Pessimillennialism

The vast majority of Christians have believed that things will get progressively worse in almost every area of life until Jesus returns with His angels. Premillennialists believe that He will establish an earthly visible kingdom, with Christ in charge and bodily present. Amillennialists do not believe in any earthly visible kingdom prior to the final judgment. They believe that only the church and Christian schools and families will visibly represent
the kingdom on earth, and the world will fall increasingly under the domination of Satan. Both eschatologies teach the earthly defeat of Christ's church prior to His physical return in power. One problem with such an outlook is that when the predictable defeats in life come, Christians have a theological incentive to shrug their shoulders, and say to themselves, “That’s life. That’s the way God prophesied it would be. Things are getting
worse.” They read the dreary headlines of the daily newspaper, and they think to themselves, “Jesus’s Second Coming is just around the corner.” The inner strength that people need to rebound from life’s normal external defeats is sapped by a theology that preaches inevitable earthly defeat for the church of Jesus Christ. People think to themselves: “If even God’s holy church cannot triumph, then how can I expect to triumph?”  Christians therefore become the psychological captives of newspaper- selling pessimistic headlines. They begin with a false assumption: the inevitable defeat in history of Christ’s church by Satan’s earthly forces, despite the fact that Satan was mortally wounded at Calvary. Satan is not “alive and well on Planet Earth.” He is alive, but he is not well. To argue otherwise is to argue for the historical impotence and cultural irrelevance of Christ’s work on Calvary.

Days of Vengeance, Gary North