the commentary by John Walvoord. I’ll come back to some of these separate issues in a moment.

Let me come now to the third view, because in some ways, the second view is easier to evaluate when you see what this one is doing. The third view, amillennialism, if you recall, says there’s no thousand-year reign in here as such. Some people take the thousand-year reign just to be a symbolism of victory. We won’t take that view here. I’ll refer to it briefly next day. Most people in the amillennialist camp see that the thousand-year reign is another way of referring to this entire period between Christ’s first coming and his second coming.

This one also handles a lot of texts very well. Now you have only one coming at the end, which is surely.… You don’t want to keep multiplying them until you have one coming, then a second coming, and then a coming at the end of the millennium, and a first resurrection, then a 1.2 resurrection, and then a second resurrection. It simplifies things. The first and second resurrections in this view are …

In the dominant amillennial view, the first resurrection is when people come to know Christ they are brought from death to life. It’s a kind of spiritual resurrection. Then the second resurrection is what we might call the literal one, where they come back from the dead to life. Thus, in this view, the first resurrection is the onset of everything that takes place during this entire church order, and then Christ comes back at the very end.

It’s a very neat view. It solves a lot of problems, but it has some problems too. I was brought up in amillennialism. My father died an amillennial Baptist pastor, so I was brought up with this view. It’s not the view I hold today, but I think I could make a very strong case for it if you gave me a couple of hours. But it does have some problems. It too must face the question of what you do with the passages that speak of Christ’s imminent coming, of his coming at any time.

Amillennialists tend to do one of two things. They either say that the great tribulation took place back here.… This was the great tribulation back here in AD 70, and then you have tribulation throughout the whole period, so once you have gotten by AD 70, Christ could come back at any time. Or they say AD 70 was important, but the great tribulation is at the end.

The trouble is there’s so much tribulation going on so often in the world that whether you’re in the great tribulation or not you can’t necessarily.… There’s not going to be a big flag going up saying, “All right, people, this is it. All the tribulations up to now have been little ones. This is the great one.” So they say you could be in it without realizing it. In that sense, I suppose, Christ could come at any time, but they do expect a much longer period in there.

Above all, this particular view, in my view, has two problems. I think you can solve that last one, but this interpretation has two problems with it. First, as the millennium is described in chapter 20, with Satan bound and thrown into the Abyss so that he will not deceive the nations anymore, it just does not sound like this entire church age.

Yes, you can say that Satan is bound in certain ways. Of course he is. He has been decisively defeated on the cross. Yes, he cannot finally destroy God’s own elect. On the other hand, in chapter 12, we’ve already seen that although he’s thrown out of heaven, he’s on the earth in full rage. If our interpretation of chapter 12 is correct, it’s very difficult to get this interpretation out of chapter 20.

Oh yes, he’s constrained in some ways and, yes, Christ is reigning in some ways, but it’s still a contested reign, and meanwhile, elsewhere in the New Testament, the Devil is going about as a roaring lion, deceiving if possible the very elect, converting himself to an angel of light to deceive us, and devouring, if it’s possible, God’s people. He doesn’t sound like a very nice chap.

If, then, he is doing all of these things, in the fist instance, in terms of the Antichrist and the False Prophet manifesting themselves at the time of the Roman Empire, but then successively and repeatedly, it sounds very difficult to label all this period millennial. That, in my view, is the biggest problem with the amillennial interpretation. Now some amillennials have a way of getting around that, but I won’t go into it right now.