14 Sep Our “Last Days” Blunder [Part 2 of 5]
If you have missed the first part of “Bamboozled Believers’ Big Bible Blunders [Part 1of 5]” you can access it here.
On The Day of Pentecost, Peter said that signs and wonders would abound in the last days. On that day 2,000 years ago, he also stated that the disciples’ ability to miraculously speak unlearned languages was a sign that they were living in the “last days.” Since we don’t see those miraculous signs and wonders today, we can conclude that we are not living in the last days today! After hundreds of years of failed prophecies issued by pulpit pounding Christian demagogues, maybe it’s time to reevaluate our “last days” doctrine.
On that Day of Pentecost, Peter also said that he was living in the “last days” before “The Day of the Lord.” So we need to understand what is meant by a “Day of the Lord.” The prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah describe “days of the Lord” for Babylon and Egypt; these were military disasters that brought those mighty empires to an end. (Note that days of calamity for the oppressors were also days of liberation for the oppressed.)
So we need to ask: “Did Peter live in the “last days” before a military disaster?”
The answer is an emphatic “Yes!” Jewish historian Josephus reports that in AD 70, Roman armies killed 1.1 million Jews and he also tells us that 97,000 survivors of the siege of Jerusalem were sold into slavery. That “Day of the Lord” meant the end of the Old Covenant Jewish religion.
Here are two more reasons to believe that prophecies concerning the “Day of the Lord” were fulfilled in AD 70:
- Malachi predicted that God would send Elijah before the “great and terrible Day of the Lord.” And Jesus said that John the Baptist fulfilled that prophecy (Matt. 11:13,14), so the “great and terrible day of the Lord” must have happened shortly after John’s time.
- Peter said that he was speaking of the same “last days” as the prophet Joel, and Joel certainly wasn’t predicting the end of the world because he said that in Jerusalem there would be “them that survive.”
We are not living in “the last days” before the “end of the world” either. Do you know that Jesus never predicted the “end of the world”? He predicted the “end of the age”… the end of the age of animal sacrifice and temple worship. Yet modern pseudo-prophets quote Peter and Jesus to tell us that we are living in the last days of planet earth.
Over and over, year after year, decade after decade and century after century, our doomsday prophets and Chicken Little preachers have been WRONG! WRONG! And WRONG again! They use prophecy that was fulfilled long ago to predict events in our future. It is time to admit our error…
Next week we will discuss our “New Heaven and New Earth” Blunder