The phrase “the last day” appears in the Greek New Testament in connection with two events: the resurrection of the dead and the judgment of those who reject Christ. Hyper-preterism (also known as full preterism) says this day came in AD 70, and that the raising Jesus promised in John 6 and the judgment He announced in John 12 happened when Rome destroyed the temple.
The texts say otherwise.
First, consider how Gary DeMar has handled these texts. I searched four of his PDF books (Last Days Madness, 2019 revision; Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths; Prophecy Wars; and Wars and Rumors of Wars) and his articles at americanvision.org. He cites the three plural “last days” texts often: Acts 2:16-17, James 5:3, and 2 Timothy 3:1. Each time his point is that the last days were the last days of the old covenant. But I found no place where he explains any of the seven singular “last day” texts in John. I also asked American Vision’s own AI, which has access to all of DeMar’s books, for DeMar’s exegesis of these verses. The only sources it returned were the two volumes of The Hope of Israel and the Nations, mainly Volume 2, and it could not find any treatment of John 12:48.
The closest he comes is a 2021 article, where he quotes John 6:54 in full, including “I will raise him up on the last day,” to argue that eating Christ’s flesh is not literal.1 He says nothing about the second half of the verse. In Last Days Madness he calls S. Greijdanus’s comment on Luke 9:27 a “helpful summary,” and the quotation ends by calling AD 70 “a precursor of his judgment on the last day.”2 DeMar’s own source puts the last day after AD 70, and DeMar never deals with it.
The only American Vision treatment of these texts I found is in The Hope of Israel and the Nations, Volume 2, written by Kim Burgess “with Gary DeMar” and published by American Vision.3 The book is a polished transcript of their podcast series. Burgess does most of the exegesis, and DeMar reads the texts and adds his own comments. In his preface DeMar says he “added content for clarification and to fill in some gaps.”4 Burgess says the “last day” of John 6:39, 40, 44, and 54 is the “last time” of 1 Peter 1:5, “the ‘last day’ of the Old Covenant order,” which came in AD 70.5 He gives no exegesis of John 6 to support this. His argument for 1 Peter rests on the word kairos instead of chronos, but John 6 uses neither; it uses hēmera. Later in the same volume he says something different: judgment “occurs for each individual on his or her own ‘last day’” at “the moment of physical death.”6 The last day cannot be both AD 70 and the day each person dies.
On Martha, DeMar sets up the argument himself. Commenting on Romans 6:6, he says that since we are not crucified the way Jesus was, “it should also follow that our resurrection is not the same as His physical resurrection.”7 Burgess answers, “Yes, exactly,” and turns to John 11. He quotes verse 25 this way: “No, Martha. I am the resurrection and the life.”8 The words “No, Martha” are not in the text, in Greek or in any English version! Burgess added them inside the quotation marks. He later says Jesus “nips the faulty hermeneutic in the bud” with Martha.9 John 12:48, the judgment text, is not discussed in that book or in any of DeMar’s books I searched.
So DeMar quotes the plural texts and leaves the singular ones alone, and the one American Vision book that addresses them asserts a date without exegesis, contradicts itself, and adds words to Jesus. Since Gary will not deal with these texts, I will.
A Logos morphological search for the adjective eschatos within four words before the noun hēmera reveals ten hits in the Greek New Testament. Seven are singular, and all seven are in John: 6:39, 6:40, 6:44, 6:54, 7:37, 11:24, and 12:48. Three are plural: Acts 2:17, James 5:3, and 2 Timothy 3:1.
The singular and the plural are not the same thing. The singular tē eschatē hēmera names a day. The plural (en tais eschatais hēmerais in Acts, en eschatais hēmerais in James and 2 Timothy) names a period of time. The apostles say they are living in the period. They never say they are living on the day. The singular day is the end of a period that is still running. The plural days are the period itself, and Scripture describes that period in terms that reach far past AD 70.
Four of the seven singular uses are in one sermon. The first: “And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day” (John 6:39). “All that he has given me” is pan ho dedōken moi, a neuter singular. It treats the Father’s gift as one whole, and the pronouns keep it that way: Jesus will lose nothing ex autou (“of it”) and will raise auto (“it”). No part of the Father’s gift will be lost, and the whole of it is promised resurrection on one designated day, “the last day.”
Who is in that gift? John uses the same neuter construction in 17:2, and again in 17:24 in the critical text (the Byzantine text there has the masculine plural, with the same meaning). In that prayer Jesus includes people who did not yet believe: “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word” (17:20). Nothing in John puts an AD 70 boundary on the gift. And in 6:39 losing and raising are set against each other: Jesus will lose nothing, alla (“but”) will raise it up. Being raised on the last day is the opposite of being lost. If the last day was AD 70, what of those who believed afterward? Either they stand outside a gift John never limits, or they were raised on a day before they were born.
Verse 40 says the same thing from the believer’s side. “Everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him” is pas ho theōrōn ton huion kai pisteuōn eis auton: pas with two present participles under one article. That describes people by their relation to the Son, not by the generation they live in, and nothing in the verse limits the group to believers before AD 70. The promise is also personal. Verse 39 spoke of the gift as a whole; verse 40 shifts to the masculine singular: kai anastēsō auton egō, “and I will raise him up,” with the emphatic egō. Jesus does not promise each believer a share in a resurrection already accomplished for a corporate body. He promises to raise him, on the last day. Believers kept coming to Christ after AD 70, and Jesus assigns their resurrection to that same day. The last day cannot fall in the middle of the very group whose resurrection Jesus assigns to it.
Verse 44: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.” The verb helkysē sits in the condition (ean mē, “unless”): no one comes unless the Father draws. Verse 45 shows the drawing is effectual, since everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes. Then kagō, “and I,” brings in the Son. Notice the repeated auton: the Father draws him, and the Son will raise him. The person drawn and the person raised are the same person. The Father is still drawing sinners to Christ; that is effectual calling (WCF 10.1). Each one drawn has Christ’s personal promise to raise him on the last day, not a share in a corporate resurrection that happened before he was born. Sinners have been drawn to Christ for nearly two thousand years since AD 70. The last day cannot come before the last of them is drawn.
Verse 54: “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” The present participles (ho trōgōn . . . kai pinōn) again describe a class of people, not a generation, and 6:47 (“whoever believes has eternal life”) shows that this feeding is by faith. As the Larger Catechism puts it, believers feed on Christ “in a spiritual manner,” as “by faith they receive and apply unto themselves Christ crucified” (WLC 170). Look at the two verbs. The believer echei, “has,” eternal life now. Jesus says anastēsō, “I will raise,” him on the last day. Resurrection is not the eternal life he already has. It is what happens later to the person who has it. Hyper-preterism tends to fold the resurrection into present covenant life in Christ. This verse keeps the two apart.
Jesus made the same distinction in John 5. The believer “has passed from death to life” already (5:24). “An hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live” (5:25). That is the spiritual raising of dead sinners, already happening. Three verses later, “and is now here” drops out: “an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out” (5:28). The word is mnēmeiois, tombs. Tombs hold bodies, and nobody came out of a tomb in AD 70. One more observation: the church still comes to the Lord’s Table, where we “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26). Whether John 6 speaks of the Supper is debated in our tradition, but the Supper itself shows the church is still waiting.
One hit is not about the end at all. “On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink’” (John 7:37). This is the Feast of Booths, seven days with an eighth added: “On the eighth day you shall hold a holy convocation . . . It is a solemn assembly” (Lev 23:36). The Hebrew word is ‘atseret; the Septuagint calls it exodion, the closing day. Whether John means the seventh or the eighth day is debated.
The verse is useful because it is ordinary. It shows how the phrase works: the last day of a period is the day after which that period is over. Here John names the period: tēs heortēs, “of the feast.” In John 6 he names none. So what period is it? The hyper-preterist says the old covenant age, but John 6 says nothing about the temple, Jerusalem, or the end of the old covenant. What the chapter does do is tie the last day, four times, to the raising of those the Father gives, those who believe, and those the Father draws. The hyper-preterist cannot assume his period; he has to show it from the text. And when John does attach something to “the last day” by name, it is “the resurrection,” in the mouth of a woman standing near her brother’s tomb (11:24).
Martha says, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24). Note the article: en tē anastasei, “in the resurrection,” a known expectation, not something Martha made up. (The Sadducees denied it, Acts 23:8, but they were the exception.) That expectation came from Daniel 12:2: “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” The sleepers are mi-yĕshēnê ‘admat-’aphar, sleepers in the ground of dust, and yaqitsu is the ordinary word for waking up. Dust is where bodies go (Gen 3:19), and the sleepers wake to one of two everlasting ends. Martha is confessing a bodily resurrection of the dead at the end.
Many, if not most, hyper-preterists say Jesus was correcting Martha’s timing here. As noted above, Burgess even goes so far as to add “No, Martha” to the text. But where does Jesus correct her? Martha did not make up “the last day.” Jesus Himself used the phrase four times in John 6 (vv. 39, 40, 44, 54) to say when He would raise His people, and John’s readers have already heard Him say it. Now Martha uses the same phrase for the raising of her dead brother, and Jesus never tells her she has the wrong day. He tells her who raises the dead: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” (11:25-26). Notice the two halves. The believer who dies will live; the believer who lives will never die. That is the same distinction as 6:54: eternal life now, resurrection later.
Then Jesus shows her what He means. He goes to a tomb where the body has lain four days and already stinks (11:39). He “cried out with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out’” (11:43), and “the man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips” (11:44). This is John 5:28 on a small scale: a voice, a tomb, a body walking out. Lazarus came back to mortal life and would die again, so this is not the final resurrection itself. It is a sign of it, and John calls these works signs because they point beyond themselves. This one points to bodies coming out of graves at Christ’s voice. If the resurrection of the last day was a “covenantal” event in AD 70 in which no body left any grave, this sign points the wrong way.
John 12:48 is about judgment. “The one who rejects me and does not receive my words has a judge; the word that I have spoken will judge him on the last day.” The subject is again a class described by present participles: ho athetōn eme kai mē lambanōn ta rhēmata mou, whoever rejects Christ and refuses His words. The judge is named with an emphatic demonstrative: ho logos hon elalēsa, ekeinos krinei auton, “the word I spoke, that will judge him.” Look at the verbs again. The rejecter echei, “has,” his judge now; the word krinei, “will judge,” him on the last day. It is the mirror image of 6:54. The believer has eternal life now and will be raised on the last day. The rejecter has his judge now and will be judged on the last day. Same day, two outcomes, just as in 5:29.
The verses just before set the scope. “I have come into the world as light, so that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness . . . for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world” (12:46-47). “Whoever believes in me” (pas ho pisteuōn eis eme) in verse 46 is the counterpart of the rejecter in verse 48. Both are defined by how they respond to Christ, not by where or when they live. The rejecters in view are not only the priests and scribes of AD 30 to 70. They are everyone who hears Christ’s words and refuses them.
Paul says the same in Athens, to pagan philosophers with no stake in the temple. God “commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed” (Acts 17:30-31). The word kathoti, “because,” makes the appointed day the reason for the command. All people everywhere must repent because a day of judgment is coming. That command is still preached, so the day is still coming. If the last day was AD 70, a man who rejects Christ today has no last day waiting for him. The hyper-preterist may answer that each man is judged at his death, and Burgess says exactly that.10 But that is not what Jesus said. He did not promise a series of private judgments. He said His word will judge the rejecter “on the last day,” the same day He will raise His people.
The three plural texts are different. None of them is about the day of resurrection. Each describes the time the apostolic church was already living in.
In Acts 2:17 Peter quotes Joel but changes the opening. Joel 2:28 in Hebrew reads ve-hayah ‘acharei-khen, “and it shall come to pass afterward,” and the Septuagint has meta tauta. Peter says, “And in the last days it shall be.” (A few manuscripts, Vaticanus among them, have meta tauta in Acts too, but most read “the last days.”)11 Peter uses the familiar prophetic language of the latter days (be-’acharit ha-yamim), found in passages such as Isaiah 2:2 and Micah 4:1, where the nations come to the mountain of the Lord. His point is that Pentecost shows the latter days have begun. Hebrews says the same: “in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb 1:2).
So the last days began with the Son and the Spirit. That tells us when they began, not when they end. The hyper-preterist says they ended in AD 70, but Peter’s sermon sets no such boundary. “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (2:21). “The promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself” (2:39). The last clause, hosous an proskalesētai, is an indefinite relative with an: as many as the Lord calls. The reach of the promise is set by God’s calling, not by a date, which takes us back to John 6:44. Joel also puts a singular day at the end of the plural days: “before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day” (2:20). Partial preterists differ on how much of 2:19-20 refers to AD 70, and I leave that open. Nothing in Peter’s sermon makes AD 70 the end of the age the Spirit opened.
James 5:3: “You have laid up treasure in the last days.” The aorist ethēsaurisate sums up the hoarding, and en eschatais hēmerais says when it happened. These men stored up wealth in the very period when that made the least sense, because “the Judge is standing at the door” (5:9). I grant that an AD 70 horizon is plausible for the judgment of the rich in James 5, and many partial preterists read it that way. But the plural phrase describes the time James’s readers already live in. It is the period, not the end of it. James also compares the church to a farmer who “waits for the precious fruit of the earth” (5:7), and Jesus said “the harvest is the close of the age” (Matt 13:39).
Second Timothy 3:1: “In the last days there will come times of difficulty.” The verb enstēsontai is future, but in verse 5 Paul says, “Avoid such people,” with a present imperative, apotrepou, and in verse 6 he describes men already creeping into households. Paul announces the last days and then tells Timothy to avoid the very men he has just described. The last days are Timothy’s present. For the end, the same letter uses a different phrase, “that day” (1:12, 18; 4:8). “There is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing” (4:8). The perfect participle tois ēgapēkosi, “those who have loved,” describes believers by their love for His appearing, not by their generation. Paul receives his crown on that day together with all of them. If that day was AD 70, the hyper-preterist has to explain how believers born afterward were crowned with Paul on a day before they lived.
The same letter warns against Hymenaeus and Philetus, “who have swerved from the truth, saying that the resurrection has already happened. They are upsetting the faith of some” (2:18). The hyper-preterist says their only mistake was timing, because the resurrection had not happened yet. That is logically possible, but Paul never says timing was their only mistake. And Paul had already said what the resurrection is: “What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable” (1 Cor 15:42). It is the dead raised, not a change of covenant status while every grave stays full.
Taken together, the ten texts are consistent. The plural “last days” is the age the apostles already lived in: Peter announces its arrival, James describes conduct within it, and Paul warns Timothy about men already present. None of them makes AD 70 its end. The singular “last day” is defined by what happens on it. On that day the whole gift of the Father is raised, everyone the Father has drawn is raised, the dead come out of their tombs at Christ’s voice, and Christ’s word judges everyone who rejected it.
None of that happened in AD 70. The Father kept giving and drawing, and the gospel kept going to the nations. The tombs were not emptied. Those who rejected Christ did not all face His word, and people have kept rejecting it since. And Paul tells us what the defeat of death looks like. Christ rose as “the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ,” and “the last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor 15:23, 26), the same adjective, eschatos. That victory is bodily: “the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed,” and then “Death is swallowed up in victory” (15:52, 54). Death has not been swallowed up. We still bury our dead.
The Westminster Confession says the same: “At the last day, such as are found alive shall not die, but be changed: and all the dead shall be raised up, with the selfsame bodies, and none other, (although with different qualities,) which shall be united again to their souls for ever” (WCF 32.2). And: “God hath appointed a day, wherein he will judge the world in righteousness, by Jesus Christ . . . In which day, not only the apostate angels shall be judged, but likewise all persons that have lived upon earth shall appear before the tribunal of Christ” (WCF 33.1). “All persons that have lived upon earth” cannot describe a day in AD 70, because most of the people who will ever live had not yet been born.
Don’t let Gary DeMar and the rest of the hyper-preterists rob you of this comfort: Christ will not lose any of those the Father gave Him. He said so four times in one sermon, twice with the emphatic kagō, “and I.” The last day is still ahead. The Confession says God keeps the day hidden so that we “shake off all carnal security, and be always watchful, because we know not at what hour the Lord will come; and may be ever prepared to say, Come Lord Jesus, come quickly. Amen” (WCF 33.3).
Gary DeMar, “Should Bible Prophecy Always be Interpreted Literally?,” American Vision, June 8, 2021, https://americanvision.org/posts/should-bible-prophecy-always-be-interpreted-literally/.
Gary DeMar, Last Days Madness: Obsession of the Modern Church, 4th rev. ed. (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision, 2019), 46. DeMar quotes S. Greijdanus, Het heilig Evangelie naar de beschrijving van Lukas (1940), 1:424-25, as cited in Herman Ridderbos, The Coming of the Kingdom, trans. H. de Jongste (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1975).
Kim Burgess with Gary DeMar, The Hope of Israel and the Nations: New Testament Eschatology Accomplished and Applied, vol. 2 (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision, 2024).
Gary DeMar, preface to Burgess, Hope of Israel, 2:viii.
Burgess, Hope of Israel, 2:40, 42.
Burgess, Hope of Israel, 2:137.
Burgess, Hope of Israel, 2:160-61 (DeMar speaking).
Burgess, Hope of Israel, 2:161.
Burgess, Hope of Israel, 2:348.
Burgess, Hope of Israel, 2:137.
Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), on Acts 2:17; see also the apparatus at Acts 2:17 in Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012).