Rapture: The End-Times Error That Leaves the Bible Behind (40 page)

One of the first things we notice again is apocalyptic literature’s disregard for our twenty-first-century obsession with chronology (GR8). There are three vignettes that overlap chronologically, just as Daniel’s visions did. In 12:6, we see the Woman (the Church of Jerusalem) fleeing into the wilderness for “1,260 days.” Then the story on earth is interrupted with some events in Heaven that explain the earthly events. The story returns in 12:14 to the same three-and-a-half-year period, expressed as “time, and times, and half a time,” during which the Church was in flight from Jerusalem. In the initial vision, we already encountered this as the time of the “trampling” of Jerusalem and as the time during which the two witnesses were slain and resurrected.

This period comprises the same forty-two months we have noticed since Daniel: the time during which the Roman Empire was at war with Jerusalem and its Temple (February of 67 to August of 70 A.D.) Because the Church had heeded the warning of Jesus in the Olivet Discourse, her members fled from Jerusalem at its outbreak and were protected at Pella in Transjordan and elsewhere while the siege progressed around Jerusalem. As we noted in Daniel, this three and a half years are the final five percent of Daniel’s seventieth week.

Now that we have met the Child (Jesus), the Woman (Mary and the Church), and the dragon (Satan), we can examine the pivotal events of Daniel’s seventieth week.

So how do the seven decades of covenantal transition begin? The Woman, Mary, gives birth to the Child, Jesus (12:2). Immediately, the dragon tries to destroy the Child. “The dragon stood before the Woman who was about to bear a Child, that he might devour her Child when she brought it forth” (12:4). This is widely understood to be a reference to Satan’s use of Herod when he tried to kill Jesus as an infant. This, too, would have been at the very beginning of the seventieth week of Daniel.

Mary’s Child is born and destined to rule the nations. But something unexpected happens. Mary’s “Child was caught up to God and to His throne.” This is a clear reference to Christ’s Ascension and coronation in Heaven. That would place us at the halfway point of Daniel’s last week, around 30 A.D.

Until this point, the primary focus of the Woman is as a symbol of the Blessed Mother, Mary. Now the symbolism of the Woman expands to include the Bride of Christ, the Church. The Woman is forced by the dragon to flee into the desert, where she is protected by God. This is a good picture of what the Jewish Christians did when they saw the Roman army surrounding Jerusalem: they fled from Jerusalem into the desert area of Pella. This event is at the very end of Daniel’s seventieth week, either in 66 or 68 A.D.

At this point, the vision changes focus for a second vignette. St. John gives us the heavenly perspective on the quick overview of Daniel’s final week just completed, and he focuses our attention on the events surrounding the Passion of our Lord. In Daniel, the entire seventieth week pivots and centers on the Passion. It is halfway through the seven decades and is the basis of the “strong covenant” of Daniel. It holds center stage in this vision as well, as it does in the entire Apocalypse and in all of history.

The Passion was an earthly, historical event, but more important, it was also a heavenly, spiritual event. St. John describes it here as a war in Heaven between Satan’s angels and God’s angels. Through the power of the risen Christ, God’s forces, led by the archangel Michael, are victorious. An announcement is made: “Now the salvation and the power and the Kingdom of our God and the authority of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb” (12:10). Satan is cast out of Heaven and grows bitter because of his defeat.

St. Augustine summed up this section of The Apocalypse well in one of his sermons: “The victory of our Lord Jesus Christ came when He rose and ascended into Heaven.… The Devil jumped for joy when Christ died; and by the very death of Christ, the Devil was overcome: he took, as it were, the bait in the mousetrap. He rejoiced at the death, thinking himself death’s commander. But that which caused his joy dangled the bait before him.
The Lord’s Cross was the Devil’s mousetrap:
the bait which caught him was the death of the Lord” (
SSA
, 222).

Now that he has described the heavenly battle that imbues the corresponding earthly events with meaning, St. John can return to the Woman’s flight into the wilderness. He had to interject the events in Heaven so we would know what truly made the flight necessary. It was the hatred of the dragon for anyone associated with this Child. The third vignette resumes the interrupted story on earth to fill in the details.

After the Ascension, the Woman primarily symbolizes the Church. The salvation of God’s people is assured by the aid of Yahweh, “the two wings of the great eagle” (12:14 and Deut. 32:10–12). God protects them for the same three and a half years in this flight, as in the flight before the heavenly scene, because they are one and the same flight (12:6; 12:14). The flight illustrated the obedience of the Church to the warning of Christ in the Olivet Discourse: “Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart” (Luke 21:21).

But Satan is not about to give up his designs on this Woman, the Church, so easily. The serpent attempts to “sweep her away with the flood” (12:15). This flood reference reflects Daniel 9:24–27. In that vision of Daniel (III:C), the war that destroys Jerusalem and its Temple is described as a flood. We have already determined that this refers to the Jewish-Roman War at the end of Daniel’s final week. So St. John gives us a tidbit of information that we did not learn in Daniel. It was Satan’s plan to use the Roman army to destroy the Church of Jerusalem during the war in Judea.

But Satan’s plan was foiled. The Christians obeyed the command of Jesus in the Olivet Discourse, and they fled at the beginning of this three-and-a-half-year period. The flood, which was the Roman army, was “swallowed” by the land (12:16). This is an accurate picture of what Josephus describes in the Jewish-Roman War. Conquering Jerusalem was no easy task. It exhausted all of Rome’s energy and patience. By the time of their victory, the Roman Empire had no stomach for tracking down and destroying the Church as Satan had planned.

Of course, Satan had surely planned to trap the Christians in Jerusalem along with everyone else. If the Church had stayed in Jerusalem, she would have been destroyed along with the Temple. But the Church heeded the warnings of the Olivet Discourse and so was not in Jerusalem when the flood came.

The next sentence must have sent chills down the spine of any early Christian reading The Apocalypse aloud in Church: “Then the dragon … went off to make war on the rest of her offspring” (12:17). The dragon does not give up when the Roman army fails to destroy the Woman and her offspring, the Church. Satan redoubles his efforts to destroy “those who keep the commandments of God” (12:17).

As history attests, Satan has continued to hate the Woman’s offspring even after the events of 70 A.D. were completed. Emperor after emperor persecuted the early Church. Diocletian, in the late third century, is perhaps the most infamous persecutor of the Church. He vowed to wipe even the word
Christian
from his empire (
CE
, IV).

This hatred has continued down through the ages into modern times. Muslims have been ruthless in their treatment of Christians who refuse to convert. Hitler’s hatred for the Church is well documented. The communists of the Soviet Union and China have shown no remorse for their persecution of Christians. Although the names change through time, the motive behind it all remains the same: the hatred of the dragon for the Woman, stemming from the dragon’s defeat by the Child.

Rapturists make such a convoluted mess of this passage that it hardly warrants a point-by-point refutation. Let me just mention one problem with their time line, caused by yet another instance of Winkle Warp.

Some rapturists understand these two forty-two-month periods (12:6 and 12:14) as consecutive, giving them their future seven-year Great Tribulation. But these are clearly
identical
times, both involving the flight of the Woman “into the wilderness.” Indeed, if we must start to place all these periods end to end, we could end up with fourteen or more years in the rapturist Great Tribulation.

There is a more serious problem with rapturists’ time line, though. They believe it will occur at the very end of history, during a seven-year tribulation that immediately precedes Christ’s second coming. Yet the dragon “went off to make war on the rest of her offspring” when his initial assault failed. When would he find the time to do this if the second advent occurs immediately? There is no room for any more war in the rapturist time line.

It is much better to understand this as St. John clearly intended. These events are history from Daniel’s final week. The events of Chapter 12 are the pivotal events in all of history. This was when Christ established the “strong covenant” with His New People.

St. John has completed his descriptions of the three key personalities around which the covenantal transition revolves. The rest of The Apocalypse is a series of visions that add details to the initial vision of seals and trumpets from Chapters 4 through 11 (plus the epilogue). While the initial vision ended when Daniel’s final week ended in 70 A.D., the last of these recapitulating visions will extend right up to the final eschaton and eternity. This is exactly what Daniel did when he recapitulated his initial vision. His final vision (III:E) extended all the way to the final judgment, his own.

There are differing opinions about how to divide the remaining visions. How many are there? The rapturist tends to see the remainder of The Apocalypse as one long chronological account of the future. That position was unheard of in the
first thirteen centuries
of the Church, when the dominant position was that they are a recapitulation of the initial vision, as in Daniel’s outline. As St. Augustine taught, the visions of The Apocalypse repeatedly review the same events and period. Most scholars would probably separate the rest of the book into four or five visions. Either way, it would not alter our interpretation one whit, although I find five to be more helpful and understandable. The first three visions relate to the three key personalities we examined in the last section.

    
III:A
  The battle strategy of the dragon

Parallels Daniel’s vision of the battle strategy of the beast

    
III:B
  The battle strategy of the Lamb

    Parallels Daniel’s vision of the battle strategy of the goat and ram

    
III:C
  The battle strategy of God’s People

    Parallels Daniel’s vision of the battle strategy of God’s People

    
III:D
  The Great Battle

Parallels Daniel’s vision of the Great Battle

    
III:E
  The vision of From Here to Eternity

Parallels Daniel’s vision of From Here to Eternity

We skipped treatment of two of Daniel’s visions (III:B and III:D) because they do not impinge directly on our topic. In The Apocalypse, we will examine all five of them in order.

After the Child of the Woman escapes the dragon in Chapter 12, St. John relates that the dragon targets the Woman’s offspring: the Church. In Vision III:A, we learn the strategy of the dragon in his pursuit of revenge on the Child for his defeat in Heaven. This emphasis on battle strategy in the first recapitulating vision should not surprise us. Daniel did the same thing. He had five recapitulating visions, and much of the content of those (including the ones we did not examine) involved the battle strategy of the combatants.

What is the dragon’s battle strategy? Basically, it is to use power and deceit to coerce people into accepting his distorted view of reality. He denies the possibility of judgment after death. His deceit is popular even today: “What you see is all you get.” If deceit fails, he intimidates and even annihilates his opponents.

In Chapter 13, St. John introduces us to the two beasts that the dragon uses to implement his strategy. The Church (the Woman and her offspring) encountered them and their full power in the Great Tribulation. We will dub them the sea-beast and the land-beast. “And I saw a beast rising out of the sea.… Then I saw another beast which rose out of the land” (13:1, 11). The sea traditionally symbolized the gentile nations, and the land traditionally stood for the Jewish people. This means that the sea-beast symbolizes gentile Rome, and the land-beast symbolizes the Jewish leadership of St. John’s day. Both are the dragon’s servants. Satan cannot have a child, like the Woman, but he does have slaves.