Bully's Blog

or The Times of the Gentiles

Structure of Daniel 7 – Part 1

The book of Daniel consists of 2 parts, a head and a body. Chapters 1-6 follow the Dominion/Covenant pattern (Forming and Filling), topped off with chapter 7 as the Succession, the Future. It is a New Israel, a New Covenant and a New Creation.

1
…..2
……….3
……………4
……….5
…..6
7

But the account of Daniel itself becomes the “head” of a greater body, the history of a new Israel, a nation resurrected from the grave of Babylon, a sweet kingdom-honey swarm drawn by the Warrior Bridegroom from the corpse of the Babylonian lion. Chapters 7 to 12 are the “body.”

1-6 (Daniel)
…..7 (Waters/New Gentile Hierarchy)
……….8 (Sacrificial Animals)
……………9 (Messiah cut off)
……….10 (Daniel “resurrected”)
…..11 (Conquest)
12 (End of the Old World – AD70)

So the history of Daniel’s personal ministry within the belly of the beast is a prefigurement of Israel’s second-Temple history, from Ezra to AD70, the Jews’ ministry as priests within a Gentile kingdom. As with Christ and the Church, the life of the second-Temple Bride was drawn out of the side of a faithful Bridegroom.

Daniel 7 gives us a rundown on the entire era, the construction of Ezekiel’s Temple, the Jew-Gentile worship construct which would last until its destruction (as Land beast and Sea beast) in AD70. You can read more about this in James Jordan’s brilliant Daniel commentary, The Handwriting on the Wall.

Of course, every stanza reflects the same structure. The Bible is entirely contrived. And so is history. Just like the Bible, history looks like a shambles unless you know what’s going on. None of the details that we skip over as meaningless is there for no reason. Dr Leithart gave us some great advice last week for reading the Bible, and we can apply it to life. It is simple. “Pay attention.”

Creation – Initiation
In the first year
…..of Belshazzar king of Babylon, (delegated authority)
….. ….Daniel had a dream (Law given)
….. ….. ….and visions of his head [while] on his bed. (Law opened)
……….Then he wrote down the dream, (Law repeated)
…..[Lit: and the head
of the matters spoken/commanded].

Division – Delegation
Daniel spoke, saying, (Delegated source)
…..“I saw in my vision by night, (Passover darkness)
……….and behold, (Ascension – view into heaven)
……………the four winds of heaven (Pentecostal Spirit)
……….were stirring up the Great Sea. (Gentile swarms)
…..And four great beasts came up from the sea,
…..(New “Day 6″ Land animals as mediators)
each different from the other. (A Succession of rulers)

Notice that this second stanza has the combined themes of water (Exodus) and a new delegated authority (Hierarchy). The Lord was creating a new Temple out of the Gentile empires, taking Sea Monsters and turning them into cherubic Guardians of the Land, just like the four beasts that surrounded His throne in heaven. As the original Aholiab and Bezalel, He took Gentile kingdoms and fashioned them by the crafty Spirit into a throne — a zoo lounge — on earth. The four winds of heaven connect heaven with the four corners of the Land, the Bronze Altar of God…

Ascension – Altar
The first [was] like a lion, and had eagle’s wings. (King and prophet)
…..I watched till its wings were plucked off; (Authority removed)
……….and it was lifted up from the [Land] (Ascension/Land/Dust)
……….and made to stand on two feet like a man, (Firstfruits Man)
……………and a man’s heart was given to it. (Man replaces wilderness beast)
……….And suddenly another beast, a second, like a bear. (A second witness)
…..It was raised up on one side, (Body)
…..and [had] three ribs in its mouth between its teeth. (Head)
And they said thus to it: ‘Arise, devour much flesh!’
(a Command which leads us from the Altar to the Table, the bread and then the New Covenant wine.)

This structure makes Babylon the kingly empire, the golden head. Daniel was a sort of Covenantal “bridegroom” whose ministry lasted until just after Babylon’s end. Persia was a bridal empire, and you can read about that in the book of Esther. James Jordan’s writings on Esther are brilliant. You should get a hold of them. But that’s only two empires, and the bronze altar (Ascension) has four horns.

Ascension – Table
After this I looked, and there was another, like a leopard, (Another kingdom)
…..which had on its back four wings of a bird. (Heavenly authority: Exodus 19:4 [1])
……….The beast also had four heads, (Altar-Land with four horns)
……….and dominion was given to it. (Scroll given to Alexander)
……………After this I saw in the night visions, (Daniel the Lampstand)
……….and behold, a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, exceedingly strong.
……….(This is another “second” empire witness, and at this point in the
……….structure, it seems “unrefinable.”)
…..It had huge iron teeth; it was devouring, breaking in pieces, (Conquest by Head)
…..and trampling the residue with its feet. (Conquest by Body)
It [was] different from all the beasts that [were] before it, and it had ten horns.
(Succession – before and after)

The second pair of empires mimic the first, but corresponding them with the statue in Daniel 2, they are stronger metals but less precious, more corruptible. (Gold doesn’t corrode. Iron rusts.) Roman iron mimics Persian silver. Greek bronze mimics Babylonian gold.

In The Handwriting on the Wall, Jordan notes that the role of the Jews throughout these four empires moved from Priests in Babylon (Altar) to Kings in Persia (Ark) to Prophets under Greek rule (Lampstand) to a Man in Rome (Table). These roles are the four “corners” of the Tabernacle.

He also notes that during Roman rule, a perverse form of the Jewish “Adam,” the Herodian line, is now seen by Daniel as a little horn. We’ll look at that next time. [2]

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A note about the picture above: it seems to some that I am stretching Bible texts. I don’t always get it right (I see this as I learn more and revisit texts), but there is a great difference between stretching a cowskin to cover a couch, and stretching a cowskin to cover a cow.

[1] Exodus 19:4 “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Myself.”
[2] See The Man of Sin.

or The False Bride Will Never Get A Management Position

“…the only unity that will be allowed by the Father is the unity that Jesus requested from the Father in John 17.”

One of the interesting “universal themes” that James Jordan has uncovered in the Bible is that of Satan’s various attempts to “gather the nations” against the Church. You can read about that in a series of blog posts called Amalek Debunks Hyperpreterism (click here and scroll down).

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The description of Jesus in Revelation 1 follows the Bible’s new Creation matrix.

Jesus is the Word, and His manifestation is described in the pattern of the Creation Week. He is the Word made flesh, the Sacrament who “tabernacled” among us, and so is described in the pattern of the Tabernacle. He is the Word in Government, ruling over the pastors of the churches, and so we also see elements of the corresponding Dominion pattern.

Revelation is indeed a sublime book. Every stanza refracts the structure of every section, which in turn refracts the structure of the book, which in turn refracts the structure of the entire Bible. This literature comes from the mouth of the uncreated, the One who creates things fully formed from nothing; it is irreducibly complex. Nothing can be added, and nothing can be taken away.

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Run-of-the-mill triperspectivalism not only misses the progression inherent in the three roles of prophet, priest and king, it gets the order wrong. Well, kind of…

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James Jordan comments on the erroneous assertion of a “Covenant of works”:

[An] error, which has plagued some Calvinistic theology for generations, is to think that there were two covenants: a covenant of works and a covenant of grace. It is the phrase “covenant of works” that is the problem. Theologians vary in how far into error they go as they try to use this bad term, but one way or another the idea seems to be that Adam was supposed to earn eternal life through good works. Since he failed, Jesus came and did it for us. This error is compounded when some theologians say that we “receive” the “covenant of grace” by faith, as if Adam was supposed to earn his merits apart from faith!

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More than thirty years after the release of their hit song, “Down Under,” (1978) Australian rock band Men at Work were hauled into court for ripping their flute riff from a nursery rhyme. The issue came up after discussion on a popular rock quiz TV show. [1]

Most Aussies of my generation knew the original (really uncool) song, and the use of it as a motif in a rock song was, well, really cool. The very fact that it didn’t have a big yellow sticker on it saying “This bit is from Kookaburra,” and the listener picked it up, was gratifying. All good music does this. All good movies do this. TV shows also use subtle allusions to past episodes as a nod to faithful viewers (and no show does it with the concrete-cracking understatement of Mad Men).

In this case of the flute riff, any dunderhead could pick it up. While I think that the current owners of the copyright, Larrikin Records, are a bunch of opportunistic bastards (and though they were once considered indie and cool, I guess they are now really uncool), it pains me that modern teachers of the Bible are too cautious to read the Scriptures in this way, too conservative to pick up the motifs, phrases and structural allusions that are obvious once they are pointed out. They are looking for the big yellow sticker, and it ain’t coming.

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Biblical chronology isn’t always easy, but it provides the answers to many questions we have concerning Bible prophecy. James Jordan shows how crucial the book of Esther is for our understanding of Bible history:

The book of Esther is one of the most neglected of the books of the Bible. To be sure, sermons are preached on it, and commentaries have occasionally been written on it, but almost without exception Esther has been interpreted in isolation from the rest of Biblical history, chronology, and theology. Even many conservative commentators tend to view the events in Esther as minor occurrences that have been inflated in the narrative in order to make the point of the book. This is because they make the wrong assumptions about the dates of these events, and because they do not understand the importance of the events in Esther to the progress of revelation and redemption.

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Well, here’s Day 6 at last, and the end of Genesis 1 (this is a really bad chapter division!)
Here’s the rest of this series:   1 2 3 4 5

In this final act of Creation, the Lord puts the lords in the palace. As James Jordan observes, ancient kings sat on thrones of beasts. As king, Solomon was enthroned over lions. His priestly government, imaged in the bronze sea, was enthroned over twelve “tribal” sacrificial bulls, carrying the living water to the nations. And in the Revelation, we see the four beasts filled with eyes beneath the throne of God. The animal kingdom was, in some important sense, to become Adam’s throne.

If you’ve read Bible Matrix, you’ll also have seen that Israel’s history follows the Creation Week, with the four Gentile “beast” empires preceding the final “empire of The Man” Christ Jesus (Daniel 7). Using the matrix, we can also see that the initial history in Daniel 1-6 follows the same pattern, with Daniel’s “dominion” over the lions (turning them into “mutes”) situated at Day 6. And, of course, Noah was also enthroned over those “from afar off.” And then, looking at the entire biblical history, at the Last Day, Jesus will be the one fully enthroned over every enemy, with every “beastly” mouth stopped.

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or Holy Smoke

Doug Wilson writes:

“The debate in the early church was not whether the Jews should stop circumcising their sons; it was whether the Gentiles had to start. The decision of the Jerusalem council was not that individual Gentiles did not have to be circumcised. If circumcision had been required of them, it would have obligated them to live as Jews under the Mosaic law — which included the circumcision of all subsequent generations. Circumcision was not being waived for individual Gentiles; circumcision was being waived for Gentiles and their seed. So the Christian church did not insist that Gentiles circumcise their infants — not because they were infants, but because they were Gentile infants” (To a Thousand Generations, pp. 68-69).

Since there is no ex-plicit proof of infant baptism, Pastor Wilson’s self-stated, continuing goal here is to find im-plicit proof. My goal in the following is to show that not only do circumcision and baptism not correspond, but also that the solution to the dispute in this passage he refers to is given in the passage, leaving no room for an im-plicit reference to infant baptism.

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or True Gravity – 2

Someone made the comment that the “Bible Matrix” is something mystical. While it is certainly typological, it is not mystical. And it is only typological because it is the process of maturity God has built into everything under heaven. Trees and men grow up and bear fruit. That’s typology.

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