Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10180. How literal are the numbers in Revelation? It is one of the first questions a thoughtful reader asks, and the answer largely determines what sort of book he thinks he is reading. Sevens, twelves, a thousand years, 144,000, forty two months, 666. The book is full of counting. My working rule is that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10181. The feasts of Israel in Leviticus 23 are not a religious calendar that expired with the temple. They are a prophetic outline of God’s programme, given fifteen centuries before the events they picture, and the accuracy with which the first four have been fulfilled is one of the quiet marvels of Scripture. Seven…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 10185. A prophetic timeline is only as good as the texts holding it up, so let me set out the sequence I believe Scripture teaches and show you where each stage comes from. What follows runs from the moment the church is caught up to the moment God dwells with His people on a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08124. The future of Satan is one of the few subjects on which Scripture is entirely unambiguous. There is no mystery about the outcome, no suspense, and no possibility of a different result, which is more than can be said for many things people are curious about. What the Bible gives is a sequence,…
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 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: 5 minutesQuestion 10198. Millennial worship is described in more detail than most Christians realise, and the details are the reason the subject causes trouble. Ezekiel spends nine chapters on a temple, a river, a prince, a priesthood and a calendar of offerings, and anyone who believes the sacrifice of Jesus was once for all wants to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10197. There will be unbelievers who die during the thousand year reign of Jesus, and Scripture is not silent about them. That surprises people, because we tend to imagine the kingdom as a place where nobody dies and nobody rebels, but the prophets describe something more textured than that. Two passages carry most of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10196. The new covenant is the promise God made through Jeremiah that He would write His law on the heart, forgive iniquity and remember sin no more, and that promise finds its fullest national expression in the Millennium. That is where a Baptist has to be careful, because we live in the blessings of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10195. The judgement of fallen angels does not happen all at once, and that is what makes the question worth asking carefully. Scripture describes some spirits already confined, others still active, a leader bound for a thousand years and then released, and a final sentence carried out at the end. Put the passages in…