Mark Hitchcock - The End: A Complete Overview of Bible Prophecy and the End of Days

A FEW YEARS AGO I ran across The Top Ten Ways to Know If You Are Obsessed with Prophecy.

1. You always leave the top down on your convertible in case the Rapture happens.
2. You never buy green bananas.
3. You talk your church into adapting the 60s pop song Up, Up, and Away as a Christian hymn.
4. Bar code scanners make you nervous.
5. You refuse a tax refund check because the amount comes to $666.
6. You can name more signs of the times than you can commandments.
7. You believe that there is an original Greek and Hebrew text with Scofields notes.
8. You believe the term Church Fathers refers to Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye.
9. You get goose bumps when you hear a trumpet.
10. You use the Left Behind books as devotional reading.

Im not obsessed with Bible prophecyI only scored six out of tenbut I certainly am interested in the end times. The Bible is a book of prophecy. So much of the Bible is prophecy that I say I love prophecy because I love the Bible. Studying the end times has helped me more than anything else to understand the whole Bible.

One of the primary reasons the average Christian avoids studying Bible prophecy is all the different views. A person picks up a few books to brush up on his or her knowledge of the end times, and soon he or she is hopelessly lost in lengthy explanations of long, unfamiliar words.

It reminds me of the little boy whose father was a preacher. After hearing his dad preach on justification, sanctification, and all the other -ations, he was ready when his Sunday school teacher asked if anyone knew what procrastination meant. The boy immediately replied, Im not sure what it means, but I know our church believes in it! Thats how many people are when it comes to Bible prophecy. Theyre not sure what these big words mean, but they know that they must believe in it.

The Bible prophecy novice is overwhelmed by words like premillennial, postmillennial, pretribulational, posttribulational, dispensational, and covenantal. He or she has seen enough charts and time lines to last a lifetime. The novice finally adopts the position of the panmillennial: it will all pan out in the end, so theres no need to worry about it anymore.

There are many different views of end times prophecy, and well cover the major ones in this book (except for panmillennialism). Nonetheless, it is critical to remember that there are three great nonnegotiables in Bible prophecythree events that all Christians believe will happen: 1) the literal, physical, visible return of Jesus Christ to the earth; 2) the bodily resurrection of the dead; and 3) the final judgment of all people. These three truths are crystal clear in Scripture and have been consistently affirmed by Gods people throughout history. Although we may disagree and debate other details of the end times scenario, these are the three immovable pillars in our eschatology.

Beyond these fundamentals, there is often a great deal of disagreement about end times biblical prophecy. Theories abound. I do not have all the answers, nor do I have every puzzle piece in place. To claim otherwise would be arrogant and foolish. Not every issue or event of end times prophecy will be addressed. There just is not enough space in one book to cover it all. Entire books have been written on most of the topics that are addressed in this volume, so not every subject will be as fully developed as many would like or even as much as I would like. But I will do the best I can to get to the heart of the matter and present the most important information clearly and understandably. Some will disagree with most of my conclusions, others will disagree with some of them, and probably no one will agree with me on all of them.

My overall paradigm in The End is a futurist, premillennial viewpoint (we will look at these categories in chapter 3). I will present alternate views in many places, especially surrounding the Millennium and the Rapture, and I hope to present them fairly and graciously. In the end, I believe one must adopt some overall system informed by Scripture. This is my best effort, using a consistent, literal method of interpretation, to put the pieces together in a way that makes sense of Scripture.