Christian Hope through Fulfilled Prophecy

There are over 100 passages in the New Testament that declared the imminence of the prophesied events. It is clear that Jesus and his disciples expected his return while some of them were still alive—in their own generation. Here are just a few interesting examples: In Matthew 10:23, Jesus tells his disciples that He would return before they had finished going through all the towns of Israel. In Matthew 16:27-28, Jesus tells his disciples that He would return before some of them have died. In Matthew 26:64, Jesus tells Caiaphas, the scribes, and the elders that they would personally see Him returning in judgment. In Luke 21, verses 22 and 32, Jesus tells his disciples that all prophecy would be fulfilled in THEIR generation. In verse 36 Jesus emphasized that the events He just listed were ABOUT TO HAPPEN. (See the New International Version or Young’s Literal Translation.) In Revelation 1:1-3 and 22:6-20 Jesus tells his first-century followers that He would return SOON and that the events of Revelation MUST TAKE PLACE SHORTLY. There is a radical re-thinking underway among theologians about eschatology. Many now see that the biblical “last days” were not meant to be the end of the world, but rather the end of the Old Covenant order which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in AD 70. There is always much resistance to a challenge to widely held beliefs. We often have very ingrained presuppositions and we have much at stake if most of our neighbors hold to a common (but perhaps incorrect) view of something. There is the problem of what psychiatrists call “cognitive dissonance,” which is “a mental conflict that occurs when, confronted with challenging new information, most people seek to preserve their current understanding of the world by rejecting, explaining away, or avoiding the new information.” This book will increase your confidence in the reliability in the Bible and in Jesus. Fear not to be challenged and changed.

As documented in this book, the most persistent challenge by skeptics hostile to the Bible and Christianity is that Jesus did not return when He promised—within the lifetimes of his followers. Indeed, there are over 100 passages in the New Testament clearly declaring: (1) that the writers of the New Testament themselves were in the "last days," and (2) that Jesus would return while some of his disciples were still alive, in fulfillment of all that had been prophesied. Were Jesus and the New Testament writers wrong? If Jesus and the writers of the New Testament were wrong, they could not have been inspired, and Jesus Himself was a false prophet. This critical problem must be addressed by the church. Could the "last days" be referring to the final days of the Old Covenant order rather than to the end of the physical universe? Was the "time of the end" when Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed in AD 70—the date when the ancient covenantal system of temple sacrifices for sin ended forever? Could many modern Christians have misunderstood what Jesus meant by his Parousia (his "Second Coming") —that it was to be a divine, but non-visible "coming in judgment" against the Jews in AD 70—similar to God's coming in judgment against the Jews or their enemies on multiple occasions in the Old Testament? Could the King James Version of the Bible have misled English speaking Christians for 400 years about certain critical details? This book explores these possibilities, which if true, resolve the challenges to the accuracy of the Bible. The author examines the growing view of Bible prophecy called "preterism" or "covenant eschatology." This is the view that most, if not all prophecy has been fulfilled, completely disarming the challenges by Christianity's opponents. Before you dismiss this idea, you should test your presuppositions against what the Bible actually says. The preterist view has been held by some Christians since the first century and is gaining adherents today as flaws in the popular theories are being critically examined and discredited. Evangelical preterism restores Jesus as a true prophet and the Bible as reliable and authoritative. The torrent of popular books and claims about biblical prophecy in recent decades seems to have a peculiar appeal to lay believers who, curiously enough, find hope in an expected destruction of the planet and its replacement with a utopia in which even carnivorous animals will take up vegetarianism. It is simply taken for granted that the Bible predicts and explains an end of time, and that there is no number of elapsed centuries spent waiting for it that cannot be called the "end times." This book upends such notions and will be of considerable interest to any Christian who takes the Bible seriously but is confounded, confused, and frustrated with the near comical, but sad state of affairs that afflicts modern Christianity on the question of the supposed end of all things. The book is the product of over 10 years of research by the author, along with input from eight contributors. The book critically examines all of the popular views of Bible prophecy, many of which are contradictory or are little more than fanciful speculations without biblical support. It is written in easy-to-follow language for the informed layman, and it clearly and definitively answers the objections to the preterist view. If you have never studied Bible prophecy carefully, or if the various modern views of prophecy just do not make sense when you read your Bible, this book will give you increased confidence in God's Word. It covers all of the eschatological topics including the New Heaven and New Earth, the Day of the Lord, the End of the Age, the Apocalypse, the Beast, the Great Tribulation, the Millennium, the Second Coming, the Kingdom of God, the Rapture, the Resurrection, and more. It brings extraordinary clarity to a difficult subject. Fear not to be challenged and changed.

Charles Meek has a BA degree from Duke University and an MBA from St. Edwards University. He is the editor and principal author of the FaithFacts.org website, one of the oldest Christian apologetics sites on the Internet. He is a contributor to the Fulfilled Covenant Bible.