The Second Coming, part 4

Shalom, friends.

So, getting all that information about "heaven" and "hell," "Paradise" and "the Lake of Fire (and Sulphur)," under our thinking caps, we come to verses on the Second Coming:

The Olivet Discourse (found in Matthew 24 and 25, Mark 13, and Luke 21) was Yeshua`s (Jesus') description of events to come in the future FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF WHEN YESHUA` SAID THE WORDS!

That's an important point with which to come to grips. Not all of the Olivet Discourse is about OUR future; some of it is already fulfilled in our PAST! Nevertheless, not all of it was fulfilled in the past, either; so the Preterists are not correct in their interpretation of these passages (nor of Revelation). In order for Preterists to interpret everything Yeshua` said as having a fulfillment in history, much of what He said has to be allegorized ("spiritualized") away. I cannot accept that premise to interpretation.

I believe that the human authors NEVER intended to convey God's message in such a manner, and I don't believe that God intended His Word to be so interpreted, either. All authors, with very few exceptions, will tell their accounts in a historical way. Furthermore, normal grammatical usage of the language in which they write will be employed. Thus, I believe in a normal grammatical-historical interpretation to Scripture.

That doesn't mean that occasionally the author won't employ some figurative language; however, the primary, overruling, interpretive method is normally as one would tell any account, from start to finish - a chronological, literal account. Therefore, the Scriptures are NEVER to be taken as primarily allegorical in nature, employing figurative language throughout, as the norm!

Having said that, the "trick" is to know what portions of the Olivet Discourse have occurred in the past and are already fulfilled and what portions are yet to be fulfilled in our future.

To accomplish this task, I did a thorough investigation into the Olivet Discourse from the Greek to create a harmonized version of the three accounts: Matthew's account, Mark's account, and Luke's account. Harmonies of the Gospels have been attempted in the past, but always in the English language for the English-speaking people. Thus, past harmonies have been performed as 1) translation into English, and then 2) harmonizing the events. I reversed that by 1) harmonizing the Greek texts first, and then 2) translating the harmonized results into English. To me, that made much better sense since the Greek is often very similar among the three accounts. I did this down to the word level in each of the three accounts, and thus changed the addresses of the words from merely "book chapter:verse" to "book chapter:verse:word." By using a spreadsheet program, it was easy to move things as necessary to align the various texts without changing the order of any of the three.

In the next section, I'll give you some of the results.

In the Messiah's love,
Retrobyter