I'm not arguing your points, but just explaining how I came to be convinced of Premil. It doesn't really matter that much, because the whole sense of a future Millennium has little to do with the present age. It's only value would be in providing hope that God would sort of wrap everything up in accord with all of His promises to Abraham.
It is an oddball age, fitting in between the present age and the eternal age of the Kingdom. I can't explain much about it because we're given nothing about it except that there are those promises God made to Abraham.
A literal Millennial Kingdom best fits the idea of fulfilling these promises to me. To go directly into a future eternal Kingdom, without the Millennial stage, would not allow for Israel to be fulfilled as a "nation."
Their fulfillment as a nation would have to been fulfilled in the OT era, which does not seem Scriptural to me. Or, Israel would have to be fulfilled not as a "nation" in the future, in the eternal age of immortality, when ethnic and gender distinctions likely will not exist any longer.
How would you deal with this?
The reason why most Premils have abandoned Premil and embraced Amil is their unhealthy focus on ethnic Israel and not Christ. The Premil focus is in error. The mistake most Christians make when analyzing the OT writers is that they wrongly get captivated with the physical Old Testament people instead of the New Testament people, the spiritual New Testament land, the physical Old Testament temple instead of the spiritual New Testament temple, the physical old covenant apparatus instead of the spiritual new covenant apparatus, the temporal old covenant sacrifices instead of the spiritual new covenant eternal sacrifice.
Old Testament Revelation
The Old Testament prophets looked through a glass darkly and described things in terms their listeners could understand. The audience of that day did not have the great wealth of knowledge and revelation we enjoy today through the appearance of Christ, the fulfilling of countless Old Testament prophecies and the completion of the written canon of Scripture. They had no great appreciation of the incarnation – how God would take on human form and make a one-off final payment for sin. The prophet's words were therefore covered in obscure language that may seem strange to the New Testament mind-set. Notwithstanding, we should consider: predicting the abolition of the Judaic sacrificial system would have been inconceivable in that day. It would have been like denying the faith or being a heretic.
Whilst the detail here is presented in terms of the law (when it was given), this doesn’t mean a return to the law; rather, the detail has new covenant realities today. The prophecy was not intended to be a scrupulously literal outline of the new economy, but rather a general overview of this new arrangement. When the Old Testament prophets described an improved economy, they described it in terms that made sense to the old covenant Israelites to whom they were writing. Thus, it is logical that a future state would be described in old covenant terms, even though these terms would not be an exact depiction of the approaching condition.
Premils take Old Testament Scripture that were prophetically written to the Old Testament saints through a glass darkly pertaining to the new covenant time and propel them into some imaginary future bipolar age of justice and injustice, deliverance and bondage, light and darkness, righteousness and unrighteousness, perfection and sin, glorification and corruption, sin and sinlessness, immortality and mortality, peace and harmony and war and terror. This concept is totally unknown to Scripture.
The difficulty Amils have with Premil is that it places a meaning on the Old Testament passages that do not fit with the consistence teaching of Scripture and which conflict with the fuller and clearer revelation of the New Testament. It seems like Premils take advantage of the vaguer and more obscured view that the prophets had and place a meaning on their predictions that were never intended by God or the prophet. That is why Premils seem more comfortable under the old covenant arrangement and are fixated with bringing it back again in the future. Amils pitch their tent in the New Testament, and let the clear and explicit New Testament explain the type and the shadow. They see Christ as the fulfillment of every single Old Testament hope.
Geerhardus Vos skillfully sums up the spiritualization of the Mosaic arrangement by Christ and the New Testament writers: “Eschatological revelation is presented in the language of the Mosaic institutions. The New Testament first transposes it into a new key. Here in the New Testament it is spiritualized. In the Old Testament it is expressed in terms of perfection of the forms of Israel’s theocracy. The holy city is center; offices, organizations, peace, abundance, etc. are there, but this all is to be eternalized in the Messianic era, and will be free of the vicissitudes of the present era. All this is the content of revelation.”
As Rev. Nicholas T. Batzig wrote in an online article Eternalizing the Old Testament: “Jesus takes all of the shadows, ordinances and promises of the Old Testament, fulfills them in His death and resurrection and then gives the spiritual and eternal substance of them to His people who believe in Him. If we would seek to understand how all things move into and out of Him, we must keep Him at the center of our hermeneutical process. He is the everlasting Son of God and establishes all the everlasting blessings of God for us who trust in Him.”
The New Testament interprets the Old Testament
To best understand the Old Testament prophets and their prophecies, it is both wise and smart to start with the fuller revelation and see how they were viewed and interpreted by Christ and the New Testament writers. We can then work back the way and let clear, explicit and fulfilment interpret the vague, shadow and symbolic, not the other way around. Most Bible students do the opposite. They start by speculating what they think the Old Testament prophet meant. False doctrine is often what results.
Whilst the Old Testament mentions end-times and the second coming, it is often written in veiled and incomplete detail, mixed and interspersed with ancient events and other historical detail. It is also presented in types and shadows.
With the first advent of Christ, God introduced a new religious arrangement that changed the format of God’s engagement with man, and also enlarged the geographical range of His grace. Israel lost its exclusive privileged place under the new economy. The theocratic system was dismantled. The old covenant ceremonial system was replaced with a better, stronger, broader, more glorious and longer-lasting covenant. Under the new covenant there was no difference placed between Jews and Gentiles. Both enjoy equal status through faith in Christ. The New Testament expanded the Gospel thrust to embrace all nations. The new covenant knew no ethnic, political or religious boundaries. It was a global trans-national scheme that targeted a fallen world.
A lot of Christians today overlook this reality and therefore have a bias and faulty perspective of natural Israel. They make the mistake of viewing physical Israel today through Old Testament glasses. They fail to see that the Old Testament dispensation has gone forever and the New Testament era has fully and wholly superseded it. The old system has been totally dismantled and abolished because it was only ever intended to be a temporary covenant with an expiration date. Its conclusion occurred when Christ died on the cross. We see that with the ripping of the curtain in the temple at the very moment Jesus breathed His last breath (Matthew 27:50-51, Mark 15:37-38 and Luke 23:45-46). It therefore has no further purpose for time and eternity.
Ignorance of New Testament truth leads many to a distorted and erroneous understanding of Old Testament truth. Ironically, and paradoxically, especially allowing for how they describe themselves, many Futurists choose to live in the past. They understand ethnic Israel today in an old covenant sense, rather than a new covenant context. It is as if the old covenant is still active and valid and the new covenant has yet to arrive. Futurists seem unable (or unwilling) to recognize the seismic shift that occurred through the introduction of the new covenant. When pressed, they continually run back to the Old Testament for some type of support for a favored place for national Israel, a return of the Jews to their ancient land boundaries, the reintroduction of the old covenant apparatus, including a rebuilt physical temple, animal blood sacrifices, and a restored Old Testament priesthood. They have to pitch their tent in the Hebrew Scriptures because they have absolutely no endorsement in the New Testament for their theological model.
Sensible and enlightened Bible scholars place greater emphasis on the New Testament because it is the fuller revelation and it is where we now reside. God’s truth has been a gradual progressive unfolding and unveiling of truth to mankind from the beginning. The change and advancement that came with the New Testament era did not jettison the old Hebrew promises but rather fulfilled them. The doctrinal light became a lot clearer with Christ’s appearance and vivid illumination of the whole dynamic between the Old and the New Testament and the first and second advents. Our Lord removed the existing vail, dispelled the religious mist and has shed much-needed light on God’s redemptive plan.
That is why theologians insist: “the Old Testament is the New Testament concealed; the New Testament is the Old Testament revealed.” Steve Lehrer wisely advises: “read the old covenant Scriptures through the lens of the New Covenant Scriptures” (New Covenant Theology: Questions Answered). The New Testament is latent in the Old Testament, and the Old Testament is patent in the New Testament.
As Reformed Theologian Vern Poythress explains: “The significance of a type is not fully discernible until the time of fulfillment … In other words, one must compare later Scripture to earlier Scripture to understand everything” (Understanding Dispensationalists).
If the Bible student fails to grasp the whole inter-relationship between the Old and New Testament then surely, they are going be all over the place when it comes to quite a number of subjects in the Bible. But equally, it would be very difficult to comprehend the whole interconnection between the Old and New Testaments without understanding the actual relationship between Israel and the Church.
We have moved from natural Jerusalem in the Old Testament to the heavenly Jerusalem in the New Testament. Christ was always redirecting our eyes away from the natural to the spiritual, from the earthly to the heavenly, from the temporal to the eternal and from the visible to the invisible. Now that the shadow has been abolished, the fulfillment has superseded it.
The Pharisees and their followers had a mistaken hyper-literalist attitude to the Old Testament prophecies, which caused them to miss the spiritual nature of the kingdom that God intended. They anticipated a physical earthly temporal earthly Jewish kingdom instead of viewing the kingdom as spiritual, heavenly and eternal. The Pharisees looked for a Messiah who would set up a physical authoritarian reign over the whole earth. They looked for a restored kingdom in Israel that would rule over the Gentile nations with a rod of iron. I feel a lot of their confusion emanated from taking passages like this one hyper-literally, when they were in fact meant to be a spiritual picture of the change that would happen through the Gospel.
However, there is not one single teaching from Christ, Paul, Peter or any of the New Testament writers that remotely suggests the Old Testament land promises, ordinances or traditions lasted any longer than the cross. There is no instruction on the Jews being brought back to the land. Whilst they may be fixated with real estate none of the new covenant writers were. Amil stands with them and the eternal covenant, not an abolished one that is shown even today to be long-defunct.
The prophets were fixated with Christ (thee hope of Israel), redemption (deliverance from sin), His majestic kingdom (a spiritual edifice) and eternal glory (being delivered from every enemy - natural and spiritual). Messiah's appearance was the ongoing perpetual hope for every true Israelite (believing Israel). It was the Pharisees that were fixated with the land. They wanted to lord over the nations in a show of racial superiority. They were captivated with the natural, physical, earthly, visible and temporal whereas the elect were captivated with the supernatural, spiritual, heavenly, invisible and the eternal.
Thanks brother!
