After Abraham offered his son Isaac as God had commanded (and then prevented), the angel of Yahweh says this:

“By myself I have sworn, declares the Yahweh, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.”  Genesis 22:16-18

We are all children of Abraham, imitators of him who put his faith in God. And of course God is the greater Abraham who offered his only begotten son Jesus who died as the true lamb of God. All Christians know we are sons of Abraham and that God, foreseeing that God would justify the gentiles, preached the gospel to Abraham saying in him all the nations of the world would be blessed (Gal. 3:8). So the promises made to Abraham, the ones he believed, went beyond the land of Canaan, to other lands where all the unwashed goyim used to live.

So far so good. All spiritual promises, right? Now look back at Genesis 22:17. The promise include the children of Abraham possessing the gates of their enemies. It’s impossible to confine this promise to Palestine or gnosticize it away to gates of people’s hearts. Gates are places of authority and power–the capital buildings in our terms–and in Jesus’ kingdom power and authority is exercised through service and sacrifice.

We know that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal and we are not to do any possessing by worldly means; Malchus gets to keep his ear. But this is not the same thing as saying the church will not demonstrably advance and the nations be discipled. Unless a seed goes into the ground and dies it will not bear much fruit, and the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. But as the seeds goes in, a big tree really does grow up. Right now, that tree is estimated to be well over a billion large, a redwood of Trinitarian Christians worshiping Christ all over the world (though increasing in the southern hemisphere and the east with white Christians being an oxymoron in 30 years if things continue as they have been and Philip Jenkins is to be trusted, but I digress).

Believing the promises given to Abraham should be at the heart of any eschatalogical understanding. Lose the millennialisms and focus on the promises and the power of the atonement. Efforts to divorce such promises from the growth of the gospel throughout history only produces evangelical schizophrenia, knowing that all authority has been given to Jesus, but therefore going to give it a sure-to-fail try at discipling the nations.