Many religious books making the best-seller lists today deal with events preceding the end of the world which include a secret coming of Christ to rapture all Christians off the earth just before a seven-year period of Great Tribulation, during which a personal Antichrist will play a central role.

This is followed by another return of Christ to set up the millennium. David Jeremiah’s, “What in the World is Going On?” is one of the best- selling Christian books of the year.

Like most of the current end time authors, Jeremiah presents a dispensational view of history based upon pre-millennialism, an end time belief system which has been around for centuries.

Dispensationalism is a relatively new system, originated in the 1830s by John Nelson Darby, an English evangelist. It was popularized in the United States through Cyrus Scofield’s reference Bible, and gained world-wide exposure in Hal Lindsey’s 1970 best-seller, “The Late Great Planet Earth.” In recent years, the fictional “Left Behind” series of books and movies have spread dispensational to nearly every household.

Basically, dispensationalism divides human history into seven ages, the final and seventh age beginning with the return of Jesus and the establishment of the millennium. Jesus will conquer the Antichrist in the battle of Armageddon, save the Jewish people, and set up His throne in a rebuilt Jewish temple to rule His kingdom for one thousand years.

Dispensationalists separate God’s plan of redemption for the Jews from the Gentile church. Their belief is that most the prophecies of the Old Testament must be literally fulfilled through the Jewish people, much of which is to happen in the future.

This is where the view departs from historic premillennialism, and the other two traditionally held end time beliefs, amillennialism and postmillennialism. Historic premillennialists look for a millennial reign of Christ on earth, but do not make the separation of Israel from the church.

Amillennialists and postmillennialists believe that the thousand- year reign of Christ mentioned in Revelation is symbolic of a long period of time during the present age, not a literal one thousand year period. In these views, Christ is coming again, not to secretly rapture the church, but to bring an end to this present age, to resurrect the dead, to judge the evil and the righteous, and to establish a new heaven and new earth which will extend not for a thousand years, but for eternity.

Until the rise of dispensationalism, the church taught that Israel was God’s people of the Old Testament and the church is God’s people of the New Testament and that in Christ the two have become one.

It has been taught throughout church history that the old covenant pointed to the new covenant made through Christ and His life given as a sacrifice for sin on the Cross.

All prophetic signs pointed to Christ and His spiritual kingdom manifest on Earth through the ministry of the church. The church was believed to be the ultimate expression of God’s plan of salvation, not a parenthetical insertion due to Israel’s rejection of Jesus.

del Loy is the pastor at Crosspoint Church in Natchez. This is a second in a three-part series on the signs of the times.