The Sheep and Goats Judgment, Part 1

Jesus opened his exhortations to watchfulness with a judgment in the distant past: the flood. He closes them with one in the distant future: the sheep and the goats. For most of church history, Christians have read Matthew 25:31–46 as the final judgment at the end of history. In the last two centuries, two very different groups have moved away from that reading. Dispensationalists make it a sorting for entry into a future millennium. Extreme preterists like J. Stuart Russell confine it to the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, and that view has led many to deny the bodily resurrection and the final judgment. In this episode, Michael explains why Russell's reading nearly destroyed his own faith. He then works through four of Russell's five arguments: • Why this passage isn't a parable, and why that matters • Where inmillennialism agrees with Russell: the connecting link and the coming of the Son of Man in that generation • The key distinction Russell misses: the Son of Man coming to reward (Matthew 16) versus coming to reign (Matthew 25) • Why "all nations" (ethnē) can't be reduced to "the tribes of the land" (phulai) Along the way, we'll see how Jesus' words to Caiaphas tie it all together. We'll also see how inmillennialism lets us keep Jesus' "this generation" time statement and still confess, with the historic church, that he "shall come to judge the quick and the dead." Next time: Russell's final argument, and how the passage points to a judgment at the end of history.