This is not the first time I have written about this topic. If you haven’t read the previous articles, “Understanding the Bible as Literature,” and “Take the Bible Literally?,” you may want to check them out for further clarification of what the word “literal” means when applied to Scripture. The motivation for this post comes from my daily reading in the Gospels. Luke quotes Isaiah in reference to John the Baptist’s ministry. Mountains are leveled; valleys are filled; rough roads are made smooth in preparation for the coming Messiah. Taken literally, this makes John the Baptist more like John the Road Builder.
Being the last Old Testament prophet, John the Baptist also
used metaphors when he preached. Immediately after Luke’s road-building
metaphor, the evangelist records John calling the unbelieving Jews “offspring
of vipers,” not because he thought they came from snakes but because snakes
were associated with lying and deception. As a warning to the “snakes,” John
said, “Even now the axe is positioned at the root of the trees.” Here John is
using the same symbolism
that Isaiah used when he prophesied that the Messiah would be a shoot from
the stump of Jesse. When the Bible authors use symbolism and metaphor, they are
conveying truth, but their words are not to be taken literally. They are
truthful not literal.
This true but not literal interpretative challenge has led
to serious doctrinal errors. I mentioned
before that believers were once persecuted by the church because they
denied that the sun literally revolved around the earth as Scripture suggests. The
centuries-long debacle known as the Crusades stemmed from the interpretation
that Jerusalem remained the Holy City even after God abandoned it and brought
about its destruction by the Romans. With the coming of the church age,
Jerusalem is no more holy than Joplin or Jersey City. The true Jerusalem is now
a heavenly city which exists in the spiritual dimension rather than the physical
one. The city of Jerusalem in modern Israel is interesting historically, but it
is not the City of God.
The misunderstanding of Jerusalem’s continuing importance
survived long after the Crusades. Four hundred years later, the idea that Jews
needed a homeland swept through the church. Because of their historical
connection to Palestine, the Jews were encouraged to resettle there. This
movement, known as Christian Zionism, was at least partially responsible for
the reinterpretation of biblical end times teaching. John Nelson Darby,
an Anglo-Irish Bible teacher, collapsed 1800 years of church history and
imagined a literal Jerusalem and a literal temple as the setting for the last
days. Ignoring the fact that physical Jerusalem was judged by God and destroyed
in 70 AD, Darby reassigns the apocalyptic prophecies* of Daniel, Isaiah,
Ezekiel, and even Jesus to a time in Darby’s future.
Darby’s followers today are found mostly in the United
States and align themselves with C.I. Schofield who plagiarized much of Darby’s
work and spread it across the country as his own. The insistence on literal
fulfillment of certain prophecies is at the core of this teaching. The most
dramatic of these, the belief in a literal 1,000-year reign of Christ on earth,
lends it name to the movement we now call millennialism (a millennium being
1,000 years). Despite the fact that the Bible itself argues against taking the
number 1,000 literally, Darby’s followers cling to it like a talisman. They
ignore Peter’s
comment that “One day with the Lord is like a thousand years, and
a thousand years is like one day.”
Although much of their teaching relies on literal
fulfillment of biblical prophecy, the millennialists become curiously
non-literal when something contradicts their interpretation. Jesus predicted as
recorded in Matthew’s gospel that the people He was addressing would be alive
at the fulfillment of His description of the last days. When Jesus spoke to
John as recorded in Revelation, He implied the same thing saying that those who
pierced him would see Him coming in judgment against them. Rather than take Jesus’
words literally, Darby’s followers twist them to mean some other group of
people at some other point in time.
A broad view of Scripture, accounting for the nature of
apocalyptic literature*, makes me believe that the judgment Jesus predicted was
accomplished in 70 AD when the Romans destroyed the temple and much of
Jerusalem itself culminating a seven-year siege (tribulation). Although the
usefulness of the temple ended when the veil was torn at Christ’s crucifixion,
its physical destruction completed God’s judgment of the apostate worship of
the wayward Jewish leaders. I believe it was those leaders who would see Jesus
“coming with the clouds,” a frequent metaphor of judgment throughout the Old
Testament. They are called “everyone who pierced Him,” clearly identifying the
Jews who demanded the execution. The “tribes of the land” who would mourn His
coming describes the nation of Israel which was no longer God’s chosen people. That
is a literal interpretation, but it doesn’t fit the scheme invented by Darby.
Darby chose to ignore that the judgment God promised through
His prophets was primarily against Jerusalem and its disobedient kings and
priests. Many passages place the time of God’s judgment concurrent with the
coming of the Messiah. No one can deny that God made a dramatic paradigm shift
at the cross. God replaced the nation of Israel with what Peter called the “holy
nation” known as the Church of Christ. God literally made a cosmic
statement when the sun darkened (as predicted) for three hours while the
Messiah bore the sins of the world. Paul plainly says the Seed
of woman fulfilled the promise that Abraham’s descendants would be a
blessing to the entire world.
Skipping over the obvious meaning of the destruction in 70
AD, Darby puts the fulfillment of the “last days” at the second coming of
Jesus. Peter had no such illusion. He stated plainly that the prophecy
of Joel concerning the last days was being fulfilled as he spoke. The
writer of Hebrews says that God had spoken through His Son “in
these last days.” Many other New Testament passages make similar
statements. To my mind, the strangest result of Darby’s interpretation is to
erase what is now 2,000 years of church history from the biblical record. Darby
would have us believe that nothing of prophetic value would happen until the
last seven years of history: the tribulation. Then the millennium. That, to me,
is literally unbelievable.
* Apocalyptic literature is a type of biblical prophecy that
is full of symbolic language that is not intended to be taken literally.
Post Script:
Most ordinary Christians in the United States who are taught
the millennial/dispensational last days scenario have no idea that it was invented
in the 19th century. Nor do they realize that the vast majority of
believers throughout the world today do not follow Darby’s scheme. The
predominant end-times teaching in the modern world follows the centuries-old
understanding that the 1,000-year reign of Jesus is a symbolic representation
of the current church age. Because they deny the literal 1,000 years, they are
called amillennials.
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