Michlaude Discipleship Project

Part Seven

Five Statements: Partial Preterism

One. Jesus really did defeat Satan at the cross — decisively, completely, described in the New Testament's own past tense. And the very same New Testament tells His church, decades later, to keep its armor on, because the war He already won in one sense is not yet the war fully finished in another.

Two. Christ's own risen body is the proof of what your body is going to become — touched, recognized, no longer subject to decay. You have not experienced that transformation yet. Neither has one single other believer, in two thousand years of dying and being buried.

Three. Jesus told the generation standing in front of Him, plainly, that they would see Jerusalem's judgment before they died — and forty years later, almost to the season, Rome burned the temple to the ground exactly as He said it would happen. In the very same breath, He told that same generation that nobody, not even the Son, knew the day of the second, larger event still to come.

Four. You are already a new creation in Christ, right now, today, this morning — and the whole physical world you are standing in in order to read that sentence is, at the very same moment, still groaning, still waiting to be set free the same way you are still waiting for your own body's redemption.

Five. Every New Testament writer who mentioned the final judgment described it as near, urgent, at hand. It has now been "at hand" for two thousand years — with every person who has died in the meantime still, on this reading, waiting their turn to stand before God.