This week we backtrack from the previous message to define some of the biggest concepts and terms of Bible prophecy and the dispensations.
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00:00Welcome to Studies with Stearman.
00:06Join us as we look deeper into the Bible.
00:10Strengthen your faith with us, even as we see the day approaching.
00:15And now, here's Gary.
00:18We're going to be talking about Psalm 110, but also we're going to do a little revisiting
00:23of what we talked about last week.
00:27Prophecy 101, because I realized after last week's study that probably I opened a lot
00:35more questions than I answered.
00:38Well, this morning we're going to do something a little bit different.
00:43After last week's study, I got an email suggesting that I had covered a lot of territory that
00:50perhaps assumed a certain level of background that might not be present.
00:55I was talking about some comments in a raging debate about how to interpret Matthew 24.
01:02To me, the debate is fairly clear, but I can understand that there might be people who
01:07have not really cut their teeth on some of the basics about the rapture and the tribulation,
01:13the idea of premillennialism or the millennial concept in general.
01:19What we're going to do is back up a little bit as we continue our study in Matthew 24.
01:24We're going to define some terms and look at some basic ideas.
01:29First of all, the rapture of the church.
01:31And I assume that everybody knows what the rapture of the church is, starting with the
01:35fact that there's no word rapture in the Bible.
01:38Okay.
01:39And the reason it's called the rapture is because the Latin Vulgate Bible in the Roman
01:43Catholic Church, in Latin, rapere, means to grab something and pull it up as if somebody
01:52lifted you up by your hair.
01:54And that translates into English as rapture.
01:56Well rapere is used in the New Testament Latin Vulgate version.
02:01And so the catching away of the church really was a concept that gained popularity among
02:06the Roman Catholic fathers, not in the way that we use it today, but they talked about
02:11the rapture.
02:13Now the teaching of the rapture is very clearly presented in 1 Thessalonians 4, 13-18.
02:21We've all read that a hundred times.
02:23The Lord shall descend from heaven with a shout, the voice of the archangel, the trump
02:26of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first.
02:30We who are alive and remain shall be caught up together to be with the Lord.
02:36Well, the idea of being caught up is that Latin word rapere, which comes from the Greek,
02:41New Testament Greek, harpazo.
02:44And that word means to grab something and forcefully pull it up.
02:48So that's where the idea of the rapture of the church comes from, because the New Testament
02:52says that at a certain point in time the church is going to be caught up by total
02:58surprise without the slightest millisecond of a warning and with no preceding prophetic
03:06event.
03:07It could happen while I'm talking.
03:09That's the rapture of the church.
03:11That Greek word harpazo, it's used in the Bible in Matthew 12, 29, John 10, 12 to mean
03:17to pick something up and carry it away quickly.
03:20It's used in Acts 8 where Philip meets the Ethiopian treasurer and witnesses to him and
03:27then is caught up and divinely transported from the desert to the little town of Azotus.
03:35And that word harpazo is used for the catching away of Philip.
03:40And so there are just numbers of places in the Bible where that term is used, but the
03:45most popular, the most arresting use of the term is in the catching up of the church.
03:51So we can all agree, and I think everybody agrees.
03:55The institutional churches, the Roman church, independent Bible churches all agree on the
04:00idea of a catching up or that the church will be snatched away.
04:07But we disagree about the circumstances under which it will happen.
04:12That's where the disagreement is.
04:14And that's what we're going to talk about this morning.
04:17To begin with, the Bible says that there's going to be a tribulation period.
04:23Jesus says, and we've read this for the last two weeks, Matthew 24, 21,
04:30"...for then shall be great tribulation such as was not since the beginning of the world
04:34to this time known or ever shall be."
04:37And if you've read the Bible, you know that there was a horrendous catastrophe in the
04:42deluge of Noah.
04:44And Jesus says the great tribulation is going to be worse than that.
04:48The whole world was destroyed in the flood.
04:50It's going to be worse than the tribulation.
04:53There are many people such as Robert Gundry, George Ladd, who have written a number of
04:58heavy thick books saying that the church is going to go through this tribulation period
05:04that Jesus talks about.
05:07And the church will then be caught up or raptured at the end of that tribulation period.
05:13Ladd and Gundry and others who believe in the same way have lots of followers.
05:20And those followers can be found mostly in the institutional churches, the state churches
05:25of Europe, for example, including the Roman church, which believes in a catching away
05:32in a very vague way at the institution of the kingdom period.
05:37Now, we here in this little Bible church follow the dispensational tradition that began
05:45around 1840 with the rise of the Plymouth Brethren.
05:50It reached a kind of pinnacle in the year 1909.
05:54And from that time till this, dispensationalism has been very popular among those who read
06:00the Bible in a certain way, and we're going to talk about that way in just a moment.
06:04Why do we say we're dispensationalists?
06:07What's the importance of even mentioning the fact that we're dispensationalists?
06:12And we're going to start right there.
06:14The idea of dispensationalism, when you study eschatology, that is the whole idea of how
06:21does the end time unfold?
06:24You really have to answer one question.
06:27What's God doing?
06:29I've heard a guy on the radio lately, he's got an advertisement, apparently he has a
06:33Bible study ministry of some sort, but he opens his, I think it's a 30 second ad with
06:39the question, what's God doing today?
06:43Do we really know, or has he just gone away and he's doing nothing at all?
06:48The invitation by this man is to study and find out what God is doing today.
06:54So what is God doing?
06:57And how do you figure out how God relates to planet Earth?
07:02Is there a discernible program?
07:05Those of us who read the Bible as a literal work, that is it's verbally inspired, it is
07:13as the theologians say, the divine plenary inspired word of the Lord.
07:19Every syllable in the original autographs is utterly true.
07:24And by the way, I'd enjoy debating anybody who believes otherwise, because I've studied
07:29this for 30 years.
07:31But that's another story.
07:33Those of us who read the Bible as literally true, ask the question, what is God doing?
07:40And we answer it with the idea of dispensationalism.
07:44Why dispensationalism?
07:47Dispensationalism describes the history of the world in spiritual terms better than any
07:51other system.
07:53And those of you who've never heard of dispensationalism or are unfamiliar with it, it's fairly simple.
08:02It began in the garden, Adam and Eve, and they were living a life of paradise until
08:08they sinned.
08:10And so their innocence ended with a bang, with a crisis, if you will.
08:17The Garden of Eden crisis, where they ate the forbidden fruit, and that ended innocence.
08:22What came next was a period of conscience, where man was basically operating within the
08:28parameters of his own conscience.
08:31We all have read about events before the Flood where the conscience of man went completely
08:37awry, and the world became a place of utter depravity.
08:41So much so that God said, I'm going to have to destroy the world, except for a few people.
08:46So that dispensation, historical dispensation, by the way from the Greek word oikonomia,
08:53from which we get our English word, economy, so you could call a dispensation an economy,
08:59ended with the Flood.
09:01The next dispensation after the Flood, men tried to reach their demigods in the same
09:07way they had before the Flood, and they tried to build a tower.
09:11And God said if they succeed in building this tower, they will realize their ambitions.
09:15We've got to do something to destroy their program.
09:19And so there was the confusion of languages, which again is a crisis, ending the era called
09:25the era of human government in which the first codes of law were developed that later
09:30became a code of Hammurabi.
09:33The next dispensation after that crisis was the dispensation of promise, Abraham.
09:41God said I want you to go to a land that I will show you.
09:44In Hebrew that is called lech lecha, which means in English you go because I told you
09:51to go and for no other reason.
09:54Not because you think you can get something out of it, you just go, lech lecha.
09:59And so he went, and the story of Abraham is that he came to the land and he went through
10:08a series of crises, ending with the Egyptian crisis when the people of Israel went down
10:16to Egypt because there were better pickings there, among other things.
10:21That led to the great crisis of the plagues of Egypt and Moses the deliverer.
10:27Well that ended the generation or the economy of promise because Moses took his people to
10:33Mount Horeb and the Lord delivered the law and the next period was law.
10:39The period of law extended from Moses 1450 BC until the first coming of Christ and Christ's
10:46crucifixion in 33 AD.
10:50That dispensation, called the dispensation of law, ended again in a crisis.
10:54So we're now looking at the first crisis, Eden.
10:58Second crisis, flood.
10:59Third crisis, Tower of Babel.
11:01Fourth, the Egyptian crisis, the Passover, the wilderness march, Moses the lawgiver.
11:08The next crisis was Christ's crucifixion that ended the period of law and started another
11:15period called the period of grace which is the church age, the present age, which is
11:21still running.
11:24We are in that age.
11:26The dispensation of grace which will end in another crisis, the tribulation crisis.
11:34We all know that there's going to be a tribulation.
11:37In fact, it's kind of interesting.
11:39The book of Enoch, which is quoted in the Bible and the portion that I'm quoting, by
11:45all reckonings, by virtually all early scholarship was written before the flood.
11:52And Enoch, son of Jared, very close to Adam in his genealogy, was thought of as basically
12:00the most righteous man of the pre-flood period.
12:02You remember Enoch was translated and went to be with God without having to die.
12:07Enoch wrote a prophecy.
12:10Mind you, living several hundred years before the flood, Enoch was writing about a catastrophe
12:17that was going to happen.
12:18Which catastrophe did he write about?
12:20Not the flood.
12:22He looked forward several thousand years to the tribulation which is still future to us.
12:28And he wrote about the tribulation.
12:30He wrote this, and the eternal God will tread upon the earth, upon Mount Sinai.
12:37He will appear in His strength from the heaven of heavens.
12:40All shall be smitten with fear.
12:42Even the watchers shall quake.
12:44Great fear and trembling shall seize them unto the ends of the earth.
12:47The high mountains shall be shaken.
12:49High hills shall be made low.
12:51Shall melt like wax before the flame.
12:53The earth shall be wholly rent and sunder.
12:56And all that is on the earth shall perish.
12:57Now he's not talking about the flood.
12:59He's talking about the words later picked up by the Old Testament prophets and used
13:03to describe the tribulation.
13:05And there shall be a judgment upon all men.
13:08But with the righteous He'll make peace and will protect the elect and mercy shall be
13:13upon them.
13:14He goes on to describe the second coming after the tribulation.
13:19Well, we're now in the age of grace.
13:23This age is going to end.
13:25The age of grace has been an amazing period of time.
13:28Think about the period from Christ to now.
13:30And in particular, think about the last 50 years.
13:34The most amazing time in the history of humanity, really.
13:39And it's all going to come crashing down in this tribulation period, which is the next
13:43crisis.
13:45And after every crisis there comes another period.
13:48This will be the millennial kingdom.
13:51And it, too, shall come to an end in a great rebellion described at the end of the book
13:56of Revelation.
13:58So dispensationalism explains human history as God awarding to man an economy within which
14:09to worship Him, and man failing to do so.
14:14Innocence, the failure by the eating of the forbidden fruit, conscience, the failure by
14:20living in utter depravity, and, by the way, allowing the intrusion of fallen angels to
14:28influence the course of their society.
14:30That was ended by the flood.
14:31Human government entered the Tower of Babel, promise ended at the great crisis in Egypt,
14:38the death of the firstborn of Egypt, the fleeing into the wilderness, and the giving of the
14:42law, the next period law lasted from 1450 B.C. to 33 A.D. with Christ's crucifixion.
14:50The next period, grace, ends in a crisis called the tribulation.
14:53That's yet to come.
14:54And then the millennial kingdom will come.
14:57And there will be a final crisis at the end of that.
15:01After that crisis at the end of a thousand years, we are told there will be a new heavens
15:06and a new earth.
15:08So we explain history in terms of dispensations because dispensationalism establishes a biblical
15:15precedent for the current church age which will end in a crisis that launches a new dispensation
15:21called the kingdom age.
15:23C.I. Schofield, influenced deeply by John Nelson Darby, wrote in his Schofield reference
15:29Bible in 1909, a dispensation, oikonomia, or economy, is a period of time during which
15:36man is tested in respect of obedience to some specific revelation of the will of God.
15:43By contrast, other systems of thought muddle, confuse, omit future prophetic development.
15:54In other words, what we want to try to do is answer that question, what is God doing?
16:01The guy on the radio always asks the question.
16:03Every time they run his spot, what's God doing?
16:07Everybody wants to know what God is doing.
16:09Well, so do we.
16:10And we read the Bible to try to find out what He's doing, and for us the dispensational
16:16model renders a greater degree of clarity than any other model.
16:22Another model, for example, a competing model, is called amillennialism.
16:29Now we've already said that dispensationalism says that there will be a crisis at the end
16:35of the church age called the tribulation.
16:38After that will be the millennium.
16:40Christ's second coming will occur, and He will establish the throne of David.
16:45Amillennialism, some people say ah, but I say a, because that's the way I grew up.
16:52You say atypical.
16:53You don't say ah-typical.
16:54You don't say atheist, you say atheist.
16:57So I say amillennial.
17:00Amillennialism means no millennium.
17:04No millennium.
17:06Amillennialism eliminates the millennial reign of Christ on the throne of David.
17:11It eliminates the new heavens and the new earth, talked about by Peter, talked about
17:15by John in the book of Revelation.
17:18Augustine, who lived from 354 to 430, was a premillennialist in his early life, but
17:27in his later writings, in particular the city of God, Augustine gave up the idea that
17:32there would be a future millennium, during which time the Jews would come back to Jerusalem
17:39and there would be a kingdom of Israel.
17:41He believed that for a while, but in his later writings he said no, that's not going to happen.
17:46The Jews have been forever set aside, never to return.
17:50There will be no millennium.
17:52Let's not even bother ourselves with it.
17:55And he developed the idea of a spiritual resurrection, so that everybody who lived from the cross
18:02to Christ's second coming is said to be spiritually resurrected, not bodily resurrected.
18:09Well, we dispensational, pre-tribulational premillennialists, and I'm going to get into
18:15all those terms in a minute, we believe in the bodily resurrection.
18:20Christ was resurrected bodily, He's promised to take us unto Himself, and then at His return
18:26we're going to come back with Him in bodily form.
18:29But even before that, we're going to receive fleshly bodies.
18:34So amillennialism came about as a result of Augustine's thought.
18:40And by the way, Augustine is the doctor of the Roman church, that's all there is to it.
18:45And his thought was that there would be no millennial kingdom on earth with Israel's
18:49ahead of the nations.
18:51There is postmillennialism, where you have the cross and the church age, which leads
18:58to a golden age and Christ's second coming.
19:02So if you are a postmillennialist, and by the way, postmillennialists would include
19:07the state churches of Europe and their offspring, the institutional churches, the large church
19:12councils, most of the large churches believe in postmillennialism.
19:19And the basic idea of postmillennialism is that the church is going to gradually spread
19:26around the whole world until the church converts the earth to Christianity and there will be
19:33a golden age at that point.
19:35And when the earth reaches a certain stage of fruition, that is, when the earth becomes
19:40good enough by the actions of the church, then Jesus will return and be seated on the
19:46throne in Jerusalem.
19:49But there won't be any millennial kingdom, there will just be an eternal state after
19:55that.
19:56Nor will there be the twelve tribes of Israel regathered.
19:59So postmillennialism says there is only the church age and the eternal state.
20:05The kingdom and the new heavens, they're right out of prophecy, just simply not there.
20:11And again, no Israel.
20:14Well God sure fibbed to Abraham.
20:18He told a whopper, he said, Abraham, I'm going to give you this land from the river of Egypt
20:24to the Euphrates, 300,000 square miles.
20:29And Abraham received that in a covenant.
20:34And if you block that out of scripture, I think you have a problem.
20:37So that's postmillennialism.
20:40Now why are we going through all of these exercises?
20:43I guess so that we'll all be on the same page and also give you an opportunity if you don't
20:47agree with this, just get up and walk out.
20:51Premillennialism.
20:52Now, I'm a premillennialist, which means that I believe there's going to be a millennial
20:57kingdom.
20:58There's the cross on the left, the present church age.
21:02There is a rapture and then a tribulation.
21:07There is, as the arrows show, the church in heaven and returning to earth with Christ
21:13at His second coming.
21:15There is a resurrection at that period of time and a millennial kingdom of a thousand
21:20years.
21:21That's a millennium.
21:24Followed by a rebellion, followed by another resurrection, a final judgment, and then the
21:31new heavens and the new earth.
21:32In other words, the Bible speaks of all of these periods.
21:36And so you have the church age, which we believe was initiated at Pentecost and will run until
21:43the catching away of the church.
21:44And currently we're discussing the catching away or the rapture of the church occurring
21:49sometime before the tribulation.
21:52The church is caught up making the way for the initiation of the kingdom period, and
21:57that means Israel returns.
22:00We are friends of Israel.
22:02We believe in a pre-tribulational rapture.
22:05We are dispensationalist, premillennial, and pre-tribulational.
22:09And that's what we're talking about.
22:11That's what the big discussion is about.
22:13There's a lot of, if you will, backroom or back-channel discussion these days on the
22:19subject at hand.
22:22Now there are others, and again, this would include people like Gundry and Ladd, post-millennialists
22:28who believe in a post-tribulational rapture.
22:32Post-tribulational rapture says the church is going to go through the tribulation period.
22:37The rapture comes at the end of seven years after the church has gone through that period
22:41of time.
22:43The interesting thing is that people who teach this think that the church is coming back
22:50with the Lord at the end of the tribulation period in order to set up the kingdom.
22:55So the kingdom will be administered by the church, they say, not by Israel.
23:01So they make two mistakes.
23:03And when we talk about Matthew 24, you have to understand there are people who believe
23:09in a pre-tribulational rapture, there are people who believe in a post-tribulational
23:13rapture, and it really makes a difference what you believe.
23:18The foundational idea of the pre-trib rapture doctrine is built upon a literal interpretation
23:24of Scripture.
23:25In other words, we don't spiritualize or allegorize Scripture, we just simply read it the way
23:30you would read a newspaper.
23:32We interpret it as you might interpret any documentary literature that you would pick
23:39up.
23:40Now, amillennialists and post-millennialists believe that most all Bible prophecy has already
23:46been fulfilled in the past.
23:50We as pre-millennial, pre-tribulationists believe that there is in fact most Bible prophecy
23:59still awaits fulfillment in the future.
24:02That's why we're called futurists.
24:04So you have premillennialism, futurism, and a distinction between Israel and the church.
24:11Those are kind of three little pillars there upon which the pre-trib rapture doctrine is
24:16built.
24:17We have to make a distinction between Israel and the church.
24:20There is prophecy written for national Israel, there's prophecy written for the church, never
24:24shall the twain meet.
24:27Post- and amillennial people merge or confuse or blur the distinction between Israel and
24:35the church, invariably.
24:37And they finally end up believing that they have inherited the promises made to Israel,
24:42which in my opinion is outright blasphemy.
24:45On that kind of a foundation, you have a contrast between the first and second coming
24:51of Christ.
24:52If you begin to develop your interpretation of the Bible based upon these principles of
24:57literal interpretation, futurism, and the distinction between Israel and the church,
25:01you're going to see the contrast between Christ's first and second coming.
25:06Other forms of interpretation tend to blur the first and second coming of Christ, some
25:10saying there's only one second coming and there's no such thing as a rapture.
25:15There is an interval needed between the first and second comings of Christ.
25:20Why do you need an interval?
25:21Well, you need an interval for the tribulation period and the judgment.
25:26And remember, the judgment is of, by, and for national Israel.
25:31It makes an end of wickedness and the wicked ones.
25:34It creates a worldwide revival and it breaks the power of the holy people.
25:39That is, Israel will see that its stiff-necked attitude has to change.
25:44It has to bow before God and accept His declarations.
25:50So we have a contrast between the comings.
25:52We have an interval between the comings.
25:55We have the doctrine of imminency, which is very important.
26:02Nothing has to be fulfilled before Jesus comes for the church.
26:08If that's true, then you have to ask, why is that true?
26:12Why is no prophecy to be fulfilled before Jesus comes?
26:16We discuss that.
26:19Then you have to deal with the nature of the tribulation.
26:22The nature of the tribulation is a time when geophysical destruction is at its maximum.
26:28I take it that there will be volcanism on an unprecedented scale, plate tectonics, continents
26:35slipping, islands disappearing, new islands appearing.
26:38The earth will change the tilt of its rotation, which is now 23.5 degrees, and some people
26:44say may go back to zero degrees as it may have been in the past.
26:48In other words, we're talking about geophysical upheavals on an unprecedented level as told
26:54by the prophets and by Enoch, by the way.
26:57Enoch wrote all about this.
26:59He's the son of Jared, very close to Adam, and he wrote all about those geophysical upheavals.
27:05The early church fathers quoted Enoch.
27:08They believed in his writings.
27:10That's the nature of the tribulation.
27:12It's not some little bad storm with hurricane chasers out in their cars, you know, and reporting
27:17on CNN.
27:19It's nothing like that.
27:21The nature of the church has to be taken into account under the pre-trib rapture doctrine.
27:27What is the nature of the church?
27:29Is the church a legal structure that has to be housed within a particular type of building
27:38and doing particular types of things as dictated by particular types of people?
27:44What is the structure of the church?
27:46What is it the church is supposed to do?
27:49You have to define that.
27:51And by the way, the institutional churches, the state churches, have all gone to great
27:55lengths to create firm superstructures, infrastructures by which the people inside of that church
28:03know what they're supposed to do.
28:06Augustine made a statement which I still find remarkable.
28:10He defined salvation, and I don't know how you define salvation.
28:16Augustine defined salvation as living within the sound of the church bell.
28:26That's a quote from Augustine.
28:28So if the bell rings and you don't go to church, you're lost.
28:33I don't believe that, just for the record.
28:37And finally, the last of those six points of doctrine there, we have to deal with and
28:43look at and understand the work of the Holy Spirit.
28:47Pre-trib rapture, up on top, that sloping line, practical motivation for godly living
28:53evangelism and missions.
28:56The outreach of the church, and I want to point out to you something.
28:59The greatest missionary movement in the history of the church age took place when?
29:05After John Nelson Darby and the Plymouth Brethren woke up.
29:09After many, many centuries, the church was asleep in 1840 up through 1882, and then George
29:16Wigram and the others gave impetus to the missions that spread out at the end of the
29:2119th and the beginning of the 20th century.
29:24Those missions went out on the strength of dispensational premillennialism.
29:33They really did.
29:35And I realize that I'm covering a lot here, but we have to define.
29:40We've been going through Matthew 24.
29:43The disciples asked two questions, when and what sign?
29:48When are you going to overthrow the world system and set up the millennial kingdom?
29:53The disciples believed in a millennial kingdom.
29:56In fact, that's what they really, really, really believed in.
30:00And secondly, what will be the signs that we should look for when that is going to happen?
30:06Jesus talks about the first half of the tribulation.
30:10He answered the question directly about signs.
30:13Matthew 24, 4-14, which we have looked at, He identifies the midpoint of the tribulation,
30:21Matthew 24, 14-40, which He calls the abomination of desolation, which is the Antichrist standing
30:26up.
30:27He identifies the second half of the tribulation, which He calls great tribulation, tithlipsis
30:34tismegalis, He calls it, tribulation, the great one.
30:40He talks about false Christs and false prophets, Matthew 24, 23-28.
30:46He talks about His second coming in glory, Matthew 24, 29-31.
30:53He gives the application of the fig tree, and remember what He said about the fig tree?
30:57He said it's a parable.
31:00By the way, the fig tree is national Israel, can't be anything else.
31:04Jeremiah said in the latter days there are going to be some good figs, and they are going
31:10to be brought back to the land and they're going to be planted and they're going to grow
31:14up as fig trees.
31:17So if Jeremiah said it, it's good enough for me, and Jesus says the parable of the fig
31:22tree.
31:23It shows the fig tree with its branch tender, putting forth leaves.
31:27You know that summer is nigh, and the fig is kind of a unique tree, you know, it starts
31:32its fruit early in the spring as it puts on its leaves.
31:36It doesn't wait until later.
31:38The fruit begins in a tiny little way and then grows out, and He says, so likewise ye,
31:43when ye shall see all these things, know that it or he is near even at the doors, and of
31:49course that summons up the book of Revelation where Christ says, behold I stand at the door
31:54and knock.
31:56And then in Revelation chapter 4 where John was standing and he heard somebody say, which
32:04means come up hither, and he looked up and he was taken up into Heaven and into the future.
32:09And Jesus says, verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass till all these things
32:14be fulfilled.
32:15Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
32:21Then we get to the days of Noah, which is where we left off last week.
32:26The parable of the days of Noah, which we're going to continue this week, is interesting
32:32because it talks about a flood, it talks about Noah and his family, it talks about some people
32:39who are taken and some people who are left.
32:44There's a great dispute about who's being talked about in that situation.
32:50If you've never studied church history and prophecy, you now realize that it's maybe
32:57a lot more complex than you thought.
33:00Turn to Matthew 24, and we're going to continue looking at this question, the big question.
33:08In the beginning of the Olivet Discourse, Jesus says, take heed that no man deceive
33:14you.
33:15He says, many will come saying, I'm Christ, shall deceive many.
33:18And you're going to hear about wars and rumors of war.
33:22He says, but the end is not yet.
33:25Nations shall rise against nation, kingdom against kingdom.
33:28The Jews said that when you see nation against nation, kingdom against kingdom, by the way
33:33this is written in the Mishnahs, then listen for the footsteps of the Messiah.
33:40They believed, as do I, that the period preceding the Great Tribulation is going to be a time
33:51of wars.
33:52Now we've seen World Wars I and II.
33:56I think we're about to see World Wars III and IV.
33:59And the question is, will the church be around for World Wars III and IV, or will we be
34:05taken to Heaven?
34:07Good question.
34:09Particularly in the light of certain things that are happening in the world today.
34:14Remember the judgment in the tribulation is necessary, viewing the history of the world
34:20dispensationally.
34:23We now live in the dispensation of the age of grace, which will be ended in the Great
34:27Tribulation, which is a period of judgment that will make an end of wickedness in general
34:33and the wicked ones, Isaiah 24, 19, and 20.
34:39Right now the wickedness and the wicked ones are in full, full tilt.
34:44I mean there's nothing to stop them, seemingly.
34:48And I think that's going to continue to be the case.
34:51It'll be a time of worldwide revival, and it'll be a time when Israel finally has open
34:59eyes and can see the plan of God and the identity of their Messiah.
35:05Luke 21, 24 says,
35:08"...they shall fall by the edge of the sword, be led away captive into all nations, they
35:12being Israel."
35:14That's part of dispensationalism, which says that in the church age the Jews will diminish
35:21and the church will increase.
35:24Luke 21, 24 says they're led away captive to all nations and Jerusalem shall be trodden
35:29down of the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.
35:32Have you noticed that Jerusalem is being trodden down of the Gentiles who are now saying that
35:38Israel does not have any prescriptive rights there?
35:42They are saying that Israel actually has no historical presence on the Temple Mount.
35:46That's all just mythology.
35:48That's called being trodden down.
35:51But Luke says that this is going to happen, Jerusalem's going to be trodden down by the
35:56Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.
36:01And these times go all the way to the end of the tribulation.
36:04In other words, the times of the Gentiles are underway right now and will extend all
36:09the way through the tribulation when commercial Babylon rises to its full height.
36:16So now I have problems on Earth.
36:20Joel, by way of review, says before the great and terrible day of the Lord there are going
36:25to be all kinds of evil things happening, leading right into this period.
36:33Matthew 24, 36.
36:37But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.
36:43We dealt with this last week.
36:47We quoted from several different people.
36:50For example, we quoted from Dr. J. Vernon McGee who says that Matthew 24, 36-44 is not
36:59speaking of the rapture of the church, but rather the judgment that shall fall during
37:04the tribulation.
37:06We read from Dr. Dwight Pentecost who in things to come said that Matthew 24, 36-44 did not
37:15deal with the catching away of the church in any way, shape, or form, but instead dealt
37:21with the tribulation period and the judgments therein.
37:24We quoted Dr. Stanley Toussaint, and if you haven't read him, he is a phenomenal expositor.
37:31Came out of Dallas Theological Seminary and one of the great writers.
37:35But again, the official Dallas Theological Seminary position and the pre-trib study group
37:39says Matthew 24, 36-44 is definitely speaking of the tribulation and not of anything pre-tribulational.
37:47Dr. John F. Walvard who is the professor emeritus, one-time chancellor of Dallas Theological
37:55Seminary, we read from him last week.
37:58He positively states that you must interpret Matthew 24, 36-44 as occurring within the
38:07tribulation period.
38:08Now he's a dispensational premillennialist, and so what I'm saying to you is that there
38:15is now some disagreement even among dispensational premillennialists about the exact nature of
38:20interpretation of the Olivet Discourse.
38:25And finally we read from Dr. Arnold Fruchtenbaum who differed markedly from the others saying
38:34very clearly this section of the Olivet Discourse is absolutely not speaking of the tribulation
38:44at all.
38:46Wow.
38:49Now I deeply admire Dr. Fruchtenbaum, and I'm going to repeat what we talked about last
38:55week.
38:56I believe in the value in certain cases of repetition.
39:00You really need to deal with a tough question from several different perspectives.
39:0524, 36 of Matthew, but of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven,
39:11but my Father only.
39:13Dr. Fruchtenbaum makes the point that the Greek construction at the beginning of Matthew
39:1736, but of that day and hour is the peri-da construction in Greek, and it means now concerning
39:25a new topic, change of thought, new idea, however you want to put it, but concerning
39:33that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.
39:39He says you must think about the tribulation period as being in two halves.
39:45Jesus describes it as being in two halves, first half, second half.
39:49And in Revelation, when John was given the great revelation of the tribulation period,
39:55it was two equal halves of 1260 days each, three and a half years, total of seven years.
40:03And with the abomination of desolation in the middle, just as Jesus gives it.
40:07And the interesting thing about that is, I think the most interesting thing about the
40:12fact that it's divided in the way that it is, is the first half, the first three and
40:19a half years of the tribulation are almost tolerable.
40:23If you like, half the population of the world being killed, and universal pestilence, no
40:30food, no economy, the economy's gone completely awry.
40:36But nevertheless, you could live then if you're crafty enough.
40:41The real horrendous geophysical events have not totally come to pass in the first half
40:46of the tribulation.
40:48So what you have, as Jesus gives it, and as Luke gives his version of the Olivet Discourse,
40:56is three periods.
40:57You have the period before the tribulation, the first half, and the second half.
41:02And they are of increasing severity.
41:05But of that day and hour, knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father
41:09only.
41:10Dr. Fruchtenbaum makes an excellent point.
41:14If you've got a seven-year tribulation coming up, and if you have read Scripture, which
41:19the Jews read, they read Scripture in ways that we don't.
41:23They're very, very, very thorough when they read Scripture.
41:27I've had debates with Jews who are Scriptural geniuses, and they can whip the socks off
41:33me.
41:34I mean, it's amazing how they study Scripture, and of course they speak Hebrew fluently,
41:39and yet they don't get it.
41:41They don't get it about the Messiah.
41:44They don't get it about what God has promised in terms of judging Israel and the world.
41:50They don't get it about the tribulation.
41:52Invariably, a Jew will say, the next time you meet a Jew, ask him if you think there's
41:57going to be a future time of judgment.
41:58No, they'll say.
42:00That's already taken place.
42:02When did it take place?
42:04World War II, the Holocaust.
42:06That was the judgment, followed by the return, and that's it.
42:10They say from the return forward, everything's coming up roses, and Israel will progressively
42:16move back into the land and finally appropriate the entire 300,000 square miles promised to
42:21Abraham.
42:22That's their eschatology.
42:25But I'm sitting there and saying, whoa, I hate to differ with you, but there's coming
42:29a time of great tribulation, and it'll be characterized by a false Messiah, and Israel
42:35will believe that Messiah to be their true Messiah.
42:38And I've got that seven years ahead of me, and it's going to be 2,520 days long, plus
42:46some other days as given by Daniel.
42:50If I'm a Jew at the beginning of the tribulation, and I understand Daniel 9.27, and I see a
42:56man sign a covenant giving Israel the right to worship in their own temple on the Temple
43:02Mount, if I'm smart, I'm going to start my stopwatch at that moment, ticking off 2,520
43:11days until the second coming of Jesus.
43:13That's what the Bible says is going to happen.
43:16But Jesus says, but of that day and hour knoweth no man, not the angels of heaven, but my Father
43:21only.
43:22You can't say that about the second coming, because you do know the day and the hour.
43:28Once the tribulation starts, you can start counting the days.
43:32They're given by the prophets, and they're given in the New Testament.
43:36So says Dr. Fruchtenbaum, but of that day and hour.
43:40But concerning another subject, of that day and hour.
43:44Now what day and hour is he talking about?
43:46He mentions that day and hour over here in Matthew 24.50.
43:51The Lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him in an hour that
43:56he's not aware of.
43:57The day and the hour.
43:59Always people have said, this has got to be the second coming of Christ.
44:03Dr. Fruchtenbaum says, and I'm inclined to agree, the day and hour spoken of here is
44:09the day and hour of the rapture.
44:12Second point.
44:14But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be.
44:18Days of Noah.
44:19What were the days of Noah?
44:21That's Noah and the boys build a bunch of tools.
44:25They got axes and big hand saws and giant woodworking tools, and they build this 350
44:32foot long boat, and everybody laughs at them.
44:36Well that's simply not the way it's characterized in Scripture.
44:39Nobody knew that they were building the boat.
44:41They were doing it in secret.
44:42You don't believe that, read the Bible.
44:45And nobody even knew, Jesus says, until the flood came.
44:48What were the days of Noah?
44:49Do you know how long before the flood Noah was born?
44:54600 years.
44:56So Noah gets to be, say, 21 years old, and he's a strapping man, ready to build a boat.
45:02He's still got 579 years before the flood, and has boys, and they grow up.
45:10The days of Noah are 600 years long, and the Bible characterizes these days as unbelievably
45:16evil.
45:18The world is out of control.
45:20And Jesus says, as the days of Noah were, that's 600 years of days, starting when Noah
45:27was born, it was already bad.
45:30If you read about the days of Jared, who preceded Noah, in the days of Jared, the fallen angels
45:36descended upon Mount Hermon, called the gate of the gods.
45:42And there they created centers of idolatry.
45:46And from that center of idolatry, they spread their evil work throughout the civilized world.
45:53This happened before Noah was born.
45:57He was born into an already evil world.
46:01And he had this 600-year period to watch the world go from bad to worse, to worse, to worse,
46:06to absolutely horrendous.
46:08So Jesus says, but as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man
46:13be.
46:14He characterized the days of Noah.
46:16The corruption of the human race to the point that it was no longer capable of genetically
46:21extending itself.
46:24It had become genetically corrupted.
46:26There are many proofs of that.
46:28And Jesus said it's going to be like that in the last days.
46:31Well surely that hasn't happened today.
46:35Genetic modification is one of the watchwords of our day.
46:38So was the days of Noah.
46:41I'm about to end here, but I want to make a point.
46:46For as, verse 38, in the days that were before the flood, they were eating, drinking, marrying,
46:51giving, and married until the day that Noah entered the ark.
46:54And knew not till the flood came.
46:57He's talking about the people surrounding Noah.
47:00They knew nothing of this project.
47:03Project Noah was just like Area 51.
47:06People had heard about it, but they didn't know what was going on there.
47:09They knew not.
47:10Until the flood came, took them all away, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man
47:16be.
47:17It took them away.
47:19The Greek word for taking away here is airo.
47:23To take away, using the verb airo, means to lift up and carry away.
47:31Then shall two be in the field, one taken, the other left.
47:36Two women shall be grinding at the mill, one taken, the other left.
47:40So here we have a little tiny description of somebody taken and somebody left.
47:46How about that?
47:48Looks like the same word, doesn't it?
47:51It's not.
47:52It's a different word for taken.
47:55This word for taken means made to disappear.
48:01One taken, another left.
48:03Two women be grinding at the mill, one taken, another left.
48:09To me that's interesting.
48:11Two different kinds of taking going on here.
48:14Verse 39 says the flood came and took all those people away.
48:20That is, the people who were judged were taken away, using a different Greek verb than the
48:26people who are taken up in verses 40 and 41.
48:31And Dr. Fruchtenbaum makes that point.
48:33She's not the first, by the way.
48:35John Nelson Darby also made the same distinction.
48:38And Darby, interestingly, the first of the dispensationalists back from 1840 to 1882
48:45made this distinction.
48:47Darby actually rendered this passage as pre-tribulational, saying it's describing the catching away of
48:54the church.
48:55And Darby said that back in a day before hardly anybody was talking about the rapture of the
49:00church.
49:01Now, I'm going to stop right there because we're going to go into some real detail from
49:06this point on.
49:08Why are we doing this?
49:09Well, we want to understand Bible prophecy as dispensational, pre-tribulational, premillennialists.