I recently got to good questions from my Premil friend, namely:
Since you asked about the Preterist view, I thought I'd share these thoughts on the very fine questions he raised at dinner, which were:
Israel? What do Postmils have against Israel?
and
What about the failure of nearly every Christian nation to maintain it's Christian heritage? How can we be optimistic about the Church que millenial kingdom?
I hope I understood the questions correctly. Even if not, these are nonetheless good, hard questions that might shut the mounts of many Postmils. At least I needed time to think on them.
Two very good questions, but which have one Biblical answer. It should suffice to say that GOD had something against Israel as a nation. Jesus makes this abundantly clear in the gospels, and nearly all the prophets agree with Him, right up to John the Baptist. Whether postmils have something against Israel is immaterial. What Jesus said against them:
In conclusion to His parable of the vine-dressers, to which the Lord appends the prophecy of Isaiah, "The stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone", Jesus said quite plainly and without hidden meaning, "Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from YOU and given to a nation producing its fruit." [Mt 21:43] It was clear that Caiaphas saw this coming in John 11:48ff, though He believed that Jesus was the problem, not himself and his people. Caiaphas was ignorant, hermeneutically and eschatologically, of the import of his words. John explains that God's children in all nations would be gathered together as one in the Church through Jesus' sacrifice, in that Temple of which Christ is the cornerstone (figuratively, of course).
Now, this is why it answers both questions: Matthew 21:43 applies to any nation that rejects the Son as Lord, and certainly to any Church that will not bear good fruit. They will be left behind, cast aside, vomited out and perhaps never visited again by the Spirit, as for example, Moab, which was utterly wiped out by the Romans. It applied certainly to national Israel, and if to them, certainly to all the world.
In the case of Israel, we know Paul says there will come a restoration. We all look forward to that day when Jews humble themselves and bow the knee to their Messiah, our Lord. But they will be grafted back into that same Olive Tree whence they were formerly cut off, alongside the many Gentiles who since have been grafted in. And so national Israel can never be equated with the Kingdom of God as might've been the case under David and Solomon, and was most certainly the case in the times of the Judges and of Samuel. For it was in the days of Samuel that they rejected God as their King, demanding a carnal king [1 Samuel 8:6f] As long as they persist in this nationalistic narcissism, they will be handed over to suffer the results described in Romans 1, like any other nation. And so these exact same divine sanctions have been levied against Laodicea when it was lukewarm, Rome when its church became corrupt, the Russian church at its greatest pettiness, Christian Germany at its intellectual zenith, and all other would-be nation-states or church hierarchies posing as the unique kingdom of God. The Temple Jesus raises is not made by human hands.
So this answers also the second question. Many kingdoms and nations have received God's blessing after embracing the Christian gospel, Rome under Constantine being the first. These nations are not the kingdom of God, any more than Israel was. The Kingdom of God is that invisible assembly (ekklesia) of His saints, which John saw coming (present tense) down out of heaven and who are called "the Lamb's bride" [Rev 21:9,10] This is not the Old City. It bears the name "New Jerusalem' because it belongs to God and IS His dwelling place, that is His Church, His Temple, His Body, not because it belongs to the Jews.
I don't speak for all pre-mils or preterists here. But I find this vision extremely hopeful. It is why I think the church should fight, not give up, in the spiritual warfare she finds herself in to this day, until "all our Lord's enemies are under His feet". The Lord Jesus bless you all to "reign on the earth with Him!" as His "Kingdom of priests and holy nation," and not by sword nor by might, "but by My Spirit, saith the Lord". Amen
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