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Is what we believe about the End Times and Jesus’ return important? In today’s episode, American Vision president Gary DeMar guides us through some common End Times theories that people draw from the Bible and how our thoughts about the End Times can impact our attitudes and how we live our daily lives.
If you’d like to dive deeper into these topics and explore some of Gary’s writing, you can read his blog posts at https://americanvision.org/authors/gary-demar/
Episode Transcription
Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.
Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again. This is Marlin Detweiler with Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have someone with us that I have known for decades, Gary DeMar. Gary, welcome.
Gary DeMar:
Good to be with you.
Marlin Detweiler:
Gary, give us a little bit of your background personally before we jump into some other things.
Gary DeMar:
I was raised in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, raised Roman Catholic. Went to Catholic school up through fifth grade and ended up spending most of my time, unfortunately, in athletics and ended up going to Western Michigan University on a scholarship for track and field. Became a Christian my senior year in college in 1973 and ended up moving down to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
The job situation in Pittsburgh was not very good in the 1970s, so I ended up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and providentially moved within a few blocks of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, where James Kennedy was pastor and it was a that was a very unique church. No, not only was James at the forefront of evangelism, he developed and promoted the Evangelism Explosion Program, which I and my future wife participated in.
We were both members there. We didn't know one another at the time, but at the same time, he was a worldview guy. I mean, he had started a Christian academy. So he was really involved in Christian education and biblical worldview issues spoke on worldview issues, held conferences on them as well. And my short term there, I ended up at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, graduated in 1977.
I got involved in the apologetics side of Christian worldview. Greg Boston was a professor there and probably the premier Christian apologist of of 20th century and moved the Atlanta area taught school here for a little while and started working at American Vision in 1980. I've been there in there ever since, although there was a short hiatus where I retired and then they pulled me back in. So I've been back in.
Marlin Detweiler:
Now that you're based in the northern part of Atlanta, tell us about American vision, what does it do?
Gary DeMar:
American Vision was started by a fellow named Steve Shiffman. So some of your listeners and viewers might have known Marshall Foster. Marshall Foster was very big in America's Christian history side of things. And he and Steve Shiffman had a little falling out. They went their separate ways. Steve was here in the Atlanta area. He had done some ministry work before he had started American Vision, which was pretty much centered on America's Christian heritage. And then we did an audio thing called the American Vision 360 Years Later that actually won an award. It was an audio presentation of America's Christian history, beginning through Columbus, all the way up to then, the present 1980s.
Then I wrote a book called God in Government. It was the first of three volumes on what the Bible said about government. Now, remember, this is the 1980s and we just finished with Jimmy Carter being president, which was seen by many to be a disaster. Ronald Reagan comes onto the scene and my goal was to help Christians understand how the Bible applied to government. And showing the government wasn't synonymous with politics. And the book sold very, very well. They wrote a second volume and wrote a third volume, and we've now combined it into one volume just called God and Government: A Biblical, Historical, and Constitutional Perspective.
Marlin Detweiler:
I remember when that came out. And I also there was a periodical that you sent out with some really intriguing and thought provoking articles. What was that called?
Gary DeMar:
It was called Biblical Worldview Magazine. We did that monthly, but with the Internet, I write now two articles a week rather than putting a magazine out which was expensive to do. Two articles a week, I do three podcasts a week and then I have another series of podcasts that I do with a seminary friend of mine, which were dealing with eschatology.
So I keep busy in that area. And American Division also publishes a great variety of books on apologetics, America's Christian history, eschatology, government, worldview thinking, etc. So we do quite a bit in the worldview side of things.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, you do great work. And for people that are listening, that aren't familiar with you, I really want to encourage them to look you up and become more familiar because you just do some remarkable, thought provoking articles and conversation. And I enjoy your Facebook posts as well, which can be very provocative. I'm reminded that there is a philosophy that you have about what you write, especially in smaller segments. Remind us all what that is. You know what I'm referring to?
Gary DeMar:
Oh, “Don't give anyone a reason to reject your position other than the position itself”
Marlin Detweiler:
Yes, that's it. I think that is incredible wisdom and I think it really resonates with me.
Gary DeMar:
And I learned that the hard way. Two reasons.
I had some very good friends who were brilliant, brilliant people, but oftentimes their personalities and their approach to things got in the way of their very, very good arguments. Yeah. So I learned from that and also from making my own mistakes. And I'll add something else to this. Having a good wife to remind me what an idiot I am sometimes, and then listening, listening to our wives' counsel.
I try to teach young people this as well. I said your demeanor, the way you say things, and the approach that you take can get in the way of your good arguments because people will find almost any excuse to reject a position. Force them to deal with the position.
Marlin Detweiler:
I think that is so wise. As we have a political season coming up and it seems like every time this happens, we could say this is the most unusual, most important, most significant election season for the preservation of America as we know it. But what's the truth and what do you think about the upcoming political season?
Gary DeMar:
Well, since we don't know what the future is and we do know what the past is, we can say that this one is really, really crucial. They have all been crucial. But this one, because now we are kind of a really a 50/50 nation here where and what we as Christians and conservatives in general decide to do is going to determine the fate of the nation, especially when you have, well, a president who I think is being manipulated by very powerful special interest groups.
I don't think he is in charge as much as people think he is in charge. And he is he's being somewhat manipulated. And I think every politician and businessman goes through this. I don't know if you saw the there's a story about the president of Disney telling DeSantis that the reason he made a decision as he did, was all the pressure that he got from a lot of these these other groups.
Everybody is in that position. Everybody's in a position to keep their job, to get reelected. And so they make compromises in order to satisfy certain groups. And that's on the conservative side as well. I don't want to even say conservative side on the Republican side, because politics, you know, power and money are corrupting influences. And I don't care what political party you're involved in, they are instrumental in driving people's opinions and actions.
And we as Christians have to be aware of that. And even though one political party is probably a little better than the other, there's still problems within that better political party that need to be dealt with as those who believe in a Christian worldview.
Marlin Detweiler:
With regard to worldview and end times or what we call eschatology, there was a notable increase in conversation and expectation that we are living in the last days. I remember seeing it on Facebook, especially in 2020 when we were in lockdowns with COVID and probably even to turn it into 2021. You have worked a lot in eschatology. You have impacted me a lot in eschatology. Talk to us about the subject of what you believe and why you believe it.
Gary DeMar:
Eschatology is a fancy name for, you know, studying the things related to the future and in particular biblical eschatology deals with very specific prophetic events that people claim refer to the end of history. And the reason I got into this was when I wrote the God and Government series back in the 1980s. And, you know, think of that. That was 40 years ago.
And, you know, I know you have gray hair. You have more hair than I do. But when we were a lot younger.
Marlin Detweiler:
You're is the same color. But I can hardly tell that.
Gary DeMar:
Yeah. So when I would go out and speak on the whole lot in government issue, invariably there'd be somebody in the audience would say, “Oh, but you know, we're living in the last days. All the signs, all, all the signs seem to be pointing to that.” And so I had to address that. That subject I remember this night was 1982, Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth, came out in 1970, and that book sold in the neighborhood of about 28 million copies.
Marlin Detweiler:
I learned it was a big seller. I didn't know it was that much.
Gary DeMar:
Yeah, it was that much. Yeah, it was. They said it was the number one in nonfiction. And that all depends on how you define nonfiction. It was supposedly the number one nonfiction book of the 1970s. Even beating out some sex book that came out that year. So give you some idea– in the 1970s how popular the eschatology was in leading up to what a lot of people believed was going to be the end sometime in the 1980s.
There's a new film that's come out called Jesus Revolution. I don't know if you're familiar.
Marlin Detweiler:
I haven't seen it yet. I'm familiar with it.
Gary DeMar:
Yeah, it's gotten some very good reviews and it is the history of the Jesus Movement of the late sixties, early seventies, with Chuck Smith and a couple of other people. And it's got some big names in it. Kelsey Grammer is in it.
Marlin Detweiler:
I graduated high school in 74, had a sister that graduated in 69, and she would have been more firmly planted in the middle of that. I think. Maybe not. I probably was in the middle, probably 70 to 72, wasn't it? But I remember that well. Most of our audience probably is a little young for that.
Gary DeMar:
Yeah. And, you know, Chuck Smith, Gregg Lowery, there's another fellow I can't remember his name, but whose know what it was and ended up dying relatively early in the night in the 1970s. But it was a huge, huge movement. But one of the aspects of that movement was it was an eschatological tint to it and that we were living in the end times.
And Chuck Chuck Smith, who died a few years ago, wrote a great number of books on this particular topic. And going back to how Lindsey spoke, how Lindsey, you know, stated in his book that Israel becoming a nation again was prophetically significant. And that took place in 1948 anyway, that Matthew 24:34 says, “this generation will not pass away and all these things take place.”
They said a generation was 40 years. Well, you can do the math. Even somebody who doesn't have Veritas Press books, they could do the math. 1948 plus what I already gave you is 1988. And so Chuck Smith, I mean, came out very specifically telling people that we were in fact, living in the End Times and the rapture of the church was going to take place between this 1981, 1988 time period.
And that was that's the basis of the whole Left Behind series. And sure enough, not only do you have the Jesus Revolution movie coming out, but you had a reboot of the Left Behind series that came out in February, and this is actually the third, the third attempt at the Left Behind. I think the first time Kirk Cameron was in the first three and then Nicolas Cage was in the second one.
And then Kevin Sorbo, I think is in this in this third one. So Bible prophecy is a huge, huge deal and it still is. But if you study the history of prophetic speculation, you begin to see that nearly every generation saw that their generation was the final generation and all the things that were supposed to happen before the End Times are taking place in their generation and here we are again doing the same thing. And a lot of people just don't have a concept of history to see that things today, I know things look bad today, but remember, we were off, you know, my father, he was in World War II, in the Korean War, because we had World War One, the rise of communism, the rise of Nazism and the French Revolution.
Before that, you go all the way through history, you had plagues that killed tens of millions of people. In fact, I just read an article today about people claiming that the hurricanes and so forth are there are more of them and they're more intense than they've ever been while this report comes out says actually they're not. Anything with earthquakes.
Marlin Detweiler:
They're better reported.
Gary DeMar:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. Look what you and I are doing here right now.
Marlin Detweiler:
Not exactly.
Gary DeMar:
You're up in Pennsylvania. I'm down here.
Marlin Detweiler:
I'm in Florida.
Gary DeMar:
Okay. All right. I see you got your golf shirt on. So you're all set, so. But yeah, okay. You're down in Florida. I'm up here in Marietta. You got me. And there's another guy on the phone somewhere or somewhere else. We get information immediately. Immediately from all over the world. There are some we are so inundated with information that we can't handle it.
It's like a firehose, right? And it's the same thing with all these events that take place today that people don't have a real historical and logical perspective of. So I, I deal with the idea with a biblical approach to what does the Bible say about eschatology? Because ultimately it comes down to that.
Marlin Detweiler:
Well, let's talk about that, and I want to set the stage for it a bit. I literally just a couple hours prior to this was at an early morning men's Bible reading, we go around the attendees at the table go around and read significant portions of a prescribed section of Scripture and then discuss it. And one of the guys, in light of the discussion, made a comment that was clearly about Jesus coming back soon pre-millennialism. And this is a conservative Presbyterian church, one that is people of the Word, theologically astute, and there was no comment to address it. Now I'm going to guess that there is more than one reason, but one of the reasons is because there's this overwhelming majority consensus of that eschatology. Tell us why you don't believe that and what you do believe.
Gary DeMar:
Well, when I first became a Christian, I guess I became Christian in 1973, Al Lindsay's Late Great Planet Earth was big, and in fact, ran into an old high school friend in Ann Arbor, Michigan, When I was competing in the track meet there, an indoor track meet, and he brought up The Late Great Planet Earth. And I didn't know anything about the Bible, and he's an intelligent guy.
But my life was kind of going downhill at that point. I wasn't so much interested in eschatology, but I was interested in this new life in Christ. And I was never an atheist. I just didn't know how to put it all together. So anyways, I went back to Kalamazoo, to Western Michigan. The only thing I had in my in terms of a Bible was my father's New Testament. A little New Testament. The kind they always took with you. Roosevelt had this kind of a prayer in the beginning of it. And that was all I had. So I started reading the gospel of Matthew, and I got to a number of passages in the Gospel of Matthew, I think Matthew 10:23. “You will not finish going through the cities of Israel until the until the son of man comes.”
I thought, wait a minute, that that doesn't fit with what I've been hearing. And then I got to Matthew 16:27 and 28 and it says, “There are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the son of man coming in his kingdom.” And I didn't know how to I didn't how to fit that in. Now I got to Matthew chapter 24, which is the big, big chapter in Matthew.
Actually, if you're going to read the eschatological significance of Matthew 24, you really got to start with Matthew chapters 21, 22, 23 - is really the background for Matthew Chapter 24. So I started reading Matthew 24 and it says this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.
Marlin Detweiler:
And for so having been written thousands of years ago. It's relevant at this moment, historically speaking. I don't understand.
Gary DeMar:
And if you look at Matthew 11 and 12, you would see that Jesus was using the phrase “this generation” to apply to their generation. But so here I was, a brand new Christian. I mean I mean brand spanking new. I mean, right, right out of the wrapping paper Christian. And I didn't know anything about the Bible.
So I kind of put it on the shelf because I was getting my act together, essentially, and ended up going to seminary, which I would not recommend this to anybody. But I was here, I was a Christian for about a year, and someone recommended I go to seminary. And I mean, that was, you know, Greek, you know, Greek, Hebrew, all this, all this stuff.
I mean, I was a fish out of water. That was me. I didn't know anything, but I came across a book. The librarian, Mr. Wagner, was selling some of his library. And there was a little red book, and it just had on the spine “Matthew 24”. And I bought it. I picked it up and it was by a fellow named Marcellus Kik.
Marcellus Kik was very prominent in conservative Christian circles. He was editor, I think he was an editor or assistant editor of Christianity Today, Reformed, Reformed in terms of theology, a sharp, sharp guy. And I started reading it, and it was simply a verse-by-verse exposition of Matthew 24; as I'm reading through this and I'm going, “Wait, this makes perfect sense because here I am in seminary now being told that you have to use the Bible to interpret the Bible” and that's what Kik was doing. He did. This generation will not pass away and all these things take place. It took me to other places in the New Testament where this generation was used. This generation applied to that particular generation. Therefore, it must be used in the same way here. So to make a long story short, out of that, since I wasn't really steeped in the whole Left Behind, Late Great Great Planet Earth stuff, it was not a was was not a difficult transition for me to make.
And over time I began to find out that this was a pretty common position that Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21, referred to events leading up to and including the destruction of Jerusalem in 1870, which is a historical event. That I mean, there's no doubt that that happened. There's no doubt that not one stone was left unturned.
Jesus predicted what happened in Matthew chapter 24. There's no doubt that, you know, tens of thousands of Jews were killed. There's no doubt that Jesus had a warning for them that this was going to happen, told them to flee, leave the city, flee Jerusalem. This is hardly a universal global event. And if you can escape on foot by going to the mountains outside of Judea, there's, you know, people on flat roofs.
You know, the Sabbath is still in use. You know, the Book of Acts talks about a Sabbath day's journey. And so it just changed my whole perspective on the end times. But I didn't use it for anything until I wrote the God in Government. And I saw people doing what you know, you were you saw out this the Bible reading place.
Somebody brings up this thing about we're living in the end times. And so I would say two things happened. Number one, you've heard this enough that you probably agree with the guy. And number two, you couldn't refute him if you tried because most people can't. And so I've heard every argument possible. I know what they all are.
And it can be heated sometimes. But I learned my lesson in not giving a reason to reject your position of in the position itself. And I kept pushing that. I said, Well, okay, give me a verse. That says, Hey, the temple has to be rebuilt. And I said, Well, give me a verse in the New Testament that says, The temple has to be rebuilt, that it's going to be rebuilt.
There isn't one. Give me a verse that says the church is going to be taken off the earth either before, during the middle of, or after a seven-year period. Give me a verse in the New Testament says that, well, most people, most people have never heard those questions asked of them, and therefore they're not able to answer the questions.
Now, that doesn't mean that people on the other side don't have an answer for it. But, you know, but if you're interpreting the Bible by using the Bible, you know, those are important questions.
Marlin Detweiler:
Absolutely.
Gary DeMar:
So anyway, that's how I think and I think and how all this fits into everything. I think a lot of one of the reasons that we're kind of in the mess we're in today is that too many Christians believe we are living the last days. There's not much we can do to change anything.
Marlin Detweiler:
We probably don't need to change anything because we're out of here.
Gary DeMar:
We're going to be out of here. Why polish brass on a sinking ship? Why rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic? I mean, this is really this is I think a lot of Christians have just completely bowed out of the system, so to speak, for two reasons. One, there's an eschatological reason to it. And the other reason is they don't believe that they should be involved in things beyond the individual spirituality of the Christian life.
Marlin Detweiler:
So can you take maybe just a minute or two and tell us what you do believe about the future? What do you believe the scriptures teach?
Gary DeMar:
Well, I believe that – let me give you two verses. Matthew 24:14 says, “The gospel must be preached in the whole world to all the nations before the end comes.” Now, people read that passage and say, See, what we need to do is continue to preach the gospel to the world. And once that's done, the end is going to come.
But when you look at that passage in context, this is that Matthew 24 passage, verse 34, says, This generation will not pass away while these things take place. When you take that Matthew 24:14 passage apart, Jesus is not describing the end of the world there because it's up in the third verse. He's talked about the end of the age, the end of the old covenant age.
What's going to take place before that generation passed away. And the gospel there that was said to be preached in the whole world. In here you need a little, little bit of –you really don't need Greek. But I'm going to tell you what the Greek is anyway. The word there for world, you would think would be cosmos like for God so loved the world that he gave his only son.
But the word that's used there is oikos. You see the word oikos there. And it's not a yogurt, it's the word for house. And so, like all oikosnomics is the lawful order of a house of the Greek word oikos. It's the same Greek word that's used in Luke 2:1 –”Then a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole point to many be taxed.” Rome would have loved to have taxed the whole cosmos, but all they could do was tax their own empire.
In the Greek word, there is what oikos meant. It's the same Greek word used in math 24 And when you go through Paul's epistles, and you'll find that in Paul's epistles, in fact, there's one place where he says that the Gospel had been preached to every creature under heaven in his day. Now, that's obviously hyperbole, but that particular verse there deals with the gospel going out to the then-known world as a witness to the nations that the Messiah had come.
That's what that verse means. Now you go to Matthew 28, Matthew 28 talks about going into all the world and making disciples of the nations. So that's a different emphasis, and that's a different command. And I think that's where we are today. We aren't just to go out and preach the gospel to people. So that's an indication, and once we do that, Jesus is going to return. No, our goal is to do what you're doing. You're making disciples of people. And by making disciples of people, they disciple their families, their business, their churches, and hopefully their world and the world in which they live. That's the biblical command now, I believe I believe that's not only a possibility, but I think that's an inevitability.
But we can't do it just by sitting back. It takes work– the kind of the work I do, kind of the work you do, the work that other Christians are doing out there. They need to have a broader– I think it was J.B. Phillips who wrote a book called Your God is Too Small, and this was years ago, and it was a great, great title.
And I believe there are people, they think that their God is too small, but Satan is too big, and we've got this mixed up, and God has given us a command to disciple the nations. So when you bring somebody to Christ, you don't leave them in a state of babyhood, but you raise them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
You look at 2 Timothy 3. Timothy was trained in God, in God's Word, by his grand grandmother and his mother. This is what we're supposed to do. And we're supposed to teach them what the Bible says about everything, not just little bits and pieces.
Marlin Detweiler:
That is wonderful. Yeah. That's why we think it's so important to have this investment in classical education, because we think we're training people in the best possible way, training children in order to take dominion as we were told to do in Genesis. And to me that is so exciting. And we have a lot of pre-millennial folks in our program, but I sure hope they'll listen to you here and be impacted by what you've said.
We've run out of time. But there's one other thing I wanted to cover. You've mentioned in a couple instances your involvement in track and field, and I don't have to ask you questions, and I and I don't want to embarrass you, but I know something about you. You were the state champ in high school in Pennsylvania in the shotput.
Gary DeMar:
Yeah!
Marlin Detweiler:
And you set the state record for Pennsylvania that held for a long time. And I hope you're not surprised that I remember this. You trained the guy that beat you.
Gary DeMar:
Yes, I did.
Marlin Detweiler:
Such a great story.
Gary DeMar:
Yeah, and this fellow was he was a state champion, Pennsylvania, for three years, three years in a row. Was the first person in the state of Pennsylvania to throw 70 feet in the shot. Anybody, any kid out there has ever thrown. I'm by the way, I'm still coaching. There's a Christian school nearby. I still coach.
And I was trying to get beat, trying to get these guys to just throw 40 feet. I said for 40 feet, I pulled a tape measure out. I said 64 feet. And I said, “I want you to look at me. That's how far I threw.” And, you know, anyway, Ron ended up throwing 70 feet back. If you look online, the junior college record and in the shot, he still holds it.
Marlin Detweiler:
Is that right?
Gary DeMar:
So see Mike, he was the first kid to throw 70 feet with the 12lb shot and 70 feet with a 16lb shot. He was the first one to do that. And he wasn't a real it wasn't a tall guy. He was only like 5’ 11’’ but he was unbelievably strong. Could bench press four on 35lb in high school.
But yeah, that's what I did. I still do it. And I did some master's track and field.
Marlin Detweiler:
But I have seen your backyard and your training area.
Gary DeMar:
So anyway, I keep telling people these types of lessons in life end up helping you much, much later in life, which they have with me as well.
Marlin Detweiler:
Folks, you have been listening to Gary DeMar of American Vision, and you’ve been with us on Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Thank you for joining us.
