Four Keys to the Millennium

A few years back, I helped write a book with four other authors called Four Keys to The Millennium.

People today are hungry to understand the historic orthodox views of eschatology besides the prevailing dispensational worldview that appeared only in 1830 and has monopolized eschatology ever since the mid-20th century.

Recently, some people have written me to say that I helped them to change their worldview or have learned something new about eschatology from my on-line books and articles.

The following is a recent email from someone who greatly encouraged me to continue with my publishing and video production.

- Jay Rogers

My husband and I have been Christians for about 11 years now and have been doing all that we can to understand what we're supposed to be doing TODAY for most of those years.

We are currently trying to understand what all these "Book of Revelation Camps" are about. What do they mean? What are they trying to say?

In our search, we came across your website and would just like to let you know that we appreciate your approach to the subject. We appreciate having general definitions given, without malice, so that we can see in a somewhat linear view what all these people are trying to get at.

It seems most folks who have "picked a camp" cannot speak of the other "camps" without sounding hateful and malicious. We didn't find that in your site. It was a relief. We are trying to become educated... we are trying to understand... and when we read things that are malicious, it makes us feel we're being fed a "party-line" and then we don't trust it anymore.

So thanks for being un-malicious.

--Crystal

The Beast of Revelation (teaser trailer)

The Beast of Revelation (teaser trailer)

This is the "extended version" of the opening to The Beast of Revelation: IDENTIFIED. The first 48 seconds I cut from the final release. I wrote, produced and edited this 145-minute presentation during the "last days" millennial bug furor of the fall of 1999 while working in cooperation with Reel to Real Ministries.

Special thanks to featured speaker Ken Gentry, host Eric Holmberg and associate producer Erik Hollander who worked on this even while braving the dreaded specter of Y2K! Remember that?

The video is not what most people think it will be. If you are curious, go to The Beast of Revelation: IDENTIFIED website and read some of the articles. The entire introduction to the video is posted there in written form along with articles that give the basic outline of the video.

Here's an excerpt from the back cover --

Who is the dreaded beast of Revelation? Now at last, a plausible candidate for this personification of evil incarnate has been identified -- or more properly, "re-identified." Ken Gentry's insightful analysis of scripture and history is likely to revolutionize your understanding of the book of Revelation -- and even more importantly -- amplify and energize your entire Christian worldview!

Historical footage and other graphics are used to illustrate the lecture Dr. Gentry presented at the 1999 Ligonier Conference in Orlando, Florida. It is followed by a one-hour question and answer session addressing the key concerns and objections typically raised in response to his position. This presentation also features an introduction that touches on not only the confusion and controversy surrounding this issue -- but just why it may well be one of the most significant issues facing the Church today.

Ideal for group meetings, personal Bible study -- for anyone who wants to understand the historical context of John's famous letter "... to the seven churches which are in Asia." (Revelation 1:4)

Does America stand alone against Islamic terrorism?

A friend of mine recommended a book called America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It by Michael Steyn.

Steyn says that in the face of the Islamic threat, the world will be divided between America and the rest and for our sake America had better win.

Although Europe now has more Muslims than ever before, this is mainly due to immigration from Europe's bordering Muslim nations. I think the greatest threat to the United States and Europe is from the radical left and western humanism, not Islam.

Islam will not have a significant influence in America. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists make up less than five percent of the total United States population. That is not likely to change.

Christianity is actually outpacing Islam worldwide:

In 1900, Africa had 10 million Christians or about 9 percent of its population. Today, there are roughly 360 million out of 784 million people or 46%.

Latin America has 480 million Christians.

Asia has another 300 million.

At this rate of growth, Christianity will be the dominant religion with 2.5 billion within the next 25 years.

There will be Muslims who will become radicalized as a result of Christ's victory, but then again, predictions about America becoming Islamic are exaggerated.

*****

Remember all the doomsday books in the 1970s and 1980s? The killer bees are coming tomorrow, nuclear holocaust is The Day After, followed in a few weeks by new uncurable strains of deadly disease, biological warfare and genetic mutants. If the 1980s were not the Decade of Shock, then we did we learn nothing from the false prophets of the Y2K scare?

By the way, you can get all these books really cheap now!

One of my favorite songs from the early 1970s is a comic ragtime novelty piece by Ray Davies called Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues. It describes the way that conspiracy theorists think.

I read in the news not long ago that it turns out we actually have killer bees in Florida now. But it's not the end of the world as we know it.

What is the "preterist" view of the book of Revelation?

Are you a person who is concerned with getting to the heart of the truth on difficult biblical passages such as those concerning eschatology?

A few years ago, I produced a video (now on DVD) that explores the preterist view of the book of Revelation. This presentation continues to have a shelf life in that more and more people are turning to this view as they see false predictions related to the dispensationalist view of the End Times fall flat.

The Beast of Revelation: Identified is the best primer on the preterist view available on DVD.

People who like to debate eschatology are those who have their minds made up and are passionate about a particular view. People who don't like these arguments are usually those with an untenable view or one they find impossible to articulate. Even so, no two "experts" have the same view on the Book of Revelation. That doesn't mean, however, that there is not a consistently correct view that may be understood. It just means that we need to work harder at it.

The heretical view of preterism can be distinguished from partial preterism in that the latter suggests that many of the prophecies of scripture are fulfilled, but obviously some have yet to come. When I speak off preterism, I am speaking of the "partial" preterist view. Futurism is the "end-times" view of prophecy, while preterism is literally the "before-times" view.

A quick web search will give you the basics. Beware though that some of the information is written by "full" or "consistent" preterists, a view that is seriously deficient in many respects, the main heresy being the denial of the Second Coming of Jesus. The partial preterist view is orthodox in terms of looking with a joyful hope in the bodily Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

John Calvin wrote a preterist commentary on Daniel. I post this at my Daniel website.

Most theologians until the rise of dispensationalism (1800s and 1900s) held a preterist view of Matthew 24 -- the so-called Olivet Discourse. R.C. Sproul in his book, The Last Days According to Jesus, outlines this viewpoint.

Preterism has always been a minority view of the church in interpreting the book of Revelation -- there are some ancient writers who refer to Nero as the "beast of Revelation 13" but it is only in a cursory manner. The fully developed preterist view did not come until after the Reformation when the Bible proliferated in the 1500s and afterward.

I find this strange because Revelation is the "capstone" of other biblical prophecies found in Daniel and Matthew 24. It is inconsistent to interpret Daniel and the Olivet Discourse as having taken place by the time of AD 70, but then place events that are described in Revelation in similar language at the end of human history. A correct view will interpret scripture with similar passages of scripture.

With regards to the book of Revelation, the modern primers on preterism are the writings of David Chilton and Ken Gentry. They draw most of their material from several authors of the late 1800s. You can get the PDF files of all their books for FREE at: http://freebooks.com/

There are other "primers" on preterism. I wrote one as part of the Rebuttal to Amillennialism in my book, The Four Keys to the Millennium.

The Beast of Revelation: Identified (No, it's NOT Kim Jong-il!)

In early 2000, I released a video called The Beast of Revelation: Identified. This was produced with Eric Holmberg and Reel to Real Ministries.

The presentation is two and half hours long and is based on Dr. Kenneth L. Gentry's teaching on Revelation 13 at the 1999 Ligonier conference. Gentry takes the partial -preterist view which states that most of Revelation is history. The textual and historical context of Revelation is the first century, not the far distant future. At the Beast of Revelation: Identified website, there are several articles that explain this viewpoint in more detail.

I also published a brief commentary on Daniel from a partial preterist perspective, which is important in helping to interpret Matthew 25,25 and the book of Revelation.

In 2000, millennial madness was rampant and the sales were brisk. The DVD is anything but a bestseller, but I've been able to sell a few copies a month consistently on my own without much advertising except through the website. Over six years, it's made the production time and expense worth it. I believe that it is a needed teaching in this age of chiliastic error.

A strange phenomenon that I've noticed is that whenver a "Left Behind" type book is published or a new "end-times" movie is released, I get a flurry of orders. Recently, this occurred again with the testing of a nuclear bomb by North Korea. I suspect that people then go searching the web for The Beast of Revelation and come to my site, which is well indexed by Google. Check the surrounding links and you'll see The Beast of Revelation: Identified ranked at number 2.

Are people thinking that Kim Jong-Il is the Beast? If so they are about 2000 years too late! Check out the DVD and related articles to see what I mean.

Could there be life on other planets?

The consensus among most conservative Christians is that there are no aliens in outer space. This is an evolutionary idea that states that out of billions of stars there must be a few planets somewhere that could sustain the evolution of life. Much of what is currently driving NASA’s exploration of the solar system is a search for life. From a biblical creationist perspective, we will find no amoebas or bacteria on Jupiter’s moons. It is unlikely that we will even find water anywhere in our solar system other than on earth. God made the earth and he created a perfect biosphere that will indefinitely support the life he created.

But the question still remains. Is it possible that God could have created a planet that contains plants, animals and even sentient creatures similar to human beings? While the Bible is silent on this, I would negate the possibility of intelligent life on other planets.

Mark Twain wrote a science fiction story, “Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven,” about the idea of a heaven where thousands of aliens from every inhabited planet in the universe arrive at a heaven that was so populated that it is the size of many planets. In the story, Captain Stormfield is amazed to find out that Christ has appeared on every planet in the universe to life an exemplary life and die for that planet’s sins. He is told, “The worlds He has saved are like to the gates of heaven in number - none can count them." Twain was satirizing the Christian view of heaven in the face of the emerging evolutionary science. However, it is just as likely that a Christian view could be used to expose the impossibility of intelligent life besides ours in the univers.

This doesn’t negate, however, the possibility of worlds that have plant and animal life. It is possible that God could have created these planets on the fourth day of creation (Gen. 1:14-19). There may be worlds He created in the foreknowledge that a redeemed civilization would one day discover and colonize. Just as a millennial impulse drove the Age of Exploration in the 15th century, so a Golden Age of Christian knowledge may drive the exploration of new worlds and the settlement of new civilizations.

If the postmillennial view is correct, we can expect to one day colonize the solar system. It is likely that we will create self-sustaining biospheres – perhaps giant bubbles on the surface of the planet Mars – that will sustain life in a similar manner as on earth. It is even possible that one day we will discover a planet capable of sustaining an atmosphere and all the various species of life found on earth. Another idea is that scientists may someday be able to create a "biosphere" on another planet that would imitate the conditions on earth. Maybe a “Noah’s Ark” of future space colonists will bring the seeds of a new earth to a far distant star?

Of course this is speculation. But Christian Reconstructionists and other postmillennialists should be considering the possibilities.

Space Exploration in Postmillennial Perspective

If the moon and Mars were to be colonized some time in the next 100 years, how would this affect the viability of a pre-trib rapture view?

Or how about this question: How do eschatological views affect the discussion on the existence of extraterrestrial life?

This is a topic I’ve always been interested in. I am a big fan of science fiction novels and programs such as the X-Files and Star Trek. As a Christian, I see these stories as entertaining ideas, or as one science fiction writer called them, “thought experiments.” I don’t believe in UFO’s or extraterrestrials but I find the concept interesting. Even the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis wrote a Space Trilogy, which like his Chronicles of Narnia series is an allegory relating to Christian theology.

As a high school junior, I wrote a science fiction novella about an atheist who invents a space ship capable of interstellar travel. After an argument with his wife, who is a Christian, he decides to travel to the nearest star and discovers a strange utopian civilization. When he returns to earth he discovers that the entire earth is deserted. He is left with no choice except to travel back to the utopian planet. To his surprise, he discovers that his wife and her friends are on the planet. Even though he has traveled many additional light years, they haven’t aged. The situational irony, of course, is that the rapture has occurred while he was en route to the Bernard Star solar system – which people thought at that time was the closest star capable of having a solar system. The novel ends with the realization that the distant planet was heaven. The fate of the protagonist was that he was thrown into a black hole, which according to my story, was the second death described in Revelation 21:8.

The biggest irony in all of this is that when I wrote this story, I was not converted to Christ. I had read the works of Hal Lindsey and seen TV programs on the topic of “The Terminal Generation.” I used to believe that the rapture had to be very close because the Bible spoke only of people being “caught up” in the air to meet the Lord. Once people began to explore other planets, I thought, that would throw a monkey wrench into the possibility of the rapture occurring while people were on other planets. At least I didn’t see any mention of it in the so-called “end-times” prophecies of the Bible.

Then ten years later as a new Christian, I read a book by John Jefferson Davis called, Christ’s Victorious Kingdom: Postmillennialism Reconsidered. Postmillennialism differs from the traditional premillennial view in that there is no “rapture” of the church sometime in a seven year tribulation of wars, diseases and natural calamities. Postmillennialism teaches essentially that the world will become gradually Christianized as time goes by. The Second Coming and the rapture will occur after a long Golden Age of peace and prosperity.

Today as a postmillennialist, I believe that we have enough time left in history to colonize space – and possibly one day travel to other solar systems. I don’t think we will find aliens on other worlds, but I often wonder whether or not God created some of these worlds in a way that would allow men from the planet earth to create biospheres on other planets. Is it possible that the Great Commission involves spreading the Gospel for beyond our own solar system?

(More about postmillennialism.)