DHK....My last post showed your having difficulty dealing with what scripture says...It said it in both the OT and the NT.
You cannot handle the figurative language in a way that the scripture offers it. To do so would require you to abandon your prophecy chart.
What chart? I didn't show you a chart?
You are so involved in figurative language that you make literal language figurative when it is not. Thus much of what you believe has led you off the path of truth.
What happened to the simple:
"Thy Word is lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path."
The Preterist doesn't believe that any more. Perhaps "lamp" must have some deep mysterious meaning, and "light" as well. Everything is so allegorical you have lost the true sense and meaning of the Bible.
You have no reasonable answer to these verses.The premill guys skim over them..or invent the ever mysterious double fulfillment idea to escape the force of the verses as used. Most of these events have passed.You cannot accept that with your system..it would leave to many holes.
Here are two things for you to seriously consider.
Get a copy of John MacArthur's "Charismatic Chaos." Go to chapter four. And study that chapter seriously. It is a very good chapter on Bible hermeneutics or the proper interpretation of the Bible. It is written in a very easy to understand method, as he does in much of his writings. You need to get down some serious principles of Biblical interpretation. It is important you do that.
Second, here is some history you need to realize. Have you ever heard of the book "The Fundamentals"?
Here is some information on it:
The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth (generally referred to simply as
The Fundamentals) is a set of 90 essays published from 1910 to 1915 by the
Bible Institute of Los Angeles.
The Fundamentals were originally edited by
A. C. Dixon and later by
Reuben Archer Torrey. Originally published as a 12-volume set,
The Fundamentals were later condensed to a four-volume set, but retained all 90 essays in their original form. The 90 essays were written by 64 different authors, representing most of the major Christian denominations.
The essays were designed to affirm, among other things, conservative
Protestant beliefs, especially those of the
Reformed tradition, and defend against ideas deemed inimical to them. They are widely considered to be the foundation of modern
Christian fundamentalism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fundamentals
--These formative years, just before 1910 was a period of time when our leaders had battled the real enemy--modernism, liberalism--those who were denying the fundamentals of the faith. Of the 64 authors, they debated among them to consider putting premillenialism as one of those fundamentals, along with the virgin birth, the incarnation, the resurrection, etc. It was fundamental to them. To my knowledge there was only one that wasn't, and that was T.T. Shields, the Canadian pastor in Toronto, but still a fundamentalist. He was, for some reason, an amillennialist. But the others were not. They were all premillenialist. It was a foundational doctrine.
i do not even care for most of them..it was a randomsampling, because i know most understand the language of these passages as figurative so I did not even have to be careful....I do not know what most any of them believe....I look at the scripture..not the men.....
But you quote them anyway! Hey, why not throw in the Koran, the Book of Mormon, and a few others as well.
Maybe EGW has commented on those verses. Did you check her?
Surely the Mormons must have some resource materials on those portions. Did you check with them?
If you look at the scripture and not the men, why did you use the commentaries in the first place? You would have never come up with the absurd ideas without the help of others.
I do not care if it is a clown at the circus...if he offers good verses I will consider them....you are looking to escape the last post, rather than admit what you were shown.
He offers the strange and vain imaginations of a philosopher--ideas that you would never come up with on your own--had you simply studied the Bible and allowed the Holy Spirit to teach you.
I do not know for sure. I have been re-reading some postmill guys.I used to reject them as you are doing now....I used to be strongly premill....but I found problems with it....I still have cassettes from Dallas Theological seminary.....s.lewis Johnson, william macrae, etc. books by walvoord,pentecost,etc.
I read and studied the Bible. There has been only position that has ever made sense to me.
I read in many passages the glorious coming kingdom of Christ where He will sit on His throne and rule with a rod of iron on this earth for a thousand years. There will be harmony among nature. And the curse will be lifted. This scenario is repeated over and over and over again, throughout many many books, so that it cannot be denied.
Therefore:
To be an amillennialist is simply to deny scripture.
To be post millennial means that we live in the Kingdom, or at least that the earth is getting better and better. This is a denial of: common sense, of Scripture, of science, of anthropology, of reality, of the truth.
Christ has not come. We are not living in the Kingdom. To destroy the meaning of "thousand years" to "years ad infinitum." Of course with 2,000 years gone by since Christ you can't stick to one thousand years any more, so once again one is forced to allegorize scripture. If you can do it to one verse, why not allegorize the blood of Christ, His death on the cross? Maybe the Muslim is right? He really didn't die? It was all allegory! Right?
But what the Bible teaches is literal--a literal kingdom. I believed that before I went to college because the Bible taught it. I believed that before I ever heard of these other positions, simply because I read my Bible.
DHK...I know what they say and do....I used to be that way. I was told it alone was the truth...audited a few classes at a premill school BBC.Clark Summit PA....they say as you do..basically anyone who is not premill is heretical. They were wrong as you are now.
Any person who denies the Word of God is standing on the brink of heresy. Do you blame them?
While I am undecided...I am trying to re-study each view and try to disprove it...I do like what the postmill writers say at this time....so..I look at how the other views attack the position...and how the postmill guys respond.
Post-mill = A thousand is not a thousand.
Therefore a Millennium is not a Millennium (they don't believe in one)
Things now are getting better--a lie from Satan, and contrary to Scripture--there will be a great falling away from the truth.
Here is a good quote from Wikipedia
Reconstructionist postmillennialism, on the other hand, sees that along with grass roots preaching of the Gospel and explicitly
Christian education, Christians should also set about changing society's legal and political institutions in accordance with Biblical, and also sometimes
Theonomic,
ethics (see
Dominion theology).
In other words postmillennialism and the social gospel go hand in hand.
