Well, welcome to Engage the Faith Live Q&A. My name is Clark Ray. I'm one of the team members here at Sattler College working on thehistoricfaith.com. Today, we will be talking with David Bercot about one of his most recent courses, Future Things. First of all, I want to say thank you to everybody in the community for submitting questions. We got a lot of good questions. It really helps us have an engaging conversation when everybody participates in the questions.
There will be an opportunity for follow-up questions at the end of the Q&A. So if you have any follow-up questions specifically about what we talk about today, go ahead and submit them in the chat to Timothy Miller. He'll be bringing those all together for us for the end of the Q&A. And so with that, I think we'll go ahead and get started. I want to thank David Bercot for joining us again today from Scroll Publishing.
He's the author of several books like Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up and Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs. And he recently, if all of you don't know that he recently released a new commentary on the gospel according to Matthew, which is kind of a first of its kind from him. And I highly recommend picking it up. I haven't finished it yet, but I've enjoyed what I've gotten through so far. It's very readable and lots of engaging and convicting material there. So David, are you ready to get started?
I'm ready, Clark. Great. So before we get started with community questions, I just want to ask you what inspired you to take an interest, at least enough interest in prophecy and eschatology to create lessons and teachings about it. Probably two big factors, as probably most of the listeners know, I grew up Jehovah's Witness, and that's their big focus is on prophecy. And of course, they've been wrong every single time on all of their prophecies, all of their dates, everything.
They're continually having to change it. And when I left the Jehovah's Witnesses, my wife and I joined an evangelical church a few years after leaving. And of course, they were big into prophecy and that, but they had a totally different outlook than Jehovah's Witnesses. And most of the things they were saying have obviously not happened either. So my interest in prophecy isn't that I think I've got the answers to things.
It's more from a viewpoint, a cautionary viewpoint, that let's not get so wrapped up in it that we make that our main focus. Our focus needs to be on our walk with Jesus Christ. He wants us to be watching and to be ready for His return. But through all of the centuries, probably most Christians thought it would be coming in their lifetime or soon after their lifetime. And that has not happened.
And so I think we just need to be very cautious about that in getting too wrapped up in what is happening around us and not focusing on our own walk. Now, the other part of eschatology concerning what happens to us when we die and what will happen after Christ returns and that sort of thing. Again, Jehovah's Witnesses have some very different perspectives on that. And so I was very interested what the historic faith was. What did they believe about life after death and that sort of thing.
And so that was very big for me because of Jehovah's Witnesses having such a unique view and then the evangelicals having a different view. And then I discovered the early church had a view different from both of them. So anyway, that's why I've done a number of courses dealing with those subjects. That's very good. So we'll go ahead and start with questions from the community. Our first question comes from Richard Earhart.
He says, I heard from another teacher that the early Christians held different views on hell, Gehenna. Some believed in universal salvation, for example, Origen and Clement of Alexandria. Some believed in annihilation, for example, Irenaeus, and others in never-ending punishment, for example, Tertullian. Was the third view the most commonly held one? And were there others who believed in annihilation or universal salvation? OK. This was an excellent question, Richard.
I assume are you the one on the screen I'm seeing? Of course, you can't see what I'm seeing. Different Richard. Richard, okay. He might be here, but not the one with the video on. Yeah, he's here. Richard Earhart is here. Okay. Well, Richard, I had to wonder if you had hacked into my computer. It's interesting. I prepared a message on that exact topic. It must have been three or four years ago. I don't remember if I recorded it. I think I got it recorded.
And then I was testing the waters a little bit with different friends. And I saw that this was going to be hugely controversial. And I get wrapped up in enough controversy. And so I thought, you know, I might just shelve that one. I don't know if the fallout's going to be worth what people will gain. And I may still publish it yet. I don't know. I wish people could discuss subjects like that without getting so upset. But your question is right on. I mean, you've totally identified exactly what it is.
And I would say probably 80% of the early Christian writers seem to have had the view of eternal conscious torment. Now, I realize I need to go back and read them because they may not be saying that. They may only be saying that the fire will be eternal. And I'm going to examine those quotes again. But that was the impression I got from reading them. Particularly the Latin writers seem to all hold to that view.
Origen is fairly unique in that he believed in torment, but he didn't believe it was going to be anything literal in the way of torture produced by God. He felt the torture would be coming from the fact that we are cut off from heaven and that realization that because of our sins, that we are cut off from God and that we are going to be living in that state and the focus on what we have done. But he also felt like he and Clement of Alexandria that God's punishments are never for retribution's sake.
They are to correct us. And so he held out non-dogmatically that perhaps God would be able to win everyone back over many thousands of years that people would repent and come back to him. And eventually you'd have restoration of everyone. He's accused of saying Satan will be restored, and he very vehemently denied that he ever taught that. So that was his view. It was definitely a very small minority view.
Although a lot in the Eastern Orthodox, a lot of the Eastern Christians after him would have followed his view that it's not literal torment. Whether they not very many picked up the universal restoration aspect, but the fact that it's not literal torment that God does not do that. Origen made the statement which certainly should give us all food for thought. He said, " People believe things about God that they wouldn't believe about the worst human being.
" And you know I think we need to reflect on that when we think about hell. And then the third view would be that there will be punishment, but that it will lead to the eventual annihilation of the sinner. That they will be consciously punished, but not eternal. The fire is eternal in the sense that their annihilation will be eternal. Irenaeus seems to say that it's not always clear. You can read this passage and he seems to definitely be saying that.
And then somewhere else, he seems to be saying something different. So I would not be dogmatic that that is what Irenaeus taught, but certain things he says lends itself to that. Theophilus and his work to Autolycus, he expressed the view, if I'm remembering correctly, I'm having to go by memory on a lot of this, that he said the Spirit is eternal, the flesh is not, and the soul is somewhere in between. It's neither immortal nor mortal.
And so he had the view that it could be annihilated and would eventually be annihilated. And it's interesting, he was from the east, would represent like Syrian, the view east of, say, the middle of what we know as the Middle East, east of Israel. And the whole Far Eastern Church, the Church of the East that is still around today, that would be their view. They do not hold to eternal conscious torment. But at some point, the punishment ends in eternal annihilation.
And those who have been very wicked will be punished for a longer period and differently than those who have sinned more in ignorance, but yet did not come to salvation. So I don't know of a fourth view beyond those. Your question nailed it perfectly. There were those three views. And the majority was the conscious eternal punishment, or at least I think that's what they are saying. And reading Jesus, it would be easy to come to that conclusion. I think that would be a natural reading.
And yet, I think the only place in the Scriptures where it talks about being tormented forever and ever is Satan and his demons. They're in Revelation. The others are thrown into the lake of fire, which is the second death, which will never be extinguished. But whether their torment is eternal or not is open to question. I'm somewhat agnostic on it. Those are the three views. What will happen is going to be what will happen.
If the eternal conscious torment stumbles you, then there were those other views that were not viewed as heretical by the early church, but there never was a doctrinal statement of the early church about eternal punishment. The apostles ' creed only requires us to believe in eternal life for the righteous and to believe that there will be a day of judgment, but it does not require one to believe in eternal conscious punishment. But it doesn't forbid the belief in it either. So anyway.
Yeah, I really appreciate that. I think what you highlighted there in the beginning is the most important part of this, from my perspective, the most important part of this discussion is being able to have these discussions openly and honestly for the sake of seeking truth rather than for the sake of dividing or driving people away. Yeah, so I really appreciate that spirit behind your exploration of these topics. And I think that's good food for thought. The next question we have here is from Grant Miller.
He asks, " In Revelation 14, are the 144,000 literally virgins or is this figurative? Are they the same 144,000 described in Revelation 7? " OK, when we get to Revelation, I wish we had a lot more writings from the early church on that subject because we would, I think, all be so curious how they were seeing everything. And we do have some, but it's very incomplete. Now, concerning the 144,000, several people do comment on that.
They seem to all understand the part of being virgins to be literal, because there was a lot of emphasis in the early church about people who would be voluntary eunuchs for the kingdom of God. Jesus had mentioned that. They don't mean physical eunuchs, but living a celibate life, never marrying, being a virgin because you have chosen that as a way of life to focus your life on Jesus Christ. And you had lots of men and you had lots of women. It was a very common thing.
It's something I see in the New Testament, but it got so out of hand in the Catholic Church that the Protestants totally rebelled against it. And so in our circles, Anabaptist, evangelical, whatever, you just don't find it at all. I mean, there are people who aren't married, but usually it's because they just never happen to get married, not because they chose a vocation of I'm going to be a virgin for Jesus Christ, and there's no support in the church for that.
So they understood that, the ones who comment on it as being literal. But yeah, we get into issues with that because I don't think anyone took all three parts. There's three parts. There's the number 144, 000. Is that number literal? And then is it literal virgins? And then number three, is it literal Israelites from these different tribes of Israel? And they seem, in general, the ones who comment to take the virginity part literal. The number 144,000, not necessarily literal. They're ambiguous on that.
And then the Israelite part, I don't think anyone took literal, that they believed that speaking about spiritual Israel. But of course, all of revelation is figurative. And yet parts of it seem to be literal. And so for all of us, on every verse, it's always hard to know, yeah, what do you take literal? What do you take figurative? And there's certainly no dogmatic answer from the early church. But I think I can say definitely the virginity part they took literally.
You mentioned something there that Grant Miller also asked. I had it later in the question list, but I thought since you kind of touched on it briefly, I might go ahead and throw that on here as well. And you might not have anything more to add than what you've already said, but are the Israelites in Revelation 7 the actual descendants of Jacob's sons, if it's only talking about the church, it seems contrary to specify that there are 12,000 from each tribe. Right.
So like I said, there's only a few who commented on it, and they all believe it was figurative Origen. He commented, he said, of course, if you're taking the virgins literally, he said, there's not even 144,000 Jewish Christians, period, let alone 144,000 virgin Jewish Christians. And it certainly didn't grow from there. Now, of course, what you had in the New Testament, we don't know for sure. Some of the things that might indicate it's figurative. But again, I mean, what it's going to be, it's going to be.
I mean, it's something I don't feel very strongly about either way. Those 12 tribes, I'd have to say it would be ironic that there's exactly 12,000 from those tribes because the tribe of Judah is the one that most of them come from. It's why we call them Jews because the vast majority are from the tribe of Judah. And so it would be odd if it's literal Israelites that it just comes out exactly equal from each tribe.
Well, I say each tribe, if you notice when you go through the list of tribes, the tribe of Dan isn't listed. So are we to believe that no Israelites from the tribe of Dan got saved or at least are included in the 144,000. And then it lists the tribe of Joseph, which there wasn't a tribe of Joseph. You have Ephraim and Manasseh. Manasseh is listed, but not Ephraim. So yeah, there are a little bit of problems if you take the tribes literal. But yeah, why he lists it that way? If it's figurative, good question. Yeah.
All right, I think we'll move on from that question. Thanks, Grant, for those questions. The next one's from Mark Zer. I'm hoping I'm pronouncing these names correctly. For Mark Zer, some of the early Christians wrote the millennium would begin at 500 AD. Wasn't their prediction proven false? Why did they think they knew when it would be when Jesus said, " Concerning that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but my Father only.
" So there's kind of two questions here about the millennium would begin at 500 AD. Was the prediction false? He seems to see some early Christians claiming that. And then why did they feel justified in making claims like that? Okay, yeah, excellent question. All of these were so good. I was really impressed by the quality of the questions. Can I just briefly say hi to Boaz and Rebecca, they're friends of mine? I just see them there on the screen. It's such a pleasure seeing them.
So the question and I'm not sure if this came from your own reading of the early church or if this was from a book. It is almost accurate, but it's a little bit misleading that they said the end would come in the year 500 AD. And that's because the division of AD and BC as we know it didn't even come about until after the year 500. So yeah, no one ever said, oh, in the year 500 AD, this is going to end. Because like you say, that chronological division didn't happen until after that.
And it didn't become well-known until around the year 800 or so during the Middle Ages. But it is based on something that is accurate. And that is, I think it's Hippolytus. I'm going by memory on a lot of these. He worked up a chronology, and he calculated that Jesus was born in the year 5,500 after the creation of Adam. Now, it was a very common view among the early Christians. I'm not sure what it is based on, but it is so widespread.
I wonder if it was something the Jews in general thought and that was carried over from the Jews, I'm not totally sure, but it was a very common view that just like there were six days of creation, that the existence of man would be, well, or seven days, the seventh day being a time of rest, it would be the same with man. Seven days, each of which would be 1,000 years based on what Peter says about 1,000 years is as a day with God.
So a very wide number of them felt that after man had been here 6,000 years, which would be like six days in using 1,000 years for a day, that then the end of man's rule would come, and then the last 1,000 years would be the millennium. It was never dogma that you had to believe. I don't know that everyone believed that, but many did. And so Hippolytus, like I say, his chronology then would have had this happening 500 years after Jesus was born.
That doesn't necessarily mean 500 AD as we know it, because he wasn't working with that same exact set of calculations. Now, as far as I know, Hippolytus is the only one who calculated Jesus being born in that year. And if any of you have read different, you can correct me on that. So, of course, when he was writing that, that would have been around the year 200. So that was something 300 years in the future.
So it was nothing like the date setting, time setting that we see today that people haven't all worked out and it's going to come in this year and that. As I shared at the beginning, you know I went through that as a Jehovah's Witness. But then there are plenty of evangelicals who do that too. And you know the end was going to come in, what was it? 1988, I think. Yeah, ' 88, I think somebody had predicted. And then several dates after that, there's always date setting.
None of the early Christians that I know of outside of the Montanists were predicting that in their lifetime. But they did have that concept that several centuries in the future, the end would come. Now, of course, Jesus said no one knows the day or the hour. He didn't say the year. But like I say, other than Hippolytus, I don't know that anyone even tried to calculate the year. I think the lesson we can learn from it is be very careful when you're dealing with chronology and prophecy.
The quote from the early church that stuck in my mind when I read them first 35 years ago, it was from Irenaeus. And he said, " Prophecy is best understood once it has been fulfilled. " And to me, that's something we ought to have posters and stick that in every church and have it on everyone's walls, that you know no one understood those prophecies about Jesus until he came and died, and then he opened people's eyes.
And then, oh, you can see all throughout the Old Testament, there's all these prophecies, but no one understood them ahead of time. They all were fulfilled in a different way than people were expecting. And so I think it will be with his second return. I think it's maybe if it's just a hobby to delve in chronology and prophecy, I think that's fine. But when we start taking it overly seriously, I think we can get wrapped up in that and lose our focus on our daily living with Christ.
Yeah, I was going to ask, I think you already answered it. Is this something that was a hobby horse of very many early Christians, or has this been accelerated in more recent years? Yeah, no, it wasn't. It was nothing like you see today. You can read those quotes and get a very wrong perspective, because those few quotes, you know seven or eight, are out of you know tens of thousands of pages of writing. You have just that little bit.
Whereas in our day, you go to a Christian bookstore, at least when they used to have Christian bookstores, and you know there'd be whole rows of nothing but prophecy, you know and every bit of it, no doubt wrong. And yeah, so this thing of being so caught up in it, where I'm sitting right now, our church, our congregation rents a building from the Seventh Day Adventists.
And you know every three or four months, they hold a series of prophecy conferences, and they go into how all of this is going to be fulfilled in the future, totally ignoring that, hey, they were saying all of this was going to be fulfilled in the 1800s, and they were wrong on that. And yeah, that doesn't seem to slow them down. They're still saying the same thing just like Jehovah's Witnesses are. Yeah.
So would you say prophecy, the biggest benefit is less about trying to figure out exactly Christ's return and more as a benefit for us to not be either our faith shooken or shaked as things arrive, if persecution comes, like we should be expecting these types of things to exist. That's the benefit of prophecy rather than trying to nail down specific events that are going to happen. What would be a beneficial use of prophecy in that sense? Yeah.
I totally agree with you that I think the two big things or maybe several big things. One, he is going to return. That's the exciting thing. He is going to return, and this time it will be in power. Another thing, there is going to be a day of judgment and a resurrection when he returns. Number three, there is going to be a great tribulation. And so we can expect persecution before Jesus returns. It may not come in our lifetime, but we should be prepared for that. And like you say, it shouldn't discourage us.
On the other hand, just because persecution comes doesn't mean the end is at hand. When Anabaptists were persecuted in the 1500s, a lot of them assumed the end is right at hand. And you know they looked at the pope as the Antichrist and the prophecies seem to be being fulfilled. And I think that's good if it helped them to stay faithful during the persecution. But if you build too much on that, yeah, then you're disappointed. The persecution ends and Christ hasn't come back. So we need to be careful.
And then I think the other thing is that there will be, and we'll get into that in another question, a man of lawlessness or perdition, an Antichrist that will mislead people. So we need to be very cautious on that respect. And we'll, I guess, get into that later. Yeah, very good. I think one of the other and maybe I'm wrong in this. One of the other dangers of trying to set down timelines within our lifetime too clearly is that it can maybe give us a tendency.
Well, if we just hold on long enough, Jesus will return rather than going out and doing something and establishing the Kingdom of God. If we just stay where we are and don't move and hold fast as a community, retain what we have, not risk it, then we'll be secure in the future or soon rather than being on the offensive for the kingdom of God and going out there and starting new things and starting new churches and planning new movements and spreading the gospel. So we have another question from Simon Isaacson.
Do you believe and I think you maybe have already kind of answered this a little bit as far as the importance of it. But do you believe in a New World Order global antichrist system prior to the Second Advent of Christ? Yeah, so things like that, I have no view on exactly how it's going to come about with the Antichrist. I believe it's going to happen that we should be cautious about being misled.
But what has happened throughout history is people tend to read those prophecies in accordance with what is happening in their day. And that's natural. I mean, I don't mock that in any way. Maybe that keeps us on our toes. The early Christians assumed it would have some connection with the Roman Empire. They couldn't picture life here on the earth continuing on after the Roman Empire fell. Because the beast in Daniel, the last one described was Rome.
At least that's how they understood it and how I would understand it. The one with the, I think, terrible teeth of iron, something like that. And so it seemed like, OK, that's the last beast. When Rome goes, then that's when the end comes. And it hasn't worked that way unless Rome is still represented by the Roman Catholic Church. I don't know. I mean, some of these might be fulfilled in ways we're not expecting.
So and likewise, like when Napoleon was around, a lot of people thought he was the Antichrist and they saw the fulfillment of a lot of prophecies and what was happening in their day. And so today, the big thing is this global, this New World Order thing. I mean, that might happen, but I personally wouldn't get too worried. Whatever it's going to be, it's going to be. And we're going to be persecuted when the Antichrist comes. We need to be ready for that persecution.
So we need to be building ourselves up spiritually. Make sure we're in fellowship with other Christians, that we have a strong personal relationship with Jesus and His Father, a strong prayer life, devotional life, a strong interaction with fellow Christians, as I said. And so we're ready when these things happen, whether it's a New World Order, whether it's connected with the UN, or their programs, or something entirely different from any of those. Thanks for that. The next question here is by Laura Eschenbacher.
Unclear if we are looking so this is actually this is kind of similar to the last question. So we put them together. So you may or may not have anything to add to this, and that's OK. But unclear if we are looking for one man to be the antichrist at the end or if it is just a political system tribe of Dan. I think you've basically already answered that as far as your interest in the specifics. Well, yeah, I could comment a little bit because the early church talks about that.
I did want to say and you know hopefully none of you are looking at me as some kind of guru who's got all of these answers. My only job that I'm trying to do for the church is to bring to light the things the early Christians believed and what the historic faith was. So I mean, what I personally think about something to me doesn't carry any weight at all. And I hope none of you put any particular weight in it.
The early church, yeah, they all looked for a person in the I'm trying to remember how the King James calls him. Is it the man of perdition? In Thessalonians, the one that Paul talks about. And they tended to connect that with the Antichrist mentioned by John and with the beast in Revelation. They were looking for a person. Some of them thought it would be Nero who would be resurrected. Again, that tendency to look at things that are more connected with your lifetime, what you're familiar with.
So they were familiar with the Roman Empire, and so they looked at things in that light. So definitely they were looking for a man. But again, as Irenaeus said, prophecy is best understood once it's been fulfilled. So it may turn out it's not an individual, but it'll be a system or a group of people or something like that. Yeah, it seems like a trend.
Each individual country that a Christian might live in seems to find some sort of way to paint whatever political leaders in power, depending on what your persuasion is there as the Antichrist or a potential antichrist. It seems like every election that comes along is this person or that person is the Antichrist.
And I think we need to be really, really careful with those kinds of conversations because you can imagine someone growing up in China as a Christian might think their political leader is the Antichrist or various other things. I really appreciate what you said that we need to be on the lookout for those things. But really the leading call is to establish our faith, our love faith relationship with Jesus ' kingdom, that we might be ready for whatever that looks like.
Knowing that something like that is coming, it matters less about who specifically it is. From Jason Althoff, this is an interesting, relevant current, very current question that I know has been going around in various circles related to COVID-19 and government authority. The modern case of COVID-19 has raised questions concerning the ability of the governing authorities to mandate universal vaccines, to refuse any exemptions, including religious, and to punish those who refuse.
This has relevance to future things and the possibility of pestilences, Matthew 24:7, or rumors of pestilences being part of the experience of those living under the governing authorities prior to the coming of the Lord. So that's kind of the background of the question. So here's the question.
Does submitting to every ordinance include what happens to one's own body forced injections in this case, from their perspective, from a compulsory medical situation that violates one's own conscience based on all available evidence. So early Christians obviously had to deal with forceful governments and forceful situations. Is there any relevant teachings that you can think of that would give us direction on something like this for a person?
Yeah, well, the two New Testament principles are to obey Caesar and submit to every ordinance. And then the other one is we must obey God as ruler rather than men. So if Caesar commands us to do something that contradicts the teachings of Jesus, we have to choose between loyalty to one or the other, then we always have to choose to obey Jesus or his father rather than men. On vaccines? Wow, yeah, then you're getting into a very gray area.
One Christian might feel that the way vaccines are produced, that there is a scriptural principle being violated, and that a Christian should not get vaccines for that reason. It's probably not my personal view. I haven't spent very much time trying to investigate that question. I have read a little bit on it. But yeah, if that was someone's Christian conscience that there is something unscriptural about it.
Now, if it's just that you don't like from a medical standpoint to get a vaccine, personally, I would probably say we should obey Caesar if it's just a personal preference. Obviously, Caesar would not be doing this to be out of a sense of wanting to persecute people. Governments are concerned about the health of their citizens. And there have been things like smallpox and that that have been almost totally eradicated. Smallpox had been eradicated, I think, for a while because of vaccines.
Polio, I remember what it was like when I was a child. And now it's extremely rare, again, because of vaccines. So they have been effective. I can see why the government would mandate that. But yeah, if you feel there's a scriptural principle being violated, then you should be true to your conscience. But as has always been the case, you can also expect to pay a price too. I mean, the early Christians knew that if they violated Caesar's law in order to obey Christ, that they would likely be punished by Caesar.
So I mean, yeah, we do have to be ready to go to jail or whatever if we violate Caesar's laws. I mean, hopefully, I'm not aware I stay out of the political realm. So I wasn't aware of any talk here in the United States, any serious talk about mandating that for everybody. But maybe if you're on political blogs and things like that, yeah, there might be stuff I'm not aware of. I have to be the last person to consult on current political issues.
Yeah, I think you touched on a point there right at the end as far as political blogs. I think in the information age, all of this talk of eschatology gets accelerated down individual tunnels. And so we all have to be careful with where we're actually receiving information from. But I appreciate just calling us back to scripture. Is it violating the commands of Christ or not? And then working it out from there and making the decision based on that rather than personal preference. At least that's how I heard you.
Yes. And that Miller asked, so we have some more questions here from what time is it about 10:42? I guess we'll stop for a second here. I don't think anyone has had any follow-up questions. I'm going to ask one or two more questions here. If you have any questions, now would be the time to submit them to Timothy Miller in the group chat. And we can take follow-up questions, anything we've talked about so far. Otherwise, we'll just keep going.
I'll ask one more question and then we'll see if we have any follow-up questions come in. So from Annette Miller, she asked, " In light of Matthew 23 verses 34 through 36, and Revelation 18:24, do you believe that Jerusalem in 70 AD or Jerusalem today is Mystery Babylon? " Okay, no, I personally would not. I see the connection. I thought that was, yeah, a very interesting question, Annette. And interestingly, your name, my sister's name is Annette. So I was excited to see that.
I was hoping the last name would be my sister's last name because she's a Jehovah's Witness and won't speak to me. So I thought, oh, it'd be neat if she submitted a question, but not likely. The early Christians, they, I would say, 100% would have understood Babylon the Great to be talking about Rome. When Peter talks about Babylon in his letter, they understood him to be talking about Rome and that Babylon in Revelation that would fall. That's talking about Rome. Now, maybe they were wrong. I don't know on that.
Again, I take note of how they looked at things. And I also take note of the principle that people have almost always been wrong in understanding prophecy in advance. So I'm happy to leave that alone of what Babylon is until it's fulfilled. But again, the historic understanding was that it's Rome. And maybe that's carried on through the Roman Catholic Church. Maybe not. Maybe it's carried on through the nations that had once been part of the Roman Empire. I don't know.
And then on the other hand, maybe they missed it altogether because they were looking at events in their day. And so Rome may be some I mean, Babylon may be something much greater beyond that. Thanks for that. So we have another question here from Richard Earhart, and we'll be wrapping up here in about 5 to 10 minutes. We might have got a question here. We'll go ahead and put that down with the next question over here. I'll ask another question from the group here from Richard Earhart again.
One of the teachings of dispensationalists from his perspective is that the current dispensation of grace was not predicted in the Old Testament, but that it was rather injected before the kingdom was established because of the Jews ' rejection of Jesus. Paul frequently mentions a secret that apparently has to do with the Gentiles. For example, in Romans 16:25, Ephesians 3:3 through 6, or Colossians 1:26.
I find prophetic passages in the Psalms and prophets which mention that the Gentiles would praise God or be reigned by Him. Paul also quotes some of these passages in Romans 15 verses 9 through 12. Here's the question. Did the early Christians have any particular opinion on why the inclusion of the Gentiles was a secret? Yeah That's the whole thing. The early Christians would have said there was no secret. A few things were prophesied about in more prophecies in the Old Testament than the salvation of the Gentiles.
Probably the prophecies about Jesus would be the only ones that would exceed the prophecies about the Gentiles coming to God. So it's everywhere throughout the Old Testament and very specific prophecies. You go all the way back to Genesis. God had told Abraham that through your seed, all the nations of the earth would be blessed. And then in Malachi, I don't have it in front of me. It talks about how, let me just see if I can find that. Probably you all know that.
The early Christians quoted so frequently the prophecy in Malachi that the nations would be, yeah, I don't have it in front of me, would be offering a pure sacrifice. The Gentiles would be offering a pure sacrifice. The prophets talk about those who are not my people will be called my people, et cetera. And then as you mentioned, Richard, in the Psalms, there's a lot of prophecies about the Gentiles. So yeah, it was no secret at all.
In fact, when Jesus was a baby when he's brought to the temple, Simeon mentions that he would be a light to the Gentiles. I mean, so yeah, this wasn't an afterthought. And I'll just comment quickly on dispensationalism. And I'm assuming you do not buy into it. One of the conclusions I came to in the years after I left Jehovah's Witnesses, you know they have so many unique teachings that have never been taught by anybody in history.
And you know I got to wondering how little sense it made that some basics of the faith would stay hidden until 1870-something. How absurd? Why would God create His church? Why would the apostles teach the faith if it wasn't going to be understood for 1,800 years? And that doesn't apply to just Jehovah's Witnesses. So many things the Protestants teach. No one taught it before Martin Luther. And so are we to believe that for 1,500 years, no one understood the basics of the gospel until Martin Luther came along.
And the same with dispensationalism. That didn't come along until the late 1700s didn't become popular until the late 1800s. Are we to believe that no one understood all of these scriptures until the 1800s? Jude says, you know, hold fast or defend the faith once for all, handed to the saints. So it was handed down complete in the beginning. There's little details we don't know, like on prophecy and things.
But as far as the basics, if dispensationalism were true, it would mean that everyone was in darkness for 1,800 years, that the disciples of the apostles didn't understand these things that somehow people understood much later. And to me, that's just absurd. I think the faith was handed down complete by the apostles on all the major details. And yeah, we can hold to what was handed down from them. Very good. Yeah, I found that question interesting, and I think your basis for it is good.
I think Timothy and I were discussing a little bit before having the, what was the mystery? And it seems like I'm not actually familiar with what specifically dispensationalist view of what the mystery is. But it definitely seems like the mystery is how God went about bringing the Gentiles in, not the fact that the Gentiles were going to be in. Right. And those verses, you know, I reread them.
It seemed to me that the mystery he was talking about was about Jesus Christ, that nobody, absolutely nobody understood in advance that the Son of God would become incarnate, and that's who the Messiah would be. And then the Gentiles coming in, yeah, it's just an additional part of all the prophecies about the Messiah. But that's how I'm reading Paul, that he's mainly talking about Jesus. That was the mystery, all of these prophecies about the Messiah and what He would do. Yeah.
All right, so we only have a few minutes to wrap up. I know you have a hard stop time by 11 o'clock. So I have two follow-up questions here, one from Richard and one from Tim. We'll try to get to both of them, but if we can't, I apologize. We'll start with Richard. His question came in first. He says, " Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp of John the Apostle. Can we then assume that Irenaeus had the right view of Revelation 20 as a pre-millennialist? Does that carry more weight?
" Yeah, I think it carries enormous weight. Now you've got to be careful with that word pre-millennial. Today, that has one meaning. It means what the evangelicals teach about fleshly Israel and all of that. So when you talk about pre-millennialism today, you mean something different than what they meant in the second century. But if you just mean that there will be a literal millennium that is still ahead, yes, that's definitely what Irenaeus taught. It seems to be what the majority of the second century taught.
And the fact that, yes, he was a disciple of Polycarp, who was a disciple of John, that carries a lot of weight. It doesn't make it infallible. But yeah, to me, we should at least have a reasonable expectation that that is the most likely thing to happen. Again, prophecy is best understood once it's been fulfilled. But yeah, so I personally think there will be some type of literal millennium. It may be a little different than what I'm foreseeing.
But it does make sense that if Polycarp if John saw this revelation and he thought this was symbolic, that Polycarp would have certainly got that from John and would have mentioned it to people who are being taught by him. So yeah, I think a lot of weight is just not infallible. Great. Thanks, Richard, for that question. Then I think this will be our last question from Tim.
In the view of paradise, with respect to Hades, how are we as Christians in the presence of Jesus when we die if Jesus is in heaven and the Father, with the Father? Okay, so In the view of paradise, that Origen would have given to that, he said it's a total misconception when we think of God being in heaven. The Scriptures speak in that sense because we humans, that's the way we think spatially and all of that. But God is everywhere. I mean, there's no place you can block God out.
So we're in the presence of God right now. We just aren't as aware of it because we're in our fleshly bodies. So once we're outside this body and we're in paradise, we will definitely be with Jesus Christ in a fuller sense than we are now, but perhaps largely because we you know will be able to see things that we don't see while we're in the flesh. So yeah, in paradise, we will be with Christ. We won't be in the final heaven. Again, none of these may be physical places probably or not.
I think Origen is right, although I find it just helps me to think of them as physical places. I tend to think that way. But I know in my heart that Origen is undoubtedly right, that these are states or you know whatever, because we just can't relate to the spirit realm. But there is a stage beyond paradise that is called heaven you know in the Scriptures and when we will be with God in an even fuller sense than in paradise. So yeah, there's those stages that we see in the Scriptures.
That's the stage we all look forward to when God fulfills uniting heaven and earth. Amen. Well, thank you very much, everybody. I really appreciate everybody taking the time this morning. I know 10 o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday isn't always the best time for everybody, but we really appreciate you taking the time. And we look forward to doing more of these in the future. We will send out a survey afterwards with feedback on things you'd like to see down the road.
And you can also look forward to some new courses coming out soon. We have some all new video courses from Chuck Pike coming out in the coming months. And then David Bercot is also working on a commentary. We're working on a new type of course based around his commentary, Matthew. So you can expect that in the coming months as well. So we have some neat things coming down the road.
So one thing we really appreciate is if you share the word about the historic faith.com, we're still growing and building the community. And the more that we're able to get the word out there, the more we're able to invest resources and time into the platform. So we really appreciate everybody taking time. David, thank you very much for your insights on the early Christians and for putting this course together as well. Do you have any closing thoughts? Like I said, I felt the questions were really good.
I mean, they were very challenging. No one threw me any softballs. I mean, I had to really think about all of them. And yeah, I really appreciate that because I think it made it enlightening for everybody else. And I look forward to the next one of these. And yeah, I'm also looking forward to your feedback of how we can make this better, if there's anything I can do differently on that. And also, it's been a joy just to see your faces, those of you I can see. For so many of my readers, it's just a name.
And you know I wonder who this person is. So it is nice. You know Again, I know Boaz and Rebecca, we go back quite a number of years. But yeah, for most of you, you're new faces to me. So it's been nice seeing you, at least in the Zoom format today.
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