What’s the Difference in a Millennium and a Millipede? with David Reagan

What’s the difference between a millennium and a millipede? Find out with Dr. David Reagan and hosts Tim Moore and Nathan Jones on the television program, Christ in Prophecy!

Air Date: July 17, 2022

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Transcript

Tim Moore: Do you know the difference between a centipede and a centurion? How about a millennium and a millepede? Dave Reagan’s latest book explaining the reality, necessity, and timing of Jesus’ Millennial reign is guaranteed to bless your socks off. Stay tuned.

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Interview with Dr. David Reagan:

Tim Moore: Welcome to Christ in Prophecy! We are delighted to bring you another wonderful book by the founder of Lamb & Lion Ministries, Dr. David Reagan. Dave, we are so glad you could come back and be with us today!

Dr. Reagan: Well, I am delighted to be here. Thank you. I nearly fell out of my chair when you were talking about the difference between a centipede and a centurion.

Tim Moore: Well, you upped the ante and made it a millipede or a Millennium, and we are so glad you did. You know, Dave you make a comment in your book that after interacting with pastors and churches and even individual Christians for many years you found a common trait regarding Bible prophecy, or at least the attitude, and you label that characteristic abysmal. What is the state of much of the Church regarding God’s prophetic Word?

Dr. Reagan: Well, I would sum it up with three words ignorance, apathy and confusion. And that is primarily with pastors. With the people in the pew, I would say a lot of it is fear. They don’t even want to talk about Bible prophecy because they think it is all about wrath and tribulation and things of that nature. Although, many are very curious about that and would like to know something about it. But mainly it is just ignorance on the part of both pastors and the general public.

Tim Moore: I found the same thing, but you suggested there is a solution to this malady of ignorance but it involves an offensive five letter word.

Dr. Reagan: Well, that is true, that word is spelled S-T-U-D-Y, study, it does take some study to get on top of Bible prophecy. And unfortunately we are in a time when people want short videos and they want short sermons, and they want everything to be condensed and let me move on, and it’s not a time of serious study.

Nathan Jones: Dave, you start the book by listing the different viewpoints of the end times. What are the four main viewpoints concerning the end times?

Dr. Reagan: Well, in the book I talk about the four major viewpoints, I do a little introduction of them, and then I talk about each one in particular. And those four viewpoints are Historic Premillennialism, which was the viewpoint of the Early Church Fathers, almost unanimously. And what that meant was, is simply that they believed that Jesus was going to come back and reign for a 1,000 years over all the earth from Jerusalem, Historic Premillennialism.

Then the second view that developed was Amillennialism and that is kind of a strange word. Amillennial it’s the way you negate something in the Greek, you put “a” in front of it. So, Amillennial means no Millennium. But what that means is no literal Millennium. They have spiritualized the Millennium to say, well, we are living in the Millennium now, that Jesus is reigning over the earth from Heaven through the Church. And the person that developed that was Saint Augustine around 400 AD and he became the most influential of all the Church Fathers; he had more impact on Catholic doctrine than anybody else. And so, the Catholic Church over the years accepted that position. And today that is the predominant position in all of Christianity held by the Catholic Church and by most of your mainline Protestant denominations. They have spiritualized it to mean something other than what it says that we are in the Millennium now, and it started at the cross, and it will go to the time that Jesus returns. And the 1,000 years simply means a long period of time, it doesn’t mean a 1,000 years.

Then in the 1600’s a Unitarian pastor by the name of Daniel Whitby, a person who didn’t even really believe in the deity of Jesus, he developed the concept of Post-Millennialism, which I consider to be the most unbiblical of all the viewpoints. It simply says that things are going to get better and better until finally the Church converts the entire world, and then the Church will reign over the world for a 1,000 years. And then Jesus will come back and we will present the kingdom to Jesus, rather than Him presenting it to us. And that is so unbiblical because the Bible teaches that the vast majority of humanity will always reject the Gospel, will never come to the Gospel. The road to Hell is very wide, the road to Heaven is very narrow.

And then the last of the four major viewpoints is what I call Modern Premillennialism. And it is like Historical Premillennialism except that it has a Rapture at the beginning of the Tribulation. So, you have the Rapture, the Church is taken out, the Antichrist appears, he rules for seven years during the Tribulation, and then Jesus returns and conquers him and sets up His Kingdom for 1,000 years. So, the only difference between the Historical Premillennialism and Modern Premillennialism is the Rapture, that it is separate and apart from the Second Coming.

So, those are the four major viewpoints. And then I decided to add another major viewpoint that is not normally considered, in fact I’ve never seen a chapter written on it, and that is called Panmillennialism. You know what? I think that is really the major viewpoint held by more than any other view. Even those claim to Amillennial if you ask them what that means, they’ll say, well I don’t know that is what my church says, I just believe it is all going to pan out in the end. I’ve heard that so much. You know when I first heard it I thought it was very funny. And then it ceased to be funny. And then it got to be aggravating, to the point that every time a pastor would say to me, well, you know I am Panmillennial, I believe it will all pan out in the end, I had to bite my tongue because what I wanted to say is you just admitted you are too lazy to study God’s Word and find out what it says on the topic.

Tim Moore: Wow.

Dr. Reagan: And that’s sad because one-fourth of the Bible is prophetic in nature. And you can’t just sit it on the shelf, I guess they do, but you shouldn’t set any of God’s Word on the shelf and say you are not going to teach it. And it is even more tragic when you consider the fact that the signs of the times have all converged for the first time in all of history. According to that fact that we are living on borrowed time and Jesus is about to return, and yet the average guy in the pew doesn’t know that because the preacher never preaches it.

Tim Moore: Absolutely. You know one of the things, you made a good point, is that people will say that Historic Premillennial viewpoint really doesn’t have a whole lot of discussion amongst the early Church Fathers. But you said there was a reason for that, they were focused on other doctrinal and foundational issues of the Church, and yet they still had an expectation of Jesus coming soon because they adopted an Aramaic phrase expressing their hope that He would.

Dr. Reagan: Well, the early Church Fathers did not write a lot about Bible prophecy because that was not what they were focused on. They were focused on major issues like the divinity of Jesus, the triune nature of God. How a church should be organized and how it should relate to other churches, and surviving persecution. That was what they were focused on. So, they didn’t write that much about it but the ones who did were Pre-Millennial in nature.

Tim Moore: Yes, sir.

Dr. Reagan: Oh, and one other thing you mentioned a word that they used. Yes.

Tim Moore: We still use it.

Dr. Reagan: The word they used was from 1 Corinthians right at the end of it in chapter 16 and that is maranatha, which is an Aramaic expression for oh, Lord come. And they used that for the first 300 years in the Church’s history. They would greet each other with maranatha. They would say goodbye maranatha. It was kind of like aloha, hello and goodbye. And it was an expression of how we want the Lord to come, and that just faded over the years.

Nathan Jones: Well, why do you think then Augustine broke from 300 years of tradition and then started spiritualizing the Millennium to just mean a general period of time?

Dr. Reagan: I would say two major reasons. One is that he was very Antisemitic. And by the year 400 all the Church Fathers, without exception I think, I don’t know of any that were not Antisemitic in nature. Antisemitism just took over the Church, and they argued that since the Jews had killed Jesus that God has washed His hands of them and has no purpose for them left. And they did not like the idea of Premillennialism because it teaches that there is going to be basically a Jewish kingdom where Jesus is reigning from Jerusalem through the Jewish people and the Jewish people will be a blessing to all the world because they will be believers in Yeshua at that time. And they just could not accept that, they said, no, God has no purpose left for the Jews.

And then a second reason that they did it was because Amillennialism argues that the Church is the kingdom, so it gave more importance to the Church and to the Pope for example because if the Pope is head of the Church then all of the nations of the world should submit to the Pope and to the Kingdom of God on earth. And so, they liked the idea of elevating the Church to the point that it is the kingdom of God, period, and all that is ever going to be of the Kingdom of God.

And then a third reason that I should mention is that by 400 AD a lot of the Church Fathers had been enamored by spiritualizing Scripture, the idea that there is a surface meaning, but the real meaning is deep inside, and only we who are Church Fathers, only we who are really skilled in the Scriptures know what it really means. And so, they came up with all kinds of absolutely bizarre interpretations. And incidentally I mentioned some of those in the book, one of them in particular I won’t even mention here, but you will find it in the book, of how bizarre these interpretations were. And one, to show you how frivolous they were, in the “City of God” which I had never read but I always quoted it, but I finally read it.

Tim Moore: You read it. A big book.

Dr. Reagan: I tell you it will put you to sleep fast. Augustine argues against the 1,000 years in Revelation 20 as meaning 1,000 years. And the only explanation he gives is that 1,000 years represents 10 to the 3rd power, therefore it is symbolic and not literal.

Tim Moore: Interesting.

Dr. Reagan: That is the only explanation the man gives.

Nathan Jones: And you have a story you shared many times with me, is that back when you were growing up in your church, your church had adopted Amillennialism to the point where they refused to sing a certain hymn because it showed a future kingdom, what hymn was that?

Dr. Reagan: Well, anything that mentioned the kingdom in the future. But the prayer, the thing that was absolutely amazing is they told us it was a sin to say the Lord’s Prayer.

Nathan Jones: A sin to say the Lord’s Prayer?

Dr. Reagan: A sin to say the Lord’s Prayer, because the Lord’s prayer says “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.” They said the kingdom has already come, so if you pray that, you are praying a prayer that has no meaning whatsoever and so you shouldn’t pray it because the kingdom has already come, the kingdom is the church, that is all the kingdom is.

Tim Moore: I can’t imagine such a lack of faith that you would not even want point people to the greater glory, and the hope that we have in Christ’s return. But you know that attitude is pretty much reflected in a guest preacher I recently heard at an evangelical church, who said as a throw away comment, “Folks, we are living in the midst of the Millennium and the Tribulation right now, but I don’t have time to explain.” And he never explained, but another very gifted theologian who was there present, I was speaking to afterwards he said, “Well, that is because that man is an Amillennialist.” And yet, that view was largely discredited, as was Post-Millennialism in the last century.

Dr. Reagan: Well, Arnold Fruchtenbaum is a Messianic Jew and a great Messianic Jewish scholar. And Arnold Fruchtenbaum once said in a lecture I heard of his, “When people tell me we are living in the Millennium now. I say to them if we are then I must be living in the slum portion.”

Tim Moore: Exactly right. Well, speaking of, again, another viewpoint that was discredited in the last century, even more so than Amillennialism is Post-Millennialism and yet, having fallen into discredit because of the wars of the last century, it seems to be making resurgence today. Why is that?

Dr. Reagan: To explain that people need to know that Post-Millennialism was developed by this fellow Daniel Whitby at a time when people were putting their faith in man, rather than in God, during the great revolution that occurred in thinking and where everybody began to think that well, our real hope is mankind and the leadership of men.

So, it is a very humanistic view because it says that man is going to improve in quality over the years, and to the point that the Church is going to convert the whole world. And when the Church converts the whole world, the Church will reign over the world for 1,000 years. So, they are believers in the progression of mankind, it is going to be better and better inevitable progression toward betterness, toward being kinder to each other and so forth. Which the Bible says that in the end times it is going to be like Noah’s day when people are hating each other, killing each other, immorality everywhere. And yet, they argue, no it’s going to get better and better.

And to the point that at the end of the 19th Century all of your major denominations were Post-Millennial and they were all arguing that the 20th Century will be century of the Church. In fact, the Disciples of Christ denomination they changed the name of their magazine to the Christian Century, because it was going to be the Christian century and we are going to go out and we are going to conquer the world for Christ.

Well, World War I and World War II just devastated that viewpoint. It died. I only know of one major book that was written in the first half of the 20th Century advocating Post-Millennialism. And I wanted to call the author and say, “Are you living on an island that you don’t get the news every day?”

Tim Moore: Right.

Dr. Reagan: But at the end of the 20th Century, it started coming back.

Nathan Jones: And Post-Millennialism is a bad interpretation because it takes two verses out of context right?

Dr. Reagan: Yes, it does. There are two verses in particular that it takes out of context. If you go over there to the Post-Millennial viewpoint you will see where I write in detail about Post-Millennialism and you will see that one of those verses is Acts 3:21 and they usually quote it this way, they say, “Jesus must remain in Heaven until all things have been restored.” Well, that is not what the verse says. The verse says, “Jesus will remain in Heaven until the time for the restoration of all things.” Well, the time for the restoration of all things is the Millennial reign, that’s when the Bible says its going to be restored. And then the other one they use is Matthew 24:14 and they say that it says that the Gospel of the kingdom must be preached to the whole world before the end will come. That’s what the verse says. And this verse, they say requires the world to be converted to Christ before He comes. The verse doesn’t say that. It just says we are going to preach the Gospel to all the world before Jesus returns. It doesn’t say we are going to convert them.

Tim Moore: Most people will not convert.

Nathan Jones: No.

Dr. Reagan: No, most will not. Most will reject it. And in fact, we are in the process of doing that now through the Internet, through satellite TV, satellite radio and everything else, we are sharing the Gospel to the whole world right now.

Tim Moore: I know that Christians who are dedicated to the primacy of Scripture are sometimes hesitant to embrace something that would be called modern. Me being a conservative I don’t like things that are newfangled perse, and so for those of who stand on Scripture alone, sola scriptura, why should we not have an issue with what you have labeled Modern Premillennialism.

Dr. Reagan: Okay, well, a lot of people do. I would say there are many arguments against the Pre-Rapture concept but the main one that people use is they say well, it is too new to be true. And they point to one person and that is to John Darby in England in the early 1820’s, and they say, well, that is where it started so it is too new to be true. Well, first of all that is not where it started. In fact we’ve had research recently that has shown that there were many people who believed in a Pre-Tribulation Rapture before Darby. And in fact, for 300 years before Darby, and by the time Darby came along it was a pretty well established concept among even Congregationalists and others.

Tim Moore: And you cite Lee Brainard, a friend of ours who found evidence even in the ancient writings of Church Fathers.

Dr. Reagan: That’s right in the ancient writings. But the point about what John Darby did was he systematized it as it had not been systematized before, and he advertised it, I mean the man preached all over the world about this, so it became an accepted viewpoint. But the reason, of course there are many good reasons why it was late in development. And one of those reasons is the fact that the Catholic Church simply was Amillennial and that is all they taught, and people accepted that, and the average person in the Middle Ages could not read or write, I mean very few people, mainly just priests could read and write. And they did not have Bibles, nobody had a Bible, you couldn’t afford a Bible. And so, what was needed for Bible prophecy really to revive was for people to get the Bible in their languages, and also be able to afford it. So, you had the invention of the Gutenberg Press, and then along with that came the revolution led by Martin Luther, the Reformation which resulted in the Bible being translated into a native language.

Tim Moore: And speaking of Martin Luther the Catholic Church said well his new idea of faith alone is too new to be true.

Dr. Reagan: Oh, yes. That was their major argument against Luther, they said it is too new to be true to talk about salvation by grace through faith. And Martin Luther said, well, all of the Church Fathers believed it. They said, no, there was no church father that believed in that. He said, well, have you read the writings of Peter and Paul and the sayings of Jesus? It is all through there.

Tim Moore: Exactly.

Dr. Reagan: It is not a new idea, its an idea that was rediscovered.

Nathan Jones: And redefined. Well, the early Church Fathers were not interested in prophecy, they were interested in doctrine.

Dr. Reagan: And they all taught imminence. Even though they didn’t understand it completely they taught imminence, they taught that the Lord could come back at any moment. Now, if you start putting all kinds of prophecies in front of that and saying, no, He can’t come back for 1,000 years. He can’t do this. He can’t do that. Then you are destroying imminence. The Bible teaches that Jesus can return any moment. The only way you can have an imminent return of Jesus is to have a Rapture that is separate and apart from the Second Coming. Because if you put the two together then you’ve got to say, no, He can’t come until the Temple is rebuilt, the Antichrist is revealed and on and on and on. No, it has to be imminent.

Nathan Jones: Absolutely. I love that you have a chapter on the Panmillennial view. I think it the first book I’ve read that has it. You call it an irresponsible copout and you explain why. But for those who say, well, why study Bible prophecy? Why? How do you answer them? Why is it important?

Dr. Reagan: Well, I go into great detail about that in here. In fact, I give ten reasons why to study Bible prophecy. I won’t mention all ten but I just mention that. The quantity of the Bible, one-fourth of it is prophecy that alone justifies studying Bible prophecy.

The uniqueness of it. There is no other book in the world that contains fulfilled prophecies. There is not one in the Quran. There is not one in the Hindu Vedas. Not one in the Book of Mormon. But the Bible contains hundreds of prophecies that are specific, not vague, and general nonsense like Nostradamus, but specific prophecies that have already been fulfilled in history.

And I’m not just talking about Messianic prophecies, I’m talking about prophecies concerning cities, and town, and nations, and empires. Isaiah writing about the fact that the Babylonian Empire would be overthrown by the Medes and the Persians before the Babylonian Empire even existed. And it was overthrown by the Medes and Persians.

I’m talking about Messianic prophecies like Psalm 22 that says the Messiah will be killed by being crucified, having His hands and His feet pierced. And there was only one way of killing people in Israel at that time, and that was by stoning them to death. And guess what? A 1,000 years later after that was written, a 1,000 years before Christ, the only way to execute people in Israel was by stoning them. But the Romans were in charge and they couldn’t stone people, so they had to go to the Romans, and the Romans crucified Him. On and on like that the Bible is just full of fulfilled prophecies that convince me, and should convince anyone that it has to be supernatural in origin.

Tim Moore: It certainly does. Dave, you mentioned two other end time viewpoints that are a little bit out there, one being Preterism, and the other the so called Pre-Wrath view. Describe each of those in just a nutshell.

Dr. Reagan: Well, Preterism is so unorthodox that I wouldn’t even consider it, it couldn’t even be considered in mainline Christianity. But it is the idea that all of the prophecies concerning the end times, all or almost all, the extreme Preterist says all end time prophecy was fulfilled in 70 AD. The moderate Preterist says all was fulfilled except for the Second Coming of Jesus. But your extreme Preterist argue that it was all fulfilled, and they argue that we are in the Eternal State right now, and things will just keep on going on. And the dead will go to Heaven and live there.

But all of that is based upon the idea that the book of Revelation was written before 70 AD when the Temple was destroyed. And their main argument for that is they turn over to Revelation 11 and they say, hey, it mentions a temple. And the Temple was destroyed so what is the deal? Well, there is going to be a third temple. There is going to be a temple that is going to be the Temple that is built during the first part of the Tribulation and which the Antichrist comes to Jerusalem to dedicate. And, so it is speaking of that temple. But these guys remind me very much of Paul when he wrote, “Avoid these two men,” and he named two men, he said, “avoid them because they teach that the resurrection has already occurred.” Well, these guys teach that the Second Coming has already occurred. To do that you have to utterly spiritualize everything, nothing means what it says.

Tim Moore: What about the Pre-Wrath guys? Because we are not going to get into as great of detail as you did. It is fascinating to read your evidence against this.

Dr. Reagan: Well, this is a very new view.

Nathan Jones: It’s growing like wildfire.

Tim Moore: It is.

Dr. Reagan: And it’s the view, they call it the Pre-Wrath view and that is a very, very bad title for it because the Pre-Tribulation view is a pre-wrath view. The Mid-Tribulation view is a pre-wrath view. What they are arguing is that the wrath of God occurs only during the end of the Tribulation, that before that, the wrath that occurs is the wrath of man and Satan and not God. And so, therefore the Rapture is going to occur three-fourths of the way through the Tribulation, near the end.

Nathan Jones: The Bowl Judgments.

Dr. Reagan: So, I call it the Late Tribulation Viewpoint. Because if it is Pre-Trib it is before. If it is Mid-Trib it is the middle. If it Post-Trib it is the end. So, you’ve got to call it the Late Trib View so people know when it occurs; it occurs late in the Tribulation. And these guys, I’m telling you, trying to figure this out was almost impossible because no one has the same idea. You ask them to draw a chart and nobody can draw a chart because everybody has a different chart. And nobody knows what everybody else is teaching. It is so confused, so convoluted. But the point of it is that regardless of where you put the Rapture near the end of the Tribulation you are destroying imminence.

Tim Moore: Yes, you are.

Dr. Reagan: Because they are saying there has to be the first half of the Tribulation, then there has to be—

Tim Moore: And in spite of the fact that Jesus is the one who breaks the seals, they claim, oh that is Satan’s wrath it’s not yet God’s wrath.

Dr. Reagan: Well, this viewpoint challenges the sovereignty of God. It challenges the sovereignty of God. It is saying that Satan and man can do things that God has no control over. We know from the Bible that God uses bad nations to penalize other nations.

Tim Moore: Yes, He does.

Dr. Reagan: In fact, He used Babylon to penalize Judah. He used Assyria to penalize Israel. God works through evil. Through Satan. He can work through evil of all kinds to bring about His will. And to say that these people were operating separate and apart from God’s will, that is crazy!

Nathan Jones: And it’s a great travesty because it denies the Millennial Kingdom. Maybe you can tell us, and you made a great argument here, some of the reasons why the Millennium is important? Why do we eject it when it contains so many promises?

Dr. Reagan: Yeah, that is what I end the book with is talking about why it is important to have a Millennium. You know I was raised in an Amillennial church. A church so Amillennial if you had any other view they would disfellowship you, normally. So, anyway I end by talking about reasons why. When I started studying the Bible and I could see without any problem whatsoever that there was going to be a Millennial reign of Jesus because I believed if the plain sense makes sense you shouldn’t look for any other sense or you end up with nonsense. So, I just believed what it said.

And then I thought, well, why? Why would Jesus want to come back to this filthy earth? To this sin plagued earth? Why would He want to come back and reign? And then I began to see all kinds of reasons. And one of the reasons for a Millennium is that God has made a lot of promises He’s got to fulfill. He’s made promises to the Jewish people that they will have a reign over all this earth, a believing Jewish people. That they will be so highly honored during that reign that if one walks by a Gentile will grab his robe and say, “May we walk with you because we know that God is with you.” God is going to turn the world upside down concerning the Jewish people.

God has made promises to the nations. He said to the nations, “A time is going to come when it is going to be what you have always wanted peace.” We are going to have peace all over the world.

He has to have a Millennium because He has made promises to the Church, that we are going to reign with the Lord Jesus Christ over all this earth. He makes that promise over, and over and over. So, those are some of the promises.

He’s made a promise to Creation I’m going to revive the Creation. I’m going to remake it so that everything is back the way it originally was. And the wolf with dwell with the lamb, and on and on and on.

Tim Moore: Well, Dave this book was a great blessing to me. And I’m already looking forward to your next project, and the projects after that the Lord has in store for you and us.

Dr. Reagan: Thank you very much.

Tim Moore: But folks, that is all the time we have for today. So, on behalf of David Reagan, and Nathan Jones, I’m Tim Moore saying, look up for our soon returning King is drawing near. Godspeed.

End of Program

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