Rapture: The End-Times Error That Leaves the Bible Behind (20 page)

We have learned much that will help us as we progress. Many passages written after Daniel will view the first advent through the lens of Daniel’s seventieth week—the seven decades of covenantal transition from the Annunciation to the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple. Rapturists tend to view salvation as a three-day accomplishment. Catholics tend to view the first advent as a three-decade event. Yet the events put into motion by Mary’s yes were not fully played out until seventy years later. As we continue, remember that Daniel predicted exactly this. In Zechariah, this seven decades of covenantal transition will be called “the day of the Lord.” In The Apocalypse, these seven decades will dominate the central, pivotal chapter (ch. 12).

The heavy lifting in Daniel is over. Our work here will help us immensely in the New Testament. But it would be a mistake to overlook completely the last vision of Daniel before we leave this book.

Just before this vision begins, there is a description of a resurrection that occurs immediately after a severe tribulation. “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever” (12:2–3). Rapturists claim that the resurrection language requires this passage to be placed at the end of the Great Tribulation, when they claim that one of the final resurrections occurs. (Yes, they believe in more than one!)

However, as elsewhere in Daniel, their system seems to be built without a clear understanding of how Scripture uses language. Elsewhere the Bible uses resurrection language to refer to a spiritual rebirth. Remember Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones that come back to life (GR7)?

This mention of a spiritual resurrection is still referring to the time of Antiochus’s persecution. This phrase describes the revival of biblical Judaism under the Maccabees after the great battle of Vision III:D. After the defeat of Antiochus, the Temple was restored, the people of God were renewed, and biblical Judaism was resurrected. Indeed, there was a spiritual rebirth in Jerusalem.

The final vision begins with Daniel 12:5. Daniel is told that he cannot understand more than he already knows. What is he trying to understand? Why, it is the mystery of the Messianic Kingdom! We encountered it in the initial vision, and its details and timing have been on Daniel’s agenda ever since. The mysteries of the Kingdom “are shut up and sealed until the time of the end.” This should give us a clue about the time frame of this last vision. The events under discussion are specifically about “the time of the end.” The time of the end begins with the arrival of the Messiah and His Kingdom (GR9).

This helps us to make sense of the last phrase in 12:4, which leads into this vision. Daniel is told to “seal up the book, until the time of the end … and knowledge shall increase.” One of the more fantastic claims of rapturists is that this is a reference to the explosion in scientific knowledge in the twentieth century. But look at the context of these verses: Daniel is being told about a very specific knowledge, which will shed light on the meaning of his visions. This knowledge concerns the mystery of the Messiah’s Kingdom. That is the knowledge that will increase at the end, when the Messiah appears. Cars and computers are wonderful developments, but I doubt that Daniel had them in mind in this vision.

Daniel is told that none of the wicked will ever understand the mystery of the Messiah’s Kingdom. “None of the wicked shall understand; but those who are wise shall understand” (12:10). This was certainly true of the Jewish leaders during the public ministry of Christ, continuing right through the Passion and the Resurrection. Even after the Church was founded, the Jerusalem leaders never understood the true significance of what had happened in their own lifetime. They never comprehended the mystery of Christ’s Kingdom or what it meant for Judaism.

This continued to be true in 70 A.D. Even after the Roman army had breached two of the three walls protecting Jerusalem, the people stood on the wall and jeered at the Roman army. They shouted that “
this Temple would be preserved
by him that inhabited therein, whom they still had for their assistant in this war, and did therefore laugh at all his [Titus’s] threatenings, which would come to nothing, because the conclusion of the whole depended upon God only” (
WJ
, V, 11:2).

They did not understand that their conquest was an inevitable result of the earlier rejection of the Messiah and His spiritual Kingdom. Jesus Himself had prophesied these events. When He entered Jerusalem for the Passover, He “wept over it, saying … ‘The days shall come upon you, when your enemies will cast up a bank about you and surround you, and hem you in on every side, and dash you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you; because you did not know the time of your visitation’ ” (Luke 19:41–44). Throughout the entire covenantal transition of Daniel’s seventieth week, the wicked remained oblivious.

But there is a second group of people in this vision—namely, the “wise.” The mere mention of them must have given Daniel some hope. “Those who are wise shall understand” (12:10). They would understand what Daniel could not: the mystery of the Kingdom. Therefore, they would act on the advice of the King. Indeed, the Church historian Eusebius informs us that the wise of those seven decades
did
understand when the time came. They fled to Pella in response to Christ’s warning, recorded for us in the Olivet Discourse (
EH
, III, 5:4).

The wise will understand that, at a certain point in history, “the continual burnt offering” will cease, and “the abomination that makes desolate … [will be] set up” (12:11). These events are related to the “shattering of the power of the holy people” (12:7). When these events occur, the wise will understand the mystery of the Kingdom that Daniel’s visions have so illuminated. These two events would be the trigger that would enable the wise to understand what Daniel could not. (This interpretation of Daniel 12:10–11 ignores the Masoretic
silluk
inserted by the Jewish scholars into this passage. See Appendix
Two
.) Did these events occur in history at a juncture that would seem to fulfill this prophecy? If so, when?

In the summer of 66 A.D., Jerusalem halted the daily sacrifices for Caesar Nero. This action was largely responsible for starting the forty-two month war between the Jews and the Romans. This could be the meaning of the phrase “the continual burnt offering.”

This phrase might also refer to the regular, daily sacrifices that the priests of the Temple had always performed, even before the influence of Rome. These were halted “for want of men to offer it” just days before the overthrow of the city by the Romans. (
WJ
, VI, 2:1). Either (or both) of these fulfills the first half of this phrase, the cessation of the offering in the Temple.

What about the “abomination”? Unfortunately for the Jews of Jerusalem, any number of abominations occurred in Jerusalem and its Temple during the years surrounding the war. Most of them were perpetrated on the Temple by the outlaw Jewish Zealots who had taken over the Temple and proceeded to treat it like a secular fortress. Shortly after the Zealots gained power, they installed a high priest who made a mockery of the Law. Battles were continually waged, and blood was shed on holy ground. Ceremonially unclean men lived in the Temple. Temple supplies were used for unholy purposes. Any one of these outrages could qualify as the abomination that Daniel predicts.

Josephus records Ananus the high priest as saying, “Certainly it had been good for me to die before I had seen the house of God full of so many abominations, or these sacred places that ought not to be trodden on at random, filled with the feet of these blood-shedding villains.” Not long after uttering these words, this high priest was also systematically hunted down and murdered by the Zealots. Josephus tells us, “The death of Ananus was the beginning of the destruction of the city” (
WJ
, IV, 5:2).

But if we must choose a single event, the “abomination that makes desolate” most likely refers to the invasion of Judea by the Roman army. We will note later in the New Testament that this is also the understanding of Luke. Famine, disease, and death were the inevitable desolation left behind in the wake of any army of this magnitude. The Roman army came in 66 A.D. and then returned en masse between 67 and 70 A.D.

The Roman army marched behind the ensign of an unclean bird, the eagle. They were Gentiles who practiced idolatry. When the Temple fell to the Romans, they promptly worshiped the eagle, which led their troops in battle within the ruins of the Temple. They “brought their ensigns to the Temple, and set them over against its eastern gate; and there did they offer sacrifices to them” (
WJ
, VI, 6:1). Even modern Christians can appreciate the abomination that this must have been to the Jews.

Their actions certainly fulfilled the vision of Daniel. Bishop Eusebius wrote, “The abomination of desolation, proclaimed by the prophets, stood in the very Temple of God, so celebrated of old, the Temple which was now awaiting its total and final destruction by fire” (
EH
, III:5).

Within five years, a pagan Roman temple was erected on the Temple site in Jerusalem. Daniel was more right than even the Jews of 70 A.D. knew. “The shattering of the power of the holy people” that Daniel predicted had been accomplished. Biblical Judaism had been obliterated. It has never been resurrected.

By this understanding of Daniel, the signs of the Olivet Discourse are actually an enlargement upon this vision of Daniel. As we will see when we get to the New Testament, Jesus urged His disciples to flee Jerusalem at the emergence of certain signs. If these signs were heeded, they would be the salvation of His infant Church.

When that infant Church in exile then observed what happened to Jerusalem, at that point “those who are wise” understood completely. What did they understand? They understood the mystery of the Kingdom. Christ’s dominion would be worldwide, not merely Jewish. The Kingdom of Christ was no longer inextricably tied to the fate of Jerusalem’s Temple, because it was spiritual and ecclesiastical rather than physical and political. This interpretation dovetails precisely with the understanding of the earliest Christians. They believed that these prophecies of Daniel spoke primarily about the decades surrounding the first advent, and ending in 70 A.D. And they put feet to their belief by fleeing when the time was right.

Before we leave our last vision in Daniel, we must note that there are two new time periods introduced in it. In the first half of the vision is the original three and a half years, or 1,260 days. Then the vision introduces 1,290 days. As if that were not enough, the passage finally mentions 1,335 days. What are we to make of this extra thirty days, and then forty-five?

Rapturists find this passage a bit awkward. There are three periods mentioned. Because rapturists have already placed their presumptuous parenthesis of two thousand years before the vision begins, they contend that the three and a half years, or 1,260 days, refer to the last half of a still future seven-year Great Tribulation. (Strictly speaking, some rapturists would refer to only the last three and a half years of the tribulation as the Great Tribulation.)

The 1,290 days in this passage they understand to include an extra thirty days after the Great Tribulation ends. These thirty days will give Christ a month to judge the Gentiles who have survived the Great Tribulation. Rapturists claim that this thirty-day period starts with Christ’s second coming and ends when the judging is complete.

But the passage also mentions 1,335 days. Rapturists believe that these extra forty-five days begin when the judging of the Gentiles is completed. During this additional month and a half, the new thousand-year Messianic kingdom will be set up. Rapturists assert that Christ will need those forty-five days to establish and staff the various bureaucracies that will oversee His reign on a worldwide basis.

I am not making this up.

Remember, rapturists view Christ as an earthly potentate ruling from a throne in the Middle East during the thousand-year period following on the heels of the seven-year Great Tribulation and the second coming.

Of course, this is based entirely on conjecture. The best that can be said of their argument at this point is that at least these gaps (of thirty and forty-five days), which they place between the Great Tribulation and the Millennium, are mentioned in the Bible, whereas the major gap (the parenthesis of over two thousand years) between the sixty-ninth and seventieth week of Daniel 9 is not. But there is a better way to understand this passage.

The extra thirty days mentioned in this vision of the end refers to the additional time it took for the total conquest of the entire city, both lower and upper, after the Temple proper was torched. The Temple was defeated within the 1,260 days that Daniel predicted. But as with any real war, it takes some time to mop up the opposition. Josephus wrote that the Temple burned on the tenth day of the month
Av
, probably August 10, 70 A.D. (
WJ
, VI, 4:5) and wrote that complete control of the city did not occur until the eighth of
Elul
, about thirty days after the ninth or tenth of
Av
(
WJ
, VI, 10:1).