Originally published in "The Lord's Coming Herald & Wesleyan Bible Prophecy Advocate," Fall Edition 1997
Th Purpose For Christ's Second Coming
Wesleyan fundamentalists believe that the purpose for
Christ's second coming is NOT to set up an earthly kingdom of old covenant
description for racial Jews, but rather to resurrect and judge all men on the
basis of that one standard of true righteousness already fully revealed in the
Christian gospel.
Where is the proverbial "setting up" terminology of
modern dispensational premillennialism used in the New Testament for anything
relating to Christ's second coming? The New Testament does not say a word about
Christ "setting up" anything when He returns! What it does say that He most
certainly will do, however, is to "deliver up" His messianic kingdom of
redemption that was set up long ago (I Cor. 23:26).
In a nutshell, Wesleyan fundamentalists believe in: (1) a
general resurrection of the dead; and, (2) the universal judgment of all
mankind, based on the revealed gospel standard of true holiness in heart and
life. Such was John Wesley's doctrine of the second coming, and, we can be sure,
the doctrine, also, of the Holy Bible.
The post-tribulational amillennial eschatology of true
Wesleyan fundamentalism is a simple, satisfying scheme, if we moderns are but
able to jettison the excess baggage of fantasy and fabrication that a great
revival of "Jewish fables" during the religious upheavals of the nineteenth
century has succeeded in heaping upon the Western churches.
The old a-millennial Protestant reformers saw "Babylon" in the
degenerate Western Christendom of their day. And one can only wonder now, if, in
the Judeo-Christian West, where the false teachings of dispensational
premillennialism have so prevailed as to have turned the true biblical religion
of the Christ into a virtual "Babylon" of ideological chaos and confusion,
the times have really changed!
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