Biblical prophecy and the last days: the rapture, tribulation, second coming, millennium, and final judgment.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08140. Paul tells the Corinthians that we are to judge angels, and from that single clause a whole industry has grown up teaching that believers hold authority over angels here and now, with instructions on how to exercise it. I want to take the verse seriously and the industry rather less so, because Paul’s…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08082 The great chain of Revelation 20 is one of those details that decides far more than it appears to. How you read it determines whether you place the millennium in the future or in the present, and that in turn shapes your entire understanding of prophecy. So this is not a question about…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08081 The False Prophet is the least discussed of the three figures who dominate Revelation 13, and that is a pity, because his role explains a great deal about how the tribulation actually functions. He is the religious arm of a political system, and he is the one who makes the whole thing work….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08080 Satan and Antichrist are not the same being, and confusing them is one of the commonest mistakes in popular prophecy teaching. One is a fallen angelic creature with a history stretching back before the human story. The other is a man, yet to appear, who will hold political power for a limited period….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08085 Demonic judgement is a subject Scripture treats with more restraint than most of us would like. We are told plainly that fallen angels face a reckoning, and we are told a good deal about Satan’s end, but the fine detail of how the two relate is sketched rather than spelled out. That should…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08083 Satan’s release at the end of the thousand years is one of the strangest turns in the whole prophetic landscape, and I understand why people stumble over it. God has bound the enemy. Jesus reigns in person from Jerusalem. The earth has known a thousand years of justice, peace and visible righteousness. And…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8018. The four angels bound at the great river Euphrates appear in Revelation 9:14 and 15, and the detail that stops most readers is not the binding but the timing. They are released for the hour, the day, the month, and the year. That is a strange way to describe a moment. It is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8017. Abaddon and Apollyon are two names for a single figure, and Revelation 9:11 gives us both because John is writing for readers in two languages. He is called the angel of the bottomless pit, and both of his names mean the same thing: Destroyer. That is a rare piece of transparency in a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10202. The last trumpet of 1 Corinthians 15:52 is regularly identified with the seventh trumpet of Revelation 11, and that identification is the single strongest argument the posttribulational position has. If Paul’s trumpet is John’s seventh, the church goes through the Tribulation and the pretribulational rapture collapses. So it deserves a careful answer rather…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10201. Almost every picture in Revelation is borrowed prophetic imagery, and once you see that, the book stops feeling like a code and starts behaving like a conclusion. Estimates vary, but of the roughly four hundred verses in Revelation something close to two thirds contain an allusion to the Hebrew Scriptures, and John never…