Saturday, September 9, 2017

islamic antichrist

in Daniel Revisited Discovering the Four Mideast Signs Mark Davidson
links all the critters in Daniel's visions to the present time. It is argued that
the reference to the ram and the goat being for the time of the end, means
that it is for now. Though already fulfilled in the wars of Alexander the
Great against Persia and the subsequent breakup of his empire, it could be
redone again.

A book arguing for preterism noted correctly that "the end of the world"
etc. terms refers to the end of the AGE not the end of all ages. That book
End Times Bible Prophecy: It's Not What They Told You by
Brian Godawa makes a good case for hyperbole as typical middle eastern
communication style, so likely to be used poetically by God in speaking
to them, and therefore various cosmic references are symbolic of falling
of kingdoms and so forth (and/or a sarcastic slam at such who may have
equated their status with that of heavenly bodies). However, this doesn't
rule out some catastrophic stuff necessarily.
 
Godawa argues against double fulfillment, but a double fulfillment IS
done by the Messiah, Christos in Greek, because Jesus fulfilled the
priestly and sacrificial prophecies which puzzled rabbis some of who
thought there would be a messiah bar Joseph who would die and a
messiah bar David who would live forever. Then, having come back
to life and ascended to heaven in His flesh (He will never die), He
will come back and fulfill the rest of those messianic prophecies, where
He rules on earth.
 
So this in fact is not exactly a double fulfillment but a two stage fulfillment,
a partial fulfillment followed by the rest.
 
So where something was not done in ancient times in a prophecy and you
can't ascribe this to a city's repentance or something, then the whole thing
might play out again later, with some of the already done things happening
again, and whatever was not done happening also.
 
Yes, Matthew 24 does refer to the AD 70 destruction of Jerusalem and the
Temple, but there are statements also about the Second Coming that can't
be anything but literal about Jesus, and not symbolic about, for instance,
Constantine. the parallel to the last days being like the days of Noah,
when everyone (except Noah and his family) were carrying on business as
usual and caught by surprise, so likewise will the Second Coming of
Christ and judgement catch all by surprise, would indicate that other
parallels might exist.
 
But it is also said that that generation that Jesus addressed wouldn't
pass away until all was done, this can be the generation that sees all these
things happen at once not in segments will see the Second Coming, but He
also said that some alive when He was speaking would not die before then.
 
Well, you got Enoch and Elijah who never died, Elijah appeared with
Moses (who did die) talking with Jesus at the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor.
These are likely the two witnesses of Revelation. Or it might be others,
since these die and are resurrected and taken up to heaven before the Second
Coming. Enoch and Elijah might well have been invisibly among them.
And some could have been miraculously kept alive to now, and will be kept
alive until the Second Coming. 
 
But the issue is, that we need to read the Bible with the Jewish mindset
of the time in mind, and not our modern very precise scientific etc. attitude
or the Greco Latin attitude that led up to that. Fine, but there are still details
that show that while AD 70 indeed fulfilled some prophecies, all prophecy
is not fulfilled, and some replay will happen.
 
The Septuagint adds that the winged lion (or lioness in LXX and Britain and
America have led the charge in rolling back male supremacism and female
disempowerment) is driven from the face of the earth, and earth would be
haretz in Hebrew, not the whole world but the land, and the lioness also
appears still existing at the time of the Second Coming. So this is something
that comes from outside of "the world," not an alien invasion but outside of
the Middle East, outside of the regions of the Roman and Persian empires.
Since it is driven from the face of the earth, yet continues to exist.
 
Daniel Revisited  relates the four horsemen of the Apocalypse to events in
modern Iraq, which is silly. They are expressly things that would SOON come
to pass so has to be a bit earlier. A big deal is made about the first horseman
having a bow but no arrows are mentioned, and Saddam Hussein admitted
he had no weapons of mass destruction so it was an empty bow he had so to
speak.
 
A bow IMPLIES the arrows. an archer. This probably refers either to the
Persian invasion of Jerusalem during Christian times, or to the Islamic
conquests or the Turks.
 
The notation of how olive oil and wine prices stayed stable while petroleum
oil went up doesn't fit, because increase of price is not harming something.
 
So far, I have read nothing that persuades me that the assessment Chris White
and others and myself have made of Daniel's four beasts is wrong.
 
The angel told Daniel that they were four kings or kingdoms that would arise
after him. But Daniel was living in the time of the Babylonian empire, which
if the equation of four beasts to four sections of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar's
dream is correct, would have Daniel living in the time of the first beast, and
therefore the angel would have said THREE more kingdoms after Daniel,
not four. So these since the fourth ends with the Second Coming, must not be
ancient kingdoms at all. That doesn't mean that the antichrist won't come from
an Islamic context, but the main reason given for this, by Richardson and Shoebat,
that John mistook the Arabic letters for the jihad slogan for the Greek letters
adding up to the triple six number, is absurd. Surrounding this is the reference
to calculating by someone with wisdom, in other words a reference to gematria,
where the numerical value of letters used as numbers in absence of separate
symbols for numbers as we now have, is applied to figure the numeric value of
a word or phrase made of those letters. This is not numerology, where some
mystical implications or predictions of someone's future is drawn from calculating
the numerical value of their names, which in modern times adds all digits to break
down to two digits, add them to get one digit and figure the mystical implications
of the number that results. that is nonsense, and not how such calculations were
made originally. and the purpose wasn't fortune telling except when it was, but
a way of looking for similarities based on same number value of words and phrases,
looking for hidden meanings.