Episode 87: A Response to John Bevere's 'The King is Coming'

Bible Prophecy Under the Microscope-Episode 87

Gary responds to a recent bestselling book by author John Bevere called “The King is Coming.”

What Jesus declared on the Mount of Olives and what Matthew records for us was a prophecy about the future of Israel’s then-living generation. Jesus spoke to His present audience around AD 33, and the temple was destroyed in AD 70. The destruction of the temple was future, but only a future that was a generation in length! It’s surprising that Donald Green, a critic of a first-century fulfillment of Matthew 24, could write the following: “A reader previously unacquainted with preterist writings will no doubt wonder how they could claim past fulfillment of the Olivet Discourse, when so much of its language seems to refer to the future.”

The entire [Olivet Discourse] prophecy was about the future, a future that was in the generational sights of that first-century generation and is now fulfilled! Green makes several unsubstantiated charges. I found this one to be the most outrageous: “when the ordinary sense of a passage in that section of the Olivet Discourse seems future, the preterist understands it to be using figurative language to refer to a now-past event.” This is absurd. The entire discourse was about the future when Jesus answered His disciples regarding their questions about the destruction of the temple and the end of the age (Matt. 24:2-3). There is nothing figurative about earthquakes, wars and rumors of wars, famines, false prophets, false christs, a great tribulation, and fleeing to literal mountains in literal Judea. Green has almost nothing to say about how preterists take a non-figurative interpretive approach to all these prophetic elements in the many books and articles that have been written on the subject over the centuries. The reason preterists take a non-figurative approach is because the Bible does. When a symbolic or “figurative” approach is followed in particular passages, it’s because the Bible follows such an approach. The Bible is the best interpreter of itself.

Wars and Rumors of Wars

A first-century interpretation of the Olivet Discourse was once common in commentaries and narrative-style books that describe the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. There is also a history of skeptics who turn to Bible prophecy and claim Jesus was wrong about the timing of His coming at “the end of the age” and the signs associated with it. A mountain of scholarship shows that the prophecy given by Jesus was fulfilled in exacting detail when He said it would: before the generation of those to whom He was speaking passed away.

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Gary responds to a recent bestselling book by author John Bevere called “The King is Coming.” While he makes several good points in his book, Bevere also falls for the “chicken little theology” that claims the sky is falling and Jesus is coming “any day now.” Gary clears the confusion by pointing to what the Bible itself actually says.

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