Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10140. The kingdom of God is one of those phrases I hear used constantly and defined almost never. It turns up in prayers, in hymns, on conference banners and in casual conversation over coffee, and if I stopped ten believers in the church car park and asked each of them what it meant, I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10132. The eternal state follows the Millennium, and confusing the two accounts for a remarkable number of muddles in popular teaching about the future. They are consecutive periods with different conditions, different populations and different purposes. Once you have the sequence clear, passages that seemed to contradict each other fall into place, and you…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10108. When Paul writes that all Israel will be saved at Romans 11:26, I understand him to mean the ethnic descendants of Jacob who are physically alive at the Second Coming of Jesus, turning to their Messiah in a national conversion at the end of the Tribulation. It does not mean every Jew who…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10094. Historic premillennialism and dispensational premillennialism agree on the headline. Jesus returns bodily to the earth before a literal thousand year reign, and He reigns in person over a real kingdom. Against amillennialism and postmillennialism, both stand together, and I want to say clearly at the outset that historic premillennialists are brothers in Christ…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10076. The role of Israel during the tribulation is central rather than incidental. That seven-year period is not primarily about the nations, the beast or even the judgements. Jeremiah calls it “a time of distress for Jacob,” and Daniel says the seventy sevens were decreed about “your people and your holy city.” Once the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10068. The covenants with Israel are the backbone of biblical prophecy, and if you get them right a great deal else falls into place. There are five of them, and four are unconditional promises that God binds Himself to keep regardless of the nation’s behaviour. A covenant in Scripture is not a contract between…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10067. Does God still have a plan for Israel? Yes, and I hold that with more confidence than almost anything else I teach about prophecy, because Paul devotes three chapters of Romans to the question and answers it in terms that leave very little room for manoeuvre. The plan for Israel is not a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10066. Replacement theology is the view that the Church has taken Israel’s place in the purposes of God, so that the promises made to the nation now belong to believers in Jesus and nothing distinctive remains for the physical descendants of Abraham. It is also called supersessionism, because on this reading the Church supersedes…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10065. Is modern Israel prophetically significant? My answer is a carefully qualified yes. I believe the return of Jewish people to the land, and the existence of a Jewish state there since 1948, sits squarely within the pattern of what the prophets said would happen before God finishes His programme with that nation. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10036. The times of the Gentiles and the fullness of the Gentiles sound almost identical, and they are constantly confused, yet they describe two quite different things in Scripture. When I speak of the times of the Gentiles I mean a period of Gentile political domination over Jerusalem and Israel, while the fullness of…