A person recently objected to my premillennialism by asserting:
The problem (one of them) with premill as I see it, is that the clear NT passages appear to teach unequivocally that when Jesus returns, there is the last judgement and then the final new heavens and the new earth.
The problem with this objection is that prewrath-premillennialism believes this as well. So it is no objection at all.
What is going on in this objection is that the amill is defining premillennialism through pretribulational categories. Pretribs believe that the second coming of Christ will happen almost instantaneously. Then after the second coming, you have the millennium, new heavens and new earth, and the final judgement. In other words, pretrib theology wrongly disconnects the second coming from these events.
Prewrath teaches instead that the second coming is a complex comprehensiveness-whole, which includes all these divine purposes that God will accomplish through his Son’s coming (parousia). The second coming includes the millennium—indeed it is the climax of the second coming—and it includes the last judgment.
It is not a punctiliar event; instead, the very meaning of parousia is “presence,” a duration of time where God will fulfill eschatological purposes.
So the objection may work against pretrib-premillennialism, but fails against prewrath-premillennialism.
Ironically, amillennialism agrees with pretribulationism in that they both believe the second coming of Christ is basically a punctiliar event—Jesus comes back and BANG the second coming is over with. But that is not how Scripture characterizes the eschatological events, since Scripture conveys a natural outworking of these events. Similarly, just as the creation of the world was not accomplished in a single day—even though God could have easily done so—the second coming of Christ will happen over time as he will be glorified in the purposes that he accomplishes.
I have written on this point in my Antichrist Before the Day of the Lord.
