Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10145. There is an eschatological tension running through the New Testament that trips up almost every new reader of the Bible sooner or later. You are told you have been saved, and then told to work out your salvation. You are told you possess eternal life, and then told to lay hold of it….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10144. Inaugurated eschatology is the most widely held framework in evangelical scholarship today, and if you have read almost any modern commentary on the Gospels you have met it whether the phrase was used or not. It holds that the kingdom of God has genuinely begun with the coming of Jesus, yet awaits its…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10143. Realised eschatology is a phrase you will almost never hear from a pulpit and almost always hear in a lecture theatre, yet its influence has quietly reached a great many pulpits anyway. It is the view that the last things promised in Scripture have already arrived in the person and work of Jesus,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10142. Is God’s kingdom something I am living in now, or something I am waiting for? I get asked that more often than you might think, usually by someone who has been reading one author who insists it is entirely present and another who insists it is entirely future, and has concluded that theologians…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10139. The idealist view treats Revelation not as a description of particular events, past or future, but as a symbolic portrayal of the ongoing conflict between good and evil that runs through the whole of history. Sometimes called the spiritual or symbolic approach, it is probably the most widely held reading in academic circles…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10138. The historicist view reads Revelation as a continuous panorama of church history, unrolling from the apostle’s own day through to the return of Jesus, with each seal, trumpet and bowl corresponding to a particular event or era along the way. For several centuries it was the standard Protestant reading, and today it has…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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…
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: 6 minutesQuestion 10131. The promise that we will reign with Christ is one of the most repeated and least discussed statements in the New Testament. Paul says it, Revelation says it several times, and Jesus said it before either of them, yet you will rarely hear a sermon on it. I suspect that is because it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10130. The tree of life in Revelation 22 stands on both banks of the river that flows from the throne, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month, with leaves for the healing of the nations. It is the same tree that stood in the middle of Eden, and its reappearance is…