2019

Dear Reader, Thank you for your subscription to the AD 70 blog. I’ve enjoyed writing over 160 posts over the past 38 months. Your comments and encouragement have been a blessing to me. With sadness, I now find it necessary to close the blog, at least temporarily. It has been…

Luke draws attention to the location where Peter preached his first two sermons. He mentions the Temple seven times (Acts 2:46; 3:1, 2, 3, 8, 10) between his accounts of these sermons. This emphasis is striking. Forty-five days earlier, Jesus had said this Temple would fall in his generation (Luke…

God poured out the Holy Spirit during Israel’s feast of Pentecost. This provided the church with the power necessary to fulfill the Great Commission (Acts 1:8). That commission contains two parts. First, Jesus commands his disciples to “teach (Gk. mathēteuō) all nations” (Matt 28:19, KJV). The word “teach” means “make…

Pentecost provided the Power the church needs to accomplish its mission to “make disciples of all the nations” (Matt 28:19). Jesus had instructed the apostles to abide in Jerusalem until it came. He said, “you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be…

After reading our “Already—Not Yet” post, a reader suggested we provide a list of prophecies inmillennialism puts in the “not yet” category. This post will expand on his request. It will use typology to develop a list of both “already” and “not yet” prophecies. It will emphasize the relevance of…

            Inmillennialism differs from the other prophetic models regarding Jesus’s coming. After he rose from the dead, he spoke with the apostles about the kingdom (Acts 1:3, 6). As he ascended into heaven, an angel said,  Men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up…

Prophetic models and their underlying assumptions influence how we interpret Scripture. The atheist Bertrand Russell believed Jesus taught his coming, the end of history, and the kingdom’s arrival would occur simultaneously. Further, he believed Jesus said they would happen in his generation based on passages like Matt 16:27–28; 24:1–3, 34.…

G. K. Beale agrees with at least one point in our first post on Acts (here). He says the “last days” were a reality in the book of Acts. Christians of that period were “the actual beginning fulfillment of the prophesied spiritual resurrection of Israel that was to transpire in…

Our prophetic model, inmillennialism, has a special interest in the New Testament book of Acts. This interest is because of the period called the “last days.” Inmillennialism says this term in Scripture usually refers to the period between Jesus’s crucifixion and the Temple’s fall (i.e., AD 30–70). Jesus referred to…

Jesus foretold the Temple’s fall. The disciples asked two questions: when would “these things” happen and what sign would there be (Mark 13:1–4).  Jesus answered the sign question first (Mark 13:5–27). He listed Israel’s birth pains (Mark 13:8), the preaching of the gospel to all nations (Mark 13:10), the abomination…