Are Plain Sense Prophecies Routinely Ignored
in the Interest of Current Events and Futurist
Doctrinal Commitments and Expectations?
by Mark Mountjoy
Many American Christians and also Pentecostal, Fundamentalist, Millennarian, and Charismatic believers around the world are raised in a religious environment that strongly emphasizes the strict belief in Premillennialism and the literal interpretation of New Testament prophecies. This belief system teaches that all prophecies must be fulfilled exactly as they are written. However, it’s important to note that there are different interpretations of biblical prophecy, Pesher and allegory, which takes a more symbolic or spiritual approach to understanding these prophecies. Many mainstream Bible interpreters prefer Pesher and allegory because they believe that many cryptic prophecies should be interpreted in a non-literal sense, focusing more on the spiritual meaning rather than a strict fulfillment of specific events. However, because so many Messianic prophecies about Jesus of Nazareth were literally fulfilled—the place of his birth, the manner of his birth through a virgin, his healing ministry, his ride on a pair of donkeys, his betrayal by a confidante, his death sentence, his crucifixion, his hands and feet pierced, his death, burial, and resurrection—it is understandable why Fundamentalists in general and Premillennialists, specifically are taught to believe in the literal interpretation of prophecies. The study of literal instances biblical prophecy fulfillment involves a familiarity with Peshat—the ‘plain sense’ interpretation and this present essay will seek to elucidate when and how it is used in the New Testament. We will also highlight examples where Peshat is unjustifiably rejected in favor of a Pesher, a relative, or abstract interpretation that allows space or leeway to avoid or surpress the direct implications of New Testament eschatology.
Israel and the Church
The New Testament uses Pesher, not Peshat, to justify the Church and Christians. Dan. 2, and 7 and Matthew Christ’s Parable of the Vineyard make this abundantly clear. And Paul's explanation of the implications of God’s promises that all families of the earth would be blessed through the Seed of Abraham, which is Jesus Christ, hammer this point home. The New Testament, under no circumstances or any guise, supports the notion of a two economy salvation--one for the people of literal Israel and another one for Christians and the churches—Acts 4:12; Ephesians 2 he broke down the middle wall of partition and we are all one in Christ (Eph. 2 and 4; Gal. 3:27 cf. Heb.2:12). Since the Second Temple has been destroyed and the Cross is the only altar remaining Jews and any other race of people have but one choice if they want their sins forgiven. In the Jews’ case the rabbis have given them a choice: Reject Jesus and swing a chicken around one’s head three times while saying a prayer,, which arrangement for atonement is found nowhere in the Tanakh!zz Kapparot
The Throne of David
The New Testament uses Sod, not Peshat or Pesher to infer that the ultimate throne of the son of David is the right hand of God, not an earthly throne in Jerusalem of the Middle East. Matthew 19:28, 25:31; Jno. 17:24; Acts 3:21 and Revelation chapters 4—5 and 21—22 show that the throne of Jesus, the son of David (after the flesh) is in the city four-square, the new Jerusalem, even as we speak.0 5 7
The Land Promises
The New Testament uses Peshat to plainly state the forfeiture of the promised kingdom of God and its transfer of custody to ‘another nation’ because of repeated acts of violence and murder actions against the prophets and saints of God.1 As a result of the forfeiture, however, two things happen:
(1) The land promisenecessarily fades and is appropiately replaced by God’s promise to subject the entire world to the rule of his beloved Son, Jesus. This means that the emphasis of what God is doing is through the Church, not a state, through the Gospel, and not the Law, and by grace through faith, and not works.
(2) The forcible establishment of the State of Israel on 12 October A.D. 132 and the establishment of the modern State of Israel on 14 May 1948 are relevant and irrelevant to the bible prophecy timetable for the two different reasons: In the first place, God knew in antiquity that Israel would make that fatal mistake and rebel a final time against the rule of the Roman Empire and be disastrously destroyed--so the temporary Bar Kokhba state was relevant to prophecy in that critical sense. However, the modern state of Israel is a completely different story because it is not even pretending to want to reestablished a reinaissance of the Levitical Priesthood and neither would it have the authority, ability, or permission of God to do so. (Eph. 3:21)pp (While it is true that some ultra-conservative Jewish groups do want a Temple to be built and the ministries and services restored, there is no indication that the government of Israel has at any time shown any intentions of moving things in that daring and dangerous direction.
The land promise for 182 square miles of the Holy Land completely pales in comparison of the enormous territory that the kingdom of our Lord Jesus takes up when, at this time in history, the population of the people of God is fast approaching a staggering three billion people; a realm with its own challenges and problems that is rivaled only by Islam, India and China in its statistical size.bb
Non-nationalist Nature of
the Kingdom of God
First and second century Judæans were terribly preoccupied with Messianic prophecies and their supposed realization through political and militeristic nationalism. The New Testament, however, approaches expansion, victory, triumph, and rule in a completely counterintuitive way: Instead of hate love, instead of revenge, forgiveness, instead of being served, serve, instead of sin, righteousness, instead of fascism, self-control, instead of hopelessness, hope, instead of ingratitude, thankfulness, instead evil, godliness, whatever is true, just, of good report, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on these things. And it was chiefly through these teachings and by this means that Christianity spread in all directions, subduing the Roman Empire without any force or weapons or coercion (in spite of being on the receiving end of brutal persecution and oppression for almost three hundred years). Against such there is no law - Gal. 5:22-24.
The Second Coming
Literalist Bible prophecy enthusiastes today insist that they interpret New Testament predictions about the Second Coming by a literal hermaneutic, but do they? All prophecies of our Lord's return in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John circumscribe it as happening in the lifetime of the Apostles, and the book of Acts depicts it as threatening to overtake the generation of the apostles' contemporaries. Moreover, all Pauline epistles except, of course, Philemon, insist and guarantee that it will happen in a context consistent with the milieu of the Second Jewish Commonwealth. (Acts 2:40; 17:30-31; 1 Cor. 7:29-31; 1 Thess. 5:1-4, 23-24, cf. 2 Thess.2 cf. Heb. 10:1) If the Second Coming is removed, displaced, or hijacked out of the literal generation in which it was promised to happen, does that not mean it is been spiritualized and relativized?
The Temple of Doom
By a strict hermenuetic of Peshat the Second Temple would be the so-called Temple of doom—not a Third Temple of past or present Jewish ambition. The New Testament, in three places in the Gospels alone, names the Second Temple as that place where the abomination of desolation would take place in the days of the Apostles and earliest Christians (Matt. 24, Mark 13, Luke 21). This expectation, however, is not confined to the teachings of Jesus, but appears in such places as Acts 6, 2 Cor. 5:1-4, 2 Thess. 2:1-12, and Rev. chapters 11 through 19. Under no circumstances does the New Testament intepret the Second Coming as an event that will overtake a Pesher of the Second Temple—which Temple’s destruction fell with finality and suddeness in the autumn of A.D.70 after nearly ten years of spooky, bizarre, and anomalous events happening both in, around, and above it.2
The Tribulation: Acts 14:22
Like the Second Coming and the Second Temple, the tribulation forecast by the New Testament is intentionally intangled in first century current events: the Theocratic Jewish government’s persistent and unyielding crackdown on the Christian phenomenon all over Judæa and the Diaspora. This is not something New Testament authors invisioned as happening after time and circumstances skip or pass over centuries and eons, to finally happen more than 20 centuries outside of the life of those who nervously anticipated such hardships. The Olivet Discourse predicts the Pella flight of the Christians out of Jerusalem--which happened in a short thirty-seven years.
The people of the Church in Jerusalem were commanded by an oracle given by revelation before the war to those in the city who were worthy of it to depart and dwell in one of the cities of Perea which they called Pella. To it those who believed on Christ traveled from Jerusalem, so that when holy men had altogether deserted the royal capital of the Jews and the whole land of Judaea…3 (3Matt. 24:16-21 cf. Eusebius’, Ecclesiastical History 3,5,3)
This heresy of the Nazoraeans exists in Beroea in the neighbourhood of Coele Syria and the Decapolis in the region of Pella and in Basanitis in the so-called Kokaba (Chochabe in Hebrew). From there it took its beginning after the exodus from Jerusalem when all the disciples went to live in Pella because Christ had told them to leave Jerusalem and to go away since it would undergo a siege. Because of this advice they lived in Perea after having moved to that place, as I said.
— Epiphanius, Panarion 29,7,7-8
On the contrary, the relentless fiery darts of the Zealots never ceased to plague the Christians whereever they were found, till at last these foes found themselves consummed by flames, or drowned in stormy seas or lakes or rivers or else carried captive to the Roman mines or sacrificed in arenas to fight ferocious lions and bears and leopards. Deal briefly with S. 144,00 S.T. MOB, B. DOJ chart,
The Resurrection of the Dead
A Peshat intepretation of the New Testament doctrine of the resurrection of the dead will recognize at least three things:
1 Timing--immediately before, during, and after the destruction of Jerusalem and at the end of the existence of the Hebrew state.
2 Nature--sown a natural body and raised a spiritual body. It does not correspond to the resurrection of our Lord from the dead. The people were killed and their bodies given to the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, but their essential persons stood before God to be judged (Rev. 19, cf. 20:15 cf. Ez. 38-39). There would be NO bodies at all in the Valley of Hamon Gog if the fallen troops of Israel were to be raised physically to face God.
3 Events--the Scriptures depict the time of the resurrection as happening as early as A.D.66 and as late as A.D.135/136. This comports with the prophecies of Daniel 12 that foretold Daniel would stand in his lot at the time when the power of the holy people was scattered.
In order to circumvent the above material, Fundamentalist interpreters are forced to introject a hypothetical parathesis into the period of time between the days of the Apostles and our time now—but this cannot be the solution if they insist that the Peshat interpretation absolutely must rule the day. They cannot have it both ways when, for example, if a Peshat interpretation was really given it was absolutely imperative that it come true and an interpretation that failed to transpire was never given multiple chances over countless centuries to prove itself infallible. What is happening in Fundamentalist hermenuetics is neither Peshat or Pesher but a naked series of prophetic speculations about so-called future impending events that have zero basis of any Bible promise or assurance whatsoever.
Rez passages in the NT chart here.
Time Statements and Audience Relevance
Matthew 10:23, 11:16, 12,, 16, 21, 22, 23, 24, and 26. The Millennium here too.Matthew 12:43-45 constraints. . ..
The Prophet Like Moses
The Ultimate Oblivion
The prophet like Moses and the ultimate oblivion: Acts 3:22, Romans 9:27 and Revelation 20:7-15.
The ‘Last Days’ and Waiting on the End (The situation with New Testament expectations from this distance in time has the illusion that Jesus failed when in reality he accomplished everything he promised to do in one hundred year’s time!) The interpretation of the Israeli State born in 14 May 1948 as the fulfillment of Bible prophecy in our modern era is invalid because an actual fulfillment of this kind must include the restoration and operation of a Temple of God--which services are obviously and notoriously absent and missing from any present scenario in the Holy Land in the past almost eight decades. The state is only a secular parlamentary government that, like any other political arrangement on earth, has a right to exist to defend itself from all threats, real or perceived.
Summary
Israel, the Church, and the throne of David, land promise of the Holy Land versus the greater expanse of the whole earth and non-nationalist nature of the kingdom of God. The Second Coming, Second Temple and tribulation interconnected and fixed into a first century circumstantial window that are reinforced by trib, mob, doj, and time statements, the prophet like moses and the ultimate doom--all these things mean a present ‘last days’ is incorrect and people ‘waiting for the end’ will ultimately be disappointed and disillusioned.
Conclusion
The claim is demonstrably incorrect the Fundamentalist theology of Dispensational Premillennial eschatology is following a Peshat (plain sense) path of interpreting Bible prophecies in the New testament. On the contrary, we have shown, again and again, that passages, chapters, and verses are glossed over, overlooked, or relativized or completely ignored in favor of a decidely incorrect interpretation that attempts to put the best face on current events and make them appear to support the idea that events foretold for the last days of the Second Jewish Commonwealth, which began in 515 B.C. and went out of existance by 20 February A.D.136, are happening now may be persuasive and plausible, but the results of these beliefs are ultimately misleading and destined for disappointment. The New Testament has a fixed and unchanging message: Redemption from sins, iniquities, and transgressions and the promise of eternal salvation can only be found through the blood of Jesus of Nazareth because of his death, burial, and resurrection; any other message is a different Gospel and is condemned by the anathemas of the Holy Scriptures. We, moreover, are not free to add or delete what has been vouchsafed to the churches in the book of Revelation and a careful study of its message in light of the late civilization it describes will prove to anyone who will investigate that it was the Semitic world of the Scribes, Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Zealots and Sicarii who saw fit to blaspheme, deny, and rebel against the Gospel when it was first revealed during the halcyon days of the early Roman Empire but troubled twilight years of the Second Jewish Commonwealth more than two thousand years ago. A theory that cannot be disproven is. . .
Endnotes
1 Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. (Ps. 2:8)
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