Revelation Introduction (Part 4) - Four Views

Revelation — Steve Gregg

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Revelation Introduction (Part 4) - Four Views

RevelationSteve Gregg

In this talk, Steve Gregg discusses the different views on interpreting the book of Revelation, focusing on the idealist, preterist, and historicist viewpoints. He cautions against taking things too literally and emphasizes the symbolic nature of the book. Gregg argues that each view has its own convincing arguments and encourages a thorough exegesis of each passage in order to gain a better understanding of the principles that can be applied to life.

Transcript

Introduction to the book of Revelation We've talked about the authorship, we've talked about the genre of literature that it is, we've talked about the symbolism in the book, we've talked about the debate over the date of revelation, and we've talked about how to interpret the book. Now, having referred to one position, the preterist position, I just give that as an example, but there are four different approaches to the book of Revelation. And these are entirely different from one another.

It's like they almost have no overlap in terms of their thought about interpretation. It's possible that you have heard various teachers on Revelation give various viewpoints on it, but all of them from the futurist viewpoint. So that some would think that the rapture occurs at the beginning of revelation, some think it happens at the end of revelation.

There are some who put the rapture in chapter 4, some put the rapture in chapter 19. Some place it in the middle, around chapter 11, or maybe 12. And so, in hearing these different views, if you happen to have heard them, you might say, wow, there's sure a lot of disagreement about the book of Revelation.

Well, you haven't heard the least of it yet. Because those who place the rapture in Revelation 4, and those who place it in chapter 19, are much closer to each other in their interpretation of Revelation than either of them are to any of the other three views. Because those who place the rapture anywhere in Revelation are taking, in that case, generally speaking, a futurist view.

Or, in some cases, an idealist view. But, I'm assuming that if you are like me, and like 90% or more of American evangelicals, you probably have heard the futurist view of Revelation, and perhaps no other. In fact, it may be that you never had any reason to think there was any other kind of view.

What is the futurist view? It is the view that Revelation is talking about the future. Now, if you had told me that sometime in the first eight years of my ministry, if you had said, well, the futurist view is the view that Revelation is talking about the future, I would say, well, duh. What else could it be talking about? You don't think that there's ever been a time in history, do you, when a bottomless pit was opened, and a swarm of locusts with scorpion tails afflicted the human race, do you? Obviously, that's future.

It never happened before, has it? How about the whole sea turning to blood? Clearly, that's never happened. That must be future. But, you see, the assumption I was making is that those things are literal.

And, if they are literal, then, of course, they must not have happened yet. It seems like we would have heard about it. And so, the idea that the book of Revelation is future rests on the idea that it is literal.

That's one reason we spent a whole session talking about the symbolism in the book, and pointing out that, although some people say, well, we have to take the book of Revelation literally, like the rest of Scripture, they don't really do so. They take literally what they want to take literally, and other things they don't. Nobody takes literally the beast being a real animal, or Jesus being a real lamb.

No one takes that literally. No one thinks Jesus is a lamb, or that the world will be ruled by an animal. And so, they would recognize symbolism there.

And so, what we really have to deal with is deciding how much of this is symbolic. And then, of course, once having made some assessments in that area, what do the symbols refer to? And how closely do they have to correspond with the events they're referring to? That is, do they have to be kind of like the event, or can they be just kind of have a distant connection in principle with whatever it's talking about? These kinds of decisions are not easy to make, and it makes it all the harder when you realize that it's not a given among biblical scholars that there's any particular time period that this is talking about. It's so much easier to be a futurist, because then you can just take anything literal that can't be taken literally.

And that's exactly, when I was a futurist, what I would have said. I would have said, if someone said, well, you don't take it all literally, I'd say, well, no, some things would be ridiculous to take them literally. But you take everything literally, unless it's absurd to take it literally.

But then, of course, one man's judgment of absurdity is different than another man's. And the older I get, the fewer things there are in the book of Revelation that I would find it possible to take literally without seeing an absurdity in it. When I was young, I believed everything I was told.

That's a good thing to do when you're young, but only while you're young. And then you need to do some thinking on your own. And my thinking led me far from my roots in the book of Revelation.

I taught the futurist view for the first eight years of my ministry. But near the end of that eight years, some of those final years, I was a little waffly. In fact, I'll tell you, I was, let's see, it was probably four years into my ministry that I began to see some problems with the futurist view.

I did not consider them to be fatal problems. They were just difficulties I couldn't resolve. Passages that didn't seem to fit.

Statements that didn't make an awful lot of sense from a futurist point of view. But I didn't know there was any other view out there. I truly did not believe any Christian had ever seen the book of Revelation otherwise than as a description of the end of the world.

But in spite of the fact that some of the things in the book of Revelation were hard to fit into that milieu, I just figured it certainly must be about the end of the world, but I can't understand how then these particular statements would fit. So the decision I made, and I consciously made this when I was, it was in 1974. I went into ministry in 70, so I was four years into it.

And I'd been a solid dispensationalist futurist, and I decided I can live the rest of my life without teaching the book of Revelation. After all, the church went four centuries without having it in the canon. It must be possible to be a good Christian without knowing what the book of Revelation is about or even having it in your Bible.

So I don't need to teach the book of Revelation. I just had concluded that I don't understand it, and I probably will not. I had understood it when I just mouthed what my teachers had said.

They seemed to understand everything. But some of the things that I repeated eventually didn't seem to fit with the text itself. And I became less and less confident in my viewpoint until I thought, okay, I really just don't know.

I didn't have anything to replace the futurist view with. I didn't know there were any other options, so I just thought, I just don't get it. But, so what? I had by this time in my ministry come to think that the most important thing for a Bible teacher to be concerned about is discipleship.

Making disciples. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever Jesus commanded. This is what we're told to teach.

And I thought, well, I can do that without teaching the book of Revelation. I assumed when I was 20 years old, or 21 years old, I assumed that I was done teaching the book of Revelation. And I thought, that's okay.

I don't need to teach it. It can be there, it can be sort of the black box of the Bible that I don't have to intrude into. We can get on just fine with the other 65 books.

And so I put Revelation out of my mind as much as I could. The problem was I kept reading the other 65 books. And as I mentioned in a previous lecture, the other 65 books are alluded to in the book of Revelation hundreds of times.

Which meant that as I read other books of the Bible, I'd come across passages that I remembered were in the book of Revelation. I remembered Revelation had said something like that. And it would make me curious.

For example, the first thing along these lines I came across as I was teaching in 1978 in a school in Santa Cruz, was a discipleship school I ran during the summer times there. 12 weeks long. You'd think 10 weeks.

Last summer was long. It was 12 weeks each summer I taught this. And I was teaching through the Bible as I am here.

Only much more. Like 6 hours a day. Because we tried to get through fast.

And besides, I didn't know much, so it didn't take long to get through the material. But I remember teaching in Matthew 12, Jesus' statement that he had bound the strong man. That is Satan.

He said no man can enter a strong man's house and spoil his goods unless he first binds the strong man. And then he can spoil his house. I knew the context.

I knew he was talking about casting demons out. He was spoiling or plundering Satan's house. And his affirmation was that I am doing what no one could possibly do unless they first bound Satan.

No one can go into Satan's house and do there what I'm doing here, unless he is first bound, incapacitated, the strong man. That is, bound Satan. And as I reflected on that, for the first time it occurred to me that Jesus said he had bound Satan.

And I thought, well, I remember something else about Satan being bound. Oh, yeah, that's in that difficult book. That's in Revelation, chapter 20.

But I thought, well, wait, Jesus is going to bind Satan at the beginning of the millennium when Jesus comes back. But in Matthew 12, he said he had already bound him. So I thought, Jesus bound Satan in his first coming, and he's going to bind him again at his second coming.

How did Satan get loose in between? This was my exact thinking. I thought, okay, he got bound back then. He'll be bound again when Jesus comes back.

What happened in between that he got loose and has to be bound again? Who let him loose? I wasn't being facetious. That was truly a crisis for me. And what I actually asked myself is, is it possible that Revelation 20 is talking about the same binding of Satan that Jesus spoke of in Matthew 12, 28? And that got me thinking very differently, because if so, that means Revelation 20 isn't talking about the second coming of Christ and the end of the world.

It might be talking about the first coming of Christ. And then, of course, that raised a lot of other questions. I won't go into detail now.

Maybe when we get to chapter 20, I'll go through it all with you. But the point is, I began to, I was trying to avoid Revelation. I was not interested in teaching Revelation.

I was reading other parts of the Bible, but I kept running into the material that's in the book of Revelation in other parts of the Bible. And it seemed to be, as I was, I guess, reading without any prejudices about the book of Revelation, perhaps, it was taking me back to look at the passages that cross-reference. And eventually, I found that I had made some sense out of one chapter.

And that was chapter 20, initially. Later, around 1982, 12 years into my ministry, when I first began teaching for YWAM, I was in Australia, actually, teaching in Brisbane. And in my free time, I was reading something like John.

And in John, chapter 12, in verse 31, Jesus said, Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out. He said, now will the ruler of this world, I had no doubt that was Satan, because Jesus used that phrase, the ruler of this world, three times. Every time meant Satan.

So, it says, now Satan's going to be cast out? And I thought, well, in Revelation 12, which, see, I couldn't get away from Revelation, because I knew it. I knew Revelation, I just didn't understand it. And so, I kept remembering things.

Revelation 12 has the dragon being cast out. But I thought that's supposed to happen in the middle of the tribulation. But Jesus said it was going to happen at the cross.

And so, this was really tweaking me, because I really had never heard anyone suggest anything about the Revelation, other than it was all about the end of the world. And the things I was seeing in cross-referencing were giving me a different picture. But I wasn't sure what that picture looked like.

It wasn't total, it was piece by piece. I think chapter 12 was the next chapter of Revelation that made some sense to me. Now, there were two out of 22 chapters that made sense to me.

The rest, I couldn't make any sense of at all. And I wasn't trying. And so, you know, my pastor, in my early years of ministry, had always said, just read through the Bible, don't get hung up on the parts you don't understand.

He said, if you come across something that just doesn't make sense to you, don't let that stop you in your pursuit through the Bible. He said, just take that little tidbit and put it back in the cupboard, and leave it for later, someday it will make sense to you. Well, I had been doing that, especially with things about Bible prophecy.

Because what I did is what many Christians did. I assumed that Revelation was about the end of the world, and then I used it as a framework to set up a paradigm of the end of the world, and then fit what Paul and Jesus and Isaiah and Daniel said, into the framework that I had formed from the book of Revelation. In other words, I started with the most obscure book in the Bible to make my framework, and even scriptures that should have been more clear were made unclear, because I had to fit them into the framework.

I had to shoehorn them in there. But I was doing that less and less, of course, when I realized I can't use the book of Revelation, because I don't know what it's about. And so what happened was, I had more and more of these things I had to put back in the cupboard in my head.

I had this junk drawer in my brain that all these pieces that didn't fit the picture had to be thrown into. And so eventually, after several years, I had a lot of puzzle pieces in that drawer. Lots of things that just didn't fit the picture.

And I decided one day to take all the pieces out and look at them and see if they fit each other by any means. They didn't fit my picture, but they might fit together with each other. And as I began to look at these pieces again, in light of each other, I began to say, wait, there's a picture forming here.

You know, I was trying to make a jigsaw puzzle. I thought it was a Forrest Glenn picture, but it turned out it was a horse pasture. You know, it was something entirely different than what I thought.

I had this idea of what the picture of Revelation was about, but I had all these parts that didn't fit. But they fit each other. And I began to wonder, maybe my whole picture is wrong.

Maybe there's a different picture that everything does fit. And that intrigued me. And this was well into the 1980s now.

Over a decade after I'd gone into the ministry, I had already become an amillennialist. I didn't know that's what it was called, because no one else I knew had ever been one. I had, by my own thinking through and comparing scriptures to scriptures, I had become an amillennialist.

I later learned that's what it was called. And I later learned there were others. I didn't know there were others.

It scared me. I was quite convinced that I had become a heretic, and that I should not only not teach the book of Revelation, but I had better never say anything about the millennium again, because it would certainly, you know, brand me, and my ministry would be over. So I was keeping good and silent about the millennium for a while.

Of course, I'll just tell you, to make a long story short, I later found out that was not my own view alone. It was the view of the whole church through most of history. So that made me feel a little better, and I felt like I could come out of the closet.

But I still was working on what Revelation is about. Revelation 20 I had no problems with. The other chapters presented difficulties.

Someone gave me a book called More Than Conquerors by William Hendrickson, a Dutch Reformed scholar. And he was amillennial, as I was, but more than that, he had an entirely different paradigm of Revelation. His view was what we call the idealist view.

I had never heard anything other than the futurist view, so this was intriguing. And the idealist view, as he presented it, was very well presented, very convincing, and fit perfectly the amillennial position I had already come to years earlier. So it felt right.

It felt like a fit. And so, for a little while, I started coming out and teaching on Revelation somewhat, but from the idealist point of view, which is, by the way, a very satisfying point of view. It's intellectually satisfying.

But I knew only two views, the futurist view and the idealist. And with those as the only options, I knew I was quite sure the idealist must be the right one, because the futurist had come to seem totally nonsensical to me, in view of other scripture. And so I was an idealist.

Somebody handed me a book back in 1982, I believe it was. Yes, it was. 1982 or 83.

Someone gave me a book by Jay Adams called The Time is at Hand. Now, Jay Adams is a Presbyterian author, amillennial. And he's not generally a teacher or a preacher or a writer about prophecy.

He's actually, he made his fame from writing about biblical counseling. In 1970, he published a book called Competent to Counsel, which was enormously successful and launched a movement in the evangelical church called the Newthetic Counseling Movement. John MacArthur's school, Master's Seminary, has a whole department of Newthetic Counseling.

Jay Adams was the father of Newthetic Counseling, which essentially was just counseling from scripture, is what it came down to, instead of psychology. But anyway, Jay Adams had written many books about counseling and was sort of the guru on that subject, but he'd written a small book on Revelation and the Olivet Discourse called The Time is at Hand. He was a preterist.

He believed that the first half of Revelation was describing the fall of Jerusalem. The first 12 chapters, he thought, or the first 11 chapters were about the fall of Jerusalem. He believed that the chapters 12 through 19 were about the fall of Rome.

And chapter 20, he took the same way I did, which was satisfying. But his preterism was radical to me. He was not idealist.

He was not futurist. He was saying Revelation had already been fulfilled in the past, an idea I would never have considered some years earlier. But being an idealist had led me to take things in the book of Revelation non-literally.

When I actually was broke free from the literal idea, then I was open to think of other possible interpretations of the symbols, and preterism made some sense. He said that Jerusalem and Rome were the two enemies of the early church. The first persecutor of the church was Jerusalem.

The Sanhedrin had Jesus killed. Stone Stephen sent Saul out to persecute the church and then persecuted him when he became a Christian. The persecutor of the church in Smyrna seemed to be the Jewish community there.

The persecutor of the church in Philadelphia, also in Revelation, seems to be the Jewish community. Jews persecuted Christians in the early days. It's hard for us to imagine that because in later history, the church became politically powerful and persecuted Jews.

We think of the Jews having suffered a great deal under the church, and they have. But in the early days, the church didn't persecute anyone because they were Christians then. Christians don't persecute people.

Institutional churches do it as a habit, but Christians don't. The early Christians didn't persecute Jews. It was the Jews who persecuted the early Christians until about 70 AD.

After that, Rome became the real persecutor of the church. The emperors did. According to J. Adams, Revelation is showing God's dealings, God's intention to judge the two great persecutors of the early church, Jerusalem and Rome.

He felt that Babylon, who appears only in the second half of Revelation, is Rome. A good case can be made for that. You know, Peter, in 1 Peter 5, sends greetings from the church in Babylon.

Most tradition says he was in Rome, which means that he might have been using the word Babylon as a name for Rome. If Revelation used the word Babylon for Rome, that would be consistent with what Peter did. Anyway, this made some sense.

But I'll tell you, it was still a little far-fetched for me. It was so new, so radical. As I read his book, I thought, that's interesting, that's convincing, that makes sense.

But when I put the book down, I thought, nah. I don't think so. It was just too different.

And so I put it aside. I was glad to know it was there. I was glad to know what some of the arguments for the preterist view were.

But I remained not totally convinced. So I fell back on my default, which was at that time the idealist view. In the middle 80s, I was given a book called The Parousia by J. Stuart Russell.

He wrote it in the 1800s. It was so controversial, he felt, that he actually issued it anonymously. He published it, first of all, anonymously.

However, the first edition was very popular and well-received, so he later put out a second edition with his name on it and came out and identified himself. He was a full preterist. I didn't know that when I read his book.

I just knew that he was seeing 70 A.D. in lots of places I'd never seen it. And he made a very convincing case for the Olivet Discourse and much of Revelation, and some other passages, even in the Old Testament, as having been referring to 70 A.D. I didn't understand until later that he thought there was no future second coming of Christ, and that he believed all prophecy had been fulfilled in 70 A.D., which I consider to be an error. I don't believe that he's correct about that.

But I found myself agreeing with him about 50% of the time in his book. He took every instance in the Bible that uses the word parousia, which is the word coming, the coming of Christ. And he showed in each case that it referred to 70 A.D. Well, like I said, I agreed with him about half the time.

His reasoning was very good in about half the cases. The other half, I thought, it's a stretch. But I think mostly through reading his book, and then, of course, some other preterist books got in my hands, which, you know, what it really took was someone had to tell me what really happened in 70 A.D. I had never been taught in 30 years of being a Christian, 15 of which I'd been in the ministry, I'd never been told anything about what happened in 70 A.D. I vaguely knew that the Romans had destroyed Jerusalem sometime around that time, and that was all I knew.

I knew there was a guy named Josephus, who was a historian who'd written something, but I only knew that he'd made some references to Jesus and so forth that were helpful in Christian apologetics. I didn't really know much about Josephus' work. I didn't realize Josephus had participated in the Jewish War and wrote a history of it in detail.

And these preterist writers tended to quote Josephus a lot, and it was an eye-opener, because Josephus was not a Christian. He was a Jew, a witness of the Jewish War, and he had never certainly had a chance to see the Book of Revelation, but many of the historical paragraphs recalling things that happened in the Jewish War, they looked like they paralleled Revelation to an extremely close degree. And so I became fairly convinced that Revelation probably had a lot to do with 70 A.D. and the destruction of Jerusalem, so I became a partial preterist.

By this time, I had been three different things, a futurist, an idealist, and now a partial preterist. There is a fourth view. I have not become that, not yet.

That's the historicist view, and I don't think I will become that, but I thought, well, I'd better look into all the views. Now that I was aware there were a lot of views, I found out that the Reformers, all the guys that the Protestants admire, like Luther and Zwingli and Calvin and all those Reformers, and Wycliffe and Huss, they were historicists. Their approach to the Revelation was historicist.

They were not futurists. They were not idealists. They were not preterists.

They were historicists. And so I thought I'd better look into that. I couldn't find any modern books on it, except those published by 70 A.D., and their interpretations were not impressive.

But some of the older commentaries, like Matthew Henry or Adam Clark, or some of the guys that I was very familiar with, but hadn't really read what they said about Revelation, Barnes notes on the New Testament. I had Barnes notes. These were about the most thorough commentator on the New Testament I could find, a Presbyterian.

These turned out to all be historicists. They were Protestant classic historicists, like the Reformers. And so I became acquainted with that, and realized they had a pretty good case too.

Not good enough for me, but pretty good. Now by this time I had become aware there were four different views of Revelation, the futurists, the idealists, the preterists, and the historicists. I also knew from experience that at least three of these could make a convincing case, or at least had convinced me at one time or another, and that the historicists, which had not convinced me, still had a pretty good case, enough to convince all Protestants for several centuries.

The historicist view, the one I've never held, and do not really anticipate holding, actually was called the Protestant view, because from the Reformation on, every Protestant scholar and preacher held to the historicist case until the 1800s, where there was a renewal of interest in the futurists. And so, I mean, what it comes down to is every one of these views has had some pretty impressive guys championing it, and every one of them felt they could make a strong case, strong enough to convince them, and many others, that their view is correct. But they were all mutually exclusive.

Well, maybe not. The idealist view could coexist with any of the other three, but the other three were definitely mutually exclusive. And this is very confusing, but since I had decided long ago I don't have to teach Revelation anymore, I had the luxury of not being confused.

I had the luxury of just being undecided. I didn't have to know, because I don't have to teach it. But I was interested.

It was fascinating, really, I mean, to see how strong a case each of these views could make. And when I started the Great Commission School in Oregon in 1983, I had become aware of some of these views. I was aware of three of them at that time, and maybe vaguely aware of the fourth.

And I had to teach through the Book of Revelation every year in that school. But only because I had to teach the whole Bible. I mean, I would have gladly left Revelation out.

That's what Calvin did. Calvin wrote commentaries on every book of the Bible except Revelation. Smart man.

I could have run a school, we'd go through the whole Bible up through Jude. You'd have to go elsewhere to learn about Revelation. Well, I didn't think that would draw many students, so I said we'll go through the whole Bible.

And that meant I was obliged to teach the Book of Revelation. I thought, well, how can I teach it? I don't know what it means. So I decided I'll teach all the views.

I'll just put them side by side, tell people what the arguments are, and let them make up their own minds. I don't care what they end up believing. I don't even know what I believe.

I'll just give them all the facts. That way, they won't be mad at me later. Now, what I meant by that is I was kind of mad at my teachers who had only told me the futurist view.

I kind of thought that wasn't very fair. They had never said, now we're going to go through the Book of Revelation, and we take here the futurist view, which we consider to be the best of the various views. I never heard anything even like that.

We just said, the Book of Revelation means this. Never any suggestion that anyone had ever thought otherwise, or that any intelligent person could ever consider another view. When I found out that was not the case, it made me angry.

I'm not a very angry person, so it's not like I blew up, but it made me resentful. I thought, my teachers cheated me. It took me many years to find out what they could have told me.

That is, that there's different views, and I could have, maybe by now, I'd know which one was right, if they'd told me about it. Instead, I have to kind of figure it out myself. I thought, one thing I don't want is to have a bunch of students go through the Bible with me, and come out later, someday, years later, and say, why didn't Steve tell me about this view? How come Steve only told me this view, the one he holds? I thought, well, an educator doesn't indoctrinate, an educator educates.

I will educate my students. I'll tell them all four views. So I went out looking for the book that would compare these views, because I thought it would be easier.

I didn't want to have lots of commentaries to consult, because I'd have to read lots of commentaries to find out all the views in detail, enough to teach them. So I started searching for the book that would compare the four views, side by side. Certainly, there was one.

I eventually found over 100 commentaries on Revelation in print at a Bible college library, which I actually used to do the research for my book. They had over 100 commentaries on Revelation. Apparently, Revelation had gotten a lot of attention from scholars, but no one had ever compared the views side by side, so that a reader could just say, right across the page, this view, this view, this view, this view of this passage.

And I thought, this is seemingly a tremendous oversight. And I thought it cannot be true. I thought, out there somewhere, someone has done this.

It's been 2,000 years, for crying out loud. Somebody will have done this. There are parallels of the Gospels.

Lots of people have done parallels of the Gospels. Certainly, someone's done parallels of the views of Revelation. It was never done.

And that is why I contacted a number of publishers and asked if they would like to have a book like that written. And I found one that did, and so I wrote it. But I didn't want to write it.

I mean, Revelation is the book I didn't want to teach anything about. It's the book I wanted to ignore, and it ends up being the only book I've ever written a commentary on. But anyway, at least now no one can say, I left them in the dark.

And if you don't have time to read my commentary or don't want to buy it, I'll give you my views for free. But you have to come out to these meetings. Right now, I want to tell you what the four views are, what the strengths and weaknesses of each of them are, and, of course, be as objective as I can.

I've already told you something about my leanings, but not everything. I'll tell you right now, my leanings are partial preterist, partial idealist. And as we go through the book of Revelation, I will justify my position in each case.

But that is the case. Part of the book of Revelation I take preterist. Part of it I take idealist.

I suppose a very, very small part I could say I take futurist, because I do believe the second coming of Christ, the future one, is in there. But not much. It's not mostly about that.

So I'm kind of mix and match, but not randomly, but generally for very good reasons, I think. So let's talk about these views. Let's talk about the historicist view first.

For the simple reason it's the oldest, as near as we can tell. People have asked me, what did the earliest Christians think about Revelation? The answer is, we can't really know. They didn't tell us.

They might have written on it, but their works have not survived. The earliest commentary on Revelation that has survived is from the third century, and it takes a view that seems to be like the historicist view, in a way. What is the historicist view? The historicist view is the idea that the book of Revelation is God writing the whole history of the church in advance, revealing to John the whole age of the church, a panorama of the entire period from John's day to the second coming of Christ, and that as you go through the book of Revelation, you are moving forward through church history from John's day and when you get to the end, you're at the end of the world, the second coming of Christ.

So it's not believing that the book is about the future or the past, but both and everything in between. And they believe this, that the seven seals, which appear early in the book, as they are broken, they correspond to the breakdown of the Roman Empire. Some historicists, like Adam Clark, sees that as possibly a reference to the destruction of Jerusalem, but most historicists think it's the Roman Empire.

So the seven seals being broken are the breakdown of the Roman Empire, especially as it fell to the barbarian hordes, the Goths and the Ostrogoths, and the Vandals and the Huns and so forth. The downfall of Rome, Western Empire, is in the seven seals. Then you have the seven trumpets.

Those, they believe, tell us of the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire, especially to the Islamists, the Mohammedan invasions. Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Empire, fell to the Islamists to the followers of Mohammed. On this view, the fifth trumpet, which brings the locusts, the locusts are the Muslim hordes coming against Constantinople.

And so we lose Rome and the Western Empire in the seven seals. We lose Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire in the seven trumpets. In the midst of that, there's concern about the rise of the papacy.

The papacy rose in the late sixth, early seventh century. And the historicist believes that the papacy is seen in the beast. The beast in Revelation 13 is the papacy and persecutes the saints, which we all dissenters from the Roman Catholic Church.

Now, here's one of the things the historicist view says, and that is that the book of Revelation follows a prophetic rule called the year for a day rule. Year for a day or day for a year means that when you read of a day, it really means a year. They say this is established in the Old Testament.

Where? Well, they always give two examples, not good ones, but they are two examples. It's all they can give. One is when Moses sent the children of Israel to spy out the land of Canaan.

They did so for 40 days. When the people rebelled, God said, I'm going to give you a year in the wilderness for every day that they spied out the land. They were there 40 days.

You're going to wander for 40 years. So we see the year for a day. Now, any thinking person should be able to see that while it is true that they received a year wandering for each day they spied, that in no sense establishes some rule of prophetic interpretation.

It's not even relevant. The other example they give is more relevant. And that is that Ezekiel was told to lie on one side for 390 days and on his other side for 40 days.

And he was told that each of those days represented a year. 390 days represented 390 years of the judgment upon Judah. And 40 days represented 40 years of judgment upon Israel, if I recall correctly.

And so for each day that he lay on his side, it represented a year of God's judgment. That is, in fact, of course, a true correspondence in a prophetic action. However, not anywhere near enough to establish the principle that this is how we're supposed to interpret prophecy.

No one does that with any of the other numbers in prophecy. Yet, these two things have encouraged the historicists to say a day equals a year. Now, where this comes in handy for them, the locusts afflict men for five months.

A month is 30 days. In the Jewish calendar, that's 150 days. And they point out a beginning and an end of the Muslim attacks and invasions and collapse of Constantinople when they figured out to be exactly 150 years.

Well, the locusts afflict for 150 days or five months. And they apply this also to the papacy. The beast's blasphemies continue for 1,260 days.

Now, if that's literal, it's three and a half years. But the historicists say that is 1,260 years, not days. And so, with the rise of the papacy about 600 AD with Pope Gregory the Great, they measured forward 1,260 years and said, the papacy is going to fall somewhere about the year 1860.

That's because the papacy is only going to last 1,260 years. Now, you can see why with that kind of reckoning, the historicists' view could survive into the 19th century. But it has pretty much fizzled out since then.

The Seventh-day Adventists grew out of a movement led by William Miller, the Millerites, who were historicists, as the Seventh-day Adventists still are. But the Millerites used these calculations to actually calculate the very day that Jesus would come back and judge the papacy. So they, the Millerites actually sold their property, put on white robes, went out on the hillside and waited for Jesus to come back.

The fact that he didn't is actually in church history has been called the Great Disappointment. And, actually, that's the technical term that historians use for the Millerites' disillusionment when Jesus didn't come back. It was called the Great Disappointment.

Somehow, the Seventh-day Adventist church survived it. The Millerites didn't. But the Seventh-day Adventists are just about the only group around today who are still historicists.

And the Seventh-day Adventists advertise in laundromats these colorful posters saying, Revelation Seminar has these pictures of dragons and things on it. And, you know, come to our seminar and learn about the book of Revelation. If you go to one of the Seventh-day Adventist Revelation seminars, you'll learn the historicist approach.

To learn it anywhere else, you have to go to the older Protestant commentaries before the 1800s. Because the historicist view just doesn't really exist anymore, except among the Seventh-day Adventists. And their interpretation isn't anywhere near as sensible as, say, some of the other commentaries were that held it.

So, the historicist view, by the way, has many points of strength about it. Not the least of which is that many things that happened in history related to the fall of the Roman Empire correspond numerically and in detail to some of the visions in Revelation. For example, Albert Barnes in Barnes' Notes on the New Testament, a very thorough commentator, a Presbyterian pastor, who spent some hours every morning of his day writing a few pages, I suppose, of notes, has left a set of books that are just incredibly thorough commentary.

When I was writing my book, I read his commentary on Revelation. And in his introduction, he says, you know, when I undertook to write this commentary on Revelation, I decided I would not take any particular view. He says, I knew there were different views out there, and I just determined that I would not take a view.

I'll just talk about what's said, what it means, not in terms of fulfillment, but what the words mean, and so forth. He was trying to avoid interpreting. But he says, as I read Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire... Now, Edward Gibbon was the great historian of the Roman Empire, and was no Christian.

In fact, he was very anti-Christian, a very antagonistic anti-Christian historian, but he wrote the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Professor Barnes, or Pastor Barnes, said, he says, as I read Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, I could not help but be struck by the almost verbal parallels to the book of Revelation. And he says, I could not keep my commitment to not interpret.

I had to take this view, and he took the historicist's view. Throughout his commentary, he points out, he quotes Gibbon, he quotes other historians and details as he's talking about things in Revelation, and they are impressive. There are impressive parallels.

There are reasons why the best minds in the Protestant Church believed this was the right view. But there were also assumptions they made, for example, the day for year 30, which doesn't really have an awful lot behind it, and of course, their predictions didn't come true in the 19th century. So the view has pretty much fallen aside.

By the way, they thought that the the seven bowl judgments, which Revelation refers to as the seven last plagues, they considered that's the French Revolution. And they pointed out good reasons for thinking so. The problem is, if so, then Revelation ended at the French Revolution, around the same time America was founded.

So the last 250 years have been inconsequential, I guess, not worth mentioning. The last judgments were upon France, or actually on the papacy in France. So there are things about the historicist's view that just didn't wash out right.

And so you'll hardly find any historicists now, though it was once called the Protestant view. In fact, it was even held before the Protestant Reformation by Huss and Wycliffe, and even some Catholic orders, like the Franciscan Order. The Franciscan Order actually believed that the Pope was the Antichrist.

And this was before there was a Reformation. They were Catholics. But the view was convincing to more than just Protestants, but it was officially the Protestant view.

But it's gone now, mostly. I mean, it's interesting reading. Very interesting.

But I don't find myself capable of taking it seriously, as I probably would have if I was living in 1812 instead of 2012. But anyway, that's the historicist's view. And it really does have a lot of people who were impressive, who held it.

Essentially everybody who wasn't a Catholic. And many Catholics. By the way, the Catholics had to respond.

And what they responded with was Preterism and Futurism. Now, let's talk about the Preterist view. The word Preterist from the Latin word preter means past.

Preterist past. If we say the Futurist view, it means revelations about the future. The Preterist view says revelations about the past.

What past? Well, it wouldn't really matter. If you believe revelation was some time in the past fulfilled, then you're a Preterist of some sort. Because Preterist isn't specific.

It just means fulfillment in the past. Just like not all Futurists agree exactly about the details of the future fulfillment, Preterists don't all exactly agree about the details of the past fulfillment. And as I mentioned, J. Adams, the first Preterist I ever encountered, believed that the first part of Revelation was fulfilled in the fall of Jerusalem and the second part in the fall of Rome.

Both of those events are now past, and therefore that's truly a Preterist view. On the other hand, J. Stuart Russell, the next Preterist I read, believed that the whole thing was fulfilled in 70 A.D. And so you'll find different views among Preterists. The view that is most in vogue among Preterists today, the one that if you buy books by Preterists or read them on the internet, pretty much the focus is on 70 A.D. For good reason.

Because many of the things in Revelation seem to correspond with Matthew 24, which Jesus himself identified with 70 A.D. Jesus said the temple would be destroyed. We know when that happened. 70 A.D. Jesus said the temple would be destroyed.

The disciples said, when will these things be? And he gave the Olivet Discourse. And concluded by saying this generation will not pass before all these things are fulfilled. He got that right on the money.

40 years later, down it came. Not one stone left standing on another. One of the most accurate predictions of Jesus, I mean not that any of his were inaccurate, but it was more specific than any other.

It's unusual for a prophet to tell when his prophecies will be fulfilled. Not unheard of, but unusual. Jesus said, this will happen within this generation.

And it came right down to the end of it, and it happened right within that generation. Ironically, atheists have sometimes used Jesus' statement, this generation will not pass before all these things be fulfilled to say, you see, Jesus was wrong. He didn't come back.

But their atheists are futurists. They think Jesus was talking about the future, the end of the world. And it didn't happen in that generation.

But if he was talking about the fall of Jerusalem, which he obviously was, since he talked about the destruction of the temple, then he was exactly right. Preterists are the ones who have the most to be amazed favorably about Jesus, for because we have an amazingly accurate prediction he made about things that would happen after his death, but within the generation of those that heard him. Now, Revelation seems to correspond with Matthew 24 very closely.

As a matter of fact, the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 is found in parallels in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but not in John. John's Gospel omits the Olivet Discourse. One theory is that John didn't see any need to include it.

He'd already written the book of Revelation, and it covered the same ground. And that theory may be correct, because I think Revelation was written before John's Gospel, but we'll worry about that another time. The thing I point out here is that the fall of Jerusalem was a very significant turning point in history, in God's redemptive history.

God made a new covenant and had to dispense with the old. Those Jews who insisted on holding on to the old covenant and refusing to enter into the new, that covenant had to be swept away. So the writer of Hebrews tells us, who apparently was writing shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem, the writer of Hebrews in chapter 8 verse 13 says, now the mention of a new covenant makes the first one obsolete.

And then he says that which has become obsolete is about ready to vanish away. That is, he was predicting that the old covenant and all its trappings would soon be swept away. Because it's obsolete now.

And that is not a minor change. After all, the temple and the Jewish order was 1400 years the way that God ordained for people to worship Him and draw near to Him. And that ended.

And something new replaced it. That is no small transition. It's worth mentioning.

In fact, it's so much worth mentioning that Jesus said in Luke 21 when He's actually describing the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans, He says, these are the days of vengeance, so that all things that are written may be fulfilled. That is, Jesus suggested that the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans would be the fulfillment of all things that were written. Now, He's not talking about Revelation because it wasn't written yet.

He's talking about Old Testament prophecy. But if all things that were written in the Old Testament were fulfilled in that event, that makes it a rather important event. Maybe important enough to have a whole New Testament book written about it.

And therefore, preterists believe, most of them today, believe that Revelation is describing the fall of Jerusalem shortly after the time it was written. This is why, as I said earlier, the date of writing is so important to preterists. If the current majority view is correct, if Revelation was written in 96 A.D., it certainly wasn't predicting the fall of Jerusalem because that had already happened a quarter of a century earlier than that.

If it was written in the reign of Nero, however, it was written before 70 A.D. Now, the strongest point about this particular viewpoint is the many references within the book that affirm that its prophecies were on the verge of being fulfilled at the time of writing. The book is written to real people living at the time John wrote. They were real churches.

This was an epistle written to some churches. Churches that John had a relationship with. Jesus sent a message to them through John, and that message was about things that were going to happen.

But not just things that were going to happen. Things that were shortly going to happen. And this is affirmed repeatedly.

In Revelation 1.1, it says, the revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave him to show his servants things which must shortly take place. And in verse 3 of chapter 1, at the very end, it says, the time is near. In chapter 1, verse 19, which is not very well translated in most English versions I've seen, but you can look this up in the Greek interlinear versions if you want to.

Verse 19 of chapter 1 should read, write the things which you have seen and the things which are, and the things which are about to take place after this. It says in most translations that shall take place. But the Greek actually says, are about to take place.

The future events recorded in Revelation are said and it's first century readers who are being affirmed this, assured of this, these things are about to happen. The time is near. The time is short.

More impressive than any of that seems to be the fact that when John gives the mark of the beast at 666 in Revelation 13, 18, he thinks his readers can figure out who it is, if they're smart. He says in Revelation 13, 18, here is wisdom, let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. His number is 666.

Well, if his readers could calculate this number and figure out who the beast is, the beast must be contemporary. The beast must be someone living at the time and therefore the fulfillment of those chapters about the beast must have been soon. Within the lifetime of the man that they would identify by that designation, 666.

It would suggest a soon fulfillment. What impresses me most along these lines is Revelation 22 and verse 10. At one level it just looks like a repetition of one of the earlier statements, but it has a different feature than the others.

In Revelation 22, 10 an angel said to John, do not seal the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is at hand. Now the time is at hand is not the first time that phrase has come up. In fact, it was at the end of chapter 1, verse 3. But the part that's new here is this line, do not seal up this book because the time is at hand.

And this is a clear contrast to Daniel chapter 12. At the close of Revelation John is told not to seal the book. At the close of Daniel, Daniel is told to seal his book.

You know why? Because the time was not at hand. In other words, Daniel is told in chapter 12, he said, what shall the end of these things be? Daniel asked the question. And he was told by this angel, just seal it up.

Go your way. Never mind. You're going to live to be old and you're going to die and be buried.

You'll rise up in the end. But in the later days, sometime much later than your lifetime, knowledge will increase. This will be opened up.

People will understand it then, but not in your time. It's not going to be fulfilled right yet. According to 1 Peter chapter 1 in verses 10 through 12, the fulfillment was in the first century.

Daniel's prophecy was looking forward to the establishment of the church and apparently the destruction of Jerusalem. So Daniel was predicting things that were about oh, 500 years or so, maybe 600 years after his own time. That was far enough off to seal the book up.

It's not going to be immediately relevant. There's a gap of 600 years. Yet some people want us to believe there's a gap of 2,000 years between the writing of Revelation and the fulfillment of its visions.

That is, the future's view holds that they're not even fulfilled yet. So they were in no sense about to take place when John wrote it. The time was not near.

The time was not at hand. It was at least 2,000 years off, if not more. And yet he was told, don't seal the book.

The time is at hand. But Daniel was to seal his book because it wasn't at hand. The prophecies of Daniel were 600 years off.

That's way off in the future. But 2,000 years is right around the corner? Not likely. Now, of course, the futurist deals with these verses.

They say, well, when it says the time is at hand, it means from God's point of view. We have to remember that a day to the Lord is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day. So if it's been 2,000 years, that's just a couple days for God.

The time really was at hand. But, of course, we ought to do some thinking before we put forward arguments. Especially if we hope to convince people with them.

Revelation was not written to God. It was written to people. And when they are assured these things are about to happen, they would in no sense think that means a couple thousand years from now.

Because a couple thousand years is not just around the corner to any human being. To God, maybe. But, hey, a million years may be just around the corner to God.

In other words, if in fact he's saying from God's point of view, it's not very far off, well, then he's telling us nothing at all. It might be a thousand years, a million years, a billion years. From God's point of view, he's an attorney.

What does he care? From his point of view, anything's near. In other words, you'd have to, in order to communicate that information, you'd better say nothing at all. Because by saying it's near, you give the impression that it's near from our point of view, from the reader's point of view.

It's very deceptive if it means, oh, from God's point of view. Why would anyone measure things from God's point of view? When the Bible talks about Satan will be loosed for a short time, does that mean several thousand years? I don't think so, because the long time that he's bound is only a thousand. A short time must be short compared to a thousand.

It's not realistic to suggest that God would tell these readers that these things are about to take place. The book should not be sealed, because the time is at hand, and him really mean that it's going to happen about 50 or more generations after their time. In other words, it's not the least bit relevant to them, but he's talking like it's deadly relevant.

Like it's right around the corner. If, in fact, this was written before 70 A.D., and if, in fact, it is describing the fall of Jerusalem, a suggestion that has much in its favor when we go through the book, then it was about to take place, and we don't have to come up with innovative ways to explain away those plain and common frequent statements. These are some of the advantages of the Preterist view.

It makes sense of the passages we were just looking at about near fulfillment. It makes the book relevant to the original readers. What a concept.

If the Futurist view is correct, the book is not relevant to the readers. It may not even be relevant to us. We don't know if we're living in the time of fulfillment, but if most Futurists are correct, and those are dispensationalists, we're going to get raptured out of here about chapter 4, verse 1. That means that about 80% of the book is not relevant to any Christians ever, because whatever Christians are around in the last days are going to go away in chapter 4. Everything after that is irrelevant.

What a strange thing for God to do, to spend so much time giving us a message in code to confuse us for 2,000 years when we break the code and find out, oh, it doesn't have to do with any Christian ever. This is about some people who aren't saved, who go into the tribulation. I don't know.

I mean, God could do that. It just doesn't make an awful lot of sense. It seems more likely that an epistle will be relevant to its readers.

All the other epistles are in the Bible. Preter's view would make it so. It would agree with the Olivet Discourse.

Again, there are parallels, many, between the Olivet Discourse and the book of Revelation. And the Olivet Discourse is stated to be fulfilled in the first generation in the destruction of Jerusalem. So, that would be a corollary.

It agrees impressively with the history of the Jewish war recorded by Josephus. I told you that earlier. I had not known much about the Jewish war until I had much of Josephus writings thrust before me.

And I had to admit, it does certainly impressively parallel. Now, of course, remember the historicist's view finds impressive parallels between Revelation and the fall of Roman Gibbon. So, I mean, anyone can find impressive parallels.

I'll tell you what, there are whole ministries on the radio. They've been on radio for decades, that every single radio program, they find impressive parallels between Revelation and whatever's in the newspapers. I remember listening to that ministry when I was young, and they said, it seemed like almost every time they were on the radio, these guys said, you know, things are lined up in the world, in the geopolitical situation.

I can't use, I can't quite imitate the southern accent, but laughter It's all lined up exactly as the Bible said it would be in the last days. Well, to everybody's surprise, in the 1980s, the Soviet Union fell. The iron current went down.

Everything changed. I wanted to tune them in the next day and see what they say about that, because everything before that was lined up exactly as the Bible said it would in the last days. You know what? I tuned them in the next day, they said, the fall of the Soviet Union has brought things into precise alignment with the way the Bible says it will be in the last days.

So I thought, well, I guess, no matter what happens, it's exactly what the Bible said would happen. So we've got the Futurists, the Historists, and the Preterists, all able to find impressive parallels with the book of Revelation at whatever time they're thinking it relates to. But suffice it to say, if you thought, well, I would believe the Preterist view on other grounds, but I don't know that any of these things ever happened.

The historian Josephus said they did, and he didn't know the book of Revelation had even been written. Of course, if this view is correct, it renders the emperor passages intelligible. The present emperor, 666, I gave you this information a moment ago.

Now, there are disadvantages of the position. One is it requires a date of writing earlier than 70 AD. That's the biggest disadvantage.

It's the only real disadvantage of the Preterist view, but it's not a small one. It requires a date of writing before the fall of Jerusalem in order for this approach to be correct. Yet, while it is controversial, it is not the majority view.

The majority view of scholars is that it was written later than that. But that wasn't the majority view a century and a half ago, and so majority views may not matter that much. Truth is never determined by a vote, the majority vote.

The truth is that while the majority of modern scholars think the Revelation was written after 70 AD, that is not incontrovertible. In fact, there are some very good arguments for the early date. That would be the main concern.

It is claimed by critics of this view that it has a checkered past because it is well known that when the Protestants were presenting the Historicist view throughout Europe and calling the Pope the Antichrist, that there was a Jesuit named Luis de Alcazar who published a pro-Roman Catholic book saying that the book of Revelation was about the fall of Jerusalem and the fall of Rome. He took the view very similar to what J. Adams did, that the first part of the book of Revelation was about the fall of Jerusalem. The second part was the fall of Rome.

Luis de Alcazar, a Roman Catholic, writing more or less no doubt to defend the Pope's reputation that he wasn't the Antichrist, said, no, the book of Revelation isn't as the Protestants say, it is in fact about things long fulfilled ago. Now, it is true that Luis de Alcazar did put forward the Preterist view to defend the Pope's against the charges of the Historicists. But, he didn't originate it.

We have evidence that a thousand years before Alcazar, this view existed among Church Fathers. There is an ancient Church writer named Andreas who wrote another one named Arethas. Andreas and Arethas were two ancient writers back in the 7th century.

A thousand years before Luis de Alcazar, who wrote commentaries on Revelation. We don't have their complete commentaries. We have quotations of them in other works.

But, Arethas, for example, was writing about Revelation 7.1, about the sealing of the 144,000. Arethas said, here then were manifestly shown to the evangelist what things were to befall the Jews in their war against the Romans. In the way of avenging the sufferings inflicted upon Christ.

And, the same author in Revelation 7.4 wrote, when the evangelist received these oracles, the destruction in which the Jews were involved was not yet inflicted by the Romans. Now, this is only one writer. We have no reason to believe this was necessarily the majority view of his time, but it could have been.

We don't know. But, he said, first of all, Jerusalem had not fallen when Revelation was written. In other words, he said it was a pre-70 AD date of writing, differing from what most people interpreted Irenaeus to say.

But, also he said that Revelation 7.1 was about the calamity that was coming on the Jews from the Romans. So, we do see a preterist view championed by at least one author a thousand years before Alcazar. Alcazar might have had motives we don't trust for promoting the view, but he didn't originate it.

Now, as far as the Olivet Discourse is concerned, which is like the book of Revelation, Eusebius, the church historian, certainly applied it to 70 AD. I have a quote here from his Ecclesiastical History written in 325 AD talking about Matthew 24. Actually, what he's talking about is the fall of Jerusalem.

The historian is describing Rome destroying Jerusalem in 70 AD, and he wrote this. He said, it is fitting to add to these accounts the true prediction of our Savior in which he foretold these very events. His words are as follows.

Woe unto them that are with child and them that give suck in those days, but pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the Sabbath day, for there shall be great tribulation such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no ever shall be. He's quoting, of course, Matthew 24, verses 19 through 21. Now, the historian, the Christian historian, in 325 AD is recording the fall of Jerusalem, and he says this fulfilled the true prediction of Jesus.

He called that the great tribulation. He quotes the Olivet Discourse. He doesn't quote Revelation, but there's a reason for that.

Eusebius actually wrote before Revelation was accepted into the canon of Scripture, and he did not accept its canonicity. Eusebius himself was one of those that were not favorable to the inclusion of Revelation in the canon, so of course he wouldn't quote Revelation, but he quotes the Olivet Discourse and clearly takes a preterist view. So, in other words, whatever else may be said for or against the preterist view, there were early writers who were preterists, and therefore it's not a view that was originated by the Roman Catholics to fight off the Protestants.

Now, the futurist view you know something about, and let me go through this quickly since you're familiar with it. I don't have to explain it to you. The futurist view is the view most people have heard.

Some have heard no other. On this view, everything, at least after chapter 3 in Revelation is future. The first three chapters deal with the seven letters dictated to be sent to the seven churches.

They have to do with events happening in the time of John. I think most scholars, even futurists, agree with that. But they believe that at chapter 4, verse 1, the rapture of the church takes place.

That is, they believe that the first three chapters are pretty much the only part of Revelation relevant to the church or the church age. The church age ends at the end of chapter 3, and the rapture takes place in chapter 4. That, of course, is still future. So, on their view, everything beyond chapter 4 is future.

And they place all the prophecies from chapter 4 through chapter 19 within a seven year period that they call the tribulation. The futurist believes there will be a seven year tribulation. Some futurists have believed that the tribulation is only three and a half years, like Edward Irving, before Darby came along.

But not much before. These men were contemporaries, Darby and he. But Edward Irving thought the tribulation was only three and a half years.

Darby thought it was seven. And most dispensationalists make it seven. But the point is that everything between chapter 4 and chapter 19 is in that short period of time at the end of the world.

The tribulation ends, whether three and a half years long or seven years long, the tribulation ends with the second coming of Christ. So, obviously, the prophecies after chapter 4 will be squished into a very short period just prior to the end of the world when Jesus comes back. Chapter 20, then, is seen to be a millennial kingdom that Jesus establishes at his return.

And chapters 21 and 22, then, are the new heavens, new earth, which are placed after the millennium on this scheme. So, on the future scheme, almost everything is still future. Chapter 4 on through 19 is a future tribulation, not yet begun.

Chapter 20 is a future millennium. Chapters 21 and 22 are future new heavens and new earth. That's how the futurist view reads it.

Now, what are the advantages of this view? Well, it's the most popular view, if that's in its favor. But it has not always been, so I guess it's not in its favor, since different views are popular at different times. I guess the real meaning can't change with the change of popular, you know, popularity of the view.

So, that would be probably the strength of the view in the average futurist view is that my pastor teaches it. Or the guys on the radio teach it, or on television teach it. That Jack Van Impe, he can quote scripture like a machine gun.

He believes it, so it must be true. My pastor knows the Bible front and back, and he believes it's true, so it must be true. The fact that I only hear this view from the people I respect means it must be true.

That is probably the primary strength of the view in the minds of most is that if it isn't true, why does this guy think it is? And I've had people call me about that many, many times. They don't have arguments in favor of the futurist view, except they say if you're right, how come John MacArthur? How come Chuck Smith? How come Jack Van Impe? How come John Hagee? How come everybody who's famous believes this futurist view? Well, they'll have to answer for themselves, but the fact that a lot of people believe it has never been an evidence that something is true. After all, if you had been born 200 years ago in a Protestant world, a Protestant home, you would have never heard of the futurist view, and no one you knew would have believed it.

Everyone you knew would have been a historicist. That doesn't mean that was true. The fact that you live in a time bubble where a particular view is the only view people are considering seriously doesn't mean it's true.

Let's get less provincial and move out and look at things from a bigger picture. You know, things are popular for whatever reasons they're popular. It's not necessarily because they're true.

But that is probably the strongest advantage of the view, is that if you believe it, you'll be in the company of most of the famous Christians today. It also appeals to our tendency to take things literally. Now, of course, the dispensational view actually presents this as a value.

We need to take things literally in the Bible. And so, if you're going to take those visions literally to the happy future, because no one would argue that any of those things in relation have literally happened in the past, it must be future. So, a future approach is very much supported by the assumption that a literal interpretation is called for.

It also harmonizes reasonably well with some current events, as I pointed out. Of course, that's true of some of the other views, too. I mean, you find a view of Revelation, you can find something to correlate with it.

Josephus, if you're a preterist, Gibbon, if you're a prehistoricist, the newspapers, if you're a futurist. And, as I said, this changes from time to time as the newspapers change. Those of us who have moved away from futurism sometimes disdainfully speak of the methods of futurism as newspaper exegesis.

We believe that you should interpret the Scripture by reference to other Scripture, not by reference to the New York Times. Because, after all, the New York Times are not inspired, and there's no evidence that anything in the New York Times was ever predicted in the Bible. Such harmonizations that the modern futurist duke had been made by Christians throughout the last centuries.

Futurists in Darby's time could harmonize it with his time. You know, between World War I and World War II, there was an organization that predated the United Nations, called the League of Nations. And, it was formed between nations to try to end wars before World War II came and proved that they were ineffectual.

And, during that season between the wars, a Christian author named William S. McBurney, Sr. Now, his son lived into our time and has been a radio preacher from the time I was a kid. I don't know if he's still around or not, William S. McBurney, Jr. But, William S. McBurney, Sr. wrote a book on Bible prophecy. He's a dispensationalist futurist.

And, my dad had a copy when I was growing up and I was reading this. And, it was interesting because he said that the Bible says there's going to be a ten-nation confederacy in the end times in Europe. And, he said, the League of Nations is that ten-nation confederacy.

Of course, the League of Nations doesn't even exist anymore. We now have the United Nations. And, frankly, most people don't say it's the ten... Most people want it to be the common market or what's called the European Union.

But, there's always problems with these things. For instance, McBurney's book had to admit that the League of Nations had thirteen member nations, not ten. And, he pointed that out.

He said, you know, some of you may object to my saying that the League of Nations is the ten-nation confederacy mentioned in Scripture. But, he says, you have to realize there are thirteen nations so that we will not recognize it for what it is. That is the deceptiveness of the devil.

The devil doesn't want us to know that this is the ten-nation confederacy, so he's made thirteen nations be in it. Now, this man was a reputable dispensational teacher, pastor of a large church and had media ministry. But, you see, when we say, wow, things are lining up in the news just like the book of Revelation said.

And, we mean by that just like we think the book of Revelation means we sometimes may be tempted to shoehorn things in that don't fit all that well. And, so, you get the impression from some of these ministries that the book of Revelation is being fulfilled before our eyes. But, when I ask people, well, tell me something right now that's going on in the world that is predicted in the book of Revelation.

To actually find something in our modern world that corresponds with something the book of Revelation teaches is hard. Now, Hal Lindsey found some things back in 1970 in his late great plan of earth. He pointed out that the kings of the east in Revelation have an army of 200 million men.

200,000,000 to be exact. 200 million. And, he said, you know, Mao Tse Tung back in the 1960's boasted that China could field an army of 200 million men.

The very number that's in the book of Revelation. That's a pretty close correspondence. Kings of the east, 200 million men.

China's in the east. But, I mean, that was perhaps one of the more impressive parallels. But, most of the parallels don't work.

And, I don't think the kings of the east in Revelation are China. I think it's a reference to the Persian Empire. But, anyway, we'll worry about that another time.

The disadvantages of the view are that it renders the book 90% irrelevant to all Christians. Including the original readers. It fails to recognize the symbolic character of apocalyptic literature.

They don't realize that apocalyptic literature is a genre that is characterized by symbolism. And, they just charge forward with their literal hermeneutic and insist that we have to take a literal thing. And, that's the only real reason to take it futuristically.

And, the other thing is that it struggles to explain the book's own predictions of a soon fulfillment. Which we saw there are several. If the book claims to have a soon fulfillment and it wasn't fulfilled for 2,000 years, you've got to do some fancy footwork to make that make sense.

They do. But, not fancy enough to impress me. Okay, the final view to consider and I'm going to be done with it is the spiritual slash idealist view.

The idealist view holds that Revelation is not describing any particular time past, present, or future. That the visions of Revelation do not connect with actual events at all. They are symbolic, impressionistic, they are dramatic depictions of ideals or principles that are true, that are Christian theology depicted in pictures.

The book Pilgrim's Progress would be a good example of an idealist kind of a piece of literature. Pilgrim's Progress is a piece of fiction. But, everything in it depicts true biblical doctrines through fiction.

It's a dramatized story made up to get across true Christian ideals and theology. That's what they say the book of Revelation was. It was just a drama, just a symbolic drama, and it's trying to get across some ideas.

Ideas like that there is a warfare between Christ and Satan. That Christians are involved in this warfare and can defeat Satan if they fight him. Well, even if they die as martyrs, they will be vindicated in heaven because the martyrs are seen up there.

Now, also a strong emphasis on the sovereignty of God in moving nations about and judging nations as seen there. There are certain concepts the sovereignty of God, the victory of Christ over Satan, and things like this which are true Christian doctrines, which are said to be depicted sort of figuratively, symbolically in these visions. But, that they are not really corresponding with a one-to-one correspondence to any particular events in history.

It's possible that these ideals can be seen worked out in lots of different historical situations. There may be recurrent fulfillment, so to speak, that the idea of the sovereignty of God can be seen thousands of times in history. Or, spiritual warfare, or martyrdom, things that are in Revelation.

They're in history, but they're not referring to any particular cases. So that you've got these three options. Either Revelation's talking about things future, or things past, or the whole scope of Christian history, or nothing at all in history.

But, it's just a theological masterpiece like Pilgrim's Progress, portrayed in a dramatic fiction. Spiritual truths, and Christian truths. Now, the idealist view can make very impressive arguments, and one of the great advantages of it is it is relevant to people of all times.

Because, the truths are always relevant. It becomes an edifying book, the principles of which can be applied to your life at any given time. No matter what generation or century you live in.

That's a good thing. The disadvantage of the idealist view, I have to admit, is it says there are no actual fulfillments. And, the book of Revelation itself says a number of times, these are things which will shortly take place.

Which sounds like events. What takes place generally are events. And, so there is supposed to be something going to take place that is being predicted here.

Which means the idealist view doesn't quite measure up. But, the idealist view otherwise is so impressive that some people have mixed it with other views. You could be a futurist and an idealist.

You could be a historicist and an idealist. You can be a preterist and an idealist. Or, you can just be an idealist.

But, the problem of being just an idealist is you don't find any particular fulfillment of events taking place that the prophecy said there's going to be events taking place. So, some think the events are the preterist events, or the futurist events, or the historicist events, but that the lessons of idealism still pertain. I mentioned that I myself am partially a preterist and partially an idealist.

But, it's not that I see the whole book as having a preterist and an idealist relevance, but rather parts of the book I see as preterist and other parts as idealist. And, the transitions from one part to the next are actually very logical and called for by the material in the text. And, that's what I'll be assuming and not just assuming, but defending as my view when I go through it verse by verse, which is what we'll start doing in tomorrow night's lectures.

We'll start going through chapter one, and we'll work our way through the whole book. I will give you a very thorough exegesis of every passage, looking up the various passages that are alluded to, cross-referencing with relevant historical things where that's useful, and giving my reasons. I will not be taking an even-handed approach, trying to give you the four views all the way through, much as I would if I had four times as long.

But, since I only have now less than, what, twelve, thirteen sessions to do it all, I'm going to have to move more quickly than I could if I was trying to take four views. So, I'm going to instead give you my views, my understanding of it, and if you want the four views handled even-handedly by the same teacher, you can get my book. And I'm not here to sell books.

You can't buy it from me, because I won't sell them. But, I will tell you what I think. And that's something I didn't do to my readers.

I didn't tell my readers what I think, but you'll know.