The Intended
Meaning of Apocalyptic Prophecy is Determined by
Valid Rules
Larry
Wilson
December 2007
Wake Up America Seminars
Introduction
There
are a thousand different interpretations on Bible
prophecy floating around today. Why? Prophetic
expositors arrive at different conclusions
because there are as many different methods of
interpretation as there are people. Methods of
interpretation is a catch-all phrase that
describes a controlling set of ideas or views
residing in a person’s head before he
actually begins to interpret prophecy. Methods of
interpretation include cherished religious
views, spiritual presuppositions, scholastic
assumptions, concepts about a role and authority
of the Bible, the authority of prophets external
to the Bible and church tradition. For example, a
Catholic scholar and a Baptist scholar will do
the same thing. Ironically, the Catholic scholar
and the Baptist scholar can study the same
passage of Scripture and arrive at very different
conclusions. How does this happen? The answer is
simple. No one approaches the study of Bible
prophecy without some kind of intellectual and
/or religious baggage. This baggage is called
“methods of interpretation,” rules of
interpretation,” or hermeneutics.
How Can the
Bible Tell us Things We Don’t Want to
Believe?
Knowingly
or unknowingly, every student of prophecy uses some
rules of interpretation. The problem is that invalid
rules will not produce valid conclusions. For
example, some people believe the following is a
valid rule: “A day in Bible prophecy always
equals a year.” If we accept this rule,
then the 1,000 years of Revelation 20 would be
translated as 365,242 literal years because a
year has 365.242 days in it. (365.242 days x 1000
years = 365,242 years)
A
valid rule cannot have an exception for if there
is an exception, who on Earth has the authority
to tell the rest of mankind, when a rule should
be applied or ignored? For reasons beyond the
scope of this article, I find the day/year rule
mentioned above to be invalid. Yes, there are
places in Daniel and Revelation where God
translates time according to the Jubilee
Calendar. In such cases, a day is translated as a
year (for example, the seventy weeks of Daniel 9
translate 490 years), but there are other places
in Daniel and Revelation where God measures time
without translation (for example, the 1000 years
in Revelation 20 and the 1,335 days in Daniel 12
are literal time periods) How can we tell when
God is translating time according to the Jubilee
Calendar and when He is not? The answer is quite
simple: A valid rule regarding the translation of
time will tell us.
Eschatology
today is largely “a nose of wax” which
various expositors manipulate for political,
religious or personal reasons. Millions of people
have been misled into believing things that have
no truth in them. In a nutshell, here’s the
problem: If a prophetic idea can be made to appear
reasonable, it can become believable. But,
history says that reasonableness does not
necessarily produce truth (even though truth is
reasonable). For thousands of years observers of
the Sun said the Earth stood still and the Sun
orbited Earth. “The reasonableness of this
position is plainly evident,” they said.
Then one day in the 16th century,
Copernicus came along and ruined the reasonable
idea by putting a few interesting facts on the
table and suddenly, two thousand years of “reasonable
evidence” was used to prove that Earth
traveled around the Sun.
Faulty
Interpretation Unavoidable until the Time of the
End
The
book of Daniel contains 533 sentences. It was
written about twenty-six centuries ago, but unlike
the other 65 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?
This means that God placed some information in
the book of Daniel that remains “top secret”
until the time of the end arrives. What is so
top-secret information that “pops out”
of Daniel at the time of the end? Before I answer
this question, consider the discovery of the
Rosetta Stone.
The
Rosetta Stone was accidentally unearthed in 1799
near Rosetta, Egypt, by some French soldiers. The
stone bore a single message written in two forms
of Egyptian script – demotic and
hieroglyphic. When archeologists examined this
second century B.C., stone, they were thrilled
because one rock unlocked a perplexing mystery.
Prior to 1799, a large number of clay tablets
bearing Egyptian hieroglyphics had been found,
but they could not be read because no one could
decipher the hieroglyphics. The Rosetta Stone
changed this. The demotic inscriptions enabled
Thomas Young (1773-1829) and J.F. Champollion
(1790-1832) to decipher the hieroglyphics of
ancient Egyptians and the rest is history.
In a
similar way, God embedded four secrets in the
book of Daniel. An angel told Daniel these
secrets would remain entombed until “the
time of the end.” (Daniel 12: 4,9) When the
time arrives for these secrets to be “unearthed,”
the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation will
become understandable – just as they read
because God wants everyone to understand what He
has to say to the final generation. The discovery
of these four secrets shatters centuries of
prophetic exposition because all interpretations
of Daniel and Revelation prior to the time of the
end are necessarily faulty and incomplete because
Daniel is not unsealed until the time of the end.
In other words, the book of Daniel was written
for the generation that would live “at the
time of the end.”
Three Levels
of Information
As the
reader might expect, God buried His secrets in
the book of Daniel very well. However, when God
wants something known, ordinary men and women can
discover the things that He has hidden. Through
the ages we find this discovery mechanism at
work: On or about the time of fulfillment,
elements of prophecy are properly understood. For
example, when it came time to understand the
timing of Christ’s birth, the wise men from
the East figured it out. (Matthew 2:2)
The
apostle Paul also noticed this phenomenon.
Consider his words: “surely you have
heard about the administration of God’s
grace that was given to me for you, that is, the
mystery made known to me by revelation, as I have
already written briefly. In reading this, then,
you will be able to understand my insight into
the mystery of Christ, which was not
made known to men in other generations as it has
now been revealed by the Spirit of God’s
holy apostles and prophets This
mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles
are heirs together with Israel, members together
of one body, and sharers together in the promise
in Christ Jesus.” (Ephesians 3:2-6)
What
did God hide in the book of Daniel? The answer to
this question requires a little explanation. The
book of Daniel offers three levels of
information. They are:
- Dramatic stories of faith
- Visions revealing God’s
plans
- Apocalyptic architecture
The
highest (or most evident) level of information in
the book of Daniel consists of dramatic stories
of faith in God. These stories were recorded for
the benefit of all generations. However, Earth’s
final generation will benefit most from these
stories because the fiery trials in the first
chapters of Daniel are mini-parallels of coming
events For example, in Daniel 3 Shadrach, Meshach
and Abednego faced mandatory worship of a golden image
that the king of Babylon constructed. In
Revelation 13:5, the inhabitants of the world
will face the mandatory worship of an image
that the king of modern Babylon will set up. These
stories and their outcomes were put in the book
of Daniel for the encouragement of all people,
especially those who will live at the end of
time.
A
second (and more difficult) level of information
in the book of Daniel concerns the meaning of the
visions. God gave Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel
visions of the future and we can be sure that
everything God said has either come to pass or
will come to pass. The good news that comes from
these visions is the knowledge that God has a
definite plan and timetable for this planet.
Because God’s people have understood (more
or less) these visions for hundreds of years, we
cannot say that the visions themselves were
sealed until “the time of the end.”
Something else was sealed up in the book of
Daniel was sealed up, something that uniquely
applies to those people who will live at the
end of the world. What is it?
Book Unsealed
The
third (and deepest) level of information embedded
within Daniel is the architecture of
apocalyptic prophecy. There are five
prophecies in Daniel and here’s the secret.
Each prophecy confirms to a consistent structure.
In other words, all five prophecies behave in
precisely the same way. After making this
discovery, the intended meaning of Daniel becomes
crystal clear! But wait! There’s a huge
bonus that goes with this discovery. God used the
same architecture in the book of Revelation that
He used in Daniel! In other words, once we
understand how the prophecies in Daniel
consistently behave, we know how the prophecies
in Revelation will behave. Daniel and Revelation
share the same unusual architecture!
Once a
consistent behavior is observed, that behavior
can be defined or quantified into a rule that is
never broken. These rules function much like the
combination code of a safe. When valid rules of
interpretation are applied to the prophecies in
Daniel and Revelation, a marvelous result occurs.
The prophecies will create a huge matrix and
every prophetic event will fit this matrix
without conflict. Even more, the prophecies will
make perfect sense just as they read!
Layers of interpretation and prophetic expositors
are not needed nor warranted. The Bible will
interpret itself!
When
the four rules in Daniel are applied to each
prophecy in Daniel and Revelation, a
comprehensive story will unfold that is
completely harmonious with everything the Bible
has to say about the ways of God. Furthermore,
all of the details in Daniel and Revelation are
in perfect harmony and synchrony with each other.
To visualize the matrix that the four rules
produce, think of a tall wedding cake with
seventeen layers! The larger pieces of the cake
are at the bottom of the stack and the smaller
pieces are on top. The “toothpicks”
that hold the seventeen layers together are
prophetic events that unite and align the
seventeen layers in Daniel and Revelation into
one grand story. The toothpicks are important
because two or more prophecies can describe the
same prophetic event! Because the same event is
described in two different ways – within two
different cake layers – a precise alignment
of all prophetic events is possible. (The wedding
cake in this illustration has seventeen layers
because there are seventeen prophecies (five in
Daniel and twelve in Revelation).
Private
Interpretation
Any
interpretation of prophecy that does not
conform to a published set of valid rules is
called a “private interpretation.” The
word “private” in this context does not
mean obscure. Millions of people believe and
endorse various interpretations that are “private”
in nature. Consider this: A private
interpretation is an interpretation that does not
have external means of validation. In other
words, a private interpretation cannot be tested
and validated by an impartial jury who have to
test the conclusions set forth by a given set of
rules. In other words, a private
interpretation requires a private interpreter. A
private interpreter is a person or persons who
use something other than valid rules to make
their interpretation appear reasonable and
valid. For most people, their interpreter is
within their church. Therefore, Baptist and
Catholic laymen cannot agree on the meaning of
prophecy because their authorities cannot agree.
This diversity emphasizes man’s need to
understand the architecture in Daniel. There
is one architecture in Daniel and Revelation;
there are four valid rules that produce one
prophetic truth. Looking for truth is a
joyful experience for those who love truth.
Caution: Even when we have valid rules of
interpretation, reaching an intended meaning is
not “a cake walk,” but eventually, the
intended meaning will appear! (It is one thing to
know the laws of algebra, but it is another thing
to correctly apply them in every case.)
The Value and
Importance of Rules
Most
Christians have not heard about nor considered
the necessity of having valid rules of
interpretation. I often hear from people who
claim they have studied the Bible prophecy for
many years and they are usually offended at my
response to some conclusions they are anxious to
defend.
My
standard comment is this: “Just send me your
rules, not your conclusions. I am well acquainted
with all the prophetic pieces in Daniel and
Revelation. I will do a simple test using rules
to see what the result may be.” This doesn’t
go over to well because most Christians do not
use valid methods (rules) of interpretation. Even
popular TV prophetic expositors do not realize
that they are merely supporting a private
interpretation when they promote what was given
to them. Here’s the point again: A private
interpretation requires a private interpreter.
Without the private interpreter sitting in the
driver’s seat, no one else could reach the
same conclusion.
Scientists
achieve advances in the study of genetics by
working at the cellular level. After years of
studying various cells within the human body,
scientists have been able to determine how
certain cells operate. In more and more cases,
they have been able to predict the behavior of
cells under controlled circumstances because they
now know something about the behaviors of amino
acids and proteins. Research scientists are
constantly looking for “consistent behaviors”
within their studies and once the behavior of a
specific amino acid or protein on a particular
cell is understood, drugs are compounded to
produce the desired results. Pharmaceutical
companies spend billions of dollars on this type
of painstaking research because they know once a
constant behavior is detected and controlled a
cure can be produced.
Consistent
Behavior
In a
similar way, the four rules in Daniel have been
distilled through a careful study and analysis of
Daniel’s prophecies. The visions within
Daniel behave in a predictable way and this
behavior allows us to decipher things about the
meaning of prophecy that we could not otherwise
know. For example, here is a consistent behavior
that occurs throughout the books of Daniel and
Revelation. Each prophecy has a beginning
point and an ending point in time, and the events
in each prophecy occur in the order in which they
are given. This rule may sound simple,
but it has profound ramifications.
Consider
the results of violating this self-evident
rule. If the events given within each prophecy of
Daniel do not occur in their given order, how
can the order of events be authoritatively
determined? This question brings up an even
greater question. Does the Bible speak for itself
or must it have an external interpreter? After
many years of study on this question, I conclude
the Bible stands alone. It speaks for itself and
the Bible is its own interpreter. The constant
and predictable architecture within Daniel’s
prophecies is the basis for Rule One. Putting
this rule in my words, the rule is: Each
apocalyptic prophecy has a beginning point and an
ending point in time and the events within each
prophecy must occur in the order they are given. Keep
in mind; I did not invent this rule. Rather, I am
expressing a self-evident behavior that recurs
without exception throughout the book of Daniel
(as well as Revelation).
The Four Rules
I hope
you will print this article and refer to it from
time to time because the following four rules
will be often discussed in this chat group. The
four rules embedded within the book of Daniel
until the time of the end are:
1.
Each apocalyptic prophecy has a beginning and
ending point in time and the events within each
prophecy must occur in the order they are given.
2.
A fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecy occurs when
all the specifications within that prophecy are
met. This includes the order of events outlined
in the prophecy.
3
Apocalyptic language can be literal, symbolic or
analogous. To reach the intended meaning of a
prophecy, the student must consider: (a) the
context, (b) the use of parallel language in the
Bible, and (c) relevant statements in the Bible
that define that symbol if an element is thought
to be symbolic.
4. God measures
apocalyptic time in two ways: (a) a day for a
year, and (b) as literal time. The presence or
absence of the Jubilee calendar determines how
God measures time.
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