A Summary of Inmillennialism — Part 2

A friend asked me to develop a 15-page summary of inmillennialism, my framework for the interpretation of biblical prophecy. This post is the second part of that summary.¹ The next two or three posts will provide the rest. I plan to then post a downloadable PDF of the entire document.

We started building our model of prophecy in Matthew’s account of the Olivet Discourse. Our previous post (here) showed its structure. This post looks at Jesus’s prophecy of the Temple’s destruction and the disciples two questions about that event.

The Opening Exhortation

“And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple: and his disciples came to him for to shew him the buildings of the temple. And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (Matt. 24:1–2).²

A few hours earlier, Jesus had foretold the Temple’s desolation in his generation (Matt. 23:36, 39). “This the disciples observing, and being intent on the outward splendour, and worldly grandeur of it, were concerned that so beautiful a structure should be deserted; and almost thought it incredible, that so strong, and firm a building could be destroyed.”³ When the disciples called Jesus’s attention to the physical structure, he reiterated the prophecy. Not one Temple-stone would be left upon another.

The Disciples’ Questions

The disciples asked a when question about Jesus’s prophecy. Matthew, Mark, and Luke use similar words. “And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be?” (Matt. 24:3). “Tell us, when shall these things be?” (Mark 13:4). “And they asked him, saying, Master, but when shall these things be?” (Luke 21:7).

“These things” in this question refers to the events surrounding the Temple’s fall. The text gives no sign they were thinking of anything else.

The disciples also asked a sign question. It involved the same subject as their when question. Mark and Luke make this clear. “Tell us . . . what shall be the sign when all these things shall be fulfilled?” (Mark 13:4). “And they asked him . . . what sign will there be when these things shall come to pass?” (Luke 21:7). “These things” means the Temple’s desolation. There is no shift in topic.

Matthew gives the sign question in two parts. The disciples ask for “the sign of thy coming (Gk. parousia)” and “the sign . . . of the end of the world (Gk. aiōn)?” (Matt. 24:3). Young’s Literal Translation (YLT) has: “what is the sign of thy presence, and of the full end of the age?’” (Matt. 24:3).

The following table summarizes the subject of the disciples’ two questions.

Gospel Account	"When" Question	"Sign" Question
Mark	“These things”	“These things”
Luke	“These things”	“These things”
Matthew	“These things”	“End of the age,” “Parousia”

Inmillennialism teaches Matthew focused on the results of the Temple’s fall. The disciples associated the Temple’s demise with both the Lord’s “parousia” (presence) and the “end of the age.” They were correct to do so. Jesus did not correct the assumptions built into their question.

This explanation differs from that of the existing prophetic frameworks. To justify it, let’s begin with the “end of the age,” since it is less controversial than the “parousia.”

The Sign of “the End of the Age”

The disciples connected the Temple’s fall with the end of an age. We should remember how they viewed history. “The Jews divided history into ‘the present age’ and ‘the age to come.’ They expected their Messiah to usher in the age to come or the Messianic age. . . . The early Christians accepted Jesus as the Messiah; therefore, they believed that he ushered in the age to come and settled the doom of the old.”⁴ 

The Temple was the preeminent symbol of the pre-Messianic, or Mosaic Age. The disciples knew the prophecies about the daily sacrifices ceasing forever (e.g., Dan. 11:31; 12:11). They surmised that the Temple’s destruction would fulfill those prophecies. There was no promise of restoration for the desolation Jesus foretold (Matt. 24:15).

The disciples were grappling with the implications of Jesus’s prophecy. If the Temple fell, the Mosaic age would end. They asked for a sign related to “the full end of the age” in which they were living. The “these things” of which Jesus spoke would end the Mosaic Age. There is no need to charge the disciples with confusion. Their question did not introduce another topic.

The Sign of Jesus’s “parousia”

The end of the Mosaic Age implied the Messianic Age would begin. The disciples understood the prophecies associated with the new age. Jesus had taught them for three and a half years. He had instructed them to “preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt. 10:7). The disciples knew the transition to the Messianic Age was underway.

They knew about God’s presence with Israel in the Mosaic Age. God had said, “I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will be their God” (Exod. 29:45). They also knew God’s presence in the Messianic Age would be more glorious. His promise was, “My tabernacle also shall be with them: yea, I will be their God, and they shall be my people. . . . And the name of the city from that day shall be, The LORD is there” (Ezek. 48:27, 35; cp. Jer. 31:33; et al.).

This accounts for the disciples’ use of the word parousia in Matt. 24:3. “Parousia literally signifies ‘a being with,’ ‘a presence.’ Not infrequently it is so rendered. It thus denotes a state, not an action. We never read of a parousia to, always of a parousia with.”⁵ It means “the state of being present at a place, presence;”⁶ “to be present.”⁷ The “state” of interest to the disciples was the Messianic age that would replace the Mosaic age.

Antonyms often help clarify the meaning of words. The opposite of parousia is not “going” as opposed to “coming,” but “absence” versus “presence.” Paul shows this by placing his “presence” (parousia) in opposition to his “absence” (apousia; Phil. 2:12). His contrast was not between two point-in-time verbs—“coming” and “going”—but between two states of being designated by the nouns “presence” and “absence.” This conforms well to what Milton Terry says: “The word [parousia] . . . means presence as opposed to absence.”⁸

Some literal translations of the Scriptures recognize this definition. They translate parousia as “presence.” The McReynolds English Interlinear supplies “presence” for every occurrence of parousia. “The Revised Version, in every instance where it does not put presence into the text as the representative of parousia, inserts the marginal note, ‘Gr. Presence,’ thus affirming that such is its real meaning.”⁹

The word parousia accounts for God’s presence with his people during the Messianic Age. W. E. Vine says, 

Cramer quotes some suggestive words from Ewald to the effect that the Parousia of Christ corresponds perfectly with the Shekinah of God in the Old Testament. For him also the doctrine of the Coming of Christ is obscured because he attaches a meaning to parousia which does not in fact belong to it. It seems too obvious to say that the usage of the word should regulate the theology, and not the theology prescribe the meaning of the word. Yet the neglect of the simple law of exegesis is responsible for some at least of the confusion into which the Hope of the Gospel has been thrown in the minds of many Christians.¹⁰

When the Temple fell, Christ’s parousia (presence) had replaced the Old Testament Shekinah. 

This word can represent the reign of a ruler. “In Greece a new era was reckoned from the parousia of Hadrian, and special advent coins were struck, in various places to commemorate the parousia of an emperor.”¹¹ In the Olivet Discourse, parousia represents the new era of Christ’s reign during the Messianic Age. This is the long-anticipated, new-covenant arrival and “presence” of God with his people. This well-documented meaning fits the disciples’ question and Jesus’s response.

This understanding of parousia is a distinguishing mark of inmillennialism. The existing prophetic frameworks insist on translating parousia as “coming.” As we said above, this creates problems. Jesus associated his parousia with the Temple’s destruction (Matt. 24:3, 27, 37, 39). The apostles linked it to the bodily resurrection at the end of the Messianic Age (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:23). A punctiliar meaning for parousia—such as the “coming” of most translations—will not allow both to be true. 

The solution is to allow parousia to represent a state of being. It signifies Christ’s presence with his church during the Messianic Age. It includes the Temple’s fall and the resurrection. The disciples understood this and asked an appropriate sign question. Paraphrasing, we can say they requested signs of Jesus’s Messianic-Age presence and the end of the Mosaic Age (Matt. 24:3). A failure to recognize the significance of the disciples’ sign question in Matthew will lead us to a faulty prophetic framework. Their question in Matthew has the same subject as it does in Mark and Luke.

Nothing in the disciples’ when and sign questions shows they were thinking of another subject. They wanted to know about the Temple’s fall, not the end of history.

Conclusion

The disciples had heard the Lord Jesus teach about the soon-coming kingdom age. They had obeyed his command to preach its arrival. They knew the end of the Mosaic Age was near. When they heard Jesus announce the Temple’s destruction, they made an immediate connection. This event would end the old age and complete the transition to the new. They were not thinking about the end of history or the end of the cosmos. They asked their questions in a way that was consistent with their perspective.

As we will see, Jesus answered their questions. He did not answer unasked questions outside the context of the Temple’s destruction. Our next few posts will show more evidence that Jesus and the disciples spoke from this perspective. This has important implications for our budding prophetic model.

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1. Part 1 is here.
2. The above painting is Nicolas Poussin’s The Destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, 1637. The digital file (here) is in the public domain (PD-1923).
3. John Gill, An Exposition of the Old and New Testaments in The Baptist Commentary Series (Paris, AR: The Baptist Standard Bearer, 1989), 7:284.
4. Ray Frank Robbins, The Revelation of Jesus Christ (Nashville: Broadman, 1975), 222.
5. W. E. Vine, Collected Writings of W. E. Vine (Nashville: T. Nelson, 1996), 5:149. Emphasis added.
6. Frederick W. Danker, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 780. Emphasis added.
7. Albrecht Oepke, “Παρουσία κτλ,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Friedrich (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964-76), 5:859.
8. Milton S. Terry, Biblical Apocalyptics: A Study of the Most Notable Revelations of God and of Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1988), 246.
9. Israel P. Warren, The Parousia: A Critical Study of the Scripture Doctrines of Christ’s Coming; His Reign as King; the Resurrection of the Dead; and the General Judgment (Portland, ME: Hoyt, Fogg & Dunham, 1884), 24–25.
10. Vine, Writings, 5:149n.
11. Georg Braumann, “Παροθσία,” in The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, ed. Colin Brown (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976), 2:898.