Be in pain and labour to bring forth, O daughter of Zion

[eclipsenow]

Futurism doesn't say Rev. is inaccessible, incomprehensible, or meaningless to any Christian, but says Rev. has always been an unsealed book (Rev. 22:10), meaning that it shouldn't be difficult for any Christian (of any time) to understand it if they simply read it as it's written:

Good so far...

chronologically and almost entirely literally.

There you go, you just wrecked it!

The few parts of it that are symbolic are almost always explained afterward (e.g. Rev. 1:20, 17:9-12), and the few symbols in Rev. that aren't explained afterward (e.g. Rev. 13:2) are usually explained elsewhere in the Bible (e.g. Dan. 7:4-7,17).

Oh, you mean like the WHOLE BOOK!??? I see intense, regular Biblical symbols in every single verse of Revelation!

Please indicate how you feel each detail of Rev. chs. 6-22 can be included in a "theological" sermon "that applies to all Christians across all time".

You look up the general theological point of the biblical symbol and how it is used in the Old and New Testament, and then apply it to all Christians across all time because THAT's what John was doing!

Also, how do you feel futurism "butchers" Rev.?

Problems with Futurism.
1: Revelation becomes irrelevant and incomprehensible for the majority of Christians. The most serious side effect of unthinking futurism is that the book of Revelation then becomes utterly irrelevant for the vast majority of Christian history. If only our generation has the world order and political situation through which to finally understand this otherwise mysterious book, then what good has it been for the church for the last 2000 years? Futurists would turn today's geo-politics into the lens through which we are to understand the bible. That's just so upside down and back to front one hardly knows where to begin conversing with these people!

Futurism as a general hermeneutic to Revelation makes the majority of the book utterly inaccessible and incomprehensible and no plain good to anyone prior to the generation that finally has the right set of geopolitics and newspaper headlines to 'get' it. In other words, my concern is not just that the book is not *about* any generation prior to ours, but that it is utterly mysterious and bewildering to any generation prior to ours. According to most futurists I read, the headlines just do not 'fit' the bible until *their* particular blend of headlines and geopolitics is finally applied to Revelation. Only *they* have the right lens. Only *they* understand. Only *they* can wriggle today's political landscape into the symbols in Revelation and finally get some *meaning* out of it.

In that case, what has been the *point* of the book for 2000 years? I thought Revelation was the unsealing of Daniel's prophetic vision. I thought it was meant to explain stuff. I thought it was an unveiling of mysteries, not a recasting of it all into doubt and uncertainty and endless, endless speculation! Futurism doesn't unveil anything, but ironically seals it all up again inside a false hermeneutic and set of presuppositions that actually *rob* the book of all its meaning.

Not only that, but it's *dangerous*. How many cults have been kick-started by reading Revelation as applying to our times? It's not just JW's, Mormons, Jonestown, Waco Texas Branch Davidians, and all the big ones that concern me. It's the countless time and energy wasted wondering how it all fits together. It's the sense of bewilderment so many feel in the face of so many competing views. It's the fact that there is a sense that none of it applies to *me* until blah blah blah happens. Futurism as a hermeneutic robs Christians of one of the most gospel orientated and comforting and *practical* books in the bible.


2: Revelation becomes PATRONISING & NASTY to today's suffering Christians.
Futurists deny that John was writing to *his* generation about things that are about to happen "soon" for "The time is near" (See Chapter 1). Instead, they rip it out of the Roman context and stick the book down somewhere 2000 years later! Instead comforting Christians suffering under the Romans back then, it rubs their noses in it and proclaims, "You think YOU'VE got it bad! Just wait till you see how bad they have it in this thing we call the TRIBULATION!" Insisting the TRIBULATION is actually in the far future makes a mockery of all those who have already suffered unspeakable loss for His name.

Try telling Richard Wurmbrant that he didn't live through a 'tribulation'. Try telling Christian parents who watched their kids get butchered in former Communist and Muslim countries. Try telling someone who watched their family get buried alive in Africa, and had to watch their children begging for their lives as they choked up dirt in their last breaths.

The futurist declares that Revelation's got nothing for them now. It's a boring timetable about the FUTURE, and how those poor Christians are going to suffer EVEN MORE! (Or get miraculously raptured away... which would make me ask why I had to go through it and they didn't!)
It's the constant projection of one, terrible, all consuming tribulation in the future when we should be more concerned about helping our brothers and sisters who are being persecuted *right now*.

3: Revelation fails to reinterpret the Messiah Christologically!
The Reformation Theologians and great Reformed Calvinist thinkers of today are Amil. They read the obvious biblical symbolism in Revelation and see a theological sermon, not a future timetable. This sermon covers a lot of ground, but much of it is Christological and helps the early Jews understand who the Messiah really was as the suffering Servant king, and how that all works with fulfilling the LONG TERM security of God's spiritual people. Jewish Christians were often confused about why Jesus was taking so long to kick out the Romans. The fact that God's Kingdom was now 'not of this world' often escaped them. Revelation explains all this.

Futurists would strip this sermon of it's power and turn it into a boring, arbitrary, lifeless timetable. To which I reply, eeerrh? So what? Especially if it's not going to happen in my lifetime?

So, other than tossing around a bunch of Scriptures that also confirm a Reformed Amil approach, they are the top 3 reasons I'm not a futurist!

Instead, Revelation describes the imminent Roman persecution of Christians with a lot of symbolic writing and Old Testament metaphors thrown in. But it does so generally, so that any 'particular' event that *might* be described is not just for Christians under Rome, but for all Christians across all time who might be persecuted. Just as the problems Paul addresses in the congregation at Corinth are not *exclusively* for Corinth, so too the challenges in Revelation were not just for the Roman Christians.

I'm partly Partial-Preterist but mainly Symbolist. That is, rather than try to get a Phd in Roman History to 'really' understand Revelation better, I think Revelation is clearer than that. It's self-explanatory if read in the context of the whole bible. It describes our danger from political persecution, worldly philosophies, the pleasures of wealth and even from God's judgement against this world in natural disasters. However, God's people are ultimately safe, and God is judging this world right now even as we wait for the FINAL judgement. God is in control, even when bad things happen. So trust Him! John said it was about things that were going to happen SOON, in his generation, and that the TIME WAS NEAR!

That's the message, in a nutshell. So it has plenty to say to Christians in ALL situations and ages and circumstances, even us in the filthy rich west. In vivid picture language, it warns us not to trust in money or worldly security. It warns us natural disasters can pluck us or our loved ones out of history and into eternity at ANY moment; but that ultimately, we are eternally secure.

I find it a disturbing book precisely because it doesn't describe some future timetable, but instead offers a general description of life anywhere, any time. These things could happen to me and to my family; and God would not have broken any promises to me! He warned me. In his love, God wrote this letter to warn me that we live in desperate times. We really do live in the Last Days, and have done since Peter declared it to be the Last Day's when the Holy Spirit first came on the church 2000 years ago. (Acts 2).

Please indicate how you feel each detail of Rev. chs. 6-22 is a Biblical symbol comparable to other non-Rev. scripture.

Do you really want an answer with this level of detail? Really?

How?

See above, the usual 3 point copy and paste I give you that you still haven't adequately addressed! While futurism doesn't SAY Revelation is incomprehensible, it MAKES it incomprehensible. It's a side effect you just haven't thought about, and to me it's such a glaring gaff that it makes almost all kinds of futurism self-obviously laughable!!!

By demanding that the book is about the future, and this future can ONLY be understood by reading it through your particular lens of geopolitics and newspaper headlines, you've made the book mysterious to anyone who doesn't have those headlines. Tell me honestly, do you think anyone 100 years ago could have guessed the way the Middle East would be carved up about now? Or that Russia and America would be friends again? Or the EU?

Also, futurism looks at today's news re: geopolitics and technology simply in order to help believers consider different ways for how the never-fulfilled, yet still understandable, and almost entirely literal, highly-detailed prophecies in Rev. chs. 6-18 might be fulfilled in our future.

You just keep repeating all those adjectives without PROVING they apply, go right ahead. I just laugh every time you write these sentences because you haven't got an ounce of proof. Assertion is not an argument!

But as I have already described above, they could NOT understand what was being discussed without today's geopolitical grid. You're just making it up.

Please indicate how you feel each detail of Rev. chs. 6-22 forms part of "a series of theological sermons focusing on the gospel", and "describes the same event repeatedly and from different angles and different images".

I didn't say that did I?


Futurism doesn't say Rev. was incomprehensible at all to former generations (see above).



Futurism doesn't say all of Rev. is literal or future, but that Rev. chs. 6-22 are a future and almost entirely literal timetable, for they're about "things which must be hereafter" (Rev. 4:1), and just as the glorious return of Jesus in Rev. 19:7-20:3 has never been fulfilled, but will be fulfilled almost entirely literally in our future, so the highly-detailed and chronological events of the preceding tribulation in Rev. chs. 6-18 have never been fulfilled, but will be fulfilled almost entirely literally in our future. Also, the millennium will be literal, and will begin after Jesus' 2nd coming (Rev. 19:7-20:6, Zech. 14:3-21), when he'll reign on the earth with the physically resurrected church for 1,000 years (Rev. 20:4-6, 5:10, 2:26-29, Ps. 2, 66:3-4). Also, Rev. chs. 6-22 aren't a general statement, but are detailed events, for there are so many of them, they're so varied, & they're chronological, & so long. To reduce all of them to 1, short general statement renders all their myriad, specific & amazing details utterly useless. It's like throwing Rev. chs. 6-22 into the trash, just to be done with them.

Please indicate how you feel each detail of Rev. chs. 6-22 forms part of "a series of theological sermons focusing on the gospel", and "describes the same event repeatedly and from different angles and different images".

I didn't say 6-22 looked at the SAME EVENT repeatedly did I? What did I actually write?

The Return of Christ is part of the gospel. The writing in Revelation describes the same event repeatedly and from different angles and different images. This difference in symbolic description shows it to be theological in nature, not some sort of literal timeline. Otherwise the book contradicts itself in the later chapters when the world is judged and sin and Satan defeated... and then it's all back again in the next chapter! (See 17 to 20 for more details).

That is, the last few chapters go over and over Judgement Day. So the fact that Judgement Day is covered does not indicate a specific timeline of literal events, as you would say, but is actually MORE evidence that this whole book is one gigantic metaphorical and symbolic exploration of certain themes. If you ask I'll try to dig up my exploration of 17 to 20 and how they describe Judgement Day from 3 different angles, but that'll do for now.

 

[Bible2]

eclipsenow said in post #61:

I see intense, regular Biblical symbols in every single verse of Revelation!

Please indicate what you feel each verse in Rev. symbolizes.

Problems with Futurism.
1: Revelation becomes irrelevant . . .

See the "relevant" part of post #49. Also, re: the rest of the "Problems with Futurism" list (which you previously posted in post #47), see the subsequent parts of post #49.

I'm partly Partial-Preterist . . .

Why does partial preterism believe in a future 2nd coming but not a future tribulation, when:

1. The 2nd coming & rapture (the gathering together/catching up together of the church: 2 Thes. 2:1, 1 Thes. 4:15-17) must occur immediately after the trib of Mt. 24/Rev. chs. 6-18 (Mt. 24:29-31, Rev. 19:7-20:6);

2. The 2nd coming & rapture can't occur until sometime after the man of sin (commonly called the Antichrist, also called the beast) sits in a 3rd Jewish temple in Jerusalem during the trib and declares himself God (2 Thes. 2:1-4, Dan. 11:31,36, Mt. 24:15-31, Rev. 11:1-2, 13:4-18); and

3. At Jesus' 2nd coming to rapture and marry the church he'll destroy the Antichrist (2 Thes. 2:1,8, Rev. 19:7,20)?

-

Partial preterism might reply: "It's obvious the rapture hasn't happened yet".

That's right. But full preterism nonetheless still (mistakenly) claims the 2nd coming, resurrection, & rapture described in 1 Thes. 4:15-17 (and in 2 Thes. 2:1, Mt. 24:29-31, 1 Cor. 15:22-23,52-54, & Rev. 19:7-20:6) have already happened, for full preterism employs the same "it's only allegorical, not literal" argument that partial preterism uses to (mistakenly) claim that all the highly-detailed, myriad different events of the trib of Rev. chs. 6-18 have already happened. If partial preterism has no problem accepting that the 2nd coming, resurrection, & rapture haven't yet occurred, for nowhere in history do we find the events of 1 Thes. 4:15-17 (which are the same events as 2 Thes. 2:1, Mt. 24:29-31, 1 Cor. 15:22-23,52-54, & Rev. 19:7-20:6), then why does partial preterism have a problem accepting that the events of Rev. chs. 6-18 haven't yet occurred, for nowhere in history do we find these events?

If you ask I'll try to dig up my exploration of 17 to 20 and how they describe Judgement Day from 3 different angles . . .

Yes, please do that, with reference to specific verses.

 

[eclipsenow]

Bible 2,
Let me know whether you ever become man enough to answer the questions I've put to you in the following post. Otherwise, I'm bored of your antics.

http://www.christianforums.com/t7639481-6/#post60401780