What is futurism in biblical interpretation?

Question 10137.

The futurist view holds that the visions of Revelation from chapter 4 onwards describe events still to come, and that the great bulk of unfulfilled biblical prophecy will be fulfilled literally in a future period. It is the position I hold and the position I believe the text requires.

It is one of four historic approaches, alongside preterism, historicism and idealism, and the difference between them is essentially a difference about when.

The outline the book gives itself

Revelation 1:19 supplies its own table of contents. Write therefore the things that you have seen, those that are and those that are to take place after this. Three tenses in one sentence, and they map onto the book with remarkable neatness.

The things seen are the vision of the risen Jesus in chapter 1. The things that are are the seven churches of chapters 2 and 3. The things that are to take place after this begin in chapter 4, which opens with the identical phrase: come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.

The futurist view simply takes that structure at face value. You can read it for yourself in Revelation 1:19, and it is the reason the division falls where it does rather than anywhere else.

The principle behind the futurist view

What drives the futurist view is not a fondness for the dramatic. It is a commitment to reading prophecy the way we read the rest of Scripture, in its normal grammatical and historical sense, allowing for figures of speech where the text signals them.

Numbers mean numbers. Places mean places. Israel means Israel. A thousand years means a thousand years, particularly when the phrase is repeated six times in six verses.

This is not wooden literalism. Revelation is full of symbols, and it usually explains them. Seven stars are the angels of the seven churches; the waters are peoples and nations; the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. Symbols that the author interprets are not a problem for the futurist view. They are a gift.

The argument from the first coming

Here is the argument I find hardest to answer from the other side. Hundreds of prophecies about the first coming were fulfilled literally. He was born in Bethlehem, of a virgin, in the line of David. He entered Jerusalem on a donkey. He was sold for thirty pieces of silver, pierced, and buried in a rich man’s tomb.

Nobody at the time expected those prophecies to be fulfilled figuratively, and nobody afterwards suggested they had been. Given that track record, the futurist view asks a simple question: on what basis do we now expect the prophecies of the second coming to be fulfilled in some other manner?

Consistency is the whole of my case here. Use one method for both comings and the futurist reading follows almost automatically.

Israel and the church stay distinct

A literal method has consequences, and this is the biggest of them. The covenant promises made to Abraham and David concerning land, seed and throne were unconditional and have never been fulfilled in the terms in which they were given.

The futurist view therefore expects a future for ethnic Israel, exactly as Paul teaches in Romans 11, and refuses to transfer those promises to the church. If God can reassign a promise made to one party, no promise made to any party is secure.

I set this out more fully in my article on the difference between Israel and the church, and it is the hinge on which most eschatological disagreement actually turns.

Where the church is in Revelation

Something worth noticing. The word church appears nineteen times in the first three chapters of Revelation and then vanishes until the closing verses of chapter 22. Across the entire tribulation section, the term is absent.

Meanwhile Israel returns to the foreground with the 144,000 from the twelve tribes, the temple, the holy city and the covenant. That pattern fits the futurist view precisely, with the church removed and God resuming His programme with Israel.

It is an argument from silence, and I would not rest the whole case on it. It is a very loud silence all the same.

Objections worth answering

The commonest objection is that a futurist reading made Revelation useless to its first readers. If none of it happens for two thousand years, why write to seven struggling congregations about it?

The answer is that Daniel was in the same position, and nobody complains that his visions were pointless. Prophecy comforts by revealing the end, not by scheduling it. A persecuted church in Smyrna was enormously helped by knowing that the beast loses.

The second objection is that futurism has been abused by date-setters and sensationalists. It has, repeatedly, and I have no defence to offer for that. A system is not refuted by its worst practitioners, and the answer is better futurism rather than a different system.

Not a recent invention

Critics sometimes claim the futurist view was invented in the nineteenth century by John Nelson Darby. That is not accurate. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Tertullian all expected a literal future tribulation, a literal antichrist and a literal earthly reign of Jesus.

What Darby and others did was systematise and popularise an approach whose components are found much earlier. The eclipse of literal interpretation came with Origen’s allegorical method and Augustine’s later adoption of a symbolic millennium, and the recovery of a plain reading is a return rather than a novelty.

The practical difference it makes

A futurist reading keeps the church expectant. If the Rapture requires no preceding signs, the Lord could come today, and Paul, Peter and John all wrote as though that were so.

It also keeps the church realistic. Scripture expects increasing apostasy rather than gradual improvement, which saves us from both despair when things worsen and complacency when they briefly improve.

And it keeps the church honest about Israel. The futurist view refuses to explain away a nation that God says He has not rejected, which has practical consequences for how we speak and pray.

Holding it without arrogance

Eschatology is a secondary matter, and I mean that. Men I love and learn from read these chapters differently, and they will be in the kingdom alongside me whatever the timetable turns out to be.

What I will not do is hold my position quietly out of embarrassment. The futurist view has consequences for how we read the whole Bible, and a secondary doctrine can still be an important one.

How futurism handles the seals and trumpets

A fair question is whether the judgements of Revelation 6 to 16 run in sequence or describe the same period repeatedly from different angles. The futurist view generally takes them as broadly sequential, with the seventh seal opening into the trumpets and the seventh trumpet into the bowls.

That reading has the advantage of explaining the intensification. The seals affect a quarter of the earth, the trumpets a third, and the bowls are total. Something is escalating, and escalation implies order.

Interludes between the series, such as the sealing of the 144,000 and the two witnesses, are not interruptions of the sequence but explanations within it. Read Revelation 8:1-2 and watch how the seventh seal opens directly into the trumpets.

Futurism and the Rapture

The futurist view is not identical with pretribulationism, and it is worth keeping the two apart. A person can read Revelation 4 onwards as future and still place the removal of the church at the midpoint or the end of the tribulation.

I hold the pretribulational position, chiefly because the church is promised deliverance from wrath rather than preservation through it, and because the doctrine of imminence collapses if identifiable events must occur first. My reasons are set out in my article on pretribulationism.

What the futurist view supplies is the framework within which that discussion can even be had. Once the tribulation is a real future period, the question of where the church stands in relation to it becomes a live one.

Daniel and Revelation together

A futurist reading of Revelation stands or falls alongside a literal reading of Daniel, and the two books interlock at almost every point. The seventieth week of Daniel 9 supplies the seven-year framework that Revelation fills in with detail.

Daniel’s first sixty-nine weeks were fulfilled with calendar precision, ending at the presentation of the Messiah. Nobody spiritualised those. Read Daniel 9:27 and ask why the seventieth should be treated differently from the sixty-nine before it.

So, now what?

Read Revelation. Actually read it, slowly, with a pencil, noticing how often John explains his own symbols and how often he quotes the Old Testament. The book pronounces a blessing on the one who reads it aloud, and it is the only book in Scripture that does.

And let the expectation shape you. John’s closing prayer is come, Lord Jesus, and a man who prays that sentence honestly will live differently from a man who does not. When did you last mean it?

“Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2)