I gotta have my orange juice.

Mark Horne writes:

“Preterism” isn’t about an “end times position.” It is a matter of basic Biblical theology. It is about how and why Jesus could issue the Great Commission to people who were, at the time, what we now call “Judaizers” and read about in Galatians. It is about why the Bible would say that twelve people who didn’t believe Jesus would or should be crucified were authorized to preach “the Gospel of the Kingdom (Luke 9:6). It is about how Jesus could exhort people to “believe in the Gospel” (Mark 1:15) without teaching them anything about his necessary death and the resurrection that would follow (and knowing they would all react negatively to the idea just like Peter did later). Yet people were commended for believing that Gospel and condemned for refusing it.

Preterism is about growing up and not reading the Bible like a child. It is about maturing past the idiot notion that Jesus was a systematic theologian longing for the day when he could make us smart enough to articulate atonement theology, or justification by faith alone, or double predestination.

Preterism contradicts the error of a kind of soft dispensationalism that is rampant in Protestantism. While hard dispensationlism wrongly wants to make room for ongoing loyalty to Moses, the soft dispensationalism I have in mind wrongly wants to think that loyalty to Moses and loyalty to Jesus are different kinds of thing: that Jesus does not stand in thorough and proper continuity with Moses (contra Hebrews 3, etc.) as the one and only successor to Moses.

A good way to think about this is to realize that the gospels are recapitulating David’s time in the wilderness, and the rest of the New Testament is recapitulating the first few years of David’s reign. Believe it or not, people and their babies were truly saved before the coming of Jesus (e.g., Luke 1). During his time here, the anointed king Jesus secretly gathered people to himself much like David did. Just like David, Jesus endured suffering so that he and his people might be vindicated. Upon his resurrection and enthronement, a forty-year countdown started for all of his people to transfer their loyalty to him and to receive the blessings of his vindication. His people were already truly saved, but God presented a new loyalty test in order for them to continue in their salvation. It is now your loyalty to Jesus that saves you and gives you life.

Loyalty to Saul, though at one time a good thing, had an expiration date; after a certain point, your exclusive love for Saul or Ish-Bosheth would condemn you rather than save you, and even Saul’s own offspring had to find their salvation in David. Likewise, loyalty to Moses, though at one time a good thing, had an absolute expiration date (Romans 7, Hebrews 10); exclusive loyalty to Moses now in fact condemns you rather than saves you. But, equally, it is important to see that loyalty to Jesus is in complete continuity with the former loyalty to Moses. If your Moses is not in harmony with Jesus, then you have the wrong Moses (John 5)! This is one reason why we must baptize our babies, and why, with David (2 Samuel 12), we have full confidence that they belong to Jesus.