Transcript

ANNOUNCER: What is eschatology? Hi, this is Grace and Focus. Glad you’ve joined us today. We’re beginning a short theological series on eschatology, the biblical study of last days or end times. And in this episode, we’re going to do an overview of this upcoming series. Once again, this is Grace in Focus, and we are a ministry of the Grace Evangelical Society, located in North Texas. Our website is faithalone.org. We want you to know about our upcoming 2026 national conference. This is an annual conference and the dates are May 18th through the 21st. It will occur at a camp in North Texas named Camp Copass with accommodations, beautiful surroundings, lots of recreation, good food. And best of all, there will be great teaching. Our theme this year is “Believe In Christ For Life.” Get all the information, get registered, take advantage of the early bird registration at faithalone.org. 

And now with our overview of eschatology, here is Bob Wilkin, along with Philippe Sterling. 

BOB: How are you doing, Philippe? 

PHILIPPE: Hi, Bob. I’m doing good. Good to be back again with you. 

BOB: Yes, amen. We’re glad y’all could join us. Philippe, you’re going to be teaching a class next semester in the Grace Evangelical Society Seminary on eschatology, right? PHILIPPE: Yes. Of course, the Seminary covers areas of theology, you know, as well as the exegesis of the Greek texts and various courses. 

BOB: Is this eschatology about snails? 

PHILIPPE: Oh, no, that’s escargot!. Your French is coming back to you. 

BOB: No, no, that’s escargology. Okay, so eschatology comes from the Greek word, not French, from the Greek word eschatos, and eschatos means what? 

PHILIPPE: That just means the things to come, the end things. 

BOB: Right. So eschatos could refer just to the last of a series of things or whatever, it’s used in New Testament often of the last days, right? And so Dwight Pentecost famously wrote this book 

PHILIPPE: And he entitled that, I think, Things To Come. 

BOB: Right. In fact, that was his dissertation. 

PHILIPPE: His doctoral dissertation. Yeah, back in the 50s, but it’s still a book that’s a good resource. 

BOB: Right. So eschatology is the study of the last days. And maybe we could just overview the grand scheme of things as the Bible teaches it. Now there are different theories of the last days, right? Different theological positions. Let’s first lay out our position, which is called the dispensational position. So what is the dispensational view—of what’s the next step in God’s program? What do we anticipate next? 

PHILIPPE: Yeah, for us of the church age, the next thing is our resurrection or glorification and the Lord coming for the Church and to take the Church up to be with Him in the air in preparation then for the judgments to come on this world. But He takes the believers of the church age, for those of us who are still alive, the instantaneous transformation of us into the likeness of His resurrected body and all of those of the Church age that preceded us in death or resurrected. And we meet them all together in the air and thus we will be with the Lord forever as Paul writes. 

BOB: Okay. So you just paraphrased 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17. 

PHILIPPE: Yes, the primary passage about the Rapture, as we call it. 

BOB: “The dead in Christ will rise first, and then we who are alive will be caught up.” And that we’re caught up in Latin is from a word related to the word “rapture.” We get the expression, the Rapture. And so this is often called the Rapture or the catching up.

PHILIPPE: Right. The actual Greek word used in the passage is harpazo. yeah, which means to snatch up, you know, yeah, 

BOB: And harpazo is related to our word harpoon, like we would harpoon a whale; we don’t do that much anymore. But when the whaling industry and full bore, there were untold millions of whales, probably, that were killed every year. And they would harpoon them and pull them back, snatch them back to the boat. And harpazo, yeah, has this sense of being caught up. And it says we’re meeting Him in the air. It doesn’t say we’re meeting him in the third heaven. 

PHILIPPE: Right. So it’s possible, you know, that this is in our atmospheric heaven, that is just an encampment, basically that the Lord sets up with the Church, with the angels, as the judgments on the earth are about to occur, “the wrath of the Lamb” as the Tribulation judgments are sometimes characterized. 

BOB: Okay. So after the Rapture—by the way, this is the whole, some of you may have read Tim LaHaye’s books, the Left Behind series, or seen some of the movies Left Behind. That’s all rapture truth. People being caught up now, I think LaHaye’s a little bit, taking literary license to where people’s clothes are left behind and all folded up and stuff. 

PHILIPPE: Yes. And car accidents happened [unintelligible]. 

BOB: I think we’re going to go with our clothes. And I don’t anticipate there will be widespread crashes of planes and cars, but there might be. It’s hard to know how that would work. I assume there will be some because there will be some situations where both pilots in a commercial jet are believers. And if that’s the case, well, then it’s going to crash unless God supernaturally sees that it doesn’t crash. I mean, I suppose God could have it to where there was going to always be at least one unbeliever in the cockpit. 

PHILIPPE: The Scriptures doesn’t tell us. Of course, LaHaye takes a fictional embellishment, you know, which is fine for imagination, but we’re probably wise to limit ourselves to much of the Scriptural descriptions. 

BOB: We know there’s going to be some delusion that comes upon the people of the world. Otherwise, everybody in the world would be coming to faith, right? They’d be going, wow, obviously, what the Bible predicted is true. Well, there’s going to be this great delusion, and they’re not going to believe that. But the next step after that is the seven-year Tribulation period you talked about. 

PHILIPPE: Right. And it’s possible what we’ve seen, Revelation 5, that scene of the one who was on the throne. And the question comes from who is worthy to open up the scroll, the seven-sealed scroll and everything. And so there’s it, there’s possible scene that occurs there that heavenly scene, whether it’s the third heaven or where we at after the Rapture. And so Christ is given the authority, in essence, to unleash the wrath of the Lamb. And those are the seven seals, the seven trumpets, the seven bowls, and the wrath of the Lamb that is poured out on the nations of the world, and also in preparing Israel to come to the moment as a nation of believing and welcoming Christ to establish then His millennial reign. 

BOB: You’ve just basically synthesized Revelation 6 through 19, right? Yes. 

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BOB: Then in Revelation 20, we get something new. What happens in Revelation 20? 

PHILIPPE: In Revelation 20, first of all, we’re told about I think the Tribulation believers who perished and who are martyred and perhaps believers of all the previous dispensations, the Old Testament believers who are resurrected and come to reign with Christ for a thousand years. Satan is bound. The Tribulation saints, the Old Testament believers, and I think the Church as well and the overcomers reign with Christ for that thousand years. Now at the conclusion of it Satan is released, and he gathers the nations in rebellion once again and they are met with an instantaneous judgment. Fire, we’re told, comes down from the heavens and consumes them and then that sets up the stage for what we call the Great White Throne Judgment, the unbelieving of all ages.

BOB:Okay, so this thousand years is often called the Millennium because of the Latin basically. 

PHILIPPE: Yes, for 1,000. 

BOB: “Mille” is 1,000. Yeah, so the Millennium is 1,000 years. In fact, remember the year 2000 was this great Millennium. 

PHILIPPE: That’s the Y2K that all the computer systems were going to crash, yes. 

BOB: But so you’ve got this thousand year reign of Christ on this earth which will be cleaned up and it will be more like the earth before the flood, I take it. 

PHILIPPE: Yes, it’s been described as a partial taking away of the curse. Not fully, death is not yet. Death still occurs. 

BOB: But likely in light of Isaiah 65:20, people are probably going to live the whole—people will be 900 and a thousand years old. 

PHILIPPE: Yes, equal it Methuselah in longevity. 

BOB: All right, so then at the end that you have the Great White Throne Judgment, and we can go into this in more detail later, of the unbelieving world. And then after, well, this is a dispute. There’s a destruction of the heavens and the earth which is mentioned at the end of 2 Peter 3:10-12, and also the Lord talked about heaven and earth will pass away but My words won’t pass away. That occurs either immediately after the Millennium before the Great White Throne Judgment, some people understand Revelation 20:11 that way, or it occurs after the Great White Throne Judgment. But in either case, either the Great White Throne Judgment occurs on earth or it occurs out in space somewhere and heaven and earth have already been destroyed. But Revelation 21 tells us what? 

PHILIPPE: That there’s a new heaven and a new earth. And a new Jerusalem, which comes right down to the new earth. 

BOB: Right. And this New Jerusalem is ginormous. Yes, right. It’s going to be the size of much of the United States. 

PHILIPPE: Yeah, it covers, basically will cover, its dimensions, half of the continental United States. 

BOB: And we’re going to be living not in the third heaven, but we’re going to be living on the new earth. And the new earth is going to also, when it says the new heavens and the new earth, the new heavens is, all the planets will be new. The stars will be new. All the universe is going to be new, right? 

PHILIPPE: Yes, I mean, we’re awestruck about the present universe, but having, you know trillions of galaxies potentially. But I imagine the new heavens and the new earth will be even more spectacular than the present one that we have. And of course, there’ll be no sin, no death, 

BOB: And no more curse. 

PHILIPPE: No more curse. 

BOB: I even wonder if things like asteroids and comets and things like that are part of the curse. Maybe with the new earth, it’s all going to be cleaned up and space travel will be easier. 

PHILIPPE: It will be pristine. And we’ll certainly, because we’ll talk about, I will come to that, about space exploration and colonization and all of that, if that’s a possibility.

BOB: I’m looking forward to all that. But the thing to keep in mind is, eschatology is beautiful. And we should not be thinking in terms of floating on clouds and strumming harps. We should be thinking in terms of living on the new earth in actual physical, glorified bodies where we will never suffer anymore, no more pain or suffering. And if we’ve been faithful in this life, we’ll rule with Christ, not only in the Millennium, but also going on to the new earth forever. 

PHILIPPE: Yeah, Revelation 22 says, “and his servants shall serve him.”

BOB: All right. Well, thank you, Philippe. And remember, let’s all keep grace in focus. 

ANNOUNCER: Be sure to check out our daily blogs at faithalone.org. They are short and full of great teaching, just like what you’ve heard today. Find them at faithalone.org/resources/blog. We would love to hear from you. Maybe you’ve got a question, comment, or some feedback. If you do, please don’t hesitate to send us a message. Here’s our email address. It’s radio@faithalone.org. That’s radio@faithalone.org. And when you do, very important. Please let us know your radio station call letters and the city of your location.

On our next episode: we continue with eschatology, five views of the Rapture. Please join us. And until then, let’s keep grace in focus.