Originally published in "The Lord's Coming Herald & Wesleyan Bible Prophecy Advocate," Spring Edition 2007
When Does the Marriage Supper Of The Lamb take Place?
Dispensationalists teach that the marriage supper of the Lamb is the event
that happens for the Church while it is in heaven during the seven year period
between the rapture and the revelation.
Several problems arise here.
First, the Bible does not teach the existence of some future "seven year" end-time prophetic time frame to start with. Where does the New Testament say anything about a future seven year end-time period?
Friends, the point is the incontestable fact that the New Testament never mentions the existence of such a time-frame period. Dispensationalists derive it solely from a misinterpretation of Daniel's prophecy of the Seventy Weeks. Once we see through the technical academic fallacies of Sir Robert Anderson's nineteenth century theory of interpreting Daniel's prophecy of the Seventy Weeks, then the logical consistency of the entire dispensational gospel unravels from its fountainhead.
Many cannot imagine that a huge system of ideological
delusion has arisen from a single major interpretational fallacy. Yet, if
Christ, and not Antichrist, is indeed the divinely-intended covenant-maker of
Daniel 9:27, then reason presses to this very conclusion.
The future seven year construction dispensationalists use to structure,
organize, and harmonize all the details of end-time Bible prophecy with which to
start is a dissonant component that miscues one's thinking on everything else.
If no future seven year period between the rapture and the revelation exists to
begin with, then, obviously, the marriage supper of the Lamb does not take place
then, either!
The truth is that the biblical marriage supper of the Lamb is not some future
event only, it is a present reality, as well. "And in this mountain shall the
Lord of host make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the
lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined" (Isa.
25:6). "Ho, everyone that is thirsty, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no
money; come ye, buy and eat. Yea, come, by wine and milk without money and
without price" (Isa. 55:1-2).
In the familiar parable of Luke 14:16-24 Jesus spoke of eating bread in the
kingdom of God as the making of a great supper. The banquet house is to be
filled in this present age; it is not an age-long empty chamber, as it were,
that only awaits the in-gushing of the saints going up in some secret pre-seven
year great tribulation rapture at some future point in time.
When we get saved we become as virgins espoused to Christ (II Cor. 11:2). When
we die as a Christian we go to the place that Jesus has gone to prepare for us
in heaven (Jn. 14:1-3). Having tasted of the good things of the Lord at the
feast of the gospel now begun, we go on to be with Jesus in the eternity-long marriage supper of the Lamb when we die.
Do we think that believers are in limbo from the time of their death until Christ returns to resurrect the dead and judge the world? Or have we, in the Wesleyan Holiness Movement, now adopted "soul sleeping" as our new doctrine of the intermediate state?
Think about it.
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