Great tribulation

One of my goals in this series of posts on Thessalonians is to show that Paul wrote from the prophetic perspective I call inmillennialism. This prophetic model arises from Jesus’ Olivet Discourse and Paul’s discussion of the kingdom of God in 1 Corinthians 15. I have documented inmillennialism in previous blog…

Jesus’s Olivet Discourse was about nothing but the Temple’s destruction. He foretold that event (Mark 13:1–2). His disciples asked two questions about it (Mark 13:3–4). He answered them in reverse order (Mark 13:5–27). The disciples asked, “what will be the sign” of the Temple’s fall? Jesus began with signs that…

We have now come to the last five days of Jesus’s life on earth. Philip later used Isa 53:7–8 to show the Ethiopian eunuch what happened next: He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; And as a lamb before its shearer is silent, So He opened not His mouth.…

Inmillennialism requires us to view many Scriptures in a new way. It challenges some of our underlying assumptions. For example, few people think of the “last days” as the final period of the Mosaic age. Inmillennialism says we must adopt the perspective of the biblical writers to understand their meaning.…

We are applying our proposed prophetic model—inmillennialism—to the gospel of Matthew. The second chapter of that book shows the fulfillment of four prophecies. All were “last days” prophecies. And, Herod played a major role in their fulfillment. These facts led us to look for Herod in Old Testament prophecies. Our…

A friend asked me to develop a 15-page summary of inmillennialism, my framework for the interpretation of biblical prophecy. This post is the third part of that summary. The next two posts will provide the rest. I plan to then post a downloadable PDF of the entire document. We started…

The post The Seven Vials — Part 2: Our Vision caused interesting reactions. One reader suggested I am smoking a hallucinogenic drug. Speaking of his younger days, he said, “none of us had the wild visions you have had and/or [sic] still having. Perhaps you would send me some of…

We need to chat about prophetic beasts. Our interpretation of Revelation using the inmillennial model requires it. They will play a major role in the rest of Revelation’s drama. In an earlier post, we saw how the Seven Mystic Figures vision describes the generation between Jesus’s birth and the destruction of the…

Only once in world history has an entire generation served as a picture of a future generation. The apostle Paul said this was true for the generation alive during Israel’s Exodus from Egypt (1 Cor. 10:6, 11). The events of that generation were “types” (or pictures) of events during the…

The Seven Mystic Figures vision makes a slight change to the timeframe of the first two judgment visions. They concentrated on the “great tribulation” Jesus predicted in the Olivet Discourse (Matt. 24:1–3, 21, 34; Rev. 7:14). This vision focuses on the entire generation of Jesus’s life on earth. It begins with…