Hello All,
(Just a general disclaimer that I must insert here at the beginning. I am but a lay person, like most of you. And these weekly “thoughts” are but my own. Not the definitive word on this or any topic. Just my own conclusions derived from my own study and faith in God. The greatest hope I have for these weekly “thoughts” is to have them be a springboard for further study on your part. Not to be a weekly treatise to be blindly accepted. So, please read them with this intent, this motive in mind).
A new “Adult Sabbath School Study Guide” lesson quarterly for our first quarter of 2020 titled “Daniel”. It’s time to look once again at this pivotal book that means so much to us Seventh-day Adventists. The first lesson titled “From Reading to Understanding” has us look at certain guidelines that have been useful for us to accurately decipher this book that was “closed up and sealed till the time of the end” (Daniel 12:9). This weekly lesson looks at five (5) of those guidelines:
1. Sunday’s lesson has us always remember that Christ is the center of the book of Daniel… and the whole Bible, too. Our other Christian friends miss so much by focusing on the New Testament without taking the entire Bible as a whole to craft their picture of God. And with the book of Daniel, too. So the first tenet is to always place Christ everyplace “God” is referenced or where “God” speaks and acts. Jesus is the personification of the Godhead.
2. Monday’s lesson addresses the literary structure used in Daniel. By ignoring this structure, erroneous interpretations are introduced. Daniel uses a common literary strategy to emphasis the points revealed in vision.
3. Tuesday’s lesson looks at the difference between classical and apocalyptic prophecies. Apocalyptic prophecies often use symbols and imagery beyond this world, while showing events that will definitely take place in this world.
4. Wednesday’s lesson looks at the different ways the apocalyptic prophecies in the book of Daniel can be understood.
a. Preterism sees all the events in Daniel as taking place in the past.
b. Futurism sees all the events as not having taken place yet… but will take place in the future.
c. Idealism sees all the events as symbolic of general spiritual realities… without any specific historical relevancy.
d. Historicism sees the events in a historical perspective (the interpretation used by SDA’s).
e. An understanding of prophetic time as a “year for a day”. This reasoning comes from God’s pronouncement to the Children of Israel when they refused to go into the Promised Land. “According to the number of the days in which you spied out the land, forty days, for each day you shall bear your guilt one year, namely forty years, and you shall know My rejection” (Numbers 14:34). And so with Daniel. “Seventy weeks are determined For your people and for your holy city, To finish the transgression, To make an end of sins, To make reconciliation for iniquity, To bring in everlasting righteousness, To seal up vision and prophecy, And to anoint the Most Holy” (Daniel 9:24). Because of the faithlessness of the people in Moses’ day, (40 days of spying) they wandered 40 years in the wilderness, a year for each day until they were delivered from their wandering. And so in Daniel’s day, because of their faithlessness, seventy weeks of years (490 years) are determined before the Messiah comes who will bring real deliverance.
5. Thursday’s lesson emphasizes that the book of Daniel is also relevant to us today.
So as we study this lesson, let us allow the principal contributor or the editor to guide our study. Just when we think we’ve learned all there is on a certain topic, lo and behold there is still more… and still more. The book of Daniel has played such a great part in our understanding and in our denomination’s eschatology, we can be tempted to disregard this quarter’s lesson. Let us not do this. We are at the “time of the end”. So this book is especially for us. Let us dig!
With brotherly love, Jim