Since I've been pondering some of the aspects of the Premillennial dispensational end times scenario I keep running across elemants of it I think are wrong. I don't know where I'm going to end up but it isn't as if I'm just discovering these elements, they've bothered me for some time but I haven't put my mind to answering them.
I'm thinking here of the Abomination of Desolation that Premill eschatology makes yet future and recalling that I've heard teaching that convincingly places it at the time of the Roman destruction of Jrrusalemt and the temple in 70 AD. Thos4e who had been warned by Jesus to flee when they saw that abomination did in fact flee and were saved from what was a bloody slaughter of such magnitude most of us have no idea. If I find a really good discussion of the historical facts I'll post it but for now I just want to say that I think there is good reason to consider that part of Jesus' prophecy in the Olivet discoverse to have been fulfilled in 70 AD.
In the book of Daniel this abomination of desolluation is referred to some four times and three of those times refer to the Greek period after the breakup of Anexander's army when the Seleucid leader Antiochus Epiphanes desecrated the Jerusalem temple with swine's blood in 167 BC. He was driven out by the Maccabees who cleansed the temple, there was the miracale of the continuously burning candes, and that is what is celebrated at Hanukkah. The remaining Abomination of Desolation belongs to the Roman period after that, and now I'm 98 percent confinced it was fulfilled in 70 AD.
It has bothered me all along that this futurist eschatology seems to anticipat4e the rebuilding of th4e physical temp0le in Jerusalem as a good thing. It can't be, it's an abomination in itself, a blasphemy against the Lord Jesus whose one-time sacrifice fulfilled and did away with the role of the animal sacrifices that were the main function of the temple. If an Abomination of Desolation was set up in that rebuilt temple it woulde not be an abomination of d4esoluation because the temple itself is the abomination.
And of course I'[ve already d3ealt with the idea that the Antichrist is yet to present himself as God in a physical temple: it was when the Bishop0 of Rome got elevated to Pope and dominated all the other offices of the Christian churches as well as having civil power in a reconstituted version of the Roman Empire, that he, the Antichrist, sat in the temple which is the people of God, declaring himself to be God, which all the titles given the Pope declare of him.
So far so good. I'll probably pare away more from the Premill eschatology, God willing, time permitting, eyesight allowing. I'm still particularly disturbed at the idea of two separate bodies of Chirst, one taken in the Rapture, followed by another that comes through the Great Tribulation. That one I don't yet have a way of resolving.
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