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How's it going everybody?

My name is Jacob Glass.

Welcome back to another episode of the Millennial medic Here on Eschatology Matters.

Today is a very special episode.

I get to take some time and speak with Jay Rogers.

Jay is the author of a couple of books on the Book of Daniel.

So now that we're jumping into Daniel chapter seven, I thought it would be perfect to have somebody who has an expertise in Daniel, the Book of Daniel in general, especially Daniel chapter seven, when it's going to get a little bit more complicated, the imagery is going to get a little bit more in depth.

We're going to have to a lot more digging.

So I thought Jay would be the perfect person to have on for Daniel chapter seven.

So welcome to the show.

Jay, Hi, how are you.

It's good to be here.

So for those listeners who might not be familiar with who you are and kind of what you've done specifically on the Book of Daniel, can you kind of give us just a little bit of an introduction.

Now, I'm just like, you know, the typical kid from Birmingham, Massachusetts.

I grew up in the seventies, and the reason I got interested in aschatology was that this was just something I've always been interested in, even before my born again experience.

As an adult, I had interest in reading a lot of Christian books.

As a teenager.

I grew up in a Catholic community.

We had a lot of Irish Catholic Italian Catholic families in my neighborhood, so everyone in my neighborhood went to the same church, you know, And a contrary to popular belief, there are Catholics who actually do read the Bible.

And we were taught at in CCD classes, and I also took a Bibleist literature class in high school.

But I can.

Remember when I was about eleven years old.

It was nineteen seventy three.

Now I was with my babysitter, and I had two younger sisters at that time, and this was a long weekend and we were together watching TV on this program and a newsflash came on, and they used to have news flashes in the seventies, or they'd interrupt the regular programming, and they came on and they had announced that Egypt had just invaded Israel.

So this was called the nineteen seventy three youm Kippur war, and I didn't know what was going on, but my babysitter looked very shocked and astonished, and she just said, you don't understand what this means.

This is the end of the world.

Jesus could come back because the Bible says that when the nations surround Israel and attack it, when Israel's attacked on all sides, that's the time.

When Jesus is going to come back.

So I'd never heard that.

Before, and I remember seeming kind of incredulous, but I wasn't scared by it.

I was actually kind of excited because I thought, well, you know, I get to see Jesus come back.

And I was eleven years old, so you know, I had I had friends at different types in school.

I had one friend who was Evangelical Lutheran and he lived not far from my house and I would go over there and his mom introduced me to programming, like you know, they told me, you know, you should watch the Seven hundred Club, PTL Club, which were like Christian programming at the time.

They gave me Christian books to read everything from, you know, David Wilkerson's books all the way to books about theology, creation science, little Christian experience books, and one of their books I remember was reading was on Search for Noah's arc.

But also during that time, I was very interested in anything that was out of the normal, like anything that was you know, supernatural or paranormal.

I remember Eric von Danikin's Charius of the Gods, you know, about the ancient astronauts they come down to Earth, and I think that that was prevalent in the whole culture at that time in the seventies, So we were very interested in anything that was out of the ordinary.

Anything paranormal was popular.

So there were books and movies about, you know, documentaries about the Locknocks Monster.

There were movies about Bigfoot and that type of thing.

So I remember.

Seeing on television there was this little documentary that Hal Lindsay had done and I saw it and it was about the late Great Planet Earth.

So right about that time, I visited my cousin staying at his house and I was about thirteen years old, and we went into a bookstore at the mall and I saw this book in the religion section.

It said the Late Great Planet Earth by Hell Lindsay, and I saw this is the book we need to get, you know, So we bought the book and I brought it home read it that weekend, and I became like this little mini prophecy expert at age thirteen.

And I started telling my cousin cousins all about it.

And I can even remember we saw on television that the United States had sold fighter jets to Iran.

Iran at that time was actually our ally, believe it or not.

So we've kind of it all over the place on these things.

And I remember saying to my cousin, you know, don't they realize that Iron is one of the nations in this confederacy that's going to attack Israel and the End Times?

You know, we're giving them better jets to do that, you know.

So everything I saw on the news, all of a sudden became about the end Times.

So my born again experience came after I graduated from college, and it was just like the type of thing when you hit a certain Asian life where prior to that everything's all about pleasure and fun, and then all of a sudden, you're an adult in reality sets in and you start to ask questions about why is life so hard?

And why don't relationships work out?

And things like that.

So, due to a series of things that happened in my family and then something that happened with me personally in a relationship, I just started looking for answers like, you know, do I have a possibility of ever getting married without having to get divorced at some point?

You know?

Do I have a possibility of having a happy life?

And so on?

So I started at my cousin's church.

This was the same cousin that I read Late Gray Planet Earth where as a teenager, and my conversion experience was not really that dramatic, but I did have a lot of dramatic experiences since then.

I got to see a lot of people come to the Lord during outreach of emissions, work, have their lives turn around, and things like that.

I was also able to take, in a very short period of time after that, twelve trips to the former Soviet Union.

We established a Christian newspaper in Russia and Ukraine.

And then just prior to that, I had gotten involved with a Christian newspaper in Florida called The Forerunner, and that's how I ended up in Florida.

So I saw God do a lot of things in my life that just proved to me that he was sovereign, that he had a destiny for my life.

But I remember the first year that I was a Christian sitting through a prophecy seminar at my home church in Boston, and the pastor had invited in this prophecy expert.

This was Ardnama Nations, you speaker on Bible prophecy, and he was going to come in and teach us on the end times and how to be prepared for what's coming and so on.

I've seen numerous seminars like that since then, but I can remember saying listening to this man, and I was already familiar with Hall Lindsey, but I was hearing things from the dispensationalist point of view that I just never heard before.

And I started to really question whether I would get that from reading the Book of Revelation for myself.

So what I did was I got a book.

I got a tape, little cassette tape of the Book of Revelation, and I listened to it all the way through a couple of times, and I said, yeah, I would never think of this on my own.

I don't really understand what the Book of Revelation is about.

I just don't think it's about this what he was talking about.

So I went to one of my pastors, one of the associate pastors in our church, and I said, you know, I liked the seminar.

I thought it was very interesting, but I don't know if I can agree with everything this guy said.

And I remember my pastor just looked at me and said, you don't agree with everything.

I don't agree with most of the things he said.

And I just thought that was kind of strange because here was a guy that was supposed to be a prophecy expert, and then my own pastor said, I don't think I agree with even half of what he said.

So I started asking a lot of questions about eschatology.

Now I remember that I had this Bible growing up.

This is a Catholic Bible.

It has footnotes, and this is the Bible that I read when I was thirteen years old and older.

And I could remember this footnote from the Book of Revelation, chapter thirteen, where it says that six hundred and sixty six, verse eighteen.

The most probable interpretation of the number is that it represents the name Caesar Neron with a nan at the end, which in Hebrew characters make up the number six hundred and sixty six.

It symbolizes extreme imperfection.

For each digit is sort of short of each digit is one short of seven, the number that signifies perfection.

So I remember this Bible, and I went back and I looked at it, and so I can remember thinking, okay, so there's other views.

That are out there.

There's you know, this is what's known as the predorist view.

And then the number of symbology is the number of the Trinity.

It's the imperfect man number six trying to be like God who symbolized by three.

That's called the idealist or symbolic view.

So I knew that there were other.

If I could step in just real quick, making me think here, is there a general consensus among Catholics in terms of their kind of eschatological view, whether it be you know, idealism or preterism.

Is there kind of a consensus among Catholics.

I know a lot of them generally are getting their theology from you know, the Mother Church.

Do they hold to a more widespread kind of like Protestants would, where there's a lot of difference in views, or did they kind of hold to one similar view.

It's something I'm not really familiar with.

Well, you know, I actually did a little study on this a while back for another book that I was working on, and what I found out was that in the Middle Ages, many of the commentators were eclectic, like they would look at one verse and they would say, oh, I'm going to interpret this from a preterist perspective, and then a few verses later in the next passage or the next chapter is more like an ongoing historical or idealist view, and then other parts they placed into the future, which so it was kind of like a grab bag where they'd mix things together.

And the earliest commentary on any book in the Bible that we have is on the Book of Revelation, believe it or not.

It's called by Victorinus of Pateau or Victorinus, whoever you say it.

And he wrote a commentary on Revelation I think in the late third century or early fourth century, and so he lived around that era, and it was edited later by Jerome.

But he does that thing, you know, where he's talking about in one chapter.

This is Nero and then at the end of the book in Revelation twenty, he's not a premillennialist, but he's more of an amillennialist or a post millennialist.

And then much of the book is also a futurist and interpretation.

But they weren't talking about, you know, two thousand years in the future.

They were talking about maybe like you know, coming up very shortly.

It was kind of imminent.

So they mixed everything together.

And it wasn't until the Reformation era where you had the historical grammatical method.

And this is like when people say scripture has to interpret scripture, and also a scripture can only have one meaning, not multiple meanings and so on, so they tended to stick with one interpretation, one hermaeutic.

So people have literally been all over the map when they deal with a book like Daniel, looking about the different kingdoms and empires and things like that.

So I just started my search because I got confused by all of this, and I eventually found a book by John Jeffer Davis called christ Victoria's Kingdom Post Millennialism Reconsidered.

That's about one hundred and twenty pages or so, and I was able to read it in about one or two sittings, and that convinced me that the postmillennial view is probably what I believe, because it has a strong message of victory, you know, and that's what I think as a Christian, is that you if you have the Holy Spirit teaching you and living on the inside of you, you have something that's very attractive to this message of victory and liberty.

So I felt this was very compelling, but I still couldn't figure out the Book of Revelation.

It took me until about nineteen ninety nine.

I've been working with a campus newspaper, as I said the Foremunner, I've been taking mission strips to Russia and Ukraine, and somewhere in there, I actually did write an article on whether Russia was Gog and magog, which is what Hele Lindsay said, which was kind of interesting, but I took a preterist view on that issue.

And I later had the opportunity to work on a video with Eric Homberg and Reltoral Ministries, which was based out of Pensaclea, Florida, and we were able to do a documentary like a little documentary question I answer format, based on a message that Ken Gentry had given at the Ligonnaire Conference, which is our Csborrow's big conference, Ligonnaire Ministries.

This was back in nineteen ninety nine and it was called the Beast of a Revelation identified and I thought, you know, I'm kind of sympathetic to this view.

I don't know if I agree with all of it.

But in the process of editing that video and going through Gentry's teaching and the little question and answer session we did with him at the end of the video, I became convinced that this is what Revelation thirteen and seventeen's talking about.

It's the persecution of the Christians under Nero, and then other parts of the book do deal with the destruction of Jerusalem in eighty seventy.

So I became convinced later on that point of view, but it took me a long time and a lot of study.

The reason I became interested in Daniel is I remember that in this Bible that I had right here, I said, well, how would this all line up, Like, how does this Revelation thirteen and seventeen line up, for instance, with Daniel two and Daniel seven about you know, the statue and the beasts and all of that.

So I went to that Bible and I copied down all the footnotes.

I just started writing on it, and I wrote what was a predoriust treatment of the prophetic portions of Daniels, like five visions, Daniel two, and then Daniel seven through twelve.

So I shared this on a bulletin board online and then, you know, back in the day, they used to have these bulletin boards before there was social media.

And I got into a debate with this Australian scholar's name was Francis S.

Nigoli, who was a historicist and also a really you know, really I think, gracious man.

He took a lot of time and we disagreed, but he was very, you know, very even tempered about it.

So we had historicists on one side of the debate who were reformed, and then the preterists, you know, two different camps, and the reformed theology group.

And we went back and forth for about a month, and I took all the notes from that and I put my articles from Daniel and all the notes together on my website for Uner dot com.

And then over the years I got other questions.

I answered those questions the best I could put those on the website as well as notes.

And then the one question I kept getting over and over again was do you know of a good preterist commentary on the Book of Daniel?

And I would be like, oh, so you want a good commentary, you know, not my material, but something good, right, So I said, well, I know that, you know, John Calvin has a good commentary on Daniel, but it's over a thousand pages long.

It's not really light reading, you know.

So the more I got that question, I started to ask people, you know, do you think I should write one?

And I'm not a credential Bible scholar.

I'm just an English teacher.

I was starting to be an English teacher in college and later I went back to doing that for a living.

And so I know how to read words on a page and know what they mean, right.

I've been around literature and writing my whole life, so I know like the basics of literary criticism, which is very similar, if not the same, bi biblical criticism.

So I saw that I could probably put together what I have, you know, do a historical section on it, do an introduction.

The notes.

I had the commentary, I had historical background and an index.

I'll be done, it'll be about one hundred pages, two hundred pages.

Maybe.

I got into the reading of all the history, you know, the ancient history from that restoration period, you know, the period after Daniel, when all the prophecies are fulfilled, especially Daniel chapter eleven and so on, and I realized, you know, I know little or next to nothing about ancient history.

I knew the basic outlined, but I didn't know anything about the Solucid period or the Telemate period.

And it took me about eighteen months of stef research, and I ended up with a book that was about, you know, over seven hundred pages, and then had to cut it down some.

So that's my book.

It's called the Book of Daniel and prederist Perspective.

Excuse me, it's called The Days of These Kings, the Book of Daniel and Prederist's Perspective.

And then I wrote a follow up because I have more questions specifically about you know, how does Daniel seven align with revelation and that type of thing.

So I did another book called The Prophecy of Daniel and Prederist's Perspective, the easy parts and the hard parts.

And the reason it's called that is because the Book of Daniel itself is pretty much agreed on by conservative scholars if you look at most of the prophecies, like people will say that, you know, the first kingdom is Babylon, the second kingdom is Persia, and then this is Greece, and then the fourth kingdom is Rome.

And I'm talking about you know, conservative, serious conservative scholars, not the pop eschatology.

We've a lot of crazy theories, but the really good, serious commentaries.

I all pretty much agree on certain parts of Daniel.

But then there are other parts that I call the hard parts, and that's where almost everyone disagrees.

And so for instance, you'll read Calvin talking about the Little Horn, which I'll show you later, and he say things like he'll say things like, you know, in this place the little Horn, some say us the Pope, others say us the Turk.

You know, it's like the Ottoman Empire at that time, the Muslim invader somewhere in the Middle Ages.

And so he says they're all wrong, you know.

So every commentator has this idea that even though there's like several dozen other interpretations, that their version of what's going on in these hard passages is the correct one.

So I wanted to go in and I really wanted to look at that carefully, like what are the hard parts, and then critique what some of the other views were, and then to give my point of view on it.

And you know, so just so you know up front, I'm not saying that the answers that I am going to present here are correct.

You know, what you should do is take what I say, go to the Bible, be like a good bread.

Let the Holy Spirit guide you.

Eschatology is not primary doctrine, it's not primary orthodoxy that determines whether or not you're saved.

But I do think it's important because it helps us understand, you know, this is where we've been in God's plan, this is where we're headed in God's destiny, and so on.

Absolutely, yeah, some people would even say eschatology matters, right, So it's it's definitely been a huge mind shift for me over the last few years.

Like you, I had some dispensational kind of upbringings.

I really didn't realize it at the time.

I was a lot younger.

I grew up through kind of the second wave of the rapture culture, right, You're you're talking about the first wave with how Lindsey and all that.

I kind of grew up with the movies, right, the Kirk Cameron movies Left Behind, and that was constantly playing in my house.

It's even without studying it.

That was my mind right when I would go to scripture.

That's what I thought was true.

You know, I didn't understand that people would lie or people would have misunderstandings of scripture when I was that young, you know, you just kind of soak everything in.

So that ended up kind of changing over time as I started to become more aware of scripture and understanding it more.

I kind of turned into what everybody would call now the pan millennialists, the idea that I don't really know, you know, everything's just going to kind of work out in the end.

And that's kind of what I held for probably majority of my adult life up until these past maybe five years, where I really started diving into eschatology and really I like how you said it, and it's what kind of drives me as well as letting scripture interpret scripture.

So that was kind of build out from that Reformation framework, looking into the scriptures and trying to make it cohesive within itself, and that was probably The coolest thing I saw, both of Revelation and now studying through Daniel is almost every time a vision or a prophecy happens, very shortly after, there's an interpretation in scripture of that very thing.

So it's like you don't have to go as far as a lot of the people do to go off to obviously the Apache helicopters and everything like that.

It's like, well, what is scripture actually trying to tell you?

And then you brought up Gentry.

Gentry has been huge as well as Bonsen people that have really taught me to view prophecy and then to see if that imagery has been used anywhere else in scripture, and if it has, what did it mean then?

And how how is the author kind of using that imagery now to show you something and to teach you something.

So once you start seeing that connection between Daniel and Revelation and Matthew, it really kind of brings you back down to earth, right, You're not up here in La La land with all of the crazy interpretations that people come up with.

So once that kind of once I kind of came aware of that, the pretors perspective became very attractive to me.

In that way because it made sense.

It was it was very logical, reasonable, and I felt like I could keep a consistent hermeneutic as I studied scripture.

Yeah, that's when I started to go on my search.

You know, when I had abandon this dispensational model.

I became, you know, more of an idealist.

I think, I think this has something to do with what's going on today, but not really specifically.

And then I would ask people.

I joined this campus fellowship and they were really into the idea of dominion emissions.

You know, we're going to take over the world for Jesus and that type of thing influence every area of life.

And so some people were reading the Reconstructionist authors in my church, you know, Rush Journey and so on, and so I would go to people and I would say, okay, well, you know that you believe in dominion whatever, but how do you interpret the Book of Daniel var instance, in Revelation.

How do you do that?

And I would get often get an answer from people like, you know, I just don't read those parts of the Bible.

I just got too many arguments over it.

It's not good to get into division.

And so I'm a pan millennialist.

It's all going to pan out, you know.

And I always felt very disappointed by that answer, because I felt like, you know, why would God give us an inspired book that we're supposed to live by, But it's impossible to understand, you know.

I was in RC.

Sproulls church for about ten years when he was alive here in Orlando.

He was in Sanford actually, and he said something that was very interesting about the perpecuity of scripture, which is the understandability of scripture.

He said that the amazing thing about the Bible is not that we disagree on.

Now, it's not the things that we disagree on.

The amazing thing is how much we actually.

Agree on it.

And there's really you know, if you go through the whole Bible, I don't know what percentage, but would be about you know, ninety five percent to ninety nine percent of the Bible, which most Christians agree on.

We have in other words that says this, it means this, there's a plain meaning there.

But then there are other passages that are the difficult passages that you have to wrestle with.

And so I always wonder why is it that those passages are there?

And I think a lot of the problem, I believe is not with the word of God.

The problem is with us in our own worldview.

You know, we're not in the culture and the historical circumstances of the people that we're reading or hearing the original message.

So we tend to think, well, this is a message for us, and we're very kind of egocentric about it, and we don't put ourselves at the heart of things.

So that's one of the things as an English major and an English teacher that we're taught to do.

And we're taught to get the students to understand the author's perspective and the author's point of view, to understand audience relevance, and how would the audience have understood Daniel, what's the historical background and so on.

So there are parts of Daniel where even Daniel says he doesn't understand it, and the Angel is saying things like, you know, don't worry when the end of day is those who are why, I shall understand.

Yeah, And and what you're saying there with the methodology that you were taught kind of as a teacher, I mean, how different is that today, The way that teachers are taught now right, it's less about you know, what did the original audience understand from it?

Now it's you know, we were supposed to base it off of how you feel about it or how you know somebody else should feel about it, and you can have your own interpretation that whole.

I guess higher criticism idea than things that are kind of being pushed into colleges now in schools now, you aren't taught to actually think of the original audience, and that I feel like that can really mess up a lot of young Christians when they're coming to read scripture, is because they are taught to think of what does this mean to me?

Rather than what did it actually mean to the original audience and what was the author's intent behind writing it in the first place.

That you can't just switch the meaning of what the author meant and think it's true.

Well, I don't know what happened.

Culturally, It's very complicated.

You know.

You just can't blame it on one thing.

You know, you can blame it on the public schools, but I think there's other things going on there too.

But I remember in the nineteen nineties or nineteen eighties, I think it was the USA today first came out, and it was very controversial because here is this newspaper that was going to be popular because it's got larger print, it's in color, there are no spills, and the reading level wasn't about the sixth grade reading level.

And that's because since I don't know since when, but for a long time, that's the average reading level of Americans.

It's about the sixth grade.

So prior to that, you'd read newspapers that are written on the high school level or the college level of journals and magazines and things like that.

So I mean, if you go back to the nineteen fifties and read Christianity today and read it today, there are two different things.

Even if you go into a young adult section in a bookstore like in Barnes and Noble.

I remember trying to find a middle school level book for my nephew.

You get a project to do for his school, and I'm looking everywhere in my app on my phone.

Each book you picked out, I was like, well, what's the lexule of book you had to read?

A middle school level book?

And they're all saying, well, they're.

All elementary school level books, and.

So I finally I went to the women working at Barnes and Noble, and I said, do you know what, do you have anything in the young adult section that's actually on a young adult level, because you know all these books saying they're on an elementary school level.

And she just kind of like shook her head and said, well, you know, unfortunately, that's kind of things how things are.

But I had to get used to this as a teacher for a long time, and it dawned on me that when people are saying young adult, what they're talking about is elementary school level writing.

So people are reading at a very low level.

First of all.

Also, if you go back to the eighteen hundreds and you read something about anything about scripture, you know, you read a book on the Bible, you read a book on the Bible or a Bible commentary back then, it's a lot more difficult to get through and it takes a lot more attention.

It's longer sentences, more difficult vocabulary, and so on.

So it's not written for a pop audience.

But the average reading level of Americans is now, like, you know, middle school reading level, but on the early nineteen hundreds, it would be about what we would call the college level today.

If you can believe that, you know, someone could pick up a book back in the eighteen hundreds by someone like Frederick Farrar.

He has a novel called.

The Darkness and the Dawn and it's a novel about nero and he showed the whole history of neuro and he also wrote a predor's commentary.

He wrote a book that had a preteror's commentary on revelation as well, so people, would you read that kind of thing for fun, you know?

And he actually wrote that novel because he wanted to make more money than when he was making off of his theology books, which is kind of interesting.

Okay, So kind of moving on from there, we're having some tech technical difficulties.

So if we can move into starting with Daniel chapter seven now kind of getting into the meat of things.

So Daniel chapter seven, like I said at the beginning, right, has a lot more imagery than I think the previous six chapters had.

Right, Obviously we have Daniel chapter two, but I would say, you know, one, three, four, five, and six are fairly I think agreed upon.

It's not until you really start getting into I think seven and nine where a lot of the difference in views really start being very apparent.

So when we get into Daniel chapter seven, the very first thing we see is right, we see in the first year of Belshazzar, a king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream.

It had disturbed him on his bed, and he kind of relays that dream.

So the very first thing we kind of have to deal with in this dream as he starts describing these four great beasts.

So, Jay, would you be able to kind of walk us through these beasts?

Okay?

One thing I want to say about the Book of Daniel as a whole is that Daniel was con term with two things.

He was concerned about preserving Jewish worship, the worship of the One True God during the captivity in Babylon, and they were looking forward to a time when the Temple would be rebuilt.

So some of Daniel's concern in the prophecy is about the rebuilding of the temple.

And then another concern is the coming of the Messiah.

So the rebuilding of the Temple the eventual coming of the Messia are the two great events that Daniel's looking forward to.

Daniel Chapter two starts with the four kingdoms, symbolized by a statue there's the gold, the silver, the brass, the legs of iron, and the feet of iron with toes mixed with myrie clay.

And we know that the head of gold is Babylon, But Daniel's looking forward and doesn't give us the names of these other kingdoms.

But then when you go into Daniel seven, you see the four kingdoms again, this time symbolized by the four beasts from the sea.

And so what happens in here is that Daniel is seeing the same idea, but he has different symbolism.

So in these visions they have to align with each other, they recapitulate, and then each time each vision adds a little bit more to the information.

It's not until you get into Daniel eight that you find out that the second and third kingdom are Persia and Greece by name.

Then in Daniel nine it gives you a timeframe which brings us up to the time of what it says in Daniel two, in the days of these kings and the days of the fourth Kingdom.

So in the days of these kings, the Messiah is going to come.

That's Daniel two, and then Daniel two and nine also aligned because it brings you up until the time of the Roman Empire with an exact number of years.

And then after that you have a fifth vision, which is Daniel eleven through twelve, And in Daniel eleven through twelve you have a very specific vision which then recapitulates very briefly Persia, because now Daniel I was living in the Persian period.

He doesn't go back and recap the Babylonian Empire, but he gives just a very brief history of Persia, and then a long history of the Greeks, the Ptolemaic kingdoms and the Talamic Kingdom with their rulers, and then the Selucid rulers, the kings of the North and the South.

So this is the Greek period, and then finally into the Roman period again, which I believe starts in chapter eleven and goes into chapter twelve.

So you have that.

Pattern in which the visions align with each other, but they also recapitulate, and then one adds a little bit more information to the one prior to that.

So that's a good way of understanding the hermeneutics.

That's a good way to interpret the book.

So you have to do the same thing with Danuel seven that you do with Daniel two, so that you'd go and say, well, the four kingdoms must be the same kingdoms.

Now I've seen people go and deviate from that.

I think it just makes a mess out of the interpretation.

But like I said, most conservative comment I settled on these kingdoms.

It's Babylon, it's Persia, then Greece, and then Rome.

The four beasts are not widely disagreed upon by conservatives.

But then we get into the part about the Little Horror, and that's where people are literally all over the place.

And so what I would say there is the first thing we have to understand is that we all have to agree on this is Rome.

The preterists are going to say it's Rome in the first century.

The historicists are going to say, yes, it's Rome in the first century, but also leading up to the papacy of the Roman Catholic Church era, like that Rome the Holy Roman Empire, right, and then the little Horn would be maybe the papacy or something else during that time period in the Middle Ages, and the futurists might say, well, it's yeah, it's Rome, but it's a revived Rom in the end times.

And so people have looked for all different types of things.

Like I can remember when I was growing up, how Lindsay said it was the European Community, the European Economic Union, which they called it different names at different times, but like the e C and then the ee C and now it's the EU, and so anyway, at one time, the European Union, which is what we call it today, had ten nations, so people thought, oh, here we are, We're in the end times.

Here's the ten nation confederacy, you know.

And we'll get into that in a minute with Daniel seven.

But of course the EU is much larger than that today, so we're gonna have to say that, you know, with the preterist idea, which is the view that you and I take, we're going to talk about the little horn.

So the most important thing to understand about Daniel seven is that Daniel sees it right from the very beginning of the chapter.

So there are four great beasts.

They came up from the sea.

Each one was different from the other.

One has a lion with eagles wings they were plucked off.

Another beast was like a bear, had ribs in its mouth, three ribs in its mouth.

There was a leopard that had four wings, of a bird, and the beasts also had four heads.

Okay, dominion was given to it.

So that aligns with chapter eight where Grease has you know this, there's a ram and then there's a goat, and there's also four horns there.

So there's an alignment between Daniel seven and Daniel eight.

So we know we get into chapter eight that the leopard is Grease and the bear is Persia, because it specifically says in those chapters that they are.

All right, So we have this dreadful beast, and what this prophecy center is on from here on end is the fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, exceedingly strong.

It had huge iron teeth, devouring, breaking in pieces and trampling residue with his feet.

It was different from all the other beasts before.

Notice that the statue had iron feet with Marie Clay.

The statue also has huge iron teeth, so in Daniel two iron feet with Marie Clay, and then this this chapter has iron teeth that iron beasts, and he was trampling the residue with his feet, so it's in both visions.

It's trampling something here, all right.

So the same thing back with the statue it had feet mixed with Marie Clay.

The Marie Clay and Daniel two symbolizes the same things in both visions here.

Okay, so the gentile nations, and I would say specifically the nation of Judea.

It was different from all the other beasts that were before had ten horns.

Now, notice it says the beasts had ten horns.

Nowhere in the prophecy doesn't say it has eleven horns, but it does say there was another horn.

Okay, Now this is where people get very you know, I don't want to say they get confused, but there's a lot of disagreement here.

Okay, a little one coming up from among them before whom the first three ones were plucked out by the roots, And there in this horn where eyes of a man were like eyes of a man.

And I'm mouse speaking pompous words.

So the big disagreement comes, who are the ten horns or what are the ten horns?

And who is this man who's a little horn?

All right, So there's two ways of looking at it.

One of them would be to say, well, there's an eleventh horn.

But what it says over and over again is that the bet said ten horns, So I lean away from that idea.

What I say is that one of the horns he sees, he sees after the ten horns, and it's one of the horns that grows up, it comes up among them.

Yeah, I think that definitely makes sense in terms of the imagery, the way that your mind is drawn to kind of try to view this image.

You're right that it says ten horns over and over again, unless they were talking about some completely separated horn that wasn't connected to the beast, which would really make no sense that it would be this self sufficient little horn over here.

But that's not what the imagery is actually saying, right, It's talking about a beast with ten horns.

So I think your your interpretation there made a lot of sense to me when I was reading through it, that the little one was a part of the ten because, like you said, you know, it says it over and over that there's ten horns, and then you go into revelation and it also is talking about ten horns.

Yeah, it says before whom three of the first horns were plucked up by the roots.

Later on, we're going to find out that the little horns comes after them.

And when you read it, you can take it as it came after the ten, or you could take it as it comes after the three, or you could take it as he saw afterward the little horn come up.

We haven't gotten to that yet.

In between there's a vision of the ancient of days, which is also very interesting, but we're not going to focus on that here.

And then he comes back to the ten horns again.

I watched them because of the sound of the pompous words which the horn was speaking.

I watched till the beast was slain and his body destroyed and given to the burning flame.

And for the rest of the beasts, they had their dominion taken away, that their lives were prolonged for a season at a time.

Okay, now I'm just gonna kind of spill the beans up front.

The way I take this is that the ten Horns are the line of emperors, not a simultaneous group, but a successive group.

All right, So what you had in the first century, first century BC and first century AD were ten Roman emperors.

There was Julius Caesar, and then Augustus, then Tiberius, Gaius, Caligula, Claudius, and then the sixth horn is Nero.

And then after there was a war, this was called the Year of the Four Emperors, which took place between sixty eight to sixty nine AD, and you had an order galba Otho, Vitelius, and then Vespasian who's the tenth.

That's how I take it all, right now, John Calvin takes the ten horns to be Rome.

He just doesn't take it to mean ten separate individuals.

He takes it as a generally symbolic number Rome.

And the little horn specifically is the line of the emperors, especially the emperors that persecuted the Church.

And then what's interesting is that Calvin does mention Nero specifically, and he spent some time on that in his commentary.

Okay, one of the things I want to say about John Calvin is that when people hear the name Calvin, one of the first things they think about is the five Points of Calvinism.

And we know that John Calvin didn't actually write those.

He did write a book called Institutes of the Christian Religion, and most people who read Calvin would want to read that.

But what I would actually really recommend that people do is pick up one of Calvin's commentaries on a book in the Bible that you're interested in, because Calvin is really one of the greatest expositors of scripture that ever lived.

I mean, he wrote on most of the books in the Bible in his lifetime, and one of them was the Book of Daniel.

So in his Institutes he does talk about the anti crisis being the Roman pontiff of the Pope.

Okay, and he says, to some we seem slanderous and petulant when we call the Roman pontif Antichrist.

And he goes on and he defends that.

But then in another passage right here is not the reference to the anti Christ, but to Daniel seven, which is a little more so.

He may not have had his commentary on Daniel worked out when he wrote his Institutes, but he wrote the commentary on Daniel later on in his lifetime, towards the end of his lifetime.

And here he says that it says I was attentive.

Therefore he says, to the horns, and behold one small one, a rose Amona.

So Calvin here is commentating on Daniel seven.

Interpreters begin to vary.

Some twist us to me in the Pope, and others the Turk, but neither opinion seems probable.

They are both wrong since they think the whole course of christ kingdom is here described, while God wished only to declare to his prophet what should happen to the first advent of Christ.

So, in other words, he's saying that this interpretation of Daniel seven only goes up to the time of the coming of Christ.

And then he goes on to describe how, you know, he believes the ten Horns specifically are the emperors of the Roman Empire, like everything from the beginning of the Roman Empire, even you know, prior to the emperors, all the way up to the end, you know, the Roman Republic and so on.

But the little Horns are specifically what they call Imperial Rome, which is that line of emperors from Julius Caesar through Nero and maybe a few other emperors that persecuted the Church.

So he points specifically to the persecution of the Church under Nero.

He doesn't say the little Horn is Nero.

He says it's Imperial Rome, but he does mention Nero.

Now what I do is I just simplify that, and I say, well, the ten Horns are the line of the ten Emperors.

They go from Julius Caesar through Vespasian and the Little Horn specifically as Nero.

So it's a little bit different than Calvin, but it's the same idea.

I'm a little bit more specific.

So one of the things you have to look at in Daniel seven is he sees this a vision, and he gives the vision.

Then he interprets the vision.

I Daniel was in troubled in spirit.

The visions that passed through my mind disturbed me.

I approach one of those standing there and asked him the meaning of all this.

So he told me and gave me the interpretation of things.

The four Great Beasts are four kings that will arise from the earth.

So it's the same kings now as in chapter two, by the way, but the Holy people of the whole most High will receive the kingdom and possess it forever, yes, forever and ever.

And that goes back to the reference in Daniel two, which speaks of in the days of these kings, there will be a kingdom that will possess all the other kingdoms.

So they're called kings.

Kings and kingdoms can be synonymous in biblical prophecy, I wanted to know the meaning of the fourth beast, which was different from the others and most terrifying its iron teeth and bronze claws.

The beasts crushed and devoured its victims, and trampled under foot whatever was left.

I also wanted to know about the ten horns on its head, and the other horn that came up before which three of them fell.

The horn that looked more imposing on the others, and had eyes in a mouth that spoke boastfully.

As I watched, the horn was raising war against the Holy People and defeating them.

And the Ancient of days came and pronounced judgment in favor of the Holy People of the Most High, And the time came when they possessed the kingdom.

So there again he repeats vision, And the fourth Beast is the fourth kingdom that will appear on the earth.

It will be different from than all the other kingdoms that will devour the whole earth, trampling it down in crushing it.

The ten horns are the ten kings who will come out from this kingdom.

And after them another king will arise, and different from the earlier ones.

He will subdue the three kings.

He will speak against the Most High and oppress his holy people, and try to change and set times in the laws.

The holy people will be delivered into his hand for time times and half of time.

One of the reasons why I think this is specific to ten kings is because it aligns very closely with the description of what happens in Revelation seventeen with the sixth head of the Beast, and the language here is very similar.

Okay, So when I did my commentary on Daniel, I just said, this is nero, and I went through it, and I said, look, he subdues three kings, and I went to look at the three kings that came before him.

Now, it just so happens.

In the Roman histories, it says that Tiberius was taken out of the way by being smothered by a pillow by Caligula, and Caligula is next in line to him, and he happens to be the next emperor.

There are some historians that do that actually happened.

But Suetonius and Tacitus were two first century historians.

They both lived in the first century, and they are the only Roman histories that we have that tell about this, and they both say that you know, this is a rumor, but they say this is how the Emperor Tiberius died.

He was being smothered by Caligula.

He was taken out of the way.

So then Caligula was assassinated by his own Praatorian guard, these German guards he had around him.

And then his replacement, Claudius, wasn't supposed to be king, but he was the next in line to be king, and then he was poisoned by his life at the time.

And what happened from there was that there was another king, Nero.

Nero wasn't in line to be king, but through a series of manipulations, his mother made it just so happened that he could become king.

So that's how I interpret that.

It's a very specific interpretation, but when you get into the Daniel eleven you also see the same thing, very specific details about the solicit kings, very specific details about Ptolemy.

So I think that's in character here.

Daniel gives you some really specific information about Nero.

I think that makes a lot of sense when you're looking at it, especially when you're taking it in context of revelation.

I think a lot more people seem to have and agreed upon view of Nero being the beast in revelation.

But for some reason, when you come into Daniel, I feel like I've heard a lot of different opinions there.

So one of the ones, and you've kind of already hit on it because it would rely on there being an eleventh horn.

But one of the ones I know is becoming popular, or was popular.

It's becoming more frequent that I hear this is that Titus was the little horn, that he was this eleventh horn, that the three that fell before him were yelba Otho, Vitellius, and they use that.

Is there any way that you would combat that view?

Obviously outside you gave your positive case.

Is there anything as to why you would deny that view?

Would it be strongly because of the ten horns?

Well, I'm going to give you an explanation.

Then I'm going to give you a counter argument that I've heard, which I think is valid.

But people think there's a seeming contradiction between Daniel seven eight and seven twenty four, But it's not a contradiction because the two verses have to mean the same thing, because one of them is the interpretation.

Of the earlier one.

So I had this question from a guy named Brian Godawa, who's fairly well known author.

He's written some novels and one on the Book of Revelation, which is kind of a novelization of the history of Revelation from a predorous view.

It's very interesting.

You can check out these books.

But he says to me, he wrote a letter to me and he says, I was going through the explanation of the Little Horror of Daniel seven.

I can see that in verse eight, the little horn comes up among the all the horns.

If Nero is the sixth king of Revelation thirteen, that works because he's the sixth king that's in the middle.

And if there's a king that comes up in the middle of the ten, it's either going to be five or six, right, So that seems to align well.

If he's among the line of kings, it sounds good.

So your thesis works well, especially when you look into the fact that you know he persecutes gods people.

So you could say that Titus persecutes God's people, being the Jews.

But I think this aligns much better where the preterist explanation of Revelation seventeen and one of the things that's important to do is understand Daniel should be used to interpret revelation.

A lot of people will come up with an interpretation of Revelation, then they will try to retrofit it back into Old Testament prophecy.

But that's actually backwards.

You know.

What we have to remember is that John was a Jew reading Old Testament prophecies from a very Hebraic point of view.

Revelation is the most Hebraic book in the New Testament.

It's the most Jewish book.

It uses a lot of Hebrew idioms and a kind of Jewish thinking for that time.

So even out of all the other books in the New Testament, it's the most Jewish book of the New Testament because it quotes the Old Testament scripture the most by bar not quotes directly, but it alludes to so much Old Testament scripture.

So you really have to know what Daniel means before you dive into Revelation.

Okay, so what does it mean?

Now?

When you get to.

Verse twenty four, verse seven to twenty four, it says the little horn arises after them.

Now, the first time I read it, I just understood it to mean the same thing as coming after the three horns.

But other people have read it and they've said to me, no, well, it says it has to come after the ten horns.

And what I say to that is it's better translated as it comes up in the midst of them, rather than after them.

So Brian asked me, is there a translation out there that translates this word among them?

This is a word in Aramaic, rather than after them among them.

So what I found was that the word in Aramaic.

And I'm not an Arabic scholar, but it's translated in English.

But this is the only.

Time that the word is used in the entire Old Testament.

And it's a preposition.

You preposition often mean different things depending on where they're used, depending on the context, and prepositions are notoriously hard words to translate from language to language just because of that reason.

They can shift their meaning.

You know, we say we get in a car.

You know I got on a plane, I took an uber.

It's like, there's different ways that we think of using prepositions.

Right.

What I found is that there's a translation of the septuagen It's not in Aramaic, but it's in Greek.

And the Septusian translator uses the word opiso, which can mean a variety of things, that can mean behind, back, after, So there's this preposition, So number one, it's a little bit ambiguous.

The second explanation is James Jordan's explanation.

He says that Daniel, you know, you should read this as though Daniel saw the little horn growing up in the midst of them after he saw the ten.

In other words, he saw the ten grow up, and then afterward he saw one of them in the midst growing up.

And so my explanation is similar to that.

It's not necessary to say that, but these two work.

But what you need to do is instead is harmonized Daniel seven to eight with seven twenty and seven twenty four, because they all have to mean the same thing.

So in other words, I'm going to go into this and not in great detail, but just for a little bit here in verse twenty four, it says that the little horn arises after these, and then there's another version of the sept two says he shall rise behind them.

So hit right away we.

See that that's kind of an ambiguous translation of that preposition.

So if Daniel seven twenty four is read in isolation, it seems to me, and another king is rising after them, So it seemed to me an eleventh king, all right.

But when you put everything together in harmony, you see in seven eight, I consider the horns, and there came up among them another little horn.

So this is what John Calvin said on seven eight.

I have no doubt that the little Horn relates to Julius Caesar and the other Caesars who succeeded, namely Augustus, Tiberius, Curricular, Claudius, Nero, and others.

So that's John Calvin's interpretation.

So he sees it as a whole line of emperors, and he lists them in order, like Julius through Nero, which are the six Roman emperors leading up to the little Horn.

So Calvin mentions Nero, but he considers a number ten a symbolics a number ten symbolizing the Roman Empire.

So the little Horn is a line of Caesar's.

That's also compatible with my interpretation.

Like I said, where I differ is that the ten horns willpresent the line of Caesars and that the little horn is specifically Nero.

That's how I interpret Revelation thirteen and seventeen as well.

Now, when you get this Daniel seven twenty, there's a parallel verse during the angel's explanation or his interpretation, the ten horns were in his head and the other which came up before whom three fell, So that doesn't talk about the little horn coming up.

It just talks about three falling before the little horn.

So that gives a sense in which the little horn came up after the three, and the three fell not after the ten, but after the three.

So if you read it as though there were ten horns in successive order, it says three fell before him, and that's in verse twenty four.

So the question is is the other little horn the eleventh horn or is it among them or between them?

And what I would get back to again is that you know, Daniel had a vision in which he saw ten horns, never says he saw eleven horns.

In the middle of the horns is one of the ten that grew up and became very strong.

So the senses there's a horn in the middle, and it grows up and becomes very strong, and three of the horns in that middle section get plucked out.

In other words, they were like you know when your teeth come in.

You know, when your baby teeth ball out, when the big teeth come in.

So that type of thing.

So if the little horn is in the middle, where is it, It's going to be number five or six.

So it just so happens that the sixth of the Roman emperors is Nero.

And that fits with the key argument that most prederous give, which is that in Revelation seventeen ten, John says, the sixth king is now is, and must most people say it's neuro.

So the sixth king that now is is the ruling emperor during John's time, which we believe was written during the time of the persecution of Christians, during the time of Nero.

So John Calvin goes on and says, with regard to the little Horn, I said it referred to the Caesars, and so on.

What does the prophet say, the little horn waged war with the saints.

So he says, that's the church, those which occurred after the Caesars arose and after which Christ was manifest in the world.

For the devil was then more enraged, and God also relaxed the reins to prove the patience of his people.

So it says so God's raising up this little horn to persecute Christians, the Church right in the beginning of the Romans, is our to spare them as much as possible.

But so great was their obstinacy and the madness of their rage, that they provoked their enemies as if devoting themselves to their destruction.

Until dreadful slaughter happened, history has a formed us.

So Calvin also mentions Titus under the auspices of his father Vespasion, who took and destroyed the city.

He says, the Jews were stabbed and slaughtered like cattle throughout the whole extent of Asia.

Thus far it concerns the Jews.

So Calvin sees it as this whole time period.

First the little Horn persecutes the Church, and then he persecutes the Jews as well.

That just so happens, and Europe did both of those things.

He persecuted the Church and then he started the war with the Saints.

But it takes place during the whole line of the.

Ten So for your argument against the Titus to you right, so to kind of recap that, you would have to reinterpret the ten Kings and the tin Horns into eleven which the text does not say.

The other case you're making is that it makes more sense of revelation when it's talking about Nero being the sixth king, so the sixth who was, So it seems to if you were to add Titus there, you would fail the ten Horns analogy and you would also not be able to make sense of revelation when it comes to five have fallen in the sixth is so, so your your interpretation seems to kind of be able to make sense of all of the text put together the best.

Yeah, so I try to put everything together.

And the other thing about my view is I say that, you know, the ten kings go up to Vespasian, so if Titus worked under the auspices of Vespasian, you know, you could say that this is speaking of the whole time period.

And this is what John Calvin actually says too.

So I'm very sympathetic to Calvin's view.

I think it's good, and I would say, at very least, you know Preterosatoleno on Calvin, listen to what he says, and then if you really want to get specific and down into the weeds, and you know, go for it and try to come up with these other real specific things.

But I think that the best explanation of the little Horn waging war against the Saints.

Is Calvin.

You know, he says, thus, he says, it must prevail for the Caesars and all who govern the provinces of the Empire raged with such extreme violence against the Church that it almost disappeared from the face of the earth.

And thus it happened that the Little Horn prevailed in appearance, and a general opinion as for a short time the safety of the Church was almost deprived of.

So I consider Calvin's interpretation to be logically valid.

It does seem to me that the ten horns represent the line of Caesars from the first king Julius to the tenth King Vespasian, with the little Horn being in the middle or the midst of them.

Now, the big question I always get from people is they say, but wait a minute.

You know, Daniel seven twenty four says there's ten kings and that shall arise, and then another, So they really get hung up on that word another and again.

What I want to point out is that the proposition is big, ambiguous, it's aramaic.

It only appears one time in the entire Bible.

And the other thing I believe is that after doesn't refer to the ten kings, but it refers to the three kings, not the ten.

One of the things that's interesting about Daniel is Daniel uses a lot of parallel structures.

So when you read it in the Aramaic and the Hebrews, how passage happens to be In Aramaic, one way you could read it would be very woodenly and just like a very literal translation.

And I came up with something like this, and ten horns from the ten kingdom are ten kings who shall arise, and another shall arise after them.

He shall be different from the first ones, and three kings who shall subdue them?

Okay, So that word them, Who's he talking about?

Is he talking about the ten kings or the three?

And if you notice that in the first part of the prophecy, the first time he sees the vision the ten horns from the kingdom is paralleled in the second part by ten kings shall arise, and the second version of the vision the interpretation, it's also paralleled by he shall subdue them.

Okay, So who is he subduing?

Is he subduing the ten and the other parallel verses it says he shall subdue three kings seven twenty four, so it says that at all of them.

In fact, it says in verse twenty four, and he shall be different from the first ones, and three kings he shall subdue, all right, So the one that subdues comes after them.

He comes after the three kings.

So it's a little bit wonky because it's not like in linear order like you'd read it in English.

But that's the way a lot of Hebrew text is.

It's written in a very kind of a odd parallel structure where it's in reverse, you know.

So that's solution to the problem is that there's three kings that the little Horn subdues.

It's not the ten.

The first one he subdues in the verse are the three kings, not the ten, And in verse twenty four the structure is inverted.

The object is the three kings, so he subdues the three kings, even though it seems like it ought to be the other way around, all right.

So that's something you know, when people read Daniel, you have to look out for.

One of them is chiastic structure, where things are actually put in reverse order.

At times.

There are several places in Daniel that are like that, where if you read things very linearly and very literally, you're not going to get that it's in reverse order, and that is in a chiasm.

The other thing you have to realize about Daniel is that when you have a difficult phrase or a difficult passage, it often means the same thing as what came right before.

That doesn't mean something different, but it means something very similar or something the same.

Yeah, that's really helpful.

It's a little horn, is Nero right?

If we've come to the spot of agreeing on that.

There's some little specifics that as I was reading through, I was curious about when it comes to the statement changes seasons and law, how would you say that, Nero did that?

Yeah, you have to read all of verse twenty five.

I'm going to read it here.

You have to read all of it in parallel structure.

Don't isolate a single phrase and say, well, what does this mean?

Look at the entire thing, because the entire thing has to mean a single thing, all right.

It says he will speak against the Most High and oppresses holy people and try to change the set times and the laws the Holy people we've delivered onto his hands for time times and half of time.

So it gives you the same idea here three different times, and each time it gives you a little bit more information.

That's a very typical Hebrew thought parallel structure.

Okay, So I want to read it what Calvin himself said about seven to twenty five, and he mentions Nero here.

Strangely enough, even though he doesn't think that the little hornet specifically Neuro, he does see it in this verse.

He says, first of all, Neuro raged most cruelly, for he burned some thousands of Christians at a time.

Now, notice multitudes or immense multitudes was mentioned by Tacitus.

It was also mentioned by Clement of Rome in the first century, and another writer who lived in this I would say, in the third century, second century, third century, named Lactantius.

And they use that word multitudes of Christians.

So multitude in Latin is very close in meaning to the word thousands.

So he said thousands of Christians were burned in Rome to extinguish the infamy which had raged against himself.

He accused them of burning Rome.

Therefore he burned the Christians.

The people could not endure his barbarity for a while.

The fourth part of the city was destroyed.

Nero he was enjoying his pleasure and rejoicing and so mournful.

A spectacle, all right.

So he offered up the Christians to the people of Rome like scapegoats.

People said that Nero burnt the city, but then he pawned that off on the Christians and burnt them escapegoats.

Now, when we get into this little passage something I don't worry that much about when I read it, and I see other people worry a lot about it.

It says, you know, what does it mean?

He changed the times and the laws.

Okay, well, there's only one person that can do that.

That's God.

If you go back to the book of Genesis, for instance, if you look at Genesis chapter one.

If you notice in Genesis chapter when I speaks to God creating the world, and the world was without form and void, darkness was on the face of the deep, and so on.

So what does God do In the first day?

He called us a light day, and the darkness he calls light.

It also says later that he put lights in the firmament and of the heaven to divide the day from the light, let there be for signs and for seasons, for days and for the years.

So the way I read that is it's just saying that this is a person who would pretend to be God himself.

I don't think, like the Seventh day Adventists through that this is the Roman pope who would change the Sabbath day from Saturday to Sunday.

I don't think it has any other meeting.

I think it's just metaphorically saying that he's speaking against the Most High, trying to become above the Most High or oppress the Holy people, and the Holy people will be delivered into his hands for time times and half a time.

By the way, that time times and half of time.

Could also be interpreted to me in a year, two years and half a year, or three and a half years.

And that also aligns with the passage and revelation about the persecution of the saints.

So if you believe that Nero began his persecution in late a d.

Sixty four, like the Fire of Rome was in the summer of sixty four, and then Nero said about to do this building project.

He was going to build a golden palace.

By the way, I have a whole book on this.

It's called Nero Caesar the sixth Set of the Beast, and I really get into that and describe all of that in there.

So he wanted to build this palace, this golden palace.

He also built a statue of himself that was one hundred feet tall, covered in gold, and according to Roman historians, later Vespasian cut off Nero's head and put another head on the statue, but it was the same statue that was in front of the coliseum that could built later on.

Nero was like this figure, similar to Nebuquinezer in chapter three of Daniel, where he builds a statue of himself that's about one hundred feet tall too.

So it's interesting that all these things line up between Daniel and Revelation.

I don't want to say that, you know, there was one hundred foot tall statue of Nero that's on the text itself, but it's interesting when you look at the history and how people at the time would look at this statue in Rome and so on, and how Nero built this pleasure palace and he burnt thousands of Christians alive and so on, and then they're reading Daniel and Revelation together, they would have been reminded of this.

So, getting back to what I was saying, if you go from sixty four, it's not say the Book of Revelation was written in late sixty four.

Let's say December sixty four, the Christians are persecuted.

Nero starts burning them at the state, putting them to death by the hundreds, by the thousands.

Finally it reaches John.

Okay, so let's say at the very end of sixty four John Wright's Revelation.

Then you go from the end of sixty four to the death of Nero in June of sixty eight.

That's exactly three and a half years.

So it's interesting to me that if we assume that the persecution of the Christians lasted three and a half years, and according to church historians, there was Peter, he was imprisoned in Rome.

Paul was in prison a second time toward the end of Neuro's reign, and according to church history, it was in the year sixty seven.

So there's two different imprisonments of Paul, one of them in the early sixties and one of them toward the end of the Neuro's reign.

And I also cover that in this book as well, So if you want to get into that, you can read all about it.

But the interesting thing about Daniel seven that comes up is at the very end of it, it says, then sovereignty and power and greatness of all the kingdoms of the heaven will be handed over to the Holy people of the Most Highest.

His kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom, and all rulers will worship and being.

Yeah.

So that last little part there, I feel like is a good transition to the vision that is kind of sat in the middle of Daniel seven, right, did these visions of the ancient days and the Son of Man coming up to the ancient of days.

So it's like you have this vision of the four earthly worldly kingdoms, a little horn which we've said as nero and what they would do.

But then he throws in that I think sprinkle of hope there and what we as Christians and believers can be looking forward to, which the whole book of Daniel is pushing forth.

I mean Daniel two, I mean sets it up that way as well, where it goes through the kingdoms and then it finishes in the days of these kings.

He would set up his kingdom.

It's dominion to be an everlasting dominion.

So he's kind of doing the same thing here in Daniel seven.

Right, So can you tell us a little bit about these two things that Daniel sees regarding the Ancient of Days and the Son of Man.

I don't spend too much time on that in my book.

I just go with the traditional view.

And this is controversial, but I do actually think that there's an image of the Trinity there and actually lines with something very similar in the Book of Revelation, by the way, but I don't deal with that in great detail.

But you have the Ancient of days and then someone like a son of Man who comes up to the Ancient of days.

So this is there was one like a son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven.

He approached the Ancient of days and was let into his presence, and he was given authority, glory, and sovereign power, and all nations and peoples in every language worshiped him.

His dominion is never lasting, dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom was one that will never be destroyed.

And so that dovetails very nicely with Daniel iiO and other verses in Daniel which talk about the dominion of Christ, and when does that dominion come, Well, it says in Daniel two forty four it came in the days of these kings, in the days of the Roman Empire and the time of the Roman Caesars.

And it supplanted the Roman Empire, not at all at once, because if you notice, in the very early part of Daniel seven, it says that the other beasts have been stripped of their authority, but we're allowed to live for a period of time.

It's not as though the Roman Empire was completely destroyed.

But this worldly power, you know, the power that the beasts of the sea had from the beginning, or the vision, they're allowed to persist.

In other words, God allows the gentile nations to persist even though God strips them.

Of their power and their authority.

So one thing that's interesting about the Roman Empire is that what the Roman emperor, what the Roman historians say, is that Nero is actually the last Caesar, and that Vespasian after the favor the Plavian dynasty came with this Spasian.

There were other Roman emperors, but they didn't really have the same power that Imperial Rome had.

So, and that specific period is called Imperial Rome.

Joke about this because what Swetonius said when he wrote this book.

He wrote this book called the Lives of the Twelve Caesars, and when he gets to the end of Nero, he literally says the line of Caesar's ended with Nero.

But then he calls his books.

He calls his book the Lives of the Twelve Caesars.

So there's this recognition even back then, as something very profound happened at the end of Nero, where Rome was dealt this death blow, people thought it was never going to recover.

And then there was a year of the Four Emperors, which was eighty sixty eight through sixty nine that lasted roughly a year.

Four emperors were against each other.

So there's wars going on in the Roman Empire as well as a word in Judea.

And then the Spasian comes to power.

Of this Spasian puts all things in order again, something like Rome coming back from the dead.

Right, we see Rome continuing on after that.

But what happens now is the Church is seated in the foundation of Rome and it grows up and becomes very powerful.

So it's like that mountain that begins to grow in the earth.

There's that small rock that smashes the stature, and the small stone becomes the Kingdom of God that grows in the earth, the great Mountain.

So post millennialists don't say that everything happened all at once and that we're in the finality of the millennium.

But the millennium is the Kingdom of God and is growing throughout history.

So with this too, this ancient of days and the Sun of Man vision that brings us into Matthew, right, Matthew twenty four in the way that Jesus is foretelling the destruction of the Temple, I mean he seems to quote from Daniel seven.

Yeah, I do have a section in my book where I have the whole list of all of the number of times at Matthew twenty four quotes or alos to the book of Daniel, which is more than you think.

It's not just in one place, but it's the part about the Son of Man.

The title son of Man is used, and he also lose at least to Daniel twelve and perhaps also Daniel nine as well.

So it's an interesting book of prophecy.

Daniel is the template for Matthew twenty four.

Yeah, and I've heard somebody say Revelation almost seems to be like John's exposition of Matthew twenty four, and I thought that was a good way to think about it in some way.

Honestly, it's not necessarily completely perfect analogy, but I think when you see the connection between even all these things, Daniel and Matthew and Revelation, and see the similarities and that unity in the message that is kind of trying to come through about Christ's kingdom and the sovereignty that he holds over earthly kingdoms, the progress of the Church here on Earth, being sent out from Christ, being sent out by their king unto the world.

I think it's awesome to see that connection between all of those things.

I think it makes it all make so much more sense than seeing them as like separate entities.

Right, Daniel's talking about this, Matthew's talking about this, Revelation's talking about something completely different, when in reality they are all playing off of each other, right John, especially John is writing while knowing the context of Daniel, knowing the context of Matthew, and explaining it to the readers.

So when we're talking about the ten Horns.

Obviously, that connection into Revelation I think is definitely going to be important to help us kind of round our view of what it was talking about.

So, yeah, if you want to hop into Relation seventeen, I'd be actually really great.

Okay.

So there's a very popular method of interpreting the Ten Horns in the Book of Revelations, saying this is an alliance of ten kingdoms who roll together in one hour.

So that's like the key verse and the key verse.

That key phrase everyone focuses on in Revelation seventeen is that these are not ten separate rulers of the same kingdom who succeed each other like in the chronological like in the chronological succession, I propose, but it's rather no, it's an alliance.

I say.

There's a chronological succession.

If we compare Daniel seven to Daniel seventeen to ten, right, it says there are ten.

There are seven kings, five or fallen, one is and one is not yet to come, and when he comes he must continue for a short space.

So that's a chronology because it talks about some that come before one that is one that it comes after.

All right, So this is a question we need to ask, here are the seven kings in Revelation among the ten kings of Daniel or is this something completely different?

And I would say they're the same.

So that represents a problem because later on in Daniel it says five or fallen one is one is not yet to come, and when he comes he must continue a short space.

Right.

That's a linear statement.

So the implication is there's a succession of kings.

There's five Roman emperors who have fallen there, Julius, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius, who each fell before Nero, just like there were three kings who fell before the horn the little horn, right, So this language is similar here.

And specifically, Roman historians say Julius was assassinated.

Augustus was not assassinated that we know of, but Tiberius, Colliguilian, and Claudius were all assassinated to make way for Nero.

So it's interesting.

I'm not saying that's definitely the interpretation, but it's interesting that historically that's what happened.

The sixth emperor was Nero.

So John writes one is and Prentists who hold an early date view for Revelations say Nero was alive when John wrote the prophecy, and then the Selva seventh would be Galba, and then Otto Vitelius Vespasian.

Galba reigned only six months, he must continue for short space.

Okay, so that's pretty straightforward so far.

But here there's a difficulty.

There are ten horns but no heads in Daniel.

In Revelation there are seven heads and ten horns.

So the way I saw it is very simply to say, it's a recapitulation.

The seven heads in revelation and the ten horns are basically symbols of the same thing.

So it's a recapitulation of the emperors of Impure or Rome.

Moving on from that too.

Kind of finishing this all up, I had just a question I put out there for listeners that they would kind of send in.

Most of it, honestly, was a whole bunch of angry dispensationalists, so I kind of skipped over a lot of those.

Most of them weren't even questions.

They were just kind of commenting at how incorrect a paratistic perspective was.

But there's a questions, I said, I would make sure I got over to you.

So Jared on X He said, do you believe the fulfillment of the seventy weeks prophecy is the ultimate jubilee upon Christ's return?

Yeah, I think that the seventy weeks of prophecy points to Christ's first advent, not his second advent.

There are seven weeks from the time of the declaration given by you know, there's a decree given by Arctic circuses.

I believe that pretty much aligns with the four hundred and eighty three years that comes up to eighty twenty seven.

And I have that in my book as well if you want to read up on that.

And so you see very clearly in the Gospels where Jesus does announce, he actually refers to a year of jubilee, and he quotes from the Book of Isaiah and he talks about the captives being set free and so on.

So yes, I think one way you can look at it is in Daniel nine there's seventy sevens.

But another way you can break it up as ten groups of forty nine years, and the forty ninth year followed by the fiftieth year is a jubilee year in scripture.

So there's another interesting thing I noted in my book is that when the Jews started to violate the jubilee year and the time of Solomon, that's the last jubilee year that's mentioned in scripture is actually in the time of Ezekiel.

So if you add up all these jubilees together from the time of Solomon all the way up to Ezekiel, you come up with roughly about four hundred and ninety years.

So the Jews were in captivity for seventy years, and it was one year for each year that they violated.

There was a sabbath law and there was also the Jubilee year of law, so they violated those and so if you wanted to work on it, that's one possible solution because God says he always keeps his promises, and he does promise in scripture that they violated the jubilee and they'd be punished by being in captivity, which certainly happened.

So what I say is that Solomon, during Solomon's reign, this was the first time when there was infant sacrifice started to take place, and then Solomon's kingdom broke in two upon his death.

Then the Northern kingdom certainly violated the Sabbath year in the Jubilee year every single year because they couldn't keep it because they were another kingdom away from Jerusalem.

And then the Southern Kingdom often violated the Sabbath year in the Jubilee year as well.

So that's what led to the seventy years of captivity.

It was the punishment for violating God's law.

And it wasn't just breaking the Sabbath and the Sabbath year and the Jubilee year.

It was every one of the Ten Commandments too that they were breaking, including infant sacrifice, which was a pretty pretty bad one.

I appreciate that.

So let's do a quick, like rapid fire summary recap of our conversation today.

So try to answer it in just a few words if you can, obviously, I know.

If you can't, that's fine.

We're just kind of recapping.

What were the four beasts and Daniel seventh?

Okay, the four beasts were symbolizing the kingdoms that would lead up to the Sign of the Messiah.

It was Babylon in the time of Daniel, followed by the overthrow of Babylon in Persia, followed by the overthrow of Persia by the Greeks under Alexander the Great.

Then we have the Selucid and Ptolemaic period, Ptolemy's and the Seleucids, which is described in great detail on Daniel eleven.

Amazing prophecy there.

And then what Daniel seven loclessly focuses on is the beasts of Iron.

So there's this past of iron that has ten horns, and one of the horn grows up, and I say, that's Nero.

I think you agree with me, And the ten horns I believe symbolizes imperial Rome.

I'm fairly certain of that.

That's when I would say, yes, definitely, I think it's definitely true, and I wouldn't be very dogmatic on the fact that I do believe this is ten Roman caesars from Julius, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero Galba, author of Vitelius Vespasian, who went to war and finished the war that Nero started against Jerusalem.

So I'd be.

Very dogmatic about this being Rome, but not so dogmatic about that it has to definitely be ten numbers, although I think that that's probably it.

You had already mentioned little horn being Nero of the ten kings.

The little Horn was specifically Nero, and then who were the three kings of verse twenty four?

Okay, so let's talk about Nero real briefly.

I would say that you know, the beast that was and is not in Revelation chapter seventeen is Rome.

Okay, Danmuline Revelation both refer to a little horn and a six king that refers to the power of Rome to make war against the Saints in the person of Nero.

So it's Rome that makes war against the Saints, but it's also Nero specifically as the king.

And the reason why I say it's Nero is because he had a mouse speaking great things.

He made war with the Saints.

He prevailed against him.

He shall wear out the Saints at the most high.

They shall be given into his hand until time times and the dividing of time.

And then we also see the same pattern in Revelation thirteen and seventeen.

First John saw one of the heads as if it was wounded to death.

A deadly wound was healed.

Nero has spoke great things in blasphemies.

Power was given to him to continue forty and two months to make war where the Saints and overcome them.

That's a direct allusion back to Daniel seven.

There.

This isn't some esoteric reference.

Nero was known throughout the empire as our Apollo, our Heracles, our Savior, the benefactor of the world, the Lord of the world, Lord and God.

Those were titles given to Nero.

Nero had his own wife, Popaa, and his daughter deified after their deaths.

Nero had such a fearsome reputation among Christians that even many of the futurists premillennialists of the early centuries believed that the beast was Nero, but they believed that it would be Nero risen from the dead again as the anti Christ.

So even though they were futurists and they believed that Nero would come again as this Antichrist, they saw this figure as being Nero.

So from a prederist point of view, I would say that the seven Kings run from Julius to Nero, and that there were three kings taken out of the way and Daniel seven.

All of them were assassinated, with the exception of Augustus, the year after Tiberius's death, that was the year that Nero was born, and then Roman historians tell Us Tiberius was smothered by Caligula.

Caligula was waiting for him to die, couldn't wait.

He was smothered by a pillowy Bicoloigulis.

It's an interesting book.

In a film and TV series by Robert Graves, it's called I Claudius, which you should definitely watch, and it covers that event.

It's really interesting.

Caligula is killed by his own pratorian guard, and then Claudius, who replaces Caligula, is poisoned by his wife, and then Nero, who's not in the line of succession, is made king because Claudius was manipulated by his wife to do that.

That being the three kings right.

The last question I have regarding this would be if you could summarize the entire book of Daniel into one theme, what do you think that would be?

Okay?

The theme of Daniel is the overpower and coming of the Kingdom of God, the reign of the Messiah.

There was also a sub theme which deals with the restoration of the Temple and the final destruction of Temple, which are signs Christ is our Temple and we as the Church live in the Holy City with Christ.

That's good.

That's really good.

So, Jay, I really appreciate your time today.

I apologize for all the technical difficulties we've had to hurtle through today.

If people could just be a fly on the wall to the amount of times we've had issues so far recording this, it would be be great.

So kind of finishing up, where could people go to find your work, specifically your books and things like that.

Yeah, what I would just prefer people to do is go to Amazon dot com type in the name Jay Rogers.

You can also get the book for my website Foruner dot com, but just look up in the Days of These Kings by Jay Rodgers.

Or you can also type in Pretorists Daniel by Jay Rodgers and you'll find a lot of results there.

Amazon is the easiest way for me to get you my books.

I prefer Amazon, and because you can get the print copy, you can also get the Kindle version, which I scalable text.

And there's also a virtual voice copy for most of my books on there as well.

Are there any current books or projects that you're working on right now that we can maybe look forward to.

Yeah, there's one that I have that doesn't have anything to do with uscatology.

It's actually called the fourth Political Theory and Biblical Perspective.

And I really like this book.

You see kind of thick here.

It's about the size of My Daniel book.

I got interested in geopolitics when I was a missionary to Russia and Ukraine.

I'm very concerned about the conflict there, and I got interested in a couple of writers on geopolitics who write not only about that event, that conflict in Ukraine before it happened, but they explain the reasons why it's happening right now.

We're in a world order shift right now.

There's usually a shift in world order that happens every so often.

You can point back to nineteen ninety one, with the fall of communists, in nineteen forty five, with the end of World War Two, nineteen twenty one, but at least every hundred years, people have met in Europe and they decide on what the new world order is going to be.

And so what I say in the book is that Christians have a great reason to have hope because we're in the midst of the greatest revival on history.

That's also happening right now.

So if you look at Western countries, where kind of like freaks in terms of revival and spiritual awakening because it's happening everywhere else in the world but not here.

And so when we think of revival, we think of you know, meetings and evangelism and things like that, but we're still sliding into a lot of aposteresy and social decas and things like that.

So that's always been a concern of mine.

I think that the West is going to embrace this new multi polit order, and I think that we will have a Christian civilization in America.

So that's what the book's about.

So if you're interested in geopolitics, that's it.

My next book is going to be a called Puritan Storm Rising, which is looking at the different revivals happening throughout American history, actually going all the way back to the beginning of history of British history.

And I also look at the different revivalings happening throughout history in America and try to use those as models.

You know, do we want a Christian nation or would we rather have a Christian civilization?

And I try to point out there's a difference between the two.

Christian civilization is based on Christian families all the way up to local communities and way beyond politics, whereas a lot of people look for a political solution.

But I say that we can look back to the Puritans and the Neo Puritans, the Great Awakenings in America.

They try to look for that model.

We don't try to repeat their mistakes, because they did make very bad mistakes.

They all had errors and flaws, but they were reformers and they were trying to fix things that were wrong, and we need to take that same attitude.

We need to look at what they did that was right, restore that, and then move on to the future.

Yeah, I definitely will be looking forward to those that I have finished in the days of these kings.

I have finished the easy parts and the hard parts.

And I'm actually reading through your book on Nero right now.

I think I'm about fifty pages in.

They've all been great, so I can imagine these two books that are put together with the same quality.

So I would definitely recommend them to any body out there.

What I would say is, I have two books on Daniel, and people would often say, like which one should I get, the shorter or the longest one.

The shorter one is, you know, it's about less than two hundred pages.

And I wrote that because people said, you know, you wrote a seven hundred page book.

No one's going to read that.

You know, you need to write something shorter.

So I put together a shorter book and it's about two hundred pages long something like that.

And what I do in that book is I summarize what I call it the hard parts of Daniel, which are the parts everyone wants to know about.

And then I also have some appendices where I answer some unanswered questions that I came up with after writing in the Days of these Kings, like some of the stuff we talked about today is actually from that book.

But the funny thing is that my best selling book is actually this thick one right here, you know, this is the one that everyone wants to get.

And then the second best selling book is the shorter one, and then number three is the neurobook, and then the book on geopolitics called which is called the Fourth Political Theory and Biblical Perspective.

So that's my show and tel for today.

Yeah, I guess everybody's just going to have to get a copy of them all and they can judge for themselves which one's the best.

I said, I've enjoyed.

I've enjoyed both of them as well as the neurobook.

There's a lot of insight, and like you said, there's differences between those where it's not like you're rereading the same thing over and over again.

All of it kind of helps to kind of build a, i think, a well rounded view of the Book of Daniel.

So I've really appreciated the work you've put in, not only that, but the articles that you do on the Forerunner.

So all those things have been quite a huge help with my study and Daniel.

And I'm thankful to the listeners because the listeners are actually the ones who appointed me in your direction that I was unfamiliar with your work up until probably the last maybe six or seven months, So it's been quite a journey getting to see what you've put out there and get to dive really deep into that.

And it was really be that you produced a predist perspective commentary on the Book of Daniel.

So I was definitely really thankful for that.

So is there any final words that you would like to say to the listeners.

Yeah, you mentioned with a lot of people noticing the book, and I've been actually kind of surprised at the notice that I've gotten.

As I said in the beginning, I struggled with writing this because I'm not, you know, a credential diologian, and I thought, well, who's going to read my book?

You can always go to someone else.

But then I realized, well, you know, there are people like Hal Lindsey and Timmlhay who want credential either, and my books have not sold as many as theirs.

You know, maybe we'll get there one hundred years from now.

And the other thing is that I wanted to point people too, is that I was able to go back and find other predorist commentaries on Daniel that virtually no one has heard of it before.

Some of them are just on Google books.

You can't really easily find reprints of them.

But I list those books in my book and I show people where to find them and come to find out, prior to my book, you know, there was another one called James Jordan, and there's other people who have done other ones since then.

And so thankfully this, this emphasis of study on the predist view of Daniel is getting more popular.

But I can only identify about a dozen books or full books like Daniel from a preaderist perspective, where there's probably, like you know, well over one hundred books on revelation from a preaderist perspective.

So I always thought that that's kind of backwards.

You know, you should look at the Old Testament first and then try to understand the New Testament by understanding the Old.

And the other thing that's very.

Interesting is almost every commentator that writes a predist commentary on Daniel, they make note of that, they say, isn't it strange?

Or I haven't been able to find that many books on it, and then that inspires them to write a book on that.

So I have, like, as a matter of fact, one of my friends on Facebook is writing one right now, so we'll see how that is.

So you're going to get differences on the hard parts.

You're going to get different opinions.

And like I said in the beginning, don't take my word for What I'm trying to get people to do is understand how to execute the Bible.

Do it for yourselves, use good hermoeutical principles.

Try to understand things like parallel structure, chiasm, Understand the world view the people, the audience relevance, how do they interpret text for themselves at that time, and those are very important things to keep in mind when you're reading this.

Well, this has been a wonderful time outside of the technical difficulties.

I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down and talk with me.

I know the listeners are going to appreciate it a lot.

I hope they get as much out of it as I have.

I hope they continue to dig into it, maybe purchase your books and learn a little bit more.

So I really appreciate it, Jay, So you don't have anything else.

That is all I have.

So I thank you all for listening because I hope you guys enjoyed it.

God bless my pleasure.

At my right and the Lord to my lordic command for all DJ.

Then I will name Tucking linked Food go for your shame

The Lorge