I’ve had a hard time keeping up with blogging this week. It’s a busy month. On Wednesday nights I’m teaching from Revelation for a youth group at a local church, and of course I have my Thursday night events, one of which I’m announcing here, which are a sort of spiritual discipline for me.
I was going to try to both talk about Daniel and Revelation (in a very general way) and then go on to talk about eschatology and the quest for the historical Jesus, but I have decided not to do that and give myself a slightly more relaxed session talking about the structure and rhetoric of Daniel and Revelation. The two books are substantially different, yet they are the two acknowledged works of apocalyptic literature in the Bible, and almost any Christian discussion of eschatology touches on them at one point or another.
Growing up as a Seventh-day Adventist meant that I repeatedly studied these books. I even took a college class titled just “Daniel and Revelation.” There was an extract of the SDA Bible Commentary combining the comments on Daniel and Revelation in one book.
While I will be looking at these two books in particular, my study since has led me to look at a much broader range of material, from Ezekiel, to several chapters in Jeremiah, to much of the latter portion of Isaiah, and much more in the Bible, and also a considerable amount of non-biblical material. Yet these two books still tend to hold pride of place.
Is their purpose to give us an end-times outline? If so, in what detail, and if not, what is their purpose? I’ll be discussing this on video this evening.
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