I love Monster Energy Drinks. The sugary fuel goes down like a bag of liquid Sour-Patch Kids, which I also love. But I only let myself drink one can every couple of weeks or so. They can’t be healthy for you.

Last year I published Once for All Delivered, a short, dense, and high-octane theology book. It’s not as sugary as Sour-Patch Kids, but neither will it rot your teeth or give you caffeine-shakes if you listen on an empty stomach. The audiobook just hit Amazon, and I’d love to share it with you. David K. Martin, who did the narration on my other audiobooks, also narrated this one.

Below is a sample of a key section from Chapter 9 on the return of Christ. If you live in the United States or the United Kingdom, I have free download codes from Audible. (Sorry if you live somewhere else; the codes the publisher gave me only work there.) If you’d like 128 minutes of dense theology, just send me an email at benjamin@fanandflame.com.

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Sample of Once for All Delivered, from Chapter 9

Jesus will return personally and bodily (Mt 24:30; 26:64; Acts 1:11; Rev 1:7). This view stands over and against the view that a “return” of Christ in the hearts of his followers could fulfill scriptural promises. The two major interpretive decisions related to Christ’s literal and physical return are the nature and timing of the tribulation and the millennium. With respect to the tribulation, many Christians interpret this term to refer to a period of intense struggle, calamity, and persecution or a “great tribulation,” as Jesus calls it (Mt 24:21). Historic premillennialism understands the Bible to teach that the church, as a whole, will remain through this tribulation period and after a time (seven years being either literal or symbolic) Jesus will return to set up his millennial kingdom on earth. This understanding of the tribulation isn’t too different from my amillennial understanding of the tribulation, though it obviously differs significantly on the millennium. Amillennialism rightly understood does not deny the existence of the millennium as atheism denies the existence of God; rather, amillennialism understands the Bible to speak of Christ’s millennial reign to be taking place in heaven right now. The amillennial view is consistent with passages that intricately link the timing of Christ’s return with the final judgment and eternal state (Rm 8:17–23; 2 Thes 1:5–10; 2 Pet 3:3–14), not two returns of Christ with a great intervening period of time between the returns, which would make for odd readings of passages like John 5:28–29 (“the hour is coming . . .” where the “hour” would be separated by 1,000 years). True, some passages in the OT, Isaiah 11 and 65 for example, seem to describe a time “better” than the church age but “not as great” as the new heavens and new earth. Yet these passages could be speaking poetically of the new heavens and new earth. In short, what some see as taking place in the millennium can actually be seen as taking place in the final state. A rigid interpretation of Isaiah 65:20, which speaks of those dying after a long life, is odd to me, when v. 19 speaks of no more weeping. How could physical death not produce weeping no matter how long one lives?

Additional consideration, of course, must be given to Revelation 20. I favor the interpretive scheme called progressive parallelism, which understands the book of Revelation to recapitulate similar sequences of events, often with each cycle moving the description of the end a bit further. So, for example, what happens with the seals in chapters 4–7 is roughly parallel with what happens with the trumpets in chapters 8–11, and so on. Space does not allow for much elaboration, but events like stars falling from the sky “as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale” (6:13) push me away from a more chronological reading of the book. Once stars have plopped upon the ground like over-ripe figs, there can’t be much left.

Addressing the classic text of Revelation 20:1–6 directly, a few things should be said. A great case can be made for describing Satan as bound in the church age and unable to deceive the nations, at least to the degree he did in the OT (2 Kg 17:29; Mt 12:28­–29; 28:18–20; Lk 4:6; 10:17–18; Jn 12:31–32; Acts 14:16; 17:30; 26:17–18; Col 2:15; 1 Jn 3:8). Also, the reign of God and Christ upon a throne is frequently (some say exclusively) spoken of in Revelation as taking place in heaven (1:4; 3:21; 4:5; 7:9ff; 8:3; 12:5; and dozens of others). The 1,000 years mentioned in vv. 3, 5, 6, and 7 from which all our millennial views build their name (pre-, -post, a-) could surely be, in such a highly symbolic book, a round number suggesting a long period of time (cf. the figurative use of 1,000 in passages such as Dt 7:9; 32:30; Josh  23:10; Jud 15:16; 1 Sam 18:7; 1 Chron 16:15; Job 9:3; Ps 50:11; 84:10; 90:4; Ecc 6:6; 7:8; SoS 4:4; Is 30:17; 2 Pet 3:8). And it doesn’t feel like a stretch in context to see the “first resurrection” of those reigning with Christ as the believers raised to the intermediate state, whereas unbelievers do not experience this resurrection but only the “second death.” Additional evidence for considering the “first resurrection” as those alive in the intermediate state (not those raised to life on earth during a premillennial reign of Christ) comes from the several parallels of Revelation 20:1–6 with 6:9–11 and the decidedly heavenly locale of those martyrs. The parallels are a little more explicit in the Greek but can still be seen in translations. Revelation 6:9 says, “(A) I saw . . . / (B) the souls of those who had been slain / (C) for the word of God and for the witness they had borne,” and 20:4 says, “(A') I saw / (B') the souls of those who had been beheaded / (C') for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God.” Then add to this that the whole vision in Revelation 20 (“I saw,” v. 1) feels very heavenly; missing from the text are earthly details about Christ reigning upon earth, the temple, the land of Canaan, and the holy city of Jerusalem (although perhaps some infer that the vision takes place on earth because the angel comes down from heaven). For all these reasons, I believe the amillennial view of a single, definitive return of Christ at the end of time cooperates best with the authorial intent of not only the broad witness of Scripture to the end times but the specific witness of Revelation 20.

* Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash