As I was finishing the previous post (here), the following statement grabbed my attention: “Till I come (Gk. erchomai), give attention to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine” (1 Tim 4:13). After a bit of thought, I recognized the reason for my sensitivity to this exhortation.
In this non-prophetic context, Paul’s until statement causes no difficulty. Everyone understands Paul meant for Timothy to “give attention to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine” during the period before his arrival. And nobody infers that this appeal would change after he came; Paul wanted his protégé to continue these practices after he left.1
But problems arise when the Apostle makes a similar statement in a prophetic context. I’m thinking of his instructions to the Corinthians regarding the Lord’s Supper: “As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes” (1 Cor 11:26).
Inmillennialism2 links the Lord’s coming to the temple’s fall in AD 70. Jesus foretold that event (Matt 24:1–2), then said, “They will see the Son of Man coming (Gk. erchomai) on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory” (Matt 24:30). He gave a specific timeframe for His coming and the temple’s demise: “Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will by no means pass away till all these things take place” (Matt 24:34). Subsequent events fulfilled His prophecy to the letter.
The connection between the temple’s demise and the Lord’s coming causes some friends to question my prophetic view. They think it implies the Lord’s Supper is no longer valid. Their reasoning goes like this: Inmillennialism says the Lord’s coming occurred when the temple fell. Paul said the church should take the Supper until He came. So, according to inmillennialism, we should no longer take the Lord’s Supper because the Lord came in judgment in AD 70.
But this reasoning fails to recognize a critical interpretive fact: “until” statements themselves do not say what will (or should) happen afterward. As we have seen, Paul’s until statement does not imply Timothy should quit reading the Scriptures after Paul came.
Some contexts demand that a change occur. For example, when Paul says God added the law “till the seed should come to whom the promise was made” (Gal 3:19), we know that a change occurred. Paul says, “Before faith came, we were kept under the law.… But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster [i.e., the law]” (Gal 3:23, 25). The law lasted until Christ, then it ended.
So, only the context, stated or implied, can tell us if a change will occur after the until condition is met; the until statement, alone, cannot.
Paul’s statement about the Lord’s Supper is like his exhortation to Timothy: the Corinthians were to observe the Lord’s Supper until the Lord came to destroy the temple and complete the transition to the messianic age. This event would show the truthfulness of Paul’s words: “The temple of God is holy, which temple you are” (1 Cor 3:17). The fall of the Mosaic-age temple would vindicate the church as the messianic-age temple.
This truth did not mean the Corinthians would cease to take Communion after the Lord’s coming. Just as Timothy would continue to “give attention to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine” after Paul came, so did the church continue to observe the Lord’s Supper after the Lord came to judge the temple.
Conclusion
One should not reject inmillennialism, thinking it implies the Lord’s Supper ended in AD 70; it doesn’t.
Note: I dealt more fully with until passages in a previous post: Until the End of the Age.
Footnotes
- The image in this post is the reverse side of Papyrus 37, a New Testament manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew. This copy most likely originated in Egypt in the third or fourth centuries. Timothy may have read a similar document. This file (here) is in the public domain (PD-US).
- For a full-length account of this prophetic model, see Michael A. Rogers, Inmillennialism: Redefining the Last Days (Tullahoma, TN: McGahan Publishing House, 2020). It is available here. For a summary, see the free PDF here.
