End Times According to the Pre=Tribbists, And My Usual Reservations

Jan Markell's Understanding the Times radio is heavy on the Pre-Trib Rapture scenario this week and I'm going to post it although I have personally pulled back from it. this program shows some opponents of the view who are awfully condemnatory against it, and I'm certainly not with them. I just keep having problems putting the scriptural sources together to build up that scenario that they are so sure about. And I object to their own characterizations of everybody who raises questions about the scenario as having some kind of nefarious motives or mental incompetence or whatever. I think there are genuinely legitimate questions BASED ON SCRIPTURE that make the Pre-Trib system shaky. I've spelled out a lot of my questions in previous posts and won't repeat them here. I still think there are valid elements in the Pre=Trib view, I just don't think it holds up as one coherent story line so I'm expecting some rearranging of parts and reinterpratations of some of the scriptural sources to characterize the final reality. Meanwhile I'm dedicated to an intense spiritual renewal on a personal level and the possibility of a revival to deal with theis corrupted world, and if the Rapture intervenes, graet, if not such a strengthening is desperately needed by both me and the Church.

The Spiritual Project A Month Into It

Since April first I've been pursuing spiritual strengthening with a passion. It started with a familiar thought that what is going on in the world is beyond human means of correction, it's God's doing for one thing, God's judgment on a corrupt world, becoming more corrupt as part of the judgment process, and it's beyond us to deal with such a trend on that level. I've thought it of course for some time, but one day I just got fed up with myself and decided I have to act on this recognition. I'm giving up any hope in human means and focusing exclusively on God. I soon got even more disgusted with myself as I realize how much of my Christian life has been misspent for so long, how much time I've squandered on political and other human systems when I should have been doing what I'm now doing, putting enormous energy into seeking God. Reading the books I've posted here and more besides, well listening to them since I can't see well enoughj to read any more, so many wonderful books in audio formats online, what a Blessing from God. He's dealing with me personally and taking the project in His own direction. I may write more later as it keeps unfolding, or I many not, at least not for some time. I'm seeking God Himself for His own sake, and seeking the power the Church should have and doesn't.

Another Brief Bleat About Evolutionary Assumptions.

Today's Dark Horse Podcast with Bret and Heather, No. 124is one in which they spend most of their time on biolobical phenomena which of coursse they discuss from their evolutionary perspective. So I'm writing this brief response as usual just to make my usual point that nothing they discuss validates the evolutionary persepctive at all. Everthing they say about the flora and fauna today is easily explained by the Creation of God. They mock the idea at one point but the mockery is a silly straw man. Nothing they report needs any other explanation. They are always talking about adaptations that a created creature would make, they don't need eevolution to explain it. Or they are talking about microevolution which is a misnomer since it has nothing to do with the theory of evolution, it's really just normal built-in variation, built into the genome of any given creature. NO OTHER EXPLANATION IS Required. tHEY ARE NEVER EVER TALKING ABOUT EVOLUTION, SAYING ANYTHING THAT REQUIRES AN EVOLUTIONARY EXPLANATION. nEVER.

Continuing to Hear Messages on Spiritual Power

John MacArthur on spirfitual power, from Ephesians

Yes I'm finally giving up on the Pre-Tribulation Rapture Eschatology

When I accepted the Pre-tribulation Rapture end-times explanation a few years ago I certainly didn't expect I'd be changing my mind about it, but that's what's happening now. I just have too many questions about it. I don't like any of the other systems any better, however, they all raise questions. Amillennialism also requires the spiritualizing of events that are described in remarkably literal terms and that has always made that system completely unacceptable to me. As for preterism I do think there are events the Pre-trib system makes future that are in fact past, but in themselves they don't undermine the general outline of the Pre-Trib system.

What still supports that system to my mind are the unfulfilled prophecies that need a literal fulfillment, such as the Seventieth Week of Daniel. Such as the Day of the LORD. Such as the great tribulation that Jesus prophesied. And a literal three-andp0 a half year period of the reign of Antichrist. I can't spiritualiz3e any of that away. The terms they are described in are too emphatically literal, and that fits the Pre-Trib system better than ano other.

But what calls the Pre-Tribe system into doubt is the doubling and even tripling of some events, that somehow never gets noted by its supported. Two maybe even three resurrections? Two bodies of sainbts? A group of martyrs expecting to be joined by another group while presumably all the martyres of the last two thousand years have already been raptured? That one continues to defy any kind of resolution I can come up with. Because the martyrs are clearly described in Revelation Six as a spec8ial group apart from the rest of the believers. Yet millions of martyrs must have been included inthe Rapture. It just makes NO sense.

So. I simply have no clear eschatology right now.

And I continue to be bothered by the fact that scripture that clearly refers to the Roman Catholic Churchwhen it first came into being in the seventh century are absorbed into the futurist There's a lot more ininvolved in this but my computer needs help whcih I can't get it yet so I can't write a longer post.interpretation.

continued

A Collection of Christian Spiritual Readings

a POST TO COLLECT LINKS FROM TIME TO TIME.


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Continuation of Previous Post About Watchman Nee

Computer won't let me post much in one place so I'm making a separate post out of this.

Later. Well, no, I don't think I'll be listening again to Nee, oh maybe once. the thing is he's powerfully cerebral and that is an entirely different spirit from Tozer's which is of the heart more than the mind. The more I listen to Tozer the deeper is my feeling of love, adoration, worship toward God. That happens to some extent with Nee but much less. I learn a lot from Nee though, but it's an entirelyh different kind of experience.

As an aside I want to mention that I'm always happy to find anyone who tackles the interpretation of the Song of Solomon, speaking of writing that aims at the heart. I don't even give a second thought to the preachers who treat the Song of Songs as a poem to marital love and there are many of those. To my mind that is a carnal level of interpretation. If it's not about the love of God and the love of God toward the believer or the Church it's an empty mental exercise. The theme of adoring love between God and believer is only touched on here and there in scripture but it is enough to pique the interest of anyone for whom that is the main point of the Christian life. It many not be many of us but there are alsways some who are looking for this experience. it is the theme of those called the mystics, or most of them. I think there are some cerebral mystics but most of them seek the Person of God in rapturaous adoration. "As the deer panteth after the water brooks, so pateth my soul after thee, Oh Lord."

Nee is one of those who has written an interpretation of the Song of Songs so I found a copy onkline and listened to some of it with the "reead aloud" function of my computer. As one might expect of him he is more thorough in his approach than others are, takes it verse by verse and makes connections between them at some length and so on. But for me it lacks that passion of love that I e must be the whole reason for the Song or it is mea ningless. In my opinionj. When Nee describes the relationship between the King and the Shulamite as "fellowship" when he brings her into the secret chamber under the banner of love I wonder at his seeming obtuseness. I stopped listening after only a few verses.

I have yet to find anyone who has explored the Song of Songs as I would like it to be explored. What Iv'e found is that those who have tried have a habit of making pronouncements about what its various symbols and figures of speech mean, and I doubt many of them agree with each other on any of them though they all have a habit of making flat pronouncements about what they mean. Nee does that too. Surely those symbols and figures are ambigfuous enough to defy such certainties. Anyway it's frustrating. I'm still hoping to find a commentator who does it justice in my opinion. Someone who illuminate the core of throbbing love in it.

It is that in Tozer's "Pursuit of God' that brings me back to it again and again, always to find some previously unnoticed word or phrase that contributes to the message of adoration of GGod.

But Nee in the video above does bring out meanings concerning salvation and sancitification that Are very useful so I still think it worth listening to.l

The Amazing Watchman Nee Unpacks Salvation in Christ like Nobody Else

I find myself listening over and over to Tozer's "Pursuit of God" and I thin kI'm going to do the same with Nee's "Normal Christian Life." These are the food for the soul I need, and I am bitterly sad that I've not made the use of them I should have over the last three decades since I beame a Christian. I don't know how I made it to the age of eighty and it's hard to imagine I have much more time to live but if the LORDD has mercy on me I'd want to take in these two books along with the Bible for whatever time Hew gives me.