Understanding Revelation and End Times Prophecy
August 27, 2025
Host: Hon. Sam Rohrer
Guest: Dr. Carl Broggi
Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 8/27/25. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.
Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.
Sam Rohrer:
Hello and welcome to this Wednesday edition of Stand In the Gap Today, and it’s also our bimonthly emphasis on Israel, the Middle East and biblical prophecy. Now my returning guest today and not a stranger to this program at all, a very special guest and a favorite one is Dr. Carl Broggi, senior pastor of Community Bible Church in Beaufort, South Carolina, and a host of his own radio program entitled Search the Scriptures, which has a website and I’ll give it again, but it is search the scriptures.org. Now today, Dr. Broggi and I are going to focus not so much on actual headline events that are unfolding in the Middle East, such as these are places we could go but we’re not such as the recent attacks. It’s a couple of days ago from the Yemen Houthis against Israel or Hamas in the Gaza, or for instance, the developing potential for Lebanon to maybe force out Hezbollah from their country.
Now, we’re also not going to spend time discussing the potential peace agreement being touted right now between the new government of Syria and Israel, or the threat of imminent major attack threatened by Iran against Israel and the warning that it may be the last war. That’s the words they used, meaning that Iran with the help of Russia, which has also threatened Israel just done that, and China, which has given much equipment now to Iran and threatening to come against Israel in full power. That’s what Iran is saying. Now each of these things clearly worthy of consideration and I did address some of them on our Monday program with military intelligence expert and student of biblical prophecy JR McGee. However, today we want to consider the larger Prophetical picture of four different ways that people approach the content of the Book of Revelation and Jesus’s Olivet discourse. Within that, the context of the end times prophecy. The title I’ve chosen to frame today’s program is simply this understanding revelation and end times prophecy, the four views of interpretation. So please stay with us for the entire program as you ask yourself the question as you listen to this, which of the four approaches to understanding revelation and end times prophecy do I embrace? Okay, so think of that as we go into it. And with that, Dr. Carl Broggi, thank you so much for being back here today.
Carl Broggi:
It’s a pleasure to be here. Sam, what an important topic With a third of the scripture being prophetic in nature, these are critical issues.
Sam Rohrer:
They really are. And before we get into the detail of each of the four basic approaches in the segment two and three to understanding the book of Revelation, the Olive it discourse and end times events, would you explain briefly two things. First is this, why the focus on the book of Revelation and the olive discourse when it comes to talking about end times things and then secondly, give a brief overview of each of these four approaches and the major distinctions between each of them. We’ll build them out more in the next segments.
Carl Broggi:
Well, the revelation of course was given from Jesus to John and the olive discourse was preached by Jesus himself. So they represent two major sections about the future. And so whenever you study prophecy, I think it’s important to understand that God is giving us a timeline for history. Only students of the Bible have a linear approach to history. That is we understand there’s a clear beginning and a clear end. There’s no other book that can speak with that authority and it’s prophetic. So much of the scripture which prophecy is we often say it’s just history written in advance, and that is a reminder that the Bible is the only book God wrote. There is no prophecy in any other religious book in the face of the earth that has literally actually been fulfilled in detail. And so when we look at the divine origin of scripture seen in the fulfillment of prophecy for the first coming 300 plus prophecies, Sam, as you know that were fulfilled, then we can approach the prophecies for the second coming with the same perspective.
And so it’s important. All scripture is given for edification of the church, and so we’re to teach the whole cows of scripture so we can’t ignore prophecy. And prophecy not only encourages us with, Hey, we have a book that is beyond belief. We have a source of authority we can trust, but it’s also given to help us to live godly lives, to make us ready. It’s not just to stimulate our intellect and make us curious. Peter will say when he describes the final program of God, all these things are going to be destroyed in this way. And in light of that, what kind of people ought we to be in holy conduct and godliness? And so when you study the revelation, you study the Olivet discourse, you see that there’s an ultimate victory that God has that we’re headed for and that we can look at history and look at the future with a sense of despair, feeling like it’s all falling apart, or we can look at it through the prophetic lens and say, no, it’s not falling apart, it’s actually coming together because God is fulfilling his plan for the ages.
So I think that’s your first question. What’s your second question again?
Sam Rohrer:
And the second question is just to compare conquest just briefly. These four categories we’re taking four approaches. I think they’re your names actually if they’re not clarify it, but they do set up the four
Carl Broggi:
Approaches. Yeah, no eschatologists. People who studied last time theology will often say that when you study prophecy, there are basically four approaches past time, present, future time, and no time. And how someone approaches the revelation or the Olivet discourse is going to be determined on one of these four approaches. So the first is what we call pastime-preterism. Preterism is a Latin word that means past or gone by. So preterism and understands the Olivet discourse and the book of Revelation as history. It’s already been fulfilled maybe with the exception of the literal second coming of Jesus in the clouds. It’s all history. The 21 judgments outlined in the revelation already happened. The rise of the antichrist, he was already here. It was all fulfilled during the time of the Roman invasion. They would say many, the antichrist was Nero, so that’s pres.
Then there’s what we call present time, it’s called historicism, and it basically says no, the prophecies and revelation, the all of it discourse are not about history, nor are they about something way out there in the future. They’re describing events that are happening today right now in time and space. And so then there’s a third view and it’s called futurism. And futurism takes the prophecies of the Olivet discourse and Revelation four through 22 as something in the future. And I would argue that that’s the correct view. I would argue that that’s the only way if you apply consistent means of interpretation, that you can understand these portions of scripture and the idealism view or the no time view basically says, well, the prophecies are just symbolic. They recur in every generation. So unlike Historicism where things are being fulfilled as we live, it says no. There’s just principles and the ultimate principle is we win, but it’s not something literal that’s going to happen in the future. So those are the four major
Sam Rohrer:
Approaches. Okay, that’s excellent, ladies and gentlemen. So we’re going to look at those predator, historicism, futurism, idealism, pastime, present time, future time, no time. That’s what it stands for. We’re going to go into those in the next segment where we look at past time and present time. We’ll take them in the next segment and then future time, no time in segment three, stay with us as we break these out. I think it’ll be a tremendous value in interest. Well, if you’re just joining us today, thanks for being on board. We’re at the beginning of the program, actually the second segment now just introduced. The theme today is this understanding revelation and end times prophecy, the four views of interpretations or four approaches that have been established over time. We’re going to talk about each of these four for how one views and understands and links together and connects what Jesus says about end time’s prophecy and the all of that discourse and what the Apostle John writes in the last book of scripture, the revelation of Jesus Christ.
Now, our guest today is Dr. Carl Broggi, not a stranger to this program. If you’ve been with us before, you know him well, if you’re just joining us, you’re going to want to stay tuned. But Dr. Broggi is a senior pastor of Community Bible Church in Beaufort, South Carolina, and he has a website@searchthescriptures.org, which has a lot of information that you will find I know to be very valuable, at least I do. Now in the first segment, Dr. Broggi, in a memorable descriptive way, you identified the four basic approaches that people have developed to interpret the book of Revelation and all of the discourse and what we just talked about prophesied events of the end times. So let’s break those down. I’m just going to link them together here two and two, the first two and then the second two only just because of time constraints. We could spend a long time on each one of them, but could you describe and compare contrast, the first two that you identified in greater detail and identify their origin, where they came from, that’s the past time and the present time approaches to these sections of scripture.
Carl Broggi:
Okay, so the prayers view pastime, Prader Latin means past gone by again. They understand the prophecies of the Olivet discourse, which is Matthew 24 and 25. And the book of Revelation is all fulfilled by 70AD with the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. Now, you can divide these preterists into two groups. Some are called full preterists, and so unfairly to partial preterist, these guys are heretics. I don’t know of any evangelical that is a full preterist, but they say that the not only has revelation and the tribulation already happened and taken place, they say we’re in the new heavens in the new earth, which is just bizarre. The second commun is already taking place. But I mentioned that because you’ll meet some people like that who will use it as a straw man to attack preterists, but most of what we would call partial preterists that would say that with the exception of the second coming from Jesus from heaven, everything has been fulfilled.
And it was started by a Roman Catholic Jesuit named Louis de Alazar, and he did it in response to Luther and Calvin who loved to identify the Pope as the antichrist. And so he came up with this view and says, no, he can’t be the antichrist. The antichrist has already been here. The tribulation has already happened. Of course, the man was lost. He formally embraced Catholic theology. There are born again Roman Catholics obviously, but he embraced a denial of salvation by grace alone through faith alone. So you have an unbeliever approaching the scripture, and I think that’s important when you consider the origins, you have people like Hank Hraf, the Bible answer man who’s a partial pres. Interestingly, he converted to Eastern Orthodoxy a few years back, maybe Gary, north, Gary DeMar more famously, maybe RC Sproul. They’re all preterists. And so to do this, to embrace preterism, you have to date the book of Revelation before 70AD, which goes against the simple reading of Scripture, Sam, like in the seven churches that are found in Revelation two and three, for instance, the church at Ephesus.
Clearly these are all second generation churches. If John had written say it’s 65AD, as the preterists would argue, that would’ve overlapped with Paul’s letter to the Ephesians that he sends to Timothy where he describes the church at Ephesus as one of the healthiest churches in all the New Testament. And yet Jesus said they left their first love. Why? It’s second generation happened after the destruction of the temple or take the church at Smyrna. It didn’t even exist when the apostle Paul was alive or the church it laid to see three times. The apostle Paul commends that church in his letter to the Colossians where Jesus rebukes them. Why? Because it is a second generation group of Christians. So prem doesn’t fit the historical setting of the New Testament, and it certainly doesn’t even begin to match the events that are described in Revelation four through 19.
In Matthew 24, for instance, Jesus said, as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so will the coming of the son of man be well, how would a preterist interpret that? Well, HRAF said, well, that’s a picture of the Roman armies advancing on Jerusalem in 70 ad. Well, actually, the Roman armies and it’s well-documented, went from west to east. They didn’t go from east to west as Jesus describes the abomination of desolation, which the antichrist is supposed to commit someday never happened. They can’t even find an example. They say, well, it happened. We just don’t have a record of it. So they have to allegorize scripture and they make revelation basically a history book. Not to mention, when Jesus describes these events, he said, it will be a time of great tribulation that has never happened since the beginning of the world will ever happen again.
And then unless those days have been cut short, no one could have survived. We’ve never had a time like that in all of human history, nothing like it. So it just ignores a lot of simple, plain truths. And Jesus in his address to the Church of Philadelphia in Revelation, I think it’s verse three, verse 10, he talks about this tribulation that will come on the entire world. We’ve never, ever, ever had that in all of human history, not even in the great World wars. So that’s one view. Other view is what we call the present time view, the historic view that is history is unfolding in the present over the course of 2000 years of the Book of Revelation. Well come up with that. You got to have a great imagination in my view. But this is what some of the Protestant reformers held to Luther, Calvin, the Puritans in early America held to the Historicist view, and it’s not quite as common as it is today as it was then.
But like you read the Westminster Confession of Faith, it’s one of a sourced documents for reform faith. Who do they say the antichrist is? The Pope definitively in one of their articles? Well, if you’re Allegorizing scripture, you might come to that. There’s virtually no historicist today except Seventh Day Adventists. What happened is you had all these date setters and people got leery after a while of all this date setting and they said it can’t be true. So 1,260 days for an Adventist, that’s 1,260 years, that pictures packed dominance from five 30 to 1790 and they’ve got it all mapped out. Well, I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s what they make it to be. And interestingly, all the symbols that historically the historicist is used, they apply to Western Europe. And so depending on which historicist you’re reading, the locusts say in Revelation nine, Sam, those are monks and friars.
During church history, Muhammad was the fallen star, Elizabeth, I was the first bold judgment in her persecution of Christians Adolf Hitler, he’s the rider on the red horse. So the problem with this is you can basically make the scripture mean whatever you want it to mean. Now, Luther found it attractive. Why? Because now he could dump on the antichrist and dump on the Pope and call him the antichrist, and the thought was reciprocal with the Pope and he found a way in which he could make his accusations against Rome fit. In fact, he made this statement that the world would not last another a hundred years. And so some accused him of being a date setter that he said it for 1565. I don’t think you can say he set it for 1565, but you can say based on his approach to revelation that he didn’t think it would last another a hundred years. Why? Because it was all being fulfilled and there wasn’t that much left to go on. So the method of interpretation is dangerous. More recent years, you’d have guys like Zwingli, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, all who affirm this approach to end times prophecy. I think a very dangerous approach.
Sam Rohrer:
Alright, well we don’t have much time left, but is there any major point claimed by either the Preterist or the Historicist that would be accurate or is basically because of the way they’re taking it, is all that they’re saying clearly Unbiblical?
Carl Broggi:
No, RC Sproul, I think he was confused on a lot of issues. I think he was more of a philosopher and a church historian than he was a theologian. But did he believe in the substitutionary atonement, the literal physical, actual return of Jesus from heaven? Of course he did. And so you’ll have guys like Doug Wilson, he’s a partial preterist. He believes, of course, that Jesus will literally come back. So no, there were some truths that they affirmed that were correct, but because of their view of how end times will unfold, they have made some false conclusions and even the way you approach the way we live today. So Doug Wilson basically has adopted post millennialism believing that the gospel will gradually triumph in history and the Christian influence will expand and all happen before Christ return. And I think that leaves people in the end disillusioned and with a false view of how God says it’s going to actually happen.
Sam Rohrer:
Alright, boy, that was a lot of information there ladies and gentlemen. Okay, we’re at the end of this segment, but we dealt with the first two. Again, the theme if you’re just tuning in, is this understanding revelation and end times prophecy. It’s really the Olivet discourse delivered by Jesus himself and then the Apostle John and his writing of the book of Revelation, which is he says, that is the revelation of Jesus Christ. So it’s putting together those things stated in those two areas where, well, it’s amazing how divergent opinions some people can have, but we’re talking about the approaches and there are four of them we dealt with. Two, we’re going to deal with futurism and idealism future time in no time in the next segment.
Well welcome back and we’re moving now into the look in this segment, the third and the fourth approach to what we’re saying is understanding the book of Revelation, the olive, that discourse and all of that of course has to do with the end times. And if you’re just listening here for the first time every other Wednesday here on Standing a Gap today, and we have done this for, I don’t know, five or six years or seven years, it’s been for a long time, we’ve devoted the focus here to Israel, the Middle East and biblical prophecy because you can’t talk about prophecy without talking about Israel. You can’t talk about prophecy without talking about what God says about it. And that’s in all of that discourse in the Book of Revelation. There are others, Daniel and other books of the Old Testament that refer as well.
But these are the two major segments. Well over time there have been approaches developed to how you interpret that, how you can put together what Jesus said in all of discourse and what the Book of Revelation says. And that’s what we’re looking at here today. Dr. Carl Broggi is my guest and he has a website with a lot of information on it. Search the scriptures.org. Alright, Carl, as should in the last segment, let’s just go into this describe compare contrast, the last two now just like you did in that last segment, this time, the Future time and the no time approaches to understanding and approaching all of it, discourse and the Book of Revelation.
Carl Broggi:
Okay, so past time preterism, present time, historicism, future time, we call it futurism. And so it looks at the book of Revelation, all of it discourse and other portions of prophetic literature in the New Testament though those are the two major ones as still going to be fulfilled in the future. So when it looks at Revelation 4 through 22, it takes a literal approach to interpreting revelation. Why should we do that? Because that’s how God taught us within the scripture to interpret prophecy. When Daniel in the ninth chapter is wondering how much longer we’re going to be in Babylon, he reads Jeremiah 25 and he takes 70 years to mean 70 years. So he knew the time was approaching the Lord Jesus in Matthew 24 15 speaks of the abomination of desolation that was spoken of by Daniel the prophet, not Daniel, the historian. So Jesus understood prophecy in a future sense.
And when you look at the sealed trumpet in bold judgments, there’s never been anything in the history of the world that even begins to compare. I saw some hailstorm the other day on the internet, Sam, and they had some hail as large as a golf ball, but the hailstones in the revelation are a hundred pounds each. Nothing like that. When you look at the judgments to come that nothing even begins to picture it. In Revelation 13, there’s a literal future world leader who will run the entire planet. We’ve never had anything like that. Revelation 17, you have this world church that is apostatized from the truth. We’ve never had a world church where all the peoples of the world have come together under one unified banner of religion. Revelation 19 and 20, Christ’s second coming, he’s going to come, he’s going to plant his feet on the Mount of olives.
He’s going to literally reign for a thousand years. So I think one of the things God did for us, Sam, to keep us from being confused, is he put the outline in the book of Revelation. He told John, therefore, write the things which you have seen and the things which are, and the things that will take place after these things. So if you think about it, there’s just 12 verses in the first chapter that are spent on the things past the things you’ve seen. Then he takes two chapters that are dedicated to the things present, a total of 51 verses for the seven churches. And then in the 19 chapters that follow beginning in Revelation four, one at the end are the things future. And so 333 of the 404 verses in the book of Revelation are committed to the future. And you can’t come to any other conclusion if you interpret the Bible and it’s plain, literal, normal, historical hermeneutic or principle for approaching the scripture.
And that’s what futurists do because again, we’re applying the rules of grammar. We’re not acknowledging dismissing that there’s figures of speech. No, we recognize that. But once we understand the figure of speech, then we interpret it literally. And so we use the laws of grammar because within the Bible itself, which we could spend a whole segment just on this, a whole program within scripture itself, God taught us how to interpret the scripture. So it’s not like, oh, I came up with this view and I think it’s really nice and this is why all the early church fathers were futurists. So it’s not until the time of Augustine where they begin to allegorize scripture. And in my view that’s driven by a spirit of antisemitism against the Jews. Because if you read plainly Matthew 24 and 25, who’s the subject? It’s the Jewish people. Jesus said he can’t even come back until you.
The Jewish people say blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. And so that’s why he will then go on to describe the tribulation period in the next chapter of Matthew 24. Because the time of Jacob’s trouble, as Jeremiah refers to it, is designed to bring the Jewish people to faith. And so Jesus recognizes this conversion when he said, when you see the abomination of desolation flee into the wilderness, that means they will have believed Jesus. By this time most of the Jews will have been converted. And so when you approach the revelation, part of the challenge is it’s filled with Old Testament quotes, but it interprets itself like I’ve just flipped here to Revelation 12. One, it says, A great sign appeared in having a woman clothed with the sun on the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of 12 stars.
Well, who’s the woman? Well, you can hear Genesis 37 plainly from that vision, that dream that Joseph has. And so while the book of Revelation never says Isaiah said or Malachi said, or yet, it refers to 24 different Old Testament books. And part of the problem is today people are ignorant of the Old Testament and therefore they can’t interpret revelation. Literally, they don’t understand it. Now the final view that we’re mentioning is what we call the idealist view. Sometimes it’s called the spiritual view and this is the no time at all view. So it’s not tied to specific historical events. They would say it’s somewhat timeless. It’s just a picture between good and evil, Christ and Satan, the church and the world. And the revelation is there to encourage us. And idealism had its roots in Augustine who lived in the fourth and fifth century who became the father of all Millennialism.
And it’s basically represented today in reformed churches, reformed churches as they call themselves. And it’s a stolen word because I would believe I’m reformed in that I believe in the five soul of the reformation, kind of like the word charismatic has been stolen in that I believe there are spiritual gifts given today, but maybe not like they do, but typically in the reformed churches, they would affirm either preterism that it’s all passed or the idealistic approach. Like Martin Lloyd Jones basically fell into this camp and he was a great man of God. He loved the Lord passionately, but I think he was confused in his eschatology. So the allegorical approach where there’s no time at all, this is the approach that they are taking in their understanding of scripture. And so to me it’s confusing and it misses the plain rules of interpretation of scripture.
Sam Rohrer:
Alright, so as you look at these, you’ve mentioned a couple of times, but the literal interpretation of scripture versus the symbolic or reading in, would that be perhaps the most distinctive underlying motivation for how one would fall into one of these four? Or is there something else?
Carl Broggi:
No, there’s something bigger behind it. And that all those who say are in reformed theologies, they call themselves today the Neo Calvinists, just like John Calvin, John Calvin said some of the most despicable, hateful things you could imagine people saying against the Jews. I have a whole long list as I read through his commentaries where statement after statement, he speaks in an antisemitic tone and he gets his theology from Augustine because he quotes Augustine, one doctoral dissertation says 4,119 times. And as I read the Institutes, which he wrote two years after his conversion, he’s 26 years old. Look, I hope you wouldn’t read anything that I wrote two years after I was saved and say that this was sound theology.
But he concluded that God was done with Israel, that the church was new Israel, and this influenced every realm of his theology. So when you come to the doctrine of election in Romans nine is not God electing Israel out of all the nations of the world, it’s God electing you, Sam to go to heaven and me to go to hell. That’s his view of election, very different. Now, preterists believe in election. It’s not an issue does God elect? It’s how does he elect? But he denies the national election of Israel. He has to because God is done with Israel and he has replaced Israel with the church. So when he establishes his camp encampment there in Geneva, Switzerland, he runs it like a theocracy. Some people were executed, three of whom you can document he was personally involved in. So you got Michael Vees who is a heretic in terms of his view of the doctrine of the Trinity. So what should we do? Well, he said execute him. Look, I would pray for him, I would love my enemies. But he thought, well, if he’s lost and he hasn’t been elected, you might as well get rid of him because he’s like a cancer within Geneva. And so his whole view, even baptism, infant baptism, he compares it to circumcision. So rooted in all of these other views is a false view of Israel, and that’s not healthy in my view.
Sam Rohrer:
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I hope that you’re grabbing all this and I know that you’re not, unless you’re really a whole lot smarter than me, that’s very possible. But you’re not going to remember all of this. So you can get all of this again on our website. Stand in the gap radio.com. Listen to this again, I want to come back. We’re going to bring some concluding thoughts to this and the context of this. Now, what difference does this make? I mean, does it make any difference which of these four to which you subscribe? Well, as we go into the final segment, again, thanks for being with us today. And just a quick reminder we have a lot yet to do here in this segment is that this program are titled Understanding Revelation and End Times Prophecy, the Four Views of Interpretation. We’ve attempted Dr. Carl Broggi special guest today here with us at least once a month.
We’ve tackled this issue because it is so real in our days and because how one interprets scripture does make an enormous difference in how we live. Because in essence, do we not do what we believe? Of course, we say that here all the time on the program. So therefore, these views of what is happening and is yet to occur, biblical prophecy found in relevant discourse, found in the Book of Revelation. How does one view those things? Because how one views those things absolutely of necessity impact how we think about what is taking place, what we anticipate will take place. And it has everything to do with how we fulfill our time here before the Lord’s coming and he is soon to be here. How do we know that? Well, based on how we interpret scripture. So it’s very practical and very real, Carl, knowing that there’s room for legitimate disagreement on the interpretation application of certain biblical statements because not all Bible believing people who’ve been truly born again and are adopted into God’s family. Not every person necessarily agrees on everything of scripture. But here’s a tough question for you. Which of these four views can I would say be legitimately embraced by a genuine born again remnant believer? That’s about the only way I can describe that real true person believer in Jesus Christ and which ones cannot. Can a person move from one to the other Anyway? You want my question? How do you answer that?
Carl Broggi:
Sure. No. So in terms of the past few prem, full prem, which says the whole Bible has already been fulfilled, we’re in the new heavens, in the new earth, as my friend Tommy Ice will often say, if we’re in the new heavens in the new earth, I must be in the ghetto. But there is no ghetto in the new heavens, in the new Earth. That’s just outright heresy. But when you consider the people who started this, these weren’t viewpoints that were started by born again Christians. And so when you look at preterism and especially liberal German theology that wanted to dismiss the authority and the accuracy of the Bible, and they’re pushing it, and you’ve got these evangelicals today basically adopting it, they should step back and think of the source. It’s just like with the other views. So I would say, yeah, you could be a partial preterist and still of course be born again.
It’s not a salvation test, but I think you’re creating a problem in terms of the role prophecy should have. And people can’t really read the signs of the times and they’re living with a sense of despair because they think they don’t see how God says it’s going to unfold in the end. So they’re not doing their churches real biblical justice. So past the present view, historicism, well again, you read Historicist in the last several centuries and you get as many views as you get Historicist. Why? Because, well, I think this applied to Hitler. No, that didn’t apply to Hitler, that applied to this leader in Europe. And you get all these views, it’s a wide open approach to scripture. And again, you’re modeling for people something that’s very dangerous. How do you approach scripture in its historical, literal context? And so when you think like of the prophet Zechariah, Calvin acknowledged that Messiah would come in on a donkey.
It was literally fulfilled into Jerusalem. Calvin acknowledged that he would literally be betrayed for 30 pieces of silver. He acknowledged that the shepherd would be struck there in Gethsemane and the disciples would flee. I have his commentary in Zechariah. It happened. He acknowledged this John quotes in John 19, that they’ll look on Jesus whom they pierce literally fulfilled. But then when he comes to Jesus planting his feet on the Mount of Olives, splitting it in two Israel, taking a prominent spot during the millennial rate of Messiah, well, that’s not what it really means. That’s God breaking someone’s heart. And so you really confuse people. Not to mention you’re not able to bless Israel, God said, I’ll bless those who will bless you and the one who curses you, I will curse. And in you the Jews, Abraham’s offspring, all the families of the earth will be blessed.
And so the reformed people don’t typically pray for Israel and its peace because they don’t see any future for their prosperous promises that God speaks about. So there’s dangers to it. So you’ve got the past view, the present view, the future view. Again, I think that’s what scripture teaches. The idealistic view. Oh, that’s just really, I think somewhat wacko. And there have been some good men, like I mentioned, Martin Lloyd Jones held to an idealist view. And I think he was disappointed that he never really saw the victory, the revival that he had so earnestly hoped to seek in his life. He just never saw it. He couldn’t expect to. Now God might bring a revival to a location, but is there going to be a worldwide revival in sweeping of all of humanity into the kingdom of God? Well, the greatest revival is still in the future and it’s during the seven year tribulation period.
So people say, well, it’s no big deal. It all pans out in the end as they’ll make jokes about the millennium or if your pre-trib well be prepared, but you should also make sure you have food in store in case the post trib is right and they think it’s no big deal. But God has called us to rightly divide the word of truth. And Jesus warned that the person who misrepresents scripture, whoever then annuls the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same what we call least in the kingdom of God. So to blow it off and say it’s unimportant, I think it’s dangerous and it’s not something we should do.
Sam Rohrer:
Alright, Carl, that’s fantastic. We don’t have much time left. I know that in these days there are some that are out there who hold to one of these views who believe that as Christian people, we as our responsibility to bring in the kingdom. And then there are those, like we’ve talked about many times in a program that the Lord is going to bring in the kingdom, but we do need to communicate the gospel, just address that of what ought to be the primary focus and motivation for all true believers in these days right now.
Carl Broggi:
Well, people can put the horse before the cart or the cart before the horse, and by their view of eschatology, and certainly there are futurists who have sat on their hands and basically we’re going to grease the skids and let the second coming and the return of Jesus happen. And that’s not what we’re to do, we’re to be active. But on the other side, when you deal with the other three positions, what it tends to do is to put a focus and a hope on trying to change the political, cultural, social structures of the world, which we should do in terms of salt and light. But what ends up happening is that our primary role to preach the gospel, to share our faith one-on-one, how do you reach the world for Christ one individual at a time? And that has been lost in our day, I think because of a faulty eschatology.
And so in many of these churches that hold the three other views other than the futurist views, they’re not known for passionate evangelism. They’re not known for sending missionaries around the world. I’m not saying they’re not doing it at all, but that’s not a primary focus. So it is important in terms of how we approach history. Our hope is not in the government of the United States. I love our president, but my hope is not in him. My hope is in the living God who promises that he’s going to culminate human history according to his plan and according to his way in that my primary responsibility is to share the good news of how people could be forgiven through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.
Sam Rohrer:
Dr. Carl, thank you so much. Wow, what a lot of information here and there’s so much further we could go, but we just are out of time. Ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for being with us. And again, you can back pick up this program off of our app Stand In the Gap. We’re on our website, stand in the gap radio.com. Listen to this again, I encourage you to do that. And then I urge you, pass it along to a friend. It will help them as well. God bless you all to see you back here tomorrow. The Lord willing.
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