Prophecy – Page 4 – Jimmy Akin

Who Is the Beast of Revelation? (Video)

One of the most sinister figures in the Bible is the so-called “Beast” from the Book of Revelation. Portrayed as a frightening monster and identified with the ominous number 666, the Beast has been the subject of an enormous amount of discussion down through the centuries.

Countless individuals, both past and future, have been proposed as the true identity of the Beast, but what does the evidence from the Bible say?

In this video, I take a calm, balanced look at the evidence from the perspective of the original Christians reading the book of Revelation in the first century and suggest that the evidence points to an individual that many will find very surprising, especially if they view the book of Revelation as applying almost exclusively to the future.

Here’s the video!

By the way, I’m preparing a Secret Information Club communique in which I “interview” Pope Benedict about the Book of Revelation.

If you’d like to know what Pope Benedict says about Revelation, you should sign up by Friday, May 25, and you’ll get the special interview on Saturday morning.

You should sign up using this form right here:

Or you can use the one in the top right hand margin or by going to www.SecretInfoClub.com.

Major Supernatural Event This Saturday!

Yes! It’s true! A major supernatural event will be occurring *this* Saturday, May 21, 2011!

I’m *not* kidding!

Harold Camping—president of the Protestant radio outreach known as Family Radio—has been predicting for some time that the long-awaited Rapture will occur on May 21st of this year.

Of course, he’s made similar predictions before. He famously got his followers worked up back in 1994 about that being the year the world would end (or something) and, well … y’know.

But this time is different!

There really *is* a major supernatural event occurring this Saturday!

That doesn’t necessarily mean that the reasoning Camping uses to arrive at his conclusion is sound. In fact, it’s not.

If you go to Family Radio’s page explaining why the Rapture is supposed to happen this Saturday, the reasoning used is astronishingly weak. Even incoherent. Dig it:

God declared in 2 Peter 3:8:

But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

God had written in the Holy Bible in Genesis 7:4:

For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

God added in Genesis 7:10-11:

And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the Flood were upon the earth. In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.

The ark that Noah had built was the only place of safety from the destruction of the Flood. Likewise, God’s gracious mercy is the only place of safety from the destruction that is coming on the Day of Judgment.

In 2 Peter 3:8, which is quoted above, Holy God reminds us that one day is as 1,000 years. Therefore, with the correct understanding that the seven days referred to in Genesis 7:4 can be understood as 7,000 years, we learn that when God told Noah there were seven days to escape worldwide destruction, He was also telling the world there would be exactly 7,000 years (one day is as 1,000 years) to escape the wrath of God that would come when He destroys the world on Judgment Day. Because Holy Infinite God is all-knowing, He knows the end from the beginning. He knew how sinful the world would become.

Seven thousand years after 4990 B.C. (the year of the Flood) is the year 2011 A.D. (our calendar).

4990 + 2011 – 1 = 7,000
[One year must be subtracted in going from an Old Testament B.C. calendar date to a New Testament A.D. calendar date because the calendar does not have a year zero.]

Thus Holy God is showing us by the words of 2 Peter 3:8 that he wants us to know that exactly 7,000 years after he destroyed the world with water in Noah’s day, he plans to destroy the entire world forever. Because the year 2011 A.D. is exactly 7,000 years after 4990 B.C. when the flood began, the Bible has given us absolute proof that the year 2011 is the end of the world during the Day of Judgment, which will come on the last day of the Day of Judgment.

Got that?

Me neither.

So let’s employ a technique commonly used by philosophers when trying to analyze someone’s argument. Let’s try to put it in logical form. As near as I can tell, Camping’s argument has a form something like this:

1) Noah’s Flood occurred in 4990 B.C.
2) Noah was warned seven days before the Flood that it would occur, per Genesis 7.
3) A day with the Lord is like a thousand years, per 2 Peter 3.
4) Therefore, 7,000 years after Noah’s Flood some great, Flood-like judgment will occur.
5) 4990 B.C. + 7000 -1 = A.D. 2011.
6) Therefore, the end of the world will occur in 2011.

Camping has other arguments zeroing in on May 21st as the date for the Rapture and for October 21st for the final end of the world (if I understand correctly), but before messing with days, let’s first see if his argument concerning years holds water.

The first thing to be remarked about the argument as I’ve put it above is that it’s not in a logically valid form. The premises do not entail the conclusions. I could fix that by rephrasing and introducing some extra, hidden premises, but Camping’s logic is so obscure that I don’t want to go too far beyond what he explicitly says. So let’s simply look at the premises of the argument and see how likely they are to be true, remembering that if even one premise is false then the whole argument is unsound (and that’s if it had a valid form to begin).

Premise 1, that the Flood occurred in 4990 B.C. is an idiosyncratic claim on Camping’s part. You’ll note that this date is earlier than the conventional Protestant Ussher chronology, which had the world beginning in 4004 B.C. and had the Flood occurring around 2348 B.C. Camping rejects the Ussher dating, and I can’t fault him for that. I reject it myself, as do most Protestants these days, because it is based on unsound methodology and results in unlikely, unprovable, and over-precise dates.

Unfortunately, I have no more confidence in Camping’s dating, which also strikes me as unlikely, unprovable, and over-precise. I don’t know what house of cards he has supporting that date, but I view basing any argument regarding the end of the world on this date as extremely shaky.

Premise 2, that Genesis depicts Noah being told that the Flood was going to begin in seven days (this was after he’d been given an earlier warning and built the ark) is true.

Premise 3, that Peter states that a day with the Lord is like a thousand years is also true.

But can we infer from this that some Flood-like judgment would occur 7,000 years after the original Flood?

Not on your life.

For a start, why zero-in on the warning Noah got seven days before everything started happening? Why not focus instead on the earlier warning he got? Why not at some other time in this narrative? The proposed starting point is arbitrary.

For another thing, why suppose that there’s any kind of prophetic significance to this at all? There is nothing in the text telling us that these seven days, or any span of time mentioned in the narrative, is a scale-model prophecy of when the end of the world will take place relative to the Flood. This is sheer supposition.

What’s more, why should the scale be a thousand years to a day? This is a notorious bugaboo with predictions of the end of the world. Over and over different interpreters pick out some random mention of days in the Old Testament, multiply it by a thousand years, and then declare some prophesied even must occur on the corresponding date.

It’s true that 2 Peter says that a day is as a thousand years with the Lord, this doesn’t give us a license to take any mention of a day and interpret it as a thousand years. Quite the opposite! The exact same passage also says the reverse: That a thousand years is like a day with God (per Psalm 90:4). In other words, time is meaningless with God. He’s an eternal being who can find as much experience in a day as we would in a thousand years and who can encompass huge spans of time like a thousand years in what is only a moment for him. Rather than providing a license to multiply any reference to a day as code for a thousand year prophetic period, this verse is actually a warning against trying to determine God’s timetable for events. That timetable is unpredictable because we cannot know what temporal calculus God is applying to particular prophecies.

Camping’s use of this verse is thus not only over-precise but flatly contrary to the literal meaning of the verse!

And would be even if the seven days mentioned Genesis 7 were a prophetic scale model, which we have no reason to think.

And if those days were prophetic in some way, why treat them and only them in such a way? What God says is that in seven days he would start flooding for 40 days and 40 nights. Does that mean that once the judgment starts it will go on for 40,000 years?

Camping doesn’t think so. He’s got the final end coming in October. This only underscores the arbitrary nature of the figure he has picked out and multiplied. If the seven days mentioned must be literally multiplied by 1,000 years, why should the 40 days also mentioned in the same passage not be similarly multiplied?

Camping does, at least, avoid the trap of thinking that there’s a “year zero” on our timeline. There’s not. It jumps from 1 B.C. to A.D. 1, so he gets points for that. Not all end-time speculators have been so fortunate on that one.

But even if we were to grant all of the foregoing, even if there were some big Flood-like event scheduled to occur 7,000 years after a 4,990 B.C. Flood, why would it have to be the end of the world? Why not just Another Big Judgment?

Even that is giving him too much credit, however. The fact is that this whole prediction is a house of cards. It’s based on over-precise, unknowable dates, arbitrary starting points, arbitrary parallelisms, invalid logic, and a multiplication factor that is wrenched out of context and used in a way flatly contrary to the clear meaning of the text.

Given that his overall year calculation is so shot through with holes, we need not be detained by his more precise datings of the Rapture or the final end. (I should also note that Catholics do not typically use the term “Rapture,” though they do acknowledge the reality of the event St. Paul mentions in 1 Thessalonians 4:17, though it is seen as occurring at the Second Coming of Christ at the end of the world, not before an earthly millennium.)

The whole thing is comic—but it is also tragic, because many people have been misled by Camping, and some have been misled into spending vast sums of money in support of his advertising campaign, telling their friends and co-workers that the world is about to end, and generally bringing scorn on the cause of Christ.

As St. Paul wrote: “It is written, ‘The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you’” (Rom. 2:24).

You have to admire the courage of people like this gentleman who spent his life savings promoting these speculations, but not their wisdom.

God help everyone who bought into this come Sunday morning.

Of course, that’s not to say Christ couldn’t come back on Saturday. I don’t see the signs being right for that, but who am I to say it couldn’t happen?

Harold Camping is right, though, that a major supernatural event will be happening this Saturday.

One of my godsons is being confirmed!

Congratulations, James!

So … what do you think?

ISRAEL: Whose Land Is It Anyway? (Pt. 1)

Recently we were discussing the Helen Thomas broujaja and the question of who “owns” the land of Israel/Palestine inevitably arose.

I’m not going to solve that long-standing and thorny question in this blog post, but I can offer some considerations that need to be taken into account when forming an opinion on the subject.

First let me note that there is room for different opinions, here. The issue is a complex one, and people of good will can take different positions—regarding the founding of the modern state of Israel, regarding its role in God’s plan, and regarding what should happen with it in the future.

In previous comboxes, some readers asserted that support for Zionism is so important that opposition to Zionism ipso facto makes one an anti-Semite. This claim is etymologically ironic in that many of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine are, in fact, Semites, but even allowing for this irony, it is simply not true. Zionism has been and remains controversial within the Jewish community itself.

Just to eliminate potential confusion at the outset, let’s define our terms. I will be using the term “Zionism” in two senses: (1) The belief that the modern state of Israel should have been founded and (2) the belief that the modern state of Israel should continue to exist. There are other ways in which the term can be and historically has been used, but these are the two ideas that we will interact with here.

Note that one can be a Zionist in one sense but not the other. One could be a Zionist in sense (2) only and hold that, while the modern state of Israel should not have been created, now that it has been, it has a right to defend itself and to continue to exist. On the other hand, one could be a Zionist in sense (1) only and hold—for example—that, while it was right to create the modern state of Israel, that state has morally forfeited its right to exist due to human rights violations or that while it may have been right to found the state of Israel in the 20th century, if unstable Arab states start getting nukes and a regional nuclear war is about to start then the best thing for the welfare of the Jewish people would be to leave the region.

Many Jewish people today are Zionists in both sense (1) and sense (2), though not all. There are quite a number who are sense (2) only Zionists, and an even-more-nuclear-future could give rise to a significant number of sense (1) only Zionists.

Some Jewish people are Zionists in neither sense (1) nor sense (2). This is the case, for example, with the gentlemen pictured, who are members of Neturei Karta, who hold a view that was quite common among Orthodox Jews prior to the founding of Israel.

This view is that the Jewish people should not try to control the land of Palestine on their own and that they should regain statehood there only through the coming and the actions of the Messiah. Trying to take control of Palestine prior to that point, on this view, constitutes a usurpation of God’s plan and is viewed as a violation of the three oaths held to regulate relations between the Jewish people and the nations during the present age.

Neturei Karta is by no means the only Jewish group holding this view, BTW.

These people are not anti-Semites. They don’t even deny that the Jewish people have a special title to the land of Palestine. They simply see the legitimate control of this land as an eschatological reality that should not be confused with contemporary Zionist aspirations.

I thus hope that the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is a little more clear and that we can discuss the issue without people wanting to automatically play the anti-Semitism card.

That said: Who owns the land?

There are two main perspectives from which this question needs to be evaluated: the prophetic and the ethical. In this post we’ll look at the prophetic perspective.

Many here in America have reflexively treated the prophetic aspect of the question as unambiguous and definitive: God promised Israel the land in the Old Testament, and so it’s theirs. Case closed.

But prophesy often is not so straightforward in its interpretation or application. God also made it clear that, if Israel committed certain sins—or sins of a certain character and magnitude—that it would be dispossessed of its land, at least for periods of time. And there are passages warning the Jewish people to submit to their conquerors and that they will not be restored to the land for a set time and things like that.

There is also the question of the way in which many Old Testament prophesies have found fulfillment through Christ in ways that would not have been expected previously. The impact that this phenomenon has on the promises regarding the land is something that cannot be ignored.

For its part, the Catholic Church acknowledges that the Jewish people still have a special role in God’s plan. That’s something I’ve written about before. But the Church does not teach that the Jewish people have a right to possess the land of the modern state of Israel in the present day by divine promise. In fact, the Holy See has studiously avoided saying that.

It has even gone so far, in its 1993 Fundamental Agreement with Israel, to state:

The Holy See, while maintaining in every case the right to exercise its moral and spiritual teaching-office, deems it opportune to recall that, owing to its own character, it is solemnly committed to remaining a stranger to all merely temporal conflicts, which principle applies specifically to disputed territories and unsettled borders [art. 11:2].

In its specific application, this passage is referring to disputed territories like the West Bank and Gaza rather than to the territory of Israel as a whole, but the same principle applies in general. The Holy See treats the question of what people have title to what territory as a temporal affair and thus something that goes beyond the Church’s purview. The Church can certainly raise moral objections to various courses of action, like trying to forcibly kick out the people who currently have title to a territory. But the question of who has title is treated as a temporal rather than theological issue. The Church does not hold that any particular people has an immutable divine right to a particular territory.

This is not to say that a Catholic could not hold that Israel does have a right to the land in the present day due to God’s promise. That is an opinion within the realm of permitted theological speculation. But it is not something the Church has signed off on. The Church has remained conspicuously neutral on that theological question as it applies in our age.

One could thus hold the opinion that the Jewish people have a right to that land in our day, that they have a right to the land but not in our day (perhaps at the Second Coming or near it, if we are not now near it), or that they no longer have a special right to the land. Each view is permitted.

This deals with the subject from the prophetic perspective. What about the ethical one?

That will be the subject of our next post.

In the meantime: What are your thoughts?

Metasearch=Preterism

A reader writes:

Hey, I have a couple of questions about preterism. I’ve been trying to figure out what preterism is, but I’m having a hard time finding any good resources on the web. Most of the websites are terribly unorganized. But what exactly is preterism, why do preterists beleive what they do, and why do they claim that if Jesus didn’t come back in 70ad that we are indeed still under the law?

I normally have an easy time becoming abreast of issues like this, but none of my books mention it, and I hear you’re a supercomputer that can do an internal metasearch for things like this.

I’ll do the best I can.

First, as to what preterism is, it is the position that the great majority of the prophecies in the Bible have already been fulfilled. Some individuals seeking to call themselves preterists, however, maintain that all the prophecies in the Bible (including the Second Coming) have been fulfilled.

Because this leads to a confusion of terms, it is better to refer to this second group by a second term. The second term that is coming to be used for them is pantelists, meaning "those who believe that all (pan) prophecies are at an end (telos)."

The distinction is important, for the question of whether or not the Second Coming has happened is the difference between orthodoxy and heresy. Pantelists are heretics. Other preterists are not heretics (unless they are heretical for other reasons, e.g., by denying the Real Presence).

As to why preterists believe what they do, a very strong case can be made that many of the prophetic texts of the Bible have already been fulfilled. I write about this in some articles that are available online. For example, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

The problem with pantelists is that they take this and push it too far, claiming that all the prophecies of Scripture have been fulfilled when the Second Coming clearly has not been. The fact that the Second Coming took place in A.D. 70 is infallibly excluded by the Nicene Creed [A.D. 325, 381], which states that Christ "will return [future tense] to judge the living and the dead."

As to preterists saying that Jesus returned in A.D. 70, it is not clear to me which kind you are talking about. Pantelists would claim that the Second Coming, the resurrection of the dead, and the inauguration of the ternal order all occurred in this year, which is all contrary to the faith for reasons that we have seen and that requires a radical reinterpretation of each of these concepts.

Many (though not all) ordinary preterists, by contrast, would say that a coming of Christ occurred in A.D. 70, but not the Second Coming, which still remains in the future.

These preterists commonly argue that the book of Revelation deals with the destruction of Jerusalem, which happend in A.D. 70. According to the theory of these (not all) preterists, Revelation depicts Jerusalem as the "Great Whore" or the "city where their Lord was crucified" (Rev. 11:8), whose fall is depicted in chapter 18 of the book. Chapter 19 presents a coming of Christ, and chapter 20 speaks of a very long period (symbolically represented as a "thousand years") in which we are presumably living.

Since the fall of the Whore, the coming of Christ, and the advent of the thousand years seem causally connected and piled on top of each other, it is plausible to suggest–given this interpretation–that the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 was due to a coming of Christ and that it inaugurated the present age in which Christianity–now separated from Judaism–has spread dramatically.

We know that, in his earthly ministry, Jesus placed significant stress on A.D. 70, when the Temple in Jerusalem would be destroyed. This destruction is mentioned in all four of the gospels, so it seems to have quite a bit of significance in God’s mind.

The question is: If this interpretation of Revelation is correct, what kind of coming of Jesus occurred in A.D. 70? Pantelists claim (contrary to the faith and with massive reinterpretation of the Second Coming) that it was the Second Coming itself. Ordinary preterists, though, are more modest and claim that it was a lesser coming, of the kind that the Old Testament frequently speaks of God having, symbolically "visiting" his people with either blessings or cursings in tow, based on whether they are keeping or violating his Law.

On this hypothesis, Christ (as God) symbolically "visited" Jerusalem in judgment for its sins (notably, his own crucifixion; cf. Rev. 11:8) through the Jewish War of the late A.D. 60s that culminated in the sacking of Jerusalem and the burning of its Temple in A.D. 70, just as Jesus has prophesied. There may have been apparitional or other phenomena associated with this event, though it did not amount to the Second Coming that is still in our future. It was a coming of Jesus, but not the Second Coming that he elsewhere prophesied.

As to why the individuals that you have encoutnered link this coming in A.D. 70 and the end of the Law, I can conjecture. I haven’t encountered this claim myself, but since Jesus said

Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished [Matt 5:17-18].

one might conclude that the Law of Moses (the Law that Jesus is talking about here) would still be binding until "all is accomplished," which these folks would then interpret (pantelistically) as "all biblical prophecies are fulfilled."

There are several problems with this:

The Law of Moses was only ever binding on Jewish people to whom it was given. It was not binding on the gentiles. Thus unless "we" are ethnically Jewish, "we" are not bound by the Law of Moses because we were never bound by the Law of Moses.
The assumption that "all is accomplished" means "all biblical prophecies are fulfilled" is by no means certain. Jesus came to clarify the Law, and so it may mean "until I have finished clarifying what God truly wants." Jesus also came in obedience to the Law, and so it may mean "until I have completely fulfilled the Law through my life, death, and resurrection." Jesus also may have only the events of his First Coming in view, in which case he may mean "until my First Coming–my life, death, and resurrection–are accomplished."
Whichever way one interprets these matters, St. Paul (who died before A.D. 70) seems to clearly regard the Law of Moses as already fulfilled and thus something that has passed away by his day, for he writes:

And you, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, having canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him. Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath. These are only a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ [Col. 2:13-17].

Hope this helps!