Snippets: The Sign Gifts Have Ceased

This snippet is a comment I made on a Facebook discussion on why I believe that the sign gifts have ceased after the apostolic age.

How did Christ and the Apostles Understand Old Testament Prophecy?

We have seen the Redemptive Kingdom develop in various stages in the Old Testament. We have also seen some key narratives that have always been part of this Kingdom structure. Now it is time to start connecting the dots to see how those narratives develop towards God’s Kingdom’s in the New Covenant. Before we can get there though, we need to consider some basics in understanding Biblical prophecy. This will help us understand prophetic literature through the lens of Scripture itself. We need to understand Biblical prophecy as the authors of the New Testament did.

Postmillennial Eisegesis of the Great Multitude of Revelation 7

I can't recall how many times I've had Postmillenials quote this verse to me to justify a massive conversion of mankind to Christianity, a time when all those passages concerning persecution and being a remnant will become a thing of the past, prior to the Parousia of our Lord! In reading select Apocalyptic and Prophetic texts in this manner, the Postmillenial commits the same error of the Dispensationalist, and reads such Literature with a literalist rather than a spiritualist hermeneutic. The presumption made is that "which no man could number" indicates a number in the billions or even more, or as some claim, the elect in history outnumber the reprobate.

A simple survey of the Biblical usage of such terminology, however, would indicate that the Postmillenial conveniently uses a literalist hermeneutic for this Text while ignoring the figurative usage of such terms in the breadth of Scripture. Lets consider the census in Numbers for instance.