While one might applaud their interest in Bible prophecy, can you prove the truth about what they are saying and publishing? Is this tetrad the heavenly sign spoken of in Joel 2: You can know the correct answer. In fact, the great God that created the heavens, including the stars, sun, moon and Earth, wants you to know the truth about Joel 2: However, to come to the correct answer, there are several things you must do.
The Importance of Bible Prophecy
Prophecy is a significant part of the Bible. Did you realize that approximately one third of the Bible is devoted to it? The Apostle Paul said in Ephesians 2: While the book of Revelation thoroughly stumps most Bible readers, you can understand this mysterious book. One important key is that in Revelation is a story-flow , relating one future event to another in time order—with occasional insets injected into the continuous story-thread. And this story-thread, or time line of end-time prophecy, reveals the timing of the heavenly signs discussed in Joel 2: The book of Revelation reveals major prophetic events in time sequence using seven seals —discussed in Revelation 6, 8, 9 and In chapter 6, Jesus Christ begins stripping off the seals—literally opening up to human understanding the sequence of world-shaking events for this end time.
Yet the events are given to us in mysterious symbols. For example, the first seal shows a rider on a white horse with a bow and a crown verse 2. What does this symbol mean? Symbols are open to all sorts of interpretations—and for generations, people have forced their own human interpretations on them. That is the grave danger for all who desire to teach prophecy. The Bible interprets its own symbols —usually in a location different than the chapter you may be reading.
You should read through chapters 6, 8, 9 and 11 at this point to familiarize yourself with these seals. However, the symbols do not make the events plain! Well, you have supposed wrong! On the contrary, believe it or not, Jesus spoke in parables to cover up, to hide the true meaning from the crowds that constantly followed Him!
Pay particular attention to verse Did Christ reveal the literal meaning of these strange symbols from Revelation elsewhere in the New Testament? Olivet—when they to whom He revealed His parables—they to whom it was given to know these mysteries—came to Him privately, and asked Him: In the astounding Olivet prophecy recorded in Matthew 24, Mark 13 and Luke 21, Christ outlined in plain language the seven seals of the book of Revelation. See the accompanying chart for the seven seals and the story flow of the book of Revelation.
The Olivet prophecy highlights a summary of world events from a. You should read all of Matthew While you keep in mind what you just read in Matthew 24, there is another key you must understand to truly grasp what Jesus Christ is telling us in these verses and in the book of Revelation. The very first condition Jesus foretells is that of false preachers , misleading and deceiving, not the few, but the many!
The Apostle Paul wrote of it, and said this spirit of iniquity was already working, even as he wrote! And it has never relaxed or ceased, but rather has developed in intensity, until the whole world, as distinctly prophesied, has become deceived and misled as to these Bible truths of God! Armstrong was referring to the prophecy in Matthew The first seal is this plague of false teachers and prophets.
The second event or condition to set in is war climaxing in intensity today in world war. We are now in the lull between World Wars ii and iii Matthew The third and fourth seals—famine and pestilence—are also included at the end of this verse.
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What is the next major prophetic event that will rock this world to its foundations? In verses , Jesus discussed the fifth seal, or the Great Tribulation. Dozens of prophecies in both the Old and New Testaments describe this horrific event. To fully explain the Great Tribulation would take more than one article.
However, you can know that religious teachers purporting to understand it are woefully ignorant about what this fifth seal truly means. Here is a short description: You can read more about this in our article on page The Tribulation has not yet occurred. However, current world events show that it is at our doorstep! Only after that modern holocaust occurs will we arrive at the next major prophetic event described in Revelation.
Jesus Christ discussed the sixth seal, or the heavenly signs, in Matthew This is the same event the Prophet Joel spoke about in his prophecy Joel 2: For all those willing to listen, here is the Bible answer to the question: Is this current tetrad the heavenly signs discussed in Joel 2: Jesus Christ tells you, No! Take the time to carefully study verse 29 with Revelation 6: The heavenly signs—where the sun grows dark and the moon becomes as blood—do not take place until after the Great Tribulation. This event introduces the time period known as the Day of the Lord, which is the seventh seal.
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This is a separate event from the Great Tribulation. During this one-year period, God unleashes His wrath on a sinful world in the form of the seven trumpet plagues discussed in Revelation 8, 9 and It is His way of showing all mankind left living that they need to repent of their wicked ways and turn to Him. Understand that God has a great purpose behind the heavenly signs discussed in Joel 2: Some Christian scholars believe the verses 11—14 refer to the era of salvation beginning with Christ's resurrection [93] and its coming fulfillment on the last day.
The word "soon" other translations use "shortly" or "quickly" does not have to be understood in the sense of close future. The Norwegian scholar Thorleif Boman explained that the Israelites, unlike Europeans or people in the West, did not understand time as something measurable or calculable according to Hebrew thinking but as something qualitative:. We have examined the ideas underlying the expression of calculable time and more than once have found that the Israelites understood time as something qualitative, because for them time is determined by its content.
The quantity of duration completely recedes behind the characteristic feature that enters with time or advances in it. Johannes Pedersen comes to the same conclusion when he distinguishes sharply between the Semitic understanding of time and ours. According to him, time is for us an abstraction since we distinguish time from the events that occur in time. The ancient Semites did not do this; for them time is determined by its content.
The following are the scriptural requirements in Judaism concerning the Messiah, his actions, and his reign. Jewish sources insist that the Messiah will fulfill the prophecies outright. Some Christians maintain that some of these prophecies are associated with a putative second coming while Jewish scholars state there is no concept of a second coming in the Hebrew Bible. The gospels of Mark , Luke , and John state Jesus sent his disciples after only one animal. A response is that the text allows for Jesus to have ridden on a colt that was accompanied by a donkey, perhaps its mother.
Rashi , a 10th century French rabbi, gave the following commentaries regarding Bible prophecies: These passages have been interpreted by some Muslim scholars as prophetic references to Muhammad. This claim has always been unacceptable to most Bible scholars. All the following are Muslim scholars' interpretations of various Biblical passages. Mormons believe that the following biblical passages prophesy or otherwise support the provenance of the Book of Mormon:. Biblical prophecy is believed to be literally true by a number of conservative Christians, such as Norman Geisler and Young Earth Creationists.
Interpreters uphold this principle by providing details of prophecies that have been fulfilled. Taylor, for example, believed the Bible prophecies were too remarkable and detailed to occur by chance. Custance maintained that the Ezekiel Tyre prophecy Ezek. These interpretive issues are related to the more general idea of how passages should be read or interpreted—a concept known as Biblical hermeneutics. Bible prophecy is an area which is often discussed in regard to Christian apologetics. Traditional Jewish readings of the Bible do not generally reflect the same attention to the details of prophecies.
Maimonides stated that Moses was the greatest of the prophets and only he experienced direct revelation. According to Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed the prophets used metaphors and analogies and, except for Moses, their words are not to be taken literally. According to the Talmud , prophecy ceased in Israel following the rebuilding of the second temple. Nonetheless Maimonides held that a prophet can be identified if his or her predictions come true. Many scholarly and popular interpreters have argued that a prophecy may have a dual fulfillment; others have argued for the possibility of multiple fulfillments.
In some senses this has been occasionally referred to as an apotelesmatic interpretation of specific prophecies. In Christian eschatology , the idea of at least a dual fulfillment is usually applied to passages in the apocalyptic books of Daniel or Revelation, and to the apocalyptic discourse of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21 , especially in interpretations that predict a future tribulation and a future Antichrist figure.
Futurists and Historicists usually hold to variations of this view, while Preterists see the same passages as applying only to events and persecutions from the time of Daniel through the first century CE. Some who believe in multiple fulfillment tend to restrict the idea to a view of history where ancient events reflecting Israel and first-century Judaism and Christianity are predictors of larger future events to happen on a global scale at a point in time, while others tend to include symbolic applications of prophecies to multiple entities and events throughout history.
Henry Kett suggested multiple fulfillments in his book History the Interpreter of Prophecy , in which he outlined numerous fulfillments for Antichrist prophecies, with chapters on the "Papal power", "Mahometanism" and "Infidelity" as parts of a long series of fulfillments of the prophecies. Samuel Horsley stated "The application of the prophecy to any one of these events bears all the characteristics of a true interpretation".
Moses Stuart — differentiated the idea that a prophetic passage has an inherent dual sense or double meaning from the idea of a later application of the prophecy in subsequent events, separate from the original prophecy: But there may be an apotelesmatic view or sense of a passage in the ancient Scriptures; and this is the case whenever a proceeding or a principle is reillustrated or reconfirmed. This makes out no double sense, but a fuller and more complete exhibition of the one and simple meaning of the original.
Other interpreters have referred to an apotelesmatic meaning of prophecy as a collapsing of perspective of "near" and "far" or "inaugurated" and "consummated" fulfillments, where from the viewpoint of the ancient Israelite prophet local events affecting Israel are merged with end-time cosmic events relating to the kingdom of God. Keil — suggested in an influential commentary "this uniting together of the two events is not to be explained only from the perspective and apotelesmatic character of the prophecy, but has its foundation in the very nature of the thing itself.
The prophetic perspective, by virtue of which the inward eye of the seer beholds only the elevated summits of historical events as they unfold themselves, and not the valleys of the common incidents of history which lie between these heights, is indeed peculiar to prophecy in general, and accounts for the circumstance that the prophecies as a rule give no fixed dates, and apotelesmatically bind together the points of history which open the way to the end, with the end itself.
Seventh-day Adventist theologian Desmond Ford Historicist termed this belief the apotelesmatic principle and stated "The ultimate fulfillment is the most comprehensive in scope, though details of the original forecast may be limited to the first fulfillment. On the other hand, Dispensational Futurist theologian Randall Price applies the term "apotelesmatic" primarily to the sense of "prophetic postponement" or "an interruption in fulfillment" that dispensationalists hold occurs between the sixty-ninth and seventieth weeks of the seventy weeks prophecy of Daniel 9: With the prefix apo , which basically has the connotation of 'separation from something,' the idea is of a delay or interruption in the completion of the prophetic program.
Therefore, apotelesmatic interpretation recognizes that in Old Testament texts that present the messianic program as a single event, a near and far historical fulfillment is intended, separated by an indeterminate period of time. Dispensational writers have referred to this as an 'intercalation' or a 'gap. Halley's Bible Handbook , the Scofield Reference Bible and many other Bible commentaries hold that the "little horn" of Daniel 8 is fulfilled both with Antiochus Epiphanes reigned BC and with a future Antichrist.
Henry Kett, taking the writings of Sir Isaac Newton, advanced to identifying three fulfillments: Antiochus Epiphanes, the Romans, and a future Antichrist. Too, because of the double, triple and quadruple applications of this prophecy to world events, an enormous amount of history is involved in the cryptogrammic language of the vision. Among most Christian denominations , the prophecy that Jesus will return to Earth is a major doctrine, which can be seen by its inclusion in the Nicene Creed.
Many specific timeframes for this prediction have been declared by individuals and groups, although many of these dates have expired without the occurrences predicted. Biblical references claimed to prophesy the end times include: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article has multiple issues.
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Abomination of desolation , Olivet Discourse , and Second Coming. Oxford English Dictionary 3rd ed. Subscription or UK public library membership required. An instance of divinely inspired speech or writing; a revelation from God or a god; a prophetic text. Also as a mass noun: Bruce, Israel and the Nations , Michigan, [], page Preaching Christ from the Old Testament. First and Second Kings. Westminster John Knox Press. A Short Introduction to the Hebrew Bible.
Bible prophecy
The Bible Readers Companion electronic ed. Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible: Complete and Unabridged in One Volume Je The Major Prophets Je The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An exposition of the Scriptures 1: Bruce, Israel and the Nations , Michigan, , page Bruce, Israel and the Nations , Michigan, , pages 62— Bruce, Israel and the nations , Michigan, , page The Promise and the Blessing. Archived from the original on 12 June Barton Payne, Encylopaedia of Biblical Prophecy , , p.
Archived from the original on September 20, Retrieved August 24, Archived from the original on 5 July Archived from the original on 17 July The History of Tyre. Columbia University Press; Colonists were imported and citizens who had escaped returned. The energy of these with the advantage of the site, in a few years raised the city to wealth and leadership again.
Archived from the original on 18 July Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation. Archived from the original on 25 July Archived from the original on Ian Shaw , Oxford Univ. Press paperback, pp. Word Pictures in the New Testament. The Wycliffe Bible commentary: New Testament Mt Commentary on Matthew An Exposition of the Scriptures 2: The New Bible Commentary.
Leicester, England; Downers Grove, Ill. The IVP Bible background commentary: Wiersbe's Expository Outlines on the New Testament Limestone Church of Christ. Edwards, The Gospel according to Mark , Wm. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text , Wm. An Outline of his Theology , Wm. Homily 12 on First Timothy Chrysostom ".
Daniel Kirk, Unlocking Romans , Wm. Archived at the Wayback Machine. US Baha'i Publishing Trust. Archived from the original on 28 September Retrieved August 14, Moses attained the highest possible human level. He perceived God to a degree surpassing every human that ever existed God spoke to all other prophets through an intermediary. Moses alone did not need this; this is what the Torah means when God says "Mouth to mouth, I will speak to him.
This would be the larger view of the subject, what theologians call the apotelesmatic meaning of the prophecy, sub specie aeternitatis —the way the heavenly intelligences see it. The Time of the End. Archived from the original on 5 March Retrieved 7 August A Commentary on the Book of Daniel. The Book of the Prophet Daniel. Translated by The Rev. Ford's application of this principle to the Adventist understanding of the prophecy of Daniel 8: