Opus 2025-505: And Then There Were None

I was watching a video where a Bible teacher was going to explain the tribulation.  It was fairly interesting until at the end when he got to looking at chapter 9 of Daniel.

If you are not familiar with the ninth chapter of Daniel, it is a vision referring to 70 weeks of prophecy.  The 70 weeks is broken down into segments of seven weeks and 62 weeks. If you remember your high school math that adds up to 69 weeks.  Initially, there is no mention of the last week, but it is finally dealt with.  When he got down to trying to explain the last day, it got really amusing, confusing, ridiculous.

This is where my skepticism of prophecy rears it’s ugly head.  His explanation was inadequate.  I went, and I looked at the commentaries of a couple of people and they were totally different.  I assume that if I had looked at a couple more, they would’ve also been different .  When you have four different theories, shall we say, you might think that only one of them could be right, and the other three are wrong.

That overlooks an obvious possibility: it’s possible that none of them are right, and all of them are wrong.  I don’t often hear this suggested but it’s where I come down.  When you have multiple highly trained people who in theory know their Bible and hopefully are people of good will coming up with totally different explanations of a confusing passage, it’s time to stop listening.  It is very possible that we don’t know the answer and we won’t ever know the answer.

When you have something in the Bible that we can’t figure out you’re welcome to keep digging, thinking, theorizing.  You can speculate until the cows come home, get milked and put up for the night.  There’s a good chance you still will not have figured it out.  At that point you need to go to bed, get some rest, stop worrying about it, and perhaps the next day read a different portion scripture.  It is very possible that God does not want you to know what it means, at least for the present.

It should give you some encouragement to know that even the people with their doctorates and real teaching positions don’t really know that much more than you do.  I think God has a real sense of humor.

homo unius libri