Charles Cooper talks about the Millennium. This presentation was given last October in O’Fallon Missouri at an eschatology forum.
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This week on Gary DeMar’s radio program he responded to the Prewrath position, briefly. For those who do not know Gary DeMar, he is a preterist author and teacher. Listening to his comments on the Prewrath position, I found them surface-level at best. Basically, his conclusion was: since Prewrath shares a futurist approach to Matthew 24 along with pretribulationism, prewrath does not have any new critiques for the preterist position.
He also claims that Prewrath does not have good scholarly exegesis that would critique preterism as well as support prewrath. I find this odd since it has been over a year now that Charles Cooper’s book has been published, God’s Elect and the Great Tribulation: An Interpretation of Matthew 24:1-31 and Daniel 9. This book is a solid, scholarly book that not only supports prewrath but has substantive critiques against preterism, some critiques that I am sure Gary DeMar is not even aware of. So I would challenge DeMar to read the book and respond to it.
Moreover, Gary DeMar in his show laments that premillennialist teachers are not eager to debate or interact with preterists. I will give DeMar the benefit of the doubt here since he is mostly (if not exclusively) exposed to pretrib premillennialists.
DeMar has debated pretrib teacher Thomas Ice for example, and I have heard this debate, which I was left shaking my head since I was not impressed by either of them. (Incidentally, Thomas Ice will not defend his pretribulationism in debate with a prewrath teacher, but he will with a preterist. That should tell you something.)
I am writing a couple of books right now and my second book is specifically on a refutation of preterism. Would it not be fitting that once that book is published there could be a public debate with DeMar with copious amounts of cross-examination? I think so. And I am sure Cooper would desire to defend his exegesis in his book in a debate with a preterist.
One of the radio programs that DeMar comments on the Prewrath, he gave his garden-variety preterist arguments to Matthew 24: “This generation,” the second-person “you,” the term “Antichrist” is not mentioned, etc., etc. He also gives the impression that “we preterists are scholarly, and you premillers over there are just ‘popular.'”
I was at a conference in Florida earlier this year where I met DeMar briefly, unrelated to eschatology, but he had a booth in which I bought several preterist books that I have been wanting to read for a while. I was disappointed by these preterist books since they did not provide much meaningful exegesis. And some of the salient issues that should have been discussed were completely ignored such as distinct purposes of the gospel writers for the Olivet Discourse (Preterists just assume that the writers had one purpose).
Again, I give DeMar the benefit of the doubt since he has been exposed all his life to sensational-popular, surface-level pretrib teachers who are not interested in meaningful interaction. But there is a new kid in town, the prewrath position, a kid who is much more sober about the Biblical text and seeks to be exegetically faithful to Scripture.
“As the gospel spreads throughout the earth and brings its divinely intended and Spirit-energized results, evil […] is eventually routed and the millennium arrives. During this era the nations live in peace, for Satan is “bound” and thereby evil is temporarily restrained. After the thousand years have ended Satan is loosed to lead a short-lived rebellion, the final conflict of evil with righteousness, whether this be understood as a spiritual battle of truth against error or in terms of political persecution. Satan’s rebellion is ended by the triumphal return of Jesus. The Second coming is followed by the general resurrection, the judgment and and the eternal state — heaven and hell” (The Millennial Maze, p. 72).
Inevitably, when the discussion of Premill versus Amill is broached, the text “Revelation 20:1-6” is invoked. This is unfortunate because that is not where the passage begins, so the amill proponent (and sadly the premill can do this as well) dives right in the middle of the passage ignoring what precedes it. The immediate passage begins back in Revelation 19:11. In other words the passage under consideration should not be “Revelation 20:1-6” but rather “Revelation 19:11-20:10.” Chapter breaks are not inspired. And in this case, the “Chapter 20” break is bifurcating the whole passage giving the impression that the subject begins at Chapter 20:1. This is one of the causes of confusion regarding the millennial debate.
This passage includes the destiny of the “three enemies of God” — the Beast, False prophet, and then the Dragon, Satan. It is essential to note that the event that precedes this destiny of the enemies of God is the victory of Christ and the armies of heaven over the nations (vv. 11-18) Then the result of this victory of what follows after is the doom and destiny of the three enemies of God.
So here is the outworking of this text: Christ and the armies of heaven have victory over the nations; the result of this is that both the beast and false prophet are thrown into the lake of fire; then, rather than Satan being thrown in the lake of fire along with the beast and false prophet, his doom is delayed one thousand years for the purpose of not deceiving the nations. So for the Amillennialist to place the starting point of the one thousand years at Christ’s first Coming is simply unintelligible and unwarranted to the text.
Speaking of the nations, it should be observed carefully that v. 15 states that the “nations” were struck down, and to assure that the nations do not rise up again, it is said that the purpose of Satan being bound for a thousand years is “to keep him from deceiving the nations.” Do you see the reasoning there? The Amill has it backwards, they claim that Satan is bound before Christ and the armies of heaven strike down the nations. That is an absurd and tortured reading of the text. The nations are struck down by Christ and the armies, and to assure that they do not rise up again during the one thousand years, Satan is bound.
This is clearly all in the context of the result of God’s judgment at his Second Coming. To read or infer that Satan’s binding happens at Christ’s First coming is demonstrably indicative of Tradition and is not handling the context rightly. Further, in this entire passage, the Greek has a set of consecutive “kais” (ands). In other words, there is no indication of an interruption in this text. The destiny of the three enemies of God are to be viewed as a unit, not to be disconnected with lifting the binding of Satan from the text and placing it at Christ’s First Coming.
So the next time you are in a discussion with an Amill and they begin the discussion at Revelation 20:1 challenge them and insist that they back up to where the context begins, which is in verse 19:11 with the victory over the nations and the two previous enemies of God.
Context, Context, Context.
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