Transcript

Thanks for purchasing this series produced by St. Joseph Communications.

The last time I gave a talk on this subject, the sound system wouldn't work for the whole first talk.

So what David was saying about spiritual warfare may very well be true.

But is it possible that at any moment a secret rapture could occur that would take believers in Jesus to heaven while plunging the rest of the world, including most Catholics, into an inescapable Great Tribulation that occurs for seven years?

At the end of that seven years, Christ comes back again, and a thousand-year reign called the Millennium begins.

After that thousand-year reign, there would then be another judgment, another battle, and then eternity begins.

That's the question we're going to try to answer, and the reason is it's important.

Because if, as Catholics, we're wrong about this issue, then we may be in trouble, right?

Okay?

But if we're right about this issue, if what the Church says is true about this issue, then people are making very bad decisions based on something that's not true—very bad decisions.

But even more important than the bad decisions that any one individual may make is the fact that truth is at stake.

One of these two positions is true; they cannot both be true.

One is true or the other.

Both sides agree that it's mutually exclusive.

Both sides agree that you can't be a good Catholic and believe that there will be a future thousand-year reign of Christ after the Second Coming.

Both sides agree that probably most good Catholics will not be raptured away if there is going to be such a thing.

So let's back up just for a minute.

We're in the 21st century.

What I'd like to do is back up for just a minute and look at history.

We're going to take a real quick stroll through history just to give you an idea: Are we at the end of the world as you know it?

Okay?

In 154, now just to give you an idea how early that is, there are people alive that knew the Apostles.

In the year 154, a man named Montanus said that the Second Coming would occur in his generation.

He took people out of the Church and started his own sect.

It didn't happen.

In 177 AD, Irenaeus decided that the world would end around 1000 AD. It did not happen.

His disciple, Hippolytus, who was also a priest, decided that the world would end around 500 AD. In case you're wondering, it didn't. A little bit later, Julius Africanus decided and wrote that the world could not go on any longer than 500 AD. The last three men were all Catholics.

Around the middle of the fourth century, St. Martin of Tours, a saint, decided that by the end of that century, the Second Coming would have to occur.

Then a brilliant man came on the Church scene and helped people to get over this fascination with the end of the world.

His name was St. Augustine, and for the next several years after St. Augustine, there really were not very many Catholics saying the end of the world is going to occur within 50 years, or 100 years, or 500 years.

But around the 8th century, Beatus, who was an abbot, preached that the world would end in 796 on Easter evening.

It was very specific.

Gregor of Tours also said the world would end; his date was somewhere between 799 and 806. Bernard of Thuringia, a little bit later, said that the world would end in 992 AD. Joachim of Fiore, a Franciscan Catholic, said that the world would end in 59 years, in the year 1260. He was speaking right around the turn of that century, going into the 13th century.

Nostradamus was born about 1503. Anybody ever heard of Nostradamus?

He said that in the year 1999, this is a quote: In the year 1999, from the sky will come the great king of terror.

Many people took that as prophecy of the Second Coming or of the rapture.

In 1501, there was a famous explorer named—how many of you have heard of Christopher Columbus?

He claimed that the world would end no later than 1656. Right around this time, just after Columbus, a new group was formed: the Anabaptists, who could trace their roots back to the Taborites, who could trace their roots back to the Hussites.

They took over the city of Munster, Germany, in 1534. The man, the Christian that took over the city—this was a Protestant sect—called himself the King of Justice, the King of New Jerusalem.

His name was actually Buckhold.

He claimed that the Millennium was going to start that year.

Martin Luther, as most of you know, was a Protestant.

He said that the end of the world could be no later than the mid-1800s.

He was a little smarter than some of the other people that claimed it; he at least put a good piece—back in other words, he didn't have to live to see his prophecy not come true.

In 1593, there was a man named John Napier.

He was no dummy; he invented mathematical logarithms.

Anybody here understand mathematical logarithms?

Oh, we have somebody that understands that; I don't understand them, okay?

But he said that the end of the world would be between 1688 and 1700. In the mid-17th century, there was a group called the Fifth Monarchy Men.

They actually were very instrumental in Cromwell's government, and they claimed that the Millennium, the Fifth Kingdom—that's where they got the Fifth Kingdom of Daniel—the Millennium would start within their lifetime.

They said it would start sometime between 1650 and 1700. In 1694, John Mason said that Christ would return on Easter Sunday, April 16, 1694. He claimed on the day after Easter that Christ had in fact come back, but that we just hadn't been able to notice it.

For 16 years after his death, his congregation still claimed that Christ had come back on that day.

In 1733, Sir Isaac Newton believed that the time of the end of the world was drawing near.

About a century after that, Joseph Smith started a group.

Does anybody know what group he started?

Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormons.

He stated in 1832 that 56 years will wind it up, that's his words—wind it up.

In other words, the world is going to end before the end of the 19th century.

Then along came a man named William Miller, who started a group called the Millerites.

He said that Christ would return sometime between March 21, 1843, and that same date the next year.

When it didn't happen, he decided that it was really going to happen on October 22, 1844, which is an interesting way to handle a failed prophecy.

I call it the rolling end of the world; when it doesn't come true, you just pick a later date.

It happens all the time.

Probably the people that have gotten this down to a total science were the people in the 19th century that formed the Jehovah's Witness sect.

They have said that Christ would return in the years 1874, 1914, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975, and most recently, 1994. Talk about rolling into the world, okay?

They've got it down.

In the mid-1890s, a Brazilian by the name of Antonio Conselheiro convinced 20,000 Brazilians that if they overthrew Emperor Pedro II, the Millennium would begin in Brazil.

The government was so upset by his preaching that they sent 10,000 soldiers; not one of those Brazilians survived.

But in the 1830s, a man started to preach that changed American Protestantism forever, and that man's name was John Nelson Darby.

His teaching took root in America, I believe, for one very simple reason: he started to teach his teachings here in America right after the Civil War.

Now think back to anything you know about the Civil War.

It was a time of tremendous upheaval; brothers took up arms against each other.

It was not at all hard to convince people that the end of the world was very, very close.

His followers actually formed a denomination, although they don't like to be called a denomination, called the Plymouth Brethren.

Most of his followers now are known as Darbyites; however, they don't like that name at all.

A name that some of them like a little bit better is Dispensationalists; however, many of them do not like that name either.

So I call them Rapturists for the simple reason that there is no other name that they like.

They call themselves believers many times, but they're the followers of John Darby.

What he taught is what we described right at the very beginning: that Jesus would come at any moment but not set foot on the earth, and the true believers would go up to meet Him in the clouds.

Then, seven years later, after seven horrible years here on earth, He would come back again.

Now, without maybe realizing it, what John Darby had actually done is taken the Second Coming and split it into two parts.

At the very least, at the very worst, what he'd done is change the biblical teaching of a Second Coming into a second and a third coming.

Now they get around this problem by saying He never touches down the first time, and we're going to talk about that a little bit later on.

I think that's a little disingenuous, to be honest with you.

But at the very least, what he did is he took the clear teaching of Scripture about a Second Coming and split it into two parts.

After the seven years, then will come the real Second Coming, and after the Second Coming, then will be a thousand-year reign.

During that time, the Church is not the primary focus of God's plan.

During that thousand-year reign, Israel—ethnic Israel, Jewish people by birth, the Old Testament holy bloodline—becomes the primary focus of God's plan of salvation.

He forced his followers into a rather strange view of the Church in that the Church is no longer the main focus of God's plan of salvation; the main focus of God's plan of salvation is ethnic Israel.

In 1916, to continue our history, William E. Blackstone said that the world will surely end within 20 years.

1934 or 1935 were the very latest.

Oswald J. Smith, who if you are an evangelical or a fundamentalist, you know that name, said that the world would end before the year 1933. C.I. Schofield, who if you're a fundamentalist, you know that name, wrote a very famous Bible with notes.

He said that World War I... Was without a doubt the beginning of Armageddon, the final battle.

When World War II came, he said that it was a fulfillment of Ezekiel chapters 38 and 39, which means he felt like World War II was the beginning of Armageddon.

Even someone of the stature of Billy Graham in 1950 said, Two years and it's all going to be over.

In 1995, he said, When will the end be?

We don't know, but every indication is that it will be sooner than we think.

In 1978, Christianity Today ran an article by Gary Wilburn that said the world must end within one generation from the birth of the state of Israel.

Now Rapturists are starting to use the rolling end of the world that Jehovah's Witnesses have gotten down to such a science.

They first started it and said it had to end within 40 years of the state of Israel being founded, which is 1948. Forty years from there is when?

1988. Did anything really important happen in the year 1988? No, not that I can think of, okay?

Nothing like that.

So now they're saying that perhaps 1967 is the important year.

That was the year that Jerusalem was unified.

And in case it doesn't work out in another five years or four years, they've already started to talk about the year 1993, which is when the peace accords were signed.

They have 40 years from whatever date they pick, and they can keep putting that back.

In 1978, Pastor Chuck Smith, who pastors a huge church out in California, said the Lord is coming for His Church before the end of 1981. The Late Great Planet Earth, which was sort of the predecessor of the Left Behind series, was written by Hal Lindsey.

He said the decade of the 1980s will be the last decade of history; we are the generation that will see the end times, the return of Christ.

In 1994, he was obviously past that date, but he still said, I wouldn't make any long-term earthly plans; the end times are almost here.

In 1988, that crucial year came and went, but there was a bestseller that sold an incredible 45 million copies called 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988. It was written by a man named Edgar C. Whisenant.

When it didn't occur, the next year he wrote a book pamphlet called 89 Reasons the Rapture Will Be in 1989. He sold substantially less than four and a half million copies of the second book.

In 1989, Jerry Falwell said, In just a few days, we will enter what may very well be the final decade.

In 1993, David Koresh, who burst onto the national scene as a person that said Armageddon would occur in 1995, made headlines.

Pat Robertson in 1995 also said, All signs point to the end of the world and the end of life as we have known it.

In 1994, Jack Van Impe, who is a radio preacher, said the rapture will occur around the year 2000. Now, three years later, he practiced that little rolling end of the world that we were talking about.

He said it will be between the year 2001 and 2012, so he's still got eight years or so for that to happen.

Tim LaHaye, who wrote the Left Behind series along with Jenkins, said in his book Are We Living in the End Times?

that sometime between the turn of the century and the first quarter of the 21st century, Christ's rapture will occur.

So he's still got another 23 years.

When the World Trade Center burned a couple of years ago, I had two friends call me.

One quoted the verse from the Book of Revelation that Babylon would be burned up in a single day.

They said, This is the beginning.

Another called me and said, This is the fulfillment of Matthew's prophecy that there would be wars and rumors of wars.

Grant and Jeffrey at Pentecostal said that this is a part of the distress of the last days.

Alden Gaines of Philadelphia said, It's happening right now.

I believe it's going to set the stage for this particular Antichrist to step forward.

Now I see it all fitting in.

Why did I take you through this little history?

It's certainly not to make fun of these people.

The whole reason I wanted to do this is to help us put into perspective what is being said to us today.

It has been said to Christians since 154 AD, for 19 centuries—almost 19 centuries, 18 and a half centuries—Catholics have been told that the end of the world was going to occur very soon.

And for 18 and a half centuries, the Church has said, We don't know the time; we don't know the hour.

And they have been ridiculed.

But time has shown that they have been right.

So what is our modus operandi going to be?

What I'd like to do is take all of the relevant passages today.

And by the way, thanks for spending today with me.

When I told my high school son what I was going to do today, he said, I can't believe anybody would listen to you for six hours.

So, we're going to try to take all the relevant passages.

Now, we're going to take them in the same order in which they were written, and this is important because if you try to look at Revelation without understanding what Jesus said in the Olivet Discourse, you're going to ask the wrong questions.

And if you try to understand the Olivet Discourse or Revelation without doing some good work in Daniel, you're going to have no clue as to what they're trying to say.

And if you look at Daniel without understanding the milieu of the Old Testament, you're not going to understand Daniel very well either.

So that's where we're going to start, okay?

Now let me first of all say what I'm going to do is lay out for you not just why the Rapturists are wrong, but a Catholic understanding of these very same passages.

There is more than one Catholic understanding of most passages of Scripture.

As Pope Pius XII said, there are few texts whose sense has been defined by the authority of the Church.

What that means is most of the time when we go to the Bible, we can take Church teaching and try to apply it to the text, and two Catholics may disagree on what that text means, and that's okay.

But what I hope to do is show you that at least one Catholic view of these texts is far superior to any Rapturist view, to any view that says we're going to be left behind.

G.K. Chesterton said it in a way that I think is as good as anybody: Why am I a Catholic?

He said, Catholics know the two or three transcendental truths on which they do agree, and they take rather a pleasure in disagreeing on everything else.

So if you disagree with some of how I handle some of these passages, that's okay.

What I'm trying to do is show you that a Catholic understanding of these passages is there are many that are better than the Rapturist view, but I don't have time to show them all to you, and I'm going to show you one.

If you hear something new that you've never heard before, don't automatically put your guard up.

As Pope Pius XII said, All should abhor that intemperate zeal which imagines that whatever is new to the ear should for that very reason be opposed or suspected.

So what I'm going to try to do is give you some new information, put it with the information that you already know, okay, and come up with a Catholic understanding of the end times, okay?

Now I should warn you, I believe that the Old Testament and the New Testament in their entirety are without error, and that I stand firmly in the tradition of the Catholic Church as enumerated in Vatican II, in Vatican I, and in countless encyclicals and documents of the Church.

If you're looking for a modernist up here today that is going to tell you that there are errors in Scripture and, Oh, don't worry about that; that's just a mistake, or, Oh, don't worry about that; you know we know better now, you came to the wrong place.

You probably want to go down someplace else, okay?

Because I'm not going to approach Scripture that way.

I'm going to stand firmly in the tradition of the Church that says the Scripture and what they're teaching is without error, and you're going to find that I sometimes disagree with the modernists because of that.

Now, in order to get started, what I'd like to do is take, first of all, nine ground rules.

I'm going to try to give you a milieu through which we can start to look at all the passages.

Now, this is probably going to be the hardest 30 minutes that we do, okay?

But if we can get through this, then all of the other Scriptures are going to start to make sense.

So first of all, let's start with the first one: prophecy foretells events in advance of any human foresight.

I don't think most of you disagree with that, but I wanted to make very clear that there is true prophecy in the Bible.

The Old Testament really did foretell the place that Jesus was going to be born.

For example, King Herod, when the wise men came to him, turned to the Jewish leaders and said, Where is this Jewish king supposed to be born?

They turned to Micah chapter 5, verse 2, and 2 Samuel chapter 5, verse 2, and they said, You know what?

He's going to be born in Bethlehem.

How did they know that?

Because the Old Testament really did foretell an event beyond what any human could have seen.

No human would have picked Bethlehem as the place where the Messiah would be born, but Scripture foretold it, and it took the Caesar to put a new tax on the people in Judea to make it happen.

But God made it happen.

Ground rule two: numbers in prophecy have a symbolic meaning that takes precedence over all other meanings.

Now, what do I mean by that?

We all wear one of these on our wrists.

How many of you have a watch on your hand?

Numbers mean something different to us.

These were not on Jesus' wrist; Mary never wore one of these; Joseph never had one of these.

Numbers meant something different to them.

Granted, there were numbers that counted things, and you didn't want to be cheated in the marketplace, but when it came to spiritual affairs, the symbolic meaning of a number took precedence over everything else.

For example, the number of God is three; the number of the world is four.

God working in the world perfectly is the number seven, or twelve, which is those two numbers added together or multiplied.

The number of completeness is ten; the number of complete completeness is a thousand because that's ten cubed.

These numbers were very, very symbolic to them.

For example, in the Old Testament, it says—and I remember a song about this—I'm going to try to sing it for you here: He owns the cattle on a thousand hills, the wealth in every mine.

Now you know why I don't make my money singing!

How many of you have heard that song?

Oh, golly, one of you!

Now, that's a direct quote from the Psalms: God owns the cattle on a thousand hills.

Which thousand?

Which thousand does He own that on?

That's a ridiculous question, isn't it?

That's not what the verse is trying to say.

The thousand is the fact that He owns everything; that He needs, He owns it all.

It's complete; His wealth is complete.

He doesn't need our offerings, okay?

This is very clear in Jeremiah chapter 29, verse 10, where Jeremiah predicts that the Babylonian Empire will come and conquer Jerusalem and take them into captivity for 70 years.

Now, 70 is 3 plus 4, 7 years times 10—God working in the world completely.

It's a complete time of God's working His judgment out on the people of Israel for what they've done.

But you know what?

When we look at history, they weren't in captivity for 70 years.

Did you know that?

They weren't. Even someone as literalistic about Scripture as Dr. John Walvoord, who did more to promote the rapture idea here in America probably than any other one man—he just died a few months ago at the ripe old age of 92—said in Daniel the key to prophetic revelation that this prophecy had to have either been 67 years or 71 years.

There's no way to make it work out to 70 years.

Working in the Old Testament with calendars is very, very complicated, so we're not going to get all into it.

But why did God give Jeremiah the wrong number?

If it was going to be 67 years, why didn't He say, Jeremiah, you're going to be in captivity for 67 years?

Because the number 70 symbolically was more important than the fact that it was 67 or 71 years.

It was about 70 years, but the number's symbolic importance was more important than the exact years that it was, okay?

Does that make sense?

Okay, we're going to go to the next one.

Ground rule three: an event can be a prophecy pointing to a still future and final fulfillment, and when it is, we should carefully consider the entire historical context of the initial Scripture prophecy under examination.

Let me give you an example: Isaiah chapter 7, verse 14: Behold, the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, a young woman, a virgin, shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call His name Emmanuel.

Now, most of us don't realize that this prophecy was fulfilled in the very next chapter of Isaiah.

In Isaiah chapter 8, verse 4, Isaiah tells us it was fulfilled that a young woman had a son, and that by the time that son was weaned, the enemies of Jerusalem had been dispersed.

That's what the promise was all about.

But something interesting started to happen immediately after that prophecy was fulfilled.

The Jewish leaders of Israel looked at those events and said that the events themselves prophesied another future event, and that virgin that would conceive and bear a son—we know by what name?

Mary.

Mary when she had the Messiah.

So the prophecy was fulfilled within that lifetime, but then that entire milieu of what happens in Isaiah chapter 7, verse 14—all those events stand as a prophecy themselves to what would happen when the Messiah came.

And so, by the time Jesus came on the scene, it was very common knowledge that, in fact, the Septuagint translated that word as virgin, and that that prophecy, that event that happened back in Isaiah's time, was going to be fulfilled when the Messiah came.

So when we look at a prophecy, sometimes it's fulfilled rather rapidly, but that event itself is also going to possibly be fulfilled at the end of time.

Now, why is this important for us?

Well, it's important for one very simple reason: 99% of the prophecy in Scripture is already fulfilled, but many of those events stand as a prophetic announcement of what will happen at the very end, okay?

So as we go through some of the prophecies and we say, Well, that one's already been fulfilled, yes, that may be true.

But it doesn't mean that that doesn't tell us something about what will come.

What I'm saying is not at all unusual.

Let me quote St. Thomas to just let you know that this ground rule is not a new one.

St. Thomas says, The author of Scriptures is God, who has the power to endow with significance not only the words but also the events themselves.

In every science, words have meaning; in this science alone, in other words, in Scripture, what is meant by the words has a further meaning.

He was actually giving us a commentary on someone earlier called St. Gregory, and what St. Gregory said is that Scripture transcends all other sciences by the way it uses one and the same discourse to tell history and to reveal mystery.

In other words, the events of history itself, the history of the Old Testament itself, that very history stands as a prophecy of what will come in the New Covenant.

Let me quote Pope Pius XII, who also has something to say for us.

He said, What was said and done in the Old Testament was ordained and disposed by God with such consummate wisdom that things past prefigured in a spiritual way those that were to come under the new dispensation of grace.

In other words, the events themselves stand as a prophecy.

Okay, ground rule number four: if you are a real stickler— is there anybody here whose garage looks really, really nice?

Okay, good.

Okay, two.

My dentist's garage is absolutely immaculate, and that's one thing I like about my dentist, okay?

Because when I have somebody, you know, drilling in my mouth, I want to make sure that he has everything where he's supposed to have it, because then he has it that way in my mouth, right?

So just a word of advice: always go by and look at your dentist's garage before you go in, okay?

But if you're that kind of person, this next rule may bother you a little bit because it's a little bit messy.

And that is that apocalyptic visions may use one object to symbolize more than one reality.

It may symbolize two realities.

This goes so against what we believe as 21st-century Americans that I'm just going to quote for you Revelation chapter 17, verses 3 through 10. You can look it up later if you want to, but in that vision, John tells us that a woman was sitting on a scarlet beast, and it had seven heads and ten horns.

Then he tells us what the seven heads are.

He says, The seven heads are seven hills on which the woman is seated; they are also seven kings.

So the seven heads, John tells us specifically—something that we find in all apocalyptic literature—but he spells it out that one symbol, the seven heads, actually has two meanings.

They're seven hills, but they're also seven kings.

We're going to find it over and over in apocalyptic literature, especially since St. John liked to do this.

Okay, ground rule number five: apocalyptic literature uses dramatic imagery of cataclysmic heavenly disruptions to describe changes within the human political sphere.

When a king is defeated, apocalyptic literature likes to talk about a star falling from heaven.

When an empire is destroyed, apocalyptic literature is going to describe that as the heavens falling, being rolled up as a scroll, and earthquakes occurring.

In other words, they take political changes and describe them in phenomenal language.

Now, how do we know this?

Because that's how the Old Testament uses it.

For example, in Isaiah chapter 13, verses 9 through 13, Isaiah is describing the destruction of Babylon by the Medes and the Persians that happened in 539 BC. Daniel was alive when that happened, but this is how he describes it: The day of the Lord comes to make the earth a desolation; for the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light.

I will make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken out of its place at the wrath of the Lord of hosts in the day of His fierce anger.

This is a description of Babylon falling, but when you look at it, the language makes it look like it's the end of the world.

Well, it was for the Babylonians; it was the end of the world for them.

And if you look at apocalyptic literature without understanding this right here, none of it makes sense.

Now, I'm just going to quote a couple of the places, if you want to look later, where this same thing occurs.

In Isaiah 34, verses 4 through 10, we're told that the skies will roll up like a scroll and all the stars shall fall as leaves fall from the vine.

This was fulfilled when Edom was destroyed in the 6th century BC. Bible scholars look at these verses and say, Yes, this was fulfilled.

Sometimes he's telling us this was fulfilled in Ezekiel chapter 32, verses 7 and 8, where the downfall of Pharaoh and Egypt is foretold, and it says, I will cover the heavens and make their stars dark; I will cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon will not give its light.

This is essential for us to understand when we get into the Olivet Discourse and when we get into Revelation.

When apocalyptic literature talks like this, it's talking about a political change in the world, and it translates that into something bigger.

Nahum 1:5 talks about the destruction of Nineveh and says, The mountains will quake and the hills will melt.

In Ezekiel 32, I already mentioned that.

Jeremiah chapter 4, verses 23 through 28, the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of Babylon is foretold.

You can read that on your own if you want to later, but the point is well made.

I hope that when you get into apocalyptic literature and it says that the sun is going to fall out of the sky and that the moon is not going to give light and a third of the stars fall to the ground, that is apocalyptic imagery for political change.

The empires of the world are going to change at that moment, okay?

We're doing good on time.

Rule number six...

Most physical objects in the Bible signify spiritual realities.

For us in our examination today, clouds are very important to realize that whenever we see clouds in the Bible associated with God or with Christ, it has to do with Him coming in His glory as judge of the world.

Now, this is not a new idea.

I'll give you a few references that you can look up if you want to at your own leisure: Exodus chapter 16, verse 10; Exodus 34, verse 5; Leviticus 16, verse 2; 1 Kings 8, verses 10-11. Clouds signify the glory of God.

We see it in the New Testament at the Transfiguration.

In Matthew 17, Jesus is up there with three disciples, and Elijah and Moses come and talk to Him.

And there's one other person present, and who is that?

Besides Moses and Elijah, we see God the Father there, and He's signified by what?

A cloud.

A cloud comes and overshadows them, and Peter gets so shook up that he says some really stupid things, okay?

But we're told that a voice came out of the cloud and said, This is my Son, my chosen; listen to Him.

God, in His glory, came to back up His Son when Peter got a little bit goofy.

It happened at the Transfiguration.

And sometimes these clouds aren't even something that you see.

Scripture uses clouds when really there are no clouds around.

For example, in Psalm chapter 104, verses 1-3, it says—probably there were no clouds involved—but clouds started to take on this symbolic meaning of God coming as judge.

In Isaiah chapter 19, verses 1 through 2, this becomes very clear.

It says, The Lord is riding on a swift cloud and comes to Egypt.

Now, when did that prophecy get fulfilled?

When did God ride the clouds and come to Egypt?

He came when the Assyrian army conquered Egypt.

We're told that God is going to come in a cloud to Egypt and judge them, and what you and I see in history is the Assyrian army being used by God in His cloud to destroy Egypt.

The same thing happens in Daniel.

We won't have time to look at it when we get to Daniel, so let me talk about it now.

Remember, Daniel's an old man, and Belteshazzar takes out the golden goblets from the temple, and they're toasting the god of wine and the god of gold.

And then there's a hand—just a hand—that comes and writes on the wall.

Do you remember this story in Daniel?

It says some words, and basically, it ruins the party.

Everybody looks at the wall; there's this hand, just a hand, writing.

And the king's mother says, Go get Daniel; he knows what that means.

Daniel comes, and he says, Let me tell you what it means, Belteshazzar.

It means God is going to judge you tonight.

Now, did God come that night?

Yes, He did, in the form of Cyrus and the Medo-Persian army.

That night, Belteshazzar was judged.

Daniel said, God's going to judge you.

What all the people in the streets saw was the Persian army marching through the city of Babylon, but was it God's judgment?

You bet it was.

You bet it was.

So that's ground rule six.

Ground rule seven: apocalyptic literature that is about Ezekiel 37—the whole Israel has been decimated, okay?

And Ezekiel is promising that that will not go on forever.

Babylon will not rule over Israel forever.

God is going to take those dead, dry bones—that is, Jerusalem—and He's going to gather them up, and He's going to make Jerusalem and Israel alive again.

When you look at the verses in Ezekiel chapter 37, it uses resurrection language with these bones, but what it's describing is the gathering together of God's people that have been scattered and the spiritual reformation, rejuvenation, and reformation of God's people.

Now, in the New Testament, we use the same language.

If you've listened carefully to whenever a child is baptized, they talk about it as a resurrection.

Why?

Because that child was spiritually dead, and he is now spiritually alive.

It's a resurrection.

Jesus, in Luke chapter 15, verse 24, tells the story of the prodigal son.

How many of you know the story of the prodigal son?

Of course!

But when the father sees the son far away, he doesn't say, Oh good, my son's back.

He says, This my son was dead and is alive again.

Did the son really die?

No. But not being in communion, not being in contact with the father, for you and me, is just as bad as death.

And when we come back to Him, whether it be the first time through baptism or the second time through what we're going to do at four o'clock, which is the Sacrament of Reconciliation, when we come back to Him, it is a spiritual resurrection.

And that spiritual resurrection is more important than any physical resurrection that can ever occur because, for the physical resurrection to occur, there must first be the spiritual resurrection.

Think about Jesus when He healed the lame man.

When He healed that lame man, the Pharisees criticized Him.

Why did they criticize Him?

Because He said, Your sins are forgiven.

He did a spiritual resurrection on the man, and so he was criticized for that.

And He said, Which is harder?

Which is harder?

The spiritual resurrection or making this man walk again?

Giving him a physical rejuvenation?

And His point is obvious: the spiritual resurrection is the harder one.

Okay, so we need to realize that resurrection language will sometimes be used in the Bible, and especially in apocalyptic literature, for a spiritual resurrection or rejuvenation.

Okay, two more.

Number eight: chronological order should never be assumed as the unifying element in visions.

In fact, it almost never is.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make in the Book of Revelation, for example, is they assume that these things all happen in chronological order.

For the first 12 centuries of the Church, nobody believed that.

That was unheard of until Joachim of Fiore came up with that idea.

Nobody took those visions and put them back to back.

Those visions look at the same events over and over again.

Visions always do.

Visions always have.

We're going to see in the Book of Daniel that that's how Daniel treats the visions.

But if you go even before that to Joseph, the first dreamer of dreams—the first dreamer of dreams had two dreams.

The first one he dreamed was about the sheaves: eleven sheaves bowed down to one sheaf, right?

That was his brothers were going to bow down to who?

To him.

Then the second vision that he had was twelve stars, a moon, and a sun, and eleven of the stars bowed down to the one star, and the moon and the sun bowed down to that one star.

And the moon and the sun—this dream got his father upset because that was who?

That was his father and mother who were going to bow down to him.

Now, do we put these chronologically behind each other?

No. The second vision is giving us a few more details of the first vision, and that's what happens in Daniel as well.

Then the last ground rule: Christ's first advent—when Christ came, His passion, His resurrection—catapulted humanity into the end of the age or the last days.

You've all seen the cartoons of people with placards that say, The end is near.

You know, they're walking by, and usually it's a guy with a long beard, and he says, The end is coming or The end is near, right?

The Church disagrees: the end is here.

The end has been here ever since Christ came.

Whenever we look at the verses in Scripture that talk about the end, we need to realize that for the Jewish mindset—which is what the early Church was—the end occurred the moment the Messiah came.

There were only three ages: there was the age before Moses, there was the age between Moses and the Messiah, and there was the end, which was after the Messiah had come.

This totally permeates all of the New Testament.

For example, Jude chapter 18 shows this.

He says, In the last times there will be scoffers.

You must remember this, beloved; he's talking to them and saying, You're in the last time; you're in the end times.

In Hebrews chapter 1, verses 1 and 2, he says, God has spoken to us in these last days by His Son.

In Hebrews 9:26, he says that Christ has appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.

In Acts chapter 2, St. Peter preaches the first sermon that brings in thousands of people into the Church, and he quotes the prophet Joel and says, In the last days, and he applies that passage to what's going on in 30 AD. We've been in the last days for almost two millennia, and when we read Scripture, we need to understand that the pivotal event in all of Scripture was the Incarnation, and ever since then, we've been in the last days.

The Catechism sums this up well.

It says in paragraph 670, Since the Ascension, God's plan has entered into its fulfillment.

We are already in the last hour; already the final age of the world is with us, and the renewal of the world is irrevocably underway.

It is now even anticipated in a real way.

So that is our ground rules.

We're going to come back to these, but I hope we won't have to justify these again, okay?

So what we'll do is we'll keep this sign up here so you can see these ground rules, or maybe you've written them down, and what we'll do is we'll come back, and when we come to a passage, I may just say, That's an illustration of ground rule three, okay?

So that every time we get into the passage, we won't have to deal with that.

Now let me just give you a little bit of a hint about where we're going next hour, and then we're going to close.

We're going to go from here into the Book of Daniel.

Now, I think Daniel is the most exciting book of the Old Testament.

There is no doubt about the fact it is the most misunderstood.

In fact, it's the only book of the Bible that I know of that Jesus so corrected the Jewish idea of what was being said in the Book of Daniel that the early Church took it and put it in a different part of the canon.

The Jewish people looked at the Book of Daniel and said, Oh, that's all history; that's all been fulfilled; that has all happened in Antiochus' time 200 years ago; it's all done.

By the way, the modernists say that now, but Jesus said, No, part of Daniel is still to come; part of Daniel will still be fulfilled.

The early Church took that historical book from the Jewish canon and placed it in with the prophetic books.

There are four major prophets in our Bible: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel.

They took this historical book and they believed what Jesus said, and they said, No, some of this is still to come, and it's a prophet.

There's one theme that ties all four of the major prophets together, and that is that all four of them talk about the New Covenant.

The four major prophets all speak of this covenant.

Let me give that to you real quick, and then we're going to take our break.

Isaiah chapter 55, verse 3: Incline your ear and come to me; hear that your soul may live, and I will make an everlasting covenant.

Ezekiel talked about a covenant of peace.

In Ezekiel 37, verse 26, he says—this is God speaking—I will make a covenant of peace with them.

Jeremiah spoke of this; this is probably the most well-known: Jeremiah 31, verses 31-34: I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.

I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

Daniel 2 talks about this new everlasting covenant of peace, and the Rapturists don't even see it.

They don't even see that the strong covenant of Daniel and what he says about the strong covenant is the reason that the early Church took that historical book and grouped it with the other three major prophets.