Are you stirring up trouble again?LOL. These are good points to bring up that should make premilleialists at least think about their position. Whether they are corrected or not is up to the Spirit of God, but I think these are some of the very same things I was beginning to think on years ago when I dropped dispensationalism. Maybe the Lord will use those same thoughts to help others in this area.

1) Many Premills don’t know their position well enough to deeply consider critiques of their system. For example, I know many Premills who would look at the Sam Storms list above and wonder if they really believed that or not.

2) Premills who do know their position very rarely wish to engage anyone on their position, unless to bring up Revelation 20 and the ‘1000years’ or something. They are much like the Arminians who would rather throw out ‘proof’ texts instead of actually getting serious about exegesis. Whether it’s ‘John 3:16 buddy!’ or ‘Revelation 20 says 1000years six times!’, the absence of serious interaction is certainly noticable.

3) Most Premills hate reading critiques of their system, so I doubt any of them paid attention to this post –much less the comments. I would be more than happy to discuss, however, as always

SDG

What will we, as sinless, supernaturally powerful immortals, be doing for a 1,000 years on a sin-cursed earth? Ruling over the sinful earthlings? If that’s the case, I’d rather pass. I don’t want to watch over unregenerate sinners for thousand years and deal with their sin cursed problems. That sounds more like an annoying babysitting job.

That last comment of yours literally (pun intended) made me chuckle.

You might find the following link interesting: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/north7.html

I think that has a lot to do with it, but it is not the end all. There are men from all positions: post-, pre-, and Amill, who believe that Israel will be restored in the future. I am certainly not one of them, though I kind of see how they get there.

I’ll check out that link you posted, thanks.

–
Nathan

Here is an excellent example of how to write a book on this important subject/doctrine. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested on this subject. Even if you would not agree with the author’s view, I am sure you will be blessed by how the author has addressed this controversy in the history of the church.

http://wipfandstock.com/store/The_Millennial_Controversy_in_the_Early_Church

“These were more fair minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they recieved the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so.”
Acts 17:11 (NJKV)

“The belief in a literal millennium was an important aspect in the Christian eschatology of the ante-Nicene age. Most of the Asiatic Church Fathers derived their chiliastic convictions not only from the millennial passage of Revelation, but also from the Jewish concept of a Golden Age, as described by the Hebrew Prophets and further developed by Jewish apocalyptic writers. The chiliastic doctrine was challenged, on exegetical and philosophical grounds, by the Alexandrian school of theology in the third century. The Church’s elevation to imperial favor by Constantine was followed by a further shift in the understanding of the millennium. The chiliastic hope of a future earthly reign of Christ was substituted with the view of a realized millennium constituting the secular dominion of the Roman Church. The factor that most contributed to this change was Augustine’s spiritualized interpretation of the first resurrection. He understood it to mean a resurrection of those dead in sin, raised to spiritual life. In his book, ‘De civitate dei,’ he advanced the opinion that the kingdom of God was already set up at Christ’s first coming and nothing remained to be accomplished before the final judgment except the brief reign of the Antichrist. Thus the teaching of a literal millennium became discredited because it was perverted by some of its friends and misrepresented by its opponents.”

The Millennial Controversy in the Early Church
By Dr. Martin Erdmann

http://wipfandstock.com/store/The_Millennial_Controversy_in_the_Early_Church