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NUMBERS ARE SYMBOLS (pages 57 through 60 - David Currie - Rapture: The End Times Error that Leaves the Bible Behind)

There were some highly useful sections in that work that I reviewed in my last post that I will be blogging on over the next week. All of the below is taken from Currie’s work.

Numbers in prophecy denote a symbolic meaning that trumps any empirical value.

In the Old Testament prophetic book of Jeremiah, we encounter our second ground rule. The prophet Jeremiah lived just before the Babylonian captivity. He looked that catastrophe straight in the eye and stated that, though oral ball in the suffering is caused, it would have an end. He predicted that the time of captivity for the Jewish nation would be 70 years: “And thus says the Lord: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place” (Jer. 29:10).

The prophet Daniel lived through this captivity. When it started, he was a young lad in Jerusalem. He was taken captive to Babylon and rose in the ranks of royal advisers. Later in his life, he came across this prophecy of Jeremiah and realize that the seventy years was close to being completed (Dan. 9). Jeremiah’s prophecy was about to be fulfilled — but not with the precision that a modern Western reader might expect.

This prophecy of the seventy years is one of the only instances in which we can compare the prophetic time of the Bible with our modern concept of historical time. Both the prediction and the fulfillment are recorded in the Bible. As a result, scholars and historians have struggled to make the historical events of the captivity fit the seventy that Jeremiah predicted. It simply never works out exactly; rather, the events fit into either sixty-seven years or seventy-one years. Even a staunch literalist such as Walvoord admits this in “Daniel, The Key to Prophetic Revelation.”

If you assume that God is omniscient and omnipotent, the natural question is, “Why would God revealed to Jeremiah a nice round numbers such as seventy when the actual time. We turn out to be a little less or a smidgen more?” The answer turns out to be quite simple. As Catholic and Protestant scholars alike have long recognized, in Old Testament times, numbers had a symbolic meaning.

Often, the symbolic meaning bears more importance than the literal numerical value. The number three was to the number of God. The number four was the number symbolizing Earth. Seven (three plus four) and twelve (three times four) signified God working in the world. Ten was the number of completion. Even multiples of these numbers were important to the ancient Jews. In the Jewish calendar, the seventh month was the most sacred, being the mom of the Feast of Trumpets, Yom Kippur, and the Feast of Tabernacles. Numbers that relate to dates and times were particularly significant.

The Bible even uses two Greek words for two types of time. Chronological time is kronos (the root of the words chronometer and chronology), whereas symbol-laden, salvific time is kairos. This kind of time is described in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8; “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under Heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted….”

So what might be the symbolism of the seventy years in Jeremiah? Seventy is a result of multiplying ten and seven. These numbers signify the completion of God’s working in the world. In that case, that work involved the punishment of Israel. The captivity of Daniel and his fellow Jews was not seventy years, but the judgment of God was complete.

This does not match our modern concept of chronological time, but it speaks to something more important — namely, symbol-laden, salvific time. The sixty - seven (or seventy-one) years of the Babylonian captivity was close enough to switch to seventy years for an observer to notice the correspondence, yet the significant number seventy was preserved. Numbers in prophecy denote a symbolic meaning that trumps any empirical value.

We must remind ourselves of this ground rule every time we read a number in the Bible. What is its symbolic meaning, if any? For example, the importance of the number one thousand is an immense. Jewish tradition teaches that this was the length of the Davidic kingdom. But when the Bible states that God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, it is inappropriate to start identifying which hills are being included. One thousand is the product of ten times ten times ten; thus it is a complete and perfect number. The number represents something more than 999 plus one. God’s wealth is totally complete.

We see the ancient significance of numbers at work even outside of prophecy. In Matthew 1:17, the author organizes Christ’s genealogy around the number fourteen. There are fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the Babylonian captivity, and fourteen from the Babylonian captivity to Jesus. This split the genealogy into “from promise given to promise fulfilled,” “from promise fulfilled to promise lost,” and finally “from promise lost to promise fulfilled eternally.” In addition, some scholars notes that the number fourteen was the number of Cain David, which would remind a reader again and again that Jesus was the son of David. All of this is easily lost on the modern reader who does not study the ancient attitude towards numbers and their meaning.

Sometimes I find it helpful to post portion of my commentary It’s Not the End of the World! to give my blog readers a taste of what they might find there and encourage them to go read the whole thing. Here is the part that I recently added regarding my increasing conviction of multiple fulfillments and importance of typology - especially as an antidote to heretical preterism.

Over the years of my studying this issue, I have emerged with a firm belief in preterism, but also with nagging feeling that the majority of orthodox preterists are bungling it up by acting like hyper-literalists in reverse - and it is exactly this mentality that is driving the giddy and the naive to embrace heresy. I hear some hyperpreterists say, “Oh well read such and such and it is just one teensy step away from my view.” Sometimes they are right - some of us have gotten so drunk on the timing statements that we are inadvertantly becoming that which we scorn in dispensationalists. We deride those who want to stretch soon into millennia while we choke on the camel of our refusal to recognize that Scripture doesn’t have a problem with multiple “fulfillments.” While we laugh at those who expect a literally black sun and a literally bloody moon, we are the fools for not allowing the Bible to teach us that timing statements do not put the kibosh on anything future.

The conception that Isaiah prophesied was to happen in his lifetime. If a preterist claims otherwise, they are a hypocrite. Yet, we find out that Jesus actually fulfilled it. Hosea tells how God called His Son Isreal out of Egypt - yet Matthew tells us that was “fulfilled” by Jesus. Fulfilled???? How many times have I heard the standard hyperpreterist soundbite, “Ful-filled means fully fulfilled.” Really? To who? Us in our modern arrogance or are we going to humble ourselves and look at the fluidity of the ancients? When we do not, we have at our feet some responsibility for those that fall into Hymenæan chasm.

So how is it that Scripture can so easily have multiple “fulfillments” without becoming silly putty in which it would be impossible to call anyone a false prophet and reign in a stampede of private and colourful interpretations? The answer is in typology.

We may say that a type is an event, a series of circumstances, or an aspect of the life of an individual or of the nation, which finds a parallel and deeper realization in the incarnate life of our Lord, in His provision for the needs of men, or in His judgments in future reign. A type thus presents a pattern of the dealings of God with man that is followed in the anti-type, when, and the coming of Jesus Christ and the setting up of His kingdom, those dealings of God are repeated, though with a fulness and finality that they did not exhibit before. [Fr JOT 38-39 quoting F. Foulkes

With the obvious exception to his interpretation of the "kingdom," I couldn't agree more, and I think this is really crucial when we preterists are dealing with Matthew 24 and repeat the mantra that it is all about the first century (at least up to verse 34.) I think we all too readily discount any possibility that it has future typological application. The objection is stated quite frequently, "But we can't know that." But can we? I think in some respects we can though the exact application we will not know except in hindsight or contemporaneously if we in fact live through it. In the very passage that we are interpreting (Matthew 24) Jesus applies long fulfilled prophecies such as the destruction of ancient Babylon and applies them to the AD70 event. How can He do this? France assists to answer this:

. . . the conviction which lies at the root of New Testament typology. It is that there is a consistency in God's dealings with men. Because his acts in the Old Testament present a pattern which can be seen to be repeated in the New Testament events; these may therefore be interpreted by reference to the pattern displayed in the Old Testament. New Testament typology is thus essentially the tracing of the constant principles of God's working in history, revealing a 'recurring rhythm and past history which is taken up more fully and perfectly in the gospel events'. [Fr JOT 39]

Since we are still awaiting the perfect consummation it seems totally consistent with the way the Bible teaches us to interpret the Bible to still see and expect future typological fulfillment of past judgments on evil and unbelief of which the destruction of Jerusalem was set forth as a prime example.

This same conviction is already apparent in the Old Testament. The prophets frequently looked forward to a ‘repetition of the acts of God’. He Exodus especially provided a model for prophetic predictions both of acts of deliverance within the national history of Israel, and of the more glorious eschatological work of God. Following the lead of the prophets, Jesus and the New Testament writers saw in the coming of Jesus a parallel and yet greater redemption. [Fr JOT 39]

Often they [Jesus' predictions of the destruction of Jersusalem] are expressed in Old Testament language which implies a typological use of the Old Testament closely related to what we have so far examined. Jewish unbelief, and the fact that it is no longer they, but Jesus and his disciples, who are the true people of God, find their logical outcome in the destruction of the Temple and capital of the nation, and this destruction, no less than these other results of the coming of Jesus, finds its types in Old Testament history. They are now to be repeated on a scale more drastic than even the Old Testament catastrophes.[Fr JOT 71]

Following these examples I do not see an issue with continuing to see in the present and future coming of Jesus a parallel and yet greater redemption and a parallel and yet greater judgment that will finally purged evil, put all his enemies under his feet, and destroyed death. Yes we have passages which explicitly teach this, but I do not think we should shy away completely in an on biblical pattern from seeing this event free figured in past judgment events, specifically “comings” of Christ.

But the objection then resurfaces, “but the text doesn’t say that.”In fact, in a recent radio program with Gary DeMar, he challenged a futurist caller who claimed that the seven churches in Revelation were both historical churches and typological of all churches throughout the ages. That caller was right. . . but Gary simplistically stated, “Where does the text say that?” I rejoin, “Where do you get the ground rules that the text HAS to literally say it in a wooden sense?” The Apostle Paul didn’t treat the Old Testament that way, neither did any of the New Testament writers. One may then state, “Yeah but they were inspired.” But that is begging the question. The Bereans searched the Old Testament Scriptures to see if what Paul said was so (Acts 17:11). Good thing they didn’t act like DeMar and claim, “Where does the text literally say that the Rock that the Israelites drank from in the Exodus was Christ?”(1 Corin. 10:3-4) If we interpreted the whole Bible like that, and in atomistically literal sense, we would reject the messianic claims of Jesus. Plus, as France points out:

A type is not a prediction; in itself is simply a person, event, etc. recorded as historical fact, would no intrinsic reference to the future. Nor is an anti-type the fulfillment of a prediction; it is rather the re-embodiment of a principle which has been previously exemplified in the tight. A prediction looks forward to, and demands, an event which is to be its fulfillment; typology, however, consists essentially and looking back and discerning previous examples of a pattern now reaching its culmination. [Fr JOT 39-40]

Amen and amen.

Another misgiving takes the form of “But where are the brakes on this thing? Do we just allegorize everything? Doesn’t this ignore the primary meaning?”

Our discussion of the difference between typology and allegory uncovers one feature essential to true typology: that is a real correspondence between type and antitype. This correspondence must be both historical (i.e. a correspondence of situation and event) and theological (i.e. an embodiment of the same principle of God’s working). The lack of a real historical correspondence reduces typology to allegory, as when the scarlet thread hung in the window by Rahab is taken as a prefiguration of the blood of Christ; both may be concerned with deliverance, but the situations and events are utterly dissimilar. On the other hand, the lack of a real theological correspondence destroys what we have seen to be the very basis of typology, the perception of a constant principle in the working of God. This is not, of course, to demand a correspondence in every detail of the two persons or events, but simply that the same theological principle should be seen operating in two persons or events which present a recognizable analogy to each other in terms of the actual historical situation. Only where there is both a historical and a theological correspondence is a typological use of the Old Testament justified.

It is therefore clearly essential to typology that a correct exegesis of the Old Testament text should be made; only so can a real correspondence of later events with those there recorded be established. Typology may, indeed must, go beyond mere exegesis. But it may never introduce into the Old Testament text a principle which was not already present and intelligible to its Old Testament readers. Sound exegesis, and a respect for the sense of the Old Testament text thus discovered, will prevent typology from degenerating into allegory. [Fr JOT 39-40]

All of the above can, and should be applied, to the New Testament events - including the past Great Tribulation.

. . . in the coming of Jesus his Old Testament acts are repeated and consummated. [Fr JOT 43]

And since it is my position (and I believe obviously the Biblical position) that this present Messianic period is the “coming” of Christ, book-ended by two physical advents, all of the works of God are repeated and consummated until The Consummation.

http://www.preteristsite.com/plain/warrenend.html#appendixb (scroll up to appendix B, my anchor links are apparently screwed up)