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Why the Prediction That Christ Would Come May 21 Was Wrong (Part 8 of 8)

by | May 31, 2011 | Current Events, Eschatology

I have one final observation to make on this whole debacle.

When those who profess to be Bible-believing Christians with bold face claim to be able to decipher the time of Christ’s coming, we are apt to assume that the Bible must not be clear about this issue. If so many professing Christians over so many centuries have predicted the time of Christ’s return, and if so many well-meaning Christians have listened to them, then the Bible must not be clear on this. The Bible must open the door to it.

But let me ask you a question, Is the Bible clear that no one can and no one ought to attempt to predict of the time of Christ’s return? Yes. Then what is the problem? Is the problem with the Bible? Is the problem with the clarity of Scripture? Is the problem with the sufficiency of Scripture? May we conclude that the Bible is an inadequate guide on this matter? That is the way men are apt to argue. That is what men are apt to conclude. But all such suspicions are wrong. The problem is not with the Bible. The Bible is clear, and it is sufficient!

The problem is with us. The problem is that we human beings are not very good listeners. The problem is that we are like that rude person who incessantly presumes to finish our sentences for us. Let me end this message with a simple plea. I will address it to myself, but you make the application to yourself. Sam, would just shut up and let God finish what He is saying? Sam, would you just be quiet and listen. Sam, would you stop trying to finish God’s sentences for Him and listen—really listen—to what He has to say!

Why the Prediction That Christ Would Come May 21 Was Wrong (Part 7 of 8)

by | May 30, 2011 | Current Events, Eschatology

III. Its Concluding Application

The “date-setters” make predictions that time after time prove to be false. Thus, they are akin to false prophets, and we may apply to such false teachers the warnings of Deuteronomy 18:20f.

Deuteronomy 18:20-22 20 “‘But the prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.’ You may say in your heart, ‘How will we know the word which the LORD has not spoken?’ When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the LORD has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.”

This passage says three things that we may apply to ourselves with regard to the modern date-setters.

Deuteronomy 18:22 addresses the people of God regarding the false prophet with the command, “You shall not be afraid of him.” The last words of Deuteronomy 18 are perfectly applicable to the modern date-setters. There is something in us that tends to respond fearfully to the Campings of the world. Could it be true? What if they are right? But even before Camping’s prediction disproved itself, the Bible gave us sober reason not to believe it. Christ has said that such predicting of His return is impossible. So heed the warning of the Word of God against such false prophets. Don’t be afraid of them! Don’t be worried by them! Don’t be rattled by them! Don’t be moved by them! Don’t be made cautious by them! Don’t give respect to their forecasts in any way! They may speak with a show of great learning. They may speak with amazing dogmatism. They may speak calm solemnity. Still, don’t be afraid of them.

Deuteronomy 18:20 commands of the false prophet: “That prophet shall die.” False prophets in the Old Testament were to be put to death. We live no longer in the Old Testament economy, and I am not teaching that we should not literally kill false prophets like Camping. But there is an application of this command to us in the NT church. We should do everything we can to kill their influence and standing in the church. We should rebuke them, denounce them, warn people against them, and, if they happen to be members of our churches, exercise church discipline against them.

Why is this an important duty for us to take to heart? Such false teachers give occasion to the wicked to mock Christianity. They give Bible-believing Christianity a bad name. They deceive and lead into sin immature believers. They bring scorn on the very doctrine they pretend to uphold, the second coming of Christ. People hear of such date-setting for the second coming of Christ and say to themselves, “Those crazy Christians are at it again!” We must get the Word out that people who write and believe predictions like Camping’s do not represent biblical Christianity or our Savior. We must let people know that Christ Himself condemns such predictions.

Deuteronomy 18 also contains a command about the true prophet in verse 19: “Whoever will not listen to My words which he shall speak in My name, I Myself will require it of him.” In Old Testament Israel the presence of false prophets did not mean that there were not true prophets to whom Israel had to listen. Similarly in our day the presence of false predictions of Christ’s return does not mean that we may ignore all that Bible does teach about Christ’s return. We must not allow all the extremism to steal from us the “blessed hope” of the appearing of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus. If you are here tonight and do not know Jesus Christ, you must not allow the failure of lunatic predictions like those of Camping to make you secure or lull you to sleep. Camping was wrong about yesterday. But Jesus is not wrong about someday! Judgment is coming. If it were today, would you appear on the right hand before Jesus or would you wake to find yourself on the dreadful left hand of the coming King and doomed to eternal judgment?

Why the Prediction That Christ Would Come May 21 Was Wrong (Part 6 of 8)

by | May 28, 2011 | Current Events, Eschatology

Context is crucial in understanding Matthew 24:36. Here is the circle of context which must be considered.

C. The Broader New Testament Context

I want you to look at two other passages in the New Testament that are related to the statement of Jesus in Matthew 24:36.

The first passage is Acts 1:6, 7.

And so when they had come together, they were asking Him, saying, “Lord, is it at this time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel? ” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority.”

When the disciples asked about the restoration of the kingdom to Israel, their question was rooted in Old Testament prophecy. The Old Testament had, indeed, predicted “the time … when the saints … (would take) … possession of the kingdom” (Dan. 7:22). Now it may be that the disciples still had too carnal and nationalistic an idea of what the restoration of the kingdom to Israel would mean, but it is clear that their hope for such a restoration was firmly built on biblical basis (Acts 3:21; Matt. 19:28). This restoration occurs, of course, in conjunction with the glorious appearance of the Messiah in His second coming.

Thus, the disciples are raising here substantially the same question that Jesus answered in Matt. 24:36. Not surprisingly, Jesus answers them in language which echoes Matt. 24:36. He refers to the Father just as He did in Matt. 24:36. There he said, “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone”. Here He says, “it is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority”. The statements are clearly parallel, but there is one key point at which Jesus enlarges upon and interprets what He said in Matt. 24:36. You will notice that He does not speak of “the day and the hour”. Now He speaks of “times or epochs”.

Whatever these words more exactly mean, they plainly confirm the meaning that we have attached to the words of Jesus in Matt. 24:36. When Jesus denies that we can know the day or hour, He is not contrasting the day and the hour with the week, month, or year. Rather, He is denying that we can have any knowledge of the date of Christ’s arrival. Not the day, nor the hour, nor the time, nor the epoch of Christ’s return can be known, and therefore certainly not the week, month, or year.

The second passage is 1 Thessalonians 5:1-4.

Now as to the times and the epochs, brethren, you have no need of anything to be written to you. For you yourselves know full well that the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night. While they are saying, “Peace and safety!” then destruction will come upon them suddenly like birth pangs upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. But you, brethren, are not in darkness, that the day should overtake you like a thief.

The meaning of this passage is plain itself and also plain in light of Matt. 24:36 and Acts 1:6, 7. Paul here uses the same two words used in Acts 1:6, 7: “times and epochs”. He plainly says that there is no need to write them about such things because they already know that the day of the Lord is coming like a thief in the night. The phrase, “thief in the night”, echoes a passage in Matthew 24 a few verses after our text:

“But be sure of this, that if the head of the house had known at what time of the night the thief was coming, he would have been on the alert and would not have allowed his house to be broken into. For this reason you also must be ready; for the Son of Man is coming at an hour when you do not think He will.”

The idea is plainly that Christ’s coming is sudden and unexpected. A thief does not announce the time of his burglary. Neither does Christ announce the time of His coming.

This is confirmed by v. 3. That verse pictures the ungodly world as promising itself peace and safety when sudden and inescapable judgment overtakes them through Christ’s return. Thus, Paul is plainly saying that he need not write them about the time of Christ’s return, because they already know that its timing is unknown.

Brief survey of the history of hermeneutics – 11. Renaissance and Reformation

by | May 27, 2011 | Hermeneutics, Historical Theology

The Renaissance: The Renaissance was a very complex humanist movement within Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Two of the most important contributions it gave to the Reformation were a return to critical scholarship and philology. What the Renaissance gave to the Reformation, then, was an academic climate of questioning the status quo and seeking to arrive at conclusions based on primary documents. Pelikan comments:

The insistence of humanistic scholars on an understanding of the biblical text based on a fresh reading of the Hebrew and Greek originals …acted as a catalyst in the reconsideration of the doctrine of authority during the age of the Reformation.[1]

This insistence led to the study of Hebrew and Greek grammar, the study of Augustine, and most importantly, the study of Paul and the Bible.

The Reformation: The Reformation was both a break with the negative elements of the past (especially the late medieval doctrine of ecclesiastical authority and the system of human merit theology) and a continuation of the discussion that had been taking place from the beginning. The Bible took center stage at the Reformation due, in part, to the influence of the Renaissance. With this came a renewed interest in Bible interpretation and historical theology, both from primary sources. The maxim ad fontes[2] produced intensified study in the original sources of the Christian tradition – the Bible first and foremost and, secondarily, the Apostolic Fathers, Patristics, and Augustine.

Neither Luther nor Calvin invented or discovered doctrines that had never been discussed before.[3] Luther’s discovery of the gospel of justification sola fide was, first and foremost, a biblical doctrine and a doctrine that all true Christians had believed from the beginning. It had been eclipsed by a system of human merit theology and sacerdotalism, but this does not mean that it never existed prior to Luther.

Calvin was no innovator himself. He built his system of theology on his understanding of Christian Scripture controlled by “the rule of faith.” He produced commentaries that are still influential in our day. The Reformers saw themselves as part of a long line of Christian interpreters, utilizing what they could from previous generations and repudiating, sometimes viciously, what they could not. Though Calvin sought to be a corrector of what he viewed as wrong with elements of the past, on the main, he assumed into his interpretive method the method handed down to him by his university professors – the scholastic method, in distinction from scholastic theology (more on this below).

Mention has been made of how some view the history of Christian interpretation in a mostly negative light. This assessment is, primarily, a post-Enlightenment phenomenon. David Steinmetz, in his book Calvin in Context, discusses Calvin’s interpretation of Isaiah 6:1ff. in the light of the history of interpretation prior to Calvin.[4] Prior to his discussion of the history of interpretation and Isaiah’s text, he notes this about F. W. Farrar.

In 1885 Frederic W. Farrar, chaplain to Queen Victoria and later Dean of Canterbury, delivered the Bampton Lecutres at Oxford on the subject of the history of interpretation. The book is a triumph of what the late Sir Herbert Butterfield of Cambridge called “Whig” historiography. Farrar admired about the past precisely those elements in it most like the present and regarded the present, indeed, as the inevitable culmination of all that was best in the past. The history of exegesis became for Farrar the history of “more or less untenable” conceptions of the Bible, “a history of false suppositions slowly and progressively corrected.” Not surprisingly, Farrar admired Antioch over Alexandria, Luther over Thomas Aquinas, Calvin over Luther, and the moderns [Enlightenment/post-Enlightenment interpreters] over all. Farrar catalogued with obvious delight every strained allegory, every factual inaccuracy, every philological howler committed by precritical exegetes in the name of biblical interpretation. While he admitted that ancient commentaries are full of practical instruction aimed at moral and spiritual edification and that much of this instruction is “of the highest intrinsic value,” he nevertheless warned that frequently such material “has but a slender connexion with the text on which it is founded.”[5]

Steinmetz goes on to show that Calvin’s exegesis of the Isaiah pericope is very similar to the history of interpretation on this text and even goes so far as to say, “While the precritical exegesis of Isaiah 6 is not an exegesis we can simply adopt, it is still not accurate to regard it as arbitrary and strained, of value only for its homiletical asides.”[6] Steinmetz interacts with Farrar after his discussion of Calvin on Isaiah 6 and the history of precritical interpretation on this text:

It is difficult to recognize the exegesis of Isaiah 6 we have just examined in the general description of the history of exegesis which Farrar offered. To be sure, it is true that the older consensus on the historical-critical setting of Isaiah 6 would find few supporters among modern commentators, but the older discussion of these questions does not seem arbitrary or strained, even by modern standards. The judgment of Christian commentators that Isaiah saw the glory of Christ was an exegetical conclusion forced on the commentators by the New Testament itself, though there was a tendency on the part of some commentators–including Calvin–to soften the hard edges of that exegesis.[7]

Farrar assumed critical, Enlightenment categories while interpreting the history of interpretation. This gave his history a slant or bias in a certain direction and explains his overly negative assessment of most of what took place prior to the modern era. Steinmetz concludes:

It is no answer to Farrar to point out that there is a good deal in ancient commentaries which is surprisingly modern even from a historical-critical or philological viewpoint, or to argue that the modern reader can find insight into the “literal” sense of the text in precritical commentaries. That is to admit his principle that precritical exegesis is good in the proportion that it anticipates or agrees with modern exegesis. Nor is it an answer to reply with a tu quoque [Latin, “thou also”] and to list the exegetical atrocities which have been committed from time to time in the name of the historical-critical method, though such a list is disquietingly easy to compile.

The principal value of precritical exegesis is that it is not modern exegesis; it is alien, strange, sometimes even, from our perspective, comic and fantastical. Precisely because it is strange, it provides a constant stimulus to interpreters, offering exegetical suggestions they would never think of or find in any modern book, forcing them again and again to a rereading and reevaluation of the text. But if they immerse themselves not only in the text but also in these alien approaches to the text, they may learn in time to see with eyes not their own sights they could scarcely have imagined and may learn to hear with ears not their own voices too soft for their own ears to detect.[8]

Not only has this modern, Enlightenment mindset infected Farrar it has infected others who look down upon, not only the Reformers, but the post-Reformation Reformed orthodox, as we shall see next.

[1] Jaroslav Pelikan, Reformation of Church and Dogma (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1985), 8.

[2] Latin for to the sources.

[3] Cf. David C. Steinmetz, Luther in Context (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1995) and David C. Steinmetz, Calvin in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

[4] Steinmetz, Calvin in Context, 95-109.

[5] Steinmetz, Calvin in Context, 95. Steinmetz is quoting from Fredric W. Farrar, History of Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979).

[6] Steinmetz, Calvin in Context, 107.

[7] Steinmetz, Calvin in Context, 107.

[8] Steinmetz, Calvin in Context, 107.

Why the Prediction That Christ Would Come May 21 Was Wrong (Part 5 of 8)

by | May 27, 2011 | Current Events, Eschatology

The third thing that must be considered regarding Matthew 24:36 is …

III. Its Contextual Confirmation

False teachers have always quoted Scripture. 2 Peter 3:15-16 says: “and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation; just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you, as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.” The problem with the heretic’s use of Scripture is that they always quote it out of context. One of the marks of false teaching is that it quotes Scripture but without regard to its context.

This is also true of the perversion of Scripture that we are now considering. It quotes and interprets Matt. 24:36 without regard to its biblical context. It is, therefore, my purpose to show you very carefully what this verse means within its context. We will look at the immediately preceding context, the immediately succeeding context, and the broader New Testament context.

A. The Immediately Preceding Context

The significant thing that we learn about verse 36 when we read the preceding context is that it is a part of a contrast.

Matthew 24:34-36 “Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away. But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.”

What is the contrast here? It is between the “all these things” of v. 34 and “that day and hour” of v. 36. If “that day and hour” refers, as we have seen, to the second coming of Christ, to what does the phrase, “all these things,” refer? To answer this question look at Matt. 24:1-3. Their questions show that the disciples were in danger of confusing two distinct events: the destruction of Jerusalem and the second coming of Christ. The contrast of vv. 34-36 is intended to clear up this confusion for them. “All these things”, therefore, refers to all those events associated with the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem. “That day and hour” refers to the events associated with the second coming of Christ proper.

Here we come to the crucial point for our purposes. How does Christ contrast these two events? He gives a time-sign for the destruction of Jerusalem. He gives no time-sign for the second coming of Christ. Notice: “This generation will not pass away until all these things take place … but of that day and hour no one knows…” Do you see the contrast Jesus makes in these verses? He contrasts the giving of a time-sign for the destruction of Jerusalem with the giving of no time-sign for His Second Coming. He gives a very broad time-sign for the destruction of Jerusalem—this generation. The destruction of Jerusalem, he says, will occur sometime in the next forty years, but I give you no time-sign at all for my own coming.

What does this mean for our interpretation of Matt. 24:36? Is Jesus saying, what the date-setters assert, that we cannot know the day or hour, but we can know the week, month, or year? Obviously not! The contrast is not between the day and the month or between knowing week, but not the hour. It is between a broad time-sign encompassing a period of forty years and no time-sign at all. Jesus determined the date of the destruction of Jerusalem to within forty years, but He gives no time-sign for His coming at all. What nonsense this makes of the claims of the date-setters to know even the year of Christ’s coming! Far from knowing the week, month, or year, we do not even know the generation of Christ’s coming!

B. The Immediately Succeeding Context

In the following context Jesus calls upon his disciples to be constantly alert for His return (Matt. 24:42-44, 50; 25:13). These commands to be alert for His coming assume that even then the timing of His coming was completely unknown. If the week and month of Christ’s return could be known, as the date-setters suggest, then the early disciples would not have had to be constantly alert. Clearly, then, when Jesus says that you do not know the day or hour of my return, He means to say that its timing is completely unknown, therefore you must be always ready.

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