When Jesus returns to the earth, He will launch a thousand year period where He is literal, physical king on the earth, ruling over every sub-king of the whole planet from His throne in Jerusalem. We generally call this the Millennium. We get the number 1000 from a cluster of verses in Revelation 20:1-6, but the descriptions of what will happen span the entire Bible.

When Jesus returns, He will bring with Him an army of resurrected saints (we talked about this in my last post). This is everyone who has ever had saving faith in God from throughout history, from Old Testament saints like Abraham to my grandma.

Jesus isn't going to snap His fingers like Thanos and change everything everywhere in an instant. He's going to take His time in an enormous, glorious procession traveling toward Jerusalem for the final confrontation.

The antichrist's ultimate objective is to be worshiped as God. He's not content to just make people fall into sin or reject Jesus. He wants to go all the way and actually be directly worshiped. Of course, really this is Satan's objective working through the antichrist. Everything he does is to achieve this goal.

The subject of the end-time Harlot Babylon is HUGE in Scripture. The longest Old Testament prophecy (Je. 50-51) and the longest New Testament prophecy (Re. 17-18) are both about Babylon. It's also called a mystery. Although we have a ton of biblical information, there are still many aspects that are veiled.

In order to fulfill His promises to Abraham and David, God must make Israel righteous, which has never yet fully happened in history. He will do this the same way He made us righteous—through the blood of Jesus in the new covenant.

My favorite Christmas hymn has always been "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel." I love the low, yearning tones that seem to hang in the air, expressing the groan of creation for a redeemer.

The Jewish story starts with God's covenant with Abraham, which is a major cornerstone of the gospel (Ga. 3:8). The Abrahamic covenant has three specific and far-reaching promises that have not yet been fulfilled, and ultimately cannot be fully fulfilled until Jesus comes.

Throughout Scripture, in every transitional generation, God has raised up messengers to proclaim what's coming. As Amos 3:7 says, "For the Lord GOD does nothing without revealing his secret to his servantstheprophets." He's really into partnership, and His desire is that we would lean in close to hear His voice, so we can spread the message of what He's doing.

As we discussed much earlier in this series, the end times are both dramatically glorious and dramatically terrible at the same time. Some groups within the church tend to emphasize one or the other, and either one is an unhealthy and inaccurate imbalance. Even as there will be all kinds of pressures and judgments besetting the earth, there will ALSO be a great revival as God pours out His Spirit and the bride comes into her maturity and authority.

Scripture is filled with promises of a global prayer and worship movement woven throughout the story of the end times. Amos 9:11 says: “On that day I will raise up the tabernacle of David... and rebuild it as in the days of old." (NKJV) The phrase "that day" is a common phrase referring to the end times.

First, let's address the question of protection. Will the church experience the full brunt of the judgments the same as the rest of the world? NO! We may experience some of the side effects, and certainly life will be difficult in many ways, but God has promised to protect us from the harshest judgments.

Chapters 6-22 are the main storyline of the book, mostly revolving around three groups of seven judgments: seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven bowls. These form the main structure of Jesus' battle plan to cleanse the earth and establish His kingdom.

As we discussed in an earlier post, the end times are good and bad all at once. Similarly, the characters in play represent both heroes and antagonists. Some of these might be familiar to you, but others you might not have considered before.

A lot of people consider Revelation the "scary book" or just plain confusing; there are even some great memes about how confusing Revelation is.Everyone starts by being confused—but no one is supposed to stop there. How mean would it be of God to write an entire book of the Bible that He knew would be out of our reach?

Studying the end times is first and foremost about knowing Jesus—the "man behind the plan." Revelation 1:1 introduces itself as the "revelation of Jesus Christ", not the revelation of the antichrist or judgment or anything else. This is absolutely key because if we memorize facts and timelines and can argue eschatology inside and out, but don't know the heart of Jesus in it ("but have not love," as 1 Corinthians 13 would say), we've missed the whole point.

I've never written out the timeline in blog form before, but I've taught it in internship classes many times, so I'm just going to invite you into my classroom and pretend that I'm standing at the whiteboard and you're sitting at a table in front of me, leaning forward and asking questions.

There seem to be two major perspectives on the "good or bad"-ness of the season of time right before Jesus comes back. On the one hand, the end times are sometimes presented as all bad bad bad—judgment, destruction, persecution… On the other hand, the story is sometimes presented as all good and no bad—that we're going to experience massive global revival, the church is going to spread the Kingdom all over the earth... As is often the case, the truth is a bit of both.