Rethinking Revelation: The Supremacy of Jesus Christ

It is common for Christians to make two crucial mistakes when trying to understand the end times. The first is placing the "millennium" at the center of their end times thinking. The millennium refers to a thousand-year period referenced six times in six verses in chapter 20 of Revelation and nowhere else in the Bible. Open almost any book about the end times and it will immediately begin framing the whole discussion in terms of the millennium. This approach to end times thinking is a serious error. Christians do not build the foundation of any other theological doctrine on such scant and cryptic biblical evidence, yet for some reason, many people don't think twice about doing it for the consummation of all things.

The second mistake is failing to recognize that the Bible talks extensively about two different ages that come to earth-shattering ends. The conclusion of God's Old Covenant brought with it the total dismantling of the Jewish priestly and sacrificial system as the New Covenant was ushered in. This was not a quiet or inconsequential transition, but one so cataclysmic that the Bible describes it with cosmic-shaking imagery often thought to attend the end of the world. In fact, Scripture speaks of the end of the Old Covenant age as much or more than the end of the world, but many readers fail to make this critical distinction and thus confuse one end with the other as if they were one event.

Taking a preterist, amillennial approach, Rethinking Revelation places these two error-prone issues into proper biblical perspective. The end of biblical Judaism is so critically important that understanding it correctly must be central to the end time discussion. And the nature and timing of the rather obscure millennium is a secondary matter that should be considered only after laying the foundation of the end times from the plentiful main and plain sections of Scripture.