email from Ellis Skolfield
Hi Brethren,
I answer doctrinal questions in e-mails and post serious articles on Christian Forums; the following is an example. If you would also like doctrinal posts like this forwarded to you, please let me know; otherwise, I’ll just relegate them to my hard drive or my trash bin.
When I look back at the Old Testament, it appears that God’s prophets foretold events that were relevant to the people they were addressing, they had fulfillment in human history to which people could relate. Did we understand those prophecies at the time? No, because God’s prophecies are not like a Ouija board, given to us to foretell the future, but given to show us in hindsight, that God knew what the future would be before it happened.
It appears that Hosea was written to the northern kingdom of Israel to foretell to the people of Israel what their future would be after they were deported from the land into the Caucasus Mountain region by the Assyrians. Hosea appears to be about the total future of the people of the northern kingdom from the deportation until they are restored to the land, 1948 A.D..
In like manner, it appears that Daniel was written to foretell to Judah what their future would be while the holy land, particularly Jerusalem, was under Gentile control. That’s made obvious by the exact fulfillment historically in the pre-Christian world empires of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and later, Rome (Daniel 2, 7 and
. In fact, Daniel prophesied the total future of the holy land and the Jewish people from the time of the Babylonian captivity up to the freeing of Jerusalem from Gentile control in 1967 A.D.
Now God is the same “yesterday, today and forever,†so it seems unreasonable to me that the Lord would change his prophetic method in the New Testament. So was Revelation fulfilled by 70 A.D. as Preterist believe or only about the last seven years of the Christian era as Dispensationalist believe? That just did not seem to fit with the rest of prophetic Scripture, so I began looking at the possibility that Revelation was being fulfilled during the Christian era.
And what do we find? Revelation 11:2 was indeed fulfilled by 1967 and Revelation 12:6 was fulfilled by 1948. Daniel takes us from the abolition of sacrifices in his time to the 688 A.D. construction of the Islamic Dome of the Rock on God’s Temple mount and Revelation 11:2 and 12:6 take us back from 1948 and 1967 to 688 A.D., the Dome of the Rock. Now I’ll accept a coincidence once, but three times over 2500 years? Give me a break, the numbers are inarguable!
But how important is it? In the middle of Revelation we prophecies that were fulfilled during the Christian era and they prove both the Preterist and Dispensational positions to be unsupportable.
Concerning a 1335 “days†of Daniel 12:12. Using the same starting point as the 1290 days (the abolition of sacrifices during Daniel time), the 1335 “days†were fulfilled in 732 A.D. at the Battle of Tours. How blessed indeed that the Lord gave victory to Charles Martel at this battle, because if God hadn’t, Christianity could been wiped from the face of the earth. A contemporary account of the battle follows . . .
Chronicle of St. Denis: “The Moslems planned to go to Tours to destroy the Church of St. Martin, the city, and the whole country. Then came against them the glorious Prince Charles, at the head of his whole force. He drew up his host, and he fought as fiercely as the hungry wolf falls upon the stag. By the grace of Our Lord, he wrought a great slaughter upon the enemies of Christian faith, so that-–as history bears witness-–he slew in that battle 300,000 men, likewise their king by name Abderrahman. Then was he [Charles] first called ‘Martel,’ for as a hammer of iron, of steel, and of every other metal, even so he dashed: and smote in the battle all his enemies. And what was the greatest marvel of all, he only lost in that battle 1500 men.â€
FROM: William Stearns Davis, ed., Readings in Ancient History: Illustrative Extracts from the Sources, 2 Volumes. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1912-13), Vol. II: Rome and the West, pp. 362-364
