Part 13: A Double Meaning.

Okay, this is Belle writing right now. If any of you are upset by math and numbers, you may be getting either bored or upset by now. Just stick with us. We move into Revelation in the next post.

I know these dates and numbers are very important or else God wouldn’t have given them to us so we could know what would happen in the last days. God is a God of great detail. Just read about the instructions of how to build the Sanctuary in Exodus and how to sew the priests clothing!  Details are important to God because each detail has a meaning.

Continued from previous post…

So does this mean Octavian is the horn of Daniel Chapter 8?  Yes, and no.

The angel Gabriel told Daniel that this particular vision “…pertains to the time of the end.” (Daniel 8: 17)  How can it pertain to the end of time when we know Egypt became a province of Rome over 2000 years ago?  That is because this vision has a dual application.

  We saw in chapter one of this book that Jesus’ prophecy in Matt. 24: 6-8 applied to both the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE and to the end of the world at the end time.  So, too, does the vision of the horn in Daniel Chapter 8 apply to two time periods; the emperors of Rome in ancient times and the power that grows from Rome in the end times.  One produces the other and, just like from parents to children, similar traits are passed down.

                                 

So if we look at the power that followed Greece in Daniel Chapter 8 as being a twofold prophecy, we can break it down like this.

Ancient Times:                                                                        End Times:

Rome                                                                                           Offspring of Rome

Emperor                                                                                      Blasphemous Horn

Destroyed the Temple at Jerusalem.                                  Tramples the Holy Place.

Demanded worship of the Emperor.                                 Calls itself equal to God.
                                                                                                       and removes Jesus’ sacrifice.

Daniel 8: 11 and 14 say that the horn “…removed the regular sacrifice from Him (meaning God), and the place of His sanctuary was thrown down…For 2,300 evenings and mornings; then the holy place will be properly restored.” 

In Gen. 1: 5 we see that an evening and a morning is another way of saying ‘one day’, and we have proven that a day in prophecy is actually one year, so here we have a timeline of 2300 years.  The first thing we must determine is where this timeline starts. 

We understand that this vision applies to events in both ancient times and the end times.  It also applies to the old system of religion practiced by the Jews (the “…small horn which grew…toward the Beautiful Land” where the temple in Jerusalem was) and to the new system set up by the sacrifice Jesus made for us and that he is offering in our place in heaven (the horn “…grew up to the host of heaven…and it removed the regular sacrifice from Him…”), so the 2300 years must cover Rome and its offspring, and time periods before and after Jesus was crucified.

We saw that the 70-week probation period given in Daniel Chapter 9 was the last chance for the Jewish nation to get with the program.  They failed and the spread of the gospel to all people began with the scattering of Christians.  After the vision containing the 2300 days, but before giving Daniel the 70-week prophetic warning for the Hebrews, the angel Gabriel told Daniel that he had come to give him ”…insight with understanding.” (Dan. 9: 22) 

How does the 70-week prophecy of Daniel 9 give help in understanding anything else?  Part of what it gives us is a starting point for the previous vision’s timeline…457 BCE. 

So if the 2300 years also begins in 457 BCE, then its end would be 1844 CE.  Did anything important happen in the year 1844?  Not that we can see with our mortal eyes because Daniel 8: 14 says that at the end of the 2300 years the “…holy place will be properly restored” and, as we have seen, this applies to what Jesus does for us in heaven.  We will go into more detail about this in later chapters.

 

We have affixed the longest timeline in prophecy, we have followed Old Testament prophecy to the end of the Jewish sacrificial system and the birth of Christianity, and we have proven that the symbolic “day” in prophetic language stands for a literal year.  Now we can move on to Revelation and start placing the things we learn there in their proper place in this timeline.  In other words, now that we have an outline we are ready to collect the pieces and put the puzzle together, beginning from the time of Christ on toward the end of time.