I got on the bus the other day and found a glossy booklet had been left on a seat. Being an enquiring sort of person, I looked through it. The end of the world was coming, it said. This particular booklet assured readers that the proclamation of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948 was the first fulfilment of prophecy (Isaiah 36:24, Isaiah 28:25-26, Amos 9:14-15 and Matthew 24:32-33, if you want to look the prophecies up!).
It continued with an interpretation of Daniel 2:39-40 and 7:19-21, where the last kingdom of the world, portrayed as a beast with ten horns, "can only be" the European Community. This beast returns in the Book of Revelation bearing the whore of Babylon, who the author assured us was the World Council of Churches. And the story of the mark of the beast, where all, "small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, are marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark" (Rev 13:16-17) is "obviously" the modern system of electronic identity cards, credit cards and the like.
So what is going to happen next? The writer explains that there will be a third world war, and goes into great detail about the events. Unfortunately, the writer had not updated his predictions, for he was sure the Libyans, the Ethiopians, the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact would launch an attack on the Holy Land (and "clearly" Revelation 16 was a description of a nuclear attack), culminating at a decisive battle at Armageddon (Rev 16:16), also called by Joel the Valley of Jehoshaphat (Joel 3:8-21).
I have seldom seen so much rubbish condensed into so few pages. The Bible is not a book of secrets which will only be unlocked in our present century. The message of Daniel was addressed to people whose faith was being challenged when the book was written. The same with Revelation, and with all prophecy. Even the prophecies which were fulfilled in the life of Jesus had a meaning, too, for the people living when they were written. Circumstances and events repeat themselves, and God acts in the same way, over and over again.
So we cannot declare, for example, that the persecution described in Daniel relates only to a particular time. It relates to a number of times - to the suffering during the Exile, to the attacks on the Jewish religion after the break up of Alexander's empire, to the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD, to the pogroms through the ages, to the Nazi holocaust. And it relates to Christian persecution, too, under Nero for instance, which is why Revelation, written in the light of Nero's attacks on the church, adopts blocks of thought from Daniel as its own.
But more importantly, it relates to us, for even if we are not persecuted, we are often tempted to compromise with the world around us. We are not called upon to bow down to Persian emperors, and worship them as gods, but we are often challenged to lay aside our beliefs and to swim with a secular tide. The prophecies are for us, too, now!
Jesus himself said that predicting the future was a silly business (Mt 24:23). So it is with Armageddon. Armageddon, which is the Greek name for the town of Megiddo, has already happened (2 Kings 23:29) - a great battle between God's people and an enemy. But this is a battle that we fight every day, and which in Jesus' victory over the grave we have already won. Maybe we can all look forward to the time when the fight has been won decisively and for ever, but attempting to predict the time by looking at our credit card statements is no use at all. God has better things in store for us than that!
HD