What Is Next?
(Part 1)
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Can
the Bible Tell Us things We
Don’t Want to Believe?
Experts widely
disagree on Bible prophecy because
knowingly or unknowingly, every
expert uses a set of rules to
support prophetic conclusions. Of
course, every expert believes his
conclusions are true because they are
in harmony with his baggage (or
rules). The problem, or course, is
that false rules cannot provide valid
conclusions. A rule is a statement
that is always true. For example, 2 +
2 equals 4 because the law of
subtraction says that 4 – 2 = 2.
When it comes to Bible prophecy, a
rule cannot have an exception, for if
it does, no one has the authority to
speak for God and tell humanity when
the rule should be applied or
ignored. To illustrate this matter,
consider the following rule: “A
day in Bible prophecy always
equals a year.” If we can accept
this rule to be true (that is, having
no exception), the 1,000 years in
Revelation 20 have to be translated
as 365,242 years. (365.242 days per
solar year x 1,000 years = 365,242
years)
For reasons that will
be presented next month, the day/year
rule described above is faulty. There
are time periods in Daniel and
Revelation where a day should be
translated as a year (for example,
the seventy weeks of Daniel 9 are
translated into 490 years), but there
are other time periods where
translation is not permitted. For
example, the 42 months in Revelation
13 and the 1,335 days in Daniel 12
are literal time periods. Because
some time periods in prophecy are
translated a day for a year and
others are not, a valid rule is
required to tell us when time periods
should be translated and when they
should not. Here is a critical point:
If we use a rule that requires us to
translate every time period in Daniel
and Revelation into a day for a year,
the Bible will be put in a position
of internal conflict. The Bible will
not be able to speak for itself
because the chronological order given
in Daniel and Revelation will be
broken! (I will demonstrate this
point in next month’s
newsletter.)
Today, millions of
Christians have embraced prophetic
concepts that have no truth in them.
A prophetic concept can appear to be
true – if flawed rules, that is,
certain presuppositions are used. For
example, many Christians believe that
the role of modern day Israel is
prophetically important during the
end of the world. They also believe
that a pre-tribulation rapture is
imminent, but the underlying
presuppositions that hold these ideas
together are faulty. The New Covenant
teaches that the Israel of God is not
biological! Everyone in Christ is now
the heir of Abraham. (Galatians
3:28,29)
Logic and
reasonableness do not alone ensure
validity. For thousands of years,
people believed Earth stood still and
the Sun traveled in orbit around
Earth. In fact, everyone could
plainly see that the Sun traveled
across the sky! Then, along came an
obscure mathematician who said the
Sun stood still. Even worse, Copernicus
proved that the Sun was not
moving and he was severely punished
for speaking out against the
traditions of the elders and telling
the truth. History demonstrates that
advocates of truth are frequently
punished. (Wasn’t Jesus
crucified for speaking the truth?)
Nevertheless, for the honest in
heart, a great joy occurs when
greater truth is found! An ongoing
discovery of greater truth is the
process that enables the Bible to
tell us things that we do not want to
believe, but unfortunately, are quick
to discredit the truth (which is
divisive). Perhaps the greatest
problem for human beings is that we
cannot know what our response to
truth will be until greater truth
arrives and it challenges our sacred
traditions.
Faulty
Interpretations until Daniel Is
Unsealed
The book of Daniel
contains 533 sentences. It was
written about twenty-six centuries
ago, but unlike the other sixty-five
books in the Bible, the book of
Daniel was sealed up “until the
time of the end.” The angel
Gabriel said to Daniel, “…Go
your way, Daniel, because the words
are closed up and sealed until the
time of the end.” (Daniel
12:9) What does “closed up and
sealed until the time of the
end,” mean? It means that God
hid something in the book of Daniel
that would remain “top
secret” until the time of the
end arrived. I am convinced that the
book of Daniel has been unsealed and
the time of the end has arrived for
the following reasons:
The secret information
that God encoded into the book of
Daniel is something like the
“Rosetta Stone.” The
Rosetta Stone was accidentally
discovered and unearthed in 1799 near
Rosetta, Egypt, by French soldiers.
The marvelous thing about this buried
rock is that it bears a message
written during the second century
B.C. in two forms of Egyptian script
– demotic and hieroglyphics.
When archeologists examined the rock,
they were thrilled because the
inscriptions would help solve a very
perplexing mystery. Prior to 1799,
archeologists could not read the clay
tablets bearing Egyptian
hieroglyphics because no one could
decipher the language. When the
Rosetta Stone was discovered and
translated, the demotic inscriptions
on the stone enabled Thomas Young
(1773-1829) and J.F. Champollion
(1790-1832) to decipher the
hieroglyphics of the ancient
Egyptians.
In a similar way, God
buried a set of four self-evident
rules in the book of Daniel 2,600
years ago. By God’s grace, I
accidentally stumbled into this
buried treasure. (Of course, the
passage or time will prove or
disapprove the validity of my claim.)
Four rules of interpretation have
shattered centuries of prophetic
exposition and tradition, because of
definition; all prophetic
interpretations are faulty and
incomplete until the book of Daniel
is unsealed. These four
rules cover chronology, fulfillment,
language and God’s use of time.
God put these things in the book of
Daniel to dethrone our traditions
because greater truth is
God’s gift to the honest in
heart. Notice how this works: God
separates people who hold to
traditions from people who love truth
by sending them greater truth on the
Earth. When greater truth comes
along, the honest in heart rejoice to
see it while the traditions of the
elders will rise up and punish those
who embrace it. Yes, the parable of
the math teacher is silly, but the
moral of the story is painfully true.
I am out of space for
now, but in next month’s
conclusion, I will discuss the four
rules that unlock the book of Daniel
and by extension, the book of
Revelation.
Larry Wilson
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