A great read I’d highly recommend for understanding Eschatology. He develops a theology of the Kingdom from a historic, pre-millennial perspective. Here’s a summary of chapter one: What is the Kingdom of God?

1 – A present Spiritual Reality.
2 – What people experience when they give their lives to the rule of the Spirit.
3 – An inheritance that God will fully give his people at a point in the future.
4 – A realm of power or dominion into which true followers of Jesus have entered.
5 – Anywhere the king is present and his subjects recognize his authority.
6 – An inner redemptive blessing experienced only by spiritual re-birth.
7 – The rule of God.

Why is the kingdom so important? In order to understand how and why God will bring the present age to a close, one has to have some starting point of what the rule of God in our world is like. The apocalypse is all about the handing over of this age to the next by the power of God on his time-table. It really should be thought of as the in-breaking from the future into our world as we know it now in order to fulfill the plan of God.

Send me your questions! Let’s get this thing rolling now.

Here’s my first shot at an eschatology time-line. This comes from a great book I’ve been Nordicizing called The Gospel of the Kingdom by G.E. Ladd. Of all the numerous end-times schemes, this one actually seems sane to me (eschatology timelines get crazy real fast). We’ll explain it on Sunday at Gathering when we begin our series called Apocalypse.

I offer this sketch to preview the conversation we’ll have this week. The best starting point in my opinion in talking about the end times is the overlap between “this age”…and “the age to come”. See Chapter III – The Kingdom is Today. Ladd’s book is so refreshing because he keeps it simple.

When Jesus came announcing the Kingdom of God, he started to connect the time frame human history has always happened in (the bottom line) with the age to come in which the Kingdom of God overtakes all human history and the rule of Jesus is made complete.

The age we live in now – is a time of transition – a huge overlap let’s call it between the world as we know it and the world to come in which all things will be made new. The first half of that overlapping history is called the church age and the second half of that time scripture calls the millennium.

Enough for now. We’ll add more to the diagram as we talk about it from week to week at Gathering. I’ll try to get you a few more posts before Sunday comes and start defining some helpful terms. I’ll show you the book in the next post.

PS – you can ignore the stamp.