Christianity and the End Times

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Babylon is the first empire in both visions of four empires.
You are making the mistake of trying to turn it into something else.

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In other words the mistake IS disagreeing with you.

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I wasn't originally looking for a winged lion, just a lion, and found the winged one which seemed better. I'm back to my original intention.

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So you were going to support your claim that a winged lion was a symbol of Babylon by showing an image of a lion without wings.

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All your accusations about my motives are not only violations of any standard of civilized conversation, they are wrong.

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What accusations ? There are none in the post you are replying to.

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The mistake is disagreeing with the entire evangelical world.

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I would have thought that even if the entire evangelical world disagreed with God, it would be the entire evangelical world that was mistaken. Interesting that you claim otherwise,

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The vision is of a lion, and I wanted an image from Babylon.

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The vision is of a lion given an eagles wings and you certainly claimed that the wings were an important part of the identification: And let us note further that you never had any evidence that the original image was intended to symbolise Babylon at all.

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Your accusations are scattered among your posts.

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The only thing I find from the last few days is when I responded to your attempt to claim a victory by citing an utterly obvious point that nobody had disagreed with in the entire history of this thread. A point that therefore did nothing to advance discussion. In a post that left many more important points - all my major points - unaddressed.I think that your motives there are pretty obvious.

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Example of snarky false interpretation of my motives: "attempt to drag out this tangent."

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You certainly are dragging it out. And there is nothing about your motive for doing so in there.

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Even the idea that I wanted a winged lion is false, I wasn't looking for a winged lion

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But you certainly preferred an image of a winged lion, despite having perfectly good images of lions - and made a point of it. And that is what I responded to.

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You should stick to the subject and stop targeting me.

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Coming from someone who has made frequent false and unjustified accusations these trivial complaints hardly bear any weight.

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You have no feeling for scripture or how to interpret prophecy. Most evangelicals do. Even where any of us may get points wrong we are on the right track, but all you are doing is multiplying errors because you have no sense of the foundational supernatural integrity of the Bible.

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Which only means that I don’t twist the Biblical text to make it fit your doctrine.

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Your completely ignoring the Roman Empire and Jesus as Messiah the Prince is egregious "error" though it is far worse than mere error.

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Calling it an error doesn’t make it so. Your failure to defeat my points argues that it is no error.

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pire and Jesus as Messiah the Prince is egregious "error" though it is far worse than mere error. You put a couple of insignificant "messiahs" in the place of Christ, and replace the giant Roman Empire with a branch off Greece and pretend all this fulfills a prophecy to "to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy."

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The two messiahs are highly significant in the context of Daniel.Disagreeing with your assessment of what is important in favour of what the author of Daniel seems to have considered to be important is no error. It is you who make the error in insisting that your ideas must be projected on to an author living in a different time, a different place a different culture.As for the end of the prophecy that is supposed to occur at the end. I don’t relate it to anything that has actually happened, so your attack there is just a misrepresentation.

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This is a trivialization of the seventy weeks prophecy, but even the whole tenor of scripture.

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That is what you say. However if I am right - and the text fits my interpretation better than yours - your complaints are trivialising the prophecy.

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Being wrong has nothing to do with motives. Oh yes "attempt to drag out this tangent" claims I have a MOTVE to "drag out this tangent.'

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When you put in points that aren’t part of the tangent, in a sub thread intended to deal with a side point out of respect to your request to wait until you finish writing your post it certainly looks like an attempt to drag out the tangent.

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Oh yes WANTING a winged lion is different from thinking a winged lion is a good symbol. I COULD want it for that reason but you turned it into a scurrilous motive.

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I did ? I can’t see where I attach any scurrilous motive to you wanting a winged lion. Obviously I think you preferred a winged lion because it better supported your assertion.

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You're very good at that.

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Inventing examples hardly supports that claim.

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I guess you believe all that. It's false in every conceivable way.

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None of it is untrue, and that is the only way of being false that counts.

So you didn’t use the image of a winged lion over all the images of unsigned lions - and make a point of it being winged - because you thought it would better support your argument ?You think that there is something scurrilous in choosing what you think is the best evidence ?Weird.

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All it means is that you are good at finding superficial correspondences but even there you come up with a totally false idea of the ten kings and just force it on the argument by ridiculous technicalities -- two kings that never reigned, oh give me a break.

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Heliodorus reigned a short while and the young Antiochus was co-regent, even if he was too young to meaningfully weird power. Even though Demetrius wasn’t in a position to do anything about it he was still rightfully King. Try finding an equally good correspondence if you think it’s just chance.So no, since even the numbers - seven and three - match, and for a specific individual the fit is hardly superficial it’s amazingly good. That you try to add qualifications to try and disqualify it - when you would strenuously object to similar arguments against an interpretation you favoured - only shows that it is good.

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No, your idea of what is true is just not true at all, it's a manipulation you somehow get away with even in your own mind, though it involves massive self-deception.

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Funny that you can never show any such self-deception then. And yet you can claim that wanting to present the evidence you think best supports your case is a scurrilous motive

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To make your ridiculous claims about the Seleucid empire as the fourth beast, and the Maccabean period as the end of the Daniel prophecy, and the two messiahs nobody has heard of, you have to utterly mangle or destroy or ignore the whole seventy weeks prophecy, you have to twist the clear order of the empires that are intended to be identical, you dismiss the obvious twoness that ties together the images of the Medo-Persian empire, you pretend the fact that the four horns of the goat aren't a part of Greece which the goat represents, you ignore the iron of the fourth beast that ties it to the legs of the statue, you try to turn it into the Seleucid empire by some kind of sophistry I can't even fully remember it's so forced and tricky. NO, YOU DO NOT HAVE ANY KIND OF TRUTH IN ANY OF THIS, it's all a concocted deviation from the clear meaning of the prophecies.

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I’ll start by noting that I did not ignore the iron of the fourth beast that ties it to the legs of the statue. In fact I claim that it is consistent with the fourth beast of Daniel 7 representing the Seleucids.Further I note that my ideas have strong support from the text and that the prophecy is not clearly against any of them. You on the other hand have yet to provide any textual support for a massive gap in the 490 years of Daniel 9 or the alleged change of context in Daniel 11 - or even answered my textual evidence that Daniel 11 continues to talk about the Seleucids and Ptolemys at least as far as 11:40.I can point out that your obvious twoness could easily be a threeness in the case of the statue. Or it could be just incidental, since the interpretation in the text makes nothing of it.I can’t say for sure what you’re mangling when you say that I pretend the fact that the four horns of the goat aren't a part of Greece which the goat represent so I can’t really answer it. As written it certainly isn’t true.If you want to claim that I’m the one pushing falsehoods you’d do better to avoid getting so much wrong.

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I've found some good discussions of the ten horns imagery related to the Roman Empire but it's going to take me a while to get through it.

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I doubt you’ll find a straightforward fit.

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As long as both images are included. I'm reading up on some interpretative views and see that at least some of yours is acknowledged, so I guess you are just getting it all from some liberal sources.

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I’m doing very little consulting of resources for anything but the history. I look at the Bible frequently because the text has to be correctly represented, I look up the actual history but the only reasearch I did with other resources was to find the possible start date for the seventy weeks. And I ended up ignoring that.But then I have a strong case so I don’t need much help.

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As long as your ideas make a mess of the seventy weeks prophecy you cannot say you have strong support from the text.

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Even with the seventy weeks prophecy they do better than yours, and I think the other prophecies ought to count for something.

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I don't see a gap. I see a prophecy of one week or seven years that was not fulfilled in the time span after Daniel. If a prophecy is not yet fulfilled, we consider it awaiting fulfilolment. There is no gap.

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Then, since the 490 weeks prophecy has not been fulfilled I guess you think it can’t even have started yet. Are you really going to give up on the claim that it successfully predicted Jesus so you can get rid of the gap ?

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I'm not sure I can defend the change of context to you although I believe it. As I've been reading through the passages it is pretty subtle. If I run across an explanation that make it clearer I will argue it here.

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If it isn’t clear it probably isn’t there.

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However, if you are including the chest of the statue as the third element, then you have to include the neck of the bear between the shoulders as a third element and the head of the ram between the two horns as a third element. However, two arms are two arms, two shoulders are two shoulders, and two horns are two horns

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That really supports my point with regard to the statue, though I admit I had no idea that you were leaving out the chest! The point is that it is easy to make up interpretations as you have just demonstrated. Note that there is no suggestion of inequality between the arms - your supposedly diagnostic trait, and as I said the explanation doesn’t make anything of the chest and the arms or of there being two arms so you are very likely picking up on something that is purely incidental.

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They occur in the image of Greece and nowhere else, as likewise the four wings and heads of the leopard which is also Greece, but you want to separate them from Greece and make a separate kingdom out of one of them.

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That’s still pretty mangled. But there’s no solid objection underneath it. If the Seleucids are the focus of the prophecy - and there is good evidence for that. And Daniel is about the cultural struggle against Hellenism, and particularly in light of Antiochs’ treatment of the Jews I don’t see it as unreasonable for Daniel 7 to present them as a different beast. Especially as they were an independent kingdom.

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Yes I got sloppy, but being wrong can be corrected.

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Then I guess there’s a chance you’ll see it my way.

I don’t think it helps them much in this case. They still need a valid first fulfilment and even if the second fulfilment is pushed off into the future to make it unfalsifiable it’s still likely to be uncomfortable for those who want to say that the end is coming soon.

These are the two leading interpretations - in popularity.The Maccabean interpretation - favoured by scholars - is that Daniel is about the Maccabean revolt, predicting that God will intervene at the end to set up an eternal Jewish kingdom.The futurist interpretation - favoured by many Christians, especially conservatives - holds that the end times remain in our future more than 2000 years later.Daniel 8 clearly favours the Maccabean interpretation since it clearly refers to that period and explicitly identifies itself as a prophecy dealing with the time of the end.Daniel 10-12 is the same, even the last section of Daniel 11 deals with the wars between the Seleucids and the Ptolomies and Daniel 12:1 goes straight into the end times, when the Jews will be delivered and even the dead will rise (12:1-3)These alone make a very strong case for the Maccabean interpretation. But what if the rest?The dream of the statue is explained as a sequence of four empires, the last of which shall be destroyed by God and replaced with an eternal kingdom supplanting all four. This can easily be read to fit the Maccabean interpretation, giving a sequence of four empires, each one absorbing the previous, and each one ruling over Babylon and Judea, the regions of interest.But what if the futurist interpretation? Their reading favours Rome as the fourth. But that is clearly problematic. First, Rome did not manage to control Babylonia which went to the Parthians. Worse, Rome was destroyed by the Turks. To add to the problems there are a number of other Empires which really should have made the list.
Even stating that Rome will - somehow - be recreated is problematic since there is no hint of that in the prophecy.Daniel 7 is more even, since it is less clear, especially on dates. However the fact that the little horn image is used here as in Daniel 8 - and the same person fits both to a degree that is quite surprising if it were not intended - weighs in favour of the Maccabean interpretation.Daniel 9 is the most problematic, but it is problematic to both sides. The limit of 490 years weighs heavily against futurist interpretations since Christians wish to put the death of Jesus at the 483rd year. The fit is not too bad but not exact - enough to be a good point, but not enough to overcome multiple equally good or better points. However, the remaining events did not occur to the seven year schedule, which is a significant point against, and the futurist interpretation is compelled to invent a gap between the 483rd year and the final 7. And the size of the gap is four times the entire duration of the prophecy and increasing.The only significant problem for the Maccabean interpretation is that the middle period is too short by about 60 years by my best attempt (I could have reduced but only by weakening the argument in other ways). However there are strong correspondences between the events of the last week and events that happened in the Maccabean period. In my judgement this prophecy still favours the Maccabean interpretation. But even if I were to judge it a narrow win for the futurist interpretation, on its own it could not stand against the evidence of Daniel 8 or Daniel 10-12 or Daniel 2 individually, let alone all three.

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The seventy weeks prophecy is divided into segments that each have their own fulfillment as well as pointing together to the great finale. 7 weeks plus 62 weeks plus 1 week is the total.

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In fact the text does not offer a clear fulfilment of the seven weeks unless it is the coming of the Anointed Prince, which is my reading, not yours.

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The first 7 were the time for the rebuilding of Jerusalem after Artaxerxes' command which sent Nehemiah to the city for that purpose.; He organized the people into families to rebuild the wall, each building a section, each armed because it was in "troublous times." The rebuilding took 7 "weeks" or 49 years.

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Did it ? Do you have any reputable source ?

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The prophecy then says another 62 weeks will count to Messiah the Prince. Those were fulfilled to before the crucifixion of Jesus. Jesus fulfilled the 69 weeks from the initial command to rebuild the city after Nebuchadnezzar destroyed it, and His crucifixion was followed by the Roman general Titus who destroyed the city and temple again. Titus is the "prince of the people who are to tome."

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That’s your interpretation but it has problems. Titus isn’t the ruler of Rome at the time (so not a Prince). Also, the destruction came about 30 years later which seems excessive for a seven year period.

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All this leaves the one week of a covenant to be made by the "prince of the people who will come."

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Who you have just said is Titus. Are you expecting him to be resurrected ?

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That hasn't yet come but since 483 years of the prophecy have been fulfilled you can't say that there are 490 unfulfilled years.

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You are confused. If there is no gap between the 483 years and the seven, the last seven years must immediately follow the 483. That is what it means for there to be no gap. You insist that there is no gap. Therefore - if the last seven years haven’t occurred - the start point must be no more than 483 years in our past. And you haven’t suggested one that fits.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

That is not a hole. The prophecy failed, that’s all. It’s not a problem for me.