Welcome to Day 1421 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomMastering the Bible – Revelation's Date and Connections to the Old Testament – Worldview WednesdayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1421 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical Worldview is essential to have a proper perspective on today’s current events. To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must have a proper understanding of God and His Word. Our focus for the next several months on Worldview Wednesday is Mastering the Bible, through a series of brief insights. These insights are extracted from a book of the same title from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars, Dr. Micheal S. Heiser. This book is a collection of insights designed to help you understand the Bible better. When we let the Bible be what it is, we can understand it as the original readers did, and as its writers intended. Each week we will explore two insights.


Mastering The Bible – Revelation’s Date and Connections To The Old TestamentInsight Seventy-Seven: The Date of the Writing of Revelation Is Important for Its InterpretationMost of the books of the New Testament can be dated with reasonable certainty. We know when Peter and Paul lived and died, for example, and their lives can be crosschecked with events in the book of Acts, which in turn can be aligned with Roman history to a large degree. The case of John and Revelation is harder, and the interpretive stakes are higher.


The key question for the date of Revelation is whether it was written before or after AD 70, the year the Jewish temple was destroyed. If Revelation was written before that date, much of the content of the book could be interpreted as leading to that cataclysmic event. That would mean most (some would say all) of the prophecies in the book have already been fulfilled. If it was written after AD 70, then the book really can’t be viewed that way—the prophecies would be still awaiting fulfillment. That’s a substantial interpretive gap.


There is no explicit reference to the temple being destroyed within the book itself. That suggests that the event had not happened—which would favor a pre-AD 70 date for the book. The other view—that the book was written after AD 70 - objects that this is an argument from silence. The debate opens with those fundamental differences. Then Revelation 11:1-2 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelations+11%3A1-2&version=NLT) comes into play:


Then I was given a measuring stick, and I was told, “Go and measure the Temple of God and the altar, and count the number of worshipers. But do not measure the outer courtyard, for it has been turned over to the nations. They will trample the holy city for 42 months.


Do John’s words indicate that Jerusalem and its temple were literally still standing and under attack? If that’s the case, then the city was destroyed in three and one-half years, and the book was written before AD 70. And that, in turn, is a serious reason to think it is not pointing to a future beyond our time.Ironically, the view that sees the prophecies as ‘‘literally” future-oriented must still interpret this passage symbolically—that Revelation 11:1-2 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelations+11%3A1-2&version=NLT) wasn’t about the actual temple a few years before AD 70. That view makes its argument by appealing to other items in the book. For example, it is argued that “Babylon” in the later chapters of the book actually...