Rapture: The End-Times Error That Leaves the Bible Behind (14 page)

There you have it. During the fourth kingdom, the Messianic Kingdom will be established. The uncut stone symbolizes Christ at His first advent. His reign established through His Passion supersedes all the kingdoms of men. From this point in history, God’s Kingdom is predicted to endure forever.

Christians have historically believed that the stone which grows into a mountain is Christ and His Kingdom. (Some modernists view the stone as a symbol of the Maccabees, while the Jews apply it to themselves.) Rapturists agree that the stone is Christ, but there is dissent from the majority of Christians over the advent to which this vision refers. Rapturists believe that this stone does not arrive until Christ’s second advent. They cannot agree that the eternal Kingdom of Christ was set up at the first advent without being led to the Church Christ established at that advent. So they deny that
any
kingdom was set up at the first advent of Christ. They believe that the Kingdom of Christ was rejected by the Jewish leaders at the first advent, and so it will have to wait for the second coming to be established.

That is the reason they insert the presumptuous parenthesis. To get the timing of the kingdoms correct, they must split the final (iron) kingdom into two parts (iron legs versus iron-and-clay feet). Then, in between these two parts of the same kingdom, they insert a delay of at least two thousand years and ignore all of that history! They believe that a resurrected Roman Empire is still in our future (many rapturists point to the European Union). They are also forced to conclude that the stone that shall stand forever (Christ) has not arrived on the scene yet!

Rapturists split the Roman Empire into two parts in spite of what the text itself actually teaches. Daniel is clear in his interpretation of the dream that these two parts are one and the same kingdom. “There shall be a
fourth
kingdom.… It shall be a divided kingdom” (2:40–41). They reason that, if two kingdoms happen to be in the same geographical area, they can be considered, for prophetic purposes, one and the same—even if they are separated by centuries. This stretches logic to the breaking point.

Further, this twisting of Daniel distorts the entire message of the vision. Remember, time is of paramount importance in Daniel. The events he describes will take about six hundred years to unfold. The rapturists’ time gap in effect distorts God’s revelation.

In contrast to this rather forced interpretation, the Catholic is free to understand the passage for what it seems intended to convey. The mystery of the Messiah’s Kingdom is the focus of this vision. The Messiah and His Kingdom were foretold to be coming during the fourth kingdom of the vision, when Rome ruled over Jerusalem. During that time, Christ would set up His Kingdom, which would grow to encompass the entire world and last forever.

This dovetails with the teaching of Jesus. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches” (Matt. 13:31–32).

We can confidently assert that in the initial statue vision, Daniel has given us the timing for the inauguration of the Kingdom of Heaven. The Catholic has no need to insert two thousand extra years between verses 40 and 41. Christ did set up God’s Kingdom on His first advent during the fourth kingdom, the ancient Roman Empire.

Daniel now interrupts the flow of visions to explore important events in the lives of three kings that Daniel served in Babylon: Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, and Darius. We will look at only one of the events, known as “Belshazzar’s folly,” from which we will be able to learn precisely
how
God “comes in judgment.” That will be very important when we start to examine the New Testament.

The events of Belshazzar’s folly occurred in Babylon. King Belshazzar precipitated God’s judgment by using the holy vessels taken from Jerusalem’s Temple for profane uses. This revealed a pride, a penchant for idolatry, and a disregard for Yahweh that resulted in God’s judgment. As a result, we get a behind-the-scenes view of the fall of the Babylonian Empire to the Medo-Persians.

When the king used God’s holy vessels for an unworthy purpose, “the fingers of a man’s hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace.… And the king saw the hand as it wrote” (5:5). Daniel interprets the handwriting for Belshazzar. “This is the interpretation.… God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end” (5:26). Belshazzar was specifically told that God was judging him and his kingdom because he did not honor God (5:23).

But it is important to note that, in this act of judgment, God never actually met with Belshazzar. He never appeared physically in Babylon to judge the king. God was in His Heaven, and any casual observer of the events surrounding the fall of Babylon would have seen Cyrus conquering Babylon with a Persian army. Cyrus the Persian and Darius the Mede were not even believers in Yahweh. Nevertheless they were the appointed instruments of God’s judgment on Babylon.

The essential point is that God used a pagan army to execute His “coming in judgment” on a city. Only those who were aware of Daniel’s prophecy would have seen God’s justice being meted out in the victory of Cyrus’s army. Anyone else might just have observed the defeat of a great city by an immense army.

We will see a similar scenario when God’s judgment falls on another, newer Babylon in the New Testament. God’s prophet, in this case the Messiah Himself, predicted that judgment. Throughout the biblical record, God visits judgment upon political entities
through
other political entities. When predicted by God’s prophet, only a fool would doubt that it is indeed God “coming in judgment” (GR6).

In Section I, there was only one vision (of a statue). It spoke of the mystery of the Messianic Kingdom revealed. This third section of Daniel contains five visions: the Battle Strategy of the Beast; the Battle Strategy of the Goat and Ram; the Battle Strategy of God’s People; the Great Battle; and From Here to Eternity. These do not all directly impinge on our investigation of the rapture, so we will not examine all of them in detail. We will examine the first, third, and fifth, which in our outline we will designate III:A (The Battle Strategy of the Beast), III:C (The Battle Strategy of God’s People), and III:E (From Here to Eternity).

Rapturists claim that at least a part of all of these visions are still future, but that is due to an unwillingness to accept the clear teaching of Daniel that the Kingdom was established during the ancient Roman empire. They insert their two-thousand-year parenthesis into the first vision and proceed as though apocalyptic visions always follow a chronological order. We can easily see that this is not the case even here in Daniel if we notice that Chapter 7 of Daniel occurred several years before Chapter 6 (GR8).

This vision will answer the question “What will be the response of the earthly kingdom to the stone that pulverized the statue? Will it fight back?” We will encounter the same four kingdoms as in the vision of the statue. This time, however, these four kingdoms are portrayed as vicious beasts.

That should give us a hint. Will God’s Kingdom win an instantaneous victory over the kingdoms of this earth? Probably not, as vicious beasts tend to fight for survival. Will there be any casualties among Christ’s faithful subjects? Perhaps, as beasts kill to protect their interests. This might be dubbed the “Empire Strikes Back” vision. The statue in the initial vision is not going to take its own destruction lying down.

The four beasts are portrayed in detail: “The first was like a lion and had eagles’ wings.… Another beast, a second one, like a bear … had three ribs in its mouth.… Another, like a leopard with four wings of a bird on its back; and the beast had four heads.… And behold, a fourth beast, terrible and dreadful and exceedingly strong; and it had great iron teeth; it devoured and broke in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet … and it had ten horns” (7:4–7).

St. Jerome, the Church’s greatest early Scripture scholar, stated that the lion represents Babylon, “on account of its brutality and cruelty.” The bear symbolizes Medo-Persia. The three bones stand for the three kingdoms that were subsumed within the Persian: “the Babylonians, the Medes, and the Persians.” The leopard with wings is a symbol of Macedonia. Alexander the Great was known for the incredible speed with which he could move his army and conquer territory
(CID)
.

The fourth, terrible beast represents Rome. Its iron teeth remind us of the iron legs and feet of the statue vision. We find ten horns on this beast, which are taken by many commentators as a reference to the ten provinces that made up the Roman Empire. The vast diversity within these ten provinces of the Roman Empire hints at why this last empire might be both strong as iron yet brittle as clay (
TCA
, V, 210, 32).

Just as in the statue vision, the four beasts (earthly kingdoms) are supplanted by “an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away” (7:14). But while the statue implies that these kingdoms will remain passive as the stone destroys them, the beasts are able to fight. This vision supplies the details of the beasts’ battle strategy. They will ultimately lose, but have no intention of going into the night softly.

Jewish scholars had a tradition that the transition into the Messianic Kingdom would take about forty years to unfold (
ET
, 356). We will learn that this prediction was amazingly accurate. Christ’s Kingdom will not enjoy an instantaneous victory on a worldwide scale. Instead, we read that a new enemy, “another horn, a little one” will arise (7:8).

Modernists try to understand this reference to a “little” horn as a symbol of Antiochus, because another little horn, mentioned in a later vision, does refer to Antiochus, who reigned during the third kingdom, about two centuries before Christ. But the details of that vision are different. The little horn we are examining points to Caesar Nero (GR3). We must be careful not to mix these prophecies. They are not arranged chronologically (GR8).

The Jews of Jesus’ day made the same mistake that modernists do today. The Jewish scholars assumed that all these visions were speaking of one event, when Antiochus desecrated the Temple just before the rise of Judas Maccabeus. A couple of the visions refer to a coming “abomination.” It is a relatively common word in the Law of Moses, but the Jews assumed it referred to the same event every time in Daniel. They actually had some biblical basis for this. The prophet Joel had promised them that God’s “people shall never again be put to shame” (2:26–27).

But Jesus specifically disagreed with the prevailing Jewish interpretation of Daniel and Joel. (In doing so, He also argues against modernists.) Jesus said, “So when you see the desolating sacrilege spoken of by the prophet Daniel standing in the holy place … flee to the mountains” (Matt. 24:15). Jesus claims the prophecies of Daniel for Himself and the times of His Church. He prophesied to His own generation that they would see yet another abomination of Daniel, that of 70 A.D. We will examine this New Testament text closely when we reach the Olivet Discourse. Actually, the abomination of Antiochus was a historical prophecy of the events of Jesus’ generation, culminating in 70 A.D. (GR3).

So we see that, although similar, the various visions of Daniel describe events that occurred in completely different centuries. In Section III, visions B and D point to Antiochus. We are examining visions A, C, and E, which point to the Romans.

The prophecy of Joel apparently applies to those people who chose to be faithful to God’s message on the day of Pentecost. It is no accident that the very next two verses after the promise of Joel were applied to the events of Pentecost by the apostle Peter (Joel 2:28–29). God’s
new
“people shall never again be put to shame.” Of course, all of these passages may very well prefigure events surrounding the final battle between good and evil (GR3).

So if not Antiochus, who was this little horn? Nero ruled Rome from 54 to 68 A.D., and the details of the vision fit him perfectly.

The little horn “had a mouth that spoke great things,” and “shall speak words against the Most High” (7:20, 25). Nero blasphemed against God by aggressively enforcing emperor worship.