Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10134. Ezekiel 38-39 describes a vast coalition from the far north sweeping down on a restored and unsuspecting Israel, and being destroyed by God Himself before a shot is properly fired. Two long chapters are given to it, which is a great deal of space for an event many Christians have never heard a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10135. Where the Ezekiel 38-39 war belongs on the prophetic timeline is one of the genuinely open questions in dispensational study, and honest men who agree about everything else land in different places on it. I hold a view, and I hold it with less certainty than I hold most things. What follows sets…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10160. The Daniel 2 statue is the single most useful outline of world history God has given us, and it was delivered to a pagan king who had no idea what he was dreaming about. Nebuchadnezzar saw an enormous image of a man made of four metals, struck at the feet by a stone…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10161. The four beasts of Daniel 7 come out of a churning sea in a night vision, and they cover the same ground as the metal image of Daniel 2 from an entirely different angle. Where Nebuchadnezzar saw a magnificent statue, Daniel saw predators. That difference in perspective is the first thing to notice….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10165. The king of the north and the king of the south dominate Daniel 11, a chapter so detailed that critics have long insisted it must have been written after the events it describes. I take the opposite view, and I think the chapter is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for predictive…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10180. How literal are the numbers in Revelation? It is one of the first questions a thoughtful reader asks, and the answer largely determines what sort of book he thinks he is reading. Sevens, twelves, a thousand years, 144,000, forty two months, 666. The book is full of counting. My working rule is that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10181. The feasts of Israel in Leviticus 23 are not a religious calendar that expired with the temple. They are a prophetic outline of God’s programme, given fifteen centuries before the events they picture, and the accuracy with which the first four have been fulfilled is one of the quiet marvels of Scripture. Seven…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10182. Israel is often called God’s prophetic clock, and the phrase is a good deal more than a slogan if you understand what it is claiming. It means that Scripture measures prophetic time by reference to one nation, so that when God is dealing openly with Israel the clock is running and when He…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10183. Ezekiel 36 and 37 are the two clearest chapters in the Old Testament on the national restoration of Israel, and they are also two of the most argued over. Ezekiel promises land, cleansing, a new heart, a new spirit, reunion of a divided people, one king over them and an everlasting covenant of…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 10185. A prophetic timeline is only as good as the texts holding it up, so let me set out the sequence I believe Scripture teaches and show you where each stage comes from. What follows runs from the moment the church is caught up to the moment God dwells with His people on a…