I am at a “Prophecy Watchers” conference in Norman, OK. I am going to make a strong effort not to personally insult or slander any of the people at this conference. Both speakers and attendees appear to be among the most zealous Christians I have ever met.

As for the saints who are in the earth,
they are the excellent ones in whom is all my delight. (Ps. 16:3)

I detest Calvinism and find it both unbiblical and insulting to God. Nonetheless, Calvinists like Georg Whitfield, Charles Spurgeon, John Piper, Paul Washer, and others are or were more devoted and holy before the Lord than I have been. With John Wesley, I have to say that I won’t see those guys in heaven because they will be far closer to the throne than I will be in the great multitude of those ransomed by the blood of the Lamb.

The last couple days I have been indulging some excellent ones in whom is all my delight as they pass on ignorance and foolishness to hundreds.

First, their absolute certainty about a 7-year tribulation coming is astonishing by itself, but they are just as certain that the rapture, the “catching away” described at the end of 1 Thessalonians 4, will happen before that tribulation. This is a rousing “we pre-tribbers are right and no one can possibly doubt it” conference.

Second, the conference began with an important speech in which the speaker warned everyone at the conference that the date-setters have a historical accuracy rate of 0.0000% exactly. Nonetheless, at one session, the speaker began by asking who believes that this is the last generation. Every hand went up except one (guess who?).

The speaker wasn’t even going to ask who didn’t believe that, but he caught himself, chuckled, and asked, “Who doesn’t believe that.” I shot my hand up, but he wasn’t even looking. He was already back to staring at his notes, knowing no one was foolish enough to think there was any possibility that society as we know it would be around in 2065 (a generation from now in biblical terms).

I have only two things I want to share about this conference, then an interesting 3rd point not necessarily on the subject of this conference:

The Rapture Is a Resurrection

Most Christians, in my experience, don’t think about the rapture as a resurrection. “The dead in Christ will rise first,” however, is a resurrection by definition.

This is a problem for the end-time understanding of everyone, or almost everyone, at this conference. They all believe there will be a 7-year tribulation in which the mark of the Beast will be forced upon everyone who wants to be able to buy or sell. In Revelation 20, however, we read that those who rejected the Beast and didn’t receive his mark lived and reigned with Christ for a thousand years (“the millennium”). This, says John the Revelator, was the first resurrection.

The first resurrection is of saints who reject the Beast and his mark, and their resurrection marks the start of the millennium. If it is the first, there can be no resurrection before. The rapture is a resurrection and, thus, cannot happen until after the first resurrection.

This destroys their whole timeline.

There may be a lot of evidence for a pre-tribulation rapture, but you can’t ignore a plain teaching in Scripture even if you have lots brilliant but not certain verses backing up your theological position.

Excursus on Ignoring Bible Verses

This sort of abuse of the Bible bothers me to no end, which is why a lot of mainline denominations and their members are bothered by my teaching. Salvation has nothing to do with works, they say over and over and over and over again, at this conference, at every other conference, from pulpits, and at coffee shop Bible studies.

I repeatedly respond with Romans 2:6-7; Galatians 6:7-9; and Ephesians 5:5-7. They repeatedly tell me that Romans 2:6-7 doesn’t mean what it says. This tells me they are misinterpreting the rest of Romans 2, which is confirmed by the fact that everyone knows what Romans 6:23 says, but no one knows what Romans 6:22 says. Both talk about eternal life, but we don’t like what Romans 6:22 says about it.

Not only that, but Romans 2:6-7 and Romans 6:22 are wickedly confusing. They contradict most of what the apostle John says (but none of what the other NT writers say). We have to ask why John says we have eternal life now and by faith only because he seems to contradict every other NT writer by saying it.

No one is doing that, however, because they’re happy to ignore verses and never look at how Paul uses eternal life and how it is different from John. Instead, Paul doesn’t mean what he says in a plain, simple-to-understand way in Romans 2:6-7. That is perfectly acceptable, while explaining where John  and Paul intersect and agree (at John 5:28-29), then giving a perfectly reasonable explanation of their differing uses of eternal life will get you cold-shouldered out of churches and Bible studies.

Rant over. Back to the 70th week of Daniel.

Daniel’s 70th Week

The argument that Daniel’s 70th week (Dan. 9:24-27) is in the future seems reasonable to me. It is this conference, where everyone believes that Daniel’s 70th week is future, that suggested to me that the 70th week is not future.

One of the speakers claimed that the early church fathers wrote about a pre-tribulation rapture. This is not true. Recently I edited a book for a friend that argues for a pre-tribulation rapture. He had quotes from early Christians about 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 indicating they believed in the rapture just as explained in those two verses.

I didn’t remember where those passages were, though I must have read them because I read all the church fathers through and including Cyprian of Carthage in the AD 250s, twice. I looked them up and found out the reason those mentions of the rapture didn’t stand out. As pointed out earlier, they knew the rapture was a resurrection, and for them the rapture was simply the prelude to the final judgment.

That may seem strange, but they understood that the rapture and the final resurrection were the same thing. The saints will meet Jesus in the air so they can be part of his triumphal final return as described by Enoch and quoted in Jude 1:14-15:

Behold, the Lord came with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their works of ungodliness which they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.

Another speaker said that Daniel’s 70 weeks are obviously not fulfilled yet because Daniel 9:23-25 has not happened yet. The things in those verses are:

1. “finish the transgression” and put an end to sin.
2. atone for iniquity
3. bring in everlasting righteousness
4. seal both vision and prophet
5. anoint a most holy place

He was reading from the KJV, not the ESV I just quoted, but I checked and they’re not different on this. Either way, Jesus did do all these things, in the past:

1. Hebrews 9:26 says Jesus appeared (past tense) once at the end of time to cancel sin.
2. Everyone agrees Jesus already atoned for iniquity, but see Titus 2:13-14 for passage saying so.
3. Jesus established righteousness by his life, his death, and his resurrection. Romans 5:19 says Jesus, by his obedience, has made (past tense) many righteous. Surely we all know that we have entered into an everlasting righteousness that will continue into the next age, except that in the next age, there will be no temptation from our bodies nor from spiritual wickedness in heavenly places.
4. 2 Peter 1:19 says we have the word of prophecy made sure, i.e. sealed. What the prophets foresaw, the apostles saw and experienced, which is why prophecy was “made sure.”
5. All of Hebrews 9 and 10 are about anointing the Holy Place. The high priests brought blood into the the temple that was a replica of the temple in the heavens. Jesus brought his own blood, once for all anointing and cleansing the heavenly temple so that we can come boldly into it to obtain mercy and favor to help in time of need (Heb. 4:16; notice the difference between mercy and favor [grace] in that verse.)

The early Christians had a much different view of what the faith is. For them the faith already meant tribulation and martyrdom. Revelation 3:10, where Jesus promises to protect the Philadelphians from the trial coming on the whole earth, was almost surely about the Domitian prosecution that happened in 95-96, or an even previous one in AD 81.

They also fully understood that Jesus did all of the things mentioned in Daniel 9. They believed they were already living in a kingdom that will never end. One day, we will be resurrected into the same kingdom, but without the natural body and its desires, without the devil and his temptations, and with unhindered, face-to-face access to God and the Lamb.

Addendum: The Nephilim and the Rebellion of 1/3 of the Angels

A speaker mentioned in passing what all Christians seem to believe nowadays, that there was a rebellion in heaven before the creation of humans, Lucifer leading 1/3 of the angels. This, we say, is where the demons came from.

I am not sure where this ridiculous legend came from, but the only passage to support it is in Revelation 12, where the dragon throws down 1/3 of the stars. I have never understood why anyone would think this happened before the creation of man because the context gives no indication of that event being in the past.

That’s not the point of this addendum, though. Instead, I thought that most people familiar with the teachings of the late Dr. Michael Heiser would know that the demons came from the spirits of the nephilim, the half-angel (more accurately, half-messenger or half-watcher) children of the “Watchers” (Book of Enoch) that had children with human woman as mentioned in Genesis 6.

I originally found out about this origin of the demons from Justin Martyr’s Apology (c. AD 150). I was stunned when I was first reading through the early Christian writings to read, “The demons are the spirits of dead men.” Whaaat!!!

I found out from others about the Book of Enoch (or 1 Enoch), which I absolutely do not believe was written by Enoch, but the early Christians did. It says that God destroyed the nephilim, the children of the “sons of God” in Genesis 6, and did not allow their spirits to have rest. He consigned them to roam the earth forever. This would explain why the legion of demons in the demoniac in Mark 5 did not want to leave the region. They probably had lived their while still alive.

That’s a lot to take in, but it is the most reasonable reading of the passages about giants in the Bible. My point, though, is that people consumed with the Nephilim, like most of these conference teachers are, would know that the story of Lucifer throwing down 1/3 of the angels in the past is non-biblical.

Apparently not. The last speaker last night mentioned the demons being from the angels that fell with Satan in the beginning, just in passing, as though everyone agreed with that idea.

I hope you got something out of this!