POSTMILLENNIALISM:
Building
A Better World
But what about the great tribulation? Where can this time of suffering and trials
fit into such an optimistic view of the end times? And who might the beast and the antichrist
be? Postmillennialists do understand the
great tribulation as an event that happens before the millennial kingdom—but postmillennialists
differ on exactly when and how the tribulation takes place. Jonathon Edwards, for example, speculated
that 1,260 days in Revelation 12:6 might symbolize 1,260 years from the time
when the bishop of the city of Rome began to dominate the church. And so, according to Edwards, the years of
the great tribulation “began in the year 606, when the pope was first seated in
his chair and was made universal bishop.
They will therefore, end about 1866.”
There’s another postmillennial perspective on the great
tribulation that’s become increasingly popular over the past several years:
This perspective is known as Preterism [PREH-terr-izm]. The word Preterism comes from the Latin praeteritus (“past” or “bygone”) and
suggests that many events described in end-times texts happened in the first-century. Theologian R. C. Sproul is probably the
best-known orthodox preterist postmillennialist.
Matthew
24:1-3 New International Version (NIV)
·
The
Destruction of the Temple and Signs of the End Times
24 Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his
disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings. 2 “Do
you see all these things?” he asked. “Truly I tell you, not one stone here will
be left on another; every one will be thrown down.” 3 As Jesus was sitting on the
Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. “Tell us,” they said,
“when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end
of the age?”
It was around the year AD 30 when Jesus spoke these
words. It’s clear that he was
prophesying about a future event—but what future event was he predicting? Many Christians have understood these words
of Jesus as a reference to a great tribulation that, even for us today, remains
in the future. Preterists place the fulfillment
of this prophecy in a very different time and place, however. According to preterists, this text was fulfilled
around the year AD 70. Specifically,
preterists point out how Jesus states twice in this text that these afflictions
will occur in “this generation” (Matthew 23:36; 24:34)—and the approximate span
of a generation in Scripture is forty years.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at this text from a
preterist perspective and see what we find!
What were the disciples actually asking?
The disciples asked two questions: (1) When will the Jewish temple be
destroyed? And, (2) what will be the
sign of the Messiah’s “return” and “the end of the age”? In preterist perspective, the Messiah’s
return does not refer to the physical return of Jesus to earth; it refers
instead to his judgment of the nation of Israel because they rejected Jesus as
their Messiah. “The end of the age”
points to the ending of a chapter in God’s work with the nation of Israel. According to preterists, the destruction of
Jerusalem in AD 70 answered both of the disciples’ questions.
- · Look up and read Matthew 24:4-28
When was the time of false messiahs? Matthew 24:4-14: “Many will come in my name,
saying ‘I am the Christ’” Jesus
predicted in these verses, and that’s precisely what occurred in the years
approaching AD 70—as did earthquakes and conflicts and famines! An earthquake rocked Pompeii in AD 62. The Jewish historian Josephus described the
50s and the 60s as a time when “the country was filled anew with robbers and
imposters… These imposters and deceivers persuaded the multitude to follow them
into the desert, and pretended that they would exhibit manifest wonders and
signs, that should be performed by the providence of God.
Then, of course, there was the war that broke out in AD
66 between several bands of Jewish revolutionaries and the Romans. At first, there were Jewish victories,
including an ambush at Beth-Horon that resulted in the slaughter of an entire
Roman legion. By the late 60s, revolts
were blazing not only among the Jews in Judea and Galilee but also among other
people-groups in Gaul, Spain, and Africa.
In AD 68, Emperor Nero committed suicide and—before Vespasian rose to
the rank of emperor in AD 69—three other emperors rose and fell amid vicious
conflicts in Rome. Under Vespasian and
later his son Titus, more Roman legions arrived in Galilee and Judea, sweeping
southward toward Jerusalem and crushing every hint of rebellion. On the shores of the Sea of Galilee, Josephus
wrote, “one could see the whole lake red with blood and covered with corpses,
for not a man escaped.” During the siege
of Jerusalem, food was so scarce in the city that a woman cooked her own
infant, ate half of the body, and offered the other half to others.
But had the gospel been proclaimed in “the whole world”
by this time, as Jesus predicted in Matthew 24:14? The phrase “the whole world” may simply mean
that the gospel has been made available beyond the Jewish people, to people of
every nation. And, according to Paul,
when he wrote his letter to the Colossians around AD 57, the gospel had reached
“the whole world” (Colossians 1:5-6; see also Romans 1:8). So—according to preterists—everything that
Jesus described in these verses found it’s fulfillment in the years leading up
to the destruction of the Jewish temple.
What was the “abomination of desolations”? (Matthew
24:15-28). The prophet Daniel predicted
a day when “the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and
the sanctuary… On the wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate”
(Daniel 9:26-27). Many biblical scholars—not
only among postmillennialists but also among amillennialists and historical
premillennialists—see the Roman army’s entrance into the Jewish temple in AD 70
as a fulfillment of Daniel’s prophecy.
Ancient church leaders such as Athanasius of Alexandria, Augustine of
Hippo, and John Chrysostom also understood this desecration of the temple to be
the abomination of desolations.
And indeed, in those horrible moments when the Romans
swept through the city of Jerusalem, the Jewish temple was desolated in the
most abominable ways. According to
Jewish tradition, Titus—the general of the Roman army—dragged a harlot into the
Holy of Holies and committed fornication with her there on top of a scroll that
contained the Hebrew Scriptures.
Roman soldiers carried their battle standards into the
temple courts. Atop every standard was
the image of an eagle, a creature that the soldiers worshipped. Significantly, the Greek word translated
vulture in Matthew 24:28 also means eagle.
Could it be that Jesus prophetically glimpsed these idolatrous Roman
battle standards forty years before the Romans set foot in the temple courts?
(To be continued)
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