In this short series, I would like to take you on a brief journey through some of the apocalyptic and
symbolic language found in the Old Testament Scriptures. I will be taking a look at the types of
verses that set the stage and lay the solid ground-work for understanding the
New Testament prophecy verses that seem to confuse so many readers of the Bible these days.
Sadly,
when it comes to the New Testament Bible prophecy scenario, so many readers are
oblivious to how so much of the same language is used frequently in Old
Testament prophecy, and so they total miss and misunderstand what is being said by this language.
Probably
the biggest cause of this, is the fact that so much attention is given to the
New Testament writings alone, and so people get a truncated understanding of
language. Instilled
in the hearts and minds of so many believers is this false dichotomy that the
Old Testament was for those old people, and the New Testament is more for us.
And due to that, people have misused and abused so much of the New Testament
that it has made the gospel message so twisted. But worse yet, it has made the
stories of the New Testament to be taken out of context fully.
After
all, while the New Testament is the good news - it is only truly good because
it comes at the end of the story that contained the "bad" news. Without understanding the whole
old story, the good news is not ever to be truly understood - it is at best just a truncated view of the story. The
idea of understanding the whole story of Scripture, especially the Hebrew
Scriptures, in order to better understand the story of the New Testament was
the general thrust of of a lecture I gave at a church conference in 2012.
I opened
up that lecture by telling the story of the shocking question that was raised by one man. He
asked a pastor friend of his, “What is good
news about the fact that Jesus is the Messiah, the descendant of David?” If
someone does not comprehend what was said beforehand about the coming Messiah,
or the struggles of the people and their promised hope, then this information
about a Messiah seems trivial.
I also discussed the response a pastor gave
to the question “Did Jesus preach the gospel?” The pastor reasoned that since
the gospel is the story of justification by faith in the work of Christ and the cross, then
it was impossible to say that Jesus was preaching the gospel. The
pastor answered - “Nope, Jesus couldn’t
have. No one understood the gospel until Paul. No one could understand the
gospel until after the cross and resurrection and Pentecost.”
That is a
truncated New Testament only story that makes little sense out of its context
in the whole story. Of course, there are so many other things in the New
Testament that are totally misunderstood because of this same type of reasons. So
when it comes to the Bible story, without the old, the new makes little sense,
and that is why things have gotten so bad in the modern church sadly.
There are so many pieces of the Old Testament
that appear in the New, and without properly grasping the original reference, it leads to so many wacky interpretations. For our purposes in this series, I would like to focus on national
judgment language in general, especially the sun, moon and stars imagery.
Just like Chicken Little, the majority of modern day
churchgoers have a theological understanding that causes them to believe the
Bible teaches about the sky literally falling. And just like Chicken Little,
they are wrong. The recent "blood moon" fiasco brought more of this type of craziness to the limelight due to typical misunderstandings.
The typical response to the "end time" scenario of these cosmic occurrences, most will respond and simply state that
obviously these things have not yet happened, because we have not seen the stars
literally fall from the sky, or the sky roll up like a scroll, and other similar ideas.
Of
course, one of the main scriptures in question for this type of study is that of Matthew 24:29:
Immediately
after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will
not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the
heavens will be shaken. (Matthew 24:29 ESV)
Is
this verse talking about the end of the entire world where the actual sun, moon
and stars and creation itself is destroyed? Most in the church today seem to
see it that way. Another similar star to earth issue is found in Revelation 12:
3-4 where the tail of the dragon sweeps a third of the stars down to earth.
Yet,
this type of verse is seen by many as being symbolic and not literal – but not
all do. Dispensational teacher John Walvoord agrees with E.W. Bullinger who
said:
It is impossible for us to take this as symbolic; or
as other than what it literally says. The difficulties of the symbolic
interpretation are insuperable, while no difficulties whatever attend the
literal interpretation. (Bullinger, TheApocalypse, 1902 – quoted by Walvoord, TheRevelation of Jesus Christ, 1966)
On
the contrary, a literal approach has major difficulties, as stars tend to be
much larger than the Earth. A single star colliding with the Earth would
obliterate it, so the thought of any more than one is inconceivable.
Walvoord
and others get around this problem – or try to – by saying these stars are
actually more like meteorites, but that does not solve the issue. If evolution
proponents claim that a single meteorite hit the earth and destroyed all life
on earth during the dinosaur age, then to consider a third of the meteorites
hitting earth is again inconceivable.
The
problem with all of this is that they fail to understand how the Bible uses terms
like these over and over again, and so they assign them literal, modern
definitions that are biblically inaccurate.
Hebrew
symbolism and idioms are often ignored or unknown to many today. Most readers
take a surface level view of the Scripture, and use 21st century
definitions and interpretive techniques to come to their conclusions.
A
simple survey of Hebrew Scripture is all that is needed to have a better
understanding of verses like these in the New Testament. So, let us go back and survey how the
Hebrew Scriptures used terms like these. We'll start with Genesis 22:17, which tells us:
I will
surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of
heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall
possess the gate of his enemies and in your offspring shall all the nations of
the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice. (Genesis 22:17-18 ESV)
Now while he does not refer to the offspring as stars, this is an
early connection of people and stars language being referenced together. Of course, we
see that this prophecy came to pass, as we are told plainly in Duet. 1:10:
The LORD
your God has multiplied you, and behold, you are today as numerous as the stars
of heaven. (Duet. 1:20 ESV)
Does
that mean Abraham’s descendants have been multiplied to number into the
billions, or however many the inconceivable amount of stars actually is? No, of
course not, it is being used in a symbolic manner to mean a large amount, not a
literal amount.
Now,
when you jump over to Genesis 37 and the story of Joseph, we find a clear cut
story showing the understanding of how God’s people understood the references
to sun, moon and stars. This story also shows us that it was a historic
understanding well known to them – so this is not where it originated:
Then he
dreamed another dream and told it to his brothers and said, "Behold, I
have dreamed another dream. Behold, the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were
bowing down to me." (Genesis 37:9 ESV)
So, taking the modern approach to
this verse, I guess we should understand that Joseph had a dream where one day
he would basically be a God, and the elements of the universe were going to
literally bow to him. Of course we know that was not the case, and we know that
even his family did not come to such a crazy conclusion:
But when he
told it to his father and to his brothers, his father rebuked him and said to
him, "What is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall I and your mother
and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves to the ground before you?" (Genesis
3:10 ESV)
So,
they clearly understood Joseph to be referencing his parents as the sun and
moon, and his eleven siblings as stars. These cosmic references were commonly
interpreted as representing governing authorities, as understood from Joseph’s
use here – but they were also often descriptive of nations or kingdoms.
This
understanding is not alien to us as modern American’s either, if you stop and
think about it. Our own US flag has stars on it, each representing a different
and separate nation state – a political power basically. Other countries use
stars on their flag in a similar manner.
I
will now share a series of quotes from other sources on this topic.
Before the advent of speculative exegesis, most Bible
commentators who studied the whole Bible understood the relationship of
collapsing universe language with the destruction of the religion and civil
state of the Jewish nation. (Gary DeMar, LastDays Madness, 4th ed., p. 144)
The
rest of these quotes are actually ones that DeMar quoted following what he just
said:
That is, the Jewish heaven shall perish, and the sun
and moon of the glory and happiness shall be darkened – brought to nothing. The
sun is the religion of the [Jewish] church, the moon is the government of the
[Jewish] state, and the stars are the judges and doctors of both. Compare Isa.
13:10; Ezek. 32:7, 8. (John Lightfoot, ACommentary on the New Testament from the Talmud and Hebraica: Matthew – 1
Corinthians, ps. 319-320 – [1859])
The darkening of the sun and moon, the falling of the
stars, and the shaking of the powers of the heavens, denote the utter
extinction of the light of prosperity and privilege to the Jewish nation, the
unhinging of authority of their princes and priests; the abject miseries to
which the people in general, especially their chief persons, would be reduced;
and the moral and religious darkness to which they would be consigned. (Thomas
Scott, The Holy Bible….with ExplanatoryNotes…, v.3 p. 110 [1832])
Thus it is that in the prophetic language great
commotions and revolutions upon earth, are often represented by commotions and
changes in the heavens. (Thomas Newton, Dissertationson the Prophecies, Which Have Remarkably Been Fulfilled, and at this Time areFulfilling in the World, p.362 [1754])
Our savior goes on, to set forth the calamities that
should befall the Jewish nation, immediately after the destruction of
Jerusalem. So entire was the subversion of their ecclesiastical and civil
state, that it may be metaphorically represented by the sun, moon, and stars,
losing their light, and all the heavenly bodies being dissolved. (W. Dalton, An Explanatory and Practical Commentary onthe New Testament, v. 1 p 118 [1842])
In ancient Hieroglyphic writings the sun, moon, and
stars represented empires and states, with their sovereigns and nobility. The
eclipse of their luminaries was said to denote temporary national disasters, or
an entire overthrow of any state. This is still an Eastern mode of writing, and
there are some classical examples of it. The Prophets frequently employ it, so
that their style seems to be a speaking hieroglyphic. Thus Isaiah describes the destruction of Babylon, and Ezekiel
that of Egypt – In accordance with this prediction, Josephus gives an account
of the persecution and slaughter of the nobility and principal men in the city
by the infuriated Zealots, computing their number at twelve thousand. (John
Forster, The Gospel-Narrative, p. 307
[1847])
Hopefully, you can see hos historically this language of cosmology was not to be understood literal, but figurative and symbolic of national judgement from the Lord. We will pick up here and proceed in the next part.
View the other parts of the topic
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
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