End of Days by Sylvia Browne

A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE BOOK OF DANIEL

The book of Daniel is often referred to as the Old Testament version of Revelation because of its apocalyptic prophecies. And, like Revelation, it’s surrounded by its share of controversy.

The young Daniel was captured by the Babylonian army during its attack on Jerusalem in 605 BC. He spent the rest of his life in Babylon, serving the royal court—primarily King Nebuchadnezzar— throughout the seventy-two-year duration of the Babylonian empire as a seer, prophet, and dream interpreter.

Jesus spoke of Daniel to his disciples on the Mount of Olives, written of in Matthew 24:15-16:

So when you see the abomination of desolation of which the prophet Daniel spoke, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.

The “abomination of desolation” to which Jesus referred two hundred years after it occurred was a specific reference to the Greek ruler Antiochus Epiphanes who, in 167 BC, erected an altar to Zeus, the supreme ruler of the Greek gods, in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, then sacrificed a pig on the altar in Zeus’s honor. Daniel 9:27 refers to that same event:

And he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week; and for half of the week he shall cause sacrifice and offering  to cease; and upon the wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate, until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator.

The general concensus among theologians is that the “desolator” who will perform the abomination of turning a sacred temple of God into a place of worship for himself will be revealed as the Antichrist. The “covenant of one week” will

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

actually be a seven-year peace treaty with Israel, which the Antichrist will break before it ends with his own form of the abomination of desolation in a Jerusalem temple. It’s no coincidence that that same broken seven-year covenant of peace by the Antichrist is referred to in the book of Revelation as one of the signs that the Second Coming of Christ is at hand and the end of days is imminent.

In fact, there are many similarities between the imagery of the Old Testament book of Daniel and the New Testament book of Revelation, all of them referring to the same sequence of apocalyptic events or, as Daniel put it, the “end of history”: the resurrection of the dead, the judgment of humankind according to the deeds they accomplished on Earth, and the embrace into heaven or the banishment to hell of humankind based on that judgment.

You’ll read in the chapter on prophets that Sir Isaac  Newton, brilliant mathematician and student of the Bible, calculated a year for the end of days based on the information alluded to in Daniel 12:6-13:

And I said to the man clothed in linen, who was above the waters of the stream, “How long shall it be ’til the end of these wonders?” The man … raised his right hand and his left hand toward heaven; and I heard him swear by him who lives forever that it would be for a time, two times, and half a time; and that when the shattering of the power of the holy people comes to an end all these things would be accomplished … And from the time that the continual burnt offering is taken away, and the abomination that makes desolate is set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days. Blessed is he who waits and comes to the thousand three hundred and thirty-five days. But go your way ’til the end; and you shall rest, and shall stand in your allotted place at the end of days.

There are those who believe that the book of Daniel was written in the sixth century by Daniel himself. Others argue that it was actually written many centuries later, by an anonymous author or series of authors, and attributed to

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