Rapture: The End-Times Error That Leaves the Bible Behind (13 page)

Now that we have looked at principles for interpreting biblical prophecy, specifically apocalyptic literature, it is time to turn to the relevant passages.

We know that the early Church spent time in the Bible to discover more about the prophecies of Jesus Christ. The Bible they explored was the Old Testament, including the apocraphyl, or deuterocanonical, books. If you expected to jump right into The Apocalypse without gaining an appreciation for the Bible that the writers of the New Testament studied, you are reading the wrong book.

Although some newcomers to the movement try to explain their belief in the rapture by turning to St. Paul’s epistles or to The Apocalypse, no one who is thoroughly immersed in this theology would start anywhere but in the Old Testament book of Daniel. That is where Darby allegedly began. The book of Daniel lays the foundation for the entire time framework of rapturist theology.

We will be quite thorough in our treatment of Daniel, and it will pay off when we approach The Apocalypse. Many people are mystified by the symbolism of St. John’s vision, but all of biblical prophecy, including The Apocalypse, will come alive if we spend sufficient time in Daniel.

Daniel understood the value of time; it is the overriding concern throughout his visions. Daniel refers to time in one way or another on about a hundred occasions in his twelve chapters! As we will see, Daniel lays out a precise time line for God’s plan of salvation. He predicts the rebuilding of the Temple and the coming of the Messiah, and includes some specific details surrounding those two pivotal events.

In their reading of Daniel, rapturists make a preposterously large time miscalculation. Right in the middle of Daniel’s time line, they insert a two-thousand-year interruption. They call it a “parenthesis”: the parenthetical “Church age.” I call it the “presumptuous parenthesis” because it is an egregious distortion of Daniel’s timing—yet time is the essence of Daniel’s book. This is a presumptuous way to handle God’s revelation.

It is important to understand what rapturists are doing here. Daniel asks God for a time line of the events leading up to the Messiah’s coming Kingdom, and God reveals it to him. The length of that time line is approximately six hundred years. But to make their system work, rapturists divide that six hundred years into two parts and insert an additional two thousand years in between! In the rapturists’ view, God “put one over on Daniel” by claiming to give him a time line, only to have it be off by more than four hundred percent!

Why do rapturists do this? For one simple reason, I believe. They are unwilling to entertain the notion that perhaps Christ founded the Kingdom of God during His first advent. They hold to the firm conviction that the Messianic Kingdom is still in the future, that it will center on ethnic Israel, and—most important—that it is entirely distinct from the Church Christ founded.

Why would rapturists deny the Kingdom of God as a present reality, one awaiting its fullness at the second coming? I believe that on a historical level, Darby—like many other religious innovators in the nineteenth century—was trying to gather a group of followers. Since he was living in a predominantly Christian country, admitting that the Kingdom of God was already present within the world would not jolt people into abandoning their former places of worship to follow him. Admitting the kingdom was already in existence would have scuttled Darby’s entire ministry in its infancy.

Furthermore, in the present day, an admission that Christ did set up a kingdom in His first advent is very dangerous to Protestantism. If the Kingdom has been established, the logical response is to look for it. The only Church that can make a credible claim to be the Kingdom of Christ on earth is the Catholic Church. Thus, by denying the present existence of God’s Kingdom, the rapturist builds a firewall against Catholicism in his congregation’s soul. In this I speak from personal experience.

Why is the rapturists’ parenthesis two thousand years? For the same reason we observed earlier in our short history: a sense of immediacy produces converts to their movement.

Based on a misreading of the Olivet Discourse, they would claim that we are in “the generation of the fig tree,” meaning that there remains only forty to seventy years before the rapture occurs. Originally the pivotal event that marked the beginning of the generation was identified as the 1948 founding of the modern state of Israel. Now people are proposing that maybe 1967 (the year Jerusalem was reunified) or even 1993 (the year of the Peace Accords) is the real starting point for the final generation. When we pass any critical milestones (just as we did in 1988, which is 1948 plus forty years), we will see rapturists use the rolling end of the world to choose a new date even further in the future. But that new date will still require that the present generation is the final one.

I have no doubt that, in 2200 A.D., they will be inserting a 2,200-year gap into Daniel’s visions so that Daniel’s last week will still be imminent. That is the purpose of the presumptuous parenthesis. It pushes the establishment of God’s Kingdom into the future—our immediate future.

But this gap is not in the text.

In fact, this gap does great violence to the text, to the fundamental message of the vision—all for the purpose of protecting rapturists from the idea that the Catholic Church might have to be examined as a possible candidate for the present-day Kingdom of Heaven.

Throughout this book are charts designed to illuminate both the rapturist and Catholic time lines. Included as reference points are accepted historical events as well.

In Daniel, we find out the “when” of God’s plan for salvation history. We must never forget that Daniel’s questions are fundamentally about
time
. St. Jerome agrees: “None of the prophets has so clearly spoken concerning Christ as has this prophet Daniel.… He set forth the very time at which He would come … stated the actual number of years involved, and announced beforehand the clearest signs” (
CID
, prologue).

By the end of our study of Daniel, we will know the overall timing of God’s entire plan of salvation. We will discover which gentile world empire will be in power when God sets up His Kingdom here on earth. Daniel will even supply details concerning the reigning Caesar, the rise and fall of Jerusalem and its Temple, the Passion of the Messiah, and the reaction of good and evil people to these events.

The rapturist desperately needs Daniel to substantiate his claim that there is still a seven-year Great Tribulation awaiting the world. There is nowhere else in the Bible he can turn to support this belief. In Unger’s
Bible Handbook
(published by Moody Press, a bastion of rapturist theology) we read in its comments on Daniel that this “book is the key to all biblical prophecy. Apart from the great eschatological disclosures of this book, the entire prophetic portions of the Word of God must remain sealed. Jesus’ great Olivet Discourse, as well as 2 Thess. 2 and the entire book of the Revelation, can be unlocked
only through an understanding of the prophecies of Daniel
.”

The rapturist absolutely must be able to prove that his interpretation of Daniel’s time line is the only viable view. If he fails, so does the time line for his entire system, and the whole rapturist house of cards collapses. If there is no future seven-year Great Tribulation, there is no reason for a secret rapture, nor any need for rebuilding the Temple. So we will begin our investigation in Daniel. Timing is everything.

Because this is not a thorough commentary on any of the books we are examining, I will not deal comprehensively with the date of authorship, nor with the identity of the human author. I will simply state my relevant conclusions.

A discussion of the authorship and dating of Daniel can make it seem as if there’s absolutely no common ground among modernists, rapturists, and Catholics. But there is one important, often-overlooked point on which all scholars agree: the author of Daniel, whoever he was, specifically intended us to read the book as if it were written by the prophet Daniel during the Babylonian exile in the sixth century B.C.

The modernist would claim that the book was written, or more likely assembled from different oral traditions, around the time of the second century B.C. But he would still hold that the author intended us to think otherwise. I do not agree with the modernist’s dating, although I can fully appreciate the weight of his arguments. The rapturist would unwaveringly assert that Daniel wrote all of Daniel in the sixth century B.C. The loyal Catholic might question the date of authorship for the three deuterocanonical segments of Daniel, but would otherwise agree in dating the book in the sixth century B.C. Again, all three understand Daniel as a book
intended
to be read as a sixth-century document.

I will refer to the author of this book as Daniel, the sixth-century Jewish prophet in Babylon. That is what the author intended, and I will honor his intention.

Daniel’s theme can be summed up as “The mystery of Messiah’s Kingdom revealed: proof that Christ is coming.” The book of Daniel was written to encourage God’s people when they were being severely persecuted. They had been defeated and dispersed by the Babylonians. Daniel wants God to bless Jerusalem again and witness God’s judgment as it falls on Jerusalem’s enemies. Even his name means “God is my judge.”

Some modernists minimize the suffering of the Jewish people under the Babylonian exile, and so try to claim that the message of Daniel applies better to the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes. This is simply not true. The Babylonians almost succeeded in obliterating Judaism from the earth, and only the grace of God working through Cyrus the Mede prevented it.

The broad-stroke outline of Daniel is as follows.

When will the Kingdom of the Messiah come? That is the question that Daniel’s initial vision answers. This vision lays the framework for the entire book. All the future visions in Daniel revisit its subject and elaborate on this foundation.

While serving his new king, Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel developed a widespread reputation for his ability to interpret dreams. He firmly established his credentials by interpreting a dream for Nebuchadnezzar even though the king refused to divulge the contents of the dream itself! The other wise men exclaimed that this was a “mystery” that only God could reveal. The word
mystery
is mentioned eight times in this chapter.
Eight
is the number of Christ. Right from the beginning, we can be sure that the “mystery” to be revealed concerns the Messianic Kingdom (GR2).

The king’s dream involved a huge statue with four sections. “The head of this image was of fine gold, its breast and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay” (2:32–33). Daniel told the king that each part of the statue represented a world empire. Looking backward, it is easy to understand that the gold head represents Babylon, the silver represents Medo-Persia, the bronze stands for Greece, and the iron represents Rome. That has been the understanding of most of the Church since before the time of St. Jerome’s commentary on Daniel
(CID)
.

The passage tells us that the iron and clay feet symbolize the strength, yet brittleness, of the fourth kingdom. “There shall be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron.… It shall break and crush all.… And as you saw the feet and toes partly of potter’s clay and partly of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom.… As you saw the iron mixed with miry clay, so they will mix with one another … but they will not hold together” (2:40–43). St. Jerome, who lived and wrote during the time of the Roman Empire, wrote, “Just as there was at the first nothing stronger and hardier than the Roman realm, so also in these last days, there is nothing more feeble, since we require the assistance of barbarian tribes”
(CID)
.

Apart from its accuracy, the startling aspect of this dream is its conclusion. During the fourth empire, “A stone was cut out by no human hand, and it smote the image on its feet … so that not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth” (2:34–35). Daniel interprets this to mean that while the fourth kingdom is still in existence, “
the God of Heaven will set up a kingdom
which shall never be destroyed.… It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever” (2:44).