Rapture: The End-Times Error That Leaves the Bible Behind (16 page)

I am making a very limited point about only this passage in Daniel and its partner passage in Matthew. I am proposing that this coming of Daniel’s vision could not possibly be a prediction of the second coming at the final eschaton. The Church has always connected it to the first advent in her Liturgy. Our evidence will only become more compelling as we examine Zechariah and the Olivet Discourse.

We are now ready to answer our last question,
why?
Why was Jesus coming? We have already hinted at this answer, but for clarity, we will back up a bit and get a running start.

It is essential to view coming “with the clouds of Heaven” in an Old Testament way. The clouds have nothing to do with the weather on that particular day, but are a sign of coming in glory, in victory, and most of all,
in judgment
(GR6).

Perhaps you remember what we learned in Ground Rule 6. We read that “the Lord is riding on a swift cloud and comes to Egypt; and the idols of Egypt will tremble at His presence” (Isa. 19:1–2). In the fulfillment of this passage in Isaiah 20:1–6, God comes to judge the false idols—in the form of the Assyrian army! God promises He is coming to Egypt, and the Egyptians witness a conquering army. The Assyrian army is the physical evidence that God came “on a swift cloud.” God’s judgment came in the form of the Assyrian army’s killing, pillaging, and conquering.

Notice the similarity of the Old Testament language in Isaiah, “The Lord is riding on a swift cloud and comes to Egypt,” to Daniel’s description, “With the clouds of Heaven there came one like a son of man” (GR3). This is not merely coincidence. God came to Egypt as Judge. Jesus is telling the Sanhedrin, which condemned Him, that they will see the day when He comes to judge them. They fancied themselves the judges, but Jesus tells them that they will live to understand their mistake. When Jesus quoted Daniel at His trial, there was an implied threat. Why is the Son of man coming? To judge. The high priest understood this threat clearly and decided that Jesus had to die.

Although Christ certainly received His Kingdom no later than at His Ascension, the Sanhedrin never saw evidence of that. There was only one event that occurred during the generation of the Sanhedrin that would show them the Christ was their Judge.
The public event that evidenced the coming of Christ in victory was the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple in 70 A.D., as instigated by the little horn, Nero
. It was a public judgment that clearly proved to all mankind that Jesus was the victor in Heaven over His enemies on earth. No other event created the instantaneous, worldwide publicity necessary to illustrate to the Sanhedrin that Christ was seated at the right hand of the Father. Just as God judged Egypt with the Assyrian army, Christ judged Jerusalem with the Roman army.

The fulfillment of Daniel’s vision also parallels the Babylonian experience of God’s judgment. Remember Belshazzar’s folly? The Babylonians witnessed the coming of God in the conquering army of the Medes. Daniel did not include this account just for the fun of telling us the inside story of his political prowess. He was preparing us for the meaning of this vision.

By this understanding, a conquering army around Jerusalem, the city of the Sanhedrin, would fulfill the “Son of man” prophecy of Daniel, as expanded by Jesus in Matthew. The Sanhedrin’s defeat was viewed as the earthly evidence of the heavenly acceptance of Christ’s victory. This parallel correspondence between events in Heaven and on earth will be seen again when these events are covered in The Apocalypse. We will learn that events in Heaven lead to events on earth and imbue them with significance. The parallel between Jerusalem and Egypt will also be expanded.

As we progress, I will illustrate that the early Church understood the fall of Jerusalem in precisely these terms. But as we have just seen, this understanding certainly fits Daniel’s vision, Isaiah’s language, and the prophecy of Jesus at His trial.

Because we firmly believe in the second coming, we automatically assume that any passage that speaks of Christ’s coming anywhere is always a reference to that blessed hope. But we must be faithful to the scriptural texts before us.

Jesus said that Daniel’s Son of man would come in judgment during the Sanhedrin’s generation. This leaves us only three logical choices. Either Jesus was lying to the Sanhedrin (the non-Christian view), or He was mistaken about His timing (the modernist view), or the “coming” in judgment of Daniel 7 and Matthew 26 occurred before the close of the first century A.D. So unless Jesus was untruthful or mistaken, this prophecy has already been fulfilled.

Jesus judged Jerusalem with the Roman army in 70 A.D. He predicted that very event: “For the days shall come upon you, when your enemies will cast up a bank about you and surround you … and they will not leave one stone upon another in you;
because you did not know the time of your visitation”
(Luke 19:42–44). Now we know that this was evidence to the entire world that Jesus had fulfilled Daniel’s “Son of man” prophecy in Heaven.

Daniel tells us that the primary result of Christ’s victory is that the saints “shall receive the kingdom.” This rings true to the early history of the Church. Even though Christ was already victor in Heaven, as long as the Temple remained, people tended to see Christianity as merely a sect within Judaism. If the sacrifice of Jesus had superseded the Old Covenant ceremonies, people would naturally wonder why animal sacrifices continued in Jerusalem. The letter to the Hebrews stands as a tribute to that confusion in the very early Church. Within the generation of His accusers, Christ with His judgment eliminated the source of confusion. Once the Old Testament system of animal sacrifices had been eliminated, the Church was free to grow unencumbered by the continued existence of biblical Judaism and the confusions it caused.

But a word of caution. This coming of the Son of man in the clouds of glorious victory and judgment must not be confused with the second advent of Christ at the final eschaton. At that time, Christ will come again in the clouds. But then He will be traveling toward earth to judge all of humanity. Daniel’s event is a far cry from, and thousands of years before, the second coming of Christ. At the same time, however, the victorious judgment of Christ in Heaven as evidenced in the events of 70 A.D. certainly does point to the final climax of history as a prophetic event (GR3).

Needless to say, rapturists do not agree with this understanding of Daniel. They place the second half of this vision in the future. But when we look at the time line of the rapturists, the problem is even more acute in this vision than in the statue vision. Now the presumptuous parenthesis of two thousand years must appear in the passage between the appearance of the fourth beast and the mere mention of his ten horns. This is proposed even though Daniel specifically informs us that only four kingdoms are involved (7:17). To claim that the fourth kingdom could be reconstituted after two thousand years, and would still be the same kingdom, is grasping at straws.

This brings up another timing problem for the rapturist. Jesus clearly told the Sanhedrin that they would see evidence of the coming of the Son of man as predicted in Daniel 7:13. Yet the rapturist places these events in the future even for our time. He must do this, because he wants to justify a still-future seven-year Great Tribulation. The rapturist is forced to believe that on the eve of His Crucifixion, Jesus made a promise to the Sanhedrin, but that His timing was off by at least two thousand years!

To summarize this vision’s message, thus far we have seen that there will be four empires between Daniel’s lifetime and the Messianic Kingdom. During the fourth, the Roman Empire that ruled two millennia ago, God will set up His eternal Kingdom, and the Son of Man will unmistakably begin His reign in glory. Eventually the whole world, even the Sanhedrin, will be forced to recognize the public victory of Jesus when He judges them through Rome. Just as God came to serve justice to the Babylonians through the army of the Medes because of Belshazzar’s folly, just as the Assyrians revealed God’s coming in His judgment of the Egyptians in Isaiah, just so Jesus publicly judged the Sanhedrin through the Roman army in 70 A.D. The saints will be persecuted by Nero, yet will receive the Kingdom after Jerusalem’s defeat in a three-and-a-half-year war. The actions and personality of the little horn, Caesar Nero, are predicted accurately. The details of the vision mesh with the events of the first century with amazing faithfulness.

If you still have residual doubts about Daniel’s message, relax. We will examine these ideas again. They are a recurring theme in Scripture (GR6).

Time is a recurring element in Daniel, but nowhere is it more important than in this vision. Daniel has foreseen the stone destroy the statue and supplant it. He knows that the little horn will make war for three and a half years and defeat the Law. He anticipates God’s saints’ receiving the Kingdom that will endure forever. The whole question, to Daniel’s mind, is “How long before these events are to be fulfilled, and what must God’s people do in the meantime?”

The enormity of Daniel’s question may make the complexity of this vision more understandable. As St. Jerome wrote, this is a passage that “has been argued over in various ways by men of greatest learning.… Each has expressed his views”
(CID)
.

Perhaps we should first pause in awe over the fact that this prophecy even exists. Daniel has predicted the rebuilding of Jerusalem even before the king let the Jewish people return there. As we know from the reaction of the neighboring peoples in Judea at that time, the decree to rebuild Jerusalem was a bold political move. Jerusalem had been an outpost of rebellion and independence from time out of mind. The concept of an anointed prince of the Jews in a rebuilt Jerusalem would not be popular with the Gentiles.

If we simplify the passage to its very core, and initially ignore all the complex numbers, the message of this vision is quite clear. Rebuild the Jerusalem Temple to pave the way for the Messiah’s coming. In other words, “If you build it, He will come.” But the vision does not stop there. Even though the Messiah will bring with Him six tremendous blessings, He will be cut off, and the Temple will be desolated. There is not going to be a “happily ever after” ending to the Messiah’s coming.

One task lies between us and the examination of this vision. We must briefly discuss the significance of the number
seven
. In answer to Daniel’s prayers, God sent Gabriel to help Daniel understand the time line of God’s plan. Gabriel reveals to Daniel an extremely complex scheme of times and numbers.

“Seven” is obviously the unifying theme of the answer to the question “When will the Jews go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple, paving the way for the Messiah’s appearance?” In ancient Jewish literature, the number
seven
signifies God’s perfect action in the world. The Babylonian captivity spanned seven decades. Every seventh year in the Hebrew calendar was a sabbatical year, during which the land was to lie fallow, and after every seventh set of seven years (the fiftieth year) was a Jubilee year (Lev. 25). Here the prophecy revolves around seventy sets of seven.

The Hebrew word used here for
seven
is
shabua
. The use of the word
sevens
is analogous to our use of the term
dozens
. When we use the word
dozens
, we might mean dozens of years, or dozens of decades, or dozens of roses, or dozens of eggs. The meaning must be determined from the context. It is the same with
sevens
. The best understanding is that of an unspecified time period; “times” or “time periods” or “seasons” would be a more accurate rendering. Moreover, there is nothing to indicate that they must mean the same thing from one reference to the next (GR2).

Because Daniel bundles these periods into groups of sevens, they are most commonly called “weeks,” or “weeks of seasons.” Thus, the entire prophecy is referred to as “Daniel’s seventy weeks” or “Daniel’s seventy weeks of seasons.” We will use this common
week
terminology.

The word
years
, which the Revised Standard Version inserts into the text after
seven
, is not in the original language. In this passage, the sevens can be understood as minutes, days, weeks, months, years, decades, or even centuries. To avoid confusion, I have deleted
years
from the text, as do several other translations (e.g., the New American Bible). I have added
seasons
in brackets to clarify the meaning.

For many contemporary readers, the initial response to all these sevens is one of consternation, which rapidly turns to disinterest. We will try to avoid that response because the message of this vision is so important. Although Daniel’s style is enigmatic, it is not undecipherable.

Rapturists believe they can prove that there is a seven-year Great Tribulation that is yet unfulfilled in this vision. To come to that conclusion, they insert the presumptuous parenthesis of two thousand years into this vision just as they did in all the others. Here it falls between the sixty-ninth and seventieth weeks. They had better be right. This assertion, about this very passage, lies at the heart and soul of the rapturist system. Both Darby and present rapturists claim that this vision is the basis for their entire time line. Remember that without a future seven-year Great Tribulation, the need for a rebuilt Jewish Temple and a secret rapture of believers disappears, and the entire rapturist system falls like a house of cards.