Rapture: The End-Times Error That Leaves the Bible Behind (19 page)

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.