Countdown 2 Eternity

Announcer: Hey, welcome to Countdown 2 Eternity with Pastors James Kaddis and Andy Woods. It's a weekly radio ministry from Calvary Chapel Signal Hill. James and Andy examine current events and connect what's going on in our world to Bible prophecy. Let's lean in and listen.

James Kaddis: Hello, my dear brothers and sisters. I want to welcome you to another episode of Countdown 2 Eternity. I am with the great Andy Woods. I am super blessed to have you, bro. I know you've been busy on the prophecy conference circuit. It's been a busy time for you. I know that when I contacted you yesterday to record, you were on a plane or getting on a plane to head back. How have you been, my dear brother?

Andy Woods: Good. I was at the Steeling the Mind conference in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. I stuck around to preach for Pastor Paul Van Noy at Candlelight Christian Fellowship in Coeur d'Alene. He's a great guy, by the way, a friend of mine.

We left at 4:30 in the morning with the snow going and it was dark. Then with all of the plane issues with the TSA and all this stuff going on all over the country, we touched down in Houston with it dark also. It was one of those kinds of days.

James Kaddis: I didn't know you were at Paul's church. He's a good brother. I love him a lot. He's a good guy. God is definitely using him.

We're going to talk about the temple. We're going to talk about how we are being characterized as Christian Zionists. I'm going to play a video for you that I think is going to expose the tactics of the enemy as he uses somebody like Tucker Carlson. What's being said here is absolutely obscene. One of the accusations that he is making right now centers around the idea that we see it as a biblical prediction that the temple has to be rebuilt.

How about we start by talking about what the Bible says concerning the rebuilding of the temple and why we know the temple is going to be rebuilt? There's lots of scriptural evidence for this: Daniel 9, 2 Thessalonians 2, Revelation. Let's talk about that first. Then we'll talk about the accusation that he's making and broaden the scope of what he's saying.

Tucker Carlson is seeking to reframe our position by creating a series of generalizations that broaden the vector of his attack so that he can discredit us. It involves nothing but a series of lies. So maybe we could talk about the issue of the temple and what the Bible says about the temple first, and then we can move on from there.

Andy Woods: Concerning Temple number three, keep in mind there's four temples total in Israel's history: two past, two future. The first one was built by Solomon and destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. The second one was built by the returnees from the Babylonian captivity and destroyed by Rome.

The fourth one is the Millennial Temple in Ezekiel 40 through 48. The one we're talking about here is Temple three. The nation of Israel has not had a temple for 2,000 years since Temple two was destroyed in AD 70. We've always believed, based on a literal reading of prophetic scripture, that Temple number three has to come into existence at some point.

The verses on it are Daniel 9:27 and Daniel 12:11. You have a reference to it in the teachings of Jesus in Matthew 24:15. Paul mentioned it in 2 Thessalonians 2:4, and the book of Revelation 11:1 and 2. We know that there has to be a temple existing midway through the Tribulation period because all of those prophecies indicate that the beast or the Antichrist is going to desecrate Temple number three at the midpoint of the Tribulation period. You can't desolate or desecrate something that doesn't exist.

The fact that there are rumbles in the world and controversies in Jerusalem about this concerning Temple number three is just a barometer. It shows us that we're rapidly approaching the Tribulation period. We really don't know how, when, and under what circumstances it's going to be rebuilt. The only thing we know with certitude is that it will be up and running midway through the Tribulation period.

When we hear all this talk about Temple number three, it's just a barometer telling us that we're moving very fast into the Tribulation period. Since Thanksgiving occurs earlier than Christmas, it shows us that the Rapture is coming even faster. That's my whole focus on Temple number three. I'm not trying to blow anything up. I'm not trying to rebuild it. I'm not funding ministries to get out there and get the job done.

All of that is a straw man argument. In fact, if I were to get involved in those kinds of projects, I would be in rebellion against Jesus, who gave me as a church age believer my instructions, which is the Great Commission. God doesn't need any help from me or anybody else to rebuild Temple number three. I find that all of our Zionist critics want to frame the issue as us trying to blow something up and rebuild something.

It's kind of funny. Our camp has been accused of creating apathy in politics. They say because you're not preaching "let's bring the kingdom in," you're not getting Christians involved in politics. Then they turn around and say you guys have so much political power that you're ready to cause World War III. Which is it? Are we leading people out of politics or into politics?

James Kaddis: This is great because we've had the likes of Tucker Carlson who made the obscene statement mentioning some Jewish groups as being complicit here. In essence, he made the statement that Christian Zionists have this desire to destroy the temple and that we may have been complicit in causing this war in Iran to take place so that we could draw fire to actually have the Temple Mount destroyed.

There has been some shrapnel that just hit the Temple Mount on the day of this recording. What the likes of Tucker Carlson is saying—and Tucker's kind of leading the charge on this one—is that we are trying to destroy Al-Aqsa and the Temple Mount. We're hoping that this will accelerate the process by which we'll be able to build the temple. That's terribly untruthful. He's lying. That's not our desire and it's not anything we're sitting on the sidelines actually hoping for because we understand what the real implications of something like that would be.

Not to mention the fact that if we want to accelerate anything, building the temple isn't going to accelerate it. What may accelerate the timeline—even though we don't accelerate timelines, as that's God's thing to do—is to observe peace. If there is a temporary peace in the Middle East that we see and it seems to be very durable, now we have the prerequisite for Ezekiel 38 to take place. If that is being fulfilled and we begin to see that move into fruition, now we know we're very close to the Rapture.

I carry the idea that Ezekiel 38 happens after the Rapture or if it happens while we're raptured or slightly before, it's very slightly before because in Ezekiel 39, God says that this is the period of time by which he's actually dealing with Israel directly. The thing that Tucker Carlson says we're looking for doesn't appear to be anything that lines up with what we believe biblically. Am I safe to make that statement?

Andy Woods: Right. He is building a narrative. You have his recent statements, but you also have when he brought on Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos, the nun with the mustache. This individual made the same comment that Zionists and those of us that believe in literal interpretation of prophecy are somehow trying to blow something up and replace it with something else.

I am a prophetic observer. I'm a prophetic watcher because that's what we're commanded to do: to watch for the signs of the times. I'm not in the business of fulfilling anything. This whole caricature about how we're supposedly trying to fulfill something to force God's hand is almost laughable. It strains incredulity how badly they misunderstand who we are and what our belief system is.

When I was going through my academic training, one of the first things they teach you is don't criticize a position until you actually understand what it is they're saying. These people have no real understanding of what we believe. It's like the pro-life movement. They find the guy that wants to shoot abortionists, and then they make him the spokesman for the whole movement. The rest of us are saying, "Wait a minute, we're pro-life. We're not in favor of shooting or killing anybody."

That's what they're doing with dispensationalists. It's such a gross mischaracterization. We would call it in logic a straw man argument. When you fill a dummy with straw, it topples over pretty easily because it's not a real person. A straw man argument is you mischaracterize what your opponent is saying, and then you strike at that mischaracterization that you've come up with. That's what this whole Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens mentality is doing with respect to this idea that somehow we're trying to force God's hand and fulfill prophecy on our own by blowing up something and trying to build something.

James Kaddis: Those are blatant lies. I want to play this for you and get your thoughts on this because what you're about to watch is unremarkable in many ways, but at the same time, it's convincing to people that don't know any better. This is Tucker Carlson seeking to characterize our view by oversimplifying something that is eschatologically complex through the conflation of a series of different terms. He's conflating things like Armageddon with the return of Christ. There's a series of conflations that he's making in an attempt to put everything together all in one big massive vector that is easy to attack because he's trying to make it sound absurd.

By the way, this is the thing that we were warned about in 2 Peter. 2 Peter actually gives us the formula by which liars do stuff like this. I actually made a video a few days ago that I released that deals specifically with the kind of deception that Tucker is deploying here. Listen to what he says and just brace yourself. This one is absolute brutal. I think that Tucker's going to have a lot to answer for when he meets his maker one day. Take a listen to what he has to say here.

Tucker Carlson: But the point of this was not to observe the status quo at all. It was to overturn the status quo to usher in a new age. That's the point of this war. This is a pivot in history and a lot of the people supporting it know that. Now, they're really in two groups. One are people motivated by religious impulse. That would include some Israelis, some religious Jews—not all, but some—and that would include some Christians: Christian Zionists. Both groups believe that they're helping to accelerate the end of history: Armageddon, the end of time, the return of the Messiah, however you want to describe it.

Both of these groups believe that history is linear. It began in one place and arrives at another with the return of God to Earth. Then history ends and we are redeemed or damned depending. That's the basic idea. Both of these groups seem under the impression that they can force God's hand, that they can bring this about through an act of will or violence, which is to say both groups believe on some level that they are God, which they are not. They're not in charge of history and you can't force God's hand. He's in charge, you are not. But both groups have lost sight of that. So that's their motive.

James Kaddis: Can you think of anything more dishonest, more deceitful, and more of a lie? Can you respond to this?

Andy Woods: How can I do X, Y, and Z to force God's hand when it's God and God alone that can fulfill his prophecies? You know, there actually is something we can do. We can hasten the destruction of this Earth through evangelism (2 Peter 3:10-11). The faster the population becomes evangelized and God is not wanting anyone to perish but for all to come to repentance, the faster the end time scenario can occur. If you're talking about forcing God's hand by way of worldwide evangelism, then count me in on that.

But if you're talking about somehow voting Trump into office, pressuring the White House, or starting a war so somehow the Al-Aqsa mosque gets destroyed so Temple number three can be rebuilt and we're forcing God's hand to fulfill prophecy, that's not only ridiculous, it's asinine.

I'm surprised Tucker Carlson, with all of the people that he's got around him and all of his resources and all of his reach, can't have a credible Christian Zionist on there to sort of explain these things to him. He doesn't want one. He wants to create a narrative. He wants to demonize all of us and he wants to really set us up for some form of persecution. The whole thing that he's saying there is just crazy.

He's describing a belief system that I certainly don't have, you certainly don't have, and to be honest with you, I don't know anyone—and I've been around Christian Zionists for a long time—who believes the way he's describing it. It's just classic straw man argumentation. It's logical fallacies 101 that he's engaged in. What's troubling to me is the vast number of people that like, click, share, subscribe, and will agree with what he's saying because they don't know any better.

James Kaddis: I am very worried about it because he goes out of his way to bring in some of the subtle truths in an attempt to carry out a series of conflations that take away credibility from the position that we have. He doesn't effectively articulate our position. The way that he articulates our position is done in a way that is so deeply dishonest that it widens the attack vector.

Then the fact that he actually goes so far as to say that history is not linear and that God did not create this sort of linear function within the realm of time—just because God says before Abraham was "I am," just because God sits outside of the realm of time does not mean we're not facing this linear mechanism that he seems to be speaking against. He's almost making history subjective, which means he's laying down the ground for it to be rewritten.

Andy Woods: His statements about the linear history are very interesting. Does he not believe in an omniscient God that knows the beginning from the end and the end from the beginning and can reveal things before they happen in our time domain? Does Solomon not say in Ecclesiastes 1:9, "as it has been, so it shall be again"?

We talk about Babylon all of the time. Babylon itself is linear. What started at the Tower of Babel will be completed at the same location. Consider the 70-year captivity. You're going to go into captivity in Judah for 70 years. Daniel was looking at the clock and he starts to pray a few years before that calendar event had elapsed. He begins to seek God's will because Daniel believed that history was linear.

It's not just an attack that he's doing here on Christian Zionism. It's the whole idea of an omniscient God who has revealed the future in his prophetic word.

James Kaddis: He's literally attacking the Word of God. It's interesting because when you look at Satan's interaction with Eve and with Adam in the garden, that's exactly what he did. He cast aspersion on the Word of God, and he did it in a way that widened the attack vector, which was necessary in order to give the statement that he's making credibility even though the statement was filled with gaslighting.

Tucker Carlson is creating an argument by which you are being forced to look at what does not exist in order to completely ignore what does exist. The enemy did this in the garden. The enemy said, "Hey, look, it's unbelievable, Eve. God said you cannot eat of this fruit." I'm paraphrasing because when I get into the specific mechanics of what was said, it's remarkable what you can learn about Satan's tactics. But I'm oversimplifying it for the sake of creating a parallel here that's easily understood by anybody that doesn't have familiarity with the material.

He goes to Eve and he says, "Look, take a look at this thing that you can't have." So she's so busy focusing on what she can't have that she completely ignores the fact that God said, "Of every tree you may freely eat with the exception of this one thing." In effect, what the enemy did was he got so good at causing her to focus on the one thing that she did not have, which in essence was superfluous, in order to forfeit every wonderful thing that was put in her lap, which was God's abundance.

That's exactly what Tucker Carlson is doing here. Tucker Carlson is making up something that actually isn't true. He's fabricating it and he's causing everybody to focus on that while you're being distracted from the abundance of what's actually happening and the overwhelming evidence that everything he says is completely false. We're so busy focusing on what we think we don't have that we literally have completely forgotten everything that we've been armed with, everything that we've been given. We spend so much time focusing on what we don't have that we're literally forfeiting the abundance that we've been given.

Tucker Carlson is saying, "Hey, look, pay attention to this. I know it means nothing. I want you to think it means something, but we all know it doesn't mean anything." While you're completely ignoring everything else, you ignore the fact that I deny that God is the God of time, that God is a God who did create history in a linear fashion. It does have a beginning and it does have an end. God himself calls himself the beginning and the end. If Tucker can throw that away, Tucker then can become very Hegelian in nature and begin to develop these theories that are antithetically opposed with one another in order to create this sort of synthesis that everybody seems to think is acceptable. In reality, all he just did was widen the vector by which the truth can be attacked.

Andy Woods: A good magician, while he's got your eyes focused on one hand, is using the off hand. I like your analogy there. The other thing that comes to mind is that Tucker seems to know enough Bible and theology to make him dangerous, but it's almost like he doesn't have much of a knowledge of it when you get into the weeds and the specifics. He's conflating a bunch of things that don't go together: Armageddon, the third temple, Ezekiel 38 and 39, and the war in Iran.

These people are like somebody that owns a weapon and has seen a few cowboy movies but has never really gone through legitimate firearms training. That's what you have in Tucker Carlson. If you're untrained, boy, he sure sounds spiritual. He quotes a lot of Bible. After all, he is a conservative, supposedly. So people end up trusting this sort of thing.

I've watched a number of them do this. That Catholic girl on his podcast recently knows how to state Replacement Theology really well. She sounds pretty good at doing it. She calls Jesus the temple, which he is, as if there's no other temples other than Jesus. She made that argument and she called the church the new Israel without disclosing that the phrase "the Israel of God" appears in Galatians 6:16 at the conclusion of a letter, and there's a double "epi" there in Greek which ranks the classification of the Israel of God to a subset within Christendom. She's trying to make it a synonym with Christianity. She paraphrases all this stuff and it rolls off her tongue. It's obvious that she was coached a bit by somebody, but she makes enough goofs and errors and mistakes to tell me as an educated theologian that she doesn't have it all together. Tucker Carlson is basically doing the exact same thing.

James Kaddis: This is a big one because this is a subject matter that very few people are actually familiar with. They're intimidated by the subject. We have a colleague that we work with, Don Perkins, who said that when he was a kid, he used to get told that you would get cursed if you read through the book of Revelation and that your face would freeze in a specific position. There are even people who were raised up that listen to this guy that just think it's all taboo.

When they listen to him, they very much appreciate how he is vectorizing this because it's convenient to attack because of the lack of credibility that Tucker presents it as having. It's very cathartic for the person that's listening to it because they don't want to face the reality of what's going to happen in the last days. They certainly don't want to study it, and if they do study it, they want to get it out of mind, understanding how bad it's going to actually be. Tucker is the tool in their hands to be able to put this into effect.

Andy Woods: If that's their underlying presupposition, they don't want to think about the second coming. Humans naturally don't want to think about that because the second coming implies accountability. If you've been messing up your parents' house while you've been housesitting, you don't want to think about Sunday night when they come back. So there's a natural tendency to push that out of your mind. What a great way to escape this aspect of coming accountability by demonizing people like ourselves that remind people over and over again that there is a day of reckoning coming.

James Kaddis: There is a day of reckoning that's coming. Because we know how wired in the infrastructure coming judgment is, there are so many people that believe that they have to do a series of things in order to earn good favor with God. In reality, more than ever, if there's ever a time to get right with God, right now is the time.

But a lot of people don't know what that takes. It has nothing to do with what you did or what you do. It has everything to do with your willingness to put your faith and trust in Christ.

Andy Woods: Christ's final words on the cross—and this is a good time of the year to think about it because we're coming up on Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday—were "It is finished," which is a translation of the Greek word *tetelestai*, which means paid in full. That's a term that's been found all over the Greco-Roman world. It's an accounting term meaning the account has been paid. Christ's final words on the cross were not, "I bought the lunch, now you leave the tip."

*Tetelestai* there is in the perfect tense, meaning one-time action with ongoing results. Christianity is not a "doing" religion; it's a "done" belief system. What we're told to do is to accept what he did for us as a free gift. According to Romans 4:4 and 5, the only way to receive a free gift from God is to believe. We would just exhort people listening to this conversation that today is the day of salvation. There is a day of reckoning coming, but the good news—which is what the gospel is—is that it's all been taken care of. Just receive it as a free gift, which you can do now even as I'm speaking.

James Kaddis: Amen. I love it, bro. We're out of time, but what a great way to end our time together. I always like it when the truth is being revealed like this. Folks, we are so grateful every single week that you guys listen to us. I want to thank you for those of you that have been supporting me in buying my book.

Last week we hit number one bestseller in 13 categories. My book on the book of Revelation, out of the 20 million books that Amazon sells, we hit 93 in their top 100 list. A lot of that was a result of going on Jack Hibbs' show. But thank you nonetheless for the support. If you have not purchased it, I want to encourage you to buy it. It's a great book because it speaks of these things that we're talking about.

I would also highly recommend that you go to Andy's website and read his books. His books are amazing. They're worth every penny. You can even buy them on Amazon. I love his books. I think they're very well written. My favorite is his one on 2 Thessalonians, but he's got a few others that are really great, especially on what is happening in the Middle East and what to expect. He is the subject matter expert on Babylon. These are resources that will equip you during this time where there's really what appears to be a starvation for truth.

We love you guys. On behalf of Andy Woods, I want to thank you again. Keep on looking to the Lord. We do hope that you enjoyed watching this and listening to it as much as we've enjoyed making it. Continue to seek the Lord and let's just continue to look up because Christ could come at any moment. We love you guys. God bless you.

Announcer: You're listening to Countdown 2 Eternity with Pastors James Kaddis and Andy Woods. If you joined us later or would just like to hear this again, stop by countdown2eternity.com. That's countdown the number 2 eternity.com.

Have you heard? Pastor James has a new book. It's entitled "The Last Book." Revelation isn't a book of fear; it's a book of hope. "The Last Book" will give you what you need to know about Revelation, the Rapture, and the end times. Learn what the Bible says about the days we're in and what God's promise is for believers in "The Last Book," available right now at countdown2eternity.com. This is also the place to go to give to this ministry, and thank you very much for your financial support and prayers. Again, we're at countdown2eternity.com.

I should also mention Andy Woods is online at andywoodsministries.org. Browse through his latest media, check out some of his recent interviews and available resources at andywoodsministries.org. Then join us next week as the Countdown 2 Eternity continues right here. This program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.