Status Updates From 10 Popular Prophecy Myths E...

There are no signs that will indicate when Jesus is to come and there is not a single prophetic event which must come before the rapture of the saints.

No one knows the day, the year, the generation when Jesus will return. He may come today. Praise His name, I would be glad to see Him; but there is no way for any honest Bible student to foretell whether Jesus will come soon or after hundreds of years.

Date-setting for the return of the Saviour has always been a heresy which turns out with embarrassment.

How foolish to think that the secret of the date of Christ’s return is given in the book of Daniel and that Jesus and none of His disciples knew it!

How it appeals to foolish human pride for a man to think, “In my superior wisdom I have figured out something others do not know!”

Instead of rejoicing that they were to be filled with the Spirit for soul-winning, they immediately jumped to the hopeful conclusion that Christ referred to His return, the restoration of David’s throne and the future independence of Israel.

Do you ever find Christians more concerned about the technical details of prophecy, more concerned about speculation as to the time of Christ’s return than about soul-winning? Well, the twelve apostles before they were Spirit-filled had the same carnal viewpoint...

One cannot hold to the imminency of Christ’s return, that is, that He may come at any moment, that He might have come at any time since Pentecost as far as any one then could know, and that Christians, all through the ages, were right to expect Christ to come at any moment, and to watch for His coming, and to believe at the same time that certain signs must come first.

The defeatism of Christians, who are not bold in preaching nor bold in prayer because they believe that Christian work is less effective than ever before, that the gospel does not bring the results that it did before, and that great revivals are less likely than ever before, is tragic indeed.

Similar to the Roman Catholic Church that read into the word ekklēsia their traditional understanding of the word “church,” dispensationalists read back into the word “church” their newly formulated dispensational view.

Because dispensationalists did not make a formal study of the translation issue, they developed a foreign understanding of ekklēsia that had more to do with the state of the church in the 18th century then with the actual meaning of the word.

Whether translated “church” or “congregation,” neither Tyndale nor the ecclesiastical powers of his day had any notion of the modern-day dispensational understanding of ‘church.’

This hierarchical understanding of ekklēsia did not stop with protests against Tyndale’s more accurate translation of the word. One of the Rules to be Observed in the Translation of the King James Bible required the following: “The old Ecclesiastical Words to be kept, viz. the Word Church not to be translated Congregation.”

As William Stafford writes, it was understood by the laity and church officials that “it was the clergy who were the ecclesia, the church.” But as Tyndale saw it, “the church was not the clergy, nor was it the hierarchical, legal, and ceremonial edifice sustaining the clergy, but rather the congregation of all who responded to the word of God.”

Tyndale’s most pernicious “attack” on the Church was his insistence that ekklesia should be translated “congregation” rather than “church”..

For his efforts, Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake in 1536 for defying church authority, opposing the Church by promoting doctrines such as Sola Scriptura, justification by faith alone, the denial of purgatory, questioning the number of sacraments, and translating particular words that could lead the laity to believe that the Church’s authority was limited...

It’s my contention that the use of “church” instead of “congregation” or “assembly” has gone a long way to create the myth of an Israel-Church distinction because it was viewed as a new thing rather than an extension of what the Old Testament had made obvious, both in the Hebrew and its Greek translation, the Septuagint.

Given the way dispensationalists continually read the Bible through the lens of modern-day events and refuse to acknowledge the time texts and the contemporary context of so many passages, the Bible can be made to say almost anything.

Notice the date of Seneca’s writing—A.D. 58—just twelve years before the destruction of Jerusalem and twenty-eight years after Jesus’ prophecy about earthquakes. After A.D. 70, earthquakes no longer have the same prophetic significance.