Mark Horne

One of the reason people are susceptible to wrong ideas about Jesus and the future, is that human nature is prone to think about how things could be better rather than realizing they could be much worse. But the history of pessimistic eschatology should itself show us how the idea that life has gotten worse is a delusion. Even before Hal Lindsey, there were masses of Christians, century by century and sometimes decade by decade who knew that human history was stuck and had reached its final moments. Everyone has “known” over and over again that Jesus was about to return because the state of the world was at such a low point and could never get better.

If you think our age is especially worse, you are participating in an ancient tradition. And you are right, in a sense. Since the troubles of this age are your troubles and are much worse than the times so far distant. In fact, all the general troubles that beset previous generations now have a romantic haze about them because you know that generation triumphed and moved on.

Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask this (Ecclesiastes 7.10).

Of course, maybe we would see Jesus gracious and righteous reign if we realized that every generation has been right. They should have been the end; progress should have stopped, the world should have slipped away into self-destruction. Maybe Jesus rescued us over and over. Maybe he’s like Buffy and has saved the world a lot. Still does.

Because the fact is, however bad things are now, they are not worse than when Jesus stood on the mountain, having risen from the dead but having nothing obvious to show for it, and told a few people that he was king and they were to go conquer the nations (re-read the Great Commission some time). If you think about it, they were the ones who had every reason to question Jesus’ rule. Sure, they witnessed the resurrection. They also all got persecuted, imprisoned, and killed. The paradox of “ambassador in chains” simply does not register with us because we are so accustomed to the contradiction in the New Testament, but they had not become numb to it.

I think there is also an assumption that, if Jesus is now conquering all his enemies until the resurrection, we should expect to see history be a straight upward slope: better and better. But if Jesus is now ruling in that way, he may feel compelled to actually enforce a downward curve from time to time. Consider this Second First Chronicles 15:

The Spirit of God came upon Azariah the son of Oded, and he went out to meet Asa and said to him, “Hear me, Asa, and all Judah and Benjamin: The Lord is with you while you are with him. If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you forsake him, he will forsake you. For a long time Israel was without the true God, and without a teaching priest and without law, but when in their distress they turned to the Lord, the God of Israel, and sought him, he was found by them. In those times there was no peace to him who went out or to him who came in, for great disturbances afflicted all the inhabitants of the lands. They were broken in pieces. Nation was crushed by nation and city by city, for God troubled them with every sort of distress. But you, take courage! Do not let your hands be weak, for your work shall be rewarded.”

Asa responds to this message by getting rid of public idols and restoring worship (along with many other things, I’m sure). But the point here is that when the Church does not teach everything Christ has commanded we should expect him to withdraw peace and prosperity from the world. This does not disprove that he reigns and has a plan for future victory; it proves that he does.

The Future of Jesus, 4: Will He Make a Difference in the World?

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The Great Commission tells Christians to persuade people to become disciples of Jesus and train them to obey everything that Jesus commands because he has won all authority in Heaven and on Earth. Yet somehow we are supposed to believe that God wants some kind of minority of Christians throughout world history and is content to allow the majority of the Human race to manage its own affairs independently. This brings out a weirdly paradoxical attitude in which “the world” is looked down upon as sinful and yet is also seen as having the ability to live without God or his son.

Would this view make any sense in Athens that served under a Roman Emperor who claimed to be divine and in which the city civic ceremonies were to other gods? Paul preached,

Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.

No one could have possibly heard in this a call for people to have a new private religious experience. Paul was talking to the residents of a city named after one of those imaginary divinities. He was calling Athens to become Christopolis.

So we see the same in Ephesus where, though the city is not named for Artemis, she is still the civic deity:

About that time there arose no little disturbance concerning the Way. For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen. These he gathered together, with the workmen in similar trades, and said, “Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in almost all of Asia this Paul has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that gods made with hands are not gods. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis may be counted as nothing, and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence, she whom all Asia and the world worship.” When they heard this they were enraged and were crying out, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!”

The consistent portrayal in Acts is that the Apostles are constantly in danger of a) being accused of treason for “acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus” and b) for disrupting the economy. One of those disruptions involved a slave girl who was demon possessed. While in the gospels this would be an “unclean spirit,” Luke uses a different description: she has a “spirit of divination,” or literallistically, a spirit of Pythia. This is a reference to the spiritualist center of the Classical Roman world. “Pythian” means “Of or relating to Delphi, the temple of Apollo at Delphi, or its oracle.” Clearly, the way the healing power of the Gospel disrupted an economy of slavery and demonic possession is meant to be understood as the threat that Christianity represented to the entire Classical world.

It is worth noting that Paul not only preached against the idols in Athens, but preached in the synagogues because of the idols in Athens:

Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned [1] in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and [2] in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there.

Taking this sentence at face value, Paul saw the predominance of idolatry in the public square and in private to be a sign that something was lacking in the synagogue.

What seems to have happened is that there has been incomplete but widespread discipleship of the nations. Now that we have fallen into an era of unbelief, no one wants to credit Jesus with the things that work about he world. So we have been encouraged to believe that such culture is “natural” and “neutral” and properly belongs to an alleged “secular” space.

But this isn’t a rational perspective on the way the world really is. Jesus has made the difference and Jesus will do even more in the future. Jesus expects disciples to recruit other disciples personally, and to live as disciples in every aspect of life. The great abuses and misunderstandings that can result can never justify disregarding Jesus’ orders to those who claim to follow him.

If there was ever a time when God allowed human societies to exist apart from loyalty to him, that time is over. God now expects everyone to acknowledge the Lordship of His Son and to obey Him.

The Future of Jesus, 3: Are there earthly blessings to be expected in the future?

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To recap, I’ve argued that a straightforward reading of the Bible shows us that Jesus wants, expects, and promises the world will be converted to Christ. I’ve also argued that a passage about one generation’s failure to embrace the Gospel is getting mistakenly transferred to our future (in my opinion this is a representative example of a mistake made in many passages; that will require more arguments in the future).

In this post, I argue that there are promises about the future that cannot refer to reality after the Resurrection of the righteous, but have to be fulfilled in our own era. Consider, for example, this passage from Isaiah 65:

For behold, I create new heavens
and a new earth,
and the former things shall not be remembered
or come into mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever
in that which I create;
for behold, I create Jerusalem to be a joy,
and her people to be a gladness.
I will rejoice in Jerusalem
and be glad in my people;
no more shall be heard in it the sound of weeping
and the cry of distress.
No more shall there be in it
an infant who lives but a few days,
or an old man who does not fill out his days,
for the young man shall die a hundred years old,
and the sinner a hundred years old shall be accursed.
They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
They shall not labor in vain
or bear children for calamity,
for they shall be the offspring of the blessed of the LORD,
and their descendants with them.
Before they call I will answer;
while they are yet speaking I will hear.
The wolf and the lamb shall graze together;
the lion shall eat straw like the ox,
and dust shall be the serpent’s food.
They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain,”
says the Lord.

People can argue about what in this passage is meant to be taken “literally” and what is not. But it does refer to blessings of some kind. And those blessing cannot be relegated to either a purely “spiritual” state, nor to life after the “Second Coming.”

Why not? This prophecy could have been delivered without any mention of death at all. If these were either blessings describing a “spiritual” reality in Christ or a post-Judgment-Day reality after the general resurrection, then death should not be part of the description at all.

But death is there in the promise that dying at the age of a hundred will be considered dying young. Immortality is not promised, merely increased longevity.

Why? There was no need to bring it up if it wasn’t intended to inform us that there will still be death, just not in the worse form that people have experienced before (or now?).

If we take Genesis 3 seriously, then not only is death a result of the Fall, but so are various aspects of the world that we take for granted: painful labor both in a man’s work and in a mother’s giving birth, for example. And we can extrapolate also disease and all the other bad things that cause unnecessary suffering and scarcity.

As I pointed out, Paul refers to our future resurrection as being the defeat of the last enemy (First Corinthians 15.26). For that reason alone, we should expect God to deliver us from plagues and famines before that time. We should expect that, as the Great Commission is fulfilled, that life expectancies will increase. This prophecy in Isaiah 65 fits well with that expectation.

By the way, how does one “spiritualize” salvation without “spiritualizing” Genesis 3? It seems to me that amillennialism demands afallism too. (No Christian believes that, of course, but I’m just saying it should give us pause.)

I don’t know that everything in Isaiah 65 is intended literally. And even if the promise about animals not eating each other is literal, I’m not sure that represents a return to Eden or a transformation that is even greater than the original state of creation. But what I do know is that the prophecy will be fulfilled when the whole world is converted. A promise made, among other places, in Isaiah 11:

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra,
and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den.
They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain;
for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea.

In that day the root of Jesse, who shall stand as a signal for the peoples—of him shall the nations inquire, and his resting place shall be glorious.

In fact, Habbakuk prophesies that the wicked will not last, not by predicting the coming of Judgment Day, but rather predicting that the rise of worldwide godliness will bring about the destruction of those who attempt to build their kingdoms upon murder. In Chapter 2, which contains the same passage that the Apostle Paul uses to prove justification by faith alone, Habbakuk writes:

Woe to him who builds a town with blood
and founds a city on iniquity!
Behold, is it not from the LORD of hosts
that peoples labor merely for fire,
and nations weary themselves for nothing?
For the earth will be filled
with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea.

There is our hope: Not only the return of Jesus, but the victory of His Spirit and His Gospel giving the whole world true knowledge of him and of his Word, bringing about the end of wickedness and an end to the weariness of frustrated labor.

The Future of Jesus, 2: Few to be saved throughout (future) human history?

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Someone asked why more people don’t see the plain and straightforward claims of the Bible about the future. I doubt I have much more to add to what I have already presented. As far as I can tell it is rarely even admitted that these passsages exist. Instead, other passages are used to claim a different teaching.

The rest of my posts on this subject will probably be devoted to removing such obstructions. (In this case, I’m mostly re-using a post from October 16, 2006).

One such passage comes from Luke 13 and is used to support the proposition that only a few will be saved in human history. This is what the text says:

He went on his way through towns and villages, teaching and journeying toward Jerusalem. And someone said to him, “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” And he said to them, “Strive to enter through the narrow door. For many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able. When once the master of the house has risen and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, ‘Lord, open to us,’ then he will answer you, ‘I do not know where you come from.’ Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets.’ But he will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you come from. Depart from me, all you workers of evil!’ In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God but you yourselves cast out. And people will come from east and west, and from north and south, and recline at table in the kingdom of God. And behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last” (Luke 13.22-29)

This is what the text does not say:

He went on his way through towns and villages, teaching and journeying toward Jerusalem. And someone said to him, “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” And he said to them, “Strive to enter through the narrow door. For many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able. When once the master of the house has risen and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, ‘Lord, open to us,’ then he will answer you, ‘I do not know where you come from.’ Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets.’ But he will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you come from. Depart from me, all you workers of evil!’ In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God but you yourselves cast out. And a really small number of people will come from east and west, and from north and south, and recline at table in the kingdom of God.”

Jesus doesn’t say only a few will be saved; he says only a few of his countrymen will be saved. And even here he is only referring to his own generation. He is talking about those who owned the streets on which he preached.

So there is nothing in this passage to make us pessimistic about the future or impute to God a stingy plan for the human race as a whole. In fact, Jesus rhetoric of all those gathering from all compass points indicates the very opposite: that most people will be eventually brought into salvation.

That doesn’t mean I think Luke 13.29 is some sort of absolute proof for “postmillennialism.” No, as I have already written, I give that honor to Isaiah 49.1-7:

Listen to me, O coastlands,
and give attention, you peoples from afar.
The Lord called me from the womb,
from the body of my mother he named my name.
He made my mouth like a sharp sword;
in the shadow of his hand he hid me;
he made me a polished arrow;
in his quiver he hid me away.
And he said to me, “You are my servant,
Israel, in whom I will be glorified.” [1]
But I said, “I have labored in vain;
I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity;
yet surely my right is with the Lord,
and my recompense with my God.”

And now the Lord says,
he who formed me from the womb to be his servant,
to bring Jacob back to him;
and that Israel might be gathered to him—
for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord,
and my God has become my strength—
he says:
“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to bring back the preserved of Israel;
I will make you as a light for the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

Thus says the Lord,
the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One,
to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nation,
the servant of rulers:
“Kings shall see and arise;
princes, and they shall prostrate themselves;
because of the Lord, who is faithful,
the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.”

It is too small a thing to God for him to show mercy on and bring salvation to a minority of humanity.

So there is no excuse for us to be stingy about the Great Commission.

The Future of Jesus, 1

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What does Jesus expect to happen in world history? We know what he told his disciples to make happen:

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and disciple all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age”(Matthew 28.18-20).

This is quite clear. The disciples are to bring all national/ethnic groups (ethnoi) into submission to Jesus by teaching them everything Jesus commands so that they observe it. This involves not just teaching a moral code, but initiation into a new society through baptism.

With these marching orders come two assurances: First, that Jesus has gained cosmic authority and, second, that he will be with his disciples as they carry out his commands.

The claim to have now gained all authority was and is immediately recognizable as an appeal to a prophecy in Daniel’s visions:

I saw in the night visions,

and behold, with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed.

Daniel is immediately told what his vision, of “one like a son of man” being enthroned, means. It means that “the saints of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever, forever and ever.” Jesus is claiming that the prophecy has now come true. It is made all the more specific in that the next thing the twelve disciples witness is Jesus ascending into heaven in a cloud.

This kingdom is not intended to stay hidden in heaven with Jesus, nor is it a grand name for a few scattered disciples. This is plain from Jesus’ own orders. It is also clear in Daniel where the prophecy of Daniel 7 is a complement to prophesies given in Daniel 2 in which Nebuchadnezzar sees a vision,

As you looked, a stone was cut out by no human hand, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold, all together were broken in pieces, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, so that not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.

The stone cut out by no human hand, Daniel explains, is the Kingdom of God. Both in Daniel 7 and in Daniel 2 a timeline is given in which there are four empires until God intervenes. The four empires are the Babylonian, the Medo-Persian, the Macedonian, and the Roman. Jesus came under the Caesars and he was exalted over them. He told his disciples to preach a new king.

The Apostle Paul later refers to the Great Commission of Matthew 28, saying that it is his calling as an Apostle to bring about “the obedience of faith” (Romans 1.5; 16.26). He spells out the future course of world history in 1 Corinthians 15, writing:

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.”

Here in addition to the prophecies of Daniel, we should also mention Psalm 110, the most quoted passage in the “New Testament”:

The LORD says to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand,
until I make your enemies your footstool.”

This is related to Psalm 2:

Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying,
“Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast away their cords from us.”

He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the LORD holds them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
and terrify them in his fury, saying,
“As for me, I have set my King
on Zion, my holy hill.”

I will tell of the decree:
The Lord said to me, “You are my Son;
today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron
and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”

Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve the LORD with fear,
and rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son,
lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,
for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him.

Paul preached that the LORD’s begetting a son was a prophecy of the resurrection:

And we bring you the good news that what God promised to the fathers, this he has fulfilled to us their children by raising Jesus, as also it is written in the second Psalm, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you.”

Paul uses this Psalm and its relation to the resurrection to begin his letter to the Romans, showing Jesus to have been born again by the Spirit to be King of all:

Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ,…

There is a parallelism here, as many scholars have noticed, between Jesus’ first birth from the line of David and his second by the resurrection of the dead. Thus Jesus royal stature involves the title “Firstborn from the dead” (Colossians 1.18; Revelation 1.5). Jesus is now a new king and he is taking possession of what he has won by his death and resurrection. That is the story of world history from his ascension until the resurrection when “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

Of course, Jesus didn’t win this kingdom for his own sake, nor does he call us to work towards its realization for his own sake. Jesus wants to save the world. That was the whole point of Israel, going back to the calling of Abraham in Genesis 12:

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

And God makes it clear that he hates the idea of only ultimately saving a small remnant out of the world:

Listen to me, O coastlands,
and give attention, you peoples from afar.
The LORD called me from the womb,
from the body of my mother he named my name.
He made my mouth like a sharp sword;
in the shadow of his hand he hid me;
he made me a polished arrow;
in his quiver he hid me away.
And he said to me, “You are my servant,
Israel, in whom I will be glorified.”
But I said, “I have labored in vain;
I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity;
yet surely my right is with the Lord,
and my recompense with my God.”

And now the LORD says,
he who formed me from the womb to be his servant,
to bring Jacob back to him;
and that Israel might be gathered to him—
for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord,
and my God has become my strength—
he says:
“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to bring back the preserved of Israel;
I will make you as a light for the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

So amid all the power grabs of world leaders, God’s objective in Jesus is the release of the human race from slavery—not just slavery from death but slavery from every other tyrant as well.

That is the future Jesus wants, expects, and orders us to promote.

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