Dispy PreMil XIV: Relevance
“Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.”
- II Thessalonians 2:1-2
“Write therefore the things that you have seen, those that are and those that are to take place after this.”
- Revelation 1:19
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I’ve been attending a weekly class on Revelation and eschatology offered by my church. The church is essentially Reformed Baptist and covenantal in their interpretations on the issues of Israel, the Church and prophecy. This class, however, has offered a balanced presentation of all the different interpretive camps and is looking to educate the attendees about all of the different options while leaving it up to us to decide where we land on the issues.
I deeply appreciate this approach seeing as how my one and only contention with being a part of this church has been its covenantal perspectives. When they’re not discussing the supersession of Israel by the Church in their sermons, they hit a grand slam every time. But I wanted to attend the class to see how they handled the issues in a more precise, focused, topical study (as opposed to only dealing with them as they arise during an expository sermon on Sunday morning) and so far I’ve very much enjoyed it.
As the pastor teaching the class has been defining the various interpretive positions, he’s been keying-in on each’s particular distinctives as well as their supposed strengths and weaknesses. Again, the point of the class so far has been to educate everyone about how different Christians handle the issues, not to preach or promote one particular perspective.
This past week, one of the alleged weaknesses presented for the futurist interpretation of Revelation was that of irrelevance to the audience. If the events of Revelation are largely still to take place, the argument goes, what relevance would the letter have had to its original recipients in places like Ephesus, Thyatira and Laodicea? What the point of telling them all of this? What difference would it have made to their current situation?
This post is to answer that accusation and to point out that it doesn’t constitute much of a weakness at all for the futurist position.
In the 90’s AD, when John first wrote and distributed his Revelation, the Church was still predominantly Jewish. The temple had been destroyed, all of the other Apostles were dead and persecution of Christians throughout the regions of the empire in which it had spread was considerable if not always constant.
Paul had already addressed a church in Thessalonica over their concerns that somehow they had missed the return of Christ and that the Day of the Lord had already come. So we know that believers in the decades immediately after the ministry of Christ were looking forward to the fulfillment of prophecy and wanting to make sure they would be protected from His coming wrath rather than the focus of it.
Jewish believers knew the history of their prophets and how they had declared with exacting precision both the exile of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah from the Promised Land as well as their eventual return. They had more recently come to see the dozens and dozens of Messianic prophecies fulfilled in the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The new man of the Church (Ephesians. 2:15) was being formed out of believing Jews and Gentiles (Isaiah 49:6). Christ’s prophecy of the destruction of the temple had been fulfilled (Matthew 24:1-2) and the Holy Spirit had descended (Acts 2:1-21 and 10:44-48). The down payment signs of the end of the age had come, but that still left dozens and dozens of prophecies unfulfilled.
The Old Testament is filled with prophecies about the coming Day of the Lord and the kingdom of the Messiah on earth. None of them have yet come to pass and the Revelation of John is God’s word to His people about how they will.
So the relevance to the immediate audiences of John’s original letters is much the same as the relevance to those of us living now in the twenty-first century all over the world: take heart, because this is how it will all come to pass. John, our fellow traveler through trials and travails of this life in a world where Satan currently runs the show, has been shown the end of all things: the destruction of God’s enemies, the establishment of Christ’s kingdom, the fulfillment of all prophecy, the restoration of Israel, the giving of the entire Promised Land to the Jews and the glorious eternal future that awaits all people of faith, both Jew and Gentile, with the God of all existence.
Attacking the futurist interpretation of Revelation as somehow irrelevant to the people to whom it was originally written can only seem reasonable to those whose presuppositions are biased against understanding what John was trying to say. Persecuted, marginalized Christians watching for the glorious promised return of their savior and the justice He will enact are in as much need of the guarantee of victory today as they were then. Believers wondering just how God will fulfill all that He has promised can rest assured that He will do all that He has said. And any believing Jew that may wonder about their place in this current age or whether or not God still has them in mind can know that the promises of the covenants have not been forgotten.
The events of Revelation may still be centuries away. That doesn’t make the book irrelevant to us anymore than it was to the very first believers who read it.
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“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ…” - Titus 2:11-13