Listen or read the following transcript as R. C. Sproul speaks on the topic of End Times in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
The following unedited transcript is provided by Beluga AI.
All right, the question is about eschatology. That’s your doctrine of the last time, you know, the future work of Christ, when He comes back, that sort of thing that people are so interested in. You know, the Left Behind series sold more copies of Christian literature of any book I’ve known or any series of Christian books that I’ve ever heard of. They were done in collaboration between Jenkins and Tim LaHaye.
And then Tim LaHaye left Jenkins, signed a $40 million contract, I believe, with Doubleday, right, and so Jenkins is coming out with his new book called Left Way Behind. But they’re all different kinds, they’re all different schools of thought with respect to eschatology.
Eschatology is the hardest section of biblical interpretation there is because so much of that prophecy is couched in highly imaginative, or what you would call apocalyptic language, highly symbolical. How do you know when it’s figurative? How do you know when it’s symbolic? And how do you know when it’s just normal, historical, indicative language? That’s the difficulty.
And you have the different schools of thought. You have the historic pre-millennial view, you have the post-millennial view, and there are different kinds of that. You have the all-millennial view, which is the majority report in the Reformed faith. You have the dispensational view, which is far and away the majority report today, although it’s barely 100 years old, you know, it’s a joint income lately on the scene of church history, but through the Schofield Bible and the Bible colleges, it just swept the evangelical world.
Then you have full preterism and partial preterism. Do you know what the difference is? Full preterists believe that all the prophecy in the New Testament and the Bible with respect to the future of the church was fulfilled in 70 AD. Nothing more to happen, okay? Except heaven and so on. Partial preterists says that the significant amount of Jesus’ predictions with respect to the future did take place in 70 AD, but He still is coming back, there’s still the resurrection of the dead, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Okay?
Now, of those positions that I’ve just mentioned, there’s only two of them that I’m sure enough to bet my life are not the biblical view. Just two of them. And the rest of them are all options for me for one reason or another. The two that I see no basis for whatsoever are first of all, dispensationalism. I think dispensationalism is flat out wrong. I did the Gifford Lecture Series at Dallas, you know, and they asked me from the floor why I wasn’t a dispensationalist. And I smiled and said, because I think it’s goofy. They all laughed, we remained friends, but that’s what I think.
And then there’s full preterism is the other one that I’m convinced is wrong. And yet the full preterists, because I’ve defended portions of partial preterism in my books, have tried to claim me as a full preterist. Don’t even listen to that when somebody tells you. It’s just like a guy I talked to the day before yesterday. He said, I heard two things about you. I said, so what? He says, I heard you moved to Florida so you could play golf. Well, maybe if I thought it would help my golf game, that might’ve been motivation, but actually I moved to Florida for completely different reasons because I was already spending four months a year in the South during the winter. So I was already playing golf 12 months a year. Had nothing to do with it.
The second was they heard that we had a law at St. Andrews that women have to cover their heads. They have to wear hats in church on Sunday morning. Look around. So where do people make up this stuff? You know, and then the other one is that I’m a full preterist. Don’t believe any of those three rumors. They’re all false.
But how do you know whether there’s apocalyptic literature or not? You take the case in my book, The Last Days According to Jesus, dealing with the Olivet Discourse and dealing with the most difficult portion of that is Jesus’ statement about this generation will not pass away until all of these things, ponta tabla, shall come to pass. And it’s that passage more than any other single passage that the higher critics have used to attack the trustworthiness of the Bible and the trustworthiness of Jesus because they say, look, 70 AD came and went. Yes, the temple was destroyed. Yes, Jerusalem was destroyed. Yes, the Jews were dispersed, as He said, but He didn’t return. The moon didn’t turn to dripping blood. The heavens didn’t roll up and all that stuff. And he said, so Jesus was wrong.
You know, Bertrand Russell wrote, Why I’m not a Christian. That’s the reason he gave. Now, I looked at that and I said, all right, what the dispensationalists do and the other millennial views with the Olivet Discourse is they say those statements that Jesus said would attend His return at that time about the heavens, the perturbations in the heaven, these astronomical upheavals and catastrophic things like this, that all of that language is to be taken, quote, literally. But when He said, “This generation will not pass away,” they spiritualized that, okay? They’re asking the question, they asked Jesus in normal English or normal Aramaic, plain language, “When are you coming back?” And He answers it. He says, “I can’t tell you the day or now, but I can give you the general thing. It’s gonna be within this generation,” which is within a 40 year period, okay?
Now, I look at that and I say, part of this has to be understood figuratively. Part of it has to be taken literally or there’s no possible way to make sense out of the Olivet Discourse. And so your question is, how do you know which way you take what? Well, you do your homework on prophetic literature in the Old Testament.
And when you see, for example, when the prophets are going to predict the destruction of Sidon and so on, other places like that, what kind of language do they use? They talk about astronomical perturbations. They say that when God pours out His wrath upon a city or upon a culture, they couch that in highly figurative language of divine judgment, which includes shaking the heavens. Got it?
So I’m saying that aspect, if we interpret the Bible by the Bible and we say this language here is exactly the same as the Old Testament prophets, which was then taught to be fulfilled in real history, then I would expect this to be the portion that’s figurative, not the simple, straightforward timeframe references. That’s how I do it.
But I mean, again, I could be wrong on that. There’s a whole lot of people that are going to be wrong when this thing gets, some people say that in the final analysis, they’re pro-millennial, you know, we’re for it.
