I hope you had a wonderful week! Everything is going well with us, so I hope the same is true for you. You know, sometimes it can be a little hard to discern what YHWH is leading you to do. You wonder if it’s your desires driving you a certain direction or if it’s the leading of the Holy Spirit. Obviously, as with anything, prayer is required to help figure this out, but sometimes you just need to step in the direction you think He’s leading and see what happens. Hopefully, your desires and YHWH’s desires are one in the same, but it’s hard for us to figure that out sometimes and if you’ve already prayed about it a bit that’s pretty much the only other way to find out!
We have another installment of revisiting the end this week, and if you haven’t gotten confused yet I hope this isn’t the week that happens! We’ll hopefully try to keep it as clear as possible, and to do that we’ll start with some background information to keep in mind as we study. And again, I can’t emphasize this enough, all this is just what I’ve come to understand through my studies. If you don’t agree, that’s completely fine! I’d just ask that you keep an open mind as we continue this revisiting of the end to see is any of these interpretations resonate with you.
As far as the background information, there is something to recognize about some of the eschatological views that are out there. I would say the vast majority of them involve a belief that the majority of the events of Revelation (and subsequently Matthew 24) are 1) worldwide vice local to the area of Israel and 2) going to occur at some point in the future. To support 1, they point to language in scripture like the word “earth,” and to support 2, they use historical events (or lack thereof) to state that there’s no historical fulfillment of these events on record. They also support 2 with a view that the book of Revelation was written just before John died, in the 90s AD. That way, the events of 70AD, with the destruction of Jerusalem, are excluded from consideration of fulfilling the events John saw.
We’ll get into 1 in a minute, but for 2, there is a key phrase used by Yeshua, when He prophesied what is recorded in Matthew 24, that people like to bring up to “prove” the events He spoke of haven’t been fulfilled yet. That phrase is, “there will be great tribulation, unmatched from the beginning of the world until now, and never to be seen again” (Matthew 24:21). When others bring up 70AD as a possible fulfillment, other more recent historical events like the holocaust or current persecution and murder of Christians by radical Muslims are used as “proof” that His prophecy couldn’t have been fulfilled in 70AD.
There was a man named Josephus that actually lived through the events of 66AD-70AD and recorded what he saw and heard. He wrote it in a book titled The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem. Now, keep in mind, he was not a believer and therefore his writings are not to be considered inspired by the Holy Spirit, but when we consider certain aspects of what he wrote and take into account some of the likely things he might have thought when writing, we still see too many similarities between what he recorded and what John saw in the vision of Revelation to think these two writings are not referring to the same events. Additionally, if you believe that John wrote Revelation in the 90s AD, the similarities between the two would mean that John was copying from Josephus’ work vice being fully inspired by YHWH, because the dating of Josephus’ work is prior to the late dating of the book of Revelation.
When we say we need to take into consideration what things Josephus was thinking when he wrote this historical account, what we mean is that he was a man that was holed up in a cave when the Romans finally overran Jerusalem and was discovered by them. His reputation, saving his own skin, and placating his captors, the Romans, sometimes took priority in his recording, so we have to keep that in mind. If there’s something in his writing that seems to make the Romans out to be more benevolent than we would think, it’s possible that he wrote it that way to keep from getting on the bad side of those that held his life in their hands. If there’s something in there that makes him out to be some kind of hero or a great person, it’s possible he wrote it that way so he wouldn’t look bad to others.
That being said, none of what we can point to as a better than likely fulfillment of events of Revelation fall into either of these categories. So, we can be confident that these things were recorded by him accurately, and without any spin in either direction. You’ll see what we mean in just a moment.
Going back to the supposed proof that the events Yeshua spoke of haven’t been fulfilled because there were horrendous things that happened to Jews and Christians after 70AD, you don’t have to look too far in Josephus’ writing to see how inaccurate this view is. (Warning: the rest of this paragraph will get quite graphic) For just two examples of this, the first is that Josephus records Jews starving to death during the siege of Jerusalem and their bodies being left in their homes because there was no one to take care of them or a place to put them. There were so many dead bodies in the city from fighting that there were piles of them in the streets and they were trampled on while the remaining Jews went to fight against the Romans. There was so much blood in the city it put out fires. The Jewish revolt was not just in Jerusalem, and those that tried to escape on the Sea of Galilee crashed into each other due to weather or the Romans crashed into them or boarded and killed them. The sea was full of dead bodies and as the sun hit them they putrefied. The second example is much more indicative of the horrors that were experienced: a mother killed and roasted her own baby, eating half of it due to lack of food and being starved and saving the other half. There were groups of Jewish revolters that were coming regularly to rape her and she offered them the other half of her baby because they told her to show them what she had cooked (they could smell she had cooked something). (Josephus Wars of the Jews 3:9:3, 6:3:4, 6:6:3, 6:8:5)
As you can see, those who think there are worse events in history that have occurred since the Jewish revolt from 66-70AD are simply uneducated regarding what occurred during that time. It was truly an unmatched great tribulation that had never been seen before and has never been seen since. But you may say, “what about in the rest of the world?” While I would argue that even in the rest of the world there has never been such horror, this brings us back to number 1 above: the use of the word “earth.”
Let’s start with the Greek word that’s translated to earth: ge. This word could be translated to earth or land (meaning the region of Israel and surrounding areas). In Luke, this word is used by Yeshua when referencing the destruction of Jerusalem (Luke 21:23). With few exceptions, nearly all translations use the word “land” for this Greek word in this verse, and that makes sense because Yeshua is clearly talking about a judgment to come on the Jews in that region.
The trouble is, when you get to Revelation and John’s vision, there are a lot of uses of this word. So, you have to try your best to figure out if the Holy Spirit was trying to inspire the idea of the whole world in each case or just the region of Israel. Also, keep in mind, there is another Greek word that is used to mean the whole inhabited earth (meaning everywhere, not just earth), and in other Greek writings it was often used to refer to the portions inhabited by the Greeks or as an equivalent to meaning the Roman Empire. This word is oikoumene, and you have to ask yourself why this word wasn’t used in Revelation if the intention was to reference the whole world vice just the land of Israel.
One example of the use of ge that causes us to question whether it means earth vice the land of Israel is at the very beginning of Revelation. John writes that Yeshua is “coming with the clouds” (there’s those clouds again!) and “all the tribes of the earth [ge] will mourn” (Revelation 1:7). Nowhere in scripture will you see any references to tribes other than to reference the tribes of Israel. Even in Revelation, where you see this Greek word for tribes, in some verses you also see the word ethnos, which is used for those that are non-Israelites, showing that these two Greek words are meant to represent two different types of people, Israelites and non-Israelites (Revelation 5:9, 7:9, 11:9, 13:7). So, in the beginning of Revelation, it should really state, “all the tribes of the land will mourn” and it means the tribes of Israel, because in context, when they saw the judgment given by Yeshua when He came in the clouds, they realized what they did and mourned.
There are other uses of this word that clearly mean land vice the whole world (Matthew 23:35, Acts 1:8, 4:26-27, Romans 10:18), but let’s take a look at an example in Revelation that suggests we need to seriously consider that the majority of the uses of this word, ge, in Revelation are meant to refer to the land of Israel vice the whole earth. When we look at one of the letters to the churches, we can see the use of both oikoumenes and ge in the same verse (Revelation 3:10). Yeshua says He will keep the church of Philadelphia from the hour of trial coming upon the whole world [oikoumenes] to test those who dwell on the land [ge]. When we look at this verse and the Greek words used, it’s a clear reference to the events of 66-70AD and the Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire. Jewish cities in the Empire, including Jerusalem, were fighting against the Empire, meaning the hour of testing had come upon the “whole world” since oikoumenes was used as a reference to the Roman Empire. The Jewish cities were limited to the land of Israel though, because that’s where the Jews lived when the Empire came and occupied that land. Therefore, this hour of trial was testing those who dwelled in the land of Israel, and not those who lived in the rest of the Empire.
When we start to look at the words of Revelation, and even the rest of scripture, through this lens, things start to make more sense and fall into place. We see that the “kings of the earth” that hid in the rocks and caves of the mountains (Luke 23:30, Revelation 6:15) align with the account of leaders in Jerusalem retreating during the siege to the caves and caverns of the upper city (Josephus Wars of the Jews 6:7:3). The “third of the earth and all the green grass” that was burned up (Revelation 8:7) aligns with the Romans cutting all the trees down around Jerusalem for 90 furlongs (11.25 miles), using them for various purposes like tents, catapults, ramps, etc., and then them being burned by the Jews during the fighting (Josephus Wars of the Jews 6:1:1), and the Romans burning plains of grass around cities and stealing the cattle that were grazing there (Josephus Wars of the Jews 3:4:1).
There are many more events of Revelation that clearly align with what Josephus recorded, right down to the weight of certain objects, and we’ll get more into that next week. This week though, it’s important to recognize that once you know what actually happened during the Jewish revolt of 66-70AD, any other event in history pales in comparison to its grotesqueness and horror. Also, many, if not all, of the uses of the word “earth” in Revelation actually mean land, and more specifically the land of Israel. Finally, Josephus’ recording of the events during that revolt are essentially the final nail in the coffin of a late dating of when John wrote the book of Revelation. There are too many similarities to maintain that John’s work was inspired by the Holy Spirit if he wrote it in the 90s AD, and we can be assured that a non-believing Jew like Josephus would not go out of his way to give credence to an apostle of Yeshua by reading his work and then writing an account of the Jewish revolt that lines up with it.
We’ll continue next week with this revisit of the end, so until then we hope you have a great week! Shabbat Shalom!
-Rob and Sara Gene
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