"Do you mean to tell me if Spurgeon and Moody were alive today,
we would not have them speak at our church?"
And they said, "Nope." And that convinced me to leave.
This is why I really dislike eschatology.
Because there's so much left to the domain of speculation,
that you can pick out just about anything, any facet of the End Times subject,
because there's a lot that goes under that umbrella, and run with it,
and defend a particular idea. And if you're loud enough about it,
and you do it often enough, people are going to think you're on to something.
And the people who are doing that know that, because it's so complicated,
it's so vast, there's so many ins and outs and intricacies of it.
That who in the world is really going to spend the time to tell me I'm wrong?
It lends itself to these idiosyncratic readings of things.
And my view is that we should leave the ambiguities where they're at.
I think they're intentional. My view of End Times is;
End Times is going to work like it worked the first time.
There are things that are intentionally cryptic. We're not supposed to know.
So don't worry about it. That's not a very popular view, I won't sell very many books.
It's like a three page book right there. I'll make it a Kindle.
Nobody will know what the page count is. But I think my advice to you
is just expose people to your view, you have every right to do that.
But also expose them to the fact that you know
what some of the problems with your own view is,
and you know what the problems with their view are as well.
And so just have an honest discussion. And rule number one is:
if you see somebody marrying their view of end times, to either A) the gospel,
or B) someone's level of commitment to Jesus,
then that individual has a spiritual problem,
and as a pastor, I would hope you tell them that.
Okay, so I would try to have the most charitable discussion you can.
And work through all the ins and outs of all... you know, find why do people disagree?
I mean, what are the issues? And try to focus on; are these things resolvable or not?
Are they soluble or not? If they're not okay, then we spend enough time on that,
let's move on to the other one, or there's two or three possibilities,
and we can keep talking about these things.
But since none of us in the room are omniscient, okay, try to get everybody else
to admit they're not omniscient. Which is actually a taller order
than you would think, especially on Facebook.
All right, if you can get them to admit they're not omniscient, then, okay, let's meet
here and chat and this and that, the other thing, but I know that if you don't hold my view,
I believe you're still a believer, you're committed to the Lord.
And I'm just here because I just like to have the conversation. And I could be wrong.
I don't know. You know, I'm looking for something that I haven't really
sort of thrown into the blender and see where that comes out.
There's nothing wrong with that. The only thing I would put in the wrong category
in these kinds of discussions, is when these subjects become substitutes
for one of those two things. And trust me, I know, there are people who crossed that line.
They can't imagine anyone being serious about the Lord or the Bible,
if they don't believe in a Rapture. They just can't literally wrap their mind around that.
And what that tells you is they've been taught to conflate two things:
the definition of the gospel with this other doctrinal point. Now, I'll give you a personal story.
I was considering... how old was I? I was probably 20 See, I got married when I was 28-29,
something like that. In 87, I was 24. Boy, I'm really losing track of it here.
And I was entertaining the thought of...
I didn't define it this way. But the way it turned out was,
I was going to have to leave or I would be basically expunged from my tradition,
because I was going to go to a school that was sort of outside
the "approved orbit" for seminary.
And not all the views of this particular place were the same as were in my church.
And so that didn't bother me. But it bothered other people.
And I remember having a discussion with some of the leadership at the church
because I was kind of being groomed to be a pastor. You know how this works, okay?
"We have a guy interested in the Bible, we got to get him into the ministry."
Whether I was good at it or not, it didn't matter. And I said,
"do you mean to tell me that if Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who was a post-tribulation,
or DL Moody, who believed in the 'second blessing', (it sounded charismatic).
You mean to tell me if Spurgeon and moody were alive today,
we would not have them speak at our church?" And they said, "Nope."
And that convinced me to leave.
Because my thought was, as much as I have benefited from this context,
I do not want to become that.
So, very early on, I've sort of had my radar tracking on this kind of stuff.
I'm willing to have any of the discussions.
But you have got to stop assessing someone's commitment to the Lord,
based on their level of percentage of agreement
with every thought that runs through your head. You are not omniscient.
There's a reason why for 2000 years
people have been debating this or that thing. It's because the text does not provide exquisite,
granular precision, clarity on everything. It just doesn't.
To me, that tells me God really didn't care as much about that topic as he did another topic.
That's my clue. God was perfectly capable of giving us 100 pages or more
on eschatology to answer all, but he doesn't So I'm going to try to be more concerned
about the stuff that there is greater clarity on, because I'm going to assume
that that's what God wanted me to focus on. That might seem really simplistic
(I tend to approach lots of things simplistically, like that).
But that's what I've always got in my radar. I mean, have you crossed the line to;
you really operating under the presumption that you are omniscient, aren't you?
I mean, that's the kind of thing I'd say in the Facebook group, which is why I stay out of that.
But honestly, there are some people that's where they're at.
They may not realize, some of them do, but they may not realize it,
but that's really what's running through their head.
Like, "I know the answer to every question. Why can't you see it?
Well, but for the grace of God, I would be Spurgeon" you know,
I mean, honestly, this is when it comes to on these discussions.