Sermon Tone Analysis

----

*Click here* to order an audio copy of this message (*90-334*).

----

*Why Every Calvinist Should Be a Premillennialist, Part 1 \\ [Discusses Sovereign Election, Israel, and Eschatology]*

*by \\ \\ John MacArthur \\ *Copyright 2007, Grace to You. \\ All rights reserved.

Used by permission.*

*Selected Scriptures*

Now I’ve been telling you for a number of months that we were going to get in to the subject of eschatology, the doctrine of last things.

We’ve been working our way through doctrinal emphases in Scripture, doctrinal themes.

And we have covered a lot of ground, but we now come to the doctrines that relate to the end times.

And in line with that, I want to try at least in the next couple of Sunday nights to establish a foundation for our understanding.

Now talking about eschatology is not without controversy.

There are a number of viewpoints of what the Bible means when it speaks of future events.

We understand that when you have a prophecy in the Bible that has not yet come to pass, not everything will be clear.

In 1 Peter chapter 1 you remember Peter says that the prophets who wrote concerning Christ, concerning the things to come wondered what person and what time.

That is to say that while they understood that someone would come, they understood whatever it was that had been revealed to them, the timing was not clear and the precise personages were not clear.

We can take prophetic scripture at face value.

We can interpret it the way we interpret any other passage of Scripture with the same use of the normal, natural means of interpreting language.

And we should.

And it will yield for us as clear an understanding of the future as the Lord wants us to have.

It’s not nearly as difficult as some people make it if you just take Scripture at face value.

Now to affix our thinking to one great future event which seems to be the most controversial, I want you to think with me about the coming Kingdom of Christ, known as the Millennial Kingdom because in the twentieth chapter of Revelation, the opening of that chapter, there is reference to the reign and rule of Jesus Christ on the earth which lasts one thousand years.

In fact, one thousand is repeated six times in that brief text.

That leaves me with the impression that God wants us not to question the length of its duration.

\\ Now with regard to the coming Kingdom of Christ in which Christ rules as supreme and sovereign ruler, there are a number of views.

But let me boil them down to three views, and these are good and I’ll give you a simple explanation so that you understand where we are going.

The first view we’ll call the post-millennial view.

That is to say that Christ will come after the Millennium, that the return of Christ is post, it is after the Millennial Kingdom.

Christ will return, He will come in a glorious Second Coming to earth but not to establish His Kingdom, but rather His Kingdom has been established.

Who will establish it?

The church.

The church will have an increasing influence in the world.

The church will become more influential, more impactful, more spiritually powerful.

The church will move out of its own environs to capture nations, leaders, ideologies, philosophies, theories, religions, and bring them all into captivity to Christ.

In the world things will get better and better and better as the church becomes more powerful and more influential.

And when the church has brought about the dominating influence of Christ across the world, He will then come and end everything and establish the new heaven and the new earth which is the eternal state.

Post-millennialists think things are going to get better.

That’s a hard sell, frankly.

They also think that there is not to be a literal thousand-year kingdom as such, but that’s just metaphoric for a long time and it simply indicates whatever the duration of that period where the influence of the church dominates the world after which Christ returns.

There is another form of that view called amillennialism...amillennialism.

And you’ve probably heard about that.

You can figure it out.

The alpha privative in the Greek language means a negative, so there is the view that there is no Millennium, that what John is writing about in Revelation 20 is very vague, may refer to nothing other than a long time in which the church flourishes on earth, simply referring to that kingdom which is spiritual...that is the rule of Christ over those who belong to Him while on earth.

And there are others who believe that that refers to heaven, that refers to the experience of the saints in heaven.

But for certain, according to amillennialists, there will be no thousand-year reign of Christ on the earth.

When He comes, everything ends immediately.

No kingdom on earth ruled by Christ before He gets here, and no kingdom on earth ruled by Christ after He gets here.

Now the truth of the matter is, those are just two ways to look at the same thing.

Post-millennialism and amillennialism is really the same thing.

I like to call amillennialism negative, and postmillennialism positive.

That’s just two ways to look at the same thing.

It’s two ways to view human history.

One says it’s not the Kingdom.

The other says it is the Kingdom.

One says moving toward the coming of Christ there will be no Kingdom.

The other says there will be a Kingdom.

But in both cases it will be the flow of history under the influence of the church.

So they’re really looking at the same thing.

One calls it a kingdom and says it will expand and expand and expand, that’s the positive spin.

The other looks at it as a spiritual kingdom also but says it will decline and decline and decline until Jesus finally comes.

\\ But in both cases they would deny the actual thousand-year reign of Christ and they would deny that Christ will reign and rule on earth and literally fulfill all His promises to the nation Israel given in the Old Testament covenants.

Whether you’re an amillennialist or a postmillennialist, you basically say Israel forfeited all its promises, forfeited all its privileges, forfeited all those things that God declared in covenant that He would give to them in the future and they forfeit it by their disobedience to the Mosaic Covenant, by their apostasy from true religion and by their rejection of their Messiah.

Therefore, Israel has been permanently set aside so that the only Kingdom will be that Kingdom that we call the church ruled by Christ either expanding to take over the world, or existing in the world, and finally in heaven.

But in any case...and by the way, postmillennialists and amillennialists differ as to the details of these kinds of things.

No sense in going in to all of that except to say in both cases they say there is no actual earthly reign of Christ fulfilling all Old Testament covenant promises.

Now against those two is the view called premillennialism.

That means there will be a Millennium and prior to that Millennium Jesus will come.

He comes pre, not post.

He comes before.

He will return to an increasingly wicked earth.

He will come in fiery judgment.

He will judge all the ungodly of all the earth and then establish His rule and His Kingdom forever.

The first phase of that eternal rule will be His reign on this earth which will last as Revelation 20 says six times, a thousand years.

After which His rule will continue because it is an everlasting rule, but it will continue in a new heaven and a new earth that replace this heaven and earth which will melt in an atomic implosion and make way for the new creation.

Those are the views.

Now we’re going to dig a little more deeply into the whole idea of the Millennial Kingdom and what the Bible says about it and as to its nature and the aspects of the Kingdom that are revealed in Scripture.

And by the way, they are many and they are wondrous to behold and we will do that.

But I want to approach this whole thing with you as my congregation the way I did with three thousand five hundred pastors a couple of weeks ago.

Now when they came here, I’m very much aware that many of them are amillennialists.

Some of them are post-millennialists, although there are fewer and fewer of those if you read the paper and have your eyes open and you’re breathing and your body has any temperature at all, you know things aren’t getting better.

But some are holding on to what they have taught in the past.

I guess self-preservation dominates their theology at that point.

But there is a growing influence of amillennialism because amillennialism has been a part of reformed theology.

Reformed theology has made a monumental comeback in this culture and thankfully so because it is biblical.

The Reformers had it right on most issues.

But they never got around to eschatology.

They never got around to applying their formidable skills.

You cannot fight the war on every front.

And at the great time of the Reformation, they were fighting the war where the battle raged the hottest and that was over the gospel and over the nature of Christ and over salvation by grace through faith and over the authority of Scripture.

They were fighting the massive Roman system.

And being occupied on those fronts, they never really got to the front of eschatology, they didn’t really get to the front of ecclesiology either, the study of the church.

But those two kind of go together, as we’ll see in this study, in some very fascinating ways.

\\ So, it is really one of the strange ironies of Reformed Theology.

And therefore it’s a strange irony in the church today that those who love the doctrine of sovereign election most, that would be Reformed theologians, those who love the doctrine of sovereign election most supremely and who love that doctrine most sincerely and...this is going to be a long sentence...and who are most unwavering in their devotion to the glory of God, the honor of Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration, the veracity and inerrancy of Scripture, those who are usually the most fastidious in Bible interpretation, yes those who are the most careful and intentionally biblical regarding all categories of doctrine, those who see themselves as guardians of biblical truth, those who are passionate to get it right, those who are not content to be wrong at all, and those who most heartily agree on the essential matters of Christian truth so that they labor with all their powers to examine in a Berean fashion every relevant text to discern the true interpretation of all matters of divine revelation are...and there’s the main verb in the sentence...are in varying degrees of disinterest in applying their skills to the end of the story and rather content to be in happy if not playful disagreement in regard to the vast biblical data on eschatology as if the end doesn’t matter much...period.

Or another way to say it would be this, how many of you have attended an amillennial prophecy conference?

There isn’t such a thing.

If you don’t know what you believe about the future, you can’t preach on it.

Whether you are a pessimistic amillennialist, or an optimistic amillennialist, that’s a post-millennialist, you don’t know what to do with prophetic truth because if you interpret prophetic truth in the same normal natural way you interpret all the rest of the passages of Scripture, you’re going to end up a pre-millennialist.

It’s inevitable.

And so you have to change the rules of interpretation.

And once you say the Bible doesn’t mean what it says, then we have no idea what it means.

Certainly you have no idea what it means, neither does anybody else.