Taking the Bible Literally Part 2

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 19^th 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.