Armageddon? (Part 2)

A response to recent (Christian) responses in the news to the Israel-Gaza conflict

In my previous post, I took note of the rise of end times prophetic punditry, resulting in preachers rallying their congregations to cheer the goings on in the Middle East in the expectation of the rapture and the final countdown to the Battle of Armageddon—all based on a reading of the Bible that treats many passages as codes to be deciphered and worked into a prophetic time-line of future events which in amazing fashion are coincidentally coming true in our age after being dormant for two thousand years. 

From this perspective, the Bible and current events become two bodies of data needing correlation to make sense of our world in perpetual conflict. 

In a coming post I will make a theological stab at my understanding of the problems in our world and God’s relationship to those problems. 

In this entry, though, I want to take up the second of the two preachers that Lee Fang focused on in his Substack post “Televangelists Invoke Holy War to Push for Weapons for Israel, Strikes on Iran.” 

What’s to like (and not)

Like Pastor John Hagee, Dr. Robert Jeffress is an evangelical preacher. He pastors one of the flagship Southern Baptist churches in the US, First Baptist Church, Dallas, Texas.

Even growing up in south Georgia I knew of this church and its long time pastor W. A. Criswell.

And like with Hagee, I can agree with Jeffress’s preaching of the good news of Jesus who redeems us from sin and gives us hope for eternal life in the present and future.

And Jeffress emphasizes that we need to be ready to meet Jesus at every moment because I am going to die or Jesus will return—I wholeheartedly agree.

As Paul said in Philippians, when Christ is preached, I will rejoice.

But like Hagee (and unlike me), Jeffress holds to premillennial dispensationalist views of the Bible and particularly Revelation. 

Whether he is as militaristic as Hagee, I don’t know—I hope not.

Jeffress has a new book coming out in December,  Are We Living in the End Times? and last week began a sermon series of the same title. 

Jeffress’s answer in the sermon to that question was “No, but almost.” 

He said we cannot know the exact time, but we can be aware of the signs of the times.

The “end times” in his view are the events that take place after the rapture of the church leading to Armageddon and the return of Christ.

Instead he said we are in the “Last of the last days” which began two thousand years ago but now point to an imminent rapture. 

All of his teaching is consistent with the dispensational time-line view of interpreting the Bible. Nothing surprised me.

An Interview

But back to Lee Fang’s Substack post.

Included toward the end of the post was a Youtube video “Interviews with Christian Zionist lawmakers, Dr. Robert Jeffress.” Lee Fang interviewed several lawmakers in Washington, DC, but also included an interview with Jeffress at his church in Dallas. 

The soundbites of the lawmakers are interesting, but the interview with Jeffress is astounding. 

I took time to transcribe it:

Fang: I heard you talk about the Battle of Armageddon. Could you talk about what you see in the Middle East and how that fits the prophetic vision for the battle of Armageddon?

Dr. Jeffress: The Bible does teach in Revelation 16 and 19 that there’s a final world battle that will take place. How would John describe an Apache helicopter or a tank? How would he explain a nuclear explosion? He uses the language of appearance but that doesn’t make it any less real. It makes it more real. It means these things are literally going to happen.

Fang: In this battle of Armageddon, who is on God’s side? Or in other words who is God’s enemy?

Dr. Jeffress: Well, the ultimate enemy is going to be all those who have rejected Christ as savior. And it’s a hard thing for people to believe that Jesus the carpenter the mild and meek teacher is going to return as Revelation 19 describes him sitting on a horse and executing those who have opposed God. But that is Jesus. Yes, the first time he came, he came as savior of the world. The next time he comes, he’s coming as the judge of all the world.

Fang also included the opening segment of a Jeffress “Pathway to Victory” TBN broadcast later in the video that Fang attended. 

Jeffress stands before the cameras and begins: 

The countdown to Armageddon has begun. And our only hope is that Jesus will return soon to take his children home. Though today’s global powers make every attempt to establish binding agreements with other nations, God will have the final say. No matter how hard we try to make world peace, or undo the effects of humanity on this earth, the end of the world is coming and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

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My Response

Let’s begin with this statement by Jeffress: 

The Bible does teach in Revelation 16 and 19 that there’s a final world battle that will take place. How would John describe an Apache helicopter or a tank? How would he explain a nuclear explosion? He uses the language of appearance but that doesn’t make it any less real. It makes it more real. It means these things are literally going to happen.

Genre confusion

First, Revelation does not teach, per se.

Jesus teaches, Paul teaches, but Revelation mostly conveys its message through visions consistent with other Jewish visionary literature from the centuries before and after John that is certainly the case with Revelation 16 and 19.

The closest thing to “teaching” in Revelation is prophetic admonition—John urges his listeners throughout to remain faithful to Jesus.

Jeffress commits an example of what I term “genre confusion.” 

Jeffress and so many others see John’s visions as physically taking place and that John was describing physical realities from his visions. 

He treats the visions like we are reading the Gospels or Acts or 1 Samuel—or today’s newspaper. 

When he mentions “Apache helicopter” Jeffress is presumably talking about the armored locusts of the fifth trumpet in Revelation 9. 

I don’t know what he thinks might be tanks—maybe the horses of the sixth trumpet? 

Nor do I know what he considers a nuclear explosion in Revelation—maybe the first three trumpets of Revelation 8? 

In any case he is turning the often bizarre images of a dream or vision into literal, physical battle implements of modern warfare—and if Jeffress is placing these in a chronological sequence, they all appear long before the Battle of Armageddon at the end of Revelation 16.

The problem with all of this thinking is that if one thing in the visions is literal and physical it must all be literal and physical. 

For instance, Jesus is described in multiple ways in Revelation 1, Revelation 5, and Revelation 19.

Is Jesus all of these in a literal, physical way? 

Further, is the dragon (“a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads”) a literal dragon pursuing a literal woman clothed with the sun and a crown of twelve stars around her head in Revelation 12 (not to mention all of the other images)? 

Does a leopard-bodied, bear-footed, lion-mouthed beast with seven heads and ten horns with crowns literally/physically rise up from the sea a la Godzilla (Revelation 13)? 

Is Babylon literally Babylon in Revelation 17 and 18? 

Is there a whore literally sitting atop a scarlet colored beast in Revelation 17?

Jesus the executioner?

Then there is Jeffress’s mind-boggling statement,

And it’s a hard thing for people to believe that Jesus the carpenter the mild and meek teacher is going to return as Revelation 19 describes him sitting on a horse and executing those who have opposed God.

The last time I read the Gospels—I have been leading Bible studies on Matthew and Luke for the past year and have written a book on John—Jesus was anything but our passive understanding of meek and mild (Jesus himself was put to death for telling the plain truth), and the last time I read Revelation, Jesus was not executing anyone.

He was righteous judge, not executioner.

Here is the passage that Jeffress refers to from the original King James translation of Revelation 19:11-16:

And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God. And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.

I will have much more to say about this passage some day. But for the moment I have these questions:

Is a literal rider on a literal white horse wielding a literal sword in his literal mouth coming in a one-to-one correspondence with John’s vision?

And does the passage really say that Jesus “executes his enemies”?

“Smite the nations” is a far cry from “executes his enemies.”

Dare I say Jeffress’s statement makes Jesus sound like a Hamas warrior?

What does this passage symbolize

Or does this passage symbolize Jesus as the incarnate, crucified, and victoriously risen Word of God (wearing a robe dipped in blood), King of Kings and Lord of Lords, who preaches the gospel to the nations (the “sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God”) with the army of redeemed saints following him (wearing the white clean linen clothes washed by the blood seen on Jesus’s robe)?

And does the rider’s treading the winepress of the anger of the wrath of God represent the work of Christ on the cross and the blood he shed on our behalf?

A symbolic reading that is consistent with the good news makes much more sense than crude literalism.

When the interpreter goes down the road of physical literalism, then Revelation devolves into absurdities. 

What is literal and what isn’t cannot be determined. 

Either the imagery is all literal, or John uses images to convey symbolic meanings. 

Symbols can point to literal and spiritual realities, but not in themselves.

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The Literal in Revelation

Now there is plenty that is literal in Revelation: a literal John who witnessed a literal Jesus who died on a literal Roman cross and who received literal visions on the literal island of Patmos and wrote to literal believers in literal churches in literal cities in the literal Roman province of Asia (Ephesus, Pergamum, Thyatira, Smyrna, Philadelphia, Sardis, Laeodicea).

All of this literal material is based in chapter one and is the background for the proclamations—usually called letters—to the seven churches in Revelation 2–3 (which themselves contain their share of symbolic images).

And based on chapters one and twenty-two, I believe John looked forward to the literal return of Christ at some point—though he uses symbols to describe that return.

The Apocalyptic Genre

But beginning in Revelation 4 (and the vision of Jesus in Revelation 1:10-20), John uses the model of apocalyptic literature to organize and record his visions. 

The visions are necessarily in succession, but not necessarily chronological in any shape or form. Revelation 12 is the prime indicator of a lack of chronological organization—the incarnation itself is narrated in symbolic form.

And what about Babylon, which had fallen six centuries prior?

The genre of apocalypse is the form John used to record what Jesus had revealed to him.

To interpret Revelation as intended, that form must be acknowledged and taken into consideration.

And that form uses symbols to convey its message.

The symbols in Revelation are not mysterious, especially to his first readers. There are plenty of good books that make clear what they represent and I will do the same in the months ahead.

John writes with images and symbols in apocalyptic form just like the Old Testament prophets did in their poetic forms.

Jesus the same …

Next Jeffress says:

Yes, the first time he came, he came as savior of the world. The next time he comes, he’s coming as the judge of all the world. 

This statement simply contradicts the witness of Scripture. 

Jesus is always savior and he is always judge. 

Jesus was savior and judge when he came in flesh (both in his teachings and on the cross) and he will always be savior and judge now and in the future. 

John says it best: 

For God did not send his Son into the world to judge the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not judged, but whoever does not believe is judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. (Emphasis mine) John 3:17–19.

Jesus was judge in his incarnation because of his very presence—those witnessing his presence had to decide (as each of us does) whether to believe Jesus or not.

People are saved or judged depending on their response to Jesus.

And that is always the case: Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8). 

Jesus does not suddenly change from savior to (executing) judge.

Armageddon again

Finally, back to Armageddon. 

Jeffress proclaims,

The countdown to Armageddon has begun. 

What does this even mean? 

Unless the rapture has taken place (as the dispensational view puts it) then we have no idea if the countdown has begun. 

According to Jeffress in his sermon linked above, the rapture itself determines the start of the countdown. 

No rapture, no countdown.

Jeffress is pressing a narrative on his listeners that does not follow its own internal logic.

Besides this, a rapture that rescues believers from the suffering of the Tribulation (as the dispensational view teaches) is not only not in Scripture, but discounts the suffering and even martyrdom of millions before who have already persevered the tribulation.

I personally believe that Jesus is coming back once to gather his saints living and dead together, that whatever tribulation is ahead, all—sinners and redeemed saints—will go through it, that many saints will be martyred for that faith and that God will ultimately vindicate all who have put faith in him despite persecution, suffering, and even death. May we all be ready. But that discussion is for another day.

Final Thoughts

In my comments about the statements of these two preachers, I do not doubt their sincerity or their integrity, I only dispute their understanding of Scripture. In Hagee’s case his interpretation has led to a militaristic Christianity that encourages participation in the violence of the world. In Jeffress’s case, Jesus himself is portrayed as violent.

But if Jesus is related in any way to violence it is this: Jesus took the violence of the world upon himself on the cross and he identifies with all who suffer violence innocently and says, Do not fear, I am with you.

A Prayer

Lord give me the faith to persevere to the end, no matter what comes. My I be an instrument of your peace. May your peace and comfort come to all who are suffering in our world. Come, Lord Jesus.