Refocusing Our Sights on God's Target

Leading Christian scholars and pastors are correctly concerned about the recently deteriorating state of evangelism among evangelical Christians. Of the 8 billion people on Earth, conservatively 6 billion are not saved as evangelicals have traditionally understood salvation. Adding to this distress, most evangelicals believe this age, except for a comparatively small remnant, belongs to Satan—that the Lord is to return soon and there will be no church-age triumph of righteousness.

Has this bleak, pessimistic, unbiblical eschatology created such distress to our sensitive evangelical souls that some seek a reconstruction of the traditional biblical view of God's sovereignty, justice, and purpose in salvation? Having forsaken biblical eschatology, unable to pray in faith for gospel victory through the church in this age, are evangelicals turning now to universalism, inclusivism, and process theology to ease their distress over the billions of unevangelized souls? Many leaders have sounded a warning of an erosion of the traditional, biblical view of God as transcendent, omniscient, omnipotent, just, and unchangeably holy—the first imperative for biblical evangelism.
But is that the whole problem?

The Fateful Lightning, focusing on widespread, long-term, evangelism and revival, has identified a second imperative which has been all but lost to evangelicalism for a century. It pleads for a reexamination of the sterile 20th-century evangelical eschatology and a biblical rethinking of God's prophetic target, while documenting the following four startling propositions:

• When the first-century church held to the biblical outlook of future things, they had great power in the gospel.
• When premillennialism and amillennialism arose as widespread doctrines in the second and third centuries, the power and effectiveness of the early church declined.
• When many Christians returned to a biblical prophetic outlook in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the "latter-day glory," the gospel again had power and a Great Awakening swept over the western world.
• Then, again, when God's people forsook that biblical eschatology and returned to premillennialism two centuries later, the revival power again declined.

These are the stubborn facts; we would do well to take heed.