Eschatology at a Glance

Most of the end-times argument comes down to where you put two marks on one line: the Second Coming, and the "thousand years." Here are the four traditional ways of drawing it, side by side, and then a fuller picture that fills the same line with what the whole Bible is actually doing across the age, one people, one spiritual temple being restored, one return.

The four traditional views

All four begin at the Cross and end in the Eternal State (the New Creation). They differ only on the rapture, the Second Coming, and the millennium. A solid line is a single visible coming; a dotted line marks a transition.

Notice the trend as you go down: the extra marks fall away. Dispensationalism needs the most machinery, a separate rapture and a separate tribulation and a separate earthly millennium; amillennialism needs the fewest, the Cross, the church age (which is the reign), and one return into the new creation. These pages lean amillennial without rejecting historic premillennialism, which shares the same one-return frame and only adds a literal earthly reign after the Second Coming. That view is genuinely the earlier of the two, held by Irenaeus and Justin Martyr, and the honest thing to say is that the church has not been of one mind here since the second century. What is not ancient is the dispensational line at the top, and that is a matter of record rather than opinion (see the Rapture, the Kingdom, and the drift from the early church).

A fuller synthesis

The four charts above answer "when is the millennium?" But the same line can be filled with what God is actually doing across the whole age. This is that picture, the amillennial line, drawn out with the biblical theology underneath it: one spiritual temple being restored, believers tried and sealed throughout, and one judgment at the end.

What the chart actually lays out

The chart runs in four movements, and rather than restate it here, it is better looked at: a run-up before the Cross where the line is being prepared, the Church Age as the spiritual temple restored out of Ezekiel 37, the disciplining and testing of God's people running underneath the whole length of it, and a consummation of sealing, judgment and the eternal state. It ends, rightly, on the two servants of Matthew 24:45-51, which is the hinge of the whole thing: who was found faithful, and who was not.

See the full chart, the hand-drawn timeline rebuilt whole →

The "70th Week" label deserves its own word, because the chart places it before the Cross while the modern charts push it to the end of the age. The seventy weeks of Daniel 9:24-27 are given "to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness… and to anoint the most Holy," which is a description of the cross, not of a treaty. In the last week "Messiah" is "cut off, but not for himself"; He "shall confirm the covenant with many for one week; and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease." Read plainly, the one who confirms the covenant is the one just named, Messiah, and the sacrifice ceased at the cross, when the veil tore and every offering after it was empty. Then "the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary," which Titus did in AD 70, "and unto the end of the war desolations are determined." The dispensational reading, stated fairly, breaks the last week off and places it at the end of the age, with "the prince that shall come" as a future antichrist who makes and breaks a covenant; it is a real reading held by serious people, and the difference turns on whether "he" in verse 27 is Messiah or the prince. That reading, the seventieth week as Christ's ministry and death with Jerusalem's ruin following, is the older one; it was held broadly before Darby, and it needs no gap of two thousand years inserted between the sixty-ninth week and the seventieth. The chart draws it so. To be fair to the record, Irenaeus and Hippolytus read the final half-week as a future Antichrist, and on that, as on Revelation 20, the early church was not of one mind; see the Antichrist for how these pages hold the spirit of antichrist as present and many, with a final embodiment left open.

The hardest verse in the field, and an honest answer to it

Whichever chart a reader ends up with, one verse waits for all of them, and it is usually raised by people who are not asking in good faith. It deserves a straight answer anyway.

Mark 13:30

Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.

C.S. Lewis put the objection in its sharpest form, in the objector’s own voice, before answering it: “the apocalyptic beliefs of the first Christians have been proved to be false… Their Master had told them so. He shared, and indeed created, their delusion. He said in so many words, ‘this generation shall not pass till all these things be done.’ And he was wrong. He clearly knew no more about the end of the world than anyone else.”

Then he concedes what has to be conceded, without softening it: “It is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible.” And then he notices what almost nobody notices:

Yet how teasing, also, that within fourteen words of it should come the statement “But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.” The one exhibition of error and the one confession of ignorance grow side by side.

C.S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night

Fourteen words apart (Mark 13:30 and 13:32). In one verse He appears to date the end; in the next but one He says He does not know it. The objection and its answer are neighbours in the same paragraph.

Note carefully whose word “error” is. It is the objector’s, not Lewis’s. The moment Lewis speaks in his own voice he brackets it, writing of the (apparently) mistaken prediction and the (apparent) mistake. He never grants that Christ was wrong. He grants that it looks wrong, and then makes that the argument:

Unless the reporter were perfectly honest he would never have recorded the confession of ignorance at all; he could have had no motive for doing so except a desire to tell the whole truth. And unless later copyists were equally honest they would never have preserved the (apparently) mistaken prediction about “this generation” after the passage of time had shown the (apparent) mistake.

This passage and the cry “Why hast thou forsaken me?” together make up the strongest proof that the New Testament is historically reliable. The evangelists have the first great characteristic of honest witnesses: they mention facts which are, at first sight, damaging to their main contention.

C.S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night

Nobody inventing a religion writes down that its founder said he did not know. Nobody protecting one leaves in a sentence that has embarrassed every generation since. That they did is the reason the Gospels can be trusted, and it is the same argument this site makes about the Fathers: the men who kept the record kept the parts that cost them something.

And notice what this answer does not require. It does not need “this generation” read as the first century, and it does not need it read as the last. Whichever of the four charts above a reader holds, the honesty of the witnesses stands, and the verse that looks worst turns out to be evidence for the book rather than against it.

Lewis takes the incarnation itself as the reason it could be so: “To believe in the Incarnation, to believe that he is God, makes it hard to understand how he could be ignorant; but also makes it certain that, if he said he could be ignorant, then ignorant he could really be. For a God who can be ignorant is less baffling than a God who falsely professes ignorance.”

Where this lands

The four charts argue about the placement of a thousand years. Your fuller picture answers the better question: what is the whole age for? It is the restoring of the one spiritual temple, the testing and sealing of the one ever-growing Body, and the long patience of a Master who will come, and will know His servants by whether they kept doing His will or said in their hearts, "my master is delayed." One people, one temple, one return, and a faithfulness that holds to the end. (See the Kingdom, the Security of Salvation, and the heart of it all.)

Study the passages

Read them in context. Links go to BibleHub.

• Ezekiel 37: dry bones, one nation, one Spirit
• Luke 10:18: Satan falls like lightning
• Psalm 110:1; 1 Corinthians 15:25: enemies under His feet
• Acts 2:17; Ephesians 1:13-14: the Spirit poured out, the sealing
• 1 Corinthians 15:51-54: the perishable for the imperishable
• Hosea 6:6; Matthew 9:13: mercy over sacrifice
• Matthew 24:45-51: the faithful and the wicked servant
• Revelation 20:11-15: the judgment

The verses themselves, every one in one table with its own words about time, are on Lining Up the Verses About the End. See also The End Times in the Prophets and the Apostles, Daniel and Revelation, Read Together. The four-views comparison is the standard teaching diagram, redrawn here. The "fuller synthesis" is the author's own timeline, reproduced with every label kept and Scripture references added. Quotations from the King James Version (and the servant passages as the author rendered them), linked to BibleHub.