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Today we're going to talk about Revelation, and not Revelation in the way that we have in the past. Revelation's own title is given in the very first verse.
It's the revelation of Jesus Christ. It's like the beast, the antichrist, the sign of the beast, all of that to me just doesn't make sense.
But if you lose track of Jesus Christ, you may end up in a destination you didn't intend.
See, when I think of Revelation, it's just fear mongering. I'm gonna be honest. But most of these are based on the
Old Testament. What we call the Old Testament was John's Bible. I didn't even know I was reading it, reading it eisegetically.
How would you prepare us for Revelation? Hi, it's Cass. I wanted to first start off by saying thank you for listening.
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Thank you so much for listening. Now let's get to the show. Hello, hello. Welcome to Biblically Speaking.
I'm your host, Cassie Mbellino. And today we're going to talk about revelation and not revelation in the way that we have in the past.
This is going to be the most helpful revelation conversation that helps you understand it in a way that actually
God wants you to, because what we're going to do is an original Biblically Speaking style where we take scripture and then we understand it with other scripture.
We do at its core exegetical understanding of the word. So if you are scrambling through revelation and none of it makes sense like it did for me before, today we're going to go side by side with the
Old Testament scripture that John is referencing in Revelation. All those things that don't make sense can be explained within the
Bible. And the expert that I have with me today is Dr. John Pauline.
You are the expert in revelation. So this is going to be an amazing conversation. Just a little bit about credibility.
The reason that you are the expert is that you're professor of religion and former dean of the
School of Religion at Loma Linda University from 2007 till now. Previous to that, you were teaching for 25 years at the
Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University. And you chair the Department of New Testament there.
You've also authored a dozen books, dozens of scholarly papers, a bunch of research, numerous media productions.
You are a specialist in the study of Joannine literature in the New Testament and everything John. Welcome to the show,
Dr. Pauline. Thank you, good to be here. How did you get into this?
Why Revelation? That's like easily the hardest book. Well, I'd have to say I grew up as a
Seventh -day Adventist and Seventh -day Adventists find their core principles in the
Book of Revelation. Now, the Book of Revelation pointed them to some insights that they did not see other churches teaching.
And they seem, you know, Book of Revelation, it sounds like it might be important for the end of time. So they said, well, if other people have not seen this or not teaching it, we ought to maybe take that up ourselves.
And I had an interesting experience about 25 years ago with the Lutheran World Federation where leaders of the
Adventist Church and leaders of the Lutheran World Federation got together. And we had some difficulties over Revelation.
Some things that we agreed on, some things we didn't agree on, but a beautiful thing happened at the end.
One of the most beautiful things I've ever experienced is the leaders of the Lutheran Church said, we don't really understand entirely what you guys are doing there.
We don't 100 % follow it, but God has called you to give a message that others are not seeing.
We give you our blessing to do that. And I'm just kind of like, wow, you know, this is the most godly, unselfish thing
I'd run into. So yeah, so there are, not everybody will see Revelation the same way, but I'm coming from a perspective that sees some things maybe that not everyone else has seen, but my mission, as you have pointed out, is to be faithful to the text and faithful to the author of the text, both divine and human, that we read the text in a way that God intended.
Wow, that's what we're here for, because I didn't even know I was reading it eisegetically. If you could, before we get into it, which
I know we are going to throughout this episode in the next 60 minutes, would you say that Revelation's about end times, end of the world, destruction, disaster, fear, or in like 10 words or less, like how would you prepare us for Revelation?
How would you see it now? Well, Revelation's own title is given in the very first verse, and I have it in front of me here in the
Greek and the English, but it's the revelation of Jesus Christ. That's the title of the book, the revelation of Jesus Christ.
So in some way, this is revealing Christ in a way that maybe other
New Testament books don't. The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants what must soon take place.
All right, so you have a double theme here. You have Jesus Christ as the center of the message, but it's a
Jesus Christ that's going to be uniquely configured for the end of the world.
Jesus, when he was on this earth, often talked about, I will come again. I'll receive you unto myself.
So we look forward to Jesus' return, and the book of Revelation is claiming here to provide insight to prepare people for that end time situation.
See, when I think of Revelation, it's just fear mongering. I'm gonna be honest. It's like the beast, the antichrist, the sign of the beast, the seven years plague, the second coming, the rapture, and we've had dozens of conversations here about end times, but do you have those feelings about Revelation?
Well, you see, there's this double title here. It's about Jesus. It's also about the end time.
It's easy to get lost in one or the other. Some people might come to Revelation, just look for Jesus and say, oh, that other stuff.
You know, like some of my Lutheran friends. That's a bunch of gobbledygook. We don't understand it, and I respect that.
These were great scholars who were talking to me at the time. One of them was from,
I think, Heidelberg University in Germany, very famous university. So not everybody sees the end time stuff.
Some people use the end time stuff to try to create all kinds of excitement and speculation and so forth, and that's never been helpful.
There was a man called Leroy Froome who wrote a four -volume set on the history of interpreting the books of Daniel and Revelation, 4 ,000 pages.
And basically 99 % of all the interpretations predicting future and stuff were wrong over the last 2 ,000 years.
Yeah, you know, people who have been confident saying through Revelation, I can predict the next couple years,
I can predict everything that happens between now and Jesus coming, that hasn't worked. Oh, that's good to know.
I do believe Revelation is there to prepare us. I do believe that there is insight we can gain about the end times, but if you lose track of Jesus Christ, you may end up in a destination you didn't intend.
Oh boy, okay. Well, I feel like I always end up in the wrong destination then.
I read Revelation. Give yourself a little slack. A lot of people, obviously, in 2 ,000 years ended up in the wrong place.
It's like the lamps, it's the pillars, it's the angels, everything. All of that, to me, just doesn't make sense.
So you are proposing a very unique - But most of these are based on the Old Testament, and that's the point that you wanted us to make today.
Yes, yes. Okay, so with this style, explain to me, how do scholars identify that, okay,
Revelation is no longer talking something new, it's now referencing something in the past. Like, ding, ding, ding, there's a signal here.
How do scholars know? Well, that's the big challenge with Revelation.
There's some 270 -something quotations of the
Old Testament in the New Testament. But Revelation never, or hardly ever,
I think never, quotes the Old Testament. And by a quote, it would be something like, you know,
Mary had a little lamb, her fleece was white as snow. You know that one, right? Okay, I'm quoting something verbatim, okay?
Revelation doesn't do that. What's it do? Revelation hints, alludes, a word here, a phrase there, a nation here, a city there.
Even more complicated. You know, and scholars up to about 45 years ago, were basically, they'd recognized there's
Old Testament stuff there, but didn't entirely know how to handle it.
And what I discovered when I was doing my doctoral dissertation, was that there was really no consistent methodology for determining, you know, when is
John actually wanting the reader to say, oh, this is something from the Old Testament, and go back there and figure out what that is gonna help us to understand this text.
So there's actually a couple of others, Gregory Beal, from I think it's
Wheaton College, and Richard Hayes, who was, is he from Yale, I think?
Anyway, they were also working on this at the same time that I was working on it. But what
I did, perhaps more than the others, the specialty is, first of all, distinguish between allusions and echoes.
Okay, I'm gonna go slow here, all right? Allusions is when the author is thinking that text.
Okay, as he's writing the book, he has that text in mind and wants the reader to see that text and bring it in, okay?
And echo is where he uses language familiar from the Old Testament, but he's not sending you there.
He's just using language that you would know from the Old Testament, but it's not an allusion.
It's not like a quotation. He's not pointing you back there. That distinction was so important to make, and now
I think pretty much everybody who studies Revelation uses that distinction. Okay, so would an allusion be like a matching word?
Would it be a symbol or a structure, syntax, semantics? Yeah, it's like a quotation, but it doesn't have the certainty that you're dealing with this particular text.
So like with the Mary had a little lamb, anybody hearing that knows exactly where I got that from.
I didn't make it up, okay? Revelation, it's never that certain. It's a little less certain because it's a word here, a phrase there, a name here and there, and so I developed a methodology that has three items to it, and I actually got this from English literature because in English literature, there's been hundreds of years they have studied, they would call them influence studies.
What earlier poets, what earlier playwrights? You know, Shakespeare is full of Italian plays, you know, stories from France, stories from England, old traditions and stuff, and when you know where he got it from, it's very, very helpful to understand
Shakespeare. So English literature has been doing this for hundreds of years. I see, that's a good parallel.
Robert Jewett was a New Testament scholar at Calvin College at the time, and he and I talked about this in 1986, and he said, why don't you go to English literature?
You know, you've made up this method. I made it up, you know, basically by studying the text and saying, well, this is helpful to look for, and I went to English literature and found they were doing the same thing
I was doing, so that gave me backup from a scholarly perspective. You don't want to invent something and be the only person, but when other people are doing it in other disciplines, it gives you some context to do it here.
Okay, I'm excited to jump into some of those illusions and the echoes, but just to understand the importance of what we're doing, why is this method even relevant for revelation?
Like, is it something we use in other books and we just don't know it? Well, any Christian writer who quotes the
Bible, that's the primary source, and you know it's that person's source, and they're taking you there all the time, they're quoting it, et cetera, et cetera, but those same writers sometimes reflect the
Bible without even realizing it. Verses that they memorized as children, the language pops in and you drop it in there without thinking, oh, that's
Psalm 24 -7. No, it's just you know that language, and so illusions are natural things that happen, and we do it all the time, especially with things like TV shows.
Let me see if I can come up with one just off the top of my head. Make my day. That's not a quotation.
It's an illusion. You know where that's from, don't you? Or who did it? I might.
I don't know. I can't remember it right now. Have you heard it? It's Clint Eastwood, and I haven't seen the movie, but make my day is kind of like somebody ironically saying, someone's gonna hurt him or something, and he says, oh, make my day, meaning anything you wanna do is not gonna succeed.
Yeah, okay. Yeah. Okay, it's something familiar that we can kind of draw back to an original.
Okay, but what if - How about, so you're saying there's a chance? Exactly. You know that one, right?
Yeah, yeah. Okay. I love Dumb and Dumber. Yeah, so that's an illusion, and we do it all the time.
Now, an echo is different, and that's where you don't know where it came from.
You know where it came from there, and you could, you know, if I was wanting you to reference that as part of what we're talking about, you would be able to do that, but there's something people often, there's a language that's sort of derogatory.
It says that person is a turkey. Now, it doesn't mean that they're actually a bird.
It simply means they're kind of slow, fat, and ugly. It's derogatory, okay?
I was there the day that that word came into the English language.
It was a football game in the late 1960s, and there was this particular player who had gained a little weight, and he said, look at that turkey play.
You know, he doesn't have it anymore, and this idea of turkey as a derogatory, a word that just says this person's, you know, kind of not got it anymore.
Now, everybody kind of recognizes that term, but they don't remember that it was, you know, goes back to a specific event in history.
So that's the difference between allusion and echo. That was really clear. John echoes
Old Testament every line, but doesn't necessarily want the reader to incorporate that into what he's doing.
You see, this is kind of a safeguard. It's what you call quality control. You can read a text in Revelation and imagine all kinds of interpretations, but when
John is working from his Bible, the Old Testament, what we call the
Old Testament was John's Bible. The New Testament did not exist, so he's working from his
Bible like any preacher would today, and so John is sometimes quoting it, sometimes just reflecting it unconsciously, and making that distinction was very helpful in interpretation,
I found. Okay, let's get into some of these revelations. So the first one that I want to go into for Revelation and then see what it's alluding to, it's
Revelation 1 .1, right at the beginning, and we kind of already touched on it, but what is it alluding to?
And you're saying it's alluding to Daniel, so I'm just gonna read the Revelation, and then I would love for you to explain what that is alluding to.
So just imagine, you're a Sunday school Christian, you open up Revelation, you've been reading your
Bible in a very dedicated way, you finally got to the last book, and you read, the revelation of Jesus Christ, which
God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass, and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant
John. All right, buckle up, this is gonna be a tough read if I'm a Sunday school Christian, so what is he alluding to here?
There's more to this? I think to me, I just read that as, hey, we're gonna read about a revelation that was given to John about Jesus.
Is there more? It would be very helpful if we could ask John what he was thinking when he wrote that.
Okay, we can't do that. So what we're doing is looking for the evidence, and I look for three types of evidence.
One is verbal parallels, when you have a major word in common between Revelation 1 -1 and, let's say,
Daniel 2, all right? Verbal parallels, the more verbal parallels you have, the more likely there's a connection.
If you have eight or nine words in order, in common, that would be a quotation, probably.
Quotation is simply a certain allusion. So verbal parallels, thematic parallels, where there's common themes, not necessarily words, common themes, and then structural parallels are where John is quoting that particular
Old Testament text over and over and over again. In a structural parallel, that makes more likely that he is quoting it at this particular point, you see?
So you're looking at a text. Is John alluding to another text? Well, if he alludes to that text 20 times in the book, that's a structural parallel.
It's powerful evidence that he would be alluding to it right here. Okay, which part of the
Revelation 1 -1 is alluding to Daniel 2, 28 and 45?
All right, there's a very strange phrase in here. Looking at it in the
English, I think this is the ESV translation. The revelation of Jesus Christ, which
God gave him to show to his servants, what must soon take place?
That what must take place is a very unusual Greek term, adeigenestai.
It's kind of awkward. It jumps out and kind of slaps you in the face. Here's the thing.
In the entire Old Testament, you'll only find it in Daniel 2. So right there is a clue.
John 1 -1 uses it. Daniel 2 uses it. I think there's one or two places where Jesus uses it.
You mean Revelation 1 -1 uses it and then Daniel 2, okay. Yeah, yeah. So this what must take place is a very unusual saying that Jesus uses once or twice.
Otherwise it's Daniel. Yeah, I'm seeing in the ESV version, Daniel 2, 28 is saying, has made known to King Nebuchadnezzar what will be in the latter days.
And then in Daniel 2, 45, it says, a great God has made known to the
King what shall be after this. Okay, the English translations are a little bit over the map, but it's the same
Greek words, adeigenestai, exact same Greek words in all three texts.
So in Revelation 1 -1, he says, what must happen soon?
In Daniel 2, 28, he says, what must happen in the last days?
Oh. In Daniel 2, 45, it's what must happen after these things. You see?
So this what must happen is the trigger point that says these three texts are linked, but they're a little bit different each time.
Yeah. So when John uses what must happen soon, in the back of his mind, it's very helpful to understand, the last days.
In Daniel 2, God has showed you, Nebuchadnezzar, what will happen in the last days.
And then John says, what must happen soon? So what do you think he's doing there?
He's saying - It feels like, yeah, somebody's saying in the future and somebody's saying it's about to happen.
Yes, yes. So the last days of Daniel are happening in Jesus.
And that explains why throughout the New Testament, it talks about Jesus coming as being the last days.
So you're saying what was future for Daniel is beginning to happen in Revelation.
You got it. You got it. But then how do we today look back at that written back then, because it seems so past tense, is it still about to happen for us?
That's the tough thing, you see. Oh, okay. God has always pictured the end as soon.
Throughout the Old Testament, the kingdom of God is coming. The kingdom of God is coming. And they were anticipating all through the prophets and 800 years goes by and it doesn't happen.
When Jesus comes and says the kingdom of God has arrived, everybody's excited.
This is awesome. Incredible stuff. And the disciples themselves were kind of expecting to see it in the immediate future.
Yeah. And you remember that the disciples say when Jesus is about to ascend to heaven, will you now set up the kingdom of Israel?
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Take a breath, slow down, and dwell in the good things. Now, back to the show. That they were gonna go to?
Military, no, they meant a military conquest. Israel would conquer the rest of the world.
They would subjugate those nasty Gentiles that have been hurting them. You see, that's why Jesus was not understood.
My kingdom is not of this world, he said. Therefore, my servants don't fight.
It's a different kind of kingdom. That's the part that the
Israelites of Jesus' day did not understand. They read the Old Testament prophecies and they were looking for all these things to happen.
If you go to the Dead Sea Scrolls, you'll see the war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness.
And they're looking at it as a pretty literal battle in which they'd be outnumbered, but with God's power behind them, they would win.
They'd drive out the Romans, set up a pure kingdom of God, and the world is gonna be hunky -dory from now on.
But Jesus didn't bring that kind of kingdom. His kingdom is within you,
Jesus said. It's a kingdom in which God is developing the qualities in you that could bring about the end of time.
But the actual end with Jesus' second coming is not yet. Yeah, I mean, that's just like so hard to -
Yeah, I'm pausing because I want you to feed back and see if we can figure this out together.
Can we? Is that even possible? I mean, how do we even, I just wish that Jesus was here to explain himself because I feel like anything
I say is just like a guess. Well, it's not quite that bad. And I think you will see,
I mean, we've already learned something here, okay, that this Revelation 1 .1 is not just some abstract thing that we don't understand.
John is working from his Bible. In his Bible, it's predicting that the kingdom of God is coming.
Jesus comes and says, it's already begun. And I like the way you put it, it's already begun.
So the kingdom of God is here, but it's not a kingdom that is visible in the ultimate sense.
And if people think, some people may think that the kingdom is the Christian church.
Well, 2 ,000 years of history, that's not been a pretty picture, has it? Between the
Crusades and Rwanda and the Inquisition and so on and so forth,
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Thank you so much. Now back to the show. And so the way that Jesus behaved on this earth is the model that God would want to show the world through his people.
So that's the challenge for us. And the book of Revelation is tying into that, even if it's not as clear at this point as it might be in Jesus' ministry.
Jesus came to transform lives, not to create political hegemony, not to create armies, et cetera.
I mean, if you had an army and he could feed 5 ,000 with a few loaves and fishes and he could heal the wounded soldiers and raise the dead and stuff, nobody could beat you, right?
That's what they were thinking. But that was not the kingdom that Jesus had in mind.
It was not the kingdom that the Old Testament was pointing to. Jesus was redirecting their thinking.
And John here is redirecting their thinking to a new vision of what God is looking for.
And the reason he's alluding to that is because when it is stated in Daniel, it's a completely different scenario.
I mean, what's happening in Daniel at that time that is being written, that's saying it's going to come in the end days.
This is right at the beginning of Daniel. This is right during the exile that he's taken from his home and brought into a paganistic society that he has to then serve.
And he kind of defies the guards right away. Like, are we setting the context right that when
John in Revelation is alluding to this verse in Daniel, he's saying, well, those people were going through something very different looking forward towards Jesus.
Now in Revelation, he is coming. It's about to happen. I guess like what role does the context of the
Daniel play in that? Yes, for Daniel, Daniel's part of this larger Old Testament context that God raised up a people, children of Abraham, children of Jacob.
And the mission of Israel was to bless the Gentiles, bless the nations.
You see, when Adam and Eve sinned, the entire human race came out of relationship with God.
The entire human race was messed up. Their characters were twisted. Instead of selflessness, selfishness comes in.
And so it's kind of a mess. And if we had a lot of time, I could show you how the call of Abraham locks in to the creation story and the fall that Adam and Eve fell and they were consequences for the human race.
The promises to Abraham would undo those negatives. And so he says, through your seed,
I will bless the nation. Then to Israel, he says, Exodus 19, you are a kingdom of priests.
God called Israel to be a model nation to show the world what God is like and to help bring in the kingdom.
Israel, unfortunately, failed in that. The Old Testament ends with a whimper instead of a bang.
But when Jesus comes, he introduces a new possibility. He becomes
Israel. He is what the Old Testament was pointing to, this perfect Israel, this model for the world.
Jesus is that. Remember, he chose how many disciples? Yeah, let's move on to the next verse, just because I want to make sure we hit all of these in our time together.
The next one is going further into Revelation, Revelation 10 .6. So I'll read the verse, and then
I'll show that you're, again, alluding to Daniel. Okay, Revelation 10 .6,
and swore by him who lives forever and ever, who created heaven and what is in it, the earth and what is in it, and the sea and what is in it, that there will be no more delay.
Okay. It probably would have been better to start with verse five, as I see it's kind of lapping over the two.
But verse five, it says, the angel whom I saw standing on the sea and the land raised his right hand to heaven and swore by him who lives forever and ever, okay?
So that's Revelation 5 .6. There's an angel who raises his right hand, swears an oath, he's standing on the sea, and he says, there'll be no more delay.
So he makes a pronouncement regarding time. And it sounds like if I'm the Sunday school Christian, I'm reading that saying, okay, so we're just kind of restating
God's dominion. You know, we're just kind of emphasizing God's glory. You know, the heaven and the sea and the earth, you know, yeah,
I got it. God has rule over all of that. So that's what I would have taken away from Revelation. But you're saying, this is alluding to verses in Daniel 12 and Daniel eight.
So the verse in Daniel 12 is, and I heard the man clothed, this is verse seven. And I heard the man clothed in linen who was above the waters of the stream.
He raised his right hand and his left hand toward heaven and swore by him who lives forever that it would be it for a time.
It would be for a time, times and a half a time that when the shattering of the power of the holy people comes to an end, all these things would be finished.
And then. There's stuff in there that I struggle to understand.
Okay, just want you to know. You have chosen, and I think a lot of people are excited to do this.
You have chosen some of the most difficult texts in the Bible. And we're gonna, through the method that I'm sharing, you can gain more understanding and more certainty than you would otherwise have.
Sorry, I interrupted you. Okay, yeah, no, this is really, really tough. So I'm hoping, what is it in Daniel 12 and eight here that we should understand kind of that blanketed, he is glory and awesome verse in Revelation.
So Daniel 8, 13 and 14 is, then I heard a holy one speaking and another holy one said to him who spoke, for how long is the vision concerning the regular burnt offering, the transgression that makes desolate and the giving over of the sanctuary and hosts to be trampled underfoot?
And he said to me, for 2300 evenings and mornings, then the sanctuary shall be restored to its rightful state.
How the heck are these all connected, Dr. Pauline? I have no idea where to begin.
Okay, let me give you a basic foundation on this one. And there's a man who lived in the early, first half of the 20th century and into like the 50s and 60s.
His name was C .H. Dodd, D -O -D -D. And he wrote a book called
According to the Scriptures, where he analyzed the 200 plus quotations of the
Old Testament in the New and discovered something that nobody had seen before and that everybody looking back says, wow, this is so good and nobody can improve on it.
What he basically said was New Testament writers don't quote the Old Testament as proof texts.
You see, a proof text is where you say, well, I think this is true and the Bible proves it, okay?
This text proves that what I'm saying is correct. Those are proof texts. Didn't do that.
Instead, the authors used them as pointers to a larger context. Give you a quick example,
Matthew 2. Jesus had to go down to Egypt because the prophet
Hosea said, out of Egypt I've called my son. All right, so Matthew 2 references the
Old Testament. Hosea 11. The problem is you go back to Hosea and it's not a prediction of the
Messiah. What is Matthew doing? Well, what Hosea is is proclaiming that there's going to be a new exodus.
Just as Israel came out of Egypt, in the future, God will bring his people out of Babylon.
All right, so this new exodus theme is common among the prophets. Matthew is using this one text, out of Egypt I called my son, to reference
Hosea's whole big picture that the coming Messiah will be a new exodus.
And so Jesus, on the cross, experienced a new exodus.
Luke says that. He's going down to Jerusalem as an exodus.
Well, how is that? Well, Israel was on one side of the sea. They went down into the sea and came up on the other side.
And were delivered from Egypt. On the cross, Jesus died, went down into the grave, and resurrected on the other side.
You see, Jesus was a new exodus. And because he was also a new
Israel with 12 disciples, just like Jacob had 12 sons, because he was a new
Israel, now Jesus was gonna fulfill the promises that the whole
Old Testament was pointing forward to. The kingdom is being established. God's mighty work is happening right here, right now.
So how does that relate to what's being said in Daniel? My point is what C .H. Dodd was saying.
Thank you, keep me on track. What he was saying was that when he quotes an
Old Testament text, it's not that that is proof of what I'm saying here. It's a pointer to a bigger context.
Hosea's context is the whole new exodus theme of the prophets looking to the future.
The future will be a new exodus. So Jesus has to come out of Egypt because it's a new exodus, you see?
So Jesus going down to Egypt was a fulfillment then of Hosea's expectation that there'd be a new
Israel, a new exodus, et cetera, in the future.
So how does that apply to Daniel and Revelation? Revelation, in this text,
Revelation 10, five and six, the angel whom I saw standing on the sea and on the land raised his right hand to heaven, let me do that, and swore by him who lives forever and ever, who created heaven and what is in it, the earth and what is in it, sea and what is in it, that there would be no more delay.
So it's a time thing. It's talking about a prophecy of time that at some time in the future,
God was gonna do a mighty act, all right? Is this alluding to Daniel 12, seven?
I would say it's the clearest allusion in the whole book of Revelation. What? There's about eight major words in common, okay?
You have an angel in Revelation 10. You have a man who's clearly a heavenly figure in Daniel 12, seven.
You have raising the right hand to heaven, both passages, swearing by the one who lives forever.
That's a lot of words that they both have in common, almost like a quotation. And then pronouncement, time will be no more, or there'll be time, times, and half a time.
Right. All right. So Daniel 12, seven is being pointed to by Revelation 10.
But in itself, it doesn't make a lot of sense, right? I can see that on your face. That is, it doesn't make a ton of sense that he would quote this.
Why are these two texts so similar? Well, when you study Bible prophecy and God gives someone a vision, he usually sends someone to interpret it, an angel or a prophet to interpret it.
In Daniel two, Nebuchadnezzar has a vision, but he doesn't understand it. Daniel comes and explains the vision to him.
The vision of Daniel is in Daniel eight, the one you read there. Up to 2 ,300 evenings and mornings, then the sanctuary will be cleansed.
That's the basic, part of the basic vision. You have a ram, you have a goat, and a bunch of stuff going on there.
And then the rest of Daniel through chapter 12 is explanation of the vision.
Yeah, that crazy vision. When, yes, when John, and by the way, it's very difficult.
I remember with a group, we studied it in the Hebrew, Daniel eight, nine to 14, very difficult texts.
In the Hebrew, okay? But there's angel after angel coming to Daniel, explaining that vision to him, all the way from chapter eight through chapter 12, all right?
So when Revelation alludes to Daniel 12, seven, it's bringing that whole context in mind.
Daniel 12, seven's explanation of eight, 13, 14. So that whole chapters eight through 12 are tied together and lying behind what
John is saying here. So you wanna know, what is he saying? Okay?
He's saying that there will come a time toward the end of time when time will be no more.
Time will be no more. That's what he's saying? That's what he's saying in 10 .6, time will be no more. Now there was a man named William Miller who read that text and he probably spent more time on Daniel than anybody ever has.
But he was just a farmer, so he didn't have a lot of scholarly education and stuff. But he looked at that and he said, if I can figure out when that time will be,
I'll know when Jesus comes. Yeah. And he figured out that Daniel eight through Daniel 12 was predicting that around the year 1843, or so,
Jesus would come. Time will be no more. Obviously that date came and it was wrong like those other 2 ,000 interpreters in Froome's book.
Okay, that was wrong again. And so the question is, was the time wrong or was the event wrong?
And what many of Miller's followers came to was he got the time right, but the event was wrong.
That the cleansing of the sanctuary was something God was gonna do in heaven. And so the
New Testament has a heavenly sanctuary. Jesus is ministering at the right hand of God in the heavenly tabernacle, heavenly sanctuary.
And so in Daniel 10, excuse me, Revelation 10, he's pointing to that same prophecy and he says, if you go to Daniel 10, seven, which
I didn't put down before me, but it basically says, but in the days of the seventh angel, when he's about to sound, the mystery of God will be finished.
So the book of Revelation is saying this end of time that Daniel is talking about is not the end of the world.
The gospel is gonna continue for another period of time and then the end will come.
If Miller was correct on the time, that this end of time, it's the end of Daniel's time prophecies.
If that's the correct, then we have entered the last era of earth's history.
How long it will be, but we've entered. See, that's the excitement when the early
Adventist pioneers read this text, they saw this and said, whoa, if Miller was right that this mid 19th century is kind of important to God, then we're in the last year of earth's history and we need to be preaching what
Revelation is talking about as preparation for the end of time. So that's how that text, difficult text is clarified through understanding
Daniel. And now we see that John is foreseeing that there'll be, people will think the world is coming to an end, but there's gonna be another period of time in which the gospel will be preached and then the end will come.
Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. The timing.
Go ahead. That, I can't dwell on this too long because I'm really excited about this next one, but that is really, really exciting and really illuminating as to like what it might be claiming there.
The last one that I want to go over with you is something that I think a lot of people get stuck on and it's
Revelation 13 verse one and two. And it's, I saw a beast rising out of the sea with 10 horns and seven heads, with 10 diadems on its horns and blasphemous names on its head.
And the beast that I saw was like a leopard. Its feet were like a bear's and its mouth was like a lion's mouth.
And to it, the dragon gave his power and his throne a great authority. I mean, are we reading
Game of Thrones all of a sudden? This is insane. You know, as the Sunday school Christian, you just say, what is going on?
And you're saying that that is alluding to Daniel seven, verse three through eight, where he essentially says, and four great beasts came out of the sea different from one another, which is very similar, but it doesn't explain what's happening.
So what's happening? And I want to say that, you know, this is not just shooting in the dark.
I think pretty much all Revelation scholars would recognize that Daniel one, one is alluding to Daniel two, at least since Gregory Beale brought that out in his commentary.
I think everybody is pretty much sees that. I think very few commentaries would not see
Daniel 12 and Revelation 10 as connecting or Revelation 13 and Daniel seven.
So these are scholarly, you know, assumptions. I think at this point,
I think anybody who writes a commentary in Revelation 13 and doesn't mention Daniel seven would be laughed out of the guild because it's so obvious.
Got it, yeah. And why don't you read the Daniel seven passage? And I want to point out to our viewers that you have a beast coming up out of the sea, several beasts coming out, one is a lion, one is a bear, one is a leopard, and another one is some really crazy beast that nobody can recognize and so on.
Yeah. So in Revelation 13, you have coming up out of the sea, lion, leopard, bear, et cetera.
Let's hear Daniel seven now. Okay, so I'll just read all of Daniel seven or maybe it's kind of long.
Maybe I'll just do three to eight. Three to seven. Okay, so starting at verse three.
And the four great beasts, what is happening? Can we just set like, this is his vision, right? Okay. Daniel goes into vision.
And I've noticed that in the Aramaic language, which Daniel seven is in, the words for Daniel's vision are identical to the ones used of Nebuchadnezzar in chapter two.
Okay. So God is doing something radical. He's calling a pagan king to be a prophet, essentially.
Okay. He's getting a vision of the future. But he needs the Hebrew prophet to explain it to him as well.
So Daniel's going into vision and what he's seeing is gonna be similar to Daniel two.
A series of kingdoms followed by the kingdom of God. A series of kingdoms.
Okay. So Daniel chapter seven, verse three. And four great beasts came up out of the sea different from one another.
The first was like a lion and had eagle's wings. Then I looked at its wings. Then as I looked, its wings were plucked off and it was lifted up from the ground and made to stand on two feet like a man.
And the mind of a man was given to it. And behold, another beast, a second one, like a bear. It was raised up on one side.
It had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth. And it was told, arise, devour much flesh. After this,
I looked and behold another like a leopard with four wings of a bird on its back. And the beast had four heads and a dominion was given to it.
After this, I saw in the night visions. After this, I saw in the night visions and behold a fourth beast, terrifying and dreadful and exceedingly strong.
It had great iron teeth. It devoured and broke in pieces and stamped what was left with its feet. And it was different from all the beasts that were before it.
And it had 10 horns. So sounds like a nightmare, but how are we as Sunday school
Christians, if I'm just generalizing here, supposed to read that in Revelation, recognize it in Daniel and say, okay, cool.
So like nightmare status monster at the end of the world. That's my main takeaway. Okay, take a look at Daniel seven.
All right, the text you just read. Yeah. How many horns are in this text?
10. 10, okay, because three of the beasts don't have any. And then one of them has 10, right?
How many heads? Oh, so many heads, like four, five.
All right, one of them has four. The others, it doesn't say, but assumably one head for each.
So one plus one plus one plus four equals? Seven. Seven, seven, all right.
So there's seven total heads here. There's a reason I'm doing this. There's seven total heads and 10 total horns.
Now let's go back to Revelation 13, one. I saw a beast coming up out of the sea, having 10 horns and seven heads.
This is one beast, not four, having the total number of heads and horns of the four beasts and Daniel.
So John is alluding to Daniel. You know, you got the lion, the bear, the leopard. I mean, if he's not alluding to Daniel, he's making this up.
Right. It's too much like Daniel to be made up. He's clearly working with Daniel seven. And he quotes
Daniel seven or alludes to it dozens of times in Revelation. So that would be a structural parallel.
He's definitely, Daniel seven is big in his mind, just as Daniel two was. So he sees one beast coming up out of the sea, just like Daniel seven, having 10 horns and seven heads, just like Daniel seven.
But here's where it gets even more interesting. This beast that comes out of the sea is a counterfeit of Jesus Christ.
How do you know that? Follow me, follow me. You see, because it's, you know, it's clear that he's using
Daniel seven. Yeah. All right, what does it have to do with Jesus? Okay. Right. Let's go to Revelation 13, one.
I saw a beast coming up out of the sea, having seven, 10 horns and seven heads. Is there someone else in Revelation that has 10 horns and seven heads?
The dragon of chapter 12 had seven heads and 10 horns.
So this beast that comes up out of the sea has seven heads and 10 horns.
What does that mean? He looks just like the dragon. And Jesus is the dragon.
Jesus said, if you've seen me, you've seen the father. If you've seen
Jesus, you've seen the father. If you've seen the sea beast, you've seen the dragon.
You see, the dragon and the sea beast are counterfeits of God the father and God the son.
And the beast from the earth of the latter part of chapter 13 is a counterfeit of the
Holy Spirit. He brings fire down from heaven. He doesn't speak of himself. He speaks of the first beast.
So you have a counterfeit trinity going on in Revelation 12 and 13.
But you're reasonably skeptical if you're hearing this for the first time. So let's go on, okay?
So he looks just like the dragon. If you've seen me, you've seen the father. Okay. Second verse, beast
I saw was like a leopard center. The dragon, chapter 12, gave him his power, throne, and great authority.
So he gets his authority from the dragon. Jesus said, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me.
By who? By his father. So Jesus is being modeled by this beast.
The beast is imitating him. But here's the clincher. I would say, verse three says that this beast was as it were slaughtered to death.
This beast that came out of the sea with the seven heads and 10 horns, one of its heads was slaughtered to death.
That word slaughter is used in verse eight of the cross.
The lamb slain from the foundation of the world. Is this unfamiliar? Yeah. Same word.
Okay. So this beast imitates the death and resurrection of Jesus. Later on in chapter 13, he says the beast which died and came to life.
So this beast is counterfeiting the death and resurrection of Jesus. And one further evidence, verse five, it says that he continues for 42 months.
How long is 42 months? Oh gosh, like. Three and a half years.
Yeah, like not that long. 12, 12, 12, 36 plus six, yeah. Okay, three and a half years.
How long was Jesus' ministry? Three years -ish. Three and a half years.
The Gospel of John, three and a half years. Yeah. So this beast from the earth counterfeits
Jesus Christ. So this allusion to Daniel then, this beast is gonna come into the world to be like Christ.
And to show the world this is what Christ would be like. But it tortures people.
It deceives people. It has the power of the dragon behind it.
So John here is in a sense mocking this counterfeit of Jesus Christ and exposing it for what it really is.
The opposite of what God is like. Now you say, why should we bother even knowing this?
What value is there in this? And that is this. John is saying that the church, so John in this vision is seeing this horrible imitation of Jesus Christ.
It's putting itself forth to be Christ. And it's the opposite of everything.
And I see John saying that the future of the church is not gonna be pretty.
And that's in fact, history has verified that. That the church through the centuries has been far from a blessing to this world.
Has been far from the ideals that Jesus Christ lived for. And that's because the church is made up of human beings.
Just like Israel was. So the message of Revelation 13 is that the greatest enemies of the gospel will actually be inside the house rather than outside.
And if you find a young atheist today, you'll probably find somebody who was deeply hurt in a church.
Yeah. And so Revelation is giving us a caution that just because we're going through the motions as Christian, just because we're going to Sunday school, just because we're listening to sermons, doesn't mean that we're truly disciples of Jesus Christ.
Truly doing what he would want to do. And when churches became institutional, especially when they had political power.
In the Middle Ages, for example, the church and the government were like one body. And when the church had that kind of power, you've heard of the
Inquisition, began to persecute. Protestants after the Reformation were not much better.
And you may have heard of the burning of Cervetus and other things like that, that the
Protestants committed as well. So the Bible's realistic. And it's letting us know that human beings are seriously flawed.
But this is the revelation of Jesus Christ. And that means when we're reading this stuff, we always have to keep in mind that the gospel that he offers, the grace of God, the beautiful character of Jesus, who when he said, if you've seen me, you've seen the
Father, he's referencing the foot washing in John 13. That's what
God is like. Jesus saying, if the Father had come down and become human, he would have been just like me.
A lot of people are afraid of God the Father. A lot of people are afraid of the judgment, et cetera.
And they're afraid of the beasts. You know, these human things that try to dominate and control.
Jesus is not like that. He's the lamb that was slain. He has, you know, power is no longer defined by force.
It's now defined by a cross, by self -sacrifice. That is what
God is like. That's how God runs the universe. Wow. That, I mean, you couldn't have said it better, especially with how you supported it and how it's echoed and alluded to throughout scripture.
There's no way that my Sunday school mind could have remembered these cross references. Like just simply the depth that you're able to go because you can pick out and see side by side the similarities in the text allows us to have this conversation.
And that's just simply something I can't do and I don't have the years studying this.
So thank you for facilitating this conversation, Dr. Pauline. This is the type of understanding that allows us to see just like the breadth of God's love.
When he says, look, I'm not just saying it once. I'm saying it many times because it's still true. And I just love how you connected it all back to Jesus and how he came because it is an upside down kingdom.
They expected the disciples, this kingdom, this military insurgents, and it was a gentle servant who washed our feet.
And it was kingdom in heaven that he established. So we're not meant to fight. And I just think that these types of studies show the level of detail in the
God that we serve. So thank you for allowing us to have this conversation. I know that a lot of people are amazed by the work that you do.
So is there any way that they can follow up with you, take a class, read a book, go to a seminar that you're hosting soon?
Well, I have good news on that. And that is that I'm writing a commentary on Revelation.
And it is as detailed as what we've done today on each of these verses. The good news is it's online and it's free.
Oh, where can they get it? So anybody can reference it. Yeah, you can go to my website.
You'll smile at this. It's thebattleofarmageddon .com. It was available, so I took it, right?
So thebattleofarmageddon .com. And you'll see a picture of me on the entry phase.
If you go to the button that says commentaries, it'll say the Facebook commentary and the
Twitter commentary. That's a long story, but just the Facebook commentary on Revelation is in 22 chapters, anywhere 50 to 100 pages each.
So you can go to any verse, including the ones we did today, and see in detail explanation of how we came to that.
But I don't want you or any viewer to be frightened by all this. They say, oh, he knows so much and stuff.
No, I've been doing this for 45 years. But you can know a lot more a month from now, a year from now, a decade from now than now.
And that's true of anybody who spends time in the Word. That they can understand it with much more clarity in the future.
And the more that you understand, the more that God can use you. Yes, yes. No, I mean,
I feel like I took such a shortcut by talking to you, because I haven't studied any years. I just get to talk to you that has dedicated 40 plus years to this.
And then here you get to give me 60 minutes in the short and condensed version, no tuition fees needed. So I will link
The Battle of Armageddon in the show notes below for anybody that might be driving and they wanna check it out later.
So I just wanna make sure everyone's directed back to you as the expert. But thank you so much for just creating these resources that allow us to grow in our faith,
Dr. Pauline. Thank you. I appreciate the time and thank you for coming on the show.