Armageddon For Beginners - Dave Mckay (10 best books of all time .TXT) 📗

grammatical context of the sentence in which they appear. One of the areas where this most often happens is with numbers. People see a passage which refers, for example, to 1260 days, but because the period of time does not fit their personal theory, they will tell you that it really means 1260 years!

 

The Year 2000 theory was an example of this. The Bible says that time is nothing to God: "A day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day." (Psalm 90:4) We know God made the world about 6,000 years ago, in just six days, and then he rested on the seventh day. Neither of these two isolated truths is prophetic. They just say the obvious: that God can do more in one day (e.g. create human life) than we could do in a thousand years.

But Bible prophecy does say that Jesus will rule the world for 1,000 years after he returns. So people took the two non-prophetic statements and put them together to form a theory that God spent 6,000 years running the world, and in the year 2000, Jesus would return, so that God could have a 1,000-year rest. But of course the Bible never said that.

(2) Secular events. Ultimately, the proof of the pudding is in eating it. If Jesus had returned on January 1, 2000, then I would have had to back down on what I said before that date. Hindsight is much sharper than foresight, and it is easier to see where a prophecy clearly said something after the "something" actually happens. This reality robs the prophecy of some of its punch, but it can still show just how clever God is: He's able to tell us something at the same time that he hides it from us until he really wants us to see it. As we said earlier, it keeps us from using our knowledge to upset the flow of events.

Secular events are especially helpful as we get closer to the fulfilment of a prophecy. Certainly things that are happening in the world today are exciting when you compare them with what the Bible says about them. But beware when people start with the newspaper and then try to find some prophetic significance in every headline they read. There is always someone trying to tell you that the Bible predicted Monica Lewinsky, or that it said Diana was going to die in a car accident. Make sure the particular prophecy lines up with the other three parts of the puzzle before you put much faith in it relating to the particular secular event.

(3) Spiritual lessons. As we said earlier, God doesn't just do miracles to entertain us, and this includes Bible prophecies. Even his warnings of judgment are pretty few and far between. Most prophecies are actually trying to teach us something about the world in general; and the lessons from one prophecy to another are fairly consistent. Most of the prophecies of the Old Testament were about the coming of Jesus Christ. Most of the prophecies of the New Testament are about his return. But along with the return itself are important revelations about the futility of trusting any other system or organisation except God himself and his invisible kingdom of love and faith.

(4) Consistent use of code words. This rule may sound a bit strange. But because prophecies are so cleverly hidden from the understanding of most people, it takes a little work to find key words that help to line one prophecy up with another. They not only establish a connection between various passages, but they also give a hint as to what the spiritual lesson is behind them.

For example, most of the Old Testament prophecies about the Jewish Messiah did not use the term "Messiah". There were a number of other code words or phrases. In Daniel 7:13 it was the term "Son of Man". Although Jesus rarely referred to himself as the Messiah (or "Christ"), he repeatedly used the term Son of Man when referring to himself. To the unlearned mind he was saying nothing proud or boastful. After all, we are all sons or daughters of other human beings. He was not claiming divinity or kingship or even that he was the Messiah. This was consistent with what he taught about not over-rating ourselves, and about leaving it to others to praise us. (Luke 14:8-11) Hindsight has revealed the full significance of what Jesus was saying. "Son of man" was a code phrase that led back to Daniel's messianic reference to Christ returning in "the clouds of heaven."

Because of all these factors, we can't teach prophecy by just pointing to a verse that says, "The U.S. is going to be destroyed in the year 2023." We have to link up a lot of jig-saw pieces first, before we can say much with confidence; and even then the prophecy will be part of a bigger lesson that is being taught. When all the pieces start going together, then it can be quite exciting. But it takes a while before this begins to happen.

 

Appendix, Chapter 3

Jonah 3:4-4:1. Jonah began to enter the city a day's journey, and he cried and said, "Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" So the people of Nineveh believed God and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them… And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way, and God repented of the evil that he had said he would do to them. And he did it not.

But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry.

Luke 14:8-11. [Jesus said:] When you are bidden of anyone to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room, lest a more honourable man than you be bidden of him, and he that bade you and him come and say to you, "Give this man place", and you begin with shame to take the lowest room. But when you are bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room, that when he that bade you comes, he may say to you, "Friend, go up higher." Then you will have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with you. For whoever exalts himself shall be abased; and he that humbles himself shall be exalted.

Daniel 7:13-14. [Daniel said:] "I saw in the night visions, and behold, one like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days. They brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.

(Back to Table of Contents)

 

4. The Revelation

Most of the prophecies in the Bible that are about the End of the World come from the writings of the Hebrew prophet Daniel (More about him in Chapters 5-8.) and from The Revelation, a book written by a man named John. John was one of the first Twelve Apostles. Because of his beliefs, he was sent to live as an exile on an island, where he eventually died. But before he died, his "Revelation" was smuggled out and circulated amongst Christians all around that part of the world.

The Revelation has intrigued and baffled people for centuries. It is so full of symbols and allegories that most people just give up trying to figure it out, after making one or two attempts.

Two hints which could make your job easier: First, break it down into smaller pieces; and second, concentrate on the bigger picture. Smaller and bigger… Sounds contradictory, doesn't it? But if you'll read on, you'll see that it isn't.

There are some major themes and some major divisions in The Revelation. If you study them one by one, it won't matter if you don't understand every single word of the book. At least you'll have a broad overview in which to fit the details.

It helps to think of The Revelation as poetry or music, or even as a painting. Too much analysis can easily destroy the overall feeling that an artist is trying to communicate. Sometimes a work of art just needs to be "experienced" rather than analysed.

 

It may be reasonable to discuss the composition, choice of colours, and subject matter of a landscape painting, for example; but it may be pointless to question what the artist was trying to say by painting one blade of grass green and another one nearby yellow. An incredibly gifted artist (such as God himself) might actually have a message hidden in the yellow blade of grass as well; but with or without an understanding of such a fine detail, one should still be able to appreciate the masterpiece as a whole. The same is true when it comes to appreciating the overall message of The Revelation.

The Revelation is divided into 22 chapters. The first three contain short letters that God told John to write to seven different churches scattered around Asia Minor. The last three chapters describe things as they will be after Jesus Christ returns to earth. Both of these sections are inspiring and informative, and well worth reading. However, you could make your target study smaller by setting these six chapters aside after you have read them once.

Some people argue that the first three chapters have secret prophetic messages hidden in them; but if they do, they would be on a par with the secret meanings in blades of grass in a painting. It would be far better to start by focusing on material that is clearly prophetic, and get to the more esoteric stuff later if you have the time and the inclination.

The last three chapters of The Revelation have to do with things that are still a long way off. They include descriptions of life in the new world that Christ will build for us, which are quite inspiring. But they contain other details which take more effort to understand. Because Christ himself is supposed to be here by the time they start to be fulfilled, we can probably expect him to help us understand anything we need to know about them when the time comes. That leaves us with chapters 4-19 of The Revelation. Now let us break them down into three major divisions.

Chapters 4-7 are a dramatic introduction to the overall theme of The Revelation. Chapters 8-13 are about the time of "Great Trouble" just before Jesus returns. And chapters 14-19 deal with God's punishment of the whole earth after he has taken his people out of the way. This time of punishment climaxes with the famous Battle of Armageddon which so many people think of when they talk of the end of the world.

Before we start to look at these various chapter divisions, however, we must remind people once again of something that most of you don't want to hear.

The opening sentence of The Revelation says that it is a revelation to God's "servants". Think about it. Servants are people who are working for God… right now. It's not a revelation to those drawn to read the book out of idle curiosity, and it's not a revelation to people who want to use it to prove their church is best. Admittedly, it's all there in black and white for anyone to read; and anyone can be amazed by much of what it says; but in the end, you're not going to like what it says unless you're willing to become a "servant of God", and even then there are going to be aspects of it which are not going to be easy to swallow.

If there is anything that today's world is not interested in, it is being "servants" of God. Even the major "Christian" denominations have largely given up on teaching people to serve God; it's just too unpopular. People are taught, instead, to serve their families, to serve their country, to serve their employers, or to serve their church; but not to serve God. They work on positive thinking, getting along with others, arts and crafts, dance classes and other forms of self-improvement, but no serious attempts are made to even find out what God wants us to do, much less try to obey it. Until that happens, the message of The Revelation is only going to make you angry, or go over your head.

(Back to Table of Contents)

 

5. The Lamb and the Beast

We have just noted that the Revelation is not a revelation to anyone apart from God's servants. The reason for this is because it's not a revelation of anything except Jesus Christ. People often call the book "Revelations" (plural), as though it's a box of goodies that one can pick and choose from. Even the people who put together the various books of the Bible into the one volume had trouble with naming this one. They called it "The Revelation of St. John the Divine". But that's not