It was back in the mid-1970s and we were visiting with a distant relative of mine and he was expounding on the premillennial teaching. He said, with considerable assurance, “I believe the Lord will return by 1990.” I pondered that for a moment then asked, “And are you ready?“ “No,” he answered.

I read in the Bible that it is much more important to be ready to meet the Lord at any time than to know when that time may be. But I had once believed the same as my relative. About a year after we were married, the pastor of the church that we are attending taught a winter long series of Bible studies in which he expounded the whole dispensational premillennial doctrine. We were new Christians and we just drank it in. After all, he was quoting Bible verses all along; it sounded like Biblical proof.

But I have a problem: I like to read. So I began reading books by well-known premillennial authors, people like Hal Lindsey, John F Walvoord, Dwight Pentecost and others. What they were doing was taking prophetic scriptures and showing how they applied to current events. It all sounded quite plausible, but there were some divergences in their interpretations, because current events don’t always cooperate with well-meaning predictions.

The great surprise was when I read a book from the early 1930s by Lewis Sperry Chafer. The writers I named above were all graduates of Dallas Theological Seminary, a couple of them were even teachers there. Chafer was the founder of Dallas Theological Seminary. In that book from the early 1930s he boldly proclaimed that Benito Mussolini was the Antichrist. Well, by the time I read the book Mussolini had come to a rather inglorious end. That raised some questions in my mind, but an even greater question was raised by his statement that the command to repentance applied only to the Jews, because, you see, the Jews had rejected Jesus. The Gentiles who did not bear that guilt did not need to repent; they just needed to believe in Jesus as their Saviour. I saw that as a flat-out contradiction of what the Apostle Paul told the Athenians, saying that God now calls all men everywhere to repent.

In time, the whole structure of premillennial dispensational doctrine began to seem like a flimsy house of cards. I abandoned it and went back to the old teaching that there is coming a day when Jesus will return, a day that is called the end of the world. At that time He will call all people, those living and those long dead, into judgement. Some will go to eternal torment and some to eternal bliss. That is quite simple and straightforward, that really is what the Bible teaches. The Bible also teaches that there is just no point in speculating about how and when the end will come.

In later reading, I found that the premillennial doctrine, the teaching of a latter day Antichrist who would set up a worldwide Kingdom and then be destroyed by the Lord at his return, came from the Roman Catholic Church. Anabaptists had for at least a thousand years been referring to the Catholic church and the Pope as Antichrist, meaning not just opposed to Christ but pretending to take his place. A writing from southern France from 1100 AD talks about how Antichrist has put his ceremonies in the place of the Holy Spirit, making salvation contingent upon baptism by a Roman Catholic priest rather than on the Holy Spirit; and all the Roman Catholic ceremonies promised the benefits of Christianity without requiring any personal connection to God or the Holy Spirit. Therefore the Anabaptists denounced the Pope as Antichrist. The title of the Pope as the Vicar of Christ, meaning the one who exercises all the power and authority of Christ in His absence from the earth, really is the same as saying that the pope is Antichrist.

Menno Simons refers to the Roman Catholic Church many times as Antichrist. The reformers took up the label of Antichrist, applying it to the Pope and the whole Catholic system. Finally, the Catholic church had to do something, so they got a couple of Jesuit scholars to write books giving a different picture of what the Bible meant by Antichrist. One was Manuel de Lacunza (1731-1801), a Jesuit scholar living in Chile, who wrote as Rabbi Juan Josaphat ben Ezra, claiming to be a Jewish scholar. In his book he placed the Antichrist as a world religious and political leader who would appear at the end of the age and be destroyed by the return of Christ. The book was written in Spanish and translated into English around 1826. It excited the imagination of a number of people, the most notable of them being John Nelson Darby. Darby was a former lawyer, then a Church of England minister who had become disillusioned with that church, deciding that there was no longer any such thing as a church. He spoke of the ruin of the church: the church lies in ruins and cannot be rebuilt, restored or revived. All that’s left for Christians is to gather together and worship, without the structure and order of a church.

In Darby’s thinking, if there was no more church then many of the passages in the Bible that applied to the church must apply to some future age. From there he went on to elaborate his premillennial doctrine. In fact he devised a whole dispensational doctrine, claiming that God had offered salvation to mankind in six different ways and every one had been a failure. The last had been the church and that was a failure too, So those verses must apply to some future era, such as when Jesus will reign on earth from Jerusalem over all the world for a thousand years. In fact Darby elaborated a whole scheme here of the rapture, seven years of tribulation, then the return of Christ, a thousand year reign and then at the end of the wonderful, peaceful thousand year reign people would rebel against Christ leading to the battle of Armageddon, the final judgement with people being assigned to either Hell or Heaven.

None of this really pops out at you from reading the Bible, you need to have a a guide to lead you through it, which is why there are so many books trying to help you understand this doctrine, all based on imagination rather than adherence to the plain word of Scripture. Darby took the Apostle Paul’s verse about rightly dividing the word of truth as authorization to snip Bible verses into little pieces and rearrange them to come up with a different scheme. That is how our pastor had taught us many years earlier; he never took the whole Bible passage and expounded on it; he took little bits from here and there and put it all together in a way that convinced us at that stage in our Christian life. But we didn’t stay convinced, the whole thing just doesn’t hold together.

The apostle Peter warns against this misuse of Paul’s words, sdaying that there are some things difficult to understand in Paul’s writings, “which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16). “Wrest” means to twist, pervert, tear apart, which is an apt description of what happens when some people think they are rightly dividing the Scripture. “Dividing” means to cut straight, toteach the truth correctly.

As for the secret rapture of the saints, that idea does not come from the Bible and was completely unknown before 1830. That was the year that Margaret Macdonald, a 15 year old Scottish girl, had a dream that the Lord was going to take His people away from the earth before the great tribulation. Darby was one of those that came to listen to this young lady’s dream and he incorporated it into his premillennial doctrine. I

I suppose Darby actually believed what he was teaching. He is described as a very meek, gentle and kind person, who at the beginning of the Plymouth Brethren movement would freely fellowship with all who professed faith in Jesus Christ. After he introduced his dispensational premillennial doctrine and some others of the Plymouth Brethren didn’t see things the same way, he began to become quite defensive of this teaching, cutting off all fellowship from those who didn’t see things the way he did and then cutting off fellowship with anybody who had fellowship with those who didn’t think as he did. Finally, he became the leader of his own little exclusive band of Plymouth Brethren, going all the way from being a humble man that would fellowship with anybody to being the virtual pope of his own little group.

It wasn’t only Darby who seized on this latter day Antichrist teaching, there are other schemes out there. My father used to listen to Canada’s National Back to the Bible hour every Sunday morning where Ernest Manning, the premier of Alberta, would talk about Gog and Magog and the Great Bear who was Russia, and how they were going to attack Israel and that would lead to the battle of Armageddon. There are various other divergent views of the doctrine. and the more one studies the premillennial doctrine the more flimsy it becomes.

After all, the teaching of Jesus Christ, the teaching of our Anabaptist-Mennonite forefathers, is that what is important is how we live our life from day to day. We should reflect the life of Jesus Christ within us and base our salvation on true repentance, a new birth and the communion of the Holy Spirit so that we can be assured that we are walking with God, that we love God, we love our neighbour as ourself and that we are ready at any time for the return of our Saviour. That is the important point: it doesn’t matter when or how He comes. We can set a date, but what happens if we are hit by a car tomorrow as we walk across the street? Are we ready? That is the one important question.