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“Christ will come again.” These brothers and sisters are correct to see this formula as the primary eschatological affirmation that binds all Christians, but if Scripture reveals more than this, then we are all obligated to learn more than this.
As for tying the dispensational view of Israel’s role in redemptive history to the doctrine of election, it should be made clear that MacArthur distances himself from the way the Reformed tradition has historically framed the doctrine of election when he treats the election of national Israel in isolation from those covenants of works and grace that serve as the means through which God sends Jesus Christ to save his elect.
Dispensationalists insist that God’s redemptive plan focuses on national Israel, with provision made for Gentiles during the church age
The dispensationalist hermeneutic colors how dispensationalists understand the Gospels as well. This is especially true of the parables of the kingdom found in Matthew 13.[4] According to dispensationalists, Jesus came to earth, bringing an offer of God’s long-anticipated theocratic kingdom to the Jews, who tragically rejected their own Messiah. God then turned to dealing with the Gentiles, making the church age a parenthesis of sorts.
According to dispensationalists, the millennium is marked by a return to Old Testament temple worship and animal sacrifices to commemorate the redemptive work of
The best way to choose the correct eschatological position from among the differing systems is to identify and evaluate the underlying hermeneutics involved. By examining the hermeneutical methods of each system, we can then decide which interpretation makes the most sense of the biblical data.
According to amillenarians, this means that Jesus Christ is the true Israel. Jesus Christ is the true temple. Jesus Christ is the heir to David’s throne, and so on. A number of specific instances of this will be addressed in part 2.
New Testament data as the determinative category by which Old Testament and future eschatology are to be interpreted.
This leaves dispensationalists frequently stuck in the awkward position of insisting on an Old Testament interpretation of a prophetic theme that has been reinterpreted in the New Testament in the light of the messianic age, which dawned in Jesus Christ.
When James applied this prophecy to the church, was he spiritualizing an Old Testament text? Or was James reading the Old Testament through a Christ-centered lens typical of the greater light of the messianic age? This question lies at the heart of the debate between amillenarians and dispensationalists.
Dispensational presuppositions will not fit with much of the interpretation supplied to Old Testament data by New Testament authors.
More importantly, such a survey gives us the proper framework and external controls to interpret prophetic sections of Scripture correctly.
If amillenarians adopt the New Testament writers’ interpretation of the Old Testament, are they not following the literal sense of Scripture, even if the New Testament writers universalize something that was limited to Israel in the Old Testament?
Systematic theologians place eschatology at the end of their systems because of matters of logical organization. Biblical theologians remind us, however, that in many ways eschatology is the warp and woof of Scripture.
This panoramic perspective of eschatology explains why Reformed Christians have often spoken of redemption decreed, accomplished, and applied (i.e., the pattern spelled out by Paul in Eph. 1:3–14).
But the end is not merely paradise regained; it is paradise glorified.
‘Everything the LORD has said we will do.’
God did not swear the oath of ratification. Rather, the people of Israel did so.
Seeing the essential continuity between these covenants is important at a number of levels. It prevents us from mistakenly seeing the Old Testament as essentially law and the New Testament as essentially gospel.
This covenant of works is never subsequently abrogated in the Scriptures, a point empirically verified whenever death strikes.
Paul’s answer was that Jesus Christ was perfectly obedient to the same covenant that the first Adam disobeyed.[13] The resurrection is proof that Christ fulfilled the terms of this covenant, because after laying down his life for our sins, God raised him up as Lord of life (Rom. 4:25).
Adam and his family were cast from Eden and never allowed to return. This recurring theme of God making a covenant, the subsequent disobedience of his people, and the consequences of the covenant curse resulting in his people being cast from the land of promise repeatedly resurfaces throughout the drama of redemption.
Like Adam, the nation came under God’s covenant judgment and was cast from Canaan, the very land God had promised to Abraham. Adam had failed. Now Israel had failed. A redeemer was still needed who would fulfill the covenant of works. “For what the law was powerless to do . . . God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man” (Rom. 8:3).
Thus, God fulfilled all the promises he made to Abraham.
This new creation, which is nothing less than a paradise glorified, is also the New Jerusalem,
This reminds us that the basic panorama of eschatology is creation, fall, and re-creation.
This explains in part why Reformed theologians see the Old Testament in terms of promises about the Redeemer and the New Testament in terms of their fulfillment. This view preserves the redemptive-historical unity between the testaments. The Bible does not have two divergent testaments bound under one cover.
Israel’s priesthood was a provisional institution that prepared the way for the true High Priest, the one who was both sacrificing priest and sacrificial victim.
Who are these new covenant people? According to the author of Hebrews, they are the members of Christ’s church. Couched in the premessianic context of Jeremiah’s prophecy, the houses of Israel and Judah are typological of the church. This is another clear-cut case of an Old Testament prophecy that is fulfilled in the church, the members of which are the spiritual seed of Abraham through faith in Jesus Christ (cf. Gal.
The New Testament, however, equates Israel’s restoration, prophesied in the Old Testament, with Jesus’s kingdom—a kingdom not of this world (John 18:36).
In this case, the prophetic perspective is in effect, as the prophets saw the two comings of Christ as one event. The New Testament sees it as two events, the first and the second advent. The “age of the Spirit,” the presence of the kingdom of God, and the so-called millennial reign of Christ characterize the period of time between these two comings of Christ.
The New Testament spoke of Jesus’s redemptive work as final and complete, and we receive his saving benefits through faith alone. All the Old Testament promises of redemption were complete in Jesus Christ.
The coming of Jesus marked the beginning of the end of the ages. The last days began with his coming, since Jesus was the long-expected Messiah. This explains the futility of discussing eschatology apart from the person and work of Jesus Christ.
He must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets.”
If these prophecies have already been fulfilled in Jesus Christ, much of the dispensational case for a future earthly millennium simply evaporates.
when the Ethiopian eunuch read Isaiah 53:7–8 and asked Philip to whom this prophecy referred, Philip told him that this passage was about Jesus (Acts 8:34–35). But this is not all that is in view here.
The prophet Hosea quoted God as saying, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (11:1). But Matthew told us that Hosea’s prophecy was fulfilled when Jesus’s parents took him to Egypt for a time as a baby to protect him from Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents” (Matt. 2:13–18). Thus, Matthew, not the “spiritualizing amillenarian” centuries later, took a passage from Hosea that referred to Israel and told his readers that it was fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
Paul also explained, “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:29). From the beginning of redemptive history, the true children of Abraham, whether Jews or Gentiles, will be heirs of God’s promise if they belong to Jesus Christ, the true seed of
new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind.
Israel’s prophets, writing during the exile, when Israel had been cast from the land, universalized the promise of a land in Canaan to include a new heaven and a new earth, the fruit of the eschatological victory won by the suffering servant and conquering
In Romans 4:13, Paul saw the fulfillment of this as follows: “It was not through law that Abraham and his offspring received the promise that he would be heir of the world, but through the righteousness that comes by faith.” As Robert Strimple so aptly puts it, “Where in the Old Testament do you find the promise that Paul refers to here? Nowhere if you insist on a strict literalism. But you find it in Genesis 17:8 . . . if you see that this is inspired apostolic interpretation of the Old Testament promise that Paul is giving us
Abraham “was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Heb. 11:10). Peter also picked up on this prophetic expansion of the Promised Land when he wrote, “In keeping with his [God’s] promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness” (2 Pet. 3:13). The inheritance promised to Abraham, which was couched in premessianic terms as a reference to the land of Canaan, was, after Israel took possession of the land under Joshua, subsequently reinterpreted by Isaiah, Paul, the author of Hebrews, and Peter as a new heaven and
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If this interpretation is correct, amillenarians are no less literal in their hermeneutic than the New Testament writers.
But this is an erroneous interpretation because it ignores an important step in the interpretive process, namely, how the New Testament writers understood this prophecy in light of the coming of Jesus Christ.
You have not come to a mountain that can be touched
But you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
why did the author of Hebrews speak of the fulfillment as a present reality?
we are speaking of the earthly Jerusalem serving as a type or a copy of the heavenly reality, which now is realized in principle. If true, this strikes a serious blow to the root of dispensational and premillennial expectations about Jesus reigning over an earthly kingdom from a new Jerusalem. The earthly Jerusalem was intended to point us to Jesus Christ and to serve as a shadow of the realities to come when God makes all things new.
Ezekiel prophesied that the temple will be rebuilt, the priesthood will be reestablished, sacrifices will be offered, and the river of life will flow from the temple. How we interpret this prophecy will have a significant bearing on the question of a future millennial age on the earth.
