I must be extraordinarily obtuse about this premill pretrib way of thinking.  Often Jan Markell's program makes a big effort to clarify it and still I don't get it, don't get something or other and don't know what it is I'm not getting or why.    This latest program makes the same attempt and by fifteen mintues into the show I'm more confused than ever.  It goes by very fast for one thing and I guess I can go back and slow it down to tr to get the points I'm missing, whichI hope I'll be up to doing, but all I ever get out of these things is hearing the story repeated again.  And again.  

I gather there is more to this idea of Replacement Theology than I've understood.  Okay that's a start.  I keep thinking it's not replacement theoogy beause it's about fulfilling the messianic promises and those promises were fulfilled in the Church.  Yes?  No?  That leaves plenty of room ofor further dealings God is to make with ethnic or unsaved israel.  But "true Israel" as Paul uses the term, I understand to apply to believing Israel, which includes Gentile believers.  Ethnic Israel is a different lvel of things.   And ethnic Israel is what is dealt with in the seventieth week of Daniel, the great tribulation and all that.    Ethnic Israel is not replaced, because it remains to be dealt with, and True Israel is not replaced because it is the fulfillment of the messianic promises and is a separate level of the story.  Or seomthing like that.  What am I not Getting?

However, apparently there are those who see the whole history of Israel as having come to an end entirely with God's divorcing them for their adulteries against Him.  That's a different element of things I wasn't taking into account and it doesn't make sense to me because ...  well I'm sure there are scriptural reasons but I'm thinking of the historical reasons and the unfulfilemt prophecy of the seventieth week.  Historically the return of Israel to the land and statehood is jawdroppingly sidnificant and I can't see how anyone cojuld dismiss that as a Big Nothing as apparently some do.    The fact that Israel is the center of so much turmoil in the world in itself points to it as God's own piece of real estate which gathers all the forces of evil abgainst it.  Cup of trembling scripture calls it.  How can that be ignored?

Scripturally I think of the prophecy of Hosea in which God makes it clear that His adulterous wife is nevertheless loved by Him and invited back.  I don't see a total abandonment there.

I think I'll stop there.  I still have a million questions about other facets of the premill pretrib scenario but I'll leave those this time.