T. Justin Comer

REBUTTAL – “If the Foundation Fails, the Chart Doesn’t Matter”

Dr. Hovind, I don’t want to start with your chart. I want to start with your pillars—the assumptions underneath it.

Because if the foundation fails, the graphic doesn’t matter.

1. The “Plain Literal Reading” Claim

You’ve said you “just take the Bible literally”

We need to be honest about what literal actually means.

Literal does not mean “never symbolic.” Literal means we take the author’s words as he intended them—genre, symbols, and all.

Revelation itself tells us this:

• “The seven lampstands are the seven churches.” (Rev 1:20)
  If I say, “the lampstands are the churches,” and believe that, I am reading literally.
  If I insist, “No, those are literal lamp fixtures,” I’ve stopped reading literally and started fighting the text.

Same with the beasts. Daniel 7 already told us beasts represent kingdoms and empires. John doesn’t reinvent that; he borrows it.

So when you equate “literal” with “non-symbolic,” that system collapses the moment John speaks plainly:

• Is Jesus literally a lamb with seven horns and seven eyes (Rev 5:6)?
• Is Satan literally a dragon or a snake (Rev 12:9)?
  Or do those symbols literally signify real persons and powers?

You also framed the choice as, “Either you take God at His Word like I do, or you’re spiritualizing and denying Scripture.”

That’s not exegesis; that’s insulation. It pre-labels any disagreement as rebellion.

Numbers 12:6–8 says God usually speaks in dark sayings, riddles, visions—not face to face like Moses. The God who wrote quantum mechanics did not promise us a children’s coloring book. His Word is clear, but clear does not mean shallow.

So my hermeneutic is simple:

Let Scripture interpret Scripture, let Revelation tell you what its symbols mean, and don’t flatten poetry to protect a chart.

2. Revelation as One Straight Timeline

You’ve said Revelation is “obviously” chronological: chapter 4 is the rapture, 6–19 is the Tribulation, 20 the millennium, 21–22 eternity. One straight line.

The problem is: the text itself refuses to stay in that line.

Revelation doesn’t end once. It ends multiple times with the same storm, the same language of finality:

• Seal 6 – Rev 6:12–17: great earthquake, sun black, moon like blood, stars falling, heaven rolled up, every mountain and island moved; the kings of the earth cry, “the great day of His wrath has come.”
• Trumpet 7 – Rev 11:15–19: “The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.” The temple in heaven opens; there are lightnings, voices, thunderings, an earthquake, and great hail.
• Bowl 7 – Rev 16:17–21: a loud voice from the throne says, “It is done.” Then lightnings, voices, thunderings, the greatest earthquake in human history, and massive hailstones.

Same storm formula. Same “this is it” language. Same Day of the Lord vocabulary Isaiah, Joel, Ezekiel, and Zechariah used for the final judgment.

So here’s the plain-reading problem:

If Revelation is a simple linear timeline, how many times does the story end?

How many “It is done”s can you have before it is actually done?

A truly literal reading has to let those repetitions stand. It has to admit John is giving us multiple camera angles on the same climax—heaven’s perspective, the Church’s perspective, Israel’s perspective—not three or four different universes ending.

I’m not complicating the text; I’m refusing to erase repeated words to save a diagram.

3. Daniel 9:27 – Messiah or Antichrist?

You said Daniel 9:27 is about Antichrist making a seven-year peace treaty with Israel that he breaks halfway through.

But the text doesn’t say Antichrist, and the grammar doesn’t support that reading.

• In Daniel 9:26, the clear subject is “Messiah the Prince.”
• Verse 27: “He shall confirm the covenant with many for one week.” The verb is higbîr—to make strong, to confirm, not to invent.
• In Daniel 11:30–32, the wicked ruler is explicitly described as violating the covenant, profaning it—not confirming it.

In the New Testament, Jesus takes that language on His own lips:

• “This is My blood of the covenant, shed for many.” (Matt 26:28; Mark 14:24)
  The same “for many” wording, attached to covenant and blood.
• Hebrews 13:20 calls His blood “the blood of the everlasting covenant.”
• Isaiah 42:6: God says to the Servant, “I will give You as a covenant to the people.”

Antichrist breaks what God has established; only Messiah confirms it.

And the KJV you and I both grew up on says confirm the covenant—not create a new one. That’s not my Greek or Hebrew; that’s your English Bible.

If you build your entire seven-year Tribulation framework on a verse that never names Antichrist, changes “confirm” into “invent,” and then import that number into Revelation to prove a timeline… that’s not Scripture interpreting Scripture; that’s a feedback loop.

4. Two Peoples or One Covenant Family?

You’ve argued that God has one program for Israel and a different one for the Church, with a “pause” on Israel’s plan while He deals with us.

But from Genesis onward, the pattern is exactly the opposite: one covenant people, repeatedly expanded, never replaced.

Gentiles have always been in the remnant of Israel:

• The “mixed multitude” leaving Egypt,
• Rahab the Canaanite,
• Ruth the Moabitess,
• Uriah the Hittite,
  and on and on.

The prophets make this explicit:

• Deut 32:21 – God says He’ll provoke Israel to jealousy “by a nation that is not a nation.”
  Paul quotes that in Romans 10–11 and ties it directly to Gentile believers.
• Isaiah 56:3–8 – Foreigners and eunuchs who join themselves to the Lord are brought to His holy mountain; their sacrifices are accepted; “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”
• Isaiah 66:18–21 – God gathers all nations and tongues and from among them takes some for priests and Levites. Gentiles literally minister in Zion.
• Ezekiel 47:21–23 – The land inheritance is explicitly extended to the stranger who sojourns among Israel; he “shall be to you as native-born.”

Micah 5 ties the story together with almost frightening precision:

• v.1: Israel under siege; their judge struck with a rod on the cheek.
• v.2: out of Bethlehem comes the ruler whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.
• v.3: “Therefore will He give them up, until the time that she which travaileth hath brought forth: then the remnant of His brethren shall return unto the children of Israel.”

Israel is given up for a time—Jacob’s trouble. A woman travails and gives birth. Then the remnant of His brethren—those joined to Messiah—return to the children of Israel. There has to be a people outside those under judgment, who are still counted “brethren,” who then return to Israel. That’s exactly Paul’s logic in Romans 11: Gentiles grafted in, not to replace the tree, but to provoke and then be reunited with the natural branches.

So my question is simple:

If God has two separate peoples and two separate programs, how many brides does He have?

Because the covenant language of Scripture never talks about God divorcing Israel so He can marry a second woman called “the Church.”

5. “Not Appointed to Wrath” and the Escape Reflex

You’ve said repeatedly, “We are not appointed to wrath,” and used that as a backbone for your end-times scheme: the Church may see tribulation, but not God’s wrath, so we must be removed before the bowls.

I agree—1 Thessalonians 5:9 says we are not appointed to wrath.

But in every major act of judgment in Scripture, God’s pattern is not removal before the crisis; it is preservation through the crisis:

• Noah is saved through the water, not from the water (1 Pet 3:20–21).
• Israel is in Egypt while the plagues fall; Goshen is spared inside the disaster, not airlifted out of it (Ex 8:22–23; 9:26).
• Daniel’s friends are in the furnace; Daniel is in the lions’ den; Jeremiah is in the siege.
• In Revelation 7, the great multitude are those who “came out of great tribulation” and stand before the throne. In Revelation 12, the woman is nourished in the wilderness for 1,260 days.

The target of wrath is the hardened rebel. But the people of God are almost always in the blast radius, preserved by God in the middle of it, not evacuated so they never feel the heat.

So when your system says, “We can’t be here when God judges,” that is not how He’s behaved with His people in any previous age. It changes His pattern to protect our comfort.

6. Revelation 4:1 and the 144,000

You also pointed to Revelation 4:1—“Come up here”—as the rapture, and the 144,000 as literal ethnic Israel after the Church is gone.

Again, the pattern in Scripture argues otherwise.

• Ezekiel 9 – immediately after that ascent, the righteous in Jerusalem are sealed on their foreheads so they’re spared when judgment falls.
• Ezekiel 8:3 – the prophet is caught up between earth and heaven to see visions of God’s judgment.

Revelation follows the same sequence:

• John is called up in the Spirit in Revelation 4:1. That’s a prophetic ascent, just like Ezekiel.
• In Revelation 7, the 144,000 are sealed on their foreheads before the trumpet judgments intensify—an echo of Ezekiel 9.

The “come up here” is John being repositioned to see, not the Church being removed to escape. The 144,000 are part of the larger covenant people, sealed to stand in judgment, not a clock-piece to make a chart symmetric.

7. The “Seven Years” and the 3½ Pattern

One more structural point: you’ve talked about a future “seven-year Tribulation” as if the New Testament says that phrase.

It never does.

The New Testament gives us three and a half repeatedly:

• “time, times, and half a time” (Dan 7:25; 12:7; Rev 12:14),
• 42 months (Rev 11:2; 13:5),
• 1,260 days (Rev 11:3; 12:6).

Those are the explicit numbers tied to the period of maximum pressure and witness.

To get “seven years,” you have to:

1. Start in Daniel 9,
2. Assume week 70 is totally future and detached from Messiah’s confirming work,
3. Then import that number into Revelation,
4. Then use Revelation to prove Daniel back again.

That’s a loop, not a line.

If the New Testament wanted to say “seven years,” it had the vocabulary. Instead, it keeps hitting 3½—the biblical pattern of testing, of cut-short time, of the last half of Daniel’s week where the counterfeit peace is exposed and the covenant is vindicated.

8. “Let’s Just Win Souls”

Finally, you’ve said some version of, “We shouldn’t argue about charts; we should win souls before Jesus comes.”

On that, I agree with the instinct but not with the execution.

If the details don’t matter, throw away the chart. If they do matter enough to draw detailed timelines, then they matter because they shape what kind of disciples we form.

Jesus warned that “because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold… but he who endures to the end shall be saved” (Matt 24:12–13). Revelation says the saints overcome “by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony; they loved not their lives even unto death” (Rev 12:11).

The greatest evangelism the world will ever see is not a Church evacuated from tribulation; it is a Church purified in it—bearing witness, loving enemies, refusing the beast’s table, and shining when Babylon burns.

Prophecy isn’t there to satisfy curiosity; it’s there to forge character.

9. The Three Nails

So let me tighten this down with three simple questions:

1. Where does the New Testament explicitly teach a seven-year Great Tribulation?
   It gives 3½, 42 months, 1,260 days. “Seven years” is a system overlay, not a quoted fact.
2. Who confirms the covenant in Daniel 9:27—Messiah, who sheds His blood “for many,” or Antichrist, who is never said to confirm anything?
   If your whole timeline rests on changing that, every verse built on it starts to shake.
3. If Revelation is strictly chronological, how many final judgments does one story need?
   Because the Book itself ends the world three or four times with the same storm, the same “it is done,” and the same Day-of-the-Lord language.

Those are not side issues. Those are load-bearing beams.

10. Closing the Rebuttal

At the end of the day, this isn’t about me being clever or you being wrong.

You and I both say we love the Bible. The real issue is how we begin reading it.

Your system leans on a chart that has to smooth out repetitions, split God’s family in two, and rewrite Daniel 9 just enough to fit a seven-year block.

Mine is much simpler:

• Let the Bible define its own symbols.
• Let the patterns of covenant, judgment, and mercy in Genesis through the prophets shape how we read Revelation.
• Refuse any model that makes God change His method at the finish line.

Every pillar of the system you’ve presented—“plain reading” as non-symbolic, a linear Revelation, Antichrist confirming the covenant, two distinct peoples, an escape from refinement—cuts across the very patterns Scripture itself repeats.

I’m not asking anyone here to take my word over yours. I’m asking them to take the text over both of us.

I love the Bible too much to make it bow to my graphics.