The prohecies of Daniel - part 6

Now, back to church history.

When we last left our believing forefathers they were mixing Greco-Roman paganism in with their Judeo-Christianity. As they spread throughout Europe they came into contact with another pervasive religious system -- that of the Celts. We think of 'Celt' as something Irish... or is it Scottish... you know, one of those. In reality, "Celtic" religion was a hodge-podge of nature religions that dominated all Europe at the time that Rome was becoming Christianized. We think of it as Irish because some pockets of it survived their long after it was largely gone from the European mainland, and because there was a 'going back to our cultural roots' movement that started in the British Isles a couple centuries ago.

These nature religions had their sky-god legends, just like Greco-Roman paganism. In some of these traditions the sky-god had already been shrunk down the same way as Zeus, but in others the sky-god was still viewed as a big G god, and Christian missionaries could easily have used this as a point of contact, the same way that modern missionaries often do, the same way that Paul did in Athens when he used the "unknown God" legend to introduce Jesus.

The Christians could have let adapted most of the Celtic traditions to Christian teaching. They could have let them dance around the May pole all they wanted, could have kept the natural medicine, the general love of the land. All they had to do -- literally, ALL they had to do -- was refute the Celtic teaching of "Dualism": the belief that good and evil are evenly matched and either one could defeat the other in the end.

So what did they do? They fought May poles and nature medicine with a passion... and absorbed dualism.

Do you know why you say "bless you" when someone sneezes? It's goes back to the medieval church belief that when you sneezed a demon could fly up into the open nasal passages. Saying "bless you" was supposed to prevent possession. The blessing at the meal? Yes, the Jews had a thankfulness tradition with their meals, but our tradition comes from the notion that demons could live on food, and that everything had to be blessed before it could be eaten lest a demon get into your stomach.

When Christianity took on dualist qualities it became a monster. The abomination of shrinking God down into a being that was no more potent than a fallen angel had the effect of turning individual Christians into agents of this weakened god. A battle was being waged, and it was up to Christians to help their god to win it. Desolation was the result.

Witch hunts = In the Mosaic law mediums were not allowed within Israel's border under pain of death. The Medieval/Renaissance witch hunts were a totally different animal, done for a totally different reason. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people were executed because the general populace was terrified that a squadron of witches were flying over their towns at night, poisoning the water, and generally causing every unpleasant circumstance in their lives.

The Inquisition = Not technically a church institution, but that's quibbling. The Inquisition was run by churchmen with church sanctioning, the fact that it was technically under the jurisdiction of the states in which it resided gave it authority to execute wrongdoers. A neurotic, pedantic organization that deserves every bit of mockery that Monte Python can heap on it. The inquisition wrote the book on informants, torture, and censorship. A book that would get dusted off by the 20th century totalitarian regimes.

The Hundred Years War = it's time to depopulate the world again.

The period of time from 1000 AD to about 1500 AD is usually thought of a time of revival in the church. The "reforms" in question were a series of pushbacks against the facets of Greco-Roman paganism that were wholly incompatible with Christian teaching. One of these was the basic form of worship; in 1000 AD when a Christian went into a church, they would sing songs in Latin, hear scriptures read out in Latin, have a prayer given in Latin and leave. The problem being: almost no one besides the priests actually understood Latin. The average Christian knew virtually nothing about the Bible's contents in medieval times, and much of what they thought they knew came from these cultural baggage trains that we've already discussed.

When vernacular Bibles began to proliferate the results were explosive. It was like Christianity was being introduced for the first time which, in a way, it was. This brought reform within the church... to a point. But eventually two factions became distinct from one another, those who held largely to the statis quo (the Roman Catholics), and those who felt it was time to separate (the protesters, or "Protestants"). Many historian will say that The Hundred Years war was more about politics than religion. I personally think the distinction is a tad silly since both politics and religion owe their existence to a common source -- people's belief systems. Whatever the case, from the middle of the 1500's to the late 1600's those calling themselves Catholics and those calling themselves something else (Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicians, Baptists, Anabaptists, etc.) went to war.

Oh, and around 1600 the plague came back... in force.

In the next post I'll wrap this up with a summary.

The prophecies of Daniel - part 5

We are going to have to digress for a while. You see, I need a metaphor to make the next "time" make sense. Fortunately, the book of Daniel provides the just the thing. It is called "the abomination that causes desolation". Let's take a look-see.

Daniel chapter 11 prophecies the troop movements and general going-ons of one Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Antiochus was the ruler of the Seleucid (Greek influenced regime of Syria) kingdom around 170 BC. In 167 BC Antiochus' army captured Jerusalem, and they immediately put an end to all the Mosaic rites of worship. Antiochus then set up an alter to Zeus in the holy temple. This is what Jesus references in Matthew 24:15 (so when you see standing in the holy place the abomination that causes desolation...) except that Jesus -- speaking 200 years after the Jews went berserk and got rid of the Seleucids and their Zeus shrine -- sites it as a future event. So what gives?

This one is easy.

First off, you need to understand that virtually every culture around the world has a legend that represents God (big God, Jehovah-God). For a long time scholars tried to tell us that Monotheism, the belief that there is only one God, evolved from Polytheism, ie: lots of gods. Then scholars began to document something called the sky-god phenomenon. It turns out that these primitive peoples with their many gods also have a legend for another God, a big G God, and that this God is all-powerful, but for some reason they can't reach out to Him so they have to settle for the little g gods. Except that in some cultures, the big G God has already been reimagined as a little g light weight who has lost his "sky-god" traits.

The word Zeus is closely related to two other Greek words, Deus and Theos, both of which simply mean "God", and words that simply mean "God" are one of the hallmarks of a sky-god legend. But Zeus isn't all powerful and he certainly isn't out of reach. If you think of God as a father figure, then Zeus would be Al Bundy. He gets drunk, he throws temper tantrums, he gets it on with women, boys, livestock. He's not like Jehovah-God. He's like you or me if we could throw lightning bolts and shapechange.

In 167 BC Antiochus' men went into the place of the mysterious God, the place where there were no visible representation for God, and they set up an image of a predictable god, a little god that doesn't deserve worship; a god you only sacrifice to when you want something. The abomination that causes desolation is the replacing of the almighty God of the universe with a dumbed-down replica. It's taking big God and shrinking Him down into something that you can control.

Yes, it happened in 167 AD, and yes, when Jesus spoke it was going to happen once again. Shrinking God is an abomination, and in the next post I'll show you how it causes desolation.

The prohecies of Daniel - part 4

At the same time that the church around the Mediterranean was suddenly inundated with "weeds", Christianity was rapidly expanding in new territories to the north. For a time in Northern and Eastern Europe Christianity was still a new faith, and it had the same effect in these regions that it originally had in the more Romanized Mediterranean -- which is to say that it displayed Biblical truth to an unbelieving population without trying to force them to join the faith. It's not that Rome didn't want to coerce them. It's just that in the 4th century, in the outlining areas of the empire, it wasn't really possible. So, for a time, Christians in places like England and Ireland, Poland and Russia, were more missionaries than overlords. Christian influence there blossomed while those conditions lasted.

But eventually it was the same. Christianity became established. Then it became the 'establishment'. Once Christianity had a firm grip on the power and prestige weeds (people who look like Christians outwardly, but do not accept Jesus as lord of their life in any real way) began to infiltrate. When they became the majority, the influence of real Christianity diminished.

Meanwhile, back in the Mediterranean, Popes were toasting Satan, falling dead committing adultery in the holy palace, and becoming intertwined with the Medici family (Italy's first Godfathers). In 1095 AD the political power of Rome was centered in Byzantium (largely modern day Turkey), while the spiritual authority was mostly rooted in old Rome. At that time the Muslims were expanding into Europe and both of these entities agreed that something had to be done about it. The answer was something called the crusades. The Pope at the time declared everyone who went to war against the heathens would be forgiven their sins and off they went.

The word "crusade" means "going to the cross" or "taking the cross" and the soldiers who took up the call literally painted a cross onto their shields and banners, but the meaning goes a little deeper. Taking the cross was seen to signify something very similar to what this badge I'm wearing right now is meant to symbolize(as I sit at the motor pool, waiting for my squadcar to get serviced) -- that being the authority to enforce the laws and dispense justice on behalf of a higher power (in my case the state of Texas may it be hallowed forever and ever amen).

For those of you unfamiliar with the history, the results of the crusades were... shall we say... a little unchrist-like. The crusaders had this nasty habit of killing everyone wherever they went. Over the 10 or so crusades, covering two or so centuries, they killed Muslims who were not hostile to them as often as the ones who were, killed women and children, wiped out the Christian populations still living and worshipping in the Middle East because, hey, they all kind of looked alike with the turbans and such, and at one point, even turned on Byzantium and went on a rape/kill spree in the Empire's capital city Constantinople.

It was not one of Christianity's finer hours.

But revival was on its way to the Mediterranean (our next upturn) and, unfortunately, on it's way to being needed over all of Europe (our next downturn).

And one other point of interest. A bit off topic for the Daniel prophecies, but something we are going to need for later: the plague arrived, and in the mid 1300's around a third of the population of the known world died off.

The prophecies of Daniel - part 3

Jesus told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared." -- Matthew 13: 24-26

A great many church historians view the fifth century as a kind of high water mark. Rome covered most of the civilized world at the time and when it imposed Christianity on it's people that meant that the majority of the people in the civilized world became "Christians". The percentage of "Christians" would never again be so high. You may have already noticed the problem. It wasn't Christians that suddenly populated the world. It was "Christians" with the somewhat sarcastic quotation marks surrouding them.

The reality is that during the fifth century AD the church lost more of its influence, more quickly, than at any other time in history. The reason for this is simple: you can not impose Christianity. It can't be done. For every other world religion the methods of worship are designed to allow people to gain a measure of control over god/gods. Take the Greco-Roman paganism for example. When a person sacrificed to the goddess Demeter, they were making an investment that they expected would return a bountiful harvest, since Demeter was the goddess of agriculture. Their worship was like a series of chemistry experiments where a certain formula of prayer and sacrifice would yield a predictable result.

There are no predictable results from the human perspective in Christianity. Even the promises of God that we know to be true play out in ways that constantly surprise us. The God of Heaven is not predictable, he is mysterious -- meaning that His knowledge and moral virtue are so much greater than our own that we can never render anything He does in Chemistry experiment terms. God does what He does because it is His nature. Not because He owes us for our sacrifices and prayers.

When Christianity became the established religion of Rome the total number of so-called "believers" increased ten fold. Churches that had a hundred, now had a thousand. A thousand became ten thousand. I think most of the bishops of this time truly meant well, but they were given an impossible task; their job was to integrate an overwhelming number of unwilling pagans into the Christian faith.

The results did not turn out well. Christianity became what you and I know today as Roman Catholicism. The church leaders introduced bits of pagan methodology in an attempt to connect with their new flock, but the indoctrination process was never complete; so worship of local gods became veneration of the saints, prayer to a feminine deity became prayer to Mary, sacrificial atonement became simony (paying for sins with money), and on and on.

But the most important change was that participation within the churches went from an expectation to an exception. The Biblical model for churches was that everyone was expected to contribute their gifts and abilities for the good of the group. The Roman Catholic model was that a few professional priests would do the work of God, everyone else was simply expected to show up and do as they were told. This will have major repercussions for our later 'times'.

For now, just notice part of the pattern. An upswing in the cycle of the church occurs when Christianity acts out its faith in the presence of non-believing world. The first of these upswings turned down when the non-believing world was coerced into pretending to be Christians.

For the next upswing, we will see that Christianity wasn't established everywhere, all at once. We will also look at the next downturn -- the crusades.

The prophecies of Daniel - part 2

In the latter stages of the first century AD, the most powerful empire the world has ever known began to take notice of a small religious sect originating in one of its smallest provinces. Pagan Rome decided that this new faith was nuisance and waged a war against it. It was an absolute impossibility that mighty Rome would 'lose' this battle. Yet that is exactly what happened.

To put this into a modern context consider the American campaign against the Al Qaida forces in Afghanistan after 9/11. Not the campaign against the country itself -- then the analogy wouldn't fit -- just the small pockets of Al Qaida and her sympathizers. Then imagine that thirty years after the campaign began (converting centuries into decades here to represent the faster flow of events these days) America lost. No, I don't mean that they failed to meet their initial objectives, I mean lost. As in -- Al Qaida sitting in the white house, Sharia law is the law of the land, every woman has to wear a burka... lost. Doesn't seem possible, does it?

And yet that's a fair symbol for what actually happened in Rome. But you say, "It wasn't a military conquest. It was cultural." That's true. But that doesn't make it any less implausible. Consider what a empire is:

A monarchy is a political unit that basically serves as a means of trying to keep its people alive. Every one has their place, whether noble, soldier, or peasant, and is expected to perform their function within the overall realm. But an empire is different (I talked about this in What does 666 mean). An empire moves wealth from the periphery to the center. It exploits the labor and resources of others for the benefit of its own. In doing this, an empire creates an apparatus that surrounds its citizens in a kind of protective bubble. That apparatus is meant to keep the citizens alive without forcing the citizens to spend all their time doing the ugly business themselves, thus allowing those same citizens things like leisure time and social mobility.

When you add that onto the nature of the Roman pagan religion you are left with a culture that existed primarily to satisfy the wants of its people. You can try and fight that statement all you want. You'll fail. But the Caesars took the power away from the Senate -- yes, with popular support from a people who wanted and single liable entity rather than the complexity of broad representation in precisely the same way that modern Americans place undo credit/blame on their sitting president. But the Plebeians were an oppressed class -- more like a less fortunate class, which every empire has, but also a class that their rulers took great pains to placate.

First century Rome was a land of free love and dramatic entertainments (gladiators, chariot races, etc.), of opulent wealth and unmatched prosperity. Within three hundred years from the first contact, the decadent people of Rome would cast away the supposed charms of all their good fortune (their idols) and bow down to worship the son of a Jewish laborer whom their forefathers had executed on a wooden cross.

Here's how it happened:

When the emperor Constantine issued an edict of toleration for Christianity in 313 AD, Christians were still a small minority of the overall population -- maybe 10%. That number, however, misses an important detail; by 313 Christianity was already extremely popular. There's several reasons for this. Two of the big ones had to do with martyrdom and the early church hospitality ministries.

I have no doubt that a great many Christians plead for their lives, begged, cried, soiled themselves, etc, before becoming lion food, but a great many didn't. These died the kind of noble, no-fear deaths that demanded a grudging respect from their audiences. In Greco-Roman paganism there is no Heaven, only Hades. Even the heroes had a nasty afterlife (just not as bad). Seeing people unafraid of dying was a real eye-opener in a world that taught you to fear the end of life.

But even more important was the Christian concept of hospitality. The early church did not spread through door to door "cold calls". It was spread by caring for the poor and needy. Some of the stories boggle the mind. For example, a group of early Christians sold themselves into slavery, then took the proceeds and purchased the freedom of another group of slaves. Materialism found itself looking face to face with lives lived for a higher calling, and the materialists felt dirty by comparison. Because of this, even before Christianity became the established religion it had a whole slew of 't-shirt' fans, people who wanted to change but couldn't quite give up their old ways. In other words, its influence was growing.

After Constantine's death Christianity fell in and back out of favor, twice being the subject of eradication campaigns. But it was never enough, and about a century after the first edict of toleration Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Paganism was outlawed. Every knee bowed. Every tongue confessed. They had to, it was the law.

And the moment that happened Christianity's influence began to diminish.

(to be cont.)

The prophecies of Daniel - part 1

Then Jesus entered a house and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, "He is out of his mind." Mark 3: 20-21

Later in the same chapter of the book of Mark, Mary and Jesus' brothers come to put a stop to His ministry. The strangest thing about this scene is that this is Mary we are talking about. The same woman who wrote a song (Luke 1: 47-55) when an angel told her she was going to give miraculous birth to the messiah. Now she thinks he's gone mad. What happened?

Apparently, the same thing that happened to John the Baptist. John baptised Jesus and witnessed the miraculous infilling of Jesus by the Holy Spirit. Later, when he was imprisoned by the Roman authorities, John sent a messenger to Jesus who essentially asked, 'are you really who you say you are?' (who I thought you were?).

Here, now, I want to reiterate my point about misconceptions and make it specific to our examination of Daniel: just like Mary and John and the Baptist, if you have a preconceived notion of how God's revelation should look -- and I'm talking literally about His 'revealings' here, not just the book of Revelation -- then it is likely that you will disbelieve the events when they actually occur.

Case in point -- In Daniel chapter 12 Daniel is told when the world will end. He answers the way that modern theologians still answer to this day, "I heard, but I did not understand," (Daniel 12: 8). There is a good reason why Daniel could not puzzle it out; today's theologians have a much flimsier excuse.

Before I explain further, how about a little backstory on our boy Daniel.

And some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood, that will be born to you, will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon. -- 2 Kings 20:18.

Daniel was one of the young men of Judah who fulfilled this prophecy when Jerusalem fell to Babylon in 586 BC. Castration of certain public servants was common in societies where the Rulers possessed harems. It wasn't just a matter of vanity. Sleeping with the harem girls was one of the basic symbols of a King's office, which is why Absalom takes time out of his takeover of Israel to sleep with King David's concubines in 2 Samuel 16:21-22. For this reason, operations like this were often performed on foreign servants... and I do mean foreign.

You see, there was no such thing as a 'minor' surgery in ancient times. This and some of the other not-so-pleasant aspects of Palace servitude meant that these positions were ideal for foreigners... people not yours... who could not easily rebel or incite rebellion....

Now, a point that needs to be made here is that eunuchs were not typically known as humanitarians. Unmarried men are often harsher by nature than family men anyways, marriage and parenthood having a softening effect of sorts. Eunuchs did not only lack families, they lacked much of anything that would inspire compassion and thoughts of a peaceful future for one's legacy. The stereotypical eunuch of the ancient near east was a stone-faced servant, lurking off to the King's left, always ready with the advice of who should be killed and how.


Then there was Daniel.

he seems to have had no bitterness toward his masters, the men who mutilated him. Not only that, but the prophecies of the Israelites overwhelmed him at times, as if he has adopted every one of them as an enormous extended family over which he felt a deeply protective love. This is the man God chose to give the first of the clearly apocalyptic visions: a man of limited temptations, a man of sympathetic character who never grew hardened in spite of living his entire adult life under the specter of possible death from a capricious ruler and jealous rivals.

And in chapter 12, verse 7 he asks when the world will end and is told-- The man clothed in linen, who was above the waters of the river, lifted his right hand and his left hand toward heaven, and I heard him swear by Him who lives forever, saying, "It will be for a time, times, and half a time. When the power of the Holy people has finally been broken, all these things will be completed."

The typical translation of this phrase 'time, times, and half a time', is a year, two years, and half a year. It's not taken totally out of the blue either, since in verse eleven we are given two time periods (1,290 days/ 1,335 days) that roughly equal 3 1/2 years. But if we take this as a veiled reference to 3 1/2 years we have two problems: 1) why didn't the angel just say "3 1/2 years? and 2) the angel didn't actually answer his question since, without any contextual clues for when to begin the 3 1/2 years he hasn't actually told him anything. 3 1/2 years from when? Starting when?

But that's not what it means. We are given all the context we need for interpretation when the angel says, "when the power of the Holy people has finally been broken."

In the next post, a brief history of the church, and three times in history that it came close to collapsing.

History isn't what you think it is - part 2

It's been a running joke in the law enforcement world for the fourteen years that I've been associated with it: "Why didn't you just try to shoot the gun out of his hand?"

The department's legal liason will read the incident report while the grand jury listens. Then queries... and before long, without fail, one of the jurors -- typically an older woman or man -- will fire off the question that make the fields of reality spin, twist, and do little jerking motions. The juror has no idea, mind you, that they may have well have just asked, "why didn't you just throw the tree nymph at him?" or "why didn't you just ram him with the unicorn?" or that the question wouldn't have made any less sense even if it had only been a random collection of words, "bacon crispy sally port?" The question is asked and it has to be answered, preferably without making the juror feel like a moron... which is tricky.

Now there's a reason for this line of questioning, and it has to do with cowboys who save the day, dress in clothes that look like they are trying to wave passing motorists into a new steak house and occasionally break out into song. You see, there is a generation in this country that grew up watching cereal westerns on this new-fangled contraption called the television set. These people watched their dapper heroes shoot a few hundred guns out of the hands of a few hundred bearded badguys' hands and, at some point, came to believe that this kind of trick shot was really possibly.

"Hah", you say, "silly old people." Except that the same thing is happening today, and it's making it hard for prosecutors to convict defendants of murder, rape, and just about anything else. It's sometimes called 'The CSI effect' and it involves the disappointment that jurors experience upon finding out that their is no good computer reconstruction of the event, no biochemical evidence taken by equipment that only NASA possesses, and only a few so-called eye witness statements given by average looking people who are really kind of boring.

The point is that we all have our misconceptions. We all have those little tidbits of knowledge that we heard or saw and accepted as truth without ever considering if the thing had a valid reason or matched those aspects of reality that we could observe and verify. There's a big one of these in the world of end times interpretation.

You could call it, "The Late Great Planet Earth Effect" and it owes its force to the '71 novel and the influence it had over a Christian populace that was already traumatized by cold war nuclear tensions and knew next to nothing about what the scriptures actually teach on the issue. Now, plenty of theologians have challenged individual aspects of the book, but they seem blind to one of the basic assumptions that led the authors down such an exotic collection of rabbit holes in the first place: the assumption that the end times prophecies will all be fulfilled during a brief period of clearly supernatural happenings.

For the moment, let me simply put the question this way -- what if it's not so simple? In the next post I will go to what I believe is the key to understanding the end times prophecies. And I think that if you simply remove the preconception of a seven year period of supernatural bloodletting, the answer to what Daniel is saying become crystal clear.

History isn't what you think it is - part 1

Don't feel bad, it isn't what Hank Hanegraaff thinks it is either.

For years the Bible answer man gave answers about every part of the Bible except one. When callers on his radio show asked about end times prophecies he would simply say that he was still researching it. Then, one day he said that his research was complete and that he had concluded that end times prophecies should be viewed through a system called preterism (the belief that most or all of the so-called 'end times' prophecies actually refer to the end of the early church and were fulfilled in the 1st century AD). Now Mr. Hanagraaff doesn't explain whether he's a partial or full-blown preterist. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, he still hasn't explained much of anything about his views, instead opting for a kind of French indie film thing of claiming poignancy while really just being vague. In his recent book, The Apocalypse Code, he is clear on one thing though; he doesn't think very highly of Tim Lehaye.

For those of you living under rocks (or just reading better books), Tim Lehaye is the driving force behind the Left Behind series. You know the one -- really popular, really bad movie adaptations. In his book, Hanagraaff spends a few hundred pages comparing Lehaye to a Nazi sympathizer, a Social Darwinist and... I don't know, my eyes started glazing over at one point, but he might have compared him to Rosie O'Donnell a time or two. Not only was it really bad form, but not even all of it was particularly accurate.

One of the things Mr. Hanagraaff railed against was Lehaye's idea of the Antichrist being physically killed, then coming back to life. Lehaye interpreted this from Revelation 13:3, where we are told that one of the heads of the Beast has a fatal wound that has been healed (much to the people's astonishment). Impossible, says Hanagraaff. Resurrecting yourself from the dead is an attribute of Christ, and Christ alone. It was the ultimate proof of His divinity. It can't happen with anyone else. It's a good point, but he's wrong about the Revelation passage. They both are.

It already has happened, and it bore no similarity to Christ's resurrection.

To understand how it happened, you need to know a little something about the mindset of people during medieval times. Life was hard in those days. Starvation and disease were rampant, and the Christians of that age knew very little about the Bible (I'll explain why in later posts). In this setting it had become quite fashionable to pitch superhuman, Christlike powers onto popular kings of that era.... and even some not so popular ones. Every region of Europe had its own 'sleeping emperor' legend. You know at least one of these -- King Arthur -- Camelot; once upon a very misguided group of people there really was a king of the Britains (too long ago to call them English) and there really was a legend that this king would return to usher in a utopian age. To us, now, those legends seem harmless. But one of the problems with legends like this, and the powerful delusion they created, was that if a person came along and told everyone, "Hey, I'm the guy," the people would, from time to time, actually believe him.

It had already happened before Frederick the Second. In 1225 AD an eccentric hermit claimed to be the reincarnation of Count Baldwin of Flanders, was promptly given the recently deceased Count's sovereign powers, and was actually spewing out royal edicts until that whole "recently deceased" thing became a problem and some of the people who knew the Count exposed the impostor as a peasant/con man.

But Frederick the Second took the cake. The real Frederick the Second (let's call him Frederick 1.0) was one of the most tyrannical rulers of the middle ages. He's was Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire at a time when 'Roman' was supposed to mean Roman Catholic, but mostly just meant modern day France and Germany, and he was excommunicated at a time when getting excommunicated while being an Emperor was akin to getting kicked out of Guns and Roses; in other words, it could happen, but... wow.... If you disagreed with Frederick 1.0, you died... badly. Murderer, blasphemer, as cruel as he was brilliant, Frederick 1.0 was certainly a beast in Biblical sense of the word. And in 1250 AD he died.

Then, 34 years later, he came back.

He first appeared in the town of Cologne, where he was viewed as a lunatic and driven out. But the return of Frederick 1.0 legend was a strong one and this impostor wasn't any simple con man. He seems to have genuinely believed that he was Frederick the second returned from the grave. Eventually others believed as well. Before long other countries were sending delegates to find out of this man was the long awaited harbinger of the millennial reign (more on this later as well) or if he were the Antichrist; there were legends for both. And before it was over an absurdly large portion of the empire accepted him as their Emperor. It took an army and a siege to depose him. Even under torture he refused to recant, saying that if they killed him he would return in a few days. Finally, they burned him at the stake, and no, he didn't return. Although another legend popped up that one day he would. I'll explain the beast and it's heads when we get to the Daniel prophecies. For now, I want to finish with the Hanagraaff/Lehaye tiff, and how it relates to the common misinterpretations of end times prophecies.

Why doesn't Mr. Hanagraaff seem to know that there is a perfectly logical explanation, and event, for Revelation 13:3 that satisfies the requirement that the "head" in question not actually conquer death (and I certainly see that as being a valid requirement). My guess is that he has never heard of it. I don't fault him for this.

You see, this is one of those historical events that you almost have to go looking for in order to find. I myself had been a medieval history buff for years and never came across it. It wasn't until I tried to write a fiction story set in the era, and had to do some serious research on medieval messianic expectations that I came across it. Now, years later, having come across a number of similarly interesting yet underreported historical events that I think I understand a bit about what is going on.

First, there is a bona fide anti-supernatural bias among mainstream historical scholars. This is convenient, since it allows them to discard the Biblical claims out of hand, but I don't think it is intentional so much as just a natural product of their worldview -- a worldview that looks at anything smacking of the "miraculous" as some sort of mistake, and then expunges it from the record.

Secondly, I think it owes something to the natural tendency of most mentally healthy persons to shy away from conspiracy theories. Most conspiracy theories are bunk, of course. They assume too much intelligence on the part of the shadow agents and far much more ability to keep secrets than what we see in real life. Yet, the more I look at history, the more it looks like one grand conspiracy to me.

I think I already mentioned the little dittie about the Babylonian captivity: that a nation of people supposed to separate from other nations failed to do so, and was ultimately carried off to a nation whose name literally means 'land of confusion'. How does several centuries of a country's history boil so easily down to a single Biblical moral (that being that denial of truth leads to slavery in the 'land of confusion')? It's almost as if some great 'conspirator' were guiding the action.

And I don't think it is Biblical history alone that does this. As we look at the prophecies of Daniel I will attempt to demonstrate how all of human history has this feeling of overriding control. I don't think we see it in modern history books simply because modern historians leave out the ironic events which reveal it. The result of this is like a Polaroid where one color has been left out. There is a faded, washed out feel, that gives modern historians the freedom to try and foist materialist causes onto anything and everything, but which fails to show the true reality.

And so Biblical scholars like Mr. Hanagraaff fall into the preterism trap when the real answer is right under their noses.... If only they knew where to look. And why don't they?

In the next, and mercifully shorter post, I look a little more into the reasons why preterism and a fully futuristic interpretation of end times prophecies miss the mark, also -- and suprisingly related -- I give my answer to that question asked by grand juries of every police involved shooting for the last six decades, "why didn't you try to shoot the gun out of his hand"?

What are the trumpets - the seventh trumpet

For four hundred years the Hebrews lived as slaves in Egypt. During that time they took on the Egyptian culture, including its pagan religion. When God freed them He used a series of plagues. Each one of these plagues was aimed at one of the Egyptian religion's major deities. So when God turned the Nile river red it was as if He was saying, "Your god of the Nile, Hopi, has no power. I have power. There is no God but me."

The last of these plagues was special. You see, Pharaohs claimed the kind of divinity we talked about with the Nephilim (see: What does Babylon mean). Pharaohs claimed to be the incarnate son of the high sun god, Ra. When God struck down the firstborn not only was He displaying His power over Pharaoh, He was also prefiguring the death of His own incarnate son, Jesus.

With the first five trumpet calls we saw challenges that serve as warnings, "Your modern 'gods' have no power," says the Lord. "They are figments, just like the Egyptian gods." But the final two trumpets are different. These are events that are going to be described elsewhere in scripture. The sixth trumpet announces a war that inevitably leads to mankind's destruction. The seventh trumpet is the cataclysmic event itself. And the challenge requires little description, because it's answer is actually written out in the text.

The seventh challenge -- mankind can change. No matter what we've done so far, if circumstances required it, we could adapt, we could overcome.

That's the figment of our collective imaginations. Here's the reality:

The rest of mankind that were not killed by these plagues still did not repent of the work of their hands; they did not stop worshiping demons, and idols of gold, silver, bronze, stone and wood—idols that cannot see or hear or walk. Nor did they repent of their murders, their magic arts, their sexual immorality or their thefts. -- Revelation 9:20-21

The answer to the seventh challenge -- Individuals change, but mankind as a whole will never change. The majority of people will always choose to try and fashion themselves into gods, then deny that that's what they are doing. This path leads to death -- always.

The seventh trumpet is an event that burns our planet to a cinder, and is also the moment of the so-called 'rapture', as we will see in other passages.

But for now I'm going to go in a different direction. I want to talk about the end times prophecies in the book of Daniel; one in particular.

Next up: History isn't what you think it is.