Now that we have looked at principles for interpreting biblical prophecy, specifically apocalyptic literature, it is time to turn to the relevant passages.

We know that the early Church spent time in the Bible to discover more about the prophecies of Jesus Christ. The Bible they explored was the Old Testament, including the apocraphyl, or deuterocanonical, books. If you expected to jump right into The Apocalypse without gaining an appreciation for the Bible that the writers of the New Testament studied, you are reading the wrong book.

Although some newcomers to the movement try to explain their belief in the rapture by turning to St. Paul’s epistles or to The Apocalypse, no one who is thoroughly immersed in this theology would start anywhere but in the Old Testament book of Daniel. That is where Darby allegedly began. The book of Daniel lays the foundation for the entire time framework of rapturist theology.

We will be quite thorough in our treatment of Daniel, and it will pay off when we approach The Apocalypse. Many people are mystified by the symbolism of St. John’s vision, but all of biblical prophecy, including The Apocalypse, will come alive if we spend sufficient time in Daniel.

Daniel understood the value of time; it is the overriding concern throughout his visions. Daniel refers to time in one way or another on about a hundred occasions in his twelve chapters! As we will see, Daniel lays out a precise time line for God’s plan of salvation. He predicts the rebuilding of the Temple and the coming of the Messiah, and includes some specific details surrounding those two pivotal events.

In their reading of Daniel, rapturists make a preposterously large time miscalculation. Right in the middle of Daniel’s time line, they insert a two-thousand-year interruption. They call it a “parenthesis”: the parenthetical “Church age.” I call it the “presumptuous parenthesis” because it is an egregious distortion of Daniel’s timing—yet time is the essence of Daniel’s book. This is a presumptuous way to handle God’s revelation.

It is important to understand what rapturists are doing here. Daniel asks God for a time line of the events leading up to the Messiah’s coming Kingdom, and God reveals it to him. The length of that time line is approximately six hundred years. But to make their system work, rapturists divide that six hundred years into two parts and insert an additional two thousand years in between! In the rapturists’ view, God “put one over on Daniel” by claiming to give him a time line, only to have it be off by more than four hundred percent!

Why do rapturists do this? For one simple reason, I believe. They are unwilling to entertain the notion that perhaps Christ founded the Kingdom of God during His first advent. They hold to the firm conviction that the Messianic Kingdom is still in the future, that it will center on ethnic Israel, and—most important—that it is entirely distinct from the Church Christ founded.

Why would rapturists deny the Kingdom of God as a present reality, one awaiting its fullness at the second coming? I believe that on a historical level, Darby—like many other religious innovators in the nineteenth century—was trying to gather a group of followers. Since he was living in a predominantly Christian country, admitting that the Kingdom of God was already present within the world would not jolt people into abandoning their former places of worship to follow him. Admitting the kingdom was already in existence would have scuttled Darby’s entire ministry in its infancy.

Furthermore, in the present day, an admission that Christ did set up a kingdom in His first advent is very dangerous to Protestantism. If the Kingdom has been established, the logical response is to look for it. The only Church that can make a credible claim to be the Kingdom of Christ on earth is the Catholic Church. Thus, by denying the present existence of God’s Kingdom, the rapturist builds a firewall against Catholicism in his congregation’s soul. In this I speak from personal experience.

Why is the rapturists’ parenthesis two thousand years? For the same reason we observed earlier in our short history: a sense of immediacy produces converts to their movement.

Based on a misreading of the Olivet Discourse, they would claim that we are in “the generation of the fig tree,” meaning that there remains only forty to seventy years before the rapture occurs. Originally the pivotal event that marked the beginning of the generation was identified as the 1948 founding of the modern state of Israel. Now people are proposing that maybe 1967 (the year Jerusalem was reunified) or even 1993 (the year of the Peace Accords) is the real starting point for the final generation. When we pass any critical milestones (just as we did in 1988, which is 1948 plus forty years), we will see rapturists use the rolling end of the world to choose a new date even further in the future. But that new date will still require that the present generation is the final one.

I have no doubt that, in 2200 A.D., they will be inserting a 2,200-year gap into Daniel’s visions so that Daniel’s last week will still be imminent. That is the purpose of the presumptuous parenthesis. It pushes the establishment of God’s Kingdom into the future—our immediate future.

But this gap is not in the text.

In fact, this gap does great violence to the text, to the fundamental message of the vision—all for the purpose of protecting rapturists from the idea that the Catholic Church might have to be examined as a possible candidate for the present-day Kingdom of Heaven.

Throughout this book are charts designed to illuminate both the rapturist and Catholic time lines. Included as reference points are accepted historical events as well.

In Daniel, we find out the “when” of God’s plan for salvation history. We must never forget that Daniel’s questions are fundamentally about time. St. Jerome agrees: “None of the prophets has so clearly spoken concerning Christ as has this prophet Daniel.… He set forth the very time at which He would come … stated the actual number of years involved, and announced beforehand the clearest signs” (CID, prologue).

By the end of our study of Daniel, we will know the overall timing of God’s entire plan of salvation. We will discover which gentile world empire will be in power when God sets up His Kingdom here on earth. Daniel will even supply details concerning the reigning Caesar, the rise and fall of Jerusalem and its Temple, the Passion of the Messiah, and the reaction of good and evil people to these events.

The rapturist desperately needs Daniel to substantiate his claim that there is still a seven-year Great Tribulation awaiting the world. There is nowhere else in the Bible he can turn to support this belief. In Unger’s Bible Handbook (published by Moody Press, a bastion of rapturist theology) we read in its comments on Daniel that this “book is the key to all biblical prophecy. Apart from the great eschatological disclosures of this book, the entire prophetic portions of the Word of God must remain sealed. Jesus’ great Olivet Discourse, as well as 2 Thess. 2 and the entire book of the Revelation, can be unlocked only through an understanding of the prophecies of Daniel.”

The rapturist absolutely must be able to prove that his interpretation of Daniel’s time line is the only viable view. If he fails, so does the time line for his entire system, and the whole rapturist house of cards collapses. If there is no future seven-year Great Tribulation, there is no reason for a secret rapture, nor any need for rebuilding the Temple. So we will begin our investigation in Daniel. Timing is everything.

Because this is not a thorough commentary on any of the books we are examining, I will not deal comprehensively with the date of authorship, nor with the identity of the human author. I will simply state my relevant conclusions.

A discussion of the authorship and dating of Daniel can make it seem as if there’s absolutely no common ground among modernists, rapturists, and Catholics. But there is one important, often-overlooked point on which all scholars agree: the author of Daniel, whoever he was, specifically intended us to read the book as if it were written by the prophet Daniel during the Babylonian exile in the sixth century B.C.

The modernist would claim that the book was written, or more likely assembled from different oral traditions, around the time of the second century B.C. But he would still hold that the author intended us to think otherwise. I do not agree with the modernist’s dating, although I can fully appreciate the weight of his arguments. The rapturist would unwaveringly assert that Daniel wrote all of Daniel in the sixth century B.C. The loyal Catholic might question the date of authorship for the three deuterocanonical segments of Daniel, but would otherwise agree in dating the book in the sixth century B.C. Again, all three understand Daniel as a book intended to be read as a sixth-century document.

I will refer to the author of this book as Daniel, the sixth-century Jewish prophet in Babylon. That is what the author intended, and I will honor his intention.

Daniel’s theme can be summed up as “The mystery of Messiah’s Kingdom revealed: proof that Christ is coming.” The book of Daniel was written to encourage God’s people when they were being severely persecuted. They had been defeated and dispersed by the Babylonians. Daniel wants God to bless Jerusalem again and witness God’s judgment as it falls on Jerusalem’s enemies. Even his name means “God is my judge.”

Some modernists minimize the suffering of the Jewish people under the Babylonian exile, and so try to claim that the message of Daniel applies better to the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes. This is simply not true. The Babylonians almost succeeded in obliterating Judaism from the earth, and only the grace of God working through Cyrus the Mede prevented it.

The broad-stroke outline of Daniel is as follows.

When will the Kingdom of the Messiah come? That is the question that Daniel’s initial vision answers. This vision lays the framework for the entire book. All the future visions in Daniel revisit its subject and elaborate on this foundation.

While serving his new king, Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel developed a widespread reputation for his ability to interpret dreams. He firmly established his credentials by interpreting a dream for Nebuchadnezzar even though the king refused to divulge the contents of the dream itself! The other wise men exclaimed that this was a “mystery” that only God could reveal. The word mystery is mentioned eight times in this chapter. Eight is the number of Christ. Right from the beginning, we can be sure that the “mystery” to be revealed concerns the Messianic Kingdom (GR2).

The king’s dream involved a huge statue with four sections. “The head of this image was of fine gold, its breast and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay” (2:32–33). Daniel told the king that each part of the statue represented a world empire. Looking backward, it is easy to understand that the gold head represents Babylon, the silver represents Medo-Persia, the bronze stands for Greece, and the iron represents Rome. That has been the understanding of most of the Church since before the time of St. Jerome’s commentary on Daniel (CID).

The passage tells us that the iron and clay feet symbolize the strength, yet brittleness, of the fourth kingdom. “There shall be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron.… It shall break and crush all.… And as you saw the feet and toes partly of potter’s clay and partly of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom.… As you saw the iron mixed with miry clay, so they will mix with one another … but they will not hold together” (2:40–43). St. Jerome, who lived and wrote during the time of the Roman Empire, wrote, “Just as there was at the first nothing stronger and hardier than the Roman realm, so also in these last days, there is nothing more feeble, since we require the assistance of barbarian tribes” (CID).

Apart from its accuracy, the startling aspect of this dream is its conclusion. During the fourth empire, “A stone was cut out by no human hand, and it smote the image on its feet … so that not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth” (2:34–35). Daniel interprets this to mean that while the fourth kingdom is still in existence, “the God of Heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed.… It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever” (2:44).

There you have it. During the fourth kingdom, the Messianic Kingdom will be established. The uncut stone symbolizes Christ at His first advent. His reign established through His Passion supersedes all the kingdoms of men. From this point in history, God’s Kingdom is predicted to endure forever.

Christians have historically believed that the stone which grows into a mountain is Christ and His Kingdom. (Some modernists view the stone as a symbol of the Maccabees, while the Jews apply it to themselves.) Rapturists agree that the stone is Christ, but there is dissent from the majority of Christians over the advent to which this vision refers. Rapturists believe that this stone does not arrive until Christ’s second advent. They cannot agree that the eternal Kingdom of Christ was set up at the first advent without being led to the Church Christ established at that advent. So they deny that any kingdom was set up at the first advent of Christ. They believe that the Kingdom of Christ was rejected by the Jewish leaders at the first advent, and so it will have to wait for the second coming to be established.

That is the reason they insert the presumptuous parenthesis. To get the timing of the kingdoms correct, they must split the final (iron) kingdom into two parts (iron legs versus iron-and-clay feet). Then, in between these two parts of the same kingdom, they insert a delay of at least two thousand years and ignore all of that history! They believe that a resurrected Roman Empire is still in our future (many rapturists point to the European Union). They are also forced to conclude that the stone that shall stand forever (Christ) has not arrived on the scene yet!

Rapturists split the Roman Empire into two parts in spite of what the text itself actually teaches. Daniel is clear in his interpretation of the dream that these two parts are one and the same kingdom. “There shall be a fourth kingdom.… It shall be a divided kingdom” (2:40–41). They reason that, if two kingdoms happen to be in the same geographical area, they can be considered, for prophetic purposes, one and the same—even if they are separated by centuries. This stretches logic to the breaking point.

Further, this twisting of Daniel distorts the entire message of the vision. Remember, time is of paramount importance in Daniel. The events he describes will take about six hundred years to unfold. The rapturists’ time gap in effect distorts God’s revelation.

In contrast to this rather forced interpretation, the Catholic is free to understand the passage for what it seems intended to convey. The mystery of the Messiah’s Kingdom is the focus of this vision. The Messiah and His Kingdom were foretold to be coming during the fourth kingdom of the vision, when Rome ruled over Jerusalem. During that time, Christ would set up His Kingdom, which would grow to encompass the entire world and last forever.

This dovetails with the teaching of Jesus. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches” (Matt. 13:31–32).

We can confidently assert that in the initial statue vision, Daniel has given us the timing for the inauguration of the Kingdom of Heaven. The Catholic has no need to insert two thousand extra years between verses 40 and 41. Christ did set up God’s Kingdom on His first advent during the fourth kingdom, the ancient Roman Empire.

Daniel now interrupts the flow of visions to explore important events in the lives of three kings that Daniel served in Babylon: Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, and Darius. We will look at only one of the events, known as “Belshazzar’s folly,” from which we will be able to learn precisely how God “comes in judgment.” That will be very important when we start to examine the New Testament.

The events of Belshazzar’s folly occurred in Babylon. King Belshazzar precipitated God’s judgment by using the holy vessels taken from Jerusalem’s Temple for profane uses. This revealed a pride, a penchant for idolatry, and a disregard for Yahweh that resulted in God’s judgment. As a result, we get a behind-the-scenes view of the fall of the Babylonian Empire to the Medo-Persians.

When the king used God’s holy vessels for an unworthy purpose, “the fingers of a man’s hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace.… And the king saw the hand as it wrote” (5:5). Daniel interprets the handwriting for Belshazzar. “This is the interpretation.… God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end” (5:26). Belshazzar was specifically told that God was judging him and his kingdom because he did not honor God (5:23).

But it is important to note that, in this act of judgment, God never actually met with Belshazzar. He never appeared physically in Babylon to judge the king. God was in His Heaven, and any casual observer of the events surrounding the fall of Babylon would have seen Cyrus conquering Babylon with a Persian army. Cyrus the Persian and Darius the Mede were not even believers in Yahweh. Nevertheless they were the appointed instruments of God’s judgment on Babylon.

The essential point is that God used a pagan army to execute His “coming in judgment” on a city. Only those who were aware of Daniel’s prophecy would have seen God’s justice being meted out in the victory of Cyrus’s army. Anyone else might just have observed the defeat of a great city by an immense army.

We will see a similar scenario when God’s judgment falls on another, newer Babylon in the New Testament. God’s prophet, in this case the Messiah Himself, predicted that judgment. Throughout the biblical record, God visits judgment upon political entities through other political entities. When predicted by God’s prophet, only a fool would doubt that it is indeed God “coming in judgment” (GR6).

In Section I, there was only one vision (of a statue). It spoke of the mystery of the Messianic Kingdom revealed. This third section of Daniel contains five visions: the Battle Strategy of the Beast; the Battle Strategy of the Goat and Ram; the Battle Strategy of God’s People; the Great Battle; and From Here to Eternity. These do not all directly impinge on our investigation of the rapture, so we will not examine all of them in detail. We will examine the first, third, and fifth, which in our outline we will designate III:A (The Battle Strategy of the Beast), III:C (The Battle Strategy of God’s People), and III:E (From Here to Eternity).

Rapturists claim that at least a part of all of these visions are still future, but that is due to an unwillingness to accept the clear teaching of Daniel that the Kingdom was established during the ancient Roman empire. They insert their two-thousand-year parenthesis into the first vision and proceed as though apocalyptic visions always follow a chronological order. We can easily see that this is not the case even here in Daniel if we notice that Chapter 7 of Daniel occurred several years before Chapter 6 (GR8).

This vision will answer the question “What will be the response of the earthly kingdom to the stone that pulverized the statue? Will it fight back?” We will encounter the same four kingdoms as in the vision of the statue. This time, however, these four kingdoms are portrayed as vicious beasts.

That should give us a hint. Will God’s Kingdom win an instantaneous victory over the kingdoms of this earth? Probably not, as vicious beasts tend to fight for survival. Will there be any casualties among Christ’s faithful subjects? Perhaps, as beasts kill to protect their interests. This might be dubbed the “Empire Strikes Back” vision. The statue in the initial vision is not going to take its own destruction lying down.

The four beasts are portrayed in detail: “The first was like a lion and had eagles’ wings.… Another beast, a second one, like a bear … had three ribs in its mouth.… Another, like a leopard with four wings of a bird on its back; and the beast had four heads.… And behold, a fourth beast, terrible and dreadful and exceedingly strong; and it had great iron teeth; it devoured and broke in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet … and it had ten horns” (7:4–7).

St. Jerome, the Church’s greatest early Scripture scholar, stated that the lion represents Babylon, “on account of its brutality and cruelty.” The bear symbolizes Medo-Persia. The three bones stand for the three kingdoms that were subsumed within the Persian: “the Babylonians, the Medes, and the Persians.” The leopard with wings is a symbol of Macedonia. Alexander the Great was known for the incredible speed with which he could move his army and conquer territory (CID).

The fourth, terrible beast represents Rome. Its iron teeth remind us of the iron legs and feet of the statue vision. We find ten horns on this beast, which are taken by many commentators as a reference to the ten provinces that made up the Roman Empire. The vast diversity within these ten provinces of the Roman Empire hints at why this last empire might be both strong as iron yet brittle as clay (TCA, V, 210, 32).

Just as in the statue vision, the four beasts (earthly kingdoms) are supplanted by “an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away” (7:14). But while the statue implies that these kingdoms will remain passive as the stone destroys them, the beasts are able to fight. This vision supplies the details of the beasts’ battle strategy. They will ultimately lose, but have no intention of going into the night softly.

Jewish scholars had a tradition that the transition into the Messianic Kingdom would take about forty years to unfold (ET, 356). We will learn that this prediction was amazingly accurate. Christ’s Kingdom will not enjoy an instantaneous victory on a worldwide scale. Instead, we read that a new enemy, “another horn, a little one” will arise (7:8).

Modernists try to understand this reference to a “little” horn as a symbol of Antiochus, because another little horn, mentioned in a later vision, does refer to Antiochus, who reigned during the third kingdom, about two centuries before Christ. But the details of that vision are different. The little horn we are examining points to Caesar Nero (GR3). We must be careful not to mix these prophecies. They are not arranged chronologically (GR8).

The Jews of Jesus’ day made the same mistake that modernists do today. The Jewish scholars assumed that all these visions were speaking of one event, when Antiochus desecrated the Temple just before the rise of Judas Maccabeus. A couple of the visions refer to a coming “abomination.” It is a relatively common word in the Law of Moses, but the Jews assumed it referred to the same event every time in Daniel. They actually had some biblical basis for this. The prophet Joel had promised them that God’s “people shall never again be put to shame” (2:26–27).

But Jesus specifically disagreed with the prevailing Jewish interpretation of Daniel and Joel. (In doing so, He also argues against modernists.) Jesus said, “So when you see the desolating sacrilege spoken of by the prophet Daniel standing in the holy place … flee to the mountains” (Matt. 24:15). Jesus claims the prophecies of Daniel for Himself and the times of His Church. He prophesied to His own generation that they would see yet another abomination of Daniel, that of 70 A.D. We will examine this New Testament text closely when we reach the Olivet Discourse. Actually, the abomination of Antiochus was a historical prophecy of the events of Jesus’ generation, culminating in 70 A.D. (GR3).

So we see that, although similar, the various visions of Daniel describe events that occurred in completely different centuries. In Section III, visions B and D point to Antiochus. We are examining visions A, C, and E, which point to the Romans.

The prophecy of Joel apparently applies to those people who chose to be faithful to God’s message on the day of Pentecost. It is no accident that the very next two verses after the promise of Joel were applied to the events of Pentecost by the apostle Peter (Joel 2:28–29). God’s new “people shall never again be put to shame.” Of course, all of these passages may very well prefigure events surrounding the final battle between good and evil (GR3).

So if not Antiochus, who was this little horn? Nero ruled Rome from 54 to 68 A.D., and the details of the vision fit him perfectly.

The little horn “had a mouth that spoke great things,” and “shall speak words against the Most High” (7:20, 25). Nero blasphemed against God by aggressively enforcing emperor worship.

The little horn is accused of attempting “to change the times and the law” (7:25). This was an attack on the very essence of biblical Judaism: the Law and the Prophets. Nero’s disdain for the Law of Moses has been well-documented. And of course, the Law forbade the worship of the emperor.

Even the description of the small horn uprooting three others can be found in the career of Nero. Daniel writes, “There came up among them another horn, a little one, before which three of the first horns were plucked up by the roots” (7:8). Later Daniel learns that the three uprooted horns were of royal lineage. “He shall be different from the former ones and shall put down three kings” (7:24). The Hebrew word used here for kings is melek. The most common translation is “king,” but it also can be translated as “royal” (Gen. 49:20; 1 Kings 10:13; Dan. 6:7).

Nero’s life fits this description like a glove. His mother, Agrippina, married the emperor Claudius shortly after Nero was born. At a young age, Nero married his stepsister, Octavia, daughter of Claudius. Agrippina persuaded Claudius to favor this new son-in-law, Nero, as his successor over his own blood son, Britannicus. After becoming emperor, Nero murdered all three of these powerful relatives, whom he saw as rivals. These murders fulfill the vision of the three royal horns that “were plucked up by the roots” (7:8).

Daniel’s vision even accurately predicts the death of Nero, who reigned until 68 A.D. During that year, the army, and finally even the Praetorian Guard, rose in rebellion against him. He fled, and when he eventually committed suicide, the dynasty that began with Caesar Augustus died with him. General Vespasian, a man outside of Nero’s line, became the next emperor (after a devastating interregnum that witnessed three would-be emperors futilely battling for the throne). Vespasian was not even an aristocrat by birth. Nero and the imperial dynasty from which he came never rose to power in Rome again. “His dominion shall be taken away, to be consumed and destroyed to the end” (7:26).

Daniel’s symbolic use of the horns alternates between being a symbol of the ten provinces of the empire and being a symbol of specific people. This type of dualistic imagery in apocalyptic imagery is quite common (GR4).

Daniel’s vision continues with more details concerning the battle strategy of the beasts. “This horn made war with the saints, and prevailed over them” (7:21). The leader of the fourth kingdom, Rome, will persecute God’s people.

This is the first reference we have to what we will later label the Great Tribulation. This fierce and sustained trial of the Church started when the little horn, Nero, needed a scapegoat for the fire that ravaged the city of Rome. This state-sponsored persecution continued for about three years, until Nero’s attention was diverted by the Jewish-Roman War. Nero was the first in a succession of ten Caesars who persecuted the Church with varying intensity (TBR, 37).

Amazingly, we are even told the length of time during which the little horn will wage war against “the law.” It will be “for a time, two times, and half a time” (7:25). These times are meant to be added together: one year, plus two years, plus half a year. This is an ancient way of saying three and a half years.

That coincides precisely with events in the first century. Jewish Zealots burned the Roman ruler’s palace, slaughtered the garrison of Roman soldiers, killed the high priest Ananias and burned his palace, and put an end to the morning and evening sacrifices for Caesar in the Temple. In response, the Roman general Cestius marched on Jerusalem and burned much of the city. Yet his expedition against Jerusalem was a disaster for Rome, and he lost six thousand soldiers in his retreat.

Caesar Nero was outraged and declared war against Jerusalem in February of 67 A.D. General Vespasian was dispatched at the head of a Roman army. This was the beginning of the Jewish-Roman War. The “little horn” who had been making “war with the saints,” even to the point of wearing “out the saints of the Most High,” now turned his wrath on “the law” that forbade worship of him (7:21, 25). That war upon “the times and the law” lasted three and a half years.

By April of 70 A.D., the son of Vespasian, General Titus, had tightened the noose of the final siege of Jerusalem. The Roman army had even come from the north, just as Ezekiel 38 and 39 had predicted.

In August of 70 A.D., the Temple of Jerusalem fell before the Roman army of Titus. The Temple was torched and systematically dismantled, piece by piece. This destruction of the Temple was the end of biblical Judaism, as even rabbis of today will attest (BET, 154). Their exclusive power to share God with the nations was gone forever with the destruction of the Temple (Isa. 2:2–5, 56).

Just as Daniel had predicted, Nero declared war in February of 67 A.D., and Jerusalem’s Temple fell in August of 70 A.D. Count the months. The Jewish-Roman War lasted forty-two months, precisely three and a half years. Jerusalem was to “be given into his hand for a time, two times, and half a time.”

We can understand the modernist’s desire to date the writing of this vision late and then apply this prophecy to Antiochus! (But remember GR1.) Daniel has been given an amazing amount of detail concerning the “how” of the establishment of God’s kingdom here on earth. We knew from the first statue vision that it would occur during the time of the Roman Empire. Now we know that he predicted some of the specific events surrounding the life and reign of Nero Caesar. This includes his murder of his rivals, his egomania, his blasphemy, and his hatred for the law of God. Most amazing, though, Daniel predicted that the Jewish-Roman War would last for three and a half years.

How do rapturists treat this section? They ignore the clear and convincing fulfillment of this vision during the fourth empire of Rome. Instead, they postulate that presumptuous parenthesis, inserting two thousand years between the beast and the beast’s horns. They then try to apply all of these prophecies concerning Nero to the future antichrist spoken of elsewhere in the Bible.

Now the vision gets really interesting. Some claim that this part of this vision is a riddle riddled with riddles. Daniel tells us that “with the clouds of Heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before Him. And to Him was given dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve Him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and His Kingdom one that shall not be destroyed” (Dan. 7:13–14).

To solve this riddle, we will approach it like a reporter. We will attempt to answer who, what, where, when, and why.

The who question is relatively simple. There are two persons mentioned. Based on details earlier in the vision, it is generally agreed that the “Ancient of Days” is God the Father.

We can be quite certain that the “son of man” is the Messiah, because Jesus referred to Himself as the “Son of man.” If you are reading this book, you probably agree that Jesus was the promised Messiah. During His trial before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish religious leaders of Jerusalem, Jesus paraphrased these very verses from Daniel and applied them to Himself (Matt. 26:64).

The high priest understood this to mean that Jesus viewed Himself as the Messiah of Daniel, and so he tore his robe and accused Jesus of blasphemy. In one aspect, the high priest was correct: that is exactly what Jesus was claiming.

Now that we know the two persons involved, what is being described? A simple question will help us to clarify our thinking. In Daniel, when the “Son of man” comes, in what direction will He be traveling? In other words, when Daniel describes the Son coming with the clouds of Heaven to be given dominion and glory and kingdom, is He coming toward Jerusalem or the Mount of Olives?

This seems to be the automatic assumption of many commentators, including rapturists, which means this prophecy must refer to either the first or the second advent. But this is an unwarranted assumption that contradicts the text itself. Daniel clearly indicates the direction of the Son’s coming. It is not toward His saints, nor even toward earth.

Daniel describes the Son of man as coming “to the Ancient of Days.” When He comes, He is “presented before Him” (7:13). The Son is traveling to the Father in Heaven for the ceremonial bestowal of His Kingdom. This is critical for our interpretation and will be crucial if we are properly to understand Jesus’ words in the Olivet Discourse.

This interpretation was the understanding of the early Church. Lactantius has been dubbed the “Christian Cicero” for his defense of Christianity around the beginning of the fourth century. He clearly understood that this passage spoke of a trip to the Father by Christ when he connected Daniel’s vision to Psalms 110:1. “The Lord says to my lord: ‘Sit at my right hand, till I make Your enemies Your footstool’ ” (TED, XLVII). He wrote of it as though it were something, not to be defended, but commonly understood in his day.

So the what question is answered in a way few of us probably expected. This prophecy does not describe the coming of the Son of man back to earth at all! Rather, this prophecy concerns the time when Jesus is recognized as the victor over sin because of the Cross. He is publicly given what is rightfully His: God’s Kingdom.

Where does this coming occur? The entire scene could very well have occurred in Heaven. In fact, since that is generally where we would expect the throne of the Ancient of Days to be, that is the primary location in view.

However, we have already noted that Jesus applied this prophecy to Himself before the Sanhedrin. In doing so, He gave us a few more tidbits of information about this event. Here is what our Lord said at His trial: “I tell you, hereafter you will see the Son of man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of Heaven” (Matt. 26:64).

Jesus told the men judging Him that they would see the coming foretold by Daniel. Since the Sanhedrin’s court was not in Heaven, but in Jerusalem, Jesus is expanding the venue of Daniel’s vision.

At the very least, we can assume that while the actual coming occurred in Heaven, the Sanhedrin would witness convincing evidence of it in Jerusalem. Some undeniable evidence that Jesus was recognized by God as the victor in Heaven must be seen by the rulers who condemned Jesus to death. This means that this cannot possibly be a future event for us in the twenty-first century, because the men of the Sanhedrin have been dead for thousands of years.

We have already started to answer the when part of our investigation. This event, this recognition of the victory of Jesus, must occur within the lifetimes of the men who condemned Jesus for blasphemy. Significantly, Jesus made this prediction after the Jewish leadership had decisively rejected His Kingship.

Since Heaven is outside our earthly sequential time line, the bestowal of God’s Kingdom there could easily have preceded the earthly, public evidence. Since we are talking about God’s recognition of Christ as King of the Kingdom, most Christians would agree that it occurred in Heaven at the Transfiguration or Ascension. In fact, the Liturgy of the Church connects this prophecy with the Transfiguration.

This understanding certainly does satisfy the details of Daniel. Christ received His Kingdom as a result of the work accomplished in His first advent. Yet Jesus extended Daniel’s relatively private event in Heaven to include another earthly event that the Sanhedrin could witness. Since He made His prophecy after the Transfiguration, and since the Sanhedrin were not privy to Christ’s Ascension, He must have been referring to another event—quite a public event which Christ could assure the Sanhedrin they would “see.” Yet this undeniable evidence of the Son of man’s victory must have occurred within the generation of the Sanhedrin.

The riddle of the “coming” in Daniel’s vision is coming into focus. The lifetime of the Sanhedrin overlaps with the time frame of this vision in Daniel. Daniel has been describing the little horn, which symbolizes Nero. Was there any public evidence that Jesus was the spiritual victor over the Old Covenant and its leadership during the times of Nero? Hold on to that question, because the answer is an emphatic yes.

I can almost hear you gasp, “Wait just one cotton-pickin’ minute! Are you implying that we must believe that the second coming of Christ occurred in 70 A.D.?”

Of course not. In fact, that belief would be soundly and correctly condemned as heresy by all Catholics and most Protestants.

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.

Let us first read this vision, verse by verse.

“Seventy weeks [seventy times seven seasons] are decreed concerning Your people and Your holy city,
to finish the transgression,
to put an end to sin,
and to atone for iniquity,
to bring in everlasting righteousness,
to seal both vision and prophet,
and to anoint a most holy.
Know therefore and understand that from the going forth of the word to restore and build Jerusalem to the coming of an anointed one, a prince, there shall be seven weeks [seven times seven seasons].
Then for sixty-two weeks [sixty-two times seven seasons] it shall be built again with squares and moat, but in a troubled time.
And after the sixty-two weeks [sixty-two times seven seasons], an anointed one shall be cut off, and shall have nothing; and the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a flood, and to the end there shall be war; desolations are decreed.
And he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week [seven seasons]; and for half of the week [three and a half seasons] he shall cause sacrifice and offering to cease; and upon the wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate, until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator.”

Without a doubt, this is a very unusual passage. The sevens appear four times in the vision. The initial mention of seventy sevens is subdivided into a first set of seven sevens, a second set of sixty-two sevens, and a final, lone set of seven commonly called the final week.

The rapturists’ first assumption, however, confounds all their subsequent efforts to understand these numbers. They assume that all of these sevens signify years. As a result, they place the first set of seven weeks (verse 24) and the second set of sixty-two weeks (verse 25) in chronological order. Added together, they approximately equal the 483 years between Daniel and Christ’s first advent (GR8).

Although I believe this understanding is flawed, that problem is dwarfed by the presumptuous parenthesis that rapturists insert between the second set of sixty-two weeks and the third, final week. They insert the gap into the middle of verse 26. They teach that up to this point, the vision applies to the first advent. Then, after the cutting-off of the Messiah is mentioned, rapturists try to insert a two-thousand-year hiatus before the Temple and Jerusalem are destroyed in the second half of verse 26. They do this to place the final, lone set of seven as a seven-year Great Tribulation that is still in our future.

Rapturists split every one of Daniel’s visions this way. In the first vision, a two-thousand-year gap is introduced into the statue, between the iron legs and the iron-clay feet. In the second vision, this two-millennia interruption is inserted between the fourth beast and that beast’s very own horns! And in this third prophecy of time periods, the same presumptuous parenthesis is inserted mid-sentence.

The question remains: where is the textual justification for these massive interruptions in Daniel’s time line? The answer is: there is none; not a shred of justification apart from the rapturists’ desire to deny that Christ set up a Kingdom during His first advent.

Even the small minority of early Church theologians who believed the seventieth week was still future argued against the introduction of any gap between the sixty-ninth and seventieth weeks. Apollinarius of Laodicea believed in a future seventieth week, but still said, “It is impossible that periods so linked together be wrenched apart, but rather the time-segments must all be joined together in conformity with Daniel’s prophecy” (cited in CID). That is the reason he predicted the end of the world in the sixth century. Of course, that is not a viable alternative for present-day rapturists.

St. Augustine certainly had no patience for any gap inserted between the sixty-ninth and seventieth weeks. He points to Luke’s Gospel as proof that this could not be done. “For let us not suppose that the computation of Daniel’s weeks was interfered with … or that they were not complete, but had to be completed afterward in the end of all things, for Luke most plainly testifies that the prophecy of Daniel was accomplished at the time when Jerusalem was overthrown” (EPA, 199:31; cited in GCC). St. Augustine was referring to Jesus’ Olivet Discourse, which we will examine most closely in Matthew’s Gospel. The long and the short of it is this: the rapturist system doesn’t work unless you approach the text with preconceived notions that it does not support.

This presumptuous parenthesis totally destroys the unity of this vision. Understood most simply, the vision teaches that there will be one Messiah who will come, and then He will be “cut off.” The Messiah’s career is preceded by the second Temple (Herod’s), which must first be rebuilt for Him and will then be destroyed. There is only one Messiah and one Temple, and their rise and fall are described in relation to each other.

Rapturists see this vision as predicting the first advent after the rebuilding of Herod’s Temple. But then they claim that mid-sentence in verse 26, the vision skips over two thousand years of history. Unbeknownst to Daniel, during this two thousand years, Herod’s Temple is destroyed, and the rapturist must now postulate the rebuilding of a third Temple. Without mentioning any of this, the end of verse 26 discusses the destruction of this third Temple (rather than the one already mentioned in verse 25). These mental gymnastics are necessary to substantiate a future seven-year Great Tribulation. In the meantime, the simple and evident unity of this vision is destroyed.

This leads to perhaps one of the most peculiar beliefs in Christianity. Rapturists believe that Jewish priests will restart the ancient animal sacrifices in a rebuilt Jerusalem Temple about the time that the Great Tribulation begins. This is necessary for the rapturist system to explain the phrase of this vision that states that someone “shall cause sacrifice and offering to cease.” The Jewish people cannot stop something they have not been doing.

But ask rapturists why God would ever allow a resumption of animal sacrifices, especially in light of His Son’s final Sacrifice, and they have no answer. To make their system coherent, rapturists must believe that the animal sacrifices will be resumed, even in the face of Hebrews 9:24–26: “Christ has entered … into Heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer Himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the Holy Place yearly with blood not his own; for then He would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, He has appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.” Rapturists believe animal sacrifices will resume in a rebuilt Temple, but they are at a loss to explain why.

Daniel states that the purpose of these seventy weeks is to bestow six blessings. As Catholics, we believe that these blessings were bestowed as a result of the first advent. But rapturists must argue that these six blessings have not yet been fulfilled and will not be fulfilled until the end of the future seven-year Great Tribulation.

But look at these six items that they claim have not yet been accomplished. The seventy weeks are decreed “to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy.” I do not believe it is possible to claim that these six blessings were not bestowed by Christ at His first advent.

Absolutely without exception, the early Church believed they were bestowed then. Tertullian wrote, “The day when Christ was born … eternal righteousness was revealed, and the Saint of saints was anointed, namely Christ, and the vision and prophecy were sealed, and those sins were remitted which are allowed.… It was because the prophecy was fulfilled by His advent that the vision was confirmed by a seal; and it was called a prophecy because Christ Himself is the seal of all the prophets, fulfilling as He did all that the prophets had previously declared concerning Him” (cited in CID). It could not be stated any more clearly.

Julius Africanus (Julius Hilarianus) wrote at the end of the fourth century that there would be no future fulfillment of the seventieth week, but that is not all: “There is no doubt [that this prophecy] constitutes a prediction of Christ’s advent, for He appeared to the world at the end of seventy weeks. After Him the crimes were consummated, and sin reached its end and iniquity was destroyed. An eternal righteousness also was proclaimed which overcame the mere righteousness of the law; and the vision and the prophecy were fulfilled, inasmuch as the Law and the Prophets endured until the time of John the Baptist, and then the Saint of saints was anointed. And all these things were the objects of hope, prior to Christ’s Incarnation, rather than the objects of actual possession” (CH, X–XI). Notice his point? If these six blessings have not been accomplished, then New Testament saints are in no better a position than were the Old Testament saints.

St. Augustine strongly argued against any future fulfillment of this vision of Daniel, pointing out instead that the prophetic events fit the first advent very well. “At the end of the age, Christ will not need to be anointed or put to death, in order that this prophecy of Daniel may then be expected to be fulfilled” (EPA, 199:912; cited in GCC).

These six blessings were so clearly bestowed through the Incarnation that it almost sounds as though these six phrases were written by a New Testament writer. And in fact, the New Testament echoes these words. In Hebrews 9:26 and 28, we read, “For [Christ] has appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.… Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for Him.” The phrase “put away sin” is an obvious reflection of Daniel’s phrase “to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity.” Hebrews makes clear that this happened in the first advent. He also makes clear that this will not happen at the second advent: “Christ will appear a second time, not to deal with sin.”

Further confirmation is seen in Luke’s Gospel. At the beginning of His public ministry, Jesus stands in His hometown synagogue of Nazareth and reads the Messianic prophecy of Isaiah 61:1–2: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me.…” He then shocks His audience by stating, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (4:16–21). Jesus declared Himself to be the Anointed One of the Old Testament, the anointed of Daniel’s vision. He came to fulfill the task of the “anointed” described here during His first advent.

The New Testament confirms, then, that all six benefits of the seventy weeks have been bestowed by Christ already. This is not surprising. If not through the Passion, when can we realistically ever hope for these benefits? In this view, we unreservedly agree with the unanimous historical interpretation of the Church.

Yet rapturists must claim that this is not true. If these blessings were bestowed in the first advent, then Daniel’s seventieth week is also history. If Daniel’s weeks are completed, then rapturists have no basis for a future seven-year Great Tribulation. If there is no tribulation, there is no need for a secret rapture. So, to justify their system, rapturists must contradict both the clear meaning of Scripture and the teaching of the early Church.

This is ironic, for rapturists take great pride in asserting that their theological position most closely resembles that of the early Church. They usually relish the opportunity to inform the Catholic that his Faith is based on later accretions added to the pure, simple Faith of the Apostles. Of course, others may believe them wrong in this assertion, but their stated aim is always to restore the original belief of the early Church—except, it seems, in this case.

They claim that in this instance, concerning the timing of Daniel’s seventieth week, the early Church was utterly and completely mistaken. Proponents such as Walvoord try to justify this with vague references to progressive revelation. In reality, however, this rejection of the beliefs of the early Church flies in the face of everything rapturists claim to believe on every other issue of theology.

The fact that the early Church believed that the blessings of the seventy weeks have already been bestowed should make this next issue seem self-evident. Almost all of the early fathers believed that the last week of Daniel ended no later than 70 A.D. In this they were in total agreement with the common Jewish interpretation of their time: that Daniel’s seventy weeks ended with the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. (cited in CID).

As we examine the early Church writers on this issue, we will not find unanimity as to the exact end of these weeks. This is largely due to an important handicap of the early Church writers. Some of the early Fathers had a very poor text of Daniel’s prophecy from which to work. In addition, they did not have an accurate idea of when Cyrus’s reign commenced. This undoubtedly affected some of their opinions when they attempted to work out exact timetables (ISW).

Yet although various authors chose varying dates as the “terminus ad quem” (end) for Daniel’s seventy weeks, virtually all the early Fathers agreed that it must be in some way associated with the fall of the Temple. Although the references can be obscure, some writers seem to have proposed 64 A.D., the year Rome burned. Also mentioned is 54 A.D., the year Nero came to the throne. This is justified, because Nero set into motion the destruction of the Temple. But by far the two most common dates are 70 A.D., the year of its burning, and 67 A.D., the year Rome declared war on Jerusalem.

For our purposes, either of these two dates would be satisfactory, which means that we stand with the majority of the early Church. Since 70 A.D. is the date emblazoned in the minds of most people as the year of the Temple’s destruction, I will refer to that date. Understand, however, that I use the date with intentional flexibility to mean the events of 67 to 70 A.D.

This date, 70 A.D., seems almost forgotten in modern theology. In spite of their differences, the early Fathers understood the importance of 70 A.D. The early-Church Fathers are so clear; it seems hard to believe that rapturists have even read them. Instead, rapturists insert that presumptuous parenthesis for the express purpose of putting the last week into our future.

We are about to explain this vision, one verse at a time, with what I believe is the most consistent Catholic understanding. But first we have to examine the most controversial of the weeks. This is commonly called Daniel’s last or seventieth week. This is the week rapturists propel into the future with the presumptuous parenthesis.

We have already seen that the entire Church unanimously believed that the six benefits of these weeks were bestowed by Christ at His first advent. We have also illustrated that the vast majority of the early Church saw all seventy weeks as completed by 67 to 70 A.D. What we have not mentioned concerns the duration of each of the seasons within this final week. How long is a shabua?

Rapturists take each of the seasons as one year. That is how they end up with a seven-year Great Tribulation that they call Daniel’s last week. But the majority of the early Church understood the last week of Daniel (seven seasons) as encompassing seven decades, not seven years. Remember, the word shabua is like the word dozens; it does not designate the duration of the sevens.

Clement of Alexandria is the earliest Church Father to give a clear answer on this issue. St. Jerome informs us that Clement of Alexandria included in his seventy weeks “the reign of Vespasian and the destruction of the Temple.” Because Clement also included Christ, this last week must include more than seven years (CID).

Origen was a student of Clement and is the key to Clement’s thinking on the seventieth week. Origen makes it explicitly clear that he believes the last week of Daniel does not refer to years, but to decades. He also went to great lengths to demonstrate that the beginning of the Temple’s destruction was half a week (thirty-five years) after Pentecost. This was because Origen understood Pentecost as the moment in the last week when the “strong covenant” of Daniel was confirmed (verse 27). He understood Pentecost to be about thirty-seven years before the Temple’s destruction. This would mean that the seventieth week of Daniel approximately spans the period from Christ’s birth to the assault on the Temple in 67 A.D. Halfway through are the events surrounding the Passion, the Resurrection, and the birth of the Church.

If Origen followed his teacher, which seems likely, we can now understand how Clement would include Christ, Nero, and Vespasian in these seven decades. The fact that Clement never explains this may indicate that this understanding was widely accepted in his day. This also harmonizes with what we have already learned: virtually the entire early Church understood the end of the seventieth week as no later than 70 A.D.

The Epistle of Barnabas already exhibits this view of the last week of Daniel (see Appendix One). “When the week is completed, the Temple of God shall be built in glory in the name of the Lord.… This is the spiritual Temple built for the Lord” (EOB, 16:6). This passage refers to the building of the Church. “The week” is Daniel’s final week, which contained the time of covenantal transition between the Old and New Covenants. The Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, Pentecost, and even the judgment of 70 A.D. were all essential to building the Church. These events took seven decades, not seven years to unfold.

Eusebius wrote the first comprehensive Church history. Rapturists fail to notice his assertion that most of the early Church accepted the final week of Daniel as seven decades rather than seven years. “Most authorities extend the one [last] week of years to the sum of seventy years, reckoning each year as a ten-year period. They also claim that thirty-five years intervened between the Passion of the Lord and the reign of Nero, and that it was at this latter date when the weapons of Rome were first lifted up against the Jews” (cited in CID).

The authorities Eusebius refers to were obviously from before his time. They probably included Barnabas, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, along with undoubtedly many others whose writings are no longer extant. Eusebius minces no words. “Most authorities” in the early Church held a position that was straightforward and easy to understand: the last week of Daniel encompassed seven decades, not seven years.

Yet this seems to be forgotten today. Even many well-educated Catholics assume that the final tribulation of the Church must last seven years. This is simply never taught in Scripture nor by the Church.

We are now ready to examine the vision verse by verse. This insight into the final week will enable us to understand the other sets of weeks of Daniel as well. As we will see, Daniel’s first set of sevens (seven weeks) is also best understood as forty-nine decades, not forty-nine years. The middle set of sevens (sixty-two weeks) is best understood as 434 years.

The vision starts with a summary of how many seasons will be under consideration: seventy weeks, or seventy times seven. The first mention of the seventy weeks does not point to years or decades. They are only a signal of how many “seasons” must transpire to bestow the six blessings. They carry the symbolic importance of the numbers seven and ten (GR2).

As we have noted, these blessings were all gained for God’s people at Christ’s first advent. The sixth blessing speaks of anointing a most holy. The Hebrew does not make it clear whether this is a person, place, or thing. The most straightforward understanding is to take every mention of “anointed” in this vision as a reference to the Messiah. That is what the word Messiah means, “anointed one.” The coming of the Messiah during the seventy weeks is one of the blessings.

The second half of verse 24 gives the reader a specific length of time before the “anointed one, a prince” arrives on the public scene. That length of time is “seven weeks” (forty-nine seasons). Again, the simplest method of understanding this vision is to take both the last set and this first set of seven weeks as decades. This would mean that the duration before the Messiah’s arrival would be seven times seven (forty-nine) decades. This would, of course, span 490 years. But when does the clock start ticking?

The vision declares that the time line starts with a decree “to restore and build Jerusalem.” In 538 B.C., Cyrus decreed the rebuilding of the Temple (Isa. 44:26–28, 45:1–4; Ezra 1:2–4). Darius issued a second decree in 520 B.C. (Ezra 6:3–12), and in that year the people started to rebuild the Temple in earnest under Zerubbabel.

But both decrees have the same problem. They do not mention the rebuilding of Jerusalem, but only the reconstruction of the Temple. A decree allowing the building of the Temple (for spiritual worship) is one thing. Allowing the building of a city with walls (for political protection) is another issue entirely. The building of the Temple might be included in the building of the city, but not vice versa.

Finally, King Artaxerxes of Persia issued a decree to rebuild the city of Jerusalem in about 457 B.C. (Ezra 7:11–26). This is the decree for which we have been waiting. The beginning point for Daniel’s seventy weeks of seasons is therefore 457 B.C., since it is the initial “word to restore and build Jerusalem.”

If we take the beginning of this seven weeks to be years, they end in the middle of nothing, around 408 B.C. But if we understand these sevens to be decades, as a complement to the Church’s clear understanding of Daniel’s last week, then this first segment makes perfect sense. The first set of seven weeks denote the forty-nine decades from 457 B.C. to 32 A.D. This spans the time from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem to the public arrival of the Messiah, the Anointed One. The prophecy certainly matches history well! Scholars now estimate that the public ministry of Jesus occurred sometime between 25 and 33 A.D.

We now encounter the second set of weeks, sixty-two times seven seasons. Rapturists insist that these weeks must follow chronologically after the first set of seven weeks. But this is not necessary (GR8). In fact, the text itself argues against that understanding. The vision states that the actual building of Jerusalem will span this second set of weeks. This means that the beginning point of the second set of weeks is not the end of the first set, but whenever the building project actually began.

Did the building start immediately in 457 B.C.? No, history is clear that it did not. While the decree to rebuild Jerusalem was first issued in 457 B.C., Nehemiah received word from Jerusalem several years later. “The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates are destroyed by fire” (Neh. 1:3). Nehemiah asked Artaxerxes to write another decree between 446 and 444 B.C. (Neh. 2:3–13). The actual rebuilding of Jerusalem began around 444 B.C., which makes this the beginning of the sixty-two weeks.

If we count this middle segment as years, we find that this segment ends in 10 B.C. That certainly meets one of the criteria for this second segment mentioned in the next verse (26): it must end before the Messiah is cut off.

This understanding also fits history exceedingly well. The 434 years from 444 to 10 B.C. saw plenty of “troubled times” for Jerusalem. During Nehemiah’s rebuilding project, the threat was so imminent that the construction workers labored with weapons at their sides. By 400 B.C., the controlling political force in Jerusalem was the priests, but they found themselves beholden to a series of conquerors. First the Persians, then Alexander the Great, then the Ptolemies of Egypt, and then the Seleucids of Syria conquered Jerusalem. Around 168 B.C., the priestly dominance was challenged by the Syrian king, Antiochus Epiphanes. In his effort to minimize Roman influence, he profaned the Temple with the sacrifice of swine to the Greek god Zeus Olympios (1 Macc. 1:44–59). The Jews rose in rebellion. By 165 B.C., the priestly family of the Hasmonians had prevailed in the war, and the Temple was reconsecrated by Judas Maccabee. The Jewish nation won complete independence by 142 B.C.

But any sense of tranquility was short-lived. The two competing Jewish groups we read about in the Gospels, the Pharisees and Sadducees, fought over religion and power. Their infighting enabled Pompey to conquer Jerusalem with a Roman army in 63 B.C. In 54 B.C, he sacked the Temple. At this point, the Temple had not been destroyed, but it was certainly not in functional shape. In fact, there was hardly a moment in these four centuries when Daniel’s description “troubled times” did not fit Jerusalem’s situation.

But this ruin of a Temple that Zerubbabel had built was not the one Jesus entered during His first advent. In 37 B.C., the Romans installed Herod the Great as king of the Jews. He initiated a massive reconstruction project on the Temple in 20 B.C. Everyone agreed this was still the second Temple, the Temple of Zerubbabel, being finally completed for glory (AJ, XV, 11).

Herod really outdid himself. This construction project enlarged the Temple greatly. While annexes and adjoining buildings were still under construction until about 63 A.D., Herod’s Temple, the culmination of Zerubbabel’s efforts, the Temple of Jesus’ day, was in fact finally completed in a peaceful, protected, and rebuilt Jerusalem by about 10 B.C. (The Jews who spoke of a forty-six-year project in John 2:20 were including the annexes and adjoining buildings.) You couldn’t ask for a more accurate, historical fulfillment of Daniel’s middle sixty-two weeks of seasons. They began in 444 B.C. and ended in 10 B.C., 434 years (sixty-two weeks) later.

Now it becomes clear why the Jews of Jesus day were so overwrought with Messianic anticipation. They knew that Daniel’s time line pointed to their generation. The Temple had been completed in 10 B.C. The forty-nine decades of the first set of weeks ended around 32 A.D. So where was the Messiah?

Perhaps because we already know the ending of the Greatest Story Ever Told, the “cutting off” of the Messiah does not startle us in the same way it would have startled Daniel. Daniel tells us that after the Temple is rebuilt and the Messiah has come, He “shall be cut off, and shall have nothing.” After His coming had been awaited for centuries, the Messiah will somehow be “cut off”! We can clearly understand this proposition as a reference to the Passion, but it must have been a mystery to Daniel.

As if that were not bad enough, Daniel learns that Jerusalem will also be destroyed. This statement in Daniel seems to be related to the Messiah’s death. At some point after the Messiah’s being cut off, an evil people will destroy both Jerusalem and its Temple. This sets up a very nice parallel in the vision. The Messiah will come; the Temple will be rebuilt. The Messiah will be cut off; the Temple will be destroyed.

We know something at which Daniel only hinted. The destruction of Jerusalem was a direct result of the cutting off of the Messiah. Jesus warned the leaders of Jerusalem that the destruction of their city and its Temple was a direct result of His being cut off, which they helped engineer. He prophesied, “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes. For 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). The city is destroyed because the Messiah is cut off.

But if this is true, who is the prince mentioned here in Daniel? “The people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary.” The Messiah is the focus of this vision, and the Prince described here is none other than he. Christ is the Prince. The parallel is clear: the Messiah comes and is then cut off; Jerusalem is rebuilt and then destroyed. The prince does not destroy the city; his “people” do. The people of the Prince who destroyed Jerusalem through their own folly were Jesus’ own kinsmen. The Jewish people destroyed their own city.

The historian Josephus claims just this point, that the Jews destroyed themselves through the abominations they performed. Josephus was a Jewish priest and general of the first century, who led the army that met General Vespasian when the Romans invaded Israel in 67 A.D. The Jewish army was utterly defeated, and only Josephus and one companion survived to surrender. Josephus became a Roman historian for Vespasian, and while in time he became sympathetic to Rome, in no way was he ever a Christian sympathizer. He wrote an extensive eyewitness account of the Jewish-Roman War titled Wars of the Jews. Unfortunately, few rapturists have read it.

Josephus tells of three warring factions within the walls of Jerusalem that created unimaginable devastation before the Romans ever entered the city in 70 A.D. Jewish tradition claims that there was initially enough food in Jerusalem to withstand a siege for twenty-one years. But the three factions burned one another’s stores of grain, initiating a severe famine (WJ, V, 1:4). The Jews of Jerusalem “never suffered anything that was worse from the Romans than they made each other suffer” (WJ, V, 6:1).

According to Josephus, no other “age ever [did] breed a generation more fruitful in wickedness than this was.… They overthrew the city themselves” (WJ, V, 10:1). He continues, “The writings of the ancient prophets … foretold that this city should be taken when somebody shall begin the slaughter of his own countrymen.… It is God, therefore, it is God Himself who is bringing on this fire, to purge that city and Temple by means of the Romans” (WJ, VI, 2:1). Traditional Jewish thought even today teaches that Herod’s Temple was destroyed because of sinat hinam, which is hatred without cause. They believe that at this time the Jewish people turned on one another for no reason, and that was the cause of the Temple’s destruction. The Messiah’s own people destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple.

When we look at the time line of Daniel’s vision, this means the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple occurred at the very end of the seventy sevens. Daniel links the war over Jerusalem to the time of “the end.” “The end” is the third and final epoch in Jewish thought. The end is that period after which the Messiah has come and set up the promised Kingdom (GR8).

Here the vision seems to rewind to give us more details. Up to now, the Messiah was introduced and then cut off. In parallel, the Temple was rebuilt and then destroyed. That destruction brings us to the “end” of the seventy weeks. But Daniel needs to give us more information about how the Messiah’s activities secure the six blessings. Daniel’s vision does not end in despair (GR8).

We have now come to the last week of Daniel. It begins with the Incarnation, around 4 B.C., and spans the seven decades to 67 to 70 A.D. These seven decades are the time of covenantal transition of which the early Fathers spoke (Appendix One). The Prince, Christ, will make a “strong covenant” that will bring a halt to the Temple sacrifices during this one week. In fact, Daniel correctly envisions all of the Messiah’s activities as contained in this final week.

I believe that the covenant of the Messiah is the unifying theme of the four major prophets. The “strong covenant” of Daniel is that New Covenant which Christ made with His own Precious Blood. Isaiah called this covenant everlasting: “I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David” (55:3). Ezekiel said it was a covenant of peace: “I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them; and I will bless them and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary in the midst of them forevermore” (37:26). Jeremiah was told by God, “I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.… I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (31:31, 33). The Liturgy of the Church links this Jeremiah passage to the Gospel passage in which Jesus foretells His death. It is undeniable. The new everlasting covenant of peace, the strong covenant, is inextricably linked to the death, the cutting off, of the Messiah.

Daniel predicts just that. This could explain why the early Church moved Daniel from the canonical section of historical writings into the prophetic section. Like the modernist, the pre-Christian Jew understood Daniel only as history. But Jesus emphatically declared that Daniel was prophetic. Daniel writes that halfway through the last week of seven decades, the Messiah caused the animal sacrifices of the Old Covenant to cease by sacrificing Himself to usher in a new, strong covenant.

This is certainly how the early Church interpreted these verses. Eusebius, the early-fourth-century bishop of Caesarea, wrote that “after our Lord’s Passion, the sacrifice and offering ceased in the middle of the week. For whatever took place in the Temple after that date was not a valid sacrifice to God” (CHR).

A Christian can scarcely read the vision’s phrase “shall cause sacrifice and offering to cease,” without thinking of Hebrews 10:11–12: “Every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, He sat down at the right hand of God.”

Placing the end of the seventieth week at 67 to 70 A.D. would mean that when Daniel refers to events about halfway through this seventieth week, he is referring to something that would happen around 32 A.D. In prophetic reckoning, 32 A.D. is certainly close enough to the date of the Passion of Christ and Pentecost to be a bona fide fulfillment of Daniel’s prophecy (GR2).

Scholars now date the Passion between 28 and 33 A.D., with the birth of Jesus around 4 or 5 B.C. I will refer to the Passion as occurring in 30 A.D. (TDY). If the symbolism of numbers had not been important to Daniel and his readers, he might have described this cutting off of the Messiah as occurring forty-seven percent of the way through the final seven decades. But even to a modern reader, this sounds a bit odd. To an ancient reader, the time of the cutting off would have lost much of its symbolic importance (GR2).

But the vision is not quite done yet. The last phrase of verse 27 completes Daniel’s vision of the battle strategy of God’s people. So far, they have been told that it is their responsibility to build God’s Temple; that when it is complete, the Messiah will come; and that He will set up a New Covenant even though He and the Temple will somehow be “cut off” and “desolated.” Now Daniel learns that at the end of these seven decades, the desolator will come.

The Jewish people believed even this last part of the prophecy was fulfilled in 70 A.D. The Jewish historian Josephus recorded that Daniel “wrote about the empire of the Romans and that [Jerusalem] … would be desolated … by them.” (AJ, X, 11, 7). Chapter 21 of Luke’s Gospel certainly agrees.

These events do not predict a future abomination in a new, rebuilt Temple, as rapturists would have us believe. The Romans certainly came on “the wing of abominations”; the very fact that a foreign army was on Judean soil was considered an abomination to the land. The symbol of Roman might was the ensign with the eagle held high at the front of that army. Being a scavenger, the eagle itself was a winged abomination to the Jews. The Romans ended up dismantling the Temple down to the very last stone. Without question, when the Romans came, they did make the city desolate.

The vision promises that the desolator will not escape God’s justice. The one who sent the “wing of abominations” in 67 A.D. met his “decreed end” when judgment was “poured out on the desolator.” Nero met his Maker after committing suicide. All three Caesars involved, Nero, Vespasian, and Titus, lost their dynasties in the “decreed end.”

Even the “people of the prince,” the Jewish Zealots, were destroyed along with Jerusalem. They desolated the Temple, and they were, in their turn, desolated themselves. Eventually everyone involved ended up the loser, save Christ and His Church. He had successfully set up His “strong covenant” and saved His fledgling Church from Jerusalem’s devastation.

Let us pause here to reflect. On close examination of Daniel’s seventy-week vision, we can be certain that no two-thousand-year gaps must be introduced to make the prophecy’s timing work out. God did not try to slip one by Daniel. We can take the vision’s timing at face value and agree with the early Church in her overwhelming consensus that these events were entirely fulfilled by the year 70 A.D. Daniel’s seventy weeks clearly point to Christ’s first advent and its blessings, the most important event in all of history.

Daniel’s last week denotes seven decades, from about 4 B.C. to 67 to 70 A.D. This is the period during which the Messiah will be active: the time of covenantal transition. After the Anointed One brings sacrifices to a halt, which we have determined would be around 32 A.D., someone will come to desolate Jerusalem and its sanctuary. Once the weeks began with the decree to rebuild in 457 B.C., they progressed without interruption until the end, in 70 A.D.

Is this view consonant with present Church teaching? Yes! “The ancient view … maintains that the prophecy of the seventy weeks refers directly to the appearance of Christ in the flesh, His death, His establishment of the New Covenant, and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans” (CE). We worked hard to get here, but now that we have arrived, we find we are in agreement with the early Church, the “ancient view.”

Our work here has been important. The problems in the rapturist system are so immense that I can honestly say that the person who throws up his hands in consternation at all of these sevens is in better shape than the rapturist who inserts that presumptuous parenthesis.

Turn back a few pages, and reread this vision carefully. These few verses form the entire biblical foundation for the rapturists’ claim that a future seven-year Great Tribulation is about to break upon the world and that the antichrist must appear and make a peace treaty with ethnic Israel. This is a good portion of their proof that the Old Covenant Temple must be rebuilt in Jerusalem.

The simplest understanding of Daniel’s seventy weeks will ultimately undercut premillennialism itself, leaving us to choose the only viable option left, Catholic amillennialism. But we are not at that point just yet. We will get there, but not just yet.

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).

This extra thirty days was still a time of tremendous bloodshed. Josephus wrote, “Around the altar a pile of corpses was accumulating; down the steps of the sanctuary flowed a stream of blood, and the bodies of the victims killed above went sliding to the bottom.” The Romans “set fire to the houses … but they ran everyone through whom they met … and made the whole city run down with blood, to such a degree indeed that the fire of many of the houses was quenched with these men’s blood” (WJ, VI, 8:5).

Finally on the eighth of Elul (September 9, 70 A.D.), Titus ordered the Roman army to halt the wholesale slaughter of Jews, “since his soldiers were already quite tired with killing men” (WJ, VI, 9:2). While some killing occurred after that point, the worst was over.

This is the best understanding of the additional thirty days. It took 1,260 days for the conquest and fall of the Temple, but there was still urban warfare in the rest of Jerusalem for another thirty days. “There shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days” of killing and abominations when the city is overthrown (12:11).

The vision has just one more detail. The vision encourages readers to “wait and come to the thousand three hundred and thirty-five days” (12:12). In other words, forty-five days after all of Jerusalem fell, safety would finally be attainable. To what could this extra time refer?

The inhabitants of Jerusalem who had escaped death during the urban warfare of the last thirty days still had somehow to survive this next forty-five-day period. After Titus had ordered a halt to the wholesale killing at the 1,290th day, the Roman soldiers herded the inhabitants of Jerusalem into the women’s court of the Temple, which was walled. One of Titus’s friends by the name of Fronto was “to determine everyone’s fate, according to his merits. So this Fronto slew all those that … were impeached one by another; but of the young men he chose out the tallest and most beautiful, and reserved them for the triumph; and as for the rest … he put them into bonds, and sent them to the Egyptian mines. Titus also sent a great number into the provinces, as a present to them, that they might be destroyed upon their theaters, by the sword and by the wild beasts; but those that were under seventeen years of age were sold for slaves. Now, during the days wherein Fronto was distinguishing these men, there perished, for want of food, eleven thousand; some of whom did not taste any food” (WJ, VI, 9:2).

It was a gruesome forty-five days. One had to hope for food, all the while watching others die of starvation, or be executed as potentially seditious, or be sorted into one of the many slave pools.

The events that occurred in Judea from 66 to 70 A.D. were seen by more than just the Church as the fulfillment of Daniel’s visions. No doubt the prophecy of Daniel gnawed on the minds of these Jews during these forty-five days as well. Upon his capture three years earlier, Josephus had informed the Romans that “he was not unacquainted with the prophecies contained in the sacred books.” (WJ, III, 8:3). But for the wicked, they did not understand the meaning of these events until it was much too late. It is doubtful that any of them ever understood the mystery of the Kingdom.

During these forty-five days, the Roman army captured virtually all the outlaw Zealots, who had retreated to the many subterranean caves around Jerusalem in the hope of waiting out the Romans and re-emerging when they had left (WJ, VI, 8:5). The Jewish Zealots very well may have thought that if they could just wait out the forty-five days, they might experience the promise of Daniel: “Blessed is he who waits and comes to the thousand three hundred and thirty-five days” (12:11).

But they didn’t make it that far. Virtually to a man, the rebels were caught. The Romans worked particularly diligently to capture the two major leaders of the Jerusalem revolt, John and Simon. John was sentenced to life imprisonment, and Simon got the death sentence. It seems that none of the Zealots survived the extra forty-five days to the relative peace that Daniel foresaw.

Josephus tells us that after Titus thought that he had Judea completely subdued, the Roman army regrouped and rewarded its heroes of the war. A month and a half after the city had been completely taken, much of the anger of the Roman soldiers had dissipated, and much of the army had been rewarded and had disbanded. The remaining army concerned itself with the task of dismantling the Temple stone by stone.

But “the wise” did “understand,” and those who were patient and faithful in their waiting were “blessed.” This mention of the blessed brings to mind the Church that fled into the wilderness before Jerusalem’s defeat, following Christ’s warning in the Olivet Discourse. They patiently waited in relative safety, and their faithfulness to Christ’s warning had secured their survival. The blessed were still safe when the 1,335 days were fulfilled. To them was entrusted the mystery of Christ’s Kingdom. That Kingdom now was free to blossom in the ancient Roman Empire without the confusion that Temple worship engendered.

Even though Daniel will not live long enough to understand completely his visions and their mysteries, he is given personal hope at the end of this vision. Daniel is informed that he will die, but still “shall stand in your allotted place at the end of the days” (12:13). For the first time in Daniel, the scope extends all the way to the final eschaton. When the final judgment occurs, Daniel will be rewarded appropriately. This is one of the earliest promises in the Bible regarding the immortality of the human soul. For Daniel it is good news, but in fact, all humans will be judged at the end of time. This is the general judgment, the “Great White Throne” judgment of The Apocalypse.

This is as close as Daniel gets to envisioning the second coming. But this vision of Daniel has taken us from here to eternity, right up to the final eschaton. No more details of the final judgment are given, but it is quite clear in the vision that the timing of Daniel’s judgment is not to be confused with the time of the “shattering.”

In this vision, the mention of the final events is almost an afterthought, a personal consolation given to Daniel. This structure will be borrowed in The Apocalypse, when St. John’s last vision also extends its scope to the final eschaton.

Let us sum up the evidence we have gleaned from Daniel. Rapturists claim that Daniel gives the entire timetable of their system: the seven years of Great Tribulation that follow on the heels of the rapture, the refocusing of God’s redemptive work exclusively through ethnic Israel during those seven years, the rebuilding of the Temple at the very beginning or even before those seven years, the coming of an antichrist who sets up his covenant with Israel at the beginning of the seven years, the breaking of the antichrist’s covenant halfway through the seven years, and the resurrection immediately after the seven years are completed.

On closer examination, this is clearly not the best way to understand these texts; in most instances, it is not even a reasonable way. In every case, rapturists have had to insert a massive gap into the time line that Daniel delineates. This is their colossal mistake. They do not take the visions for what they are plainly trying to teach—the timing and meaning of the first advent—and thus they completely twist the meaning of Daniel’s predictions concerning the time of salvation that was to come. The presumptuous parenthesis is necessary because of the rapturists’ refusal to accept Daniel’s overall message: God’s spiritual Kingdom came when the Messiah appeared during the ancient Roman Empire. The seventy weeks ended in 67 to 70 A.D., by which time the blessings bestowed on Christ’s Church were evident to the world.

This view, the Church’s historical understanding, emerges as both reasonable and superior. Christ’s birth, death, Resurrection, and founding of the Church, and the judgment upon those who rejected His new Kingdom are the fulfillment of these prophecies. From Daniel’s perspective, the drama of the Incarnation spanned seven decades of covenantal transition. Other than the final judgment of the man Daniel, there is nothing in these visions still awaiting fulfillment, except in the sense that all these events point to a still future death and resurrection of our world itself, and the founding of a new Heaven and a new earth at the final eschaton (GR3).

Four hundred years ago, a famous mathematician, Blaise Pascal, summed up Daniel very well: “One must be bold to predict the same thing in so many ways. It was necessary that the four idolatrous or pagan monarchies, the end of the kingdom of Judah, and the seventy weeks, should happen at the same time, and all this before the second Temple was destroyed.… The time foretold by the state of the Jewish people, by the state of the heathen, by the state of the Temple, by the number of years.… Christ will then be killed … in the last week.… In the seventieth week of Daniel … the heathen should be … brought to the knowledge of the God worshiped by the Jews; that those who loved Him should be delivered from their enemies, and filled with His fear and love.… And it happened” (PEN, XI, 708–722).

Pascal summarized these visions well. Daniel predicted the Roman Empire would be in power when Messiah came. And it happened. He predicted the rebuilding of Jerusalem and its Temple as a precondition for the first advent. And it happened. He predicted the Great Tribulation of Christ’s fledgling Church. And it happened. He predicted the Passion of our Lord along with its benefits. And it happened. He predicted the establishment of the new strong covenant. And it happened. He predicted the destruction of Jerusalem, the Temple, and biblical Judaism. And it happened. Daniel even predicted his own final judgment. What he did not predict is the second coming of Christ. That would have to wait for another Prophet.

We have now completed Daniel, which contains the most difficult passages in the entire Old Testament, and we are ready to proceed to the New Testament. You might first want to read Appendix Three, however, for a brief discussion of the Old Testament book of Zechariah. Rapturists claim that there are events in Zechariah that require that Jerusalem’s Temple be rebuilt and the animal sacrifices of the Old Covenant be reinstituted. They claim that this plan for ethnic Israel will be independent of the Church. Yet we have already seen that Daniel allows no time for that.

What we will find is that rapturists are working under a minor misunderstanding. Zechariah makes it crystal clear that God will never return to His Old Covenant with ethnic Israel—that God broke that relationship forever during Daniel’s seventieth week.

After Daniel, the rapturist argument boils down to one simple assertion: the events portrayed in the apocalyptic passages of the Bible have not yet been fulfilled. Central to this assertion is the refusal to accept that Christ did indeed set up the Kingdom of God during His first advent. As we saw in Daniel, this leads to the presumptuous parenthesis, the rapturists’ colossal mistake.

We must give credit where it is due. Rapturists believe that the prophecies of the Bible must be fulfilled. I do not disagree in the least. I do disagree with the claim that there remains much unfulfilled prophecy.

Because this is the sum and substance of their argument, we will approach the New Testament passages differently from the way we approached Daniel. In the New Testament, we will attempt to determine whether the key prophetic proof texts in the rapturists’ system could already have been fulfilled.

Of course, at least some New Testament passages have not yet been fulfilled, because the second advent is still in the future. We will examine these passages to determine whether they teach a two-stage coming: a secret rapture first with the second advent seven years later. If all the passages have either been fulfilled or are easily understood without resorting to a secret rapture, then the heart will have been ripped out of the rapturist position. Without any biblical support, why believe it?