Bible Questions with Michael Pearl
Episode 011: Are Daniel's prophecies meant for the Church?

Episode Transcription:

Michael Pearl:  Hi again, this is Mike Pearl. We're back here to answer your Bible questions. So, Jared is going to read them. I've not seen them yet, and I'm going to try to give you an answer from the old black book here. My black book is losing it's cover.

Jared:  Could you please explain how to study the prophetic books, specifically "Daniel's 70 weeks." Are those prophecies for today's church, or was it just a prophecy for Jerusalem?

Michael:  OK. There's three issues there that this question has raised. I don't know if I'll remember all three of them or not. First of all, let's go backwards. The book of Daniel, is it for the church? The book of Daniel is for the end days. It makes that clear. In fact, the book of Daniel ends with the second coming of Christ, with the establishment of the kingdom. Each one of the dreams Daniel had terminated with, for instance the rock cut out without hands, comes rolling down the mountain, smashes these four world kingdoms and sets up a kingdom which will never be destroyed, which kingdom is ruled by the Almighty through the nation of Israel. So, certainly that's an end time prophecy, no way you could avoid that.

So, it has implications for all the nations. It's got the Gentile nations, each one of the divisions, has Gentile nations, Gentile kings, and has God's kingdom in competition with it, which wins in the end. In fact the book of Daniel is far much more for us today than it was even at the time that it was given, far more meaningful. Easier to understand now, because we have the book of Revelation.

The book of Daniel and the book of Revelation fit together like this, like hand in glove. You wouldn't understand the book of Revelation well at all without the book of Daniel, and in turn the book of Daniel is opened up and illuminated by the book of Revelation, as well as some of Paul's comments in the epistles and some of the things Christ said in Matthew chapter 24 and other places. So that was one of your questions.

And the other one was...What was the other one, how to interpret, what was the rest of it?

Jared:  [Inaudible 02:08‑02:13]

Michael:  You should know by now not to put the questions away.

Jared:  Are those prophecies for today's church? How to study the prophetic books.

Michael:  How to study the prophetic books. OK. The best way to study the Bible as a whole is to start with the big picture. Get yourself some graphs or charts of Bible history. Larkin's "Dispensational Truth" is absolutely essential in that regard. There are other works, lesser works, but every one of them are based on what Larkin did. Written in about 18, I mean, 1910 or 1917, something like that, Larkin's "Dispensational Truth" is a series of graphs, graphing out the scriptures in terms of the chronology and the development, and the relationship of events according the calendar time frame. So get something like Larkin's "Dispensational Truth, " and make sure when you start reading a book, you know where it fits. Make sure you know where the prophets....You can download off the Web, charts that would have each prophet in relationship to the king of Israel, and the king of Judah, and also in relationship to the secular kings that related to Israel, like Babylon, Assyria, Egyptian pharaohs.

So when you can understand the time frame in which a prophet is writing, who was king, then you can go back and take the historical books, first and second Kings, first and second Chronicles, Samuel, and then take the prophets and place the prophet in the historical book and read those together, then you get a much better view.

It also is good to take some simple conservative commentary that relates some of that information. Don't trust a commentary to interpret each individual passage of scripture, but they're often good for giving you a historical overview of the context of that particular book. So you read two or three different commentaries to get an overview of the context of the book.

And then you need to do word studies. For instance, when you come to the book of Daniel where he speaks of "Times, times, and the dividing of times, " don't guess what that is. Don't ask the Seventh Day Adventists, or the Baptists. When he says, "Times, times, and the dividing of times, " get your Bible out and look up "Times" and see what it is. You'll find that words are repeated, phrases are repeated, and in each context it is self‑defining.

So when you have something, a word appearing just three times in the whole Bible, or a phrase, and each time it is used in a context, you put those three together and you can get a very well‑rounded definition of that word. When something is used 15, 20 times or 100 times, you can throw out your Greek lexicons and your Hebrew lexicons. They become useless at that point because you have the original resource. You have all of these different contexts in which these words were used, and that becomes the most infallible way to define a word or a phrase.

So when you define all the words, define all the phrases, then you can understand the sentences. Then you can understand the chapters, and you can understand the books in relationship to the whole. So that's the way you study.
There was a third part to that question that was implied. I don't remember what it was now. My brain is old. All right, we'll let that suffice.

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