1) PROPHECIES IN THE FORM OF STORIES IN THE BOOK OF DANIEL
2) THE TREE STUMP AND THE TEMPLE MOUNT
3) THE WRITING ON THE WALL
4) DANIEL IN THE LIONS' DEN
5) THE REST OF THE BOOK OF DANIEL
6) THE IRON AND THE CLAY IN THE BOOK OF DANIEL
7) CONCLUSION ABOUT THE BOOK OF DANIEL
8) THE BOOK OF ESTHER
9) THE TEN KINGS
10) THE BIBLE'S SEVENTY SEVENS
11) THE STORY OF THE GOLDEN GATE
12) JOB AND JOSEPH
13) THE TOWER OF BABEL
14) THE WORMWOOD PROPHECY
15) WAS JESUS FORETOLD BY NAME?
16) PROPHECY OF EXILE IN THE BOOK OF JEREMIAH
17) CROSSING THE RED SEA
18) THE PENTAGON PROPHECY
19) THE PERSIANS AND BABYLON
20) THE MEANING OF NOAH'S ARK
21) THE APPLE TREE PROPHECY
1) PROPHECIES IN THE FORM OF STORIES IN THE BOOK OF DANIEL
The Old Testament Book of Daniel contains prophecies in the form of stories, all of which revolve around the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, or his successors. The Book of Daniel is like an Old Testament version of the Book of Revelation. The Book of Daniel is longer in the Catholic Bible, but what we will see here is in both Catholic and Protestant Bibles.
Daniel Chapter 2 is the well-known story about Nebuchadnezzar's dream of a statue whose parts were made of different materials, and which was destroyed by a massive stone which fell from the sky. Nebuchadnezzar's kingdom is the head, and the rest of the body of the statue are the successive great kingdoms which would come afterward. Daniel is very much like the earlier Joseph, who could explain the dreams of Pharaoh in Egypt in the Book of Genesis.
As rulers of the known world, Babylon is succeeded by by the Medes and the Persians who defeat and destroy it. They are in turn succeeded by Greece, who is then succeeded by Rome. Rome is mysterious in that it is vanquished, like the others, but then later returns. It's return is in the form of the European Union, which occupies approximately the same territory that the Roman Empire once did, in the Last days of the world. The toes of the statue are made of iron mixed with clay, which do not mix very well, and thus the "toes" of the Roman Empire are the different European nations that were carved from it's former territory.
Egypt is missing from the list of successive great powers, but we now know that by the time this prophecy was made Egypt's time as a great power had already passed, and the same goes for Assyria which had been defeated and supplanted by Babylon by the time this prophecy was made.
The stone which fell and destroyed the statue represents, of course, the Kingdom of God which will destroy the power of the nations, which do not follow his will, and will reign over the earth during the Millennium.
The Book of Daniel is all about prophecy and many Christians have discerned the story of another statue in the next chapter, Chapter 3, as a prophecy of the image of the future Antichrist that was also described much later in the Book of Revelation, Chapter 13. The dimensions of the statue are given as 60 cubits high, and 6 cubits wide. The number of musical instruments that are given as a signal to everyone to fall and worship the statue is 6. This gives us the number 666, which is given in the Book of Revelation as the number of the Antichrist. But this was written many centuries before the Book of Revelation.
This story in the Book of Daniel about this golden image set up by Nebuchadnezzar has no archaeological or historical evidence that it ever took place. That is because it is a prophecy told as a story, and is a forerunner of the later prophecy in the Book of Revelation. It also relates to the chapter preceding it, about the dream of the statue representing the kingdoms of the world, which is ultimately destroyed by God. Even after having this dream interpreted, Nebuchadnezzar decides to set up his own statue which must be worshiped, thus making himself into a god just as the Antichrist will do.
Also part of the picture is that Nebuchadnezzar was the king of Babylon, and Chapter 18 of the Book of Revelation describes a "Mystery Babylon" that will be "utterly destroyed in one hour", during the Last days of the world and the time of the Antichrist, just as the statue representing the wicked kingdoms of the world was destroyed by the stone from the sky, after it's time had been fulfilled. We saw that in the posting on this blog, "The End Of The World As We Know It".
2) THE TREE STUMP AND THE TEMPLE MOUNT
But what about the next chapter, Chapter 4? This is a third story involving Nebuchadnezzar, this time a dream about a great tree that is cut down. The tree represents Nebuchadnezzar. Even though the tree is cut down, it is not gone forever because a band of iron and bronze is put around the stump of the tree, to preserve it so that it can be restored.
What happens next in the story is that Nebuchadnezzar refuses to repent of his pride in the greatness of his kingdom, and to acknowledge the supremacy of God. Nebuchadnezzar goes insane, loses his authority, and for 7 years is reduced to living in the open field and eating grass like an animal. Finally he remembers God, acknowledges his supremacy, and has his kingdom restored to him.
But, like the story in Chapter 3, there is no historical evidence at all for the 7 year interruption in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, and this has disturbed many Christians over the years.
That is because this is a prophecy being told in the form of a story. A large tree does not grow back from it's stump after being cut down, and placing a metal band around the stump would not be of any help. So, the story must mean something else.
What about the Temple Mount in Jerusalem? The Temple was destroyed during the uprising against Roman rule, which was one of the nations represented in the statue in Chapter 2, but the artificial mount that it was built on was preserved by the retaining wall around it. The Temple is expected to have to be rebuilt for the Last days and the time of the Antichrist. We visited the Temple Mount in the posting on this blog, "Esau And The Temple Mount".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Mount#/media/File:Israel-2013(2)-Aerial-Jerusalem-Temple_Mount-Temple_Mount_(south_exposure).jpg
Do you see the connection here? the Temple is represented by the tree. The tree is cut down, the Temple is destroyed, but the "stump" of the tree remains, which is the Temple Mount, preserved by the "band" around it, which is the retaining wall built by King Herod in order to enlarge Mount Moriah, on which the First Temple, which was ordered destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar was built. The Second Temple, known as the Temple of Zerubbabel, was rebuilt in the same spot, after the Jews returned from the exile in Babylon to which Nebuchadnezzar sent them.
Much later, King Herod dismantled the Second Temple, which had never been as impressive as the First Temple, in order to rebuild the magnificent Third Temple. He expanded Mount Moriah by building the massive retaining wall around it, and filling in the gap. The Dome of the Rock is on the site that was once the top of Mount Moriah. The so-called "Western Wall", where Jews go to worship, is the western side of this retaining wall.
In Chapter 4, Nebuchadnezzar's period of insanity lasted 7 years. (Some versions of the Bible translate this as "7 times"). This is also the length of the time of the Antichrist, in the Book of Revelation, to which the Temple Mount, which I see as represented by the stump with the band around it, is so important.
The story of Nebuchadnezzar's period of insanity, and exile from his royal authority, takes place during the Jews' exile from their homeland, in Babylon. The story is thus also an analogy for the Jews of how they will be restored to their homeland when they properly acknowledge God. But it is also a prophecy of the second, and much longer exile, during the Diaspora following the revolt against Roman rule, in 70 AD, which led to the destruction of the Third Temple, the cutting down of the tree, even though the stump with the band around it remained in the form of the Temple Mount with it's retaining wall.
During the first exile, in Babylon, there was this 7 year period in the story of Nebuchadnezzar's exile into the wilderness due to insanity. The end of the second exile, the long Diaspora, results in another 7 year period, the time of the Antichrist. Finally, it all ends with the return of Jesus to earth to begin the Millennium, which was represented in the story in Chapter 2 by the rock that fell to earth and toppled the successive wicked kingdoms of the world.
It has long been understood how the stories about Nebuchadnezzar in Chapters 2 and 3 are really prophecies, but I cannot find any information that the tree, it's stump, and the band around the stump, in Chapter 4 are a prophecy of the Temple, the Temple Mount and, the retaining wall around the Temple Mount, as it seems to me to be certain that it is.
3) THE WRITING ON THE WALL
What about the chapter before the story of the lions' den, Chapter 5? Nebuchadnezzar had apparently died by this time and Belshazzar was having a wild party in the palace of Babylon. Suddenly, a hand appeared and wrote on the wall. The writing read that Belshazzar's kingdom had been weighed in the balance and had been found to be wanting, it would be taken from him and given to the Medes and the Persians. This is a clear reflection back to the inscribing of the Ten Commandments on stone tablets.
Before the night was over, the prophecy would come true. While the party was going on, the army of the Medes and the Persians put a temporary dam across the Euphrates River and got inside the walls of Babylon on the river bed. It was in this successive kingdom that Daniel, one of the Jewish exiles in Babylon, would be appointed as an official before his sentence to the lions' den. The Medes and the Persians were also the second kingdom, following Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, in the statue of Chapter 2.
But if Chapter 2 was about the successive ruling kingdoms, represented by the different parts of the statue, then shouldn't an example be given of how rule would pass from one kingdom to another? This is what the story of the writing on the wall, in Chapter 5, accomplishes. No stone has been found in the ruins of Babylon with any such writing on it, but it fits well into what I see as this series of stories as prophecies.
This sudden destruction of Babylon in Chapter 5 is also a foretelling of the sudden destruction of "Mystery Babylon", far in the future as described in the Book of Revelation and which we saw in the posting on this blog, "The End Of The World As We Know It". This future "Mystery Babylon", like the doomed idolatrous Babylon in Chapter 5, will be suddenly destroyed just when it feels at peace and secure.
One note about this chapter that is not in the Bible. Belshazzar is very perturbed by the sight of the writing appearing on the palace wall in front of him. He offers to make Daniel the "third ruler in the kingdom" if Daniel could interpret the writing. This is because Belshazzar was not actually the king himself. His father, Nabonidus was king, so that Belshazzar himself was the "second ruler in the kingdom". This is why he could only offer to make Daniel the "third ruler in the kingdom".
4) DANIEL IN THE LIONS' DEN
The next question becomes, if Jesus is so important to God's plan then shouldn't he be included in these prophecies, told in the form of stories? The rock falling from the sky in Chapter 2, which topples the statue that represents the successive empires, is widely understood to represent the future Kingdom of Jesus on earth. But this prophecy does not go into detail about exactly who Jesus is.
But what about another story in the Book of Daniel, the story of Daniel in the lions' den in the next chapter, Chapter 6? This is similar to the story of the idolatrous statue and the furnace, in Chapter 3. By the time of this story, Babylon has fallen and Daniel is an important official in the court of the Persians, who were represented as the next empire in line in the statue of Chapter 2.
Opponents of Daniel accuse him of worshiping his God, instead of the king. Daniel is sentenced to be thrown into the lions' den. The king himself does not want Daniel to be sentenced, suffers a sleepless night after Daniel is thrown in, and had advised Daniel that surely his God would protect him. But yet justice had to be done. The king rushes to the den at sunrise, and Daniel is still alive. The king is delighted that the lions have done him no harm. This proved that Daniel's God was the real God, and so he was not guilty of idolatry. His accusers were then thrown into the lions' den, where they were killed immediately.
But why shouldn't this be a prophecy told in the form of a story also? This story, as well as the rest of the Book of Daniel, was told many centuries before the time of Jesus. Just as the king did not actually want Daniel to be executed, so God did not want Jesus to be crucified, but justice had to be done--not for anything that Jesus was guilty of, but to pay the just price for our sins.
Just as Daniel made an unlikely emergence from the lions' den the following morning, so Jesus rose from his tomb on the first Easter. Daniel's false accusers, who resented the high position that the king had given him, would later be mirrored in Jesus' accusers, who were motivated by envy of his popularity. The lions represent Jesus' future Roman executioners.
The course of the story is very similar to that of Chapter 2, the idolatrous statue and the furnace, but my conclusion is that Chapter 2 is about the Tribulation Period, with the idolatrous image that will be set up by the Antichrist that is foretold in Chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation, while the story of the lions' den is about the future mission of Jesus. All of the prophetic stories in the Book of Daniel before this end with the coming of Jesus, so there would logically be a story included about the meaning of Jesus.
5) THE REST OF THE BOOK OF DANIEL
In the next chapter after the story of the lions' den, Chapter 7, Daniel himself has a mysterious dream, rather than interpreting a dream for a king. This dream is about a succession of four beasts, and these represent the same succession of empires that are described as the parts of the statue in Chapter 2. But the fourth beast has ten horns, and these are the same as the ten toes of the statue in Chapter 2.
Chapter 7 gives more information about what these ten mean than Chapter 2 does. Another horn arises among the ten horns that "has eyes and speaks boastfully". This new horn subdues three of the ten horns. Far in the future, In Chapter 17 of the Book of Revelation, St. John is also given a vision of ten horns, and describes them as "ten kings who give their power and authority to the beast". The Antichrist is referred to as "The Beast", in the Book of Revelation. This, of course, reflects to Daniel's vision of four beasts. These ten kings are described in Revelation 17 as opposing the Lamb. But the Lamb will defeat them because he is "Lord of Lords and King of Kings".
The Lamb, of course, is Jesus. Just as a lamb was given for sacrifice in Old Testament times, to serve as a propitiation for sins, Jesus was referred to as "The Lamb of God" because his "sacrifice" on the cross paid the price of sin once and for all. Just like the king who had Daniel thrown into the den of lions, God did not want this to happen, but his justice had to be done.
Next, the "Ancient of Days" is described as having "clothing as white as snow and hair as white as wool". Notice that this is exactly the way in which Jesus is described in the first chapter of the Book of Revelation, which was written far in the future. This is identified in Chapter 7 as being the one who will establish God's Kingdom on earth. after defeating the wicked kingdoms. This shows, again, the link between the Book of Daniel and The Book of Revelation. The Book of Daniel was written after the Jews' return from exile, over five hundred years before Christ. Revelation was written well after the time of Jesus, when the apostle John was elderly and in exile on the island of Patmos.
Yet there is a difference between the Books of Daniel and of Revelation. The Book of Daniel, in both the vision of the statue in Chapter 2 and Daniel's vision of the beasts in Chapter 7, describes four kingdoms which will have practical rule over the known world. But the Book of Revelation, Chapter 17, Verse 10, states that there are seven kings, of which five have fallen, one is, and one is yet to come. The Beast, the Antichrist, will be the eighth king who will have rule over the world.
But remember that Daniel is only looking forward, while Revelation is reviewing what has happened in the past, the kingdoms that have had rule over the known world, as well as looking forward. Egypt and Assyria were also great kingdoms that had practical rule over the known world, but came before the Book of Daniel. So, these are included in the past kingdoms of Revelation but not in the future kingdoms of Daniel.
In Revelation Chapter 17, Verse 10, the kingdom that is, at the time Revelation was written, is, of course, Rome. The five that had dominated the world, but had fallen by this time, were Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia (with Media) and, Greece. The one that is to come, the seventh, is the future restoration of Rome, which we see in the European Union. The Eighth, the Antichrist or the Beast, will come from that restoration of Rome.
We know this because the ten toes and the ten horns of Daniel are from the fourth kingdom, which is Rome and the Antichrist is the horn in Daniel Chapter 7 that will emerge from these. This leaves the only possible explanation of the ten, which are also defined in both Daniel and revelation as ten kings which will come from the fourth kingdom, as European nations which arose from the Roman Empire. The meaning of the "toes made of iron and clay", in the statue of Daniel Chapter 2 is that iron and clay do not mix well, and so the European nations will remain as separate entities after the fall of Rome. When they are put back together, as the European Union, it will comprise another kingdom and it is from this that the Antichrist will emerge. The three kings that are subdued by the Antichrist are three kings that resist his rule, possibly including Britain which voted to leave the European Union. The ten kings are core members of the European Union.
After this, in Daniel Chapter 8, we find actual prophecy, rather than prophecy as fictional stories. There is a ram, a mighty beast with two horns. But one horn is longer than the other, even though it came up later. This ram represents the kingdom of the Medes and the Persians. At the time of the fall of Assyria, the Medes were the rulers, with the Persians as a vassal state. But the Persians overcame their masters, so that the Medes and the Persians were still together, nut now the Persians were the rulers. The lesser, but older, horn of the ram is the Medes, while the newer horn is the Persians.
Another beast appears, in Daniel Chapter 8, this time it is a goat with a prominent horn. The goat charges at the ram, who is unable to resist it's power. But after the goat displaces the ram as the new power, it's prominent horn is broken into four pieces. One of the pieces mysteriously is given control of God's people and the daily sacrifice.
The goat represents Greece, which defeated and supplanted the Medes and the Persians as the dominant power. The breaking of the horn in pieces represents the breaking up of Alexander's empire after his death. One of the fragments of the Greek Empire was the Seleucids, who gained control of the Jews and put a stop to their daily sacrifices, which led to what is known as the Maccabean Revolt, in which the Jews managed to briefly attain independence for the first time in centuries, until the Romans gained control.
This chapter also leads to the time of the Antichrist, which makes it appear as if he has roots in Greece as well as in the future Rome. But remember that so much of what Rome was had been rooted in Greece. Much of the Roman pantheon of gods, were the earlier Greek gods but with different names, also that Greece is in the European Union.
Remember that all of this is amazing prophecy centuries before the events actually happened.
The next chapter of the Book of Daniel, Chapter 9, describes the well-known "seventy sevens" of years. This is the time from the building of the Second Temple, after the Jews' return from exile in Babylon, to the coming of the "Anointed One", which is a prophecy of Jesus and the time frame fits perfectly. Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed the First Temple, before taking the Jews into exile. But this accounts for only 69 sevens. There is one seven, of years, left over. This refers to the seven years of the Antichrist.
Chapter 9 of the Book of Daniel also has the prophecy, "The people of the ruler who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary". This refers to how, after 69 of the 70 "sevens" of years and the arrival of the "Anointed One" (Jesus), the Romans will destroy the city (Jerusalem) and the sanctuary (the temple), which they did after the Jewish uprising against their rule in 70 AD. "The ruler who is to come" again refers to the Antichrist which will emerge from a union of the nations which once made up the Roman Empire.
Daniel Chapter 11 prophecies about the future "King of the North and King of the South". This is about the two fragments of Alexander's Greek Empire which would jostle over control of the Jews. The "King of the South" are the Ptolemy dynasty, which ruled Egypt and controlled Israel first. "The King of the North" is the Seleucids, who eventually took control of Israel from the Ptolemies. The most famous name to emerge from the Ptolemaic Dynasty is that of Cleopatra, but all of their queen actually had this title.
But this chapter, once again, comes around to the Antichrist and the "Time of the End", where there will also be a "King of the North" and a "King of the South". This looks to another prophet of the Last Days, Ezekiel, who, as we saw in the posting, "The End Of The World As We Know It", foretells the invasion of Israel in the Last Days by a "powerful enemy to the north", with allies to the south of Israel.
6) THE IRON AND THE CLAY IN THE BOOK OF DANIEL
The history of Europe actually revolves around two components, and the relationship between these two components. These are the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire came first, and the papacy sees itself as the heir of this empire, through which Christianity spread. But during the early Middle Ages, the eastern part of Christendom became more independent. The pope formed an empire, that was to be under the control of the papacy, the purpose of which was to bring the eastern domains back into line. On Christmas day in the year 800, Charlemagne was crowned as Holy Roman Emperor in the old St. Peters Basilica.
But the plan didn't work. The eastern Christians split away, in what is known as the Great Schism of 1054, after representatives of the pope had excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius. Meanwhile, many of the Holy Roman Emperors defied the authority of the pope, and the struggle between the two became known as the Investiture Controversy.
That would be the beginning of Europe being shaped by what we could call the "frenemy", a mixture of friend and enemy, relationship between the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. I can't think of a better word to describe it.
The eastern Christians formed a separate branch of the religion from the Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox Church. The historical precedent for this was the splitting of the Roman Empire. After the fall of the western Roman Empire, with it's capital at Rome, the eastern part of the empire would continue on for another thousand years.
It would be known as Byzantium and it's capital would be at Constantinople. It would speak Greek, rather than the Latin of the western part of the empire. Following the Schism of 1054, Constantinople would be the center of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
But a new empire formed to the east of Byzantium and began expanding. This was the Ottoman Empire. Finally, in 1453, the Ottomans conquered Constantinople and renamed it as Istanbul. The Ottomans were Moslems and the center of the Eastern Orthodox Church ended up shifting far to the north, to a place called Moscow.
Moscow became known as the "Third Rome". The original Rome, the headquarters of the Catholic Church was, of course, the First Rome. Upon the split of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Constantinople became the center of that church and thus became the "Second Rome".
With the Eastern Orthodox Church split away, the rivalry between the heritages of the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire began to play out in the remaining Catholic domain of Europe.
Nearly five hundred years after the Great Schism of 1054, there was another split in the Catholic Church. The Reformation began in what is now Germany, which was in the heart of the Holy Roman Empire. The territory of the Holy Roman Empire was generally to the north of what had been the Roman Empire and I think it is safe to say that the split brought about by the Reformation was rooted in the historic rivalry between the two historic empires of Europe.
Earlier, the so-called "Babylonian Captivity of the Church", when French popes had moved the papacy to Avignon, was not a split in the church, as were the Reformation and the Schism of 1054, but was simply a matter of where the headquarters of the Catholic Church was going to be located.
Britain, which had been part of the Roman Empire but not the Holy Roman Empire, went to the Protestant side during the Reformation. But the Anglican Church that resulted, as a compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism, was among the branches of Protestantism that, along with Lutheranism, stayed closest to the liturgy of the Catholic Church.
A major deciding factor in the Reformation was language. Those areas that spoke Germanic (Northern European) languages almost all went with the Protestants. Those areas that spoke Romance languages almost all remained Catholic. This is reminiscent of the earlier split between the Latin and Greek languages after the end of the Roman Empire. But the Reformation was centered on the areas of northern Europe that were part of the Holy Roman Empire, but had not been part of the Roman Empire.
The older fault line between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church remains as well. The split in Ukraine, between the eastern and western parts of the country that have recently been in a civil war, is a reflection that, nearly a thousand years ago, the eastern part went with the Eastern Orthodox Church while the western part remained Catholic. The same can be said of the historic rivalry between Poland and Russia because Poland chose to remain Catholic.
Along came Napoleon. It was his conquests that brought the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire to an end. Napoleon later declared himself as a Roman emperor. "I am a true Roman emperor. I am of the best race of the Caesars".
Napoleon was crowned in a lavish ceremony in Notre Dame Cathedral. The pope was there to crown him, as another pope had crowned Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor just over a thousand years before. But just as the pope was about to put the crown on his head, Napoleon snatched the crown from the pope and put it on himself.
Napoleon's conquests brought the Holy Roman Empire to an end. He declared himself as a Roman emperor. Unlike the first Holy Roman Emperor, Napoleon put himself before the pope by snatching the crown from him and putting it on himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronation_of_Napoleon_I#/media/File:NapoleanCoronationDavid.jpg
What this amounts to then, in the view of European history as the tension between the two historic empires, is that Napoleon represented the heritage of the Roman Empire reemerging and striking back at the Holy Roman Empire, and bringing it to an end.
Napoleon's invasion of Russia did not fit into this competition between the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. Russia represented the "Third Rome", after the center of the Eastern Orthodox Church moved there. Napoleon's campaign represented a reenactment of the original split between the eastern and western halves of the original Roman Empire. That did not involve the Holy Roman Empire, which was later formed by the pope to rein in the wayward eastern Christians.
Napoleon's time was followed by a limited restoration of the French monarchy, which was followed by the establishment of a republic. Napoleon's nephew, known as Napoleon III, ended up as president of the French republic. He was only allowed one term as president and when it was over, in true Napoleonic style, simply declared the end of the republic and himself as emperor of a revived French Empire, the one established by his uncle.
But the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire wasn't quite finished yet. The German-speaking states across central Europe, which had been the heart of the Holy Roman Empire, were achieving political unity. By far the largest of these states was Prussia.
A war between Prussia and France, the Franco-Prussian War, resulted in the capture of Napoleon III and the final end of the empire of Napoleon, who had declared himself as a Roman emperor. What is known as the German Empire, or Imperial Germany, was actually declared by the victorious Prussians at Versailles.
The Holy Roman Empire was long gone. But the new German emperor, Wilhelm I, was of the House of Hohenzollern, which had been a dynasty in the Holy Roman Empire. The end of Napoleon's empire represented a rejuvenation of the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire, and it's striking back at the heritage of it's historical rival, the Roman Empire.
Notice the composition of the two sides in the First World War. Imperial Germany, at the heart of what had been the Holy Roman Empire, was allied with Austria, which had also been part of the Holy Roman Empire. German-speaking Austria, being shut out of the German federation because it had been the main rival of ultimately victorious Prussia, was now partnered with neighboring Hungary as the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The two would be allied with the Ottoman Empire. This had certainly not been a part of the Holy Roman Empire but it had conquered, and brought to an end, Byzantium which had been the continuation of the eastern Roman Empire. The Ottoman Empire thus fits as a part of the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire, as an ally of it's heritage. Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were known as the Central Powers.
Allied against the Central Powers in the First World War was Russia, France, Britain and, Italy. What do you notice here?
Russia, as we have seen, had been the "Third Rome", as the center of the Eastern Orthodox Church after the 1453 fall of Constantinople. Italy was, of course, the original homeland of the Roman Empire and only the north of Italy had been part of the Holy Roman Empire. Most of France had been to the west of the Holy Roman Empire but had been part of the Roman Empire. Britain had been partially in the Roman Empire but not in the Holy Roman Empire. The Roman Empire actually defined the divisions of Britain, the part that had been occupied was called England, the part to the north that hadn't was called Scotland, the part to the west that hadn't was called Wales.
The First World War was literally a war between the heritage of the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. This time, the Roman Empire emerged victorious.
But the rivalry wasn't over yet. The Weimar Republic that had replaced Imperial Germany after the First World War had been devastated by the economic crash of 1929. Out of the ruins arose another incarnation of the Holy Roman Empire, the Nazis. They referred to themselves as the "Third Reich", Imperial Germany being the Second Reich and the original Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne being the First Reich.
This led to another World War. The alliances were much the same as in the previous war, except that Italy took on a different role. Mussolini came before Hitler as a Fascist and was, in many ways, Hitler's mentor. He was entering the war on the same side as Hitler, the Axis Powers.
Instead of the Roman Italy, as in the First World War, this was the reenactment of the post-Roman Catholic Italy where the pope had created the Holy Roman Empire, and crowned Charlemagne as it's first emperor, even though Mussolini's stated goal was revival of the Roman Empire. Mussolini, actually the creator of the modern Vatican even though he claimed to be an atheist, played the role of Pope Leo and Hitler played the role of Charlemagne.
The Nazis were trying to fulfill the original purpose of the Holy Roman Empire, gathering Europe together and then confronting the east. The deadliest combat the world has ever seen was on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. It was the Third Reich against the Third Rome.
But never forget that the two cannot be entirely separate, just as France and Germany are never entirely separate. Both originated from the Franks, and Charlemagne was a Frank. Napoleon and Hitler were on opposite sides of the rivalry between the two historic empires, but Hitler made a point of visiting Napoleon's Tomb. The founding of Imperial Germany, as a united nation, was actually proclaimed at Versailles and the German emperors, although on the Holy Roman Empire side, took the title of "Kaiser", which means "Caesar".
There is always that "frenemy" relationship between the two. You can see how the balance of power has shifted back and forth, throughout European history. Neither the heritage of the Roman Empire or the Holy Roman Empire has ever gained lasting dominance over the other.
Peaceful modern Europe represents the two sides finally getting along with one another. Notice that the two treaties which founded the European Union are the Treaty of Rome and the later Treaty of Maastricht. In geographic terms, the Treaty of Rome represents the Roman Empire and the Treaty of Maastricht (in the Netherlands) represents the Holy Roman Empire.
Here is some really interesting symbolism.
Notice that the Imperial Banner of the Holy Roman Empire is a double-headed eagle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire#/media/File:Banner_of_the_Holy_Roman_Emperor_with_haloes_(1400-1806).svg
Although Byzantium, and later Russia, were to be enemies of the Holy Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire was actually founded to rein in the wayward Christians of the east, both of them also had the double-headed eagle as their symbol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Rome#/media/File:Palaiologos-Dynasty-Eagle.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Rome#/media/File:Lesser_Coat_of_Arms_of_Russian_Empire.svg
As it would turn out, a double-headed eagle would perfectly represent the relationship between the heritages of these two rival empires, the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. Two rival heads, looking in opposite directions, yet part of the same body.
If the double-headed eagle represents both the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire together, notice how Napoleon's France, representing the heritage of the Roman Empire, and the Second and Third Reichs of Germany, representing the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire, also have eagles as symbols but with only one head.
The one-headed eagle on the coat of arms of Napoleon's empire is looking to it's left.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_French_Empire#/media/File:Imperial_Coat_of_Arms_of_France_(1804-1815).svg
The coat of arms of Imperial Germany, ruled by the kaisers, would have a very similar eagle, but with one head looking to it's right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Empire#/media/File:Wappen_Deutsches_Reich_-_Reichsadler_1889.svg
The Nazi eagle also has one head looking to it's right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranks_and_insignia_of_the_German_Army_(1935%E2%80%931945)#/media/File:Insignias_casco.svg
If we put the two together, we get the double-headed eagle. The major conflicts in Europe have been when one tries to gain dominance over the other. This is very reminiscent of the early biblical rivalry between the two twins, Jacob and Esau, that we saw in "Esau And The Temple Mount".
So, what does this have to do with the Book of Daniel?
In the second chapter of the Book of Daniel, he interprets a dream that Nebuchadnezzar has had. But it is actually a prophecy told in the form of a story. Nebuchadnezzar had dreamed of a statue, which represented four successive empires that were to dominate the world. Nebuchadnezzar himself, with his Babylon, was the head of gold. As time goes on, each successive empire was of a metal that was inferior to the one before it. From gold to silver to bronze to iron.
The legs were made of iron, and represented the fourth empire. The feet of the statue are a continuation of this fourth empire, but are made of iron mixed with clay. Since iron does not mix very well with clay, there is some unity between the two, but the unity is "partly strong and partly brittle".
The four successive empires that were to dominate the known world are very clear. They are Babylon, Media-Persia, Greece and, Rome. Each conquered the one before it.
The iron, as the fourth empire represented by the statue, represents Rome. The Romans widely used metals and iron was a strong metal used in making weapons.
Clay, in contrast, is not something of which weapons were made. Clay was used in building and for writing tablets. This fits the character of the Holy Roman Empire, which wasn't a "conquering" empire and never fulfilled it's original purpose of regaining control over the eastern Christians. It's accomplishments were more in building magnificent cathedrals and in the intellectual realm.
Doesn't this perfectly fulfill the prophecy in the Book of Daniel that the feet of the statue will be made of "iron mixed with clay" so that it would have some unity, but would be "partly strong and partly brittle". There are two elements to the feet, iron and clay, just as there have been two major elements to the history of Europe that has prevented it's lasting unity, the heritages of the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire.
Also notice that the feet in the prophecy in the Book of Daniel would have ten toes. Later in the book, Chapter 7, there are the ten kings that are represented by ten horns. That is because this continue of the kingdom made of iron in the statue is the same as the one that ultimately produces the ten kings. The four beasts coming out of the sea in Chapter 7 represent the same four successive empires as the statue in Chapter 2.
In the prophecy of the statue, a rock comes down from the sky and lands on the feet. That indicates that the End of the World will come when all of the rivalry between the iron and the clay, which we see as the heritages of the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, has been completed.
7) CONCLUSION ABOUT THE BOOK OF DANIEL
The Book of Daniel is one of the most amazing books of the Bible, and has long intrigued readers with it's prophecies. But many Christians have been disturbed at the lack of evidence that any of the stories in the first six chapters actually took place. That is because these are prophecies told in the form of stories.
I cannot see that anyone has concluded that the tree stump, with a band around it, in Chapter 4, is a prophecy of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The tree that was cut down represents the Temple, which was destroyed due to sin and idolatry, but whose "stump" remains as the Temple Mount with the retaining wall around it, so that the Temple might be restored.
8) THE BOOK OF ESTHER
Here is a question about the subject of Bible prophecy. The prophecies in the Bible revolve around how the end of the present world will come, so that the Kingdom of Jesus can be established on earth and there can be the ideal paradise that God always intended. The ultimate purpose is to show that it is only the ways of God that are right. The history of the Israelites is foretold in advance, the exile in Babylon for disobedience and return, the coming of the Messiah, another scattering for disobedience, another return, and finally the Apocalypse followed by the Kingdom of God.
But then how about the Holocaust? Wouldn't it be logical that something so vital in the history of the Jews, around which the prophecies of the future of the entire world revolve, be included somewhere in the prophecies? The Holocaust nearly destroyed the Jews, but ended up being the catalyst that restored them to their homeland, as abundantly foretold in the Bible, after being scattered throughout other countries for nearly 1,900 years.
After seeing that five of the first six chapters of the Book of Daniel each contains an apparently fictional story, that is actually a prophecy told in the form of a story, we come to another book from around the same era and relating to the same events.
What about the Book of Esther? Unlike the short stories in the Book of Daniel that are each a single chapter in length, the Book of Esther is a single story spanning ten chapters. The story is widely understood to be a fictional story of Jewish nationalism. One thing that really stands out about the Book of Esther, as a book of the Bible, is that the name of God is not mentioned.
But, in light of what we have seen about the Book of Daniel, in Part One, could the book actually be another prophecy told in the form of a story?
In the Book of Esther, a Jew named Mordecai is among the descendants of those taken into exile by Nebuchadnezzar. When Babylon was conquered by the Persians, and the Jews allowed to return to their homeland, it is known that not all of them chose to return. There was long a significant Jewish colony, in what is now Iraq, that dated from this time. Mordecai had adopted his young cousin, Hadassah, when her parents were killed. She was also known as Esther.
The Medes and the Persians, in whose kingdom Mordecai lives, have a king named Ahasueras. This is believed to be another name for either Xerxes or Artaxerxes. The highest official in the land is known as Haman. The book describes Haman as an Agagite. Remember that Agag was the king of the Amalekites that were enemies of God, and who the earlier King Saul was suppose to put to death, but angered God by sparing him instead.
Haman is enraged that Mordecai refuses to bow to him, and seeks to not only kill Mordecai but all of the Jews. In a way reminiscent of Daniel in the Lions' Den, which takes place in the same kingdom, Haman accuses Mordecai, and all of the Jews, of idolatry to the king, and seeks permission to commit genocide against them.
But the queen of the kingdom, Vashti, disobeyed and angered the king, and ended up being replaced by the charming Esther. Mordecai happens to uncover an assassination plot against the king, and Queen Esther speaks up to save her people, and the king turns against Haman.
Haman is described as having ten sons. Here is the number ten again. In the Book of Daniel, we saw that the statue of the kingdoms that will dominate the known world has "ten toes", which represent ten future kings. Later in Daniel, there are "ten horns" which are described as ten kings. These ten horns are also written about what was then far in the future, in the Book of Revelation, where they are again defined as ten future kings. In the Book of Daniel, another "horn" arises from these ten kings that, as we saw, "has eyes and speaks boastfully". This other king is seen as following the ten kings, who will give their authority to him, in the Book of Revelation, which defines him as the Antichrist. The "ten kings" represent the European Union, which is descended from the Roman Empire, which is one of the kingdoms foretold to dominate the world.
The "ten toes" of the statue in Daniel, Chapter 2, are described as being of a mixture of iron and clay, which does not mix well. Indeed, the countries that make up the European Union have a history of being much more divided than united. But they are described together as "ten kings", represented by horns, when they are finally able to unite.
Haman seems very much like a prophecy of someone such as the Antichrist. Yet there are some differences. The Books of Daniel and Revelation definitely have the Antichrist coming after the ten kings, who will give their power to him. But Haman is described as having ten sons. If these represent the ten kings, how can they be his sons if they must come before him? This indicates that Haman represents a character that comes before the ten kings.
For another difference, Haman's objective is to destroy and eliminate the Jews. But there is no indication that the Antichrist will do any such thing. In fact, the Book of Revelation foretells that the Antichrist will "sit down in the Temple of the Jews and claim to be God".
A third difference is the seven-year period that is associated with the time of the Antichrist both in the prophecies of Daniel and of Revelation. Considering that the story in the Book of Esther is so similar to those in Daniel, and we can see that those are prophecies in story form, if Haman seems so much like he might be a prophecy of the Antichrist, then why is this seven-year period completely missing from the Book of Esther?
This makes it seem that the character of Haman is actually a prophecy of a figure that is like the Antichrist, but which will come earlier. He must come before the ten kings, while the Antichrist will come after.
We would expect that this Antichrist-like predecessor to the actual Antichrist will hate the Jews and, just like Haman, seek to kill all of them. In fact Haman, with demonic delight, constructed a great gallows on which to hang Mordecai.
Haman is, of course, a prophecy of Hitler, and the great gallows that the built represents the gas chambers. Purim is the Jewish holiday that arose from the story in the Book of Esther. Hitler himself once stated that, "If we are defeated then the Jews will be celebrating a second Purim".
The king, now sympathizing with Esther's people, could not revoke the edict against the Jews that had already been made, but did make a counter-edict allowing the Jews to act in self-defense. Haman got the punishment that he had sought for the Jews, hung on his own gallows, just as the top surviving Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg.
Instead of killing the Jews, Haman's attempted genocide turned out to be the catalyst for Mordecai to be given Haman's estate and to become the highest official after the king. Just as Hitler ended up being the catalyst for the restoration of Israel after the long Diaspora. The signet ring that had earlier been given to Haman was now given to Mordecai, and Mordecai approached the king wearing "the royal robes of blue and white" ( Chapter 8, Verse 15).
Could it be that, considering that the tree stump with the metal band around it in the Book of Daniel must represent the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, with Herod's retaining wall around it, the signet ring that was taken from Haman, here representing the all of the Gentiles that have ruled the Holy Land, and given to Mordecai also represents the Temple Mount, with the "ring" of the retaining wall around it?
This is the Temple Mount today, seen from the south. The Temple is gone, destroyed as prophecied in the uprising against Roman rule. The structures in front of the retaining wall, a former Umayyad palace, and the two mosques on the mount, are later constructions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Mount#/media/File:Israel-2013(2)-Aerial-Jerusalem-Temple_Mount-Temple_Mount_(south_exposure).jpg
This is a model of what the Temple likely looked like around the time that the Books of Daniel and Esther were written, after the return from exile in Babylon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Mount#/media/File:Jerusalem_Modell_BW_2.JPG
As for Mordecai approaching the king in the "royal robes of blue and white", and having being given the ring which represents the Temple Mount, which is the most important place to Jews, this is the Israeli flag of today. This was neither the flag nor the colors of the country until the modern restoration, in 1948 following the Holocaust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Israel#/media/File:Flag_of_Israel.svg
If you wonder why prophecies are told in the form of stories and imagery like this, one reason might be that the modern concept of freedom of the press was unknown in ancient times. Making a statement that the kingdom was one of the wicked series of empires that would one day be destroyed by God could get one in a lot of trouble. Also in the Book of Daniel, Chapter 12 Verse 9, it states that "The prophecies are sealed until the time of the end". This does not mean physically sealed, the prophecies were always in the book. The meaning is that the prophecies would not be understood until the time in which they would be fulfilled.
9) THE TEN KINGS
I have noticed something about these ten kings, which are widely accepted as being a representation of the European Union, a descendant of the Roman Empire just preceding the Antichrist. The trouble is that there are more than ten countries in the European Union.
But this prophecy of the ten kings is written in conjunction with the list of the great empires which have dominated the world. During the imperial era, most of the world's land area was under the control, at one time or another, of one or more of the European colonial powers. This time of European colonies began with Columbus and has not completely concluded yet. It is true that there are more than ten countries in the European Union, which the "ten kings" represent, and that has created a problem for some people when these prophecies are explained to them.
However, what I would like to point out is that there are ten European countries that have been colonial powers in the modern era, within the past few centuries. All are now part of the European Union, although Britain has plans to leave. Not all of the ten will give their power to the Antichrist willingly, the Book of Revelation foretells that he will subdue three of the ten.
The ironic thing about Hitler is that he was the catalyst not only for the restoration of the state of Israel, but also of the founding of the European Union, the "ten kings" of which Hitler, represented by Haman, came before, but from which the Antichrist will arise. This is why the Book of Esther describes Haman, who represents Hitler, as having "ten sons". The ten European colonial powers, who controlled the vast majority of the world, are now united as the European Union, from which the Antichrist will arise. This is what provides the continuity between the Roman Empire and the Antichrist.
The connection between the Roman Empire and the European Union is not only the occupation of approximately the same land area, but that Hitler was not only the catalyst of the European Union but also the protege of Mussolini, who came before Hitler and whose stated objective was to restore the Roman Empire.
The countries of the European Union are led by prime ministers and presidents, even though they are foretold as "ten kings". This is because democracy was unknown at the time of the Book of Esther. All nations were led by kings, whether called kings or sultans or emperors. But at the time of the colonial period, all of the imperial European nations were led by royalty. When the German states united, the King of Prussia became the first leader of the united country. The European royal houses are inter-related, have you ever heard of Queen Victoria being described as "the grandmother of Europe"?
Here is a list of the "ten kings", European colonial powers which controlled most of the world but would later unite as the core nations of the European Union.
1) Britain- Scotland actually had a colony of it's own, in what is now Panama, but it joined with Britain in 1707.
2) France
3) Spain
4) Portugal
5) Germany- After unification had Namibia (Southwest Africa) and some islands in the Pacific. These German Pacific islands were taken, during the First World War, and given to Japan, which then fortified them as a defensive barrier for it's own empire in the Second World War.
6) Italy- After unification had Libya, Ethiopia and, Somaliland.
7) Netherlands- Had Indonesia, after it had been Portuguese. Aruba and St. Maarten are still Dutch. Afrikaners are descended from Dutch settlers. Eastern New York State has many Dutch names, which is where the name of Roosevelt comes from.
8) Belgium- The entire Congo region was considered as the personal estate of King Leopold.
9) Denmark- Controlled the largest island in the world, Greenland.
10) Sweden- Had various scattered colonies. It is mostly forgotten that the U.S. state of Delaware began as a Swedish colony.
10) THE BIBLE'S SEVENTY SEVENS
One of the most perplexing things in the Bible has always been the prophecy of seventy weeks of years in the Book of Daniel, Chapter 9 Verses 24-27. There is a Wikipedia article about it, "Prophecy of Seventy Weeks".
The prophecy was made after the Jews had returned from exile in Babylon. The First Temple, the Temple of Solomon, had been destroyed by the Babylonians, and the returnees set about rebuilding it. The prophecy states that from the time the announcement or decree went out to rebuild Jerusalem to the time that an "anointed one" is "cut off" will be 69 weeks of years, in other words 483 years.
Seven was an important number and weeks were used to refer to seven years, as well as seven days. Due to the different way of counting, the prophecy states that from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem to the time that the anointed one will be "cut off", or killed, will be seven weeks of years and sixty-two weeks of years, which add to sixty-nine weeks of years. The term "anointed one" is what messiah actually means. So that this person who will be killed 483 years after the decree to rebuild Jerusalem will be the long-awaited Messiah.
Here is the prophecy, I have copied and pasted it from the Wikipedia article.
24"Seventy weeks are decreed for 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 place. 25Know therefore and understand: from the time that the word went out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the time of an anointed prince, there shall be seven weeks; and for sixty-two weeks it shall be built again with streets and moat, but in a troubled time. 26After the sixty-two weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing, and the troops 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. 27He shall make a strong covenant with many for one week, and for half of the week he shall make sacrifice and offering cease; and in their place shall be an abomination that desolates, until the decreed end is poured out upon the desolator."
Let's go to another Wikipedia article. The first book of the Bible concerning this rebuilding of Jerusalem after it has been destroyed by the Babylonians is the Book of Ezra. Some Jews had already been back at Jerusalem, and had built a replacement for the destroyed Temple, although this Second Temple (or the Temple of Zerubbabel) was poor in comparison with the glory of Solomon's destroyed Temple.
But the city had not been rebuilt, delayed due to opposition until it could be determined that the Persian king Cyrus, who released the Jews from exile after conquering Babylon, had actually signed a decree that Jerusalem could be rebuilt. Most of the Jews at Jerusalem were still living in makeshift housing, and the sacrifices were not being properly done in the new Temple.
This is what Ezra was sent to correct. The ruling king of Persia sent him to Jerusalem, with a large number of other exiles. It is now certain that the exiles did not return from Babylon at once, it was more like a trickle over many decades. Ezra, and later also Nehemiah, got the rebuilding of Jerusalem underway and restored the correct temple rites, as well as condemning intermarriage with non-Jews. The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah are the two biblical books that explain this time. The two were originally one book.
Notice the date that the Wikipedia article on Ezra gives for his being sent back to Jerusalem. It is 457 B.C.
Now, let's go to another Wikipedia article, the one about the year "7 BC". This year is considered by many to have been the year that Jesus was born because there was a bright planetary conjunction that Matthew could have taken as "The star of Bethlehem", which guided the Magi to the infant Jesus.
Some believe that Jesus was born in 4 B.C., and that could possibly be correct. But King Herod is reported to have died in 4 B.C., and remember that before dying he had heard of a new king being born, had talked with the Magi who brought gifts to the infant Jesus, and ordered that all boys under two years of age be killed. Jesus' parents, however, had taken him to safety in Egypt until Herod died.
Jesus is believed to have been crucified when he was 33 years old, this is the age given in the Wikipedia article on Jesus. Although it is not absolutely certain that he was crucified at age 33 or was born in 7 B.C., these figures must be close. This means that Jesus was likely crucified in the year 26 A.D.
How long was it from 457 B.C. to 26 A.D.? That's right, exactly 483 years.
The Bible foretold when the Messiah would be killed, and leaves no doubt about who that Messiah was. Jesus was the only one around this time who was taken seriously as possibly being the Messiah. This could not have been inserted into the Bible after the fact because it is also in the Hebrew scriptures, although the Jews did not accept Jesus as the Messiah.
Next in the prophecy, after the Messiah (meaning anointed one) is "cut off", the translation of being killed, the troops of the "prince who is to come" will destroy the city and the sanctuary.
It is clear what this means. A generation after Jesus' crucifixion, the Jews rose up against Roman rule and, after a very difficult siege, they destroyed the Jews' Temple and much of the city of Jerusalem. The Jews were sent off into exile, and would not regain control of their homeland for nearly 1,900 years. Israel would be reestablished in 1948, and the Old City of Jerusalem recaptured in the Six-Day War of 1967.
So we know that this "prince who is to come" must somehow come from the Roman Empire. But, for one thing, the Romans didn't really have any title or significant position called a prince. However, we have seen that the Antichrist will arise out of "ten kings", which are the members of the European Union that were the colonial powers which, at one time or another, ruled the vast majority of the land area on earth. The European Union occupies basically the same land area as the Roman Empire, and the original treaty which began the European Union was signed in Rome. The catalyst of the founding of the European Union was Hitler, who had started as a protege of Mussolini, whose stated aim was to reestablish the Roman Empire, and didn't live to see how well he had succeeded.
Following this in the prophecy is that this "prince" will "form a strong covenant with many for one week". Remember that we are referring to "weeks of years", or seven years. Also remember that the prophecy is of seventy "weeks" of years, but the time between the decree to rebuild Jerusalem and the death of the Messiah was foretold to be only sixty-nine weeks of years. This leaves one week, or seven years, left over, and this is because it is the time of the Antichrist, and the reign of the Antichrist being for seven years is also in many other places in the Bible.
We know that the Antichrist will reign for seven years, and that he will go into the Jews' Temple, which must somehow be rebuilt or replaced, and declare himself to be God. The Antichrist will cause the Jews' usual ritual offerings and sacrifices to cease, and will cause a mysterious "abomination that desolates". Remember that elsewhere the Book of Daniel also refers to the "Abomination of Desolation", which is believed by most to be simply the Antichrist entering the Temple and claiming to be God himself.
It says that for "half of the week" the Antichrist will cause the sacrifices to cease. This means for three and a half years. Remember that the time of the Antichrist is divided into two halves. The first half will actually be the best time that the world has ever seen. He will seem to have the answers to everything.
But it will all be a fantastic, satanic lie. Things will began to fall apart, and the second half of the time of the Antichrist will be the worst time that the world has ever seen, or ever will see. Each of the first three Gospels has a chapter about the Apocalypse, and Jesus makes it clear that if had not returned, in His Second Coming, to establish the promised Millennium on earth, that no one would be left alive on earth.
This prophecy reveals that the transition from good times to bad times begins when the Antichrist goes into the Temple and claims to be God himself. This is when the regular sacrifices in the Temple cease, and will be a direct challenge to God. The people will have put their faith in the Antichrist, but he will be helpless to stop God's judgments, which will fall very heavily on the earth. The Antichrist that the world has put it's faith in will lose control over parts of the world, and will be unable to prevent the horrific wars of the Apocalypse.
The Antichrist will be a messianic figure. The idea of European leaders acting like the messiah is nothing new. Upon Napoleon's coronation, with the pope set to put the crown on his head, Napoleon instead took the crown, although this was prearranged, and put the crown on his own head, thus putting himself beyond God's authority.
When Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Jerusalem in 1898, knowing that the Book of Revelation, Chapter 19, describes Jesus arriving at the Second Coming on a white horse, himself entered Jerusalem on a white horse. The Jaffa Gate, through which he entered was too low for him to go through on the horse. So, he demanded that a breach be made in the wall so that he could enter without getting off the horse, and would thus look like the Messiah.
Finally, remember that when Jesus was asked by someone if they had to forgive someone who apologized to them, Jesus answer that they are to be forgiven even if they apologize "seventy times seven times". It does not otherwise refer to these "seventy times seven" years in the New Testament, but could Jesus have been giving a hint that he is the one that the prophecy was referring to?
Also remember that Jesus was actually crucified after not "seventy times seven" years, as the prophecy names at first, but after only sixty-nine times seven years. That is simply because there will be a Second Coming of Jesus, which will take place to end the seven-year reign of the Antichrist, which is still yet to come and will be the seventieth of the units of seven years.
THE PROPHETIC MEANING OF CHRISTMAS
Here is something really profound that I cannot see has ever been pointed out.
Christmas, representing the Birth of Jesus, is celebrated on December 25. We know that Jesus was not really born on December 25. The reason that it began to be celebrated on this day is that Christianity was not one of the legal religions of the Roman Empire.
The Romans had a holiday, Saturnalia, around the time of the winter solstice. The Christians placed their holiday at the same time to avoid drawing attention to themselves, and Jesus ended up being celebrated on December 25.
But what do you notice here? There is something very interesting with regard to the prophecies of the Last Days, as detailed in the posting on this blog, "The End Of The World As We Know It".
Remember what we saw how the Book of Daniel, Chapter 9, actually foretells the time from the destruction of the First Temple, by Nebuchadnezzar, to the time of Jesus with amazing accuracy. Usually we describe 7 days as a week, but this chapter uses "weeks of years" with 7 years as a week.
We know that the Tribulation Period, the terrible time just prior to the Return of Jesus to set up His Kingdom on earth, will last 7 years. The Antichrist will rule during this time. The first half of this period will actually be the best time that the world has ever seen. That is why the Book of Revelation describes the Antichrist as reigning for 42 months, which is 3 1 / 2 years or half of the 7-year period. But during the second half of the Tribulation Period things will begin to fall apart and the result will be the worst time that the world has ever seen, or ever will see.
Notice that Christmas, representing Jesus, on December 25 is exactly one week, 7 days, before the beginning of the New Year.
Have you ever thought that maybe God wanted it this way? The Return of Jesus will actually come in two parts. The first part is what is commonly referred to as the Rapture. (Even though that is a general term that is not in the Bible). Jesus will remove His faithful people before the Tribulation begins. The second part is 7 years later, when Jesus returns to earth with the people that he earlier removed to end the Tribulation and set up His Kingdom on earth.
The mysterious scene in the Book of Revelation, Chapter 14, Verse 14, involving two harvests by angels, actually represents first the Rapture and then God's Judgement. The first harvest is the Rapture. Then comes the second harvest, of grapes which are subject to God's wrath. But there is no wrath in the first harvest because it is Jesus removing His faithful people first.
Doesn't it seem that God wanted Christmas to fall exactly one week before the New Year so that Christmas will represent the Rapture and the New Year represents Jesus establishing His Kingdom on earth?
NOTRE DAME AND THE ANCIENT-MODERN PARALLEL
Readers are likely wondering why the tragedy at Notre Dame Cathedral had to happen. There is an answer but it involves going far back into ancient times, more than two thousand years before the cathedral was built. I notice something about Christianity that has never been documented that explains why this happened at Notre Dame.
What I notice that is really amazing is that there is a parallel between the destructions of the Temple in ancient times and the major splits in the church in modern times. Why don't we call this "The Ancient-Modern Parallel".
The Book of Daniel Chapter 9, Verses 20-27, explains the "seventy sevens" that was revealed to Daniel. Each seven is a "week" of years, or seven years. From the restoration of the Jews' Temple, which had been destroyed by the Babylonians, to the "cutting off", or death, of the "anointed one" will be 69 sevens. Due to a literal translation of a different way of expressing numbers, it states "seven sevens and sixty-two sevens" instead of 69 sevens, but it means the same thing.
After the Jews had returned from exile in Babylon, worship had become very corrupted at the Temple that was being rebuilt. Ezra, with a large group of former exiles with him, was sent back to Jerusalem to correct the religious services, which he did. Ezra has the book in the Bible named for him. The date that Wikipedia gives for Ezra being sent back to Jerusalem is 457 B.C.
Messiah Means "anointed one". Christians, although not Jews, believe that Jesus was the long-awaited, and prophecied, Messiah. The exact birthday of Jesus is not known but 7 B.C. is the most widely-accepted year for his birth. Some believe that Jesus was born in 4 B.C. but the problem with that is that King Herod is known to have died in 4 B.C. and, sometime before his death, he had heard about the birth of the Messiah and gave the order that every boy, two years old and younger, should be killed. It is not known exactly when this order was given but this makes a birth in 7 B.C. appear more likely.
The Bible states that Jesus began his ministry at about 30 years of age, and his ministry to have lasted three years. That means that Jesus was likely crucified at age 33. With His birth in 7 B.C. that means 26 A.D.
Now, what do you notice? 69 "weeks" of years is 483 years. From 457 B.C., when Ezra was sent back to Jerusalem to establish correct worship in the Temple that had been rebuilt after having been destroyed, to 26 A.D., when Jesus is most likely to have been crucified, is exactly 483 years. The reason that there is only "69 weeks", when the scripture first stated 70 weeks, is that one "week" of 7 years is remaining for the Tribulation Period just prior to Jesus' Second Coming.
Next, let's go to more recent times. After the final 7 years of the "70 weeks", Jesus will return to establish the Millennium on earth. This is when the world will finally be the godly paradise that it was intended to be. When humans try to ignore God and run the world by their own wisdom, they just make a mess of things.
The year of 7 B.C. for Jesus' birth is really interesting because we know that the Tribulation Period will last for 7 years just prior to Jesus' Second Coming to begin the Millennium. Jesus will return just prior to the start of the Tribulation Period to remove His faithful believers in the event commonly referred to as the Rapture, although this is a general term that is not in the Bible. Also Jesus' birthday ended up being celebrated on December 25, although that is not His real birthday it is 7 days before the beginning of the new year. We can see how these "weeks of years", in the Book of Daniel, extend far beyond the prophecy itself.
The year 2000 was the turn of a millennium, although not the beginning of Jesus' Millennium. Remember that the Ancient-Modern Parallel is about the mirror image formed by the destructions of the Temple in ancient times and the major splits in the church in more recent times. There were two major splits in the church, the most recent was the Protestant Reformation which began in 1517.
What do you notice here? From 1517 to the turn of the millennium was also 483 years, or 69 "weeks" of years. The remaining "week" of the original 70 weeks is, of course, reserved for the Tribulation Period that will precede Jesus' Millennium.
The first temple of the Jews to be destroyed was actually Shiloh, which was in the Central Highlands of Israel or what would be referred to today as the West Bank. This was where the story of Samuel began. It was destroyed by the Philistines in 1050 B.C.
Shiloh was never rebuilt because it was replaced by the Temple in Jerusalem that was built by King Solomon. But that was destroyed, as described above, by the Babylonians led by King Nebuchadnezzar. The siege of Jerusalem, which led to the destruction of the Temple, took place in 587 B.C. This means that from the destruction of Shiloh to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, which replaced it, was 463 years.
Now let's go back to more recent times. There were two major splits in the church. The first was the Great Schism of 1054, when what became the Eastern Orthodox Church split away from the Catholic Church. The second was the Protestants splitting away in the Reformation, which began in 1517, as described above.
Once again, what do you notice here? The time between the two major splits of the church, from 1054 to 1517, is also 463 years.
Is this absolutely amazing, or what? I humbly thank God that I was the one to be allowed to point that out.
33 years, the age at which Jesus was almost certainly crucified, also shows up in modern times. The original city of Jerusalem came back under Jewish control in 1967. This was foretold by Jesus to begin the one generation countdown to His Return to establish His Kingdom, the Millennium, on earth. 1967 was 33 years before the beginning of the millennium, although this is not the same thing as Jesus' Millennium.
But there was another Temple destruction in ancient times, that following the Jewish uprising against Roman rule in 70 A.D. This is the event foretold by Jesus that the Temple will be so completely destroyed, as it had long before by the Babylonians, that "not one stone will remain upon another". What happened was that the wooden portions of the Temple caught fire. The heat melted the gold in the Temple. After the fire went out, Roman legionnaires pried the stones apart while searching for gold so that indeed "not one stone remained upon another".
But the walls of the Temple Mount, upon which the Temple was built, remained. The Jewish place of worship at the Temple Mount today is the "Western Wall".
So if there is a parallel between the destructions of the Temple, in ancient times, and the major splits of the church, in more modern times, there were three Temple destructions, Shiloh in 1050 B.C., by the Babylonians in 587 B.C. and, by the Romans in 70 A.D. But there have been only two major splits in the church, the Great Schism of 1054 and the Protestant Reformation of 1517. But, if this is correct, there must be something as a modern reflection of the final destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D.
In section 17) CROSSING THE RED SEA, I explained my belief that God allowed the 19-year delay between the reestablishment of the nation of Israel in 1948 to the return of the original city of Jerusalem to Jewish control in 1967 to give us a chance to build the Millennium ourselves, without going through the Apocalypse first.
The postwar generation was the one that had seen a terrible world war, genocide, the development of nuclear weapons and economic crash. Maybe this would be the generation that had learned it's lesson that humans had to follow God or it would end in disaster. It was only when God saw that it wasn't going to work, humans were just too sinful, that Jerusalem had come back under Jewish control in 1967, for the first time since ancient times, to begin the one-generation countdown to the Second Coming of Jesus, as foretold in the Gospels.
So the 483 years, 69 "weeks" of years, since the Reformation in 1517 brings us to the millennium, the year 2000. But then the 19-year delay brings us to 2019. We cannot calculate the time that Jesus will return in this way because the Gospels state that no one knows that time, it will be unexpected.
The island in the Seine River, upon which Notre Dame Cathedral was built, is actually very reminiscent of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Both are the oldest parts of their respective cities. The island in Paris has both Notre Dame Cathedral and the original palace of Paris, before the French royal family built new palaces, first the complex that is now the Louvre, and later Versailles. In Jerusalem, in the same way, there was the Temple on the Temple Mount and an adjacent fortress, the Antonia. There was also Herod's Palace, in the Old City of Jerusalem, not far away.
The devastating fire at Notre Dame was very much a parallel of the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 A.D. Although there were no legionnaires prying stones apart looking for gold at Notre Dame, the wooden part burned away just as at the Temple. But the stone structure of Notre Dame remained standing, and it seems definite that it will be rebuilt. In the same way, the Temple Mount remains so that it could possibly be someday rebuilt.
The Western Wall of the Temple Mount, the Jewish place of worship there, is the part that remains closest to the way that Herod built it. Similarly the western side of Notre Dame Cathedral, which is the front, is the only side of the cathedral that remains undamaged by the fire.
Notre Dame Cathedral has one other thing in common with the Temple in Jerusalem. Napoleon was crowned as emperor at Notre Dame. The pope was getting ready to put the crown on his head when he famously snatched the crown from him and put it on himself, thus putting himself above the pope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronation_of_Napoleon_I#/media/File:Jacques-Louis_David_-_The_Coronation_of_Napoleon_(1805-1807).jpg
Also, not far from Notre Dame is Le Madeleine. This is a temple-like structure built by Napoleon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Madeleine,_Paris#/media/File:Madeleine_Paris.jpg
There is a grand painting in Le Madeleine, called "The History of Christianity", featuring Napoleon as a Christ-like figure ministering to the people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Madeleine,_Paris#/media/File:%C3%89glise_de_la_Madeleine_1,_Paris_July_2011.jpg
The Bible foretells that one day, during the Tribulation Period, the Antichrist will enter the Jews' Temple and declare himself to be God. Obviously, the Temple must be rebuilt first. This seems to me to be a very close parallel to Napoleon snatching the crown from the pope and crowning himself.
This is why Notre Dame Cathedral was the modern reflection of the destruction of the Jews' Temple in 70 A.D., and why this fire had to happen. The world is more secular today and so another split in the church isn't a factor, so there was this destruction at the cathedral instead.
11) THE STORY OF THE GOLDEN GATE
This is unrelated to the prophecy above.
Some believe that the Ottomans actually tried to prevent the coming of the Messiah. There is only one gate on the eastern side of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, known as the Golden Gate. There is a prophecy in the first three verses of Chapter 44 of the Book of Ezekiel that "The eastern gate of the sanctuary must remain shut because the lord has entered through it, he will enter and go out through the same way".
This gate was not constructed until about five hundred years after the time of Jesus. It may have been built on the site of an earlier gate. The Book of Ezekiel was written in the era of the destruction of the First Temple, which was Solomon's original temple, by the Babylonians. This was nearly six hundred years before the construction of Herod's Third Temple and the time of Jesus.
The gate was walled over by Moslems, reopened by the Crusaders, and walled over by Moslems again. The Ottomans rebuilt the gate with the city walls, but walled it over for good in 1541. When else has a gate been built, just so that it can be walled over?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Gate_(Jerusalem)#/media/File:Golden_Gate_Jerusalem_2009.JPG
Not only did the Ottomans rebuild the gate as the only one on the eastern side of the Temple Mount, just to wall it over, they also put a cemetery in front of it. Did they know of the prophecy in the Book of Ezekiel, and want to stop the Messiah's arrival, also knowing that a pious Jew must avoid contact with dead bodies, which they may have believed to include crossing a cemetery?
But what if Jesus was indeed the foretold Messiah? We know from the Gospels that Jesus and the Apostles used to meet on the Mount of Olives, away from the crowds in the city, which is just east of the Temple Mount on the other side of the Kidron Valley. Also Gethsemane, where Jesus did his final prayer before the crucifixion, is immediately east of the Temple Mount, between it and the Mount of Olives.
So, it is extremely unlikely that Jesus never entered the Temple from the east, just as the prophecy foretold.
12) JOB AND JOSEPH
THE BOOK OF JOB
The Book of Job may be the oldest book of the Bible. It is about a man who goes through terrible trials because God allows Satan to test him, but does not allow Satan to take his life. First, God grants Satan's request to allow him to take away Job's children and wealth. Job is a devout and righteous man, and Satan hopes to show that he follows God only because God gives him abundant blessings. When, much to Satan's disappointment, Job still adheres to God, Satan is granted his request to be allowed to take away Job's health. Most of the book is about Job's long discussions with his three friends that come to support him.
But this appears to me to be yet another example of indirect prophecy, or what we could call "Prophecy in Form". This, likely the oldest book in the Bible, is an ancient mirror and foreshadow of the newest book in the Bible, the Book of Revelation.
The primary message of the Book of Job is that life is unpredictable. We are to follow God, and he may give us blessings, but just because we follow him doesn't guarantee that he will give us blessings. But we are to follow him anyway.
However, at the same time, it foretells the Book of Revelation, which is about the end of the present world and the establishment of God's Kingdom on earth. The Book of Job is a reflection of the Bible as a whole in that it is about a fall, and then an ultimate regaining of what was lost. The Bible begins with the fall from the Garden of Eden, due to sin, and ends with the regaining of paradise with God's Kingdom established on earth.
In the above sections, we saw that there were the "ten kings", both in the Books of Daniel and Revelation, who give their authority to the Antichrist. We then saw in the Book of Esther how the villain, Haman, had "ten sons", which my conclusion is really represent these same "ten kings".
We find that Job also has ten children, but this time only seven are sons. In fact, when Job's fortunes are restored at the end of the book, and he has a new family, he once again has exactly the same number of sons and daughters.
In the Book of Revelation, there are seven angels administering Judgments on the earth. There are also seven churches that are described early in the book. These are reflected by Job's seven sons. Just as the Book of Job is a reflection of the Bible as a whole, in the fall from paradise and the final regaining of it, the Book of Revelation is actually similar to the Book of Job, but where the Book of Job is about the tribulations suffered by one man, the Book of Revelation is about the tribulations that will be suffered by the entire world.
Job's friends engage in three rounds of discourse with him, taking turns at offering advice and comfort to Job, and then listening to Job's response. The seven angels in the Book of Revelation, which look to be foreshadowed by Job's seven sons, engage in three rounds of judgments on the earth, which appear to be foreshadowed by the three rounds of discourses, the seal, trumpet and, bowl judgments.
After the friends and Job complete their discourse, with no satisfactory answers as to why God would allow this to happen to the righteous Job, a young man names Elihu appears. It is made clear that he is much younger than Job and his friends. He gives a sermon of his own, criticizing both Job and his friends.
Finally, God himself enters the picture. He also is critical of Job and his friends, and their flawed reasoning. God commands them to sacrifice seven bulls in atonement. Here is the number seven again.
But God does not criticize Elihu. Has anyone ever thought that this is what the pattern of Jesus will be, which was far in the future at the time this book was written. Elihu represents Jesus, while the three friends might represent the flawed religious establishment of Jesus' time, the Pharisees, the Sadduccees and, the priesthood. The arguments of Job's three friends has the same legalistic tone as the establishment of Jesus' day. Jesus appeared as a young upstart, claiming to set things right, just as Elihu does here.
Just after Elihu had finished speaking, God commanded the three friends to make the sacrifice for atonement. Could this have the meaning that Jesus, here represented by Elihu, would someday himself be the ultimate sacrifice, by dying on the cross for our sins? And that the seven bulls to be sacrificed in atonement are a foreshadow of both the seven churches and the seven angels in the Book of Revelation?
The message of the Book of Job seems to be that it is a reflection of the entire Bible, in the loss of paradise and the ultimate regaining of it, but it revolves around the experiences of only one man rather than of the entire world. The Book of Job also points to Jesus, who will be the one man who takes on the sins of the entire world.
Just as Job was righteous, and in no way deserved the tribulations that he suffered because Satan scoffed that his faith wasn't really genuine, Jesus will not deserve the punishment that he will take on, for everyone else's sins. The pointing to the future Book of Revelation is because that foretells the time when paradise will actually be regained, just as Job finally regained even much more than he had originally lost.
JOSEPH
How many times have you read an article, or listened to a story, in which two related events were entwined together? I find that the story of Joseph in Egypt, early in the Bible in the Book of Genesis, is such a story about related events, with the exception that these related events are both in the past and in the future.
Like Daniel, in his book, Joseph has the ability to interpret dreams. Joseph started with his own dreams of domination over his eleven brothers, the sons of Jacob which would form the twelve tribes of Israel. His brothers did not appreciate this, and got him sold into slavery in Egypt.
Joseph arose to a position of great power in Egypt. This is not beyond historical possibility at all since it is known that a Semitic people known as the Hyksos ruled Egypt for a period of time. The Israelites were also Semitic.
Joseph foretold Pharaoh's dreams about two cows, one healthy and one very underfed, and two stalks of grain, the first bountiful and the second parched and nearly worthless. Joseph foretold that both dreams represented two seven-year periods. The first would be a time of great abundance, the second a time of great famine.
This is, of course, a reflection of the time of the Antichrist. Except that there will be only one seven-year period. The first half will be the best time that the world has ever seen, the Antichrist will seem to have the answers to everything. But the second half will be the worst time that the world has ever seen, or ever will see.
Joseph's brothers come to Egypt, seeking food during the terrible famine, and meet Joseph. At first, they do not recognize him but later are reconciled.
Could Joseph be a reflection of his future relative, Jesus? With his early dreams of domination a reflection of the prophecies of Jesus' coming, made before his time? His brothers selling him into slavery representing the religious leaders arranging Jesus' crucifixion. The initial failure to recognize him a reflection of the religious establishment of Jesus' time failing to recognize him as the awaited Messiah. Joseph was earlier rejected, sold into slavery by his brothers, but now emerges as the leader and their savior, ensuring their supply of food in the famine, just as Jesus would later be.
Notice also that the pharaoh gives Joseph, his second-in-command just as Jesus is God's "second-in-command", a signet ring. We saw in the section about the meaning of the Book of Esther that the signet ring that Mordecai was given by the king seemed to be a representation of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, with the ring being symbolic of Herod's retaining wall around the Temple Mount, which at the time that book was written was still centuries in the future.
This is not to say that the story of Joseph in Egypt is entirely a reflection of the future. Clearly, something must have happened for the Egyptians to part with a ready source of slave labor.
These two successive seven years periods, the first very good and the second very bad, are a reflection of the time of the Antichrist, in which the first half of his seven-year reign will be the best time that the world has ever seen but the second half will be the worst time that the world has ever seen, but which is only one seven-year period.
But the same technique of "double prophecy" can be seen in an earlier dream interpretation by Joseph, when he was in prison with the chief baker and the chief butler of Egypt. Both have mysterious dreams, and ask Joseph for interpretation. He reveals that the chief baker will be hanged on a tree in three days, but the chief butler will be restored to his former position in the same three days.
What about Jesus' far in the future crucifixion? He was crucified on a cross, which was foreshadowed here by the chief baker to be hanged on a tree. But he would rise from his tomb, under God's power after having paid the price for sin, in three days. This is foreshadowed by the chief butler of Egypt to be restored to his former position in three days.
Later, in the beginning of the Book of Exodus, a new pharaoh arises who "knows nothing about Joseph", and the Israelites, the descendants of Joseph and his brothers, are made into slaves. We know that the Israelites' fellow Semites, the Hyksos who ruled Egypt for about 150 years, were overthrown by a rebellion and driven out of Egypt. It would then seem likely that the Egyptians, having regained rule over their own land, might not take kindly to these foreigners that the Hyksos had allowed into their country.
When the time came for the Israelites to be freed from slavery, God sent a total of ten tribulations on Egypt, until they released the Israelites. Here is the number ten again, which is the same number of the "ten kings" who will give their authority to the Antichrist, but whose world will suffer terrible tribulations from God. Pharaoh thus represents the Antichrist of the distant future.
The Israelites' escape from slavery represents the Rapture of the Christians just prior to the beginning of the Tribulation period. The word "rapture" is not in the Bible, but is a term used by Christians for the removal of the true church before God's judgment falls on earth.
Notice, for example, the Book of Revelation, which is about the Tribulation period, although it is foretold in many other places in the Bible as well. The church is often mentioned in the first three chapters, but then is missing until Jesus returns with his saints near the end of the book. That is because the church, the true Christians, are not there when the terrible tribulations are going on. Although during that time, the Book of Revelation foretells that "so many people will come to Christ that they cannot be numbered".
It seems that all of the events of Jesus' both first and second comings are clearly reflected in the events of the ancient Israelites' arrival and slavery in, and final escape, from Egypt to their own promised land, although the events are not in the same sequence.
13) THE TOWER OF BABEL
The Tower of Babel occurs early in the Bible, in the first nine verses of the Book of Genesis, Chapter 11.
According to this brief story, humans settled on a plain of Mesopotamia called Shinar. They decided to bake clay bricks and, binding them together with tar or asphalt, build a "tower that reaches all the way to Heaven". God did not want that to be done, as humans would then be capable of doing anything. So, God struck the people so that they would speak different languages. The building of the tower would then be impossible, because they would not be able to understand each other, and language has always been the primary factor in distinguishing one nation from another.
Indeed this land that was known as Sumer, which we saw in our visit to "Basra", has a shortage of stone, wood and, metal, but an abundance of clay. Ziggurats, artificial hills used for religious purposes, were built of clay bricks.
But yet the story doesn't seem to make sense. Clay bricks alone, without a modern steel frame, simply cannot be used to build a structure that is very high. The weight of the bricks above would crush those below. The material used as binder, as described in the story, is also puzzling. Some versions of the Bible translate the binder as "tar", others as "asphalt", others as "bitumen", and others simply as "slime".
But none of these materials would be an effective binder for any brick structure. Bricks work best with ordinary mortar. I have never heard of a brick building that used any of these materials as mortar. Asphalt is distilled from petroleum, and bitumen is a kind of naturally-occurring asphalt. Tar is also made from petroleum, but can also be made of some plants. But none is good for the construction of a brick building.
But now, lets move far forward to the Last Days of the world, that are foretold in the Bible. The nations of the world have always been divided by language, remember the feet of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar's dream in the Book of Daniel with the feet being made "partly of iron and partly of clay which cannot mix", but this must be put aside in the Last Days so that all nations can come under the influence of the one-world system of the Antichrist.
In the decades leading up to the culmination of human history as we saw in the posting on this blog, "The End Of The World As We Know It", the restrictions placed on humans in the story of the Tower of Babel are lifted so that the Antichrist can have his full reign. The world still does not have a single language, but it is relatively easy to get one language translated into another by human translators or software. Humans the world over use the same system of numbers, calendar, time measurement and, the Metric System.
Humans cannot literally "reach to Heaven", but we can do things that the ancients could not possible have ever imagined. Jet aircraft make it so that anyone nowadays can wake up in any country, and go to bed that night in any other country. Spacecraft have taken close-up photographs of planets that the ancients did not imagine existed. The internet makes it easy to instantly make a virtual visit to anywhere in the world, as well as to share the information that the world has to offer.
What about modern skyscrapers? If what "reaching to Heaven" means is to reach the sky, they certainly accomplish that.
Actually, in the general area where the story of the Tower of Babel takes place, is the Burj Khalifa. This is the tallest building that the world has ever seen. It is nearly a kilometer, more than half a mile, in height.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa#/media/File:Burj_Khalifa.jpg
Distillates of petroleum, such as the "asphalt", "bitumen" or, "tar" given in translations of the Bible, would not make good mortar for a brick building. But let"s stop and think about what it could mean. If we look at a modern skyscraper, the glass windows that cover the outside are arranged in the same way as the bricks in older structures. The glass in skyscrapers has to be especially strong, so that a single pane is not used. Two or more panes are laminated together.
This is what gives us safety glass, such as that used in car windshields. Two or more panes are laminated together. If the glass is broken, it is highly unlikely that the shatter pattern of both panes will be exactly the same. Each pane holds the other together, through the laminate, even though both panes are broken.
Now, here is the important thing that I want to point out. Various resins are used to laminate panes of glass together but all are products of petroleum, just like the "asphalt", "bitumen" or, "tar" described in the story of the Tower of Babel as binding the "bricks" together of the "tower that will reach to Heaven". If we consider the glass panes as the "bricks" that are the outer appearance of modern skyscrapers, remembering that this story was written more than a thousand years before glass was used for windows, then we see that the story is an absolutely amazing prophecy of modern skyscrapers, with their outer windows being bound together with products of petroleum..
Another thing that I find so intriguing is that the story in the Bible has the Tower of Babel put together from tar or bitumen or asphalt, which is distilled from oil. Again this, at first, does not seem to make structural sense, since none of these would be good for ordinary brick mortar. But the many tall buildings around the Persian Gulf were definitely built with the wealth that came from oil.
The vast reserves of oil in the Middle East were unknown, and would have been of little use, to the ancients. In those days, "oil" meant olive oil. This is why some version of the Bible have the Tower of Babel being built with "slime" to hold the bricks together, as petroleum may have seeped from the ground in places. But it is amazing that this prophecy would be written by the ancient Israelites, whose land did not have oil, as taking place in the distant plain of Shinar, which indeed turned out to be very rich in oil.
But the "Tower of Babel" is not just about the Burj Khalifa, which I am only using as an example because of it's height, or the tall buildings that are today in the area where the story took place. It refers to the skyscrapers of the Last Days that are all over the world. Another thing that is so interesting about this is that traditional architecture differs greatly from one place in the world to another, but that is not the case with the skyscrapers which look just about the same no matter where in the world they are found. That is certainly another side of the reversal, in the Last Days, of the world being divided by different languages.
Yet another interesting thing about this story is plastics. It is only in the past seventy years, or so, that plastic has come into widespread use. This means that the age of skyscrapers, with laminated glass, is also the age of plastic, which is also made from petroleum. So much is made of plastic that the era in which we live, the Last Days of the world as we know it, could be described as the "Plastic Age".
Shinar, where the story is described as taking place, is the old name of Babylon, which is the southern part of Mesopotamia. The name of Babylon is believed to actually come from Babel. We know already that a "Mystery Babylon" will play a role in the Last Days of the world that we know.
But also, considering the Jews' Temple in Jerusalem, I see the Tower of Babel as a kind of an anti-Temple. The Temple represents God, the Tower of Babel represents the sinful and idolatrous world that listens to the promises of the Antichrist and sees no need of the real God.
Just as God scatters the people so that they cannot build the tower in the story, the Babylonians who later lived where the story is described as taking place destroy the Temple that the Jews have built, and take them captive away from their land. This is like the people of Babel striking back at God. The Jews are sent to rebuild the Temple, after Babylon had been conquered, but, in the Last Days of the world, the Antichrist will visit the rebuilt Temple and claim to be God. This effectively captures and, at least temporarily, makes the Temple into the Tower of Babel for the Last Days.
14) THE WORMWOOD PROPHECY
Here is another amazing aspect of Bible prophecy that is known, but not by a lot of people. Chapter 8, verses 10 and 11, of the Book of Revelation has a prophecy that must have mystified people for centuries.
"The third angel sounded his trumpet and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky onto a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became bitter, and many people died from drinking the bitter waters".
Why would a star, or a meteor that is referred to as a "falling star", be named for wormwood, which is a shrub?
If you go to the article titled "Chernobyl", on www.wikipedia.org , the answer becomes clear. Go to the "History" section of the article and, under that, go to the first subsection, which is "Name Origin". You will see that the name of Chernobyl means wormwood.
As you may remember, Chernobyl is where the nuclear meltdown took place in 1986 that spread nuclear radioactivity over a wide area. This is what Chernobyl is known for, and the first thing that anyone thinks of when they hear the name.
One of the primary rules for survivors of a nuclear disaster or attack is never to drink from open water that has been exposed to radioactivity. The falling star represents one or more nuclear missiles, and many people who survived the blast died from drinking water afterward. When the Chernobyl nuclear accident happened, it let us know what this prophecy meant.
15) WAS JESUS FORETOLD BY NAME ?
The prophet Zechariah, in the Old Testament of the Bible, has well-known references to the life of Jesus, more than five hundred years before his time.
References to a potter and price of thirty pieces of silver, which are also in the Book of the prophet Jeremiah, as well as the coming king entering Jerusalem "riding on a donkey", Zechariah 9:9, which was quoted in the New Testament Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 21, in the Gospel of Mark 11: 1-11 and the Gospel of John, Chapter 12. Jesus made his triumphant entry into Jerusalem riding on a borrowed donkey.
Zechariah also has a vision about people "mourning for the one who they pierced". We know that as Jesus was being crucified, a Roman soldier thrust his spear into Jesus' side to be sure that he was dead.
But what about the visions of Zechariah in the first seven chapters of his book? In these seven chapters are nine separate visions. Two of the visions are about a high priest named Joshua, who was the first high priest following the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem following the return from exile in Babylon.
In one of the visions, in Chapter 3 of Zechariah, Joshua has his rags replaced with clean clothes. It states that Joshua will "take away sin in one day". Another vision, beginning in Chapter 6 Verse 3, is about Joshua being given a crown.
The thing that is so striking is that nowhere else do the prophets treat the religious establishment with such reverence. God himself is revered, but the religious establishment is usually portrayed as corrupt and sinful. The way that the high priest is revered here is very much an exception for all of the prophets.
But here is something that might explain it.
The Book of Zechariah was written well before the Hellenistic era. The name "Jesus" is actually the Greek form of the name "Joshua". Notice that, in the Old Testament, there are others named Joshua but no one named Jesus.
The Old Testament Book of Joshua, about the leader who succeeded Moses, was a different Joshua and his story took place centuries before this.
Other examples of Greek names introduced in the Hellenistic period, which began with the conquests of Alexander the Great and continued after his empire broke into pieces, with the Ptolemies ruling Egypt and the Seleucids ruling what is now Syria and Palestine, are the names of the three pyramids of Giza, within what is now Cairo.
The three pyramids of Giza were built by a succession of three Egyptian pharaohs, who were father, son and, grandson. The original Egyptian named of the pyramids were Khufu, Khafre and, Menkaure. The Ptolemies, of which the queens were named Cleopatra, took on the trappings of Egyptian pharaohs but continued to speak Greek. The pharaohs who had built the three pyramids more than two thousand years before took on the Greek names of Cheops, Chephren and, Mycerinus.
For that matter, Thebes as well as Egypt are actually Greek names.
Considering this, doesn't it seem that the two visions of Joshua by Zechariah are actually prophecies of Jesus by name? Even though it is true that the first high priest after the rebuilding of the Temple after return from exile in Babylon was also named Joshua?
Remember that Jesus paid the price for sin, "taking away sin in one day", as in the vision of Zechariah. If an ordinary high priest could "take away sin in one day" it wouldn't be necessary for the ritual sacrifices to keep going on.
Also Jesus comes twice, the first time as Savior to pay the price for sin and the second time as king to actually rule over the world, making it the paradise that God had always intended it to be. The first vision of Zechariah about Joshua was having his rags replaced by clean clothes, and "taking away sin in one day", this was about the Savior role. The second vision of Zechariah about Joshua was of him receiving a crown, this was about the king role.
Each of these two visions of Joshua in the Book of Zechariah also refers to a servant of God in the future, known as "The Branch". In the first vision regarding Joshua, it is "The Branch" who will "take away sin in one day". In the second vision, it is "The Branch" who will reign as a king blessed by God.
"The Branch" was a prophecy of Jesus.
16) PROPHECY OF EXILE IN BOOK OF JEREMIAH
There is a brief prophecy in the Book of the prophet Jeremiah, and we can use Wikipedia to see how it turned out.
In the Book of Jeremiah, Chapter 27 Verse 7, made before the Jews were sent to exile in Babylon, warns the Jews that they "will serve Nebuchadnezzar, his son and, his grandson".
We know that it was the Babylonian leader Nebuchadnezzar II who destroyed Jerusalem and took most of the Jews into exile. We also know that the exile lasted 48 years before Babylon was conquered by Persia and the Jews allowed to return home. It is sometimes in prophecy as 70 years, but it took quite some time after the Jews returned home to get the Temple rebuilt and the ceremonies reinstated, and that is what this refers to, from the destruction of the Temple to it's reinstatement.
We see on Wikipedia that Nebuchadnezzar II was succeeded by his son, Amel-Marduk.
He was murdered and succeeded by his brother-in-law, Neriglissar, the husband of Nebuchadnezzar II's daughter.
He was succeeded by his son, whose mother was Nebuchadnezzar II's daughter so that he would be Nebuchadnezzar II's grandson, Labashi-Marduk.
Labashi-Marduk reigned as a child for less than a year before being murdered in a coup led by Nabonidus. But that would not last long. Babylon was soon to be defeated and overthrown by the Persians, and the Jews would be allowed to return home. But the Jewish captives in Babylon did indeed serve Nebuchadnezzar, his son, and his grandson, just as Jeremiah foretold.
The son of Nabonidus was Belshazzar. He is the one holding a royal party when he is alarmed by the "handwriting on the wall", in the Book of Daniel. He offered to make Daniel "the third ruler in the kingdom" if he could interpret the writing. But it was to no avail because the writing on the wall was a message from God that the kingdom of Babylon was at an end.
The reason that he only offered to make Daniel the "third ruler in the kingdom" is that Belshazzar was a prince, he never reigned as king. His father, Nabonidus, was still king when the kingdom ended. Belshazzar was the "second ruler", the prince, so he could only offer Daniel to be the "third ruler".
Another interesting prophecy is the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 13. It is about Babylon being overthrown. The thing that is interesting is that, at the time of Isaiah, Babylon wasn't even an independent nation. It was just a part of the Assyrian Empire.
But sure enough, Babylon had long before been a great nation. The most famous name associated with the original Babylon had been Hammurabi, the king whose law code became the foundation of justice from then until now. But Babylon was reinvigorated by an influx of people known as Chaldeans. Like everyone else, Babylon hated Assyrian rule. Great rebellions began which not only liberated Babylon but actually began the process that overthrew Assyria.
Babylon supplanted Assyria as the next great power, becoming what is now referred to as Neo-Babylon.. The Assyrians had taken the northern kingdom of Israel into permanent captivity, scattering them around the Assyrian Empire, so that they became known as "The Ten Lost Tribes". When Babylon became the great power, they took the remaining southern kingdom of Judah into captivity, but Babylon was conquered by the Persians, who released the Jews from captivity, thus fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah that had been made about 150 years before, before Babylon was even an independent nation.
17) CROSSING THE RED SEA
EVE AND LUCY AND MODERN SCIENCE
Has anyone ever noticed an interesting connection about the earliest human, "Lucy", that was found in Ethiopia?
In biblical terms, Lucy would correspond to Eve, the first woman as described in the Bible. Unfortunately, Eve ate the "forbidden fruit" and she and Adam were banished from the paradise that God had created for them, the Garden of Eden.
Has anyone noticed the connection between Eve and Lucy? Lucy was so-named because the Beatles song "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" was playing on the music apparatus of the expedition as they were discovering her remains. The song is actually a reference to the LSD that, as an unfortunately popular illegal drug, was a "forbidden fruit" of the time.
Isn't that interesting? Eve is recorded in the Bible as eating the "forbidden fruit" and Lucy, Eve's scientific counterpart, ended up inadvertently being named for an illegal drug.
The Bible also records Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land, after being freed from bondage in Egypt, across the Red Sea. Ethiopia, known to be the original home of humans and the land where Lucy was discovered, was on the coast of the Red Sea, or at least it was before Eritrea split away and became a separate country.
Modern science has found something else. The Red Sea was not always there. Both Ethiopia and part of the Arabian Peninsula are situated on a geological formation called the Arabian-Nubian Shield. But this was split apart by the widening of the Red Sea. This is part of my geological theory, "The Story Of Planet Earth", on the geology blog, in the Supporting Documents: 69) THE GEOLOGY OF THE MIDDLE EAST EXPLAINED.
Ethiopia is in the lower left of the following map. The Arabian Peninsula, from which Ethiopia was separated by the formation of the Red Sea, is on the right. Yemen, where the Queen of Sheba is widely believed to have been from and who is the legendary descendant of Ethiopian monarchs, is directly opposite Ethiopia on the Arabian Peninsula.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea#/media/File:Red_Sea_topographic_map-en.jpg
Another thing that modern science has found is the vast amount of oil in the Arabian Peninsula, but not in Ethiopia. Oil is formed of ancient plant material. What that must mean is that the Arabian Peninsula, although a dry desert today, was once filled with lush vegetation.
Now stop and think. The common homeland where humans are known to have originated, Ethiopia, was separated from what was a lush garden of plants by the Red Sea, which had not previously been there. Moses is described in the Bible as leading his people "across this Red Sea" to the Promised Land.
Could this mean that the Red Sea formed as representing the separation of humans from the original garden paradise that had been created for them? Moses, leading them "across the Red Sea", was reversing that separation. To add to this connection, Moses is described in the Bible as marrying an Ethiopian woman, rather than one of his own people. Moses' brother and sister criticized him for marrying this foreign wife, but God himself came to his defense. There was to be a biblical link between Ethiopia and Moses crossing the Red Sea.
By the way, something else that is very interesting is the Israelites being led to Israel as the Promised Land. From there, they were to bring his message to the world. What was not known at the time is that Israel is located exactly in the center of the eastern hemisphere. Europe, Africa and, Asia would be accessible from Israel by land or sea. Israel is right in the middle of the three continents and no other location has this advantage. The Red Sea is part of this advantage as ships could sail to all of the east from the port of Eliat. This could not possibly have been known at the time.
Remember that, while they were being led to the Promised Land, they were still called Israelites, after Jacob whose name had been changed to Israel. They did not become known as Jews until later, when the tribe of Judah became predominant.
THE SIXTIES AND THE MILLENNIUM
The return of the city of Jerusalem to the Jews was foretold long ago, by Jesus in the Gospels, to begin the countdown, spanning a human lifetime or less, of the Return of Jesus to set up His Kingdom on earth. This return happened in 1967. Israel had already been reestablished but the Old City of Jerusalem did not come back under Jewish control until the Six-Day War in June of that year. There was actually a 19-year delay between the founding of the reborn state of Israel and the regaining of the Old City of Jerusalem.
Maybe there was a reason for that delay.
(Note-Remember that we saw the biblical prophecies of the Last Days being fulfilled in our time in the posting on this Blog, "The End Of The World As We Know It").
The world as we know it was to conclude in the Apocalypse before Jesus returned to actually run the earth, and it would be the paradise that God had always intended it to be. The reason that it wasn't went back to Eve "eating the forbidden fruit" and bringing sin into the human race. This paradise under the direct rule of Jesus is referred to as the Millennium, and could be described as a restoration of the original paradise that God Intended for us.
But it isn't like God to let the world be destroyed without first giving humans a chance to bring about the Millennium themselves. At the time Israel was reestablished, in 1948, the world had just finished the most terrible war that it had ever seen. Maybe the world had learned it's lesson that trying to ignore God and do things it's own way just doesn't work for long.
There were extensive and detailed prophecies in the Bible about how the Last Days would fall into place but the lesson of the Book of the prophet Jonah is that even the prophecies of destruction of a wicked, idolatrous and barbaric place like Nineveh can be put on hold if the people sincerely repent and follow God in time. Maybe we could call the Second World War the Tribulation Period and Hitler the Antichrist if the people had their hearts in the right place to see if they could build the Millennium themselves.
Israel had been reestablished but God decided to put the beginning of the countdown to Apocalypse on hold. Let the postwar generation come of age, the Baby Boomers, and see if they had learned enough from the horrific destruction around them to build the Millennium without the Apocalypse.
What came when the new generation grew up is the phenomenal time that we know as "The Sixties".
In many ways, the spirit was in the right place. There was an idealism during the Sixties that did indeed have the potential to bring about a Millennium. There had been an economic crash, a depression, and a second terrible world war, along with almost unbelievable genocide. The war had ended with the use of fantastic new bombs that had the potential to obliterate the world.
This could be the generation that had learned the lessons and would change everything.
The Summer of 1967, despite all of the conflict going on, was optimistically called "The Summer of Love". In 1969, the world saw the idealism of the rock music era as 400.000 young people converged for three days at a place called Woodstock, in New York State, and there was not a single act of violence. It very much resembled a religious pilgrimage.
The symbol of the Sixties became the "peace sign".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_symbols#/media/File:Peace_sign.svg
This was a time of sensing that a "Promised Land" might be within reach. There was the flow of people to Haight-Ashbury, then to Woodstock. There was the "Hippie Trail", across central Asia. Hippies from the west usually began the journey in Istanbul, those from Australia and Japan from the east. They were looking for adventure and enlightenment and, of course, drugs.
There was a strong Christian side to the Sixties that often gets overlooked, and which culminated in the Christian version of Woodstock, Explo '72 in Dallas. The songs of rock music, although rarely religious in nature, strongly resembled the psalms in the Bible in form.
They wanted a better world, and sensed that it was within reach.
But we just couldn't make it. Human nature wasn't going to allow it. No matter how much commendable idealism there was, the Sixties were filled to overflowing with sin and illegal drugs one of which Lucy, the scientific equivalent of Eve in the Bible, would be named for.
In 1966, Time Magazine issued the iconic cover story "Is God Dead"? In 1967, Life Magazine described the era well with another cover story, "The Permissive Society", with the catchphrase of the day, "Anything Goes", which was a reference to morality. It didn't create a better world, Time Magazine described 1967 as "That long, strange year".
In the summer of 1969, American astronauts walked on the moon. A few weeks later came the phenomenon of Woodstock, a three-day rock concert with 400,000 people but without a single act of violence. The bringing of humans to the moon, and getting them safely back was like crossing a "Red Sea", a previously unbridgeable gap, and the spirit to build a whole new world was clearly seen at Woodstock.
But between those events came the shock of the Charles Manson murders, which horrified the U.S. It wasn't some foreign force that had landed and committed these murders, it was our own children who had run away from home and joined this murderous musician who claimed to be Jesus.
The west coast version of Woodstock do not go as well and the Sixties, so full of hope and promise, ended in a December 1969 concert that exploded into violence at Altamont Speedway.
The Summer of 1967 was called "The Summer of Love", although America's war in Vietnam was raging, American cities were ablaze with urban riots, civil war in Nigeria, anti-Vietnam war protests were also going on in in America. Drug addiction was all around and the moral catchphrase was "anything goes".
It was during this summer that God saw that it wasn't going to work. Humans simply were not going to build the Millennium, a restoration of the original paradise that God intended for us, themselves. It was during the summer of 1967 that God moved ahead with starting the countdown to the Apocalypse, which would be followed by the real Millennium. In the Six-Day War of June 1967, the Old City of Jerusalem came back under Jewish control.
(Note-What I find to be an interesting example of the rebelliousness of the Sixties is the word "ain't". All of us children used the word and teachers would scold us that it is not a proper word and is not in the dictionary. But the word was everywhere. But now that it is in the dictionary, and is officially a word, very few people seem to use it anymore).
THE ROCK MUSIC ERA AND LIVE AID
It couldn't build the Millennium, but the rock music era was not entirely without merit. Back in the world's original homeland of Ethiopia, Communists had overthrown Emperor Haile Selassie. The color symbolizing Communism is red. These Communists in effect brought about a second Red Sea, further removing Ethiopia from the original paradise that God intended for humans.
During the tenure of the Communists, Ethiopia underwent a famine that was as if it was out of the Apocalypse. Then an amazing event took place that was like something the world had never seen before. In 1985, the global rock music community undertook two great concerts, each resembling the one at Woodstock 16 years before, to raise money for our common Ethiopian homeland.
One concert was held in London, and the other in Philadelphia. There were also other concerts held across the world. It was all broadcast across the world and close to half the world's population watched what was known as "Live Aid".
This was the culmination of the idealism of the rock music era. It couldn't cross both Red Seas, bringing humanity back to the paradise that was intended by way of the Millennium. But we could say that it did cross one Red Sea, bringing our common homeland of Ethiopia back from this apocalyptic famine.
There was no other nation that anything like this has been done for. But the world knew now that Ethiopia was our common home, where God had chosen for humans to begin.
So we see that there is another meaning to Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land across the Red Sea. It seems that this story was intended for prophecy as well. We could see the link between Lucy, representing Eve who got humans expelled from paradise by eating the "forbidden fruit", by the fact that she was named for the "forbidden fruit" of LSD, which was one of the factors preventing the Sixties from beginning the Millennium.
But the Sixties actually did, inadvertently, bring the world back toward religion from secularism. America in the Sixties was reflected, ten years later, in Iran. It was an inverted reflection, hostile to America, but it is striking how bell-bottom pants and sideburns were in style in Iran during the 1979 Revolution and Hostage Crisis. The crowds of young Iranians chanting "Death To America" looked very much like the young Americans protesting the Vietnam War in the Sixties. As we saw in the posting on this blog, "The Great Revolution Of Our Time", this turned out to be the beginning of the reversal of the previously-inexorable trend toward secularism.
CROSSING THE RED SEA
In modern times Israel had been reestablished as foretold in the prophecies. The oldest human beings had been found in Ethiopia. The oil, which must have come from a lush garden of plants, was found just across the Red Sea from Ethiopia. It was also found that the Red Sea, which separated our common Ethiopian homeland from the former garden on the Arabian Peninsula had not always been there but was gradually widening.
Another interesting connection is that we know that the oil in the Middle East, which the world has gotten so dependent upon, will be a major factor in bringing about the wars of the Apocalypse. Wouldn't it be ironic if the remains of the plants in the original Garden of Eden, now in the form of oil, helps to bring about the Apocalypse that results in the restoration of humans to the paradise that God originally intended for them?
Then there is the subject of Charles Manson. He claimed to be Jesus and decided to bring about the Apocalypse himself by having his followers brutally murder people in their homes, in well-off neighborhoods, and write "PIG" on the wall in their blood. At a time of great racial tension in the U.S., he thought that the killings would be blamed on black militants, which would set off a racial war which would be the beginning of Armageddon. Whatever was left of the world then have to depend on Manson for guidance, and he would preside over the Millennium as Jesus.
But this was two years after the Old City of Jerusalem had come back under Jewish control, thus starting the biblical countdown, of one lifetime or less, to Apocalypse. A lot of people were talking about, and taking an interest in, the subject of Bible prophecies being fulfilled in our time. What was Satan thinking about all of this? It would greatly increase the faith of many people in the Bible to see these old prophecies actually being fulfilled. Could it be that Satan reached down to the Manson "Family" in an effort to ridicule the whole subject, and make it look evil and sinister?
For that matter, Satan knows that when the Apocalypse happens his time is up. He also knows that the time frame for the Apocalypse revolves around the Jews and their return to Israel. Before the restoration of Israel in 1948, the vast majority of the Jews lived in Europe. What if Satan could raise a powerful army, quickly conquer Europe, and then preclude the Apocalypse by simply killing all of the Jews?
But this attempt to kill all of the Jews is what ended up getting Israel restored. In a remarkably similar way, Satan's efforts to get Jesus killed is what ended up sealing God's plan of redemption for humanity.
But what about the actual crossing of the Red Sea, as described in the Bible? A powerful wind, as described in the Bible, divided the water so that the Israelites could cross the sea without getting wet. Remember that, as we saw in the sections above, prophecy is sometimes told in the form of a story. This crossing of the Red Sea could be the combined description both of the crossing led by Moses, and also a future crossing when the nation of Israel is restored before the Apocalypse.
Thousands of Jews were brought to Israel, first from Sudan and then from Ethiopia in great airlift operations named Operation Moses, Operation Joshua and, Operation Solomon. In 1991, Operation Solomon famously set a world record for squeezing the most people into an aircraft, well over a thousand.
But let's consider aerodynamics for a moment. When an aircraft flies, the wing divides the air so that a powerful wind, in effect, crosses the wings. The wing is curved on the top and flat on the bottom so that the air has to flow faster over the top than the bottom. This creates a condition of lower pressure above the wing than below it. When this difference in pressure exceeds the weight of the plane, it flies.
Such aerodynamic science was completely unknown during biblical times. Could this be at least part of what was meant by the wind dividing the Red Sea, but dividing the air above it rather than the sea itself, so that the Jews of the future could also cross the sea without getting wet?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Solomon#/media/File:Flickr_-_Government_Press_Office_(GPO)_-_LINE_OF_ETHIOPIAN_IMMIGRANTS_STREAMING_OUT_OF_THE_HERCULES.jpg
Adding to this link is the fact that Moses, despite opposition from his family about marrying a foreigner, married an Ethiopian woman.
In similar ways, Jews in Yemen were brought back by Operation Magic Carpet, and Jews in Iraq, who had been there since the time of the captivity in Babylon by Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, which are the two books in the Bible describing the return of the Jews from captivity in Babylon.
But the story of the Exodus in the Bible has pharaoh regretting letting the Israelites go and pursuing them after they had left for Israel. That has not happened yet, in the modern side of the parallel story, but remember that Ethiopia is listed in the Bible as one of the nations that will join in the attack on Israel in the Last days of the world, that will begin the final war of the world.
EGYPT AND THE CROSSING OF THE RED SEA
Critics charge that there is scant evidence that the Exodus, the Israelites being led from slavery in Egypt as described in the Bible, actually took place as it was told. But I have been thinking about another angle to it. What about the effect that it had on the Egyptians?
What I see as the greatest mystery of ancient Egypt is the era known as the Amarna Period. The name also refers to the "Amarna Letters", letters by the Egyptian leadership during this period to diplomatic posts in other lands.
Egypt was a very polytheistic nation which honored a broad pantheon of gods. Like any other comparable civilization that we can see, Egypt had a god for everything. Many gods, with control over certain aspects of life, were not universal. In one city a request might be made to one god, but the same request would be made to a different god if in another city. Egypt's gods were very important to it, and there was a long and hallowed tradition of how they must be worshiped.
All of a sudden, a new pharaoh comes to the throne, Amenhotep IV. He surprises and dismays all of Egypt by announcing that one god is supreme above all others. He changed his name to Akhenaten to reflect devotion to this one supreme god, which was called Aten.
The new pharaoh destroyed many of the temples of the traditional gods, making many enemies in the process, and built a new capital city to reflect the new era of devotion to his god. The city was called Amarna, which gives it's name to this brief era. This was not exactly monotheism, the old gods of Egypt were still there. But now one of the gods was to be honored far above the others.
The disk of the sun was considered as the manifestation of this one supreme god. The people would actually worship the pharaoh while he worshiped the one supreme god, putting himself in a role somewhat like a high priest or the earthly son of this god.
The position of women in Egypt improved during this time and from it comes the best-known face of ancient Egypt, the bust of Nefertiti. She was the queen of Akhenaten during his great religious reform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nefertiti#/media/File:Nofretete_Neues_Museum.jpg
But the change of religion did not go over very well at all. It was unpopular with nearly everybody and was reversed just as soon as Akhenaten died. The capital city was moved back to Thebes. The son of Akhenaten was the famed King Tut, short for Tutankhamen. King Tut actually died as a teenager, might have actually been the most insignificant of pharaohs, and you have heard of him only because grave robbers never found his tomb.
Horemheb was the following pharaoh who really reversed the religious reforms. He destroyed the capital city that had been built for the new supreme god, and not much remains of it today. Being childless he appointed his vizier as his successor, who would take the throne as "Ramesses I", as we saw in the posting by that name. This began a new dynasty, the Nineteenth Dynasty.
It is true that there is little historical record of the Exodus from Egypt. But the Egyptians did not like to be defeated, and they were in the habit of selectively recording, and even erasing, parts of their own history. We know for sure that a warlike people called the Hyksos conquered and ruled Egypt for a time but there is very little Egyptian record of that. Ramesses II, grandson of Ramesses I, was known as the Great Builder of ancient Egypt, he wanted to be remembered by his endless building, but he is also known to have imposed his cartouche on buildings that others had built.
We have to understand that this is so out of the ordinary, so unique in ancient Egypt that it demands special explanation. No other pharaoh ever attempted anything like this. Akhenaten had all of the makings of a great pharaoh. But he put himself down in the history of his nation as a criminal and heretic. He was buried in a very small tomb and generally scorned after his death. He became essentially a non-person in Egypt and his name is missing from later lists of previous pharaohs. Akhenaten's mummy, nor that of his queen Nefertiti, have even been positively identified. Virtually anything to do with his new religion was destroyed, and his religion of one supreme god forgotten.
What then made him do it? There is a clear explanation that really should get some attention.
What if the story of the Exodus, as told in the Bible, really did happen as told. The Egyptians saw the awesome power of the Israelites' God. While they may not have paid much attention to the religion of their slaves, the Bible records Moses describing their God to the unnamed pharaoh. They knew that the Israelites worshiped only one God. During the Exodus, the Egyptians saw the power of this God.
The Egyptians would not have known the details of their former slaves' religion, this was before the Bible was written, all they knew was that they worshiped only one all-powerful God which, at the time, was a very unique idea.
The timing is right, the Fourteenth Century B.C. We know that King David ruled over Israel around 1000 B.C. Before the Exodus and that time, the Israelites had to go through the long periods of wandering in the wilderness, gradually clearing the land of the Canaanites, and the period when Israel was ruled by leaders known as Judges.
Doesn't it look to you as if the Egyptians, having seen the power of the Israelites' God as described in the Bible, but really not wanting to admit that they and their gods had been defeated by the God of their slaves, had a pharaoh who thought that the best thing for Egypt was to incorporate this one supreme God, and facilitated that as best as he could, even though destroying his own reign and legacy in the process?
He even changed his name to signify his new religious convictions, from Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten, just as Abram had his name changed to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, and Jacob to Israel.
I see this as the best evidence that the Exodus, as described in the Bible with all of it's miracles, took place just as described. It could not have been that the Egyptians had gotten dissatisfied with the old gods because the country was poor or subject to foreign domination, and sought a new god to change their fortunes, because Egypt was near the height of it's power at the time.
But there is still more to consider.
Of all the hundreds of pharaohs and other important people in the long history of Egypt, two have emerged as the "faces" of old Egypt. These are Nefertiti, as we saw above, and King Tutankhamen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun#/media/File:CairoEgMuseumTaaMaskMostlyPhotographed.jpg
Nefertiti was the queen of Akhenaten, the pharaoh who tried to get Egypt worshiping one supreme God, and Tutankhamen was his son. Although Nefertiti was not Tutankhamen's mother. The only other name from Egypt that has any comparison to these two is Ramesses II, who would rule in the following dynasty.
Now, stop and think. Doesn't it strike you as very noteworthy that the two who should emerge as the most familiar faces from Egypt's very long history are the queen and the son of this scorned pharaoh who had tried to get Egypt to abandon it's historic pantheon of gods, in order to worship one supreme God?
King Tutankhamen was actually quite likely the most insignificant of pharaohs. He became king as a child, was in exceptionally poor health, and died in his teens. Decisions during his reign were almost certainly made by advisers, who would succeed Tutankhamen as pharaohs themselves, Ay and Horemheb. The reason that he is so famous today is that, unique among the pharaohs of Egypt, grave robbers never found his tomb before archeologists did in modern times.
Could it be that God arranged it for Tutankhamen and Nefertiti to emerge as the best-known figures of the long history of Egypt to show that the Egyptians had certainly seen the power of the Israelites' God in delivering them from slavery? Even though they were not about to record it, the world could see their reaction to it. This could not have been done for Akhenaten himself because he was scorned upon death, becoming a non-person whose name is missing from later lists of past pharaohs, and was buried in a very modest tomb.
King Tutankhamen, son of Akhenaten, is recorded as going against his father's religious ideas upon succeeding him. In fact, the new king's original name was to have been Tutankhaten, recognizing the one supreme god, but was changed to Tutankhamen, for the original Egyptian gods. But he was a child upon becoming pharaoh and decisions were certainly being made for him.
In the campaign of Horemheb against this new religious idea, the following statue of King Tut and his queen was severely damaged. But yet they have emerged in modern times as the faces of ancient Egypt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun#/media/File:Tutankhamun_at_Luxor_temple.jpg
18) THE PENTAGON PROPHECY
On October 21, 1967, what I see as the defining day, in spiritual terms, of the Baby Boomer era took place. At the height of the Vietnam War, there was a March to the Pentagon to protest the war. Hundreds of people gathered in front of the Pentagon and, through chanting and meditation, attempted to levitate the building, lift it off the ground, and to purge it of "the evil within".
The levitation of the Pentagon apparently wasn't successful, at least in terms of gravity, the building remained securely anchored to it's foundation. But this event showed where the Sixties really stood in the grand scheme of things. There was just something so special about this time. I was just a young child but I could tell how special the time was.
We know that the return of the original city of Jerusalem to the Jews begins the one-generation countdown to the establishment of Jesus' Kingdom on earth, but the Tribulation Period and the reign of the Antichrist has to come before that. Israel came back into existence in 1948, after nearly 1,900 years of dispersion, but there was a 19 year delay between that and the return of Jerusalem, which happened as a result of the Six-Day War of June 1967.
What I later concluded was that there was a reason for that delay. God wanted to first give us a chance to build the Millennium ourselves, without going through the Tribulation Period, which will be the worst time that the world has ever seen.
This was the Baby Boom Generation that was born into a world that had just gone through a cataclysmic world war, genocide and the development of nuclear weapons that could destroy civilization at the touch of a button. This might be the generation that had learned it's lesson. Maybe they could even build the Millennium, when the world would be the godly paradise that it had always been intended to be, without going through the Tribulation Period.
God decided to give them a chance. Israel had been reestablished but there would be a delay in Jerusalem coming back under Jewish control, as was foretold by Jesus.
The reason that there was so much protest against the Vietnam War, when people are usually patriotic to their country, is that there was an unspoken sense that this was a very special time. It was the budding Millennium, and there wasn't supposed to be wars. In many ways, the hearts of the Baby Boomers in the Rock Music Era were in the right place. This was the generation that wanted a better world and it seemed as if it might be within reach.
But we just couldn't do it. We were just too sinful. God saw that it wasn't going to work, it was only getting more sinful, so in June of 1967 the Six Day War brought the original city of Jerusalem back under Jewish control, for the first time in nearly two thousand years, as prophecied by Jesus to begin the one-generation countdown to the Millennium.
A few months later, this attempt to levitate the Pentagon showed what had happened. We saw in "The Aztec Prophecy", on this blog, how the Aztecs had a prophecy that is today on the Mexican flag. When they saw an eagle devouring a snake while perched on a cactus, that was where they were to build their city. The result was Mexico City, which would become the largest city in the world.
But what the Aztecs didn't understand at the time is that they were a step below where they thought they were. The snake was actually their own god Quetzalcoatl, a snake-like deity sometimes called "The Plumed Serpent". They still had to go through the "tribulation" of conquest by the Spanish conquistadors before they came to the real God.
The crowd that was trying to levitate the Pentagon definitely had their hearts in the right place. They wanted a better world and thought that the evil that was hindering that world lived within the Pentagon. It was reminiscent of the teachings of Jesus. He told His disciples that if they had enough faith they could "command a hill to move from here to there and it would". Jesus also commanded demons to leave people, and they had no choice but to obey.
But the crowd that was trying to levitate the Pentagon, despite clearly having faith, didn't have their faith in the right place. Their faith, at least for the most part, was not in Jesus but in the power of their chanting and meditation. Like the Aztecs, they were at a lower level than they thought. They were like the false prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. They were trying to prove that Baal was superior to Elijah's God. But no matter how much chanting they did, their sacrifice wouldn't miraculously burst into flame. The world is still going to have to go through the Tribulation Period to get to the Millennium.
Nearly 34 years later, right where the crowd trying to levitate the Pentagon had been standing, a hijacked plane flew into the side of the Pentagon as part of the 9 / 11 Attacks. Has anyone ever thought that maybe this was part of that crowd getting their answer, although not quite in the way that they had expected?
Notice that number, 34. There were three building impacts in the 9 / 11 attacks and, of course, all three were planned together and related. The impact on the Pentagon was the third and it occurred 34 minutes after the impact on the South Tower. This makes it appear as if it was to indicate that The impact on the Pentagon was also related to the attempt to levitate it, 34 years before.
The 9 / 11 Attack changed the world, not bringing about the Millennium by itself but by starting the world down the path that, by the way things have been going since then, will lead to the Apocalypse although the time of the Antichrist must come first. After the Apocalypse will come the establishment of Jesus' Kingdom on earth. Those who had tried to levitate the Pentagon will finally get the world that they wanted and it will be much better than they could possibly have imagined.
19) THE PERSIANS AND BABYLON
There was another nation where the idea of one supreme god arose, and which also had important dealings with the Israelites, that nation is Persia.
The religion known as Zoroastrianism was the official religion of Persia when Cyrus conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return home from their captivity there. They were given back all of the religious articles that Nebuchadnezzar's forces had taken after destroying the Temple in Jerusalem.
(Note-They were called Israelites before, after Jacob whose name had been changed to Israel, and were not called Jews until the tribe of Judah became predominant).
What stands out about the Zoroastrians is that, like the Jews, they believed in only one supreme God, which made them unique in the world. The religion began with a prophet called Zoroaster. Some, like the German writer Nietzsche, refer to him as Zarathustra.
Islam ultimately displaced Zoroastrianism in what is now Iran, but the pre-Islamic Persian past has never completely been eradicated. For one example, Iran's New Year, Nowruz, is actually a Zoroastrian holiday. Many Zoroastrians moved to India, where the colony in Bombay became known as Parsis, meaning "Persians". The Iranian royal line that we saw in "Remembering The Pahlavi Dynasty", on this blog, was originally Zoroastrian.
Like the new religion of Akhenaten in Egypt 800 years before, this really stands out in history. Rarely has such generosity been seen from a great empire in ancient times. The cost of rebuilding the Temple, once they got to Jerusalem, was even reportedly paid for by the Persians. It quite likely might not have been rebuilt otherwise.
The Bible treats the exile in Babylon as punitive, and it was, although it was noting like the enslavement in Egypt long before and many Jews elected to stay in Babylon when they had the chance to return home. The Books of Daniel and Esther are about Jews who did not return home. Jeremiah did not go into exile but Ezekiel did, and his prophecies are made from Babylon. But it is also clear that God wants the Jews in Babylon, stating that those who go will prosper while those who try to seek sanctuary in Egypt will not.
Could it be that God, seeing that they had arrived at the idea of one supreme God and so were on the right track, wanted them to contact the Jews with their concept of God? Like the earlier Amarna Period in Egypt, how else can this logically be explained? The way the Persians dealt with the Jews is just so unique in the ancient world, and requires some special explanation.
More than 500 years later, at the time of Jesus, the Magi arrived to pay homage to the infant Jesus, and to give him the three gifts of gold, frankincense and, myrrh. The Magi were a class of Zoroastrian priests, from Persia, who had reportedly followed the Star of Bethlehem likely along what was then the Silk Road, because the birth of Jesus fulfilled a Zoroastrian prophecy.
It appears that both monotheistic religions, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, had messengers to herald the coming of Jesus, the Magi when he was born and John the Baptist when Jesus began his ministry at the age of about 30. Just as the Magi were Zoroastrian priests, John the Baptist was from a Jewish priestly family.
The Bible actually says relatively little about the Magi, and the only Gospel that tells their story is that of Matthew. But they have outdone even the Queen of Sheba in having all kinds of legends spun around them. Because they brought three gifts to the infant Jesus, it has been presumed that there were three Magi, but nowhere in the Bible does it give their number.
Sometimes they are referred to as "The Three Wise Men" or "The Three Kings", but there is no reason to presume that they were kings. There is a popular Christmas song about them, "We Three Kings Of Orient Are", and they are a staple of Christmas scenes. I once played one of the Wise Men in a Christmas play. In Medieval times, they were even given names, Balthazar, Caspar and, Melchior.
20) THE MEANING OF NOAH'S ARK
We have seen how these old stories in the Bible can have meanings that go far beyond the actual story. The story of the Crossing of the Red Sea, for example, is loaded with meaning and prophecy. Another thing that we saw is how the band around the stump of the tree in the Book of Daniel seems to be a prophecy of the Temple Mount after the Temple had been destroyed.
But what about the story of Noah's Ark? Noah released a dove from the ark, as the waters were receding, three times. The first time it returned. Seven days later, the dove was sent out again and it returned with an olive leaf. Seven days after that, the dove was sent out but did not return.
What do you suppose that this could mean? Much later, in the Gospel of St. Luke, the Holy Spirit descended in the form of a dove as Jesus was being baptized by John the Baptist. Jesus was baptized in water, the water of the Jordan River, just like the water of the Flood. Have you ever stopped to think that the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a dove was the return of the dove sent out by Noah?
When Jesus was crucified, the cross was made of wood and was held together by nails. Jesus was also crucified on the cross with nails. Just as Noah's Ark was made of wood which was held together by nails.
Just as the dove returned to Noah, Jesus will also return to gather His people before the beginning of the Tribulation Period in the event commonly referred to as the Rapture. Although this is a general term that is not in the Bible. He will then return seven years after that to set up His Kingdom for the Millennium, in which the world will be the holy paradise that it was always meant to be.
But notice the common number 7. The dove was sent out again in 7 days and Jesus will return in 7 years, when sent by God. Remember that, in the Book of Daniel, "weeks of years" are used, so that 7 years is referred to as a "week", which would ordinarily mean 7 days. We saw this in the section of this posting 10) THE BIBLE'S SEVENTY SEVENS.
The descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove meant that Jesus was actually now Noah's dove.
The second time that the dove returned to Noah, it brought an olive leaf. Some versions of the Bible translate it as an olive branch. In the Old Testament, both Isaiah and Jeremiah prophecy the coming of a "branch". Although it is not stated, when the Holy Spirit descended as a dove at the baptism of Jesus, this showed that Jesus was that branch. In the Book of Isaiah it is referred to as a "Branch of Jesse" and we know that Jesse, the father of King David, was a direct ancestor of Jesus.
The Book of Genesis gives the dimensions of Noah's Ark. Although we know that it is a very large ship the dimensions are probably not exactly translatable. But what about the Temple Mount in Jerusalem? Have you ever thought that the Temple Mount, with the north-south length being longer than the east-west width, which is greater than the height, very much resembles the dimensions of Noah's Ark?
Notice how the south wall of the Temple Mount resembles a ship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Mount#/media/File:South_Temple_Mount.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship#/media/File:Ship_diagram-numbers.svg
Notice also how this model of the Temple, before it's destruction, very much resembles the superstructure of a ship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holyland_Model_of_Jerusalem#/media/File:Jerusalem_Modell_BW_2.JPG
The Book of Genesis describes Noah's Ark as coming to rest on the mountains of Ararat. The Temple Mount is actually "resting" on another famous mount. It is Mount Moriah, although it is a hill and not as high as Mount Ararat, the meaning is the same.
Two other things that are interesting is that Noah's Ark is described as having three decks, and Jesus rose after being crucified in three days. The Book of Genesis describes Noah as waiting "forty days and forty nights" before opening a window on the ark after it came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. There are two mountains, one larger and one smaller, but the two mountains are at exactly 40 degrees north latitude.
So we have seen in the section of this posting 2) THE TREE STUMP AND THE TEMPLE MOUNT that the band around the tree stump in the Book of Daniel is almost sure to be a prophecy of the Temple Mount, we can see how it is also foretold by the old story of Noah's Ark.
1) PROPHECIES IN THE FORM OF STORIES IN THE BOOK OF DANIEL
The Old Testament Book of Daniel contains prophecies in the form of stories, all of which revolve around the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, or his successors. The Book of Daniel is like an Old Testament version of the Book of Revelation. The Book of Daniel is longer in the Catholic Bible, but what we will see here is in both Catholic and Protestant Bibles.
Daniel Chapter 2 is the well-known story about Nebuchadnezzar's dream of a statue whose parts were made of different materials, and which was destroyed by a massive stone which fell from the sky. Nebuchadnezzar's kingdom is the head, and the rest of the body of the statue are the successive great kingdoms which would come afterward. Daniel is very much like the earlier Joseph, who could explain the dreams of Pharaoh in Egypt in the Book of Genesis.
As rulers of the known world, Babylon is succeeded by by the Medes and the Persians who defeat and destroy it. They are in turn succeeded by Greece, who is then succeeded by Rome. Rome is mysterious in that it is vanquished, like the others, but then later returns. It's return is in the form of the European Union, which occupies approximately the same territory that the Roman Empire once did, in the Last days of the world. The toes of the statue are made of iron mixed with clay, which do not mix very well, and thus the "toes" of the Roman Empire are the different European nations that were carved from it's former territory.
Egypt is missing from the list of successive great powers, but we now know that by the time this prophecy was made Egypt's time as a great power had already passed, and the same goes for Assyria which had been defeated and supplanted by Babylon by the time this prophecy was made.
The stone which fell and destroyed the statue represents, of course, the Kingdom of God which will destroy the power of the nations, which do not follow his will, and will reign over the earth during the Millennium.
The Book of Daniel is all about prophecy and many Christians have discerned the story of another statue in the next chapter, Chapter 3, as a prophecy of the image of the future Antichrist that was also described much later in the Book of Revelation, Chapter 13. The dimensions of the statue are given as 60 cubits high, and 6 cubits wide. The number of musical instruments that are given as a signal to everyone to fall and worship the statue is 6. This gives us the number 666, which is given in the Book of Revelation as the number of the Antichrist. But this was written many centuries before the Book of Revelation.
This story in the Book of Daniel about this golden image set up by Nebuchadnezzar has no archaeological or historical evidence that it ever took place. That is because it is a prophecy told as a story, and is a forerunner of the later prophecy in the Book of Revelation. It also relates to the chapter preceding it, about the dream of the statue representing the kingdoms of the world, which is ultimately destroyed by God. Even after having this dream interpreted, Nebuchadnezzar decides to set up his own statue which must be worshiped, thus making himself into a god just as the Antichrist will do.
Also part of the picture is that Nebuchadnezzar was the king of Babylon, and Chapter 18 of the Book of Revelation describes a "Mystery Babylon" that will be "utterly destroyed in one hour", during the Last days of the world and the time of the Antichrist, just as the statue representing the wicked kingdoms of the world was destroyed by the stone from the sky, after it's time had been fulfilled. We saw that in the posting on this blog, "The End Of The World As We Know It".
2) THE TREE STUMP AND THE TEMPLE MOUNT
But what about the next chapter, Chapter 4? This is a third story involving Nebuchadnezzar, this time a dream about a great tree that is cut down. The tree represents Nebuchadnezzar. Even though the tree is cut down, it is not gone forever because a band of iron and bronze is put around the stump of the tree, to preserve it so that it can be restored.
What happens next in the story is that Nebuchadnezzar refuses to repent of his pride in the greatness of his kingdom, and to acknowledge the supremacy of God. Nebuchadnezzar goes insane, loses his authority, and for 7 years is reduced to living in the open field and eating grass like an animal. Finally he remembers God, acknowledges his supremacy, and has his kingdom restored to him.
But, like the story in Chapter 3, there is no historical evidence at all for the 7 year interruption in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, and this has disturbed many Christians over the years.
That is because this is a prophecy being told in the form of a story. A large tree does not grow back from it's stump after being cut down, and placing a metal band around the stump would not be of any help. So, the story must mean something else.
What about the Temple Mount in Jerusalem? The Temple was destroyed during the uprising against Roman rule, which was one of the nations represented in the statue in Chapter 2, but the artificial mount that it was built on was preserved by the retaining wall around it. The Temple is expected to have to be rebuilt for the Last days and the time of the Antichrist. We visited the Temple Mount in the posting on this blog, "Esau And The Temple Mount".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Mount#/media/File:Israel-2013(2)-Aerial-Jerusalem-Temple_Mount-Temple_Mount_(south_exposure).jpg
Do you see the connection here? the Temple is represented by the tree. The tree is cut down, the Temple is destroyed, but the "stump" of the tree remains, which is the Temple Mount, preserved by the "band" around it, which is the retaining wall built by King Herod in order to enlarge Mount Moriah, on which the First Temple, which was ordered destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar was built. The Second Temple, known as the Temple of Zerubbabel, was rebuilt in the same spot, after the Jews returned from the exile in Babylon to which Nebuchadnezzar sent them.
Much later, King Herod dismantled the Second Temple, which had never been as impressive as the First Temple, in order to rebuild the magnificent Third Temple. He expanded Mount Moriah by building the massive retaining wall around it, and filling in the gap. The Dome of the Rock is on the site that was once the top of Mount Moriah. The so-called "Western Wall", where Jews go to worship, is the western side of this retaining wall.
In Chapter 4, Nebuchadnezzar's period of insanity lasted 7 years. (Some versions of the Bible translate this as "7 times"). This is also the length of the time of the Antichrist, in the Book of Revelation, to which the Temple Mount, which I see as represented by the stump with the band around it, is so important.
The story of Nebuchadnezzar's period of insanity, and exile from his royal authority, takes place during the Jews' exile from their homeland, in Babylon. The story is thus also an analogy for the Jews of how they will be restored to their homeland when they properly acknowledge God. But it is also a prophecy of the second, and much longer exile, during the Diaspora following the revolt against Roman rule, in 70 AD, which led to the destruction of the Third Temple, the cutting down of the tree, even though the stump with the band around it remained in the form of the Temple Mount with it's retaining wall.
During the first exile, in Babylon, there was this 7 year period in the story of Nebuchadnezzar's exile into the wilderness due to insanity. The end of the second exile, the long Diaspora, results in another 7 year period, the time of the Antichrist. Finally, it all ends with the return of Jesus to earth to begin the Millennium, which was represented in the story in Chapter 2 by the rock that fell to earth and toppled the successive wicked kingdoms of the world.
It has long been understood how the stories about Nebuchadnezzar in Chapters 2 and 3 are really prophecies, but I cannot find any information that the tree, it's stump, and the band around the stump, in Chapter 4 are a prophecy of the Temple, the Temple Mount and, the retaining wall around the Temple Mount, as it seems to me to be certain that it is.
3) THE WRITING ON THE WALL
What about the chapter before the story of the lions' den, Chapter 5? Nebuchadnezzar had apparently died by this time and Belshazzar was having a wild party in the palace of Babylon. Suddenly, a hand appeared and wrote on the wall. The writing read that Belshazzar's kingdom had been weighed in the balance and had been found to be wanting, it would be taken from him and given to the Medes and the Persians. This is a clear reflection back to the inscribing of the Ten Commandments on stone tablets.
Before the night was over, the prophecy would come true. While the party was going on, the army of the Medes and the Persians put a temporary dam across the Euphrates River and got inside the walls of Babylon on the river bed. It was in this successive kingdom that Daniel, one of the Jewish exiles in Babylon, would be appointed as an official before his sentence to the lions' den. The Medes and the Persians were also the second kingdom, following Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, in the statue of Chapter 2.
But if Chapter 2 was about the successive ruling kingdoms, represented by the different parts of the statue, then shouldn't an example be given of how rule would pass from one kingdom to another? This is what the story of the writing on the wall, in Chapter 5, accomplishes. No stone has been found in the ruins of Babylon with any such writing on it, but it fits well into what I see as this series of stories as prophecies.
This sudden destruction of Babylon in Chapter 5 is also a foretelling of the sudden destruction of "Mystery Babylon", far in the future as described in the Book of Revelation and which we saw in the posting on this blog, "The End Of The World As We Know It". This future "Mystery Babylon", like the doomed idolatrous Babylon in Chapter 5, will be suddenly destroyed just when it feels at peace and secure.
One note about this chapter that is not in the Bible. Belshazzar is very perturbed by the sight of the writing appearing on the palace wall in front of him. He offers to make Daniel the "third ruler in the kingdom" if Daniel could interpret the writing. This is because Belshazzar was not actually the king himself. His father, Nabonidus was king, so that Belshazzar himself was the "second ruler in the kingdom". This is why he could only offer to make Daniel the "third ruler in the kingdom".
The next question becomes, if Jesus is so important to God's plan then shouldn't he be included in these prophecies, told in the form of stories? The rock falling from the sky in Chapter 2, which topples the statue that represents the successive empires, is widely understood to represent the future Kingdom of Jesus on earth. But this prophecy does not go into detail about exactly who Jesus is.
But what about another story in the Book of Daniel, the story of Daniel in the lions' den in the next chapter, Chapter 6? This is similar to the story of the idolatrous statue and the furnace, in Chapter 3. By the time of this story, Babylon has fallen and Daniel is an important official in the court of the Persians, who were represented as the next empire in line in the statue of Chapter 2.
Opponents of Daniel accuse him of worshiping his God, instead of the king. Daniel is sentenced to be thrown into the lions' den. The king himself does not want Daniel to be sentenced, suffers a sleepless night after Daniel is thrown in, and had advised Daniel that surely his God would protect him. But yet justice had to be done. The king rushes to the den at sunrise, and Daniel is still alive. The king is delighted that the lions have done him no harm. This proved that Daniel's God was the real God, and so he was not guilty of idolatry. His accusers were then thrown into the lions' den, where they were killed immediately.
But why shouldn't this be a prophecy told in the form of a story also? This story, as well as the rest of the Book of Daniel, was told many centuries before the time of Jesus. Just as the king did not actually want Daniel to be executed, so God did not want Jesus to be crucified, but justice had to be done--not for anything that Jesus was guilty of, but to pay the just price for our sins.
Just as Daniel made an unlikely emergence from the lions' den the following morning, so Jesus rose from his tomb on the first Easter. Daniel's false accusers, who resented the high position that the king had given him, would later be mirrored in Jesus' accusers, who were motivated by envy of his popularity. The lions represent Jesus' future Roman executioners.
The course of the story is very similar to that of Chapter 2, the idolatrous statue and the furnace, but my conclusion is that Chapter 2 is about the Tribulation Period, with the idolatrous image that will be set up by the Antichrist that is foretold in Chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation, while the story of the lions' den is about the future mission of Jesus. All of the prophetic stories in the Book of Daniel before this end with the coming of Jesus, so there would logically be a story included about the meaning of Jesus.
5) THE REST OF THE BOOK OF DANIEL
In the next chapter after the story of the lions' den, Chapter 7, Daniel himself has a mysterious dream, rather than interpreting a dream for a king. This dream is about a succession of four beasts, and these represent the same succession of empires that are described as the parts of the statue in Chapter 2. But the fourth beast has ten horns, and these are the same as the ten toes of the statue in Chapter 2.
Chapter 7 gives more information about what these ten mean than Chapter 2 does. Another horn arises among the ten horns that "has eyes and speaks boastfully". This new horn subdues three of the ten horns. Far in the future, In Chapter 17 of the Book of Revelation, St. John is also given a vision of ten horns, and describes them as "ten kings who give their power and authority to the beast". The Antichrist is referred to as "The Beast", in the Book of Revelation. This, of course, reflects to Daniel's vision of four beasts. These ten kings are described in Revelation 17 as opposing the Lamb. But the Lamb will defeat them because he is "Lord of Lords and King of Kings".
The Lamb, of course, is Jesus. Just as a lamb was given for sacrifice in Old Testament times, to serve as a propitiation for sins, Jesus was referred to as "The Lamb of God" because his "sacrifice" on the cross paid the price of sin once and for all. Just like the king who had Daniel thrown into the den of lions, God did not want this to happen, but his justice had to be done.
Next, the "Ancient of Days" is described as having "clothing as white as snow and hair as white as wool". Notice that this is exactly the way in which Jesus is described in the first chapter of the Book of Revelation, which was written far in the future. This is identified in Chapter 7 as being the one who will establish God's Kingdom on earth. after defeating the wicked kingdoms. This shows, again, the link between the Book of Daniel and The Book of Revelation. The Book of Daniel was written after the Jews' return from exile, over five hundred years before Christ. Revelation was written well after the time of Jesus, when the apostle John was elderly and in exile on the island of Patmos.
Yet there is a difference between the Books of Daniel and of Revelation. The Book of Daniel, in both the vision of the statue in Chapter 2 and Daniel's vision of the beasts in Chapter 7, describes four kingdoms which will have practical rule over the known world. But the Book of Revelation, Chapter 17, Verse 10, states that there are seven kings, of which five have fallen, one is, and one is yet to come. The Beast, the Antichrist, will be the eighth king who will have rule over the world.
But remember that Daniel is only looking forward, while Revelation is reviewing what has happened in the past, the kingdoms that have had rule over the known world, as well as looking forward. Egypt and Assyria were also great kingdoms that had practical rule over the known world, but came before the Book of Daniel. So, these are included in the past kingdoms of Revelation but not in the future kingdoms of Daniel.
In Revelation Chapter 17, Verse 10, the kingdom that is, at the time Revelation was written, is, of course, Rome. The five that had dominated the world, but had fallen by this time, were Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia (with Media) and, Greece. The one that is to come, the seventh, is the future restoration of Rome, which we see in the European Union. The Eighth, the Antichrist or the Beast, will come from that restoration of Rome.
We know this because the ten toes and the ten horns of Daniel are from the fourth kingdom, which is Rome and the Antichrist is the horn in Daniel Chapter 7 that will emerge from these. This leaves the only possible explanation of the ten, which are also defined in both Daniel and revelation as ten kings which will come from the fourth kingdom, as European nations which arose from the Roman Empire. The meaning of the "toes made of iron and clay", in the statue of Daniel Chapter 2 is that iron and clay do not mix well, and so the European nations will remain as separate entities after the fall of Rome. When they are put back together, as the European Union, it will comprise another kingdom and it is from this that the Antichrist will emerge. The three kings that are subdued by the Antichrist are three kings that resist his rule, possibly including Britain which voted to leave the European Union. The ten kings are core members of the European Union.
After this, in Daniel Chapter 8, we find actual prophecy, rather than prophecy as fictional stories. There is a ram, a mighty beast with two horns. But one horn is longer than the other, even though it came up later. This ram represents the kingdom of the Medes and the Persians. At the time of the fall of Assyria, the Medes were the rulers, with the Persians as a vassal state. But the Persians overcame their masters, so that the Medes and the Persians were still together, nut now the Persians were the rulers. The lesser, but older, horn of the ram is the Medes, while the newer horn is the Persians.
Another beast appears, in Daniel Chapter 8, this time it is a goat with a prominent horn. The goat charges at the ram, who is unable to resist it's power. But after the goat displaces the ram as the new power, it's prominent horn is broken into four pieces. One of the pieces mysteriously is given control of God's people and the daily sacrifice.
The goat represents Greece, which defeated and supplanted the Medes and the Persians as the dominant power. The breaking of the horn in pieces represents the breaking up of Alexander's empire after his death. One of the fragments of the Greek Empire was the Seleucids, who gained control of the Jews and put a stop to their daily sacrifices, which led to what is known as the Maccabean Revolt, in which the Jews managed to briefly attain independence for the first time in centuries, until the Romans gained control.
This chapter also leads to the time of the Antichrist, which makes it appear as if he has roots in Greece as well as in the future Rome. But remember that so much of what Rome was had been rooted in Greece. Much of the Roman pantheon of gods, were the earlier Greek gods but with different names, also that Greece is in the European Union.
Remember that all of this is amazing prophecy centuries before the events actually happened.
The next chapter of the Book of Daniel, Chapter 9, describes the well-known "seventy sevens" of years. This is the time from the building of the Second Temple, after the Jews' return from exile in Babylon, to the coming of the "Anointed One", which is a prophecy of Jesus and the time frame fits perfectly. Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed the First Temple, before taking the Jews into exile. But this accounts for only 69 sevens. There is one seven, of years, left over. This refers to the seven years of the Antichrist.
Chapter 9 of the Book of Daniel also has the prophecy, "The people of the ruler who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary". This refers to how, after 69 of the 70 "sevens" of years and the arrival of the "Anointed One" (Jesus), the Romans will destroy the city (Jerusalem) and the sanctuary (the temple), which they did after the Jewish uprising against their rule in 70 AD. "The ruler who is to come" again refers to the Antichrist which will emerge from a union of the nations which once made up the Roman Empire.
Daniel Chapter 11 prophecies about the future "King of the North and King of the South". This is about the two fragments of Alexander's Greek Empire which would jostle over control of the Jews. The "King of the South" are the Ptolemy dynasty, which ruled Egypt and controlled Israel first. "The King of the North" is the Seleucids, who eventually took control of Israel from the Ptolemies. The most famous name to emerge from the Ptolemaic Dynasty is that of Cleopatra, but all of their queen actually had this title.
But this chapter, once again, comes around to the Antichrist and the "Time of the End", where there will also be a "King of the North" and a "King of the South". This looks to another prophet of the Last Days, Ezekiel, who, as we saw in the posting, "The End Of The World As We Know It", foretells the invasion of Israel in the Last Days by a "powerful enemy to the north", with allies to the south of Israel.
6) THE IRON AND THE CLAY IN THE BOOK OF DANIEL
The history of Europe actually revolves around two components, and the relationship between these two components. These are the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire came first, and the papacy sees itself as the heir of this empire, through which Christianity spread. But during the early Middle Ages, the eastern part of Christendom became more independent. The pope formed an empire, that was to be under the control of the papacy, the purpose of which was to bring the eastern domains back into line. On Christmas day in the year 800, Charlemagne was crowned as Holy Roman Emperor in the old St. Peters Basilica.
But the plan didn't work. The eastern Christians split away, in what is known as the Great Schism of 1054, after representatives of the pope had excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius. Meanwhile, many of the Holy Roman Emperors defied the authority of the pope, and the struggle between the two became known as the Investiture Controversy.
That would be the beginning of Europe being shaped by what we could call the "frenemy", a mixture of friend and enemy, relationship between the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. I can't think of a better word to describe it.
The eastern Christians formed a separate branch of the religion from the Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox Church. The historical precedent for this was the splitting of the Roman Empire. After the fall of the western Roman Empire, with it's capital at Rome, the eastern part of the empire would continue on for another thousand years.
It would be known as Byzantium and it's capital would be at Constantinople. It would speak Greek, rather than the Latin of the western part of the empire. Following the Schism of 1054, Constantinople would be the center of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
But a new empire formed to the east of Byzantium and began expanding. This was the Ottoman Empire. Finally, in 1453, the Ottomans conquered Constantinople and renamed it as Istanbul. The Ottomans were Moslems and the center of the Eastern Orthodox Church ended up shifting far to the north, to a place called Moscow.
Moscow became known as the "Third Rome". The original Rome, the headquarters of the Catholic Church was, of course, the First Rome. Upon the split of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Constantinople became the center of that church and thus became the "Second Rome".
With the Eastern Orthodox Church split away, the rivalry between the heritages of the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire began to play out in the remaining Catholic domain of Europe.
Nearly five hundred years after the Great Schism of 1054, there was another split in the Catholic Church. The Reformation began in what is now Germany, which was in the heart of the Holy Roman Empire. The territory of the Holy Roman Empire was generally to the north of what had been the Roman Empire and I think it is safe to say that the split brought about by the Reformation was rooted in the historic rivalry between the two historic empires of Europe.
Earlier, the so-called "Babylonian Captivity of the Church", when French popes had moved the papacy to Avignon, was not a split in the church, as were the Reformation and the Schism of 1054, but was simply a matter of where the headquarters of the Catholic Church was going to be located.
Britain, which had been part of the Roman Empire but not the Holy Roman Empire, went to the Protestant side during the Reformation. But the Anglican Church that resulted, as a compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism, was among the branches of Protestantism that, along with Lutheranism, stayed closest to the liturgy of the Catholic Church.
A major deciding factor in the Reformation was language. Those areas that spoke Germanic (Northern European) languages almost all went with the Protestants. Those areas that spoke Romance languages almost all remained Catholic. This is reminiscent of the earlier split between the Latin and Greek languages after the end of the Roman Empire. But the Reformation was centered on the areas of northern Europe that were part of the Holy Roman Empire, but had not been part of the Roman Empire.
The older fault line between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church remains as well. The split in Ukraine, between the eastern and western parts of the country that have recently been in a civil war, is a reflection that, nearly a thousand years ago, the eastern part went with the Eastern Orthodox Church while the western part remained Catholic. The same can be said of the historic rivalry between Poland and Russia because Poland chose to remain Catholic.
Along came Napoleon. It was his conquests that brought the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire to an end. Napoleon later declared himself as a Roman emperor. "I am a true Roman emperor. I am of the best race of the Caesars".
Napoleon was crowned in a lavish ceremony in Notre Dame Cathedral. The pope was there to crown him, as another pope had crowned Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor just over a thousand years before. But just as the pope was about to put the crown on his head, Napoleon snatched the crown from the pope and put it on himself.
Napoleon's conquests brought the Holy Roman Empire to an end. He declared himself as a Roman emperor. Unlike the first Holy Roman Emperor, Napoleon put himself before the pope by snatching the crown from him and putting it on himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronation_of_Napoleon_I#/media/File:NapoleanCoronationDavid.jpg
What this amounts to then, in the view of European history as the tension between the two historic empires, is that Napoleon represented the heritage of the Roman Empire reemerging and striking back at the Holy Roman Empire, and bringing it to an end.
Napoleon's invasion of Russia did not fit into this competition between the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. Russia represented the "Third Rome", after the center of the Eastern Orthodox Church moved there. Napoleon's campaign represented a reenactment of the original split between the eastern and western halves of the original Roman Empire. That did not involve the Holy Roman Empire, which was later formed by the pope to rein in the wayward eastern Christians.
Napoleon's time was followed by a limited restoration of the French monarchy, which was followed by the establishment of a republic. Napoleon's nephew, known as Napoleon III, ended up as president of the French republic. He was only allowed one term as president and when it was over, in true Napoleonic style, simply declared the end of the republic and himself as emperor of a revived French Empire, the one established by his uncle.
But the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire wasn't quite finished yet. The German-speaking states across central Europe, which had been the heart of the Holy Roman Empire, were achieving political unity. By far the largest of these states was Prussia.
A war between Prussia and France, the Franco-Prussian War, resulted in the capture of Napoleon III and the final end of the empire of Napoleon, who had declared himself as a Roman emperor. What is known as the German Empire, or Imperial Germany, was actually declared by the victorious Prussians at Versailles.
The Holy Roman Empire was long gone. But the new German emperor, Wilhelm I, was of the House of Hohenzollern, which had been a dynasty in the Holy Roman Empire. The end of Napoleon's empire represented a rejuvenation of the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire, and it's striking back at the heritage of it's historical rival, the Roman Empire.
Notice the composition of the two sides in the First World War. Imperial Germany, at the heart of what had been the Holy Roman Empire, was allied with Austria, which had also been part of the Holy Roman Empire. German-speaking Austria, being shut out of the German federation because it had been the main rival of ultimately victorious Prussia, was now partnered with neighboring Hungary as the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The two would be allied with the Ottoman Empire. This had certainly not been a part of the Holy Roman Empire but it had conquered, and brought to an end, Byzantium which had been the continuation of the eastern Roman Empire. The Ottoman Empire thus fits as a part of the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire, as an ally of it's heritage. Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were known as the Central Powers.
Allied against the Central Powers in the First World War was Russia, France, Britain and, Italy. What do you notice here?
Russia, as we have seen, had been the "Third Rome", as the center of the Eastern Orthodox Church after the 1453 fall of Constantinople. Italy was, of course, the original homeland of the Roman Empire and only the north of Italy had been part of the Holy Roman Empire. Most of France had been to the west of the Holy Roman Empire but had been part of the Roman Empire. Britain had been partially in the Roman Empire but not in the Holy Roman Empire. The Roman Empire actually defined the divisions of Britain, the part that had been occupied was called England, the part to the north that hadn't was called Scotland, the part to the west that hadn't was called Wales.
The First World War was literally a war between the heritage of the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. This time, the Roman Empire emerged victorious.
But the rivalry wasn't over yet. The Weimar Republic that had replaced Imperial Germany after the First World War had been devastated by the economic crash of 1929. Out of the ruins arose another incarnation of the Holy Roman Empire, the Nazis. They referred to themselves as the "Third Reich", Imperial Germany being the Second Reich and the original Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne being the First Reich.
This led to another World War. The alliances were much the same as in the previous war, except that Italy took on a different role. Mussolini came before Hitler as a Fascist and was, in many ways, Hitler's mentor. He was entering the war on the same side as Hitler, the Axis Powers.
Instead of the Roman Italy, as in the First World War, this was the reenactment of the post-Roman Catholic Italy where the pope had created the Holy Roman Empire, and crowned Charlemagne as it's first emperor, even though Mussolini's stated goal was revival of the Roman Empire. Mussolini, actually the creator of the modern Vatican even though he claimed to be an atheist, played the role of Pope Leo and Hitler played the role of Charlemagne.
The Nazis were trying to fulfill the original purpose of the Holy Roman Empire, gathering Europe together and then confronting the east. The deadliest combat the world has ever seen was on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. It was the Third Reich against the Third Rome.
But never forget that the two cannot be entirely separate, just as France and Germany are never entirely separate. Both originated from the Franks, and Charlemagne was a Frank. Napoleon and Hitler were on opposite sides of the rivalry between the two historic empires, but Hitler made a point of visiting Napoleon's Tomb. The founding of Imperial Germany, as a united nation, was actually proclaimed at Versailles and the German emperors, although on the Holy Roman Empire side, took the title of "Kaiser", which means "Caesar".
There is always that "frenemy" relationship between the two. You can see how the balance of power has shifted back and forth, throughout European history. Neither the heritage of the Roman Empire or the Holy Roman Empire has ever gained lasting dominance over the other.
Peaceful modern Europe represents the two sides finally getting along with one another. Notice that the two treaties which founded the European Union are the Treaty of Rome and the later Treaty of Maastricht. In geographic terms, the Treaty of Rome represents the Roman Empire and the Treaty of Maastricht (in the Netherlands) represents the Holy Roman Empire.
Here is some really interesting symbolism.
Notice that the Imperial Banner of the Holy Roman Empire is a double-headed eagle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire#/media/File:Banner_of_the_Holy_Roman_Emperor_with_haloes_(1400-1806).svg
Although Byzantium, and later Russia, were to be enemies of the Holy Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire was actually founded to rein in the wayward Christians of the east, both of them also had the double-headed eagle as their symbol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Rome#/media/File:Palaiologos-Dynasty-Eagle.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Rome#/media/File:Lesser_Coat_of_Arms_of_Russian_Empire.svg
As it would turn out, a double-headed eagle would perfectly represent the relationship between the heritages of these two rival empires, the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. Two rival heads, looking in opposite directions, yet part of the same body.
If the double-headed eagle represents both the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire together, notice how Napoleon's France, representing the heritage of the Roman Empire, and the Second and Third Reichs of Germany, representing the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire, also have eagles as symbols but with only one head.
The one-headed eagle on the coat of arms of Napoleon's empire is looking to it's left.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_French_Empire#/media/File:Imperial_Coat_of_Arms_of_France_(1804-1815).svg
The coat of arms of Imperial Germany, ruled by the kaisers, would have a very similar eagle, but with one head looking to it's right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Empire#/media/File:Wappen_Deutsches_Reich_-_Reichsadler_1889.svg
The Nazi eagle also has one head looking to it's right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranks_and_insignia_of_the_German_Army_(1935%E2%80%931945)#/media/File:Insignias_casco.svg
If we put the two together, we get the double-headed eagle. The major conflicts in Europe have been when one tries to gain dominance over the other. This is very reminiscent of the early biblical rivalry between the two twins, Jacob and Esau, that we saw in "Esau And The Temple Mount".
So, what does this have to do with the Book of Daniel?
In the second chapter of the Book of Daniel, he interprets a dream that Nebuchadnezzar has had. But it is actually a prophecy told in the form of a story. Nebuchadnezzar had dreamed of a statue, which represented four successive empires that were to dominate the world. Nebuchadnezzar himself, with his Babylon, was the head of gold. As time goes on, each successive empire was of a metal that was inferior to the one before it. From gold to silver to bronze to iron.
The legs were made of iron, and represented the fourth empire. The feet of the statue are a continuation of this fourth empire, but are made of iron mixed with clay. Since iron does not mix very well with clay, there is some unity between the two, but the unity is "partly strong and partly brittle".
The four successive empires that were to dominate the known world are very clear. They are Babylon, Media-Persia, Greece and, Rome. Each conquered the one before it.
The iron, as the fourth empire represented by the statue, represents Rome. The Romans widely used metals and iron was a strong metal used in making weapons.
Clay, in contrast, is not something of which weapons were made. Clay was used in building and for writing tablets. This fits the character of the Holy Roman Empire, which wasn't a "conquering" empire and never fulfilled it's original purpose of regaining control over the eastern Christians. It's accomplishments were more in building magnificent cathedrals and in the intellectual realm.
Doesn't this perfectly fulfill the prophecy in the Book of Daniel that the feet of the statue will be made of "iron mixed with clay" so that it would have some unity, but would be "partly strong and partly brittle". There are two elements to the feet, iron and clay, just as there have been two major elements to the history of Europe that has prevented it's lasting unity, the heritages of the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire.
Also notice that the feet in the prophecy in the Book of Daniel would have ten toes. Later in the book, Chapter 7, there are the ten kings that are represented by ten horns. That is because this continue of the kingdom made of iron in the statue is the same as the one that ultimately produces the ten kings. The four beasts coming out of the sea in Chapter 7 represent the same four successive empires as the statue in Chapter 2.
In the prophecy of the statue, a rock comes down from the sky and lands on the feet. That indicates that the End of the World will come when all of the rivalry between the iron and the clay, which we see as the heritages of the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, has been completed.
7) CONCLUSION ABOUT THE BOOK OF DANIEL
The Book of Daniel is one of the most amazing books of the Bible, and has long intrigued readers with it's prophecies. But many Christians have been disturbed at the lack of evidence that any of the stories in the first six chapters actually took place. That is because these are prophecies told in the form of stories.
I cannot see that anyone has concluded that the tree stump, with a band around it, in Chapter 4, is a prophecy of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The tree that was cut down represents the Temple, which was destroyed due to sin and idolatry, but whose "stump" remains as the Temple Mount with the retaining wall around it, so that the Temple might be restored.
8) THE BOOK OF ESTHER
Here is a question about the subject of Bible prophecy. The prophecies in the Bible revolve around how the end of the present world will come, so that the Kingdom of Jesus can be established on earth and there can be the ideal paradise that God always intended. The ultimate purpose is to show that it is only the ways of God that are right. The history of the Israelites is foretold in advance, the exile in Babylon for disobedience and return, the coming of the Messiah, another scattering for disobedience, another return, and finally the Apocalypse followed by the Kingdom of God.
But then how about the Holocaust? Wouldn't it be logical that something so vital in the history of the Jews, around which the prophecies of the future of the entire world revolve, be included somewhere in the prophecies? The Holocaust nearly destroyed the Jews, but ended up being the catalyst that restored them to their homeland, as abundantly foretold in the Bible, after being scattered throughout other countries for nearly 1,900 years.
After seeing that five of the first six chapters of the Book of Daniel each contains an apparently fictional story, that is actually a prophecy told in the form of a story, we come to another book from around the same era and relating to the same events.
What about the Book of Esther? Unlike the short stories in the Book of Daniel that are each a single chapter in length, the Book of Esther is a single story spanning ten chapters. The story is widely understood to be a fictional story of Jewish nationalism. One thing that really stands out about the Book of Esther, as a book of the Bible, is that the name of God is not mentioned.
But, in light of what we have seen about the Book of Daniel, in Part One, could the book actually be another prophecy told in the form of a story?
In the Book of Esther, a Jew named Mordecai is among the descendants of those taken into exile by Nebuchadnezzar. When Babylon was conquered by the Persians, and the Jews allowed to return to their homeland, it is known that not all of them chose to return. There was long a significant Jewish colony, in what is now Iraq, that dated from this time. Mordecai had adopted his young cousin, Hadassah, when her parents were killed. She was also known as Esther.
The Medes and the Persians, in whose kingdom Mordecai lives, have a king named Ahasueras. This is believed to be another name for either Xerxes or Artaxerxes. The highest official in the land is known as Haman. The book describes Haman as an Agagite. Remember that Agag was the king of the Amalekites that were enemies of God, and who the earlier King Saul was suppose to put to death, but angered God by sparing him instead.
Haman is enraged that Mordecai refuses to bow to him, and seeks to not only kill Mordecai but all of the Jews. In a way reminiscent of Daniel in the Lions' Den, which takes place in the same kingdom, Haman accuses Mordecai, and all of the Jews, of idolatry to the king, and seeks permission to commit genocide against them.
But the queen of the kingdom, Vashti, disobeyed and angered the king, and ended up being replaced by the charming Esther. Mordecai happens to uncover an assassination plot against the king, and Queen Esther speaks up to save her people, and the king turns against Haman.
Haman is described as having ten sons. Here is the number ten again. In the Book of Daniel, we saw that the statue of the kingdoms that will dominate the known world has "ten toes", which represent ten future kings. Later in Daniel, there are "ten horns" which are described as ten kings. These ten horns are also written about what was then far in the future, in the Book of Revelation, where they are again defined as ten future kings. In the Book of Daniel, another "horn" arises from these ten kings that, as we saw, "has eyes and speaks boastfully". This other king is seen as following the ten kings, who will give their authority to him, in the Book of Revelation, which defines him as the Antichrist. The "ten kings" represent the European Union, which is descended from the Roman Empire, which is one of the kingdoms foretold to dominate the world.
The "ten toes" of the statue in Daniel, Chapter 2, are described as being of a mixture of iron and clay, which does not mix well. Indeed, the countries that make up the European Union have a history of being much more divided than united. But they are described together as "ten kings", represented by horns, when they are finally able to unite.
Haman seems very much like a prophecy of someone such as the Antichrist. Yet there are some differences. The Books of Daniel and Revelation definitely have the Antichrist coming after the ten kings, who will give their power to him. But Haman is described as having ten sons. If these represent the ten kings, how can they be his sons if they must come before him? This indicates that Haman represents a character that comes before the ten kings.
For another difference, Haman's objective is to destroy and eliminate the Jews. But there is no indication that the Antichrist will do any such thing. In fact, the Book of Revelation foretells that the Antichrist will "sit down in the Temple of the Jews and claim to be God".
A third difference is the seven-year period that is associated with the time of the Antichrist both in the prophecies of Daniel and of Revelation. Considering that the story in the Book of Esther is so similar to those in Daniel, and we can see that those are prophecies in story form, if Haman seems so much like he might be a prophecy of the Antichrist, then why is this seven-year period completely missing from the Book of Esther?
This makes it seem that the character of Haman is actually a prophecy of a figure that is like the Antichrist, but which will come earlier. He must come before the ten kings, while the Antichrist will come after.
We would expect that this Antichrist-like predecessor to the actual Antichrist will hate the Jews and, just like Haman, seek to kill all of them. In fact Haman, with demonic delight, constructed a great gallows on which to hang Mordecai.
Haman is, of course, a prophecy of Hitler, and the great gallows that the built represents the gas chambers. Purim is the Jewish holiday that arose from the story in the Book of Esther. Hitler himself once stated that, "If we are defeated then the Jews will be celebrating a second Purim".
The king, now sympathizing with Esther's people, could not revoke the edict against the Jews that had already been made, but did make a counter-edict allowing the Jews to act in self-defense. Haman got the punishment that he had sought for the Jews, hung on his own gallows, just as the top surviving Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg.
Instead of killing the Jews, Haman's attempted genocide turned out to be the catalyst for Mordecai to be given Haman's estate and to become the highest official after the king. Just as Hitler ended up being the catalyst for the restoration of Israel after the long Diaspora. The signet ring that had earlier been given to Haman was now given to Mordecai, and Mordecai approached the king wearing "the royal robes of blue and white" ( Chapter 8, Verse 15).
Could it be that, considering that the tree stump with the metal band around it in the Book of Daniel must represent the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, with Herod's retaining wall around it, the signet ring that was taken from Haman, here representing the all of the Gentiles that have ruled the Holy Land, and given to Mordecai also represents the Temple Mount, with the "ring" of the retaining wall around it?
This is the Temple Mount today, seen from the south. The Temple is gone, destroyed as prophecied in the uprising against Roman rule. The structures in front of the retaining wall, a former Umayyad palace, and the two mosques on the mount, are later constructions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Mount#/media/File:Israel-2013(2)-Aerial-Jerusalem-Temple_Mount-Temple_Mount_(south_exposure).jpg
This is a model of what the Temple likely looked like around the time that the Books of Daniel and Esther were written, after the return from exile in Babylon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Mount#/media/File:Jerusalem_Modell_BW_2.JPG
As for Mordecai approaching the king in the "royal robes of blue and white", and having being given the ring which represents the Temple Mount, which is the most important place to Jews, this is the Israeli flag of today. This was neither the flag nor the colors of the country until the modern restoration, in 1948 following the Holocaust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Israel#/media/File:Flag_of_Israel.svg
If you wonder why prophecies are told in the form of stories and imagery like this, one reason might be that the modern concept of freedom of the press was unknown in ancient times. Making a statement that the kingdom was one of the wicked series of empires that would one day be destroyed by God could get one in a lot of trouble. Also in the Book of Daniel, Chapter 12 Verse 9, it states that "The prophecies are sealed until the time of the end". This does not mean physically sealed, the prophecies were always in the book. The meaning is that the prophecies would not be understood until the time in which they would be fulfilled.
9) THE TEN KINGS
I have noticed something about these ten kings, which are widely accepted as being a representation of the European Union, a descendant of the Roman Empire just preceding the Antichrist. The trouble is that there are more than ten countries in the European Union.
But this prophecy of the ten kings is written in conjunction with the list of the great empires which have dominated the world. During the imperial era, most of the world's land area was under the control, at one time or another, of one or more of the European colonial powers. This time of European colonies began with Columbus and has not completely concluded yet. It is true that there are more than ten countries in the European Union, which the "ten kings" represent, and that has created a problem for some people when these prophecies are explained to them.
However, what I would like to point out is that there are ten European countries that have been colonial powers in the modern era, within the past few centuries. All are now part of the European Union, although Britain has plans to leave. Not all of the ten will give their power to the Antichrist willingly, the Book of Revelation foretells that he will subdue three of the ten.
The ironic thing about Hitler is that he was the catalyst not only for the restoration of the state of Israel, but also of the founding of the European Union, the "ten kings" of which Hitler, represented by Haman, came before, but from which the Antichrist will arise. This is why the Book of Esther describes Haman, who represents Hitler, as having "ten sons". The ten European colonial powers, who controlled the vast majority of the world, are now united as the European Union, from which the Antichrist will arise. This is what provides the continuity between the Roman Empire and the Antichrist.
The connection between the Roman Empire and the European Union is not only the occupation of approximately the same land area, but that Hitler was not only the catalyst of the European Union but also the protege of Mussolini, who came before Hitler and whose stated objective was to restore the Roman Empire.
The countries of the European Union are led by prime ministers and presidents, even though they are foretold as "ten kings". This is because democracy was unknown at the time of the Book of Esther. All nations were led by kings, whether called kings or sultans or emperors. But at the time of the colonial period, all of the imperial European nations were led by royalty. When the German states united, the King of Prussia became the first leader of the united country. The European royal houses are inter-related, have you ever heard of Queen Victoria being described as "the grandmother of Europe"?
Here is a list of the "ten kings", European colonial powers which controlled most of the world but would later unite as the core nations of the European Union.
1) Britain- Scotland actually had a colony of it's own, in what is now Panama, but it joined with Britain in 1707.
2) France
3) Spain
4) Portugal
5) Germany- After unification had Namibia (Southwest Africa) and some islands in the Pacific. These German Pacific islands were taken, during the First World War, and given to Japan, which then fortified them as a defensive barrier for it's own empire in the Second World War.
6) Italy- After unification had Libya, Ethiopia and, Somaliland.
7) Netherlands- Had Indonesia, after it had been Portuguese. Aruba and St. Maarten are still Dutch. Afrikaners are descended from Dutch settlers. Eastern New York State has many Dutch names, which is where the name of Roosevelt comes from.
8) Belgium- The entire Congo region was considered as the personal estate of King Leopold.
9) Denmark- Controlled the largest island in the world, Greenland.
10) Sweden- Had various scattered colonies. It is mostly forgotten that the U.S. state of Delaware began as a Swedish colony.
10) THE BIBLE'S SEVENTY SEVENS
One of the most perplexing things in the Bible has always been the prophecy of seventy weeks of years in the Book of Daniel, Chapter 9 Verses 24-27. There is a Wikipedia article about it, "Prophecy of Seventy Weeks".
The prophecy was made after the Jews had returned from exile in Babylon. The First Temple, the Temple of Solomon, had been destroyed by the Babylonians, and the returnees set about rebuilding it. The prophecy states that from the time the announcement or decree went out to rebuild Jerusalem to the time that an "anointed one" is "cut off" will be 69 weeks of years, in other words 483 years.
Seven was an important number and weeks were used to refer to seven years, as well as seven days. Due to the different way of counting, the prophecy states that from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem to the time that the anointed one will be "cut off", or killed, will be seven weeks of years and sixty-two weeks of years, which add to sixty-nine weeks of years. The term "anointed one" is what messiah actually means. So that this person who will be killed 483 years after the decree to rebuild Jerusalem will be the long-awaited Messiah.
Here is the prophecy, I have copied and pasted it from the Wikipedia article.
24"Seventy weeks are decreed for 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 place. 25Know therefore and understand: from the time that the word went out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the time of an anointed prince, there shall be seven weeks; and for sixty-two weeks it shall be built again with streets and moat, but in a troubled time. 26After the sixty-two weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing, and the troops 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. 27He shall make a strong covenant with many for one week, and for half of the week he shall make sacrifice and offering cease; and in their place shall be an abomination that desolates, until the decreed end is poured out upon the desolator."
Let's go to another Wikipedia article. The first book of the Bible concerning this rebuilding of Jerusalem after it has been destroyed by the Babylonians is the Book of Ezra. Some Jews had already been back at Jerusalem, and had built a replacement for the destroyed Temple, although this Second Temple (or the Temple of Zerubbabel) was poor in comparison with the glory of Solomon's destroyed Temple.
But the city had not been rebuilt, delayed due to opposition until it could be determined that the Persian king Cyrus, who released the Jews from exile after conquering Babylon, had actually signed a decree that Jerusalem could be rebuilt. Most of the Jews at Jerusalem were still living in makeshift housing, and the sacrifices were not being properly done in the new Temple.
This is what Ezra was sent to correct. The ruling king of Persia sent him to Jerusalem, with a large number of other exiles. It is now certain that the exiles did not return from Babylon at once, it was more like a trickle over many decades. Ezra, and later also Nehemiah, got the rebuilding of Jerusalem underway and restored the correct temple rites, as well as condemning intermarriage with non-Jews. The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah are the two biblical books that explain this time. The two were originally one book.
Notice the date that the Wikipedia article on Ezra gives for his being sent back to Jerusalem. It is 457 B.C.
Now, let's go to another Wikipedia article, the one about the year "7 BC". This year is considered by many to have been the year that Jesus was born because there was a bright planetary conjunction that Matthew could have taken as "The star of Bethlehem", which guided the Magi to the infant Jesus.
Some believe that Jesus was born in 4 B.C., and that could possibly be correct. But King Herod is reported to have died in 4 B.C., and remember that before dying he had heard of a new king being born, had talked with the Magi who brought gifts to the infant Jesus, and ordered that all boys under two years of age be killed. Jesus' parents, however, had taken him to safety in Egypt until Herod died.
Jesus is believed to have been crucified when he was 33 years old, this is the age given in the Wikipedia article on Jesus. Although it is not absolutely certain that he was crucified at age 33 or was born in 7 B.C., these figures must be close. This means that Jesus was likely crucified in the year 26 A.D.
How long was it from 457 B.C. to 26 A.D.? That's right, exactly 483 years.
The Bible foretold when the Messiah would be killed, and leaves no doubt about who that Messiah was. Jesus was the only one around this time who was taken seriously as possibly being the Messiah. This could not have been inserted into the Bible after the fact because it is also in the Hebrew scriptures, although the Jews did not accept Jesus as the Messiah.
Next in the prophecy, after the Messiah (meaning anointed one) is "cut off", the translation of being killed, the troops of the "prince who is to come" will destroy the city and the sanctuary.
It is clear what this means. A generation after Jesus' crucifixion, the Jews rose up against Roman rule and, after a very difficult siege, they destroyed the Jews' Temple and much of the city of Jerusalem. The Jews were sent off into exile, and would not regain control of their homeland for nearly 1,900 years. Israel would be reestablished in 1948, and the Old City of Jerusalem recaptured in the Six-Day War of 1967.
So we know that this "prince who is to come" must somehow come from the Roman Empire. But, for one thing, the Romans didn't really have any title or significant position called a prince. However, we have seen that the Antichrist will arise out of "ten kings", which are the members of the European Union that were the colonial powers which, at one time or another, ruled the vast majority of the land area on earth. The European Union occupies basically the same land area as the Roman Empire, and the original treaty which began the European Union was signed in Rome. The catalyst of the founding of the European Union was Hitler, who had started as a protege of Mussolini, whose stated aim was to reestablish the Roman Empire, and didn't live to see how well he had succeeded.
Following this in the prophecy is that this "prince" will "form a strong covenant with many for one week". Remember that we are referring to "weeks of years", or seven years. Also remember that the prophecy is of seventy "weeks" of years, but the time between the decree to rebuild Jerusalem and the death of the Messiah was foretold to be only sixty-nine weeks of years. This leaves one week, or seven years, left over, and this is because it is the time of the Antichrist, and the reign of the Antichrist being for seven years is also in many other places in the Bible.
We know that the Antichrist will reign for seven years, and that he will go into the Jews' Temple, which must somehow be rebuilt or replaced, and declare himself to be God. The Antichrist will cause the Jews' usual ritual offerings and sacrifices to cease, and will cause a mysterious "abomination that desolates". Remember that elsewhere the Book of Daniel also refers to the "Abomination of Desolation", which is believed by most to be simply the Antichrist entering the Temple and claiming to be God himself.
It says that for "half of the week" the Antichrist will cause the sacrifices to cease. This means for three and a half years. Remember that the time of the Antichrist is divided into two halves. The first half will actually be the best time that the world has ever seen. He will seem to have the answers to everything.
But it will all be a fantastic, satanic lie. Things will began to fall apart, and the second half of the time of the Antichrist will be the worst time that the world has ever seen, or ever will see. Each of the first three Gospels has a chapter about the Apocalypse, and Jesus makes it clear that if had not returned, in His Second Coming, to establish the promised Millennium on earth, that no one would be left alive on earth.
This prophecy reveals that the transition from good times to bad times begins when the Antichrist goes into the Temple and claims to be God himself. This is when the regular sacrifices in the Temple cease, and will be a direct challenge to God. The people will have put their faith in the Antichrist, but he will be helpless to stop God's judgments, which will fall very heavily on the earth. The Antichrist that the world has put it's faith in will lose control over parts of the world, and will be unable to prevent the horrific wars of the Apocalypse.
The Antichrist will be a messianic figure. The idea of European leaders acting like the messiah is nothing new. Upon Napoleon's coronation, with the pope set to put the crown on his head, Napoleon instead took the crown, although this was prearranged, and put the crown on his own head, thus putting himself beyond God's authority.
When Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Jerusalem in 1898, knowing that the Book of Revelation, Chapter 19, describes Jesus arriving at the Second Coming on a white horse, himself entered Jerusalem on a white horse. The Jaffa Gate, through which he entered was too low for him to go through on the horse. So, he demanded that a breach be made in the wall so that he could enter without getting off the horse, and would thus look like the Messiah.
Finally, remember that when Jesus was asked by someone if they had to forgive someone who apologized to them, Jesus answer that they are to be forgiven even if they apologize "seventy times seven times". It does not otherwise refer to these "seventy times seven" years in the New Testament, but could Jesus have been giving a hint that he is the one that the prophecy was referring to?
Also remember that Jesus was actually crucified after not "seventy times seven" years, as the prophecy names at first, but after only sixty-nine times seven years. That is simply because there will be a Second Coming of Jesus, which will take place to end the seven-year reign of the Antichrist, which is still yet to come and will be the seventieth of the units of seven years.
THE PROPHETIC MEANING OF CHRISTMAS
Here is something really profound that I cannot see has ever been pointed out.
Christmas, representing the Birth of Jesus, is celebrated on December 25. We know that Jesus was not really born on December 25. The reason that it began to be celebrated on this day is that Christianity was not one of the legal religions of the Roman Empire.
The Romans had a holiday, Saturnalia, around the time of the winter solstice. The Christians placed their holiday at the same time to avoid drawing attention to themselves, and Jesus ended up being celebrated on December 25.
But what do you notice here? There is something very interesting with regard to the prophecies of the Last Days, as detailed in the posting on this blog, "The End Of The World As We Know It".
Remember what we saw how the Book of Daniel, Chapter 9, actually foretells the time from the destruction of the First Temple, by Nebuchadnezzar, to the time of Jesus with amazing accuracy. Usually we describe 7 days as a week, but this chapter uses "weeks of years" with 7 years as a week.
We know that the Tribulation Period, the terrible time just prior to the Return of Jesus to set up His Kingdom on earth, will last 7 years. The Antichrist will rule during this time. The first half of this period will actually be the best time that the world has ever seen. That is why the Book of Revelation describes the Antichrist as reigning for 42 months, which is 3 1 / 2 years or half of the 7-year period. But during the second half of the Tribulation Period things will begin to fall apart and the result will be the worst time that the world has ever seen, or ever will see.
Notice that Christmas, representing Jesus, on December 25 is exactly one week, 7 days, before the beginning of the New Year.
Have you ever thought that maybe God wanted it this way? The Return of Jesus will actually come in two parts. The first part is what is commonly referred to as the Rapture. (Even though that is a general term that is not in the Bible). Jesus will remove His faithful people before the Tribulation begins. The second part is 7 years later, when Jesus returns to earth with the people that he earlier removed to end the Tribulation and set up His Kingdom on earth.
The mysterious scene in the Book of Revelation, Chapter 14, Verse 14, involving two harvests by angels, actually represents first the Rapture and then God's Judgement. The first harvest is the Rapture. Then comes the second harvest, of grapes which are subject to God's wrath. But there is no wrath in the first harvest because it is Jesus removing His faithful people first.
Doesn't it seem that God wanted Christmas to fall exactly one week before the New Year so that Christmas will represent the Rapture and the New Year represents Jesus establishing His Kingdom on earth?
NOTRE DAME AND THE ANCIENT-MODERN PARALLEL
Readers are likely wondering why the tragedy at Notre Dame Cathedral had to happen. There is an answer but it involves going far back into ancient times, more than two thousand years before the cathedral was built. I notice something about Christianity that has never been documented that explains why this happened at Notre Dame.
What I notice that is really amazing is that there is a parallel between the destructions of the Temple in ancient times and the major splits in the church in modern times. Why don't we call this "The Ancient-Modern Parallel".
The Book of Daniel Chapter 9, Verses 20-27, explains the "seventy sevens" that was revealed to Daniel. Each seven is a "week" of years, or seven years. From the restoration of the Jews' Temple, which had been destroyed by the Babylonians, to the "cutting off", or death, of the "anointed one" will be 69 sevens. Due to a literal translation of a different way of expressing numbers, it states "seven sevens and sixty-two sevens" instead of 69 sevens, but it means the same thing.
After the Jews had returned from exile in Babylon, worship had become very corrupted at the Temple that was being rebuilt. Ezra, with a large group of former exiles with him, was sent back to Jerusalem to correct the religious services, which he did. Ezra has the book in the Bible named for him. The date that Wikipedia gives for Ezra being sent back to Jerusalem is 457 B.C.
Messiah Means "anointed one". Christians, although not Jews, believe that Jesus was the long-awaited, and prophecied, Messiah. The exact birthday of Jesus is not known but 7 B.C. is the most widely-accepted year for his birth. Some believe that Jesus was born in 4 B.C. but the problem with that is that King Herod is known to have died in 4 B.C. and, sometime before his death, he had heard about the birth of the Messiah and gave the order that every boy, two years old and younger, should be killed. It is not known exactly when this order was given but this makes a birth in 7 B.C. appear more likely.
The Bible states that Jesus began his ministry at about 30 years of age, and his ministry to have lasted three years. That means that Jesus was likely crucified at age 33. With His birth in 7 B.C. that means 26 A.D.
Now, what do you notice? 69 "weeks" of years is 483 years. From 457 B.C., when Ezra was sent back to Jerusalem to establish correct worship in the Temple that had been rebuilt after having been destroyed, to 26 A.D., when Jesus is most likely to have been crucified, is exactly 483 years. The reason that there is only "69 weeks", when the scripture first stated 70 weeks, is that one "week" of 7 years is remaining for the Tribulation Period just prior to Jesus' Second Coming.
Next, let's go to more recent times. After the final 7 years of the "70 weeks", Jesus will return to establish the Millennium on earth. This is when the world will finally be the godly paradise that it was intended to be. When humans try to ignore God and run the world by their own wisdom, they just make a mess of things.
The year of 7 B.C. for Jesus' birth is really interesting because we know that the Tribulation Period will last for 7 years just prior to Jesus' Second Coming to begin the Millennium. Jesus will return just prior to the start of the Tribulation Period to remove His faithful believers in the event commonly referred to as the Rapture, although this is a general term that is not in the Bible. Also Jesus' birthday ended up being celebrated on December 25, although that is not His real birthday it is 7 days before the beginning of the new year. We can see how these "weeks of years", in the Book of Daniel, extend far beyond the prophecy itself.
The year 2000 was the turn of a millennium, although not the beginning of Jesus' Millennium. Remember that the Ancient-Modern Parallel is about the mirror image formed by the destructions of the Temple in ancient times and the major splits in the church in more recent times. There were two major splits in the church, the most recent was the Protestant Reformation which began in 1517.
What do you notice here? From 1517 to the turn of the millennium was also 483 years, or 69 "weeks" of years. The remaining "week" of the original 70 weeks is, of course, reserved for the Tribulation Period that will precede Jesus' Millennium.
The first temple of the Jews to be destroyed was actually Shiloh, which was in the Central Highlands of Israel or what would be referred to today as the West Bank. This was where the story of Samuel began. It was destroyed by the Philistines in 1050 B.C.
Shiloh was never rebuilt because it was replaced by the Temple in Jerusalem that was built by King Solomon. But that was destroyed, as described above, by the Babylonians led by King Nebuchadnezzar. The siege of Jerusalem, which led to the destruction of the Temple, took place in 587 B.C. This means that from the destruction of Shiloh to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, which replaced it, was 463 years.
Now let's go back to more recent times. There were two major splits in the church. The first was the Great Schism of 1054, when what became the Eastern Orthodox Church split away from the Catholic Church. The second was the Protestants splitting away in the Reformation, which began in 1517, as described above.
Once again, what do you notice here? The time between the two major splits of the church, from 1054 to 1517, is also 463 years.
Is this absolutely amazing, or what? I humbly thank God that I was the one to be allowed to point that out.
33 years, the age at which Jesus was almost certainly crucified, also shows up in modern times. The original city of Jerusalem came back under Jewish control in 1967. This was foretold by Jesus to begin the one generation countdown to His Return to establish His Kingdom, the Millennium, on earth. 1967 was 33 years before the beginning of the millennium, although this is not the same thing as Jesus' Millennium.
But there was another Temple destruction in ancient times, that following the Jewish uprising against Roman rule in 70 A.D. This is the event foretold by Jesus that the Temple will be so completely destroyed, as it had long before by the Babylonians, that "not one stone will remain upon another". What happened was that the wooden portions of the Temple caught fire. The heat melted the gold in the Temple. After the fire went out, Roman legionnaires pried the stones apart while searching for gold so that indeed "not one stone remained upon another".
But the walls of the Temple Mount, upon which the Temple was built, remained. The Jewish place of worship at the Temple Mount today is the "Western Wall".
So if there is a parallel between the destructions of the Temple, in ancient times, and the major splits of the church, in more modern times, there were three Temple destructions, Shiloh in 1050 B.C., by the Babylonians in 587 B.C. and, by the Romans in 70 A.D. But there have been only two major splits in the church, the Great Schism of 1054 and the Protestant Reformation of 1517. But, if this is correct, there must be something as a modern reflection of the final destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D.
In section 17) CROSSING THE RED SEA, I explained my belief that God allowed the 19-year delay between the reestablishment of the nation of Israel in 1948 to the return of the original city of Jerusalem to Jewish control in 1967 to give us a chance to build the Millennium ourselves, without going through the Apocalypse first.
The postwar generation was the one that had seen a terrible world war, genocide, the development of nuclear weapons and economic crash. Maybe this would be the generation that had learned it's lesson that humans had to follow God or it would end in disaster. It was only when God saw that it wasn't going to work, humans were just too sinful, that Jerusalem had come back under Jewish control in 1967, for the first time since ancient times, to begin the one-generation countdown to the Second Coming of Jesus, as foretold in the Gospels.
So the 483 years, 69 "weeks" of years, since the Reformation in 1517 brings us to the millennium, the year 2000. But then the 19-year delay brings us to 2019. We cannot calculate the time that Jesus will return in this way because the Gospels state that no one knows that time, it will be unexpected.
The island in the Seine River, upon which Notre Dame Cathedral was built, is actually very reminiscent of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Both are the oldest parts of their respective cities. The island in Paris has both Notre Dame Cathedral and the original palace of Paris, before the French royal family built new palaces, first the complex that is now the Louvre, and later Versailles. In Jerusalem, in the same way, there was the Temple on the Temple Mount and an adjacent fortress, the Antonia. There was also Herod's Palace, in the Old City of Jerusalem, not far away.
The devastating fire at Notre Dame was very much a parallel of the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 A.D. Although there were no legionnaires prying stones apart looking for gold at Notre Dame, the wooden part burned away just as at the Temple. But the stone structure of Notre Dame remained standing, and it seems definite that it will be rebuilt. In the same way, the Temple Mount remains so that it could possibly be someday rebuilt.
The Western Wall of the Temple Mount, the Jewish place of worship there, is the part that remains closest to the way that Herod built it. Similarly the western side of Notre Dame Cathedral, which is the front, is the only side of the cathedral that remains undamaged by the fire.
Notre Dame Cathedral has one other thing in common with the Temple in Jerusalem. Napoleon was crowned as emperor at Notre Dame. The pope was getting ready to put the crown on his head when he famously snatched the crown from him and put it on himself, thus putting himself above the pope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronation_of_Napoleon_I#/media/File:Jacques-Louis_David_-_The_Coronation_of_Napoleon_(1805-1807).jpg
Also, not far from Notre Dame is Le Madeleine. This is a temple-like structure built by Napoleon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Madeleine,_Paris#/media/File:Madeleine_Paris.jpg
There is a grand painting in Le Madeleine, called "The History of Christianity", featuring Napoleon as a Christ-like figure ministering to the people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Madeleine,_Paris#/media/File:%C3%89glise_de_la_Madeleine_1,_Paris_July_2011.jpg
The Bible foretells that one day, during the Tribulation Period, the Antichrist will enter the Jews' Temple and declare himself to be God. Obviously, the Temple must be rebuilt first. This seems to me to be a very close parallel to Napoleon snatching the crown from the pope and crowning himself.
This is why Notre Dame Cathedral was the modern reflection of the destruction of the Jews' Temple in 70 A.D., and why this fire had to happen. The world is more secular today and so another split in the church isn't a factor, so there was this destruction at the cathedral instead.
This is unrelated to the prophecy above.
Some believe that the Ottomans actually tried to prevent the coming of the Messiah. There is only one gate on the eastern side of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, known as the Golden Gate. There is a prophecy in the first three verses of Chapter 44 of the Book of Ezekiel that "The eastern gate of the sanctuary must remain shut because the lord has entered through it, he will enter and go out through the same way".
This gate was not constructed until about five hundred years after the time of Jesus. It may have been built on the site of an earlier gate. The Book of Ezekiel was written in the era of the destruction of the First Temple, which was Solomon's original temple, by the Babylonians. This was nearly six hundred years before the construction of Herod's Third Temple and the time of Jesus.
The gate was walled over by Moslems, reopened by the Crusaders, and walled over by Moslems again. The Ottomans rebuilt the gate with the city walls, but walled it over for good in 1541. When else has a gate been built, just so that it can be walled over?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Gate_(Jerusalem)#/media/File:Golden_Gate_Jerusalem_2009.JPG
Not only did the Ottomans rebuild the gate as the only one on the eastern side of the Temple Mount, just to wall it over, they also put a cemetery in front of it. Did they know of the prophecy in the Book of Ezekiel, and want to stop the Messiah's arrival, also knowing that a pious Jew must avoid contact with dead bodies, which they may have believed to include crossing a cemetery?
But what if Jesus was indeed the foretold Messiah? We know from the Gospels that Jesus and the Apostles used to meet on the Mount of Olives, away from the crowds in the city, which is just east of the Temple Mount on the other side of the Kidron Valley. Also Gethsemane, where Jesus did his final prayer before the crucifixion, is immediately east of the Temple Mount, between it and the Mount of Olives.
So, it is extremely unlikely that Jesus never entered the Temple from the east, just as the prophecy foretold.
12) JOB AND JOSEPH
THE BOOK OF JOB
The Book of Job may be the oldest book of the Bible. It is about a man who goes through terrible trials because God allows Satan to test him, but does not allow Satan to take his life. First, God grants Satan's request to allow him to take away Job's children and wealth. Job is a devout and righteous man, and Satan hopes to show that he follows God only because God gives him abundant blessings. When, much to Satan's disappointment, Job still adheres to God, Satan is granted his request to be allowed to take away Job's health. Most of the book is about Job's long discussions with his three friends that come to support him.
But this appears to me to be yet another example of indirect prophecy, or what we could call "Prophecy in Form". This, likely the oldest book in the Bible, is an ancient mirror and foreshadow of the newest book in the Bible, the Book of Revelation.
The primary message of the Book of Job is that life is unpredictable. We are to follow God, and he may give us blessings, but just because we follow him doesn't guarantee that he will give us blessings. But we are to follow him anyway.
However, at the same time, it foretells the Book of Revelation, which is about the end of the present world and the establishment of God's Kingdom on earth. The Book of Job is a reflection of the Bible as a whole in that it is about a fall, and then an ultimate regaining of what was lost. The Bible begins with the fall from the Garden of Eden, due to sin, and ends with the regaining of paradise with God's Kingdom established on earth.
In the above sections, we saw that there were the "ten kings", both in the Books of Daniel and Revelation, who give their authority to the Antichrist. We then saw in the Book of Esther how the villain, Haman, had "ten sons", which my conclusion is really represent these same "ten kings".
We find that Job also has ten children, but this time only seven are sons. In fact, when Job's fortunes are restored at the end of the book, and he has a new family, he once again has exactly the same number of sons and daughters.
In the Book of Revelation, there are seven angels administering Judgments on the earth. There are also seven churches that are described early in the book. These are reflected by Job's seven sons. Just as the Book of Job is a reflection of the Bible as a whole, in the fall from paradise and the final regaining of it, the Book of Revelation is actually similar to the Book of Job, but where the Book of Job is about the tribulations suffered by one man, the Book of Revelation is about the tribulations that will be suffered by the entire world.
Job's friends engage in three rounds of discourse with him, taking turns at offering advice and comfort to Job, and then listening to Job's response. The seven angels in the Book of Revelation, which look to be foreshadowed by Job's seven sons, engage in three rounds of judgments on the earth, which appear to be foreshadowed by the three rounds of discourses, the seal, trumpet and, bowl judgments.
After the friends and Job complete their discourse, with no satisfactory answers as to why God would allow this to happen to the righteous Job, a young man names Elihu appears. It is made clear that he is much younger than Job and his friends. He gives a sermon of his own, criticizing both Job and his friends.
Finally, God himself enters the picture. He also is critical of Job and his friends, and their flawed reasoning. God commands them to sacrifice seven bulls in atonement. Here is the number seven again.
But God does not criticize Elihu. Has anyone ever thought that this is what the pattern of Jesus will be, which was far in the future at the time this book was written. Elihu represents Jesus, while the three friends might represent the flawed religious establishment of Jesus' time, the Pharisees, the Sadduccees and, the priesthood. The arguments of Job's three friends has the same legalistic tone as the establishment of Jesus' day. Jesus appeared as a young upstart, claiming to set things right, just as Elihu does here.
Just after Elihu had finished speaking, God commanded the three friends to make the sacrifice for atonement. Could this have the meaning that Jesus, here represented by Elihu, would someday himself be the ultimate sacrifice, by dying on the cross for our sins? And that the seven bulls to be sacrificed in atonement are a foreshadow of both the seven churches and the seven angels in the Book of Revelation?
The message of the Book of Job seems to be that it is a reflection of the entire Bible, in the loss of paradise and the ultimate regaining of it, but it revolves around the experiences of only one man rather than of the entire world. The Book of Job also points to Jesus, who will be the one man who takes on the sins of the entire world.
Just as Job was righteous, and in no way deserved the tribulations that he suffered because Satan scoffed that his faith wasn't really genuine, Jesus will not deserve the punishment that he will take on, for everyone else's sins. The pointing to the future Book of Revelation is because that foretells the time when paradise will actually be regained, just as Job finally regained even much more than he had originally lost.
JOSEPH
How many times have you read an article, or listened to a story, in which two related events were entwined together? I find that the story of Joseph in Egypt, early in the Bible in the Book of Genesis, is such a story about related events, with the exception that these related events are both in the past and in the future.
Like Daniel, in his book, Joseph has the ability to interpret dreams. Joseph started with his own dreams of domination over his eleven brothers, the sons of Jacob which would form the twelve tribes of Israel. His brothers did not appreciate this, and got him sold into slavery in Egypt.
Joseph arose to a position of great power in Egypt. This is not beyond historical possibility at all since it is known that a Semitic people known as the Hyksos ruled Egypt for a period of time. The Israelites were also Semitic.
Joseph foretold Pharaoh's dreams about two cows, one healthy and one very underfed, and two stalks of grain, the first bountiful and the second parched and nearly worthless. Joseph foretold that both dreams represented two seven-year periods. The first would be a time of great abundance, the second a time of great famine.
This is, of course, a reflection of the time of the Antichrist. Except that there will be only one seven-year period. The first half will be the best time that the world has ever seen, the Antichrist will seem to have the answers to everything. But the second half will be the worst time that the world has ever seen, or ever will see.
Joseph's brothers come to Egypt, seeking food during the terrible famine, and meet Joseph. At first, they do not recognize him but later are reconciled.
Could Joseph be a reflection of his future relative, Jesus? With his early dreams of domination a reflection of the prophecies of Jesus' coming, made before his time? His brothers selling him into slavery representing the religious leaders arranging Jesus' crucifixion. The initial failure to recognize him a reflection of the religious establishment of Jesus' time failing to recognize him as the awaited Messiah. Joseph was earlier rejected, sold into slavery by his brothers, but now emerges as the leader and their savior, ensuring their supply of food in the famine, just as Jesus would later be.
Notice also that the pharaoh gives Joseph, his second-in-command just as Jesus is God's "second-in-command", a signet ring. We saw in the section about the meaning of the Book of Esther that the signet ring that Mordecai was given by the king seemed to be a representation of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, with the ring being symbolic of Herod's retaining wall around the Temple Mount, which at the time that book was written was still centuries in the future.
This is not to say that the story of Joseph in Egypt is entirely a reflection of the future. Clearly, something must have happened for the Egyptians to part with a ready source of slave labor.
These two successive seven years periods, the first very good and the second very bad, are a reflection of the time of the Antichrist, in which the first half of his seven-year reign will be the best time that the world has ever seen but the second half will be the worst time that the world has ever seen, but which is only one seven-year period.
But the same technique of "double prophecy" can be seen in an earlier dream interpretation by Joseph, when he was in prison with the chief baker and the chief butler of Egypt. Both have mysterious dreams, and ask Joseph for interpretation. He reveals that the chief baker will be hanged on a tree in three days, but the chief butler will be restored to his former position in the same three days.
What about Jesus' far in the future crucifixion? He was crucified on a cross, which was foreshadowed here by the chief baker to be hanged on a tree. But he would rise from his tomb, under God's power after having paid the price for sin, in three days. This is foreshadowed by the chief butler of Egypt to be restored to his former position in three days.
Later, in the beginning of the Book of Exodus, a new pharaoh arises who "knows nothing about Joseph", and the Israelites, the descendants of Joseph and his brothers, are made into slaves. We know that the Israelites' fellow Semites, the Hyksos who ruled Egypt for about 150 years, were overthrown by a rebellion and driven out of Egypt. It would then seem likely that the Egyptians, having regained rule over their own land, might not take kindly to these foreigners that the Hyksos had allowed into their country.
When the time came for the Israelites to be freed from slavery, God sent a total of ten tribulations on Egypt, until they released the Israelites. Here is the number ten again, which is the same number of the "ten kings" who will give their authority to the Antichrist, but whose world will suffer terrible tribulations from God. Pharaoh thus represents the Antichrist of the distant future.
The Israelites' escape from slavery represents the Rapture of the Christians just prior to the beginning of the Tribulation period. The word "rapture" is not in the Bible, but is a term used by Christians for the removal of the true church before God's judgment falls on earth.
Notice, for example, the Book of Revelation, which is about the Tribulation period, although it is foretold in many other places in the Bible as well. The church is often mentioned in the first three chapters, but then is missing until Jesus returns with his saints near the end of the book. That is because the church, the true Christians, are not there when the terrible tribulations are going on. Although during that time, the Book of Revelation foretells that "so many people will come to Christ that they cannot be numbered".
It seems that all of the events of Jesus' both first and second comings are clearly reflected in the events of the ancient Israelites' arrival and slavery in, and final escape, from Egypt to their own promised land, although the events are not in the same sequence.
13) THE TOWER OF BABEL
The Tower of Babel occurs early in the Bible, in the first nine verses of the Book of Genesis, Chapter 11.
According to this brief story, humans settled on a plain of Mesopotamia called Shinar. They decided to bake clay bricks and, binding them together with tar or asphalt, build a "tower that reaches all the way to Heaven". God did not want that to be done, as humans would then be capable of doing anything. So, God struck the people so that they would speak different languages. The building of the tower would then be impossible, because they would not be able to understand each other, and language has always been the primary factor in distinguishing one nation from another.
Indeed this land that was known as Sumer, which we saw in our visit to "Basra", has a shortage of stone, wood and, metal, but an abundance of clay. Ziggurats, artificial hills used for religious purposes, were built of clay bricks.
But yet the story doesn't seem to make sense. Clay bricks alone, without a modern steel frame, simply cannot be used to build a structure that is very high. The weight of the bricks above would crush those below. The material used as binder, as described in the story, is also puzzling. Some versions of the Bible translate the binder as "tar", others as "asphalt", others as "bitumen", and others simply as "slime".
But none of these materials would be an effective binder for any brick structure. Bricks work best with ordinary mortar. I have never heard of a brick building that used any of these materials as mortar. Asphalt is distilled from petroleum, and bitumen is a kind of naturally-occurring asphalt. Tar is also made from petroleum, but can also be made of some plants. But none is good for the construction of a brick building.
But now, lets move far forward to the Last Days of the world, that are foretold in the Bible. The nations of the world have always been divided by language, remember the feet of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar's dream in the Book of Daniel with the feet being made "partly of iron and partly of clay which cannot mix", but this must be put aside in the Last Days so that all nations can come under the influence of the one-world system of the Antichrist.
In the decades leading up to the culmination of human history as we saw in the posting on this blog, "The End Of The World As We Know It", the restrictions placed on humans in the story of the Tower of Babel are lifted so that the Antichrist can have his full reign. The world still does not have a single language, but it is relatively easy to get one language translated into another by human translators or software. Humans the world over use the same system of numbers, calendar, time measurement and, the Metric System.
Humans cannot literally "reach to Heaven", but we can do things that the ancients could not possible have ever imagined. Jet aircraft make it so that anyone nowadays can wake up in any country, and go to bed that night in any other country. Spacecraft have taken close-up photographs of planets that the ancients did not imagine existed. The internet makes it easy to instantly make a virtual visit to anywhere in the world, as well as to share the information that the world has to offer.
What about modern skyscrapers? If what "reaching to Heaven" means is to reach the sky, they certainly accomplish that.
Actually, in the general area where the story of the Tower of Babel takes place, is the Burj Khalifa. This is the tallest building that the world has ever seen. It is nearly a kilometer, more than half a mile, in height.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa#/media/File:Burj_Khalifa.jpg
Distillates of petroleum, such as the "asphalt", "bitumen" or, "tar" given in translations of the Bible, would not make good mortar for a brick building. But let"s stop and think about what it could mean. If we look at a modern skyscraper, the glass windows that cover the outside are arranged in the same way as the bricks in older structures. The glass in skyscrapers has to be especially strong, so that a single pane is not used. Two or more panes are laminated together.
This is what gives us safety glass, such as that used in car windshields. Two or more panes are laminated together. If the glass is broken, it is highly unlikely that the shatter pattern of both panes will be exactly the same. Each pane holds the other together, through the laminate, even though both panes are broken.
Now, here is the important thing that I want to point out. Various resins are used to laminate panes of glass together but all are products of petroleum, just like the "asphalt", "bitumen" or, "tar" described in the story of the Tower of Babel as binding the "bricks" together of the "tower that will reach to Heaven". If we consider the glass panes as the "bricks" that are the outer appearance of modern skyscrapers, remembering that this story was written more than a thousand years before glass was used for windows, then we see that the story is an absolutely amazing prophecy of modern skyscrapers, with their outer windows being bound together with products of petroleum..
Another thing that I find so intriguing is that the story in the Bible has the Tower of Babel put together from tar or bitumen or asphalt, which is distilled from oil. Again this, at first, does not seem to make structural sense, since none of these would be good for ordinary brick mortar. But the many tall buildings around the Persian Gulf were definitely built with the wealth that came from oil.
The vast reserves of oil in the Middle East were unknown, and would have been of little use, to the ancients. In those days, "oil" meant olive oil. This is why some version of the Bible have the Tower of Babel being built with "slime" to hold the bricks together, as petroleum may have seeped from the ground in places. But it is amazing that this prophecy would be written by the ancient Israelites, whose land did not have oil, as taking place in the distant plain of Shinar, which indeed turned out to be very rich in oil.
But the "Tower of Babel" is not just about the Burj Khalifa, which I am only using as an example because of it's height, or the tall buildings that are today in the area where the story took place. It refers to the skyscrapers of the Last Days that are all over the world. Another thing that is so interesting about this is that traditional architecture differs greatly from one place in the world to another, but that is not the case with the skyscrapers which look just about the same no matter where in the world they are found. That is certainly another side of the reversal, in the Last Days, of the world being divided by different languages.
Yet another interesting thing about this story is plastics. It is only in the past seventy years, or so, that plastic has come into widespread use. This means that the age of skyscrapers, with laminated glass, is also the age of plastic, which is also made from petroleum. So much is made of plastic that the era in which we live, the Last Days of the world as we know it, could be described as the "Plastic Age".
Shinar, where the story is described as taking place, is the old name of Babylon, which is the southern part of Mesopotamia. The name of Babylon is believed to actually come from Babel. We know already that a "Mystery Babylon" will play a role in the Last Days of the world that we know.
But also, considering the Jews' Temple in Jerusalem, I see the Tower of Babel as a kind of an anti-Temple. The Temple represents God, the Tower of Babel represents the sinful and idolatrous world that listens to the promises of the Antichrist and sees no need of the real God.
Just as God scatters the people so that they cannot build the tower in the story, the Babylonians who later lived where the story is described as taking place destroy the Temple that the Jews have built, and take them captive away from their land. This is like the people of Babel striking back at God. The Jews are sent to rebuild the Temple, after Babylon had been conquered, but, in the Last Days of the world, the Antichrist will visit the rebuilt Temple and claim to be God. This effectively captures and, at least temporarily, makes the Temple into the Tower of Babel for the Last Days.
14) THE WORMWOOD PROPHECY
Here is another amazing aspect of Bible prophecy that is known, but not by a lot of people. Chapter 8, verses 10 and 11, of the Book of Revelation has a prophecy that must have mystified people for centuries.
"The third angel sounded his trumpet and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky onto a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became bitter, and many people died from drinking the bitter waters".
Why would a star, or a meteor that is referred to as a "falling star", be named for wormwood, which is a shrub?
If you go to the article titled "Chernobyl", on www.wikipedia.org , the answer becomes clear. Go to the "History" section of the article and, under that, go to the first subsection, which is "Name Origin". You will see that the name of Chernobyl means wormwood.
As you may remember, Chernobyl is where the nuclear meltdown took place in 1986 that spread nuclear radioactivity over a wide area. This is what Chernobyl is known for, and the first thing that anyone thinks of when they hear the name.
One of the primary rules for survivors of a nuclear disaster or attack is never to drink from open water that has been exposed to radioactivity. The falling star represents one or more nuclear missiles, and many people who survived the blast died from drinking water afterward. When the Chernobyl nuclear accident happened, it let us know what this prophecy meant.
15) WAS JESUS FORETOLD BY NAME ?
The prophet Zechariah, in the Old Testament of the Bible, has well-known references to the life of Jesus, more than five hundred years before his time.
References to a potter and price of thirty pieces of silver, which are also in the Book of the prophet Jeremiah, as well as the coming king entering Jerusalem "riding on a donkey", Zechariah 9:9, which was quoted in the New Testament Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 21, in the Gospel of Mark 11: 1-11 and the Gospel of John, Chapter 12. Jesus made his triumphant entry into Jerusalem riding on a borrowed donkey.
Zechariah also has a vision about people "mourning for the one who they pierced". We know that as Jesus was being crucified, a Roman soldier thrust his spear into Jesus' side to be sure that he was dead.
But what about the visions of Zechariah in the first seven chapters of his book? In these seven chapters are nine separate visions. Two of the visions are about a high priest named Joshua, who was the first high priest following the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem following the return from exile in Babylon.
In one of the visions, in Chapter 3 of Zechariah, Joshua has his rags replaced with clean clothes. It states that Joshua will "take away sin in one day". Another vision, beginning in Chapter 6 Verse 3, is about Joshua being given a crown.
The thing that is so striking is that nowhere else do the prophets treat the religious establishment with such reverence. God himself is revered, but the religious establishment is usually portrayed as corrupt and sinful. The way that the high priest is revered here is very much an exception for all of the prophets.
But here is something that might explain it.
The Book of Zechariah was written well before the Hellenistic era. The name "Jesus" is actually the Greek form of the name "Joshua". Notice that, in the Old Testament, there are others named Joshua but no one named Jesus.
The Old Testament Book of Joshua, about the leader who succeeded Moses, was a different Joshua and his story took place centuries before this.
Other examples of Greek names introduced in the Hellenistic period, which began with the conquests of Alexander the Great and continued after his empire broke into pieces, with the Ptolemies ruling Egypt and the Seleucids ruling what is now Syria and Palestine, are the names of the three pyramids of Giza, within what is now Cairo.
The three pyramids of Giza were built by a succession of three Egyptian pharaohs, who were father, son and, grandson. The original Egyptian named of the pyramids were Khufu, Khafre and, Menkaure. The Ptolemies, of which the queens were named Cleopatra, took on the trappings of Egyptian pharaohs but continued to speak Greek. The pharaohs who had built the three pyramids more than two thousand years before took on the Greek names of Cheops, Chephren and, Mycerinus.
For that matter, Thebes as well as Egypt are actually Greek names.
Considering this, doesn't it seem that the two visions of Joshua by Zechariah are actually prophecies of Jesus by name? Even though it is true that the first high priest after the rebuilding of the Temple after return from exile in Babylon was also named Joshua?
Remember that Jesus paid the price for sin, "taking away sin in one day", as in the vision of Zechariah. If an ordinary high priest could "take away sin in one day" it wouldn't be necessary for the ritual sacrifices to keep going on.
Also Jesus comes twice, the first time as Savior to pay the price for sin and the second time as king to actually rule over the world, making it the paradise that God had always intended it to be. The first vision of Zechariah about Joshua was having his rags replaced by clean clothes, and "taking away sin in one day", this was about the Savior role. The second vision of Zechariah about Joshua was of him receiving a crown, this was about the king role.
Each of these two visions of Joshua in the Book of Zechariah also refers to a servant of God in the future, known as "The Branch". In the first vision regarding Joshua, it is "The Branch" who will "take away sin in one day". In the second vision, it is "The Branch" who will reign as a king blessed by God.
"The Branch" was a prophecy of Jesus.
16) PROPHECY OF EXILE IN BOOK OF JEREMIAH
There is a brief prophecy in the Book of the prophet Jeremiah, and we can use Wikipedia to see how it turned out.
In the Book of Jeremiah, Chapter 27 Verse 7, made before the Jews were sent to exile in Babylon, warns the Jews that they "will serve Nebuchadnezzar, his son and, his grandson".
We know that it was the Babylonian leader Nebuchadnezzar II who destroyed Jerusalem and took most of the Jews into exile. We also know that the exile lasted 48 years before Babylon was conquered by Persia and the Jews allowed to return home. It is sometimes in prophecy as 70 years, but it took quite some time after the Jews returned home to get the Temple rebuilt and the ceremonies reinstated, and that is what this refers to, from the destruction of the Temple to it's reinstatement.
We see on Wikipedia that Nebuchadnezzar II was succeeded by his son, Amel-Marduk.
He was murdered and succeeded by his brother-in-law, Neriglissar, the husband of Nebuchadnezzar II's daughter.
He was succeeded by his son, whose mother was Nebuchadnezzar II's daughter so that he would be Nebuchadnezzar II's grandson, Labashi-Marduk.
Labashi-Marduk reigned as a child for less than a year before being murdered in a coup led by Nabonidus. But that would not last long. Babylon was soon to be defeated and overthrown by the Persians, and the Jews would be allowed to return home. But the Jewish captives in Babylon did indeed serve Nebuchadnezzar, his son, and his grandson, just as Jeremiah foretold.
The son of Nabonidus was Belshazzar. He is the one holding a royal party when he is alarmed by the "handwriting on the wall", in the Book of Daniel. He offered to make Daniel "the third ruler in the kingdom" if he could interpret the writing. But it was to no avail because the writing on the wall was a message from God that the kingdom of Babylon was at an end.
The reason that he only offered to make Daniel the "third ruler in the kingdom" is that Belshazzar was a prince, he never reigned as king. His father, Nabonidus, was still king when the kingdom ended. Belshazzar was the "second ruler", the prince, so he could only offer Daniel to be the "third ruler".
Another interesting prophecy is the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 13. It is about Babylon being overthrown. The thing that is interesting is that, at the time of Isaiah, Babylon wasn't even an independent nation. It was just a part of the Assyrian Empire.
But sure enough, Babylon had long before been a great nation. The most famous name associated with the original Babylon had been Hammurabi, the king whose law code became the foundation of justice from then until now. But Babylon was reinvigorated by an influx of people known as Chaldeans. Like everyone else, Babylon hated Assyrian rule. Great rebellions began which not only liberated Babylon but actually began the process that overthrew Assyria.
Babylon supplanted Assyria as the next great power, becoming what is now referred to as Neo-Babylon.. The Assyrians had taken the northern kingdom of Israel into permanent captivity, scattering them around the Assyrian Empire, so that they became known as "The Ten Lost Tribes". When Babylon became the great power, they took the remaining southern kingdom of Judah into captivity, but Babylon was conquered by the Persians, who released the Jews from captivity, thus fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah that had been made about 150 years before, before Babylon was even an independent nation.
17) CROSSING THE RED SEA
EVE AND LUCY AND MODERN SCIENCE
Has anyone ever noticed an interesting connection about the earliest human, "Lucy", that was found in Ethiopia?
In biblical terms, Lucy would correspond to Eve, the first woman as described in the Bible. Unfortunately, Eve ate the "forbidden fruit" and she and Adam were banished from the paradise that God had created for them, the Garden of Eden.
Has anyone noticed the connection between Eve and Lucy? Lucy was so-named because the Beatles song "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" was playing on the music apparatus of the expedition as they were discovering her remains. The song is actually a reference to the LSD that, as an unfortunately popular illegal drug, was a "forbidden fruit" of the time.
Isn't that interesting? Eve is recorded in the Bible as eating the "forbidden fruit" and Lucy, Eve's scientific counterpart, ended up inadvertently being named for an illegal drug.
The Bible also records Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land, after being freed from bondage in Egypt, across the Red Sea. Ethiopia, known to be the original home of humans and the land where Lucy was discovered, was on the coast of the Red Sea, or at least it was before Eritrea split away and became a separate country.
Modern science has found something else. The Red Sea was not always there. Both Ethiopia and part of the Arabian Peninsula are situated on a geological formation called the Arabian-Nubian Shield. But this was split apart by the widening of the Red Sea. This is part of my geological theory, "The Story Of Planet Earth", on the geology blog, in the Supporting Documents: 69) THE GEOLOGY OF THE MIDDLE EAST EXPLAINED.
Ethiopia is in the lower left of the following map. The Arabian Peninsula, from which Ethiopia was separated by the formation of the Red Sea, is on the right. Yemen, where the Queen of Sheba is widely believed to have been from and who is the legendary descendant of Ethiopian monarchs, is directly opposite Ethiopia on the Arabian Peninsula.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea#/media/File:Red_Sea_topographic_map-en.jpg
Another thing that modern science has found is the vast amount of oil in the Arabian Peninsula, but not in Ethiopia. Oil is formed of ancient plant material. What that must mean is that the Arabian Peninsula, although a dry desert today, was once filled with lush vegetation.
Now stop and think. The common homeland where humans are known to have originated, Ethiopia, was separated from what was a lush garden of plants by the Red Sea, which had not previously been there. Moses is described in the Bible as leading his people "across this Red Sea" to the Promised Land.
Could this mean that the Red Sea formed as representing the separation of humans from the original garden paradise that had been created for them? Moses, leading them "across the Red Sea", was reversing that separation. To add to this connection, Moses is described in the Bible as marrying an Ethiopian woman, rather than one of his own people. Moses' brother and sister criticized him for marrying this foreign wife, but God himself came to his defense. There was to be a biblical link between Ethiopia and Moses crossing the Red Sea.
By the way, something else that is very interesting is the Israelites being led to Israel as the Promised Land. From there, they were to bring his message to the world. What was not known at the time is that Israel is located exactly in the center of the eastern hemisphere. Europe, Africa and, Asia would be accessible from Israel by land or sea. Israel is right in the middle of the three continents and no other location has this advantage. The Red Sea is part of this advantage as ships could sail to all of the east from the port of Eliat. This could not possibly have been known at the time.
Remember that, while they were being led to the Promised Land, they were still called Israelites, after Jacob whose name had been changed to Israel. They did not become known as Jews until later, when the tribe of Judah became predominant.
THE SIXTIES AND THE MILLENNIUM
The return of the city of Jerusalem to the Jews was foretold long ago, by Jesus in the Gospels, to begin the countdown, spanning a human lifetime or less, of the Return of Jesus to set up His Kingdom on earth. This return happened in 1967. Israel had already been reestablished but the Old City of Jerusalem did not come back under Jewish control until the Six-Day War in June of that year. There was actually a 19-year delay between the founding of the reborn state of Israel and the regaining of the Old City of Jerusalem.
Maybe there was a reason for that delay.
(Note-Remember that we saw the biblical prophecies of the Last Days being fulfilled in our time in the posting on this Blog, "The End Of The World As We Know It").
The world as we know it was to conclude in the Apocalypse before Jesus returned to actually run the earth, and it would be the paradise that God had always intended it to be. The reason that it wasn't went back to Eve "eating the forbidden fruit" and bringing sin into the human race. This paradise under the direct rule of Jesus is referred to as the Millennium, and could be described as a restoration of the original paradise that God Intended for us.
But it isn't like God to let the world be destroyed without first giving humans a chance to bring about the Millennium themselves. At the time Israel was reestablished, in 1948, the world had just finished the most terrible war that it had ever seen. Maybe the world had learned it's lesson that trying to ignore God and do things it's own way just doesn't work for long.
There were extensive and detailed prophecies in the Bible about how the Last Days would fall into place but the lesson of the Book of the prophet Jonah is that even the prophecies of destruction of a wicked, idolatrous and barbaric place like Nineveh can be put on hold if the people sincerely repent and follow God in time. Maybe we could call the Second World War the Tribulation Period and Hitler the Antichrist if the people had their hearts in the right place to see if they could build the Millennium themselves.
Israel had been reestablished but God decided to put the beginning of the countdown to Apocalypse on hold. Let the postwar generation come of age, the Baby Boomers, and see if they had learned enough from the horrific destruction around them to build the Millennium without the Apocalypse.
What came when the new generation grew up is the phenomenal time that we know as "The Sixties".
In many ways, the spirit was in the right place. There was an idealism during the Sixties that did indeed have the potential to bring about a Millennium. There had been an economic crash, a depression, and a second terrible world war, along with almost unbelievable genocide. The war had ended with the use of fantastic new bombs that had the potential to obliterate the world.
This could be the generation that had learned the lessons and would change everything.
The Summer of 1967, despite all of the conflict going on, was optimistically called "The Summer of Love". In 1969, the world saw the idealism of the rock music era as 400.000 young people converged for three days at a place called Woodstock, in New York State, and there was not a single act of violence. It very much resembled a religious pilgrimage.
The symbol of the Sixties became the "peace sign".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_symbols#/media/File:Peace_sign.svg
This was a time of sensing that a "Promised Land" might be within reach. There was the flow of people to Haight-Ashbury, then to Woodstock. There was the "Hippie Trail", across central Asia. Hippies from the west usually began the journey in Istanbul, those from Australia and Japan from the east. They were looking for adventure and enlightenment and, of course, drugs.
There was a strong Christian side to the Sixties that often gets overlooked, and which culminated in the Christian version of Woodstock, Explo '72 in Dallas. The songs of rock music, although rarely religious in nature, strongly resembled the psalms in the Bible in form.
They wanted a better world, and sensed that it was within reach.
But we just couldn't make it. Human nature wasn't going to allow it. No matter how much commendable idealism there was, the Sixties were filled to overflowing with sin and illegal drugs one of which Lucy, the scientific equivalent of Eve in the Bible, would be named for.
In 1966, Time Magazine issued the iconic cover story "Is God Dead"? In 1967, Life Magazine described the era well with another cover story, "The Permissive Society", with the catchphrase of the day, "Anything Goes", which was a reference to morality. It didn't create a better world, Time Magazine described 1967 as "That long, strange year".
In the summer of 1969, American astronauts walked on the moon. A few weeks later came the phenomenon of Woodstock, a three-day rock concert with 400,000 people but without a single act of violence. The bringing of humans to the moon, and getting them safely back was like crossing a "Red Sea", a previously unbridgeable gap, and the spirit to build a whole new world was clearly seen at Woodstock.
But between those events came the shock of the Charles Manson murders, which horrified the U.S. It wasn't some foreign force that had landed and committed these murders, it was our own children who had run away from home and joined this murderous musician who claimed to be Jesus.
The west coast version of Woodstock do not go as well and the Sixties, so full of hope and promise, ended in a December 1969 concert that exploded into violence at Altamont Speedway.
The Summer of 1967 was called "The Summer of Love", although America's war in Vietnam was raging, American cities were ablaze with urban riots, civil war in Nigeria, anti-Vietnam war protests were also going on in in America. Drug addiction was all around and the moral catchphrase was "anything goes".
It was during this summer that God saw that it wasn't going to work. Humans simply were not going to build the Millennium, a restoration of the original paradise that God intended for us, themselves. It was during the summer of 1967 that God moved ahead with starting the countdown to the Apocalypse, which would be followed by the real Millennium. In the Six-Day War of June 1967, the Old City of Jerusalem came back under Jewish control.
(Note-What I find to be an interesting example of the rebelliousness of the Sixties is the word "ain't". All of us children used the word and teachers would scold us that it is not a proper word and is not in the dictionary. But the word was everywhere. But now that it is in the dictionary, and is officially a word, very few people seem to use it anymore).
THE ROCK MUSIC ERA AND LIVE AID
It couldn't build the Millennium, but the rock music era was not entirely without merit. Back in the world's original homeland of Ethiopia, Communists had overthrown Emperor Haile Selassie. The color symbolizing Communism is red. These Communists in effect brought about a second Red Sea, further removing Ethiopia from the original paradise that God intended for humans.
During the tenure of the Communists, Ethiopia underwent a famine that was as if it was out of the Apocalypse. Then an amazing event took place that was like something the world had never seen before. In 1985, the global rock music community undertook two great concerts, each resembling the one at Woodstock 16 years before, to raise money for our common Ethiopian homeland.
One concert was held in London, and the other in Philadelphia. There were also other concerts held across the world. It was all broadcast across the world and close to half the world's population watched what was known as "Live Aid".
This was the culmination of the idealism of the rock music era. It couldn't cross both Red Seas, bringing humanity back to the paradise that was intended by way of the Millennium. But we could say that it did cross one Red Sea, bringing our common homeland of Ethiopia back from this apocalyptic famine.
There was no other nation that anything like this has been done for. But the world knew now that Ethiopia was our common home, where God had chosen for humans to begin.
So we see that there is another meaning to Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land across the Red Sea. It seems that this story was intended for prophecy as well. We could see the link between Lucy, representing Eve who got humans expelled from paradise by eating the "forbidden fruit", by the fact that she was named for the "forbidden fruit" of LSD, which was one of the factors preventing the Sixties from beginning the Millennium.
But the Sixties actually did, inadvertently, bring the world back toward religion from secularism. America in the Sixties was reflected, ten years later, in Iran. It was an inverted reflection, hostile to America, but it is striking how bell-bottom pants and sideburns were in style in Iran during the 1979 Revolution and Hostage Crisis. The crowds of young Iranians chanting "Death To America" looked very much like the young Americans protesting the Vietnam War in the Sixties. As we saw in the posting on this blog, "The Great Revolution Of Our Time", this turned out to be the beginning of the reversal of the previously-inexorable trend toward secularism.
CROSSING THE RED SEA
In modern times Israel had been reestablished as foretold in the prophecies. The oldest human beings had been found in Ethiopia. The oil, which must have come from a lush garden of plants, was found just across the Red Sea from Ethiopia. It was also found that the Red Sea, which separated our common Ethiopian homeland from the former garden on the Arabian Peninsula had not always been there but was gradually widening.
Another interesting connection is that we know that the oil in the Middle East, which the world has gotten so dependent upon, will be a major factor in bringing about the wars of the Apocalypse. Wouldn't it be ironic if the remains of the plants in the original Garden of Eden, now in the form of oil, helps to bring about the Apocalypse that results in the restoration of humans to the paradise that God originally intended for them?
Then there is the subject of Charles Manson. He claimed to be Jesus and decided to bring about the Apocalypse himself by having his followers brutally murder people in their homes, in well-off neighborhoods, and write "PIG" on the wall in their blood. At a time of great racial tension in the U.S., he thought that the killings would be blamed on black militants, which would set off a racial war which would be the beginning of Armageddon. Whatever was left of the world then have to depend on Manson for guidance, and he would preside over the Millennium as Jesus.
But this was two years after the Old City of Jerusalem had come back under Jewish control, thus starting the biblical countdown, of one lifetime or less, to Apocalypse. A lot of people were talking about, and taking an interest in, the subject of Bible prophecies being fulfilled in our time. What was Satan thinking about all of this? It would greatly increase the faith of many people in the Bible to see these old prophecies actually being fulfilled. Could it be that Satan reached down to the Manson "Family" in an effort to ridicule the whole subject, and make it look evil and sinister?
For that matter, Satan knows that when the Apocalypse happens his time is up. He also knows that the time frame for the Apocalypse revolves around the Jews and their return to Israel. Before the restoration of Israel in 1948, the vast majority of the Jews lived in Europe. What if Satan could raise a powerful army, quickly conquer Europe, and then preclude the Apocalypse by simply killing all of the Jews?
But this attempt to kill all of the Jews is what ended up getting Israel restored. In a remarkably similar way, Satan's efforts to get Jesus killed is what ended up sealing God's plan of redemption for humanity.
But what about the actual crossing of the Red Sea, as described in the Bible? A powerful wind, as described in the Bible, divided the water so that the Israelites could cross the sea without getting wet. Remember that, as we saw in the sections above, prophecy is sometimes told in the form of a story. This crossing of the Red Sea could be the combined description both of the crossing led by Moses, and also a future crossing when the nation of Israel is restored before the Apocalypse.
Thousands of Jews were brought to Israel, first from Sudan and then from Ethiopia in great airlift operations named Operation Moses, Operation Joshua and, Operation Solomon. In 1991, Operation Solomon famously set a world record for squeezing the most people into an aircraft, well over a thousand.
But let's consider aerodynamics for a moment. When an aircraft flies, the wing divides the air so that a powerful wind, in effect, crosses the wings. The wing is curved on the top and flat on the bottom so that the air has to flow faster over the top than the bottom. This creates a condition of lower pressure above the wing than below it. When this difference in pressure exceeds the weight of the plane, it flies.
Such aerodynamic science was completely unknown during biblical times. Could this be at least part of what was meant by the wind dividing the Red Sea, but dividing the air above it rather than the sea itself, so that the Jews of the future could also cross the sea without getting wet?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Solomon#/media/File:Flickr_-_Government_Press_Office_(GPO)_-_LINE_OF_ETHIOPIAN_IMMIGRANTS_STREAMING_OUT_OF_THE_HERCULES.jpg
In similar ways, Jews in Yemen were brought back by Operation Magic Carpet, and Jews in Iraq, who had been there since the time of the captivity in Babylon by Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, which are the two books in the Bible describing the return of the Jews from captivity in Babylon.
But the story of the Exodus in the Bible has pharaoh regretting letting the Israelites go and pursuing them after they had left for Israel. That has not happened yet, in the modern side of the parallel story, but remember that Ethiopia is listed in the Bible as one of the nations that will join in the attack on Israel in the Last days of the world, that will begin the final war of the world.
EGYPT AND THE CROSSING OF THE RED SEA
Critics charge that there is scant evidence that the Exodus, the Israelites being led from slavery in Egypt as described in the Bible, actually took place as it was told. But I have been thinking about another angle to it. What about the effect that it had on the Egyptians?
What I see as the greatest mystery of ancient Egypt is the era known as the Amarna Period. The name also refers to the "Amarna Letters", letters by the Egyptian leadership during this period to diplomatic posts in other lands.
Egypt was a very polytheistic nation which honored a broad pantheon of gods. Like any other comparable civilization that we can see, Egypt had a god for everything. Many gods, with control over certain aspects of life, were not universal. In one city a request might be made to one god, but the same request would be made to a different god if in another city. Egypt's gods were very important to it, and there was a long and hallowed tradition of how they must be worshiped.
All of a sudden, a new pharaoh comes to the throne, Amenhotep IV. He surprises and dismays all of Egypt by announcing that one god is supreme above all others. He changed his name to Akhenaten to reflect devotion to this one supreme god, which was called Aten.
The new pharaoh destroyed many of the temples of the traditional gods, making many enemies in the process, and built a new capital city to reflect the new era of devotion to his god. The city was called Amarna, which gives it's name to this brief era. This was not exactly monotheism, the old gods of Egypt were still there. But now one of the gods was to be honored far above the others.
The disk of the sun was considered as the manifestation of this one supreme god. The people would actually worship the pharaoh while he worshiped the one supreme god, putting himself in a role somewhat like a high priest or the earthly son of this god.
The position of women in Egypt improved during this time and from it comes the best-known face of ancient Egypt, the bust of Nefertiti. She was the queen of Akhenaten during his great religious reform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nefertiti#/media/File:Nofretete_Neues_Museum.jpg
But the change of religion did not go over very well at all. It was unpopular with nearly everybody and was reversed just as soon as Akhenaten died. The capital city was moved back to Thebes. The son of Akhenaten was the famed King Tut, short for Tutankhamen. King Tut actually died as a teenager, might have actually been the most insignificant of pharaohs, and you have heard of him only because grave robbers never found his tomb.
Horemheb was the following pharaoh who really reversed the religious reforms. He destroyed the capital city that had been built for the new supreme god, and not much remains of it today. Being childless he appointed his vizier as his successor, who would take the throne as "Ramesses I", as we saw in the posting by that name. This began a new dynasty, the Nineteenth Dynasty.
It is true that there is little historical record of the Exodus from Egypt. But the Egyptians did not like to be defeated, and they were in the habit of selectively recording, and even erasing, parts of their own history. We know for sure that a warlike people called the Hyksos conquered and ruled Egypt for a time but there is very little Egyptian record of that. Ramesses II, grandson of Ramesses I, was known as the Great Builder of ancient Egypt, he wanted to be remembered by his endless building, but he is also known to have imposed his cartouche on buildings that others had built.
We have to understand that this is so out of the ordinary, so unique in ancient Egypt that it demands special explanation. No other pharaoh ever attempted anything like this. Akhenaten had all of the makings of a great pharaoh. But he put himself down in the history of his nation as a criminal and heretic. He was buried in a very small tomb and generally scorned after his death. He became essentially a non-person in Egypt and his name is missing from later lists of previous pharaohs. Akhenaten's mummy, nor that of his queen Nefertiti, have even been positively identified. Virtually anything to do with his new religion was destroyed, and his religion of one supreme god forgotten.
What then made him do it? There is a clear explanation that really should get some attention.
What if the story of the Exodus, as told in the Bible, really did happen as told. The Egyptians saw the awesome power of the Israelites' God. While they may not have paid much attention to the religion of their slaves, the Bible records Moses describing their God to the unnamed pharaoh. They knew that the Israelites worshiped only one God. During the Exodus, the Egyptians saw the power of this God.
The Egyptians would not have known the details of their former slaves' religion, this was before the Bible was written, all they knew was that they worshiped only one all-powerful God which, at the time, was a very unique idea.
The timing is right, the Fourteenth Century B.C. We know that King David ruled over Israel around 1000 B.C. Before the Exodus and that time, the Israelites had to go through the long periods of wandering in the wilderness, gradually clearing the land of the Canaanites, and the period when Israel was ruled by leaders known as Judges.
Doesn't it look to you as if the Egyptians, having seen the power of the Israelites' God as described in the Bible, but really not wanting to admit that they and their gods had been defeated by the God of their slaves, had a pharaoh who thought that the best thing for Egypt was to incorporate this one supreme God, and facilitated that as best as he could, even though destroying his own reign and legacy in the process?
He even changed his name to signify his new religious convictions, from Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten, just as Abram had his name changed to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, and Jacob to Israel.
I see this as the best evidence that the Exodus, as described in the Bible with all of it's miracles, took place just as described. It could not have been that the Egyptians had gotten dissatisfied with the old gods because the country was poor or subject to foreign domination, and sought a new god to change their fortunes, because Egypt was near the height of it's power at the time.
But there is still more to consider.
Of all the hundreds of pharaohs and other important people in the long history of Egypt, two have emerged as the "faces" of old Egypt. These are Nefertiti, as we saw above, and King Tutankhamen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun#/media/File:CairoEgMuseumTaaMaskMostlyPhotographed.jpg
Nefertiti was the queen of Akhenaten, the pharaoh who tried to get Egypt worshiping one supreme God, and Tutankhamen was his son. Although Nefertiti was not Tutankhamen's mother. The only other name from Egypt that has any comparison to these two is Ramesses II, who would rule in the following dynasty.
Now, stop and think. Doesn't it strike you as very noteworthy that the two who should emerge as the most familiar faces from Egypt's very long history are the queen and the son of this scorned pharaoh who had tried to get Egypt to abandon it's historic pantheon of gods, in order to worship one supreme God?
King Tutankhamen was actually quite likely the most insignificant of pharaohs. He became king as a child, was in exceptionally poor health, and died in his teens. Decisions during his reign were almost certainly made by advisers, who would succeed Tutankhamen as pharaohs themselves, Ay and Horemheb. The reason that he is so famous today is that, unique among the pharaohs of Egypt, grave robbers never found his tomb before archeologists did in modern times.
Could it be that God arranged it for Tutankhamen and Nefertiti to emerge as the best-known figures of the long history of Egypt to show that the Egyptians had certainly seen the power of the Israelites' God in delivering them from slavery? Even though they were not about to record it, the world could see their reaction to it. This could not have been done for Akhenaten himself because he was scorned upon death, becoming a non-person whose name is missing from later lists of past pharaohs, and was buried in a very modest tomb.
King Tutankhamen, son of Akhenaten, is recorded as going against his father's religious ideas upon succeeding him. In fact, the new king's original name was to have been Tutankhaten, recognizing the one supreme god, but was changed to Tutankhamen, for the original Egyptian gods. But he was a child upon becoming pharaoh and decisions were certainly being made for him.
In the campaign of Horemheb against this new religious idea, the following statue of King Tut and his queen was severely damaged. But yet they have emerged in modern times as the faces of ancient Egypt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun#/media/File:Tutankhamun_at_Luxor_temple.jpg
18) THE PENTAGON PROPHECY
On October 21, 1967, what I see as the defining day, in spiritual terms, of the Baby Boomer era took place. At the height of the Vietnam War, there was a March to the Pentagon to protest the war. Hundreds of people gathered in front of the Pentagon and, through chanting and meditation, attempted to levitate the building, lift it off the ground, and to purge it of "the evil within".
The levitation of the Pentagon apparently wasn't successful, at least in terms of gravity, the building remained securely anchored to it's foundation. But this event showed where the Sixties really stood in the grand scheme of things. There was just something so special about this time. I was just a young child but I could tell how special the time was.
We know that the return of the original city of Jerusalem to the Jews begins the one-generation countdown to the establishment of Jesus' Kingdom on earth, but the Tribulation Period and the reign of the Antichrist has to come before that. Israel came back into existence in 1948, after nearly 1,900 years of dispersion, but there was a 19 year delay between that and the return of Jerusalem, which happened as a result of the Six-Day War of June 1967.
What I later concluded was that there was a reason for that delay. God wanted to first give us a chance to build the Millennium ourselves, without going through the Tribulation Period, which will be the worst time that the world has ever seen.
This was the Baby Boom Generation that was born into a world that had just gone through a cataclysmic world war, genocide and the development of nuclear weapons that could destroy civilization at the touch of a button. This might be the generation that had learned it's lesson. Maybe they could even build the Millennium, when the world would be the godly paradise that it had always been intended to be, without going through the Tribulation Period.
God decided to give them a chance. Israel had been reestablished but there would be a delay in Jerusalem coming back under Jewish control, as was foretold by Jesus.
The reason that there was so much protest against the Vietnam War, when people are usually patriotic to their country, is that there was an unspoken sense that this was a very special time. It was the budding Millennium, and there wasn't supposed to be wars. In many ways, the hearts of the Baby Boomers in the Rock Music Era were in the right place. This was the generation that wanted a better world and it seemed as if it might be within reach.
But we just couldn't do it. We were just too sinful. God saw that it wasn't going to work, it was only getting more sinful, so in June of 1967 the Six Day War brought the original city of Jerusalem back under Jewish control, for the first time in nearly two thousand years, as prophecied by Jesus to begin the one-generation countdown to the Millennium.
A few months later, this attempt to levitate the Pentagon showed what had happened. We saw in "The Aztec Prophecy", on this blog, how the Aztecs had a prophecy that is today on the Mexican flag. When they saw an eagle devouring a snake while perched on a cactus, that was where they were to build their city. The result was Mexico City, which would become the largest city in the world.
But what the Aztecs didn't understand at the time is that they were a step below where they thought they were. The snake was actually their own god Quetzalcoatl, a snake-like deity sometimes called "The Plumed Serpent". They still had to go through the "tribulation" of conquest by the Spanish conquistadors before they came to the real God.
The crowd that was trying to levitate the Pentagon definitely had their hearts in the right place. They wanted a better world and thought that the evil that was hindering that world lived within the Pentagon. It was reminiscent of the teachings of Jesus. He told His disciples that if they had enough faith they could "command a hill to move from here to there and it would". Jesus also commanded demons to leave people, and they had no choice but to obey.
But the crowd that was trying to levitate the Pentagon, despite clearly having faith, didn't have their faith in the right place. Their faith, at least for the most part, was not in Jesus but in the power of their chanting and meditation. Like the Aztecs, they were at a lower level than they thought. They were like the false prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. They were trying to prove that Baal was superior to Elijah's God. But no matter how much chanting they did, their sacrifice wouldn't miraculously burst into flame. The world is still going to have to go through the Tribulation Period to get to the Millennium.
Nearly 34 years later, right where the crowd trying to levitate the Pentagon had been standing, a hijacked plane flew into the side of the Pentagon as part of the 9 / 11 Attacks. Has anyone ever thought that maybe this was part of that crowd getting their answer, although not quite in the way that they had expected?
Notice that number, 34. There were three building impacts in the 9 / 11 attacks and, of course, all three were planned together and related. The impact on the Pentagon was the third and it occurred 34 minutes after the impact on the South Tower. This makes it appear as if it was to indicate that The impact on the Pentagon was also related to the attempt to levitate it, 34 years before.
The 9 / 11 Attack changed the world, not bringing about the Millennium by itself but by starting the world down the path that, by the way things have been going since then, will lead to the Apocalypse although the time of the Antichrist must come first. After the Apocalypse will come the establishment of Jesus' Kingdom on earth. Those who had tried to levitate the Pentagon will finally get the world that they wanted and it will be much better than they could possibly have imagined.
19) THE PERSIANS AND BABYLON
There was another nation where the idea of one supreme god arose, and which also had important dealings with the Israelites, that nation is Persia.
The religion known as Zoroastrianism was the official religion of Persia when Cyrus conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return home from their captivity there. They were given back all of the religious articles that Nebuchadnezzar's forces had taken after destroying the Temple in Jerusalem.
(Note-They were called Israelites before, after Jacob whose name had been changed to Israel, and were not called Jews until the tribe of Judah became predominant).
What stands out about the Zoroastrians is that, like the Jews, they believed in only one supreme God, which made them unique in the world. The religion began with a prophet called Zoroaster. Some, like the German writer Nietzsche, refer to him as Zarathustra.
Islam ultimately displaced Zoroastrianism in what is now Iran, but the pre-Islamic Persian past has never completely been eradicated. For one example, Iran's New Year, Nowruz, is actually a Zoroastrian holiday. Many Zoroastrians moved to India, where the colony in Bombay became known as Parsis, meaning "Persians". The Iranian royal line that we saw in "Remembering The Pahlavi Dynasty", on this blog, was originally Zoroastrian.
Like the new religion of Akhenaten in Egypt 800 years before, this really stands out in history. Rarely has such generosity been seen from a great empire in ancient times. The cost of rebuilding the Temple, once they got to Jerusalem, was even reportedly paid for by the Persians. It quite likely might not have been rebuilt otherwise.
The Bible treats the exile in Babylon as punitive, and it was, although it was noting like the enslavement in Egypt long before and many Jews elected to stay in Babylon when they had the chance to return home. The Books of Daniel and Esther are about Jews who did not return home. Jeremiah did not go into exile but Ezekiel did, and his prophecies are made from Babylon. But it is also clear that God wants the Jews in Babylon, stating that those who go will prosper while those who try to seek sanctuary in Egypt will not.
Could it be that God, seeing that they had arrived at the idea of one supreme God and so were on the right track, wanted them to contact the Jews with their concept of God? Like the earlier Amarna Period in Egypt, how else can this logically be explained? The way the Persians dealt with the Jews is just so unique in the ancient world, and requires some special explanation.
More than 500 years later, at the time of Jesus, the Magi arrived to pay homage to the infant Jesus, and to give him the three gifts of gold, frankincense and, myrrh. The Magi were a class of Zoroastrian priests, from Persia, who had reportedly followed the Star of Bethlehem likely along what was then the Silk Road, because the birth of Jesus fulfilled a Zoroastrian prophecy.
It appears that both monotheistic religions, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, had messengers to herald the coming of Jesus, the Magi when he was born and John the Baptist when Jesus began his ministry at the age of about 30. Just as the Magi were Zoroastrian priests, John the Baptist was from a Jewish priestly family.
The Bible actually says relatively little about the Magi, and the only Gospel that tells their story is that of Matthew. But they have outdone even the Queen of Sheba in having all kinds of legends spun around them. Because they brought three gifts to the infant Jesus, it has been presumed that there were three Magi, but nowhere in the Bible does it give their number.
Sometimes they are referred to as "The Three Wise Men" or "The Three Kings", but there is no reason to presume that they were kings. There is a popular Christmas song about them, "We Three Kings Of Orient Are", and they are a staple of Christmas scenes. I once played one of the Wise Men in a Christmas play. In Medieval times, they were even given names, Balthazar, Caspar and, Melchior.
20) THE MEANING OF NOAH'S ARK
We have seen how these old stories in the Bible can have meanings that go far beyond the actual story. The story of the Crossing of the Red Sea, for example, is loaded with meaning and prophecy. Another thing that we saw is how the band around the stump of the tree in the Book of Daniel seems to be a prophecy of the Temple Mount after the Temple had been destroyed.
But what about the story of Noah's Ark? Noah released a dove from the ark, as the waters were receding, three times. The first time it returned. Seven days later, the dove was sent out again and it returned with an olive leaf. Seven days after that, the dove was sent out but did not return.
What do you suppose that this could mean? Much later, in the Gospel of St. Luke, the Holy Spirit descended in the form of a dove as Jesus was being baptized by John the Baptist. Jesus was baptized in water, the water of the Jordan River, just like the water of the Flood. Have you ever stopped to think that the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a dove was the return of the dove sent out by Noah?
When Jesus was crucified, the cross was made of wood and was held together by nails. Jesus was also crucified on the cross with nails. Just as Noah's Ark was made of wood which was held together by nails.
Just as the dove returned to Noah, Jesus will also return to gather His people before the beginning of the Tribulation Period in the event commonly referred to as the Rapture. Although this is a general term that is not in the Bible. He will then return seven years after that to set up His Kingdom for the Millennium, in which the world will be the holy paradise that it was always meant to be.
But notice the common number 7. The dove was sent out again in 7 days and Jesus will return in 7 years, when sent by God. Remember that, in the Book of Daniel, "weeks of years" are used, so that 7 years is referred to as a "week", which would ordinarily mean 7 days. We saw this in the section of this posting 10) THE BIBLE'S SEVENTY SEVENS.
The descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove meant that Jesus was actually now Noah's dove.
The second time that the dove returned to Noah, it brought an olive leaf. Some versions of the Bible translate it as an olive branch. In the Old Testament, both Isaiah and Jeremiah prophecy the coming of a "branch". Although it is not stated, when the Holy Spirit descended as a dove at the baptism of Jesus, this showed that Jesus was that branch. In the Book of Isaiah it is referred to as a "Branch of Jesse" and we know that Jesse, the father of King David, was a direct ancestor of Jesus.
The Book of Genesis gives the dimensions of Noah's Ark. Although we know that it is a very large ship the dimensions are probably not exactly translatable. But what about the Temple Mount in Jerusalem? Have you ever thought that the Temple Mount, with the north-south length being longer than the east-west width, which is greater than the height, very much resembles the dimensions of Noah's Ark?
Notice how the south wall of the Temple Mount resembles a ship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Mount#/media/File:South_Temple_Mount.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship#/media/File:Ship_diagram-numbers.svg
Notice also how this model of the Temple, before it's destruction, very much resembles the superstructure of a ship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holyland_Model_of_Jerusalem#/media/File:Jerusalem_Modell_BW_2.JPG
The Book of Genesis describes Noah's Ark as coming to rest on the mountains of Ararat. The Temple Mount is actually "resting" on another famous mount. It is Mount Moriah, although it is a hill and not as high as Mount Ararat, the meaning is the same.
Two other things that are interesting is that Noah's Ark is described as having three decks, and Jesus rose after being crucified in three days. The Book of Genesis describes Noah as waiting "forty days and forty nights" before opening a window on the ark after it came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. There are two mountains, one larger and one smaller, but the two mountains are at exactly 40 degrees north latitude.
So we have seen in the section of this posting 2) THE TREE STUMP AND THE TEMPLE MOUNT that the band around the tree stump in the Book of Daniel is almost sure to be a prophecy of the Temple Mount, we can see how it is also foretold by the old story of Noah's Ark.
21) THE APPLE TREE PROPHECY
Could it be that the biblical story of Adam and Eve falling by eating the Forbidden Fruit is also a prophecy? The fruit opened their eyes, giving them wisdom and knowledge that they had not had before, but also brought about their fall from paradise into sin.
Far in the distant future, Sir Isaac Newton was at home in Lincolnshire. One day, he saw an apple fall from a tree. According to some accounts, he was sitting under the tree and the apple hit him on the head.
It was a revolutionary moment because he suddenly realized that the universe was governed by a force that he called gravity.
Around the same time, Newton discerned the nature of light and color. He developed calculus, which he called "fluxions". During this great year of discovery, he set out the principles of mechanics.
Telescopes were being used to look into space. Galileo's telescope revealed things that had never before been seen, such as the craters on the moon and the moons of Jupiter. But a telescope based on lenses is strictly limited in size, and thus power, because a lens can only be supported by it's edges, and a large lens will sag under it's own weight.
Newton got the idea of basing a telescope on a concave mirror, which wasn't limited in size because it can be supported from beneath. This is known as a reflecting, or Newtonian, telescope, as opposed to a refracting telescope based on lenses. Modern astronomy has revolved around reflecting telescopes. Although the refracting design might be preferable for small portable telescopes because the mirrors of a reflecting telescope can be knocked out of alignment.
This streak of discoveries by Sir Isaac Newton is considered as the beginning of modern science.
Just like Adam and Eve's Forbidden Fruit, the fall of Isaac Newton's apple gave humanity knowledge and understanding that it had not had before. Unlike the Forbidden Fruit, the development of modern science was not forbidden to humans. The world now had the Word of God and were (hopefully) mature enough to handle the wisdom and knowledge that had been withheld from them earlier.
The knowledge of science, and the technology that it brought, certainly made life easier in many ways. But it has also made wars far more deadly and destructive. Can you believe that the Nobel Peace Prize was founded by the inventor of high explosives? We have now gained the ability to destroy civilization by pressing a few buttons, as well as to destroy the environment that we depend on to survive.
As I have written here before, if I had to describe our times in one sentence it would be; "We have reached the point where we can change the world faster than we can adapt to the changes that we have made in the world".
Along with the wonders of communication technology came the ability of governments to conduct surveillance of people. It is interesting that Newton's wonderful year of discovery was 1666, and the Bible tells us that the number of the Antichrist will be 666.
We saw the importance of the number 19 to the biblical prophecies of the Last Days in the section of the compound posting on this blog, "The Aztec Prophecy", April 2018, 30) "The Nineteen Prophecy". Notice that the digits in the year 1666 add up to 19.
Again, the reason that 19 is an important number is that two especially important numbers in the Bible were 7 and 12. God chose for there to be 7 days in a week and there were 12 tribes of Israel before there were 12 apostles. If we add 7 and 12 we get 19. 7 was important early, at the time of creation. 12 was important later, so it makes sense that 19 would be important in the Last Days.
For one thing, Newton's streak of discoveries that began with the fall of an apple began not as part of his academic career at Cambridge but because he was home because everything was shut down by the plague. In the future there would be another pandemic and the changes it would bring about are leading to the reign of the Antichrist, as we saw in the posting on this blog "The End Of The World As We Know It", June 2020.
The digits of the year of Newton's furlough at home due to the plague, 1666, add up to 19. The future pandemic preceding the Antichrist, whose number is 666 and would be made possible by the science and technology made possible by Newton's discoveries during that year, would be Covid-19.
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