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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ron Rhodes
late Dr. John F. Walvoord, my primary prophecy mentor at Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) in the 1980s.
my seven years of graduate study at DTS.
Finally, I remain eternally grateful to the Lord for blessing Kerri and me with two wonderful children—David and Kylie, both now grown—whose lives and Christian commitment are never-ending sources of inspiration. Even as I write, David is busy taking seminary courses, and Kylie just returned from missionary work in Ghana.
The chronology expressed in this book is faithful to the biblical text, based on a literal interpretation of prophecy, and held by many devout believers in God’s Word. My prayer is that this book will help you to understand God’s plan for the ages.
This kind of sloppy thinking is a reflection of our current culture.
In the Scriptures, God has provided everything He wants us to know about Him and how we can have a relationship with Him. God is the one who caused the Bible to be written. Through it He speaks to us today just as He spoke to people in ancient times when its words were first given.
they composed and recorded without error His revelation to humankind in the words of the original manuscripts. In other words, the original documents of the Bible were written by men who were permitted to exercise their own personalities and literary talents but who wrote under the control and guidance of the Holy Spirit, the result being a perfect and errorless recording of the exact message God desired to give to humankind.
The writings came from God but were mediated through a prophet of God.
Second Peter 1:21 provides a key insight regarding the human– divine interchange in the process of inspiration. This verse informs us that “no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” The Greek word translated “carried along” literally means “forcefully borne along.” Even though human beings were used in the process of writing down God’s prophecies, these men were all literally borne along by the Holy Spirit. The human wills of the authors were not the originators of God’s message.
Yet just as the sailors were active on the ship (though the wind, not the sailors, ultimately controlled the ship’s movement), so the human authors were active in writing as the Spirit directed. This assures us that the prophetic Scriptures truly did derive from God and not mere human beings.
Scripture is historically reliable.
“Why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?…For the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God” (Matthew 15:3,6). Such verses affirm that Scripture is supreme over human tradition.
In view of such facts, you and I can trust every single prophetic statement found in the pages of Scripture.
Whenever I did get lost, it was invariably because I was reading the map book incorrectly.
It refers to the way any person of normal intelligence would understand the text without using any special keys or codes.
Another way to describe the literal meaning of Scripture is that it embraces the normal, everyday, common understanding of the terms. Words are given the meaning that they normally have in common communication. It is the basic, normal, or plain way of interpreting a passage.
But we would not know what is not literally true of God unless we first know what is literally true.
“I am the true vine” (John 15:1),
it means that believers derive their spiritual life from Christ, our spiritual vine.
Jesus said He was a door (John 10:9)
when a literal interpretation would contradict other truths inside or outside the Bible, as when the Bible speaks of the “four corners of the earth” (Revelation 7:1)
In short, as the famous dictum puts it, “When the literal sense makes good sense, seek no other sense lest the result be nonsense.” I follow this dictum throughout the rest of the book.
Bowls of incense represent the prayers of the saints (5:8),
Clearly, then, each symbol represents something literal.
Textual clues often point us to the literal truth found in a symbol—either in the immediate context or in the broader context of the whole of Scripture.
Jesus often used parables that are not to be taken literally. Yet each parable conveys a literal point. Jesus wanted His parables to be clear to those who were receptive. In fact, He carefully interpreted two of them for the disciples—
He did this not only so there would be no uncertainty as to their correct meaning but also to show believers how to interpret the other parables. The fact that Christ did not interpret His subsequent parables indicates that He fully expected believers to be able to follow His methodology and understand the literal truths they pointed to.
We would not know what is not literally true of God unless we first know what is literally true.
For example, later biblical texts take earlier ones as literal, as when the creation events in Genesis 1–2 are taken literally by later books
This is likewise the case regarding the creation of Adam and Eve (Matthew 19:6; 1 Timothy 2:13),
Further, at Jesus’s first coming, He literally fulfilled more than a hundred predictions, including that He would be…
Note also that by interpreting prophecy literally, Jesus Himself indicated His acceptance of the literal interpretation of the Old Testament (Luke 4:16-21).
By rebuking those who did not interpret the resurrection literally, Jesus indicated the literal interpretation of the Old Testament was the correct one (Matthew 22:29-32).
Jesus’s use of Scripture constitutes one of the most convincing evidences that Scripture ought to be interpreted literally.
A prophet chronology that has any hope of being accurate must follow a literal method of interpreting individual Bible prophecies.
This verse has a depth and richness in the original Greek that does not come across in English translations,
When the plain sense makes good sense, seek no other sense lest you end up with nonsense.
Bible expositor David Cooper suggests that in view of this dictum, we ought to “take every word at its primary, ordinary, usual, literal meaning, unless the facts of the immediate context, studied in the light of related passages and axiomatic and fundamental truths, indicate clearly otherwise.”
Likewise, prophecy scholar Arnold Fruchtenbaum suggests that “unless the text indicates clearly that it should be taken symbolically, the passage should be understood literally.”
A plain reading of Genesis indicates that when God created Adam in His own rational image, He gave Adam the gift of intelligible speech so he could communicate objectively with the Creator and with other human beings (Genesis 1:26; 11:1,7). Scripture shows that God sovereignly chose to use human language as a medium of communicating revealed truths, often through pronouncements of the prophets.
If God created language primarily so He could communicate with human beings and so human beings could communicate with each other, He would naturally use language and expect man to use it in its normal and plain sense. This view of language is a prerequisite to understanding not only God’s spoken word but also His written Word (Scripture).
The plain meaning of these promises makes perfect sense. There is no good reason to say that such verses will not be fulfilled with Israel but are rather spiritually fulfilled in the modern church—a position held by proponents of replacement theology.
Our doctrinal opinions should not govern our interpretation of Scripture.
None of us approaches Scripture with a blank slate. For this reason, our doctrinal opinions must be in harmony with Scripture and subject to correction by it. Only the positions that are compatible with Scripture are legitimate. We must allow the biblical
to modify or even completely reshape our presuppositions and beliefs.
Testing this position against Scripture, however, reveals significant problems.
the antichrist will be a Roman Gentile and not a Muslim.
The point is that we must always be willing to test our beliefs against Scripture.
